James M. Bardeen
Bardeen in 1980
Born	James Maxwell Bardeen May 9, 1939 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Died	June 20, 2022(2022-06-20) (aged 83) Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Education	Harvard University (BS) California Institute of Technology (PhD)
Known for	Laws of black hole thermodynamics
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Washington Perimeter Institute
Doctoral advisor	Richard P. Feynman William A. Fowler

James Maxwell Bardeen (May 9, 1939 – June 20, 2022) was an American physicist, well known for his work ingeneral relativity, particularly his role in formulating thelaws of black hole mechanics. He also discovered the Bardeen vacuum, anexact solution of theEinstein field equation.

Bardeen was born inMinneapolis,Minnesota, on May 9, 1939.^[1] His father,John Bardeen, won theNobel Prize in Physics twice for inventing the transistor and formulating the theory of superconductivity;^[1][2] his mother, Jane Maxwell Bardeen, worked as a zoologist and a high school teacher. During his childhood, Bardeen resided inWashington, D.C.,Summit, New Jersey, andChicago as part of his father's employment. He attended theUniversity Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. He then studied physics atHarvard University, even though his father wanted him to go into biology.^[1] After graduating in 1960, he undertookgraduate studies at theCalifornia Institute of Technology under the direction ofRichard Feynman andWilliam Alfred Fowler.^[1][3] Bardeen was awarded aDoctor of Philosophy in 1965.^[1]

Bardeen first worked at Caltech and theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in postdoctoral positions. He became a part of the astronomy department of theUniversity of Washington in 1967. He subsequently joinedYale University in 1972. That same year, he co-authored the watershed paper "The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics" withStephen Hawking andBrandon Carter during a meeting held at theÉcole de physique des Houches. Later that year, Bardeen theorized the doughnut shape and size of a black hole’s "shadow", which was later popularized by the observations ofMessier 87 by theEvent Horizon Telescope.^[1]

Bardeen returned to the University of Washington in 1976, remaining there until his retirement in 2006. Together withMichael S. Turner andPaul Steinhardt, he published a paper in 1982 detailing the way submicroscopic fluctuations in the density of matter and energy in theearly universe would bring about the arrangement of galaxies seen in the present day.^[1] Bardeen was also a distinguished visiting research fellow^[4] atPerimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 2012, he was elected to the U.S.National Academy of Sciences.^[5]

Bardeen married Nancy Thomas in 1968. They met the year before inParis while he was attending a conference, and remained married until his death. Together, they had two children, William and David.^[1]

Bardeen's brother,William A. Bardeen, was also a physicist.^[1] His sister, Elizabeth, was married toThomas Greytak, a physicist atMIT. In a 2020 interview given toFederal University of Pará in Brazil, Bardeen recalls his journey as a physicist, his father's influences on him, his experiences as a doctoral student of Richard Feynman, and working withStephen Hawking.^[6][7][8]

Bardeen died on June 20, 2022, at a retirement home inSeattle. He was 83, and suffered from cancer prior to his death.^[1]

• Bardeen–Petterson effect
• Cosmological perturbation theory
• Post-Newtonian expansion

• James Bardeen, Perimeter Institute homepage
• Publications of James Maxwell Bardeen in theSPIRES database
• arXiv.org preprints for J. Bardeen
• Search on author James Bardeen fromGoogle Scholar

• 1939 births
• 2022 deaths
• 20th-century American physicists
• 21st-century American physicists
• American cosmologists
• American relativity theorists
• California Institute of Technology alumni
• Deaths from cancer in Washington (state)
• Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Harvard College alumni
• Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
• Scientists from Minneapolis
• Sloan Research Fellows
• University of Washington faculty
• Fellows of the American Physical Society

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