American physicist (1932?2023)
Charles William Misner
(
; June 13, 1932 ? July 24, 2023) was an American physicist and one of the authors of
Gravitation
. His specialties included
general relativity
and
cosmology
. His work has also provided early foundations for studies of
quantum gravity
and
numerical relativity
.
Biography
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Academic training and university positions
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Misner received his
B.S.
degree from the
University of Notre Dame
in 1952. He then moved to
Princeton University
, where he earned an
M.A.
in 1954 and completed his
Ph.D.
in 1957. His dissertation,
Outline of Feynman Quantization of General Relativity; Derivation of Field Equations; Vanishing of the Hamiltonian
, was completed under
John Wheeler
.
Prior to completing his Ph.D., Misner joined the faculty of the Princeton Physics Department with the rank of Instructor (1956?1959), and was subsequently promoted to assistant professor (1959?1963). In 1963 he moved to the
University of Maryland, College Park
as an associate professor and achieved full professor status there in 1966.
Since 2000, Misner has been
Professor Emeritus
of Physics, and he continued to be a member of the Gravitation Theory Group in the
Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics
. During his career, Misner advised 22 Ph.D. students primarily at Princeton and at the University of Maryland.
Misner held visiting positions at the
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
(also known as the Albert Einstein Institute); the
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
at the
University of California, Santa Barbara
; the Pontifical Academy of Cracow (Poland); the
Institute for Physical Problems
in Moscow (during the time of the
Soviet Union
); the
California Institute of Technology
, the
University of Oxford
, and the
University of Cambridge
.
Research
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Most of Misner's research fell into the area of
general relativity
, which describes the
gravitational
interactions of very
massive
bodies. He contributed to the early understanding of
cosmology
where he was one of the first to point out the
horizon problem
, the role of
topology
in general relativity,
quantum gravity
, and
numerical relativity
. In the areas of cosmology and topology, he first studied the
mixmaster universe
, which he devised in an attempt to better understand the dynamics of the early universe, and developed a solution to the
Einstein field equation
that is now known as
Misner space
. Together with
Richard Arnowitt
and
Stanley Deser
, he published a
Hamiltonian
formulation of the Einstein equation that split
Einstein's
unified
spacetime
back into separated space and time. This set of equations, known as the
ADM formalism
, plays a role in some attempts to unify
quantum mechanics
with general relativity. It is also the mathematical starting point for most techniques for numerically solving Einstein's equations.
In 2015, the
Albert Einstein Society
presented the
Albert Einstein Medal
to Deser and Misner for their work; Arnowitt had died the previous year.
[2]
Death
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Charles W. Misner died on July 24, 2023, at the age of 91.
[3]
Bibliography
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References
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External links
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