Charles W. Misner
Charles W. Misner ( born June 13, 1932 in Jackson ( Michigan)) is an American theoretical physicist who deals with the theory of gravity.
Misner received his bachelor's degree in 1952 from the University of Notre Dame, a master's degree in 1954 from Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in 1957 with John Archibald Wheeler ( " Outline of Feynman Quantization of General Relativity "). From 1956 he was professor " Instructor " in Princeton and in 1959 Assistant. In 1963 he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he was from 1966 to 2000 professor of physics. Since then, he is a professor emeritus and senior research scientist in the group for Gravitational Physics. He has been a visiting professor 1966/7 and 1976 in Cambridge, England, in 1959 and 1976 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, in 1971 at the Institute for Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1972 at Caltech, 1973 at All Souls College, Oxford, 1980/81 and 2000 at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and from 2000 to 2002 and 2005 at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam.
1958 to 1962 he was a Sloan Fellow and 1972/73 Guggenheim Fellow. In 1994 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics with Stanley Deser and Richard Arnowitt. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Misner is known for its cosmological approach of " Mixmaster Universe" ( as a model of a chaotic, oscillating cosmological evolution ), the Arnowitt - Deser - Misner mass definition and the Arnowitt - Deser - Misner (ADM) form of the field equations of general relativity ( in a " Hamiltonian form " of the equations of motion by splitting into three-dimensional spacelike hypersurfaces and a time-like coordinate). With his students Beckedorff he was very early in the 1960s, in a further development of the Oppenheimer - Snyder - treatment of a gravitational collapse of a solution of the field equations for what was later called the Black Hole. Later, Misner et al employed with numerical treatment of general relativity.
With his teacher John Wheeler and Kip Thorne in 1973, he wrote the textbook Gravitation ( Freeman, 1279 pages), which is valid until today (2008) as a standard work. With Patrick Cooney in 1991 he published the book Spreadsheet Physics on the use of spreadsheets in physics lessons.
His doctoral counts Carl H. Brans.