Stanley Deser, whose ideas about gravity help explain the universe, dies at age 92

Stanley Deser, a theoretical physicist who helped elucidate the details of gravity and how it shapes the space-time structure of the universe, died April 21 in Pasadena, California. He was 92.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Abigail Deser.

Physicists have long dreamed of coming up with a theory of everything – a set of equations that neatly and completely describe how the universe works. By the mid-20th century, they had come up with two theories that serve as the mainstays of modern physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Quantum mechanics describes how in the subatomic realm everything is broken up into separate chunks, or quanta, like the individual particles of light called photons. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity had elegantly captured how mass and gravity bend the fabric of space-time.

However, these two pillars did not fit together. General relativity does not have any understanding of quanta; a quantum theory of gravity is an ambition that remains unfulfilled to this day.

“The problem we face is how to unify the two into a seamless theory of everything,” said Michael Duff, emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London in England. “Stanley was one of the first to address this problem.”

In 1959, dr. Deser, along with two other physicists, Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner, published what is now known as the ADM formalism (named after the initials of their surnames), who rearranged the equations of general relativity into a form that laid the foundations for work on a quantum theory of gravity.

“It’s a bridge to quantum,” said Edward Witten, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. quantum gravity.

The ADM formalism offered additional benefit: It made general relativity equations amenable to computer simulations, allowing scientists to investigate phenomena such as the space-bending pull of black holes and the universe-shaking explosions when stars collide.

The twisted equations split four-dimensional space-time into slices of three-dimensional space, an innovation that enabled computers to deal with the complex data and, as Frans Pretorius, a professor of physics at Princeton University, put it : “these slices evolve over time to find the full solution.”

Dr. Deser is perhaps best known for his work in the 1970s as one of the pioneers of supergravity, extending an idea known as supersymmetry to gravity.

From quantum mechanics, physicists already knew that fundamental particles fell into two groups. Known constituents of matter such as electrons and quarks fall into the group known as fermions; while those that carry fundamental forces such as photons, the particles of light that transmit the power of electromagnetism, are known as bosons.

Supersymmetry assumes an undiscovered boson partner for each fermion and a fermion partner for each boson.

Dr. Deser teamed up with Bruno Zumino, one of the founders of supersymmetry, to add gravity to the theory and create the theory of supergravity. Supergravity includes gravitons – the gravitational equivalent of photons – and adds a supersymmetric partner, the gravitino.

Particle accelerator experiments have yet to yield evidence for any of these partner particles, but the theories have not been disproved and their mathematical elegance means they remain attractive to physicists.

Supergravity is also a key aspect of superstring theories, which attempt to provide a full explanation of how the universe works, overcoming shortcomings of quantum gravity theories.

“Stanley was one of the most influential gravity researchers in his extremely long and distinguished career,” said Dr. Witten, who has played a pioneering role in coming up with theories about super strings.

Stanley Deser was born in Rovno, Poland, a city now known as Rivne and part of Ukraine, on March 19, 1931. As Jews, his parents, Norman, a chemist, and Miriam fled Poland’s repressive, anti-Semitic regime in 1935 to Palestine. . But the prospects of finding work there were dim, and a few months later they moved to Paris.

In 1940, as World War II swept Europe, the family narrowly escaped France after Germany invaded.

“They finally realized the danger and decided to leave everything behind,” wrote Dr. Deser about his parents in his autobiography, “Forks in the Road.” “I hurried with my father to empty our safe. That evening, my mother sewed the coins into a belt of towels, a well-practiced refugee maneuver, while the rest of us packed up some stuff.”

The family fled to Portugal and eleven months later obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States. They eventually settled in New York City, where Norman and Miriam ran a chemical supplies business.

By age 12, Stanley had been promoted to 10th grade, and he graduated from high school at age 14. Julian Schwinger, a Nobel laureate. He received his doctorate in 1953.

After postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Dr. Deser joined the faculty of Brandeis University in 1958.

The next three years, in which he worked on the ADM formalism, produced “the greatest happiness one could hope for,” he wrote in his autobiography.

In an interview last year for Caltech’s Heritage Project, Dr. Deser recalled that he, Dr. Arnowitt, and Dr. Misner completed much of the work during summers in Denmark in a kindergarten class. “The nice thing about this kindergarten is that there are blackboards,” he said. “Denmark is very good at that.”

Because the blackboards were mounted low for kids, “we would crawl and write equations,” said Dr. Desert. “And the papers just poured out the door.”

Dr. Misner, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Maryland, said there were parallels between the ADM rearrangement of general relativity and the quantum field theory of electromagnetism that other physicists were working on, and that they could apply that experience to general relativity.

The work on supergravity took place during a stay at the CERN particle laboratory in Geneva, where Dr. Zumino worked. “To our surprise, we had a consistent theory in just three weeks,” recalled Dr. Desert himself.

He and dr. Zumino published an article on supergravity in June 1976. However, another group of physicists – Daniel Freedman, Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen – got ahead of them, describing supergravity in a paper completed about a month earlier. Dr. Deser and Dr. Zumino submitted theirs.

As a result, said Dr. Deser, the work he and Dr. Zumino did sometimes get overlooked. In 2019, a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics – accompanied by $3 million – was awarded to the opposing team.

“He was understandably upset,” said Dr. Duff, the British physicist. “I think they could have erred generously and included Stanley as the fourth receiver.” (Dr. Zumino passed away in 2014.)

Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Witten, who served on the award committee, declined to discuss the details of the decision, but Dr. Schwarz said, “It was a purely scientific decision.”

Dr. Deser worked at Brandeis until he retired in 2005. He then moved to Pasadena to be close to his daughter and took an unpaid position as a senior research associate at Caltech.

In addition to Abigail, he is survived by two other daughters, Toni Deser and Clara Deser, and four grandchildren.

His wife of 64 years, Elsbeth Deser, died in 2020. A daughter, Eva, died in 1968.

Although dr. If he was an expert on gravity and general relativity, he was not infallible.

In the Caltech interview, he recalled a paper in which he suggested that gravity could solve some disturbing infinities that showed up in the quantum field theory of electrodynamics.

Other notable physicists had similar thoughts but did not publish them. Doctor Deser did.

“It was trash,” he said. Speaking at a conference, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who invented much of quantum electrodynamics, “without much effort shot me to pieces, which I deserved,” he said.

He added: “Everyone is entitled to a few strikes.”