Physics Today

Richard Lewis Arnowitt Stanley Deser, Charles Misner , Pran Nath, and Marlan Scully

Citation: Physics Today 67(12), 68 (2014); doi: 10.1063/PT.3.2629 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2629 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/67/12?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing

This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to IP: 131.215.70.231 On: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 15:44:15 obituaries method for current-algebra analyses, and, with Nath, he provided a solution To notify the community about a colleague’s death, subscribers can visit to the so-called U(1) problem of why the http://www.physicstoday.org/obituaries, where they can submit obituaries (up to ninth pseudoscalar meson, η′, is so 750 words), comments, and reminiscences. Each month recently posted material will much heavier than the octet pseudo - be summarized here, in print. Select online obituaries will later appear in print. scalars. He was a coauthor with Nath and Bruno Zumino of the first local super symmetry via a superspace for- Richard Lewis mulation, a precursor of supergravity. Arnowitt While he was at TAMU, Dick’s other contributions—some in collaboration ichard Lewis Arnowitt, distin- with Bhaskar Dutta, Teruki Kamon, and Rguished professor emeritus at other colleagues—ranged from future Texas A&M University (TAMU) accelerator designs to topics in CP vio- and an internationally renowned figure TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY lation, dark matter, and cosmology. in general relativity (GR) and high- Dick’s distinguished teaching career energy physics, died on 12 June 2014 included mentoring a number of PhD after a gallant struggle with cancer. His students; publishing many review pa- older brother, Edwin, has begun an en- pers; and presenting a vast array of dowment in Dick’s name for graduate courses, plenary talks at international student support at TAMU. conferences, and summer school lec- In GR, Dick is best known for the tures. In recent years he was a frequent Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) formu- invited lecturer at the Erice Interna- lation, which expresses GR as a modern tional School of Subnuclear Physics in field theory. His major work in high- Sicily. Dick was an exemplary citizen as energy physics was with Ali Cham- well and contributed to the building up seddine and one of us (Nath) on the and the welfare of his physics depart- development of supergravity grand Richard Lewis Arnowitt ments, as the undersigned can attest. unification, specifically the minimal Dick’s more than six decades in physics, SUGRA model, a tool commonly used as well as his personal qualities, will in the search for new physics beyond ulty in 1956. He moved to Northeastern long be remembered by the many stu- the standard model. University in 1959 and in 1986 was called dents, colleagues, and friends he at- Dick was born in New York City on to TAMU, where he founded its Center tracted worldwide. 3 May 1928 and grew up there when it for Theoretical Physics. Stanley Deser was the center of production of future Dick’s physics career was illustrious Brandeis University physicists. A science prodigy, he fin- and prolific, with more than 330 pub- Waltham, Massachusetts ished high school early and went to lications on a wide range of topics. California Institute of Technology Pasadena Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), His Syracuse years included the work, Charles Misner where he obtained simultaneous bache- with his student Marvin Girardeau, University of Maryland lor’s and master’s degrees at 20. The old- on the highly cited pair theory for College Park est technical institute in the US, RPI was many-boson systems. The Girardeau– Pran Nath a mecca for young scientists during the Arnowitt formalism is particle-number Northeastern University postwar years, in part due to the prox- conserving and thus avoids subtle pit- Boston, Massachusetts imity of General Electric’s renowned falls associated with, for example, a per- Marlan Scully Schenectady research laboratory. turbative analysis of the S-matrix. Texas A&M University Dick then went to Harvard Univer- The ADM formulation, published in College Station sity with his fellow RPI graduate a series of some 15 papers in 1958–62, Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey George Benedek. Benedek remembers garnered its authors the American his RPI and Harvard years with Dick Physical Society’s 1994 Dannie Heine- with pleasure, as does another of us man Prize for Mathematical Physics. The (Deser), who shared classes, projects, ADM definition of GR energy is one of Warren Keith and desks with him all four years. Dick’s the formulation’s best-known conse- Sinclair thesis with Julian Schwinger, on radia- quences. More generally, ADM remains tive corrections to hydrogen’s hyperfine a standard tool in GR—for example, in arren Keith Sinclair celebrated structure, was one of the last of the post- numerical methods to compute non - Whis 90th birthday amid family war quantum electrodynamics loop cal- linear gravitational radiation from shortly before his death on culations. Schwinger mentioned to one black hole mergers. 14 May 2014 in Escondido, California. of us (Scully) that he always appreciated With Chamseddine and Nath, Dick We personally have lost a dear friend, Dick and regarded him very warmly. coauthored a highly cited paper on and the radiation science community Given Schwinger’s elevated standards, super gravity grand unification in 1982. has lost a most respected colleague. His that is high praise indeed! Their mSUGRA model is part of the career, which spanned three continents After postdoc stints at the Berkeley theoretical arsenal in the search for new and almost 50 years, can be divided into Radiation Laboratory in 1952–54 and the physics at CERN’s Large Hadron Col- three phases: medical physics, radio- Institute for Advanced Study in 1954–56, lider. With Marvin Friedman and Nath, biology, and radiation protection. He Dick joined Syracuse University’s fac- Dick developed an effective Lagrangian excelled in all.

68 December 2014 Physics Today www.physicstoday.org