Bryce DeWitt


Bryce Seligman DeWitt was an American theoretical physicist noted for his work in gravitation and quantum field theory.

Personal life

He was born Carl Bryce Seligman, but he and his three brothers, including noted ichthyologist Hugh Hamilton DeWitt, added "DeWitt" from their mother's side of the family, at the urging of their father, in 1950. Several decades later, when Felix Bloch learned of this name change, he was so upset that he blocked DeWitt's appointment to Stanford University; consequently, DeWitt and his wife Cecile DeWitt-Morette, a mathematical physicist, accepted faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin. DeWitt trained in World War II as a naval aviator, but the war ended before he saw combat.  He died September 23, 2004, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 81. He is buried in France, and was survived by his wife and four daughters.

Academic life

He received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. His Ph.D. supervisor was Julian S. Schwinger, a Nobel Prize-winning american theoretical physicist, best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics. Afterwards, DeWitt held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and worked at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. Thereafter, he held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, later, at the University of Texas at Austin.
In 1957 he and his wife organized the Chapel Hill Conference.

Awards

In 1987 he was awarded the Dirac Prize, the Pomeranchuk Prize in 2002, and, posthumously, the American Physical Society's Einstein Prize in 2005. He also was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Work

He pioneered work in the quantization of general relativity and, in particular, developed canonical quantum gravity, manifestly covariant methods, and heat kernel algorithms. DeWitt formulated the Wheeler–DeWitt equation for the wave function of the universe with John Archibald Wheeler and advanced the formulation of Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. With his student Larry Smarr, he originated the field of numerical relativity.

Books