Stanley Deser

Stanley Deser (born Salomon Deser; March 19, 1931 – April 21, 2023) was a Polish-born, American theoretical physicist, known for the ADM formalism and other contributions to gravitational theory. He shared in 1994, with Richard Arnowitt Arnowitt and Charles Misner Misner, the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, and in 2015, with Misner, the Einstein Medal — Arnowitt died in 2014. Deser was elected in 1971 a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in 1979 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1994 a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and in 2021 a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. Quotes I was born, and grew up in, a particularly tumultuous and tragic time. Unlike most of the people of my generation in Europe, I was extremely lucky. My parents were one step ahead of annihilation at any given moment. Let me strongly emphasize that I was never directly exposed to that era's unspeakable horrors.My arrival was on March 19th, 1931, some five years after QM and fifteen after GR, in Rovno (now the Ukrainian Rivne), a Polish city near the Soviet border. Forks in the Road: A Life in Physics Singapore World Scientific Publishing 2021 9789811234200 https://books.google.com/books?id=52ZEEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA3 3 (164 pages) … I moved to Brandeis University Brandeis. I got back in touch with my old pal, graduate school roommate and all that, Richard Arnowitt Dick Arnowitt, who was then at Syracuse University Syracuse, and we started talking about what's left to do. QED was gone. Supergravity was, of course, far-off on the horizon. So after spin one comes spin two. And we didn't know from relativity, but we knew from field theory. We first started off doing pure spin two but a la Schwinger. It had first been done by Pauli and Markus Fierz Fierz in the ‘30s and by a poor Russian called Matvei Bronstein Bronstein, which was also Trotsky's real name. That was a mistake. He was shot at the very early days of Great Purge The Terror. Apparently, they just got people from the phone book. He was right up there with Landau and Gamow and all that, really bright guy, as I discovered later. July 14, 2022 https://heritageproject.caltech.edu/interviews-updates/stanley-deser Caltech Heritage Project, Interviews Stanley Deser, Theoretical Physicist (interview on June 3, 2022 by David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project) Time travel requires organizing all the mass in the universe in a very particular configuration. So good luck! as quoted by Bayram Tekin in: A Tribute to S. Deser: Conserved Quantities in Generic Gravity Theories 2023 arXiv:2307,12758v2 10.48550/arXiv.2307.12758 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12758 (quote from p. 4 of 38 pages) Quotes about Deser He leaves behind a lifetime of work in theoretical physics that remains foundational, including co-inventing supergravity (contemporaneously with Sergio Ferrara Ferrara, Daniel Z. Freedman Freedman and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen van Nieuwenhuizen) and formulating the dynamics of the Superstring theory superstring with Bruno Zumino Zumino; showing that general theories with massive gravity are inconsistent; and developing topologically massive gauge theories and gravity with Roman Jackiw Jackiw and Claudio Bunster Teitelboim.Stanley was an important member of the scientific community. As Rainer Weiss, who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the observation of gravitational waves, related, he played an important role in convincing the National Science Foundation to fund the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. Albion Lawrence, https://cerncourier.com/a/stanley-deser-1931-2023/ CERN Courier Stanley Deser 1931–2023 5 July 2023 External links https://www.brandeis.edu/physics/people/profiles/deser-stanley.html Stanley Deser, Ancell Professor of Physics, Emeritus Martin A. Fisher School of Physics, Brandeis University Deser/Melamed: About the Family Sousa Mendes Foundation https://sousamendesfoundation.org/family/deser-melamed Category:1931 births Category:2023 deaths Category:Academics from the United States Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Immigrants to the United States Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Category:Physicists from the United States