Matthew Choptuik

Matthew William Choptuik (* 1961 ) is a Canadian theoretical physicist who studies numerical relativity.

Choptuik studied at the University of British Columbia with a master's degree in 1982 and a doctorate with William Unruh in 1986 (Numerical Techniques for Radiative Problems in General Relativity). As a post-doctoral student he was at Cornell University , at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara , at CITA in Toronto and at Scarborough College at the University of Toronto, and from 1991 at the University of Texas at Austin , where he 1995 became an associate professor. In 1999 he became a member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara and in the same year Professor at the University of British Columbia.

In 2004 and 2007/08 he was at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics near Potsdam. He has also been at the Perimeter Institute since 2010 .

In 1993 he showed - under non-generic initial conditions - the possibility of naked singularities occurring in general relativity with scalar matter. This had previously been the subject of a wager between Stephen Hawking , Kip Thorne and John Preskill . Hawking lost the bet after Choptuik was released, but renewed it under non-generic starting conditions.

In 2003 he received the CAP-CRM Prize . In 2003 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from Brandon University.

Web links

• Homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Choptuik, Universality and Scaling in Gravitational Collapse of a Massless Scalar Field, Phys. Rev. Lett. , Vol. 70, 1993, pp. 9-12
2. ↑ Only with precise fine-tuning of the initial conditions, which are lost even in the case of small disturbances
3. ↑ Matt Crenson The naked truth: Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking loose a bet , APS News, February 12, 1997