Charles W. Misner | |
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| Born | (1932-06-13)June 13, 1932 Jackson, Michigan, U.S. |
| Died | July 24, 2023(2023-07-24) (aged 91) |
| Alma mater | University of Notre Dame Princeton University |
| Known for | Gravitation Mixmaster universe Misner space ADM formalism Wormhole |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship[1] Heineman Prize (1994) Albert Einstein Medal |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | General relativity |
| Institutions | Princeton University University of Maryland |
| Thesis | Outline of Feynman Quantization of General Relativity; Derivation of Field Equations; Vanishing of the Hamiltonian (1957) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Wheeler Arnold Ross |
| Doctoral students | Carl H. Brans Richard A. Isaacson James A. Isenberg Richard Matzner Vincent Moncrief C. V. Vishveshwara |
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Charles William Misner (/ˈmɪsnər/; June 13, 1932 – July 24, 2023) was an American physicist and one of the authors ofGravitation. His specialties includedgeneral relativity andcosmology. His work has also provided early foundations for studies ofquantum gravity andnumerical relativity.
Misner received hisB.S. degree from theUniversity of Notre Dame in 1952. He then moved toPrinceton University, where he earned anM.A. in 1954 and completed hisPh.D. in 1957. His dissertation,Outline of Feynman Quantization of General Relativity; Derivation of Field Equations; Vanishing of the Hamiltonian, was completed underJohn 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 theUniversity of Maryland, College Park as an associate professor and achieved full professor status there in 1966.Since 2000, Misner has beenProfessor Emeritus of Physics, and he continued to be a member of the Gravitation Theory Group in theMaryland 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 theMax Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (also known as the Albert Einstein Institute); theKavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara; the Pontifical Academy of Cracow (Poland); theInstitute for Physical Problems in Moscow (during the time of theSoviet Union); theCalifornia Institute of Technology, theUniversity of Oxford, and theUniversity of Cambridge.
Most of Misner's research fell into the area ofgeneral relativity, which describes thegravitational interactions of verymassive bodies. He contributed to the early understanding ofcosmology - he was one of the first to point out thehorizon problem, the role oftopology in general relativity,quantum gravity, andnumerical relativity. In the areas of cosmology and topology he first studied themixmaster universe, which he devised in an attempt to better understand the dynamics of the early universe, and developed a solution to theEinstein field equation that is now known asMisner space. Together withRichard Arnowitt andStanley Deser he published aHamiltonian formulation of the Einstein equation that splitEinstein's unifiedspacetime back into separated space and time. This set of equations, known as theADM formalism, plays a role in some attempts to unifyquantum mechanics with general relativity. It is also the mathematical starting-point for most techniques for numerically solving Einstein's equations.
In 2015, theAlbert Einstein Society presented theAlbert Einstein Medal to Deser and Misner for their work; Arnowitt had died the previous year.[2]
Charles W. Misner died on July 24, 2023, at the age of 91.[3]
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