Dennis William Sciama

Dennis William Sciama ( born November 18, 1926 in Manchester, † 18 December 1999, Oxford) was a professor of physics and has been dealing with cosmology.

Life and work

He was educated at Malvern College and then at Cambridge, where he became a student of Paul Dirac. As Dirac fascinated by Mach's principle, depend on the local physical phenomena of the effect of the mass in the universe. There he met Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle know and became a follower of the steady-state theory developed at that time in England, an unorthodox alternative to Edwin Hubble's discoveries canonized since the Big Bang theory. In his doctoral thesis in 1952, he developed a theory of gravity based on the Mach's principle.

In 1959 he married. From this marriage two daughters were born. In the same year he went to Princeton and Harvard. In 1961 he returned to Cambridge. At this time, the cosmology was something broke. Dennis Sciama to make astrophysics and cosmology to a creative branch of physics, which he in Russia and John Archibald Wheeler in America with Yakov Zeldovich one of the leading at the time, scientists in this field succeeded. By talking he convinced Roger Penrose to turn to the theory of gravitation, to which this gave significant contributions soon.

At Cambridge he taught the well-known astrophysicist George Ellis, Brandon Carter, Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees. Dennis Sciama was a leading theoretician of the theory of black holes, and also encouraged his students to their research. He encouraged her, Roger Penrose seize topological ideas of what Stephen Hawking did with great success.

In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow as Wilson discovered the cosmic background radiation, and thus the steady-state theory was untenable, he gave up on this and was a supporter of the Big Bang theory ("Big Bang " theory). One of his employees at this time was Martin Rees.

In 1971 he went to Oxford. There, too, he had known students such as John D. Barrow, James Binney, Philip Candelas ( b. 1951 ) and David German. From 1978 to 1982 he also taught intermittently at the University of Texas. In 1983 he went to the " International School of Advanced Studies " in Trieste. There, too, he published some theories. He received many honors and worked from 1980 to 1984, the Chairman of the " International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. "

His former students describe him as a warm-hearted man who was more like a father than as a professor at them. His support was them safe, even if their opinions differed from his. Dennis Sciama remained scientifically active until his death in 1999.

  • Physicist ( 20th century)
  • Astrophysicist
  • Member of the Royal Society
  • Briton
  • Born in 1926
  • Died in 1999
  • Man
228112
de