American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Residency
International (1)
Resident (1)
Class
1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences[X]
Subdivision
106. Physics[X]
1Name:  Dr. James B. Hartle
 Institution:  University of California, Santa Barbara; Santa Fe Institute
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1939
 Death Date:  May 17, 2023
   
 
James Hartle was educated at Princeton University (AB,1960), and the California Institute of Technology where he completed a Ph.D.in 1964 with Murray Gell-Mann. He has held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. He is currently Research Professor and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. His scientific work is concerned with the application of Einstein's relativistic theory of gravity --- general relativity --- to realistic astrophysical situations, especially cosmology. He has contributed usefully to the understanding of gravitational waves, relativistic stars, and black holes. He is currently interested in the quantum origin of the universe and the earliest moments of the big bang where the subjects of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and cosmology overlap. His work with Stephen Hawking on the quantum wave function of the universe is an example. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a NATO Senior Science Fellow, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a founder and past director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received the American Physical Society’s 2009 Einstein Prize for his work in gravitational physics.
 
2Name:  Dr. Christopher John Pethick
 Institution:  Nordita; Niels Bohr International Academy
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
Christopher Pethick is a theoretical physicist of remarkable breadth and depth, whose seminal contributions to neutron star, ultracold atomic gas, and condensed matter physics have been recognized by his Onsager Prize for statistical physics and Bethe Prize for theoretical astrophysics. He gave the first consistent description of neutron stars, from their low density crust to their superfluid interior, their behavior during stellar collapse and subsequent cooling, and identified compact X-ray sources as accreting neutron stars. He provided the microscopic basis of our current understanding of liquid helium-3 at nonzero temperature, showed how related ideas could be used to understand the transport properties of heavy-fermion materials, and in a very different context, quark matter at high densities. Recently he has bridged the gap between atomic and condensed-matter physics by his imaginative application of condensed matter concepts to ultracold atomic gases. His major influence on Scandinavian science has been recognized by his election to the Royal Danish and Norwegian Academies of Sciences and Letters.
 
Election Year
2016[X]