Ted Jacobson

Theodore " Ted" Jacobson ( born November 27, 1954) is an American physicist who deals with astrophysics and gravitational physics.

Jacobson studied at Reed College ( BA 1977) and in 1983 received his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin with Cecile DeWitt - Morette. After that, he was a post-doc 1982/83 on a Fulbright scholarship at the Technion in Lawrence Schulman, 1984 in Paris ( Meudon Observatory and the Institute Henri Poincaré ), from 1984 to 1986 at the University of California, Santa Barbara ( UCSB ) and 1986-1988 at Brandeis University.

In 1988 he became assistant professor, associate professor in 1993 and 1998, Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland.

He has been a visiting scientist at UCSB, the University of Utrecht (1995/1996), the University of Paris VII, the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematical Physics and the University of Bern.

In 1986, he played a role in the early years of the loop quantum gravity when he formulated with Lee Smolin the Wheeler - De Witt equation of quantum cosmology in the imported Abhay Ashtekar loop variables and found exact solutions of the loop equation.

In 1995, he suggested that gravity is an emergent thermodynamic effect, which generally results from a holographic description of gravity and introduced by Jacob Bekenstein and other thermodynamics of black holes and event horizons. The equations of general relativity arise after Jacobson then as a thermodynamic equation of state. He suspects an underlying theory of discrete basic elements of space-time ( similar to the classic combination of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics) with the generation of new elements in the context of the expansion of the universe.

Writings

  • Jacobson Trans - Planckian redshifts and the substance of the space -time river, Progress Theor. Phys. Suppl, Volume 136, 1999, p.1
  • Ted Jacobson Thermodynamics of Spacetime - The Einstein equation of state, Phys. Rev. Lett., Volume 75, 1995, S.1260
  • Jacobson, B. Hu (Editor): Directions in General Relativity, Vol.2, Cambridge University Press 1993
Cécile DeWitt-Morette Technion – Israel Institute of Technology University System of Maryland
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