Stanley Deser (March 19, 1931 – April 21, 2023) was an American physicist known for his contributions to
general relativity. He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at
Brandeis University in
Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at
California Institute of Technology.
Biography
Born on March 19, 1931, in Równe, Poland (now
Rivne, Ukraine).
He and his family received visas from
Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Bayonne, France on June 21, 1940 enabling them to cross into Portugal, thus saving their lives. They sailed from Lisbon in May 1941 and settled in New York.
Deser earned his B.A. (Summa cum laude) in 1949 at
Brooklyn College in New York, and his master's degree 1950 at
Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953, with a thesis entitled "Relativistic Two Body Interactions". From 1953 to 1955, he was at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. He was at the
Niels Bohr Institute from 1955 to 1957, and a lecturer at Harvard from 1957 to 1958. He was an invited professor at the Sorbonne during 1966–1967 and 1971–1972, he held a visiting professorship at
All Souls College in
Oxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lectureship at Harvard in 1975.
In the context of
general relativity, he developed, with
Richard Arnowitt and
Charles Misner, the
ADM formalism, roughly speaking a way of describing
spacetime as
space evolving in
time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
, which allows a recasting Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely the
Hamiltonian formalism. In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities like
energy
Energy () is the physical quantity, quantitative physical property, property that is transferred to a physical body, body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of Work (thermodynamics), work and in the form of heat and l ...
or, equivalently,
mass (so-called
ADM mass/energy) which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all. With L. Abbott, Deser extended the notion of energy for gravity with a cosmological constant. And with
Claudio Teitelboim he showed that
supergravity has positive energy.
Another of Deser's research interests was covariant
quantum gravity. Deser applied the new formalism of covariant quantum field theory developed by
Gerard 't Hooft and
Martinus Veltman in the early 1970s. With
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen he demonstrated the one loop nonrenormalizability of general relativity plus electromagnetism, plus
Yang-Mills, plus Dirac fermions, and plus a cosmological constant. The apparent impasse revealed by these efforts was partially overcome in 1976, following a strikingly independent approach from the contemporary work of
Daniel Freedman,
Sergio Ferrara and
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, when Deser and
Bruno Zumino demonstrated that a spin 3/2 field can be added to general relativity to produce a consistent, locally supersymmetric theory called
supergravity.
In 1994, Deser, along with Arnowitt and Misner, received the
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. Along with Misner he won the 2015 Einstein Medal. He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, received honorary doctorates from
Stockholm University (1978) and the
Chalmers Institute of Technology (2001), and he was a fellow of both the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, a conference in his honor was celebrated in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2021, one of only about 180 worldwide in all sciences.
A conference in honor of Stanley Deser and the
ADM collaborators was held in November 2009 at
Texas A&M University on the 50th anniversary of their research.
Personal life and death
Deser was married to Swedish artist Elsbeth Deser and had three children.
His daughter
Clara Deser is a climate scientist at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Deser's autobiography,
Forks in the Road, was published in September 2021. He died in
Pasadena, California on April 21, 2023, at the age of 92.
See also
*
Polyakov action
References
External links
Deser's profile at Brandeis
{{DEFAULTSORT:Deser, Stanley
1931 births
2023 deaths
Brooklyn College alumni
Polish emigrants to the United States
Harvard University alumni
Brandeis University faculty
American relativity theorists
Quantum gravity physicists
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Foreign members of the Royal Society
Albert Einstein Medal recipients