Herbert Pfister

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Herbert Pfister (born March 10, 1936 in Munich ; † September 16, 2015 in Gomaringen ) was a German physicist .

Life

Pfister studied mathematics and physics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and passed the state examination in 1958 with an admission thesis in mathematics on representations of discrete groups. There he then worked with Fritz Bopp on his dissertation on the relativistic multi-body problem of quantum mechanics: The three-particle case , with which he received his doctorate in 1963 . In 1964 he took part in a summer school at Brandeis University in Massachusetts on elementary particle physics and general relativity (ART), where he was particularly impressed by Hermann Bondi's lectures.

Pfister moved to the University of Tübingen and completed his habilitation there in 1970 with the text The electromagnetic form factor of the proton for time-like impulse transfer . In 1977, during an Enrico Fermi summer school in Varenna, he met John Archibald Wheeler , whose work had a strong influence on Pfister's future career . In 1979 he became professor for theoretical physics in Tübingen and remained so until his retirement in 2001.

At the suggestion of Jürgen Ehlers (during a research semester at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics ), Pfister dealt with the centrifugal force problem in GTR and other phenomena of so-called gravitomagnetism from the 1980s to the 1990s . Together with Julian Barbour , he organized an international conference on Mach's principle in Tübingen in 1993, whose conference proceedings Mach's Principle: From Newton's Bucket to Quantum Gravity became a standard work for this research area. In addition, he investigated boundary value problems for the stationary Einstein equations and their applications to rotating stars and together with Urs Schaudt showed that stationary axially symmetric Einstein equations can be solved with generic boundary conditions. In the last year of his life, Pfister and Markus King published the book Inertia and Gravitation: The Fundamental Nature and Structure of Space-Time ( Springer International Publishing , Cham ZG 2015) as a summary of his life's work.

Pfister was married and had two daughters and a son.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary notice Herbert Pfister In: Reutlinger General-Anzeiger , September 19, 2015 (accessed on January 22, 2016).
  2. ↑ Compare the information in the catalog of the German National Library
  3. ↑ Jörg Frauendiener: Death of Herbert Pfister (accessed on January 23, 2016).
personal data
SURNAME Pfister, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich , Germany
DATE OF DEATH 16th September 2015
Place of death Gomaringen , Germany