Biographical Memoirs Volume 90 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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BRYCE SELIGMAN DEWITT
BRYCE SELIGMAN DEWITT
Pages 54-69
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Larry Murphy
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DeWitt was born Carl Bryce Seligman on January 8, 1923, in Dinuba, California, the eldest of four boys. His paternal grandfather, Emil Seligman, left Germany around 1875 at the age of 17 and emigrated to California, where he and his brother established a general store in Traver.
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He spent seven months at the Berkeley branch of the Manhattan Project and then asked to be released. He reasoned that any bright youngster could do what he was doing (hand soldering, reading meters, general gofer work)
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The younger boys were, or had been, at school in the eastern United States, and all had encountered repeated misunderstandings and false assumptions based solely on their surname, something that had seldom occurred in California. From June to December 1950 DeWitt was with Pauli at the ETH in Zürich, and afterward he went to Bombay to spend a postdoctoral year at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
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Through the efforts of John Wheeler, who had become aware of his work on quantum gravity, DeWitt was offered and accepted the directorship of the Institute of Field Physics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His initial title at UNC was visiting research professor, which enabled him to teach, or not, as he chose, and to have students.
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In January 1957 Cecile, who had also been given the title of visiting research professor, organized the first of the general relativity and gravitation (GRG) conferences: "On the Role of Gravitation in Physics." The participants included Christian Møller, Leon Rosenfeld, Andre Lichnerowicz, Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, Dennis Sciama, Peter Bergman, John Wheeler, and Richard Feynman.
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In 1963 he gave his most famous course, "The Dynamical Theory of Groups and Fields," which was published as a book the following year. In it he introduced a condensed notation applicable to all field theories, extended Schwinger's heat kernel methods to curved spacetime and other nonconstant backgrounds, and gave the first (and now standard)
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In the summer of 1968 DeWitt was visited by Max Jammer, who was thinking of writing a book on the interpretation of quantum mechanics and its history. DeWitt was astonished to learn that Jammer had never heard of Hugh Everett III, who had published a paper on this topic in the same issue of Reviews of Modern Physics in which contributions from the 1957 Chapel Hill conference had appeared.
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No longer was it possible to offer postdoctoral positions with the assurance that funds would be available even if grant money failed to materialize. The postdocs of earlier years had included Felix Pirani, Ryoyu Utiyama, Peter Higgs, and Heinz Pagels.
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Texas gave him a center of his own to which he invited people such as David Deutsch and Philip Candelas, with whom DeWitt had become acquainted during a Guggenheim year as visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1975-1976. DeWitt's early years at Texas were devoted to the colliding black hole problem and to the problems of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, including the problem of the conformal or Weyl anomaly and the description of Hawking radiation.
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, was published in 2003, when he was 80 years old. It effectively sets forth his special viewpoint on theoretical physics and includes the following unique contents: • A derivation of the Feynman functional integral from the Schwinger variational principle and a derivation of the latter from the Peierls bracket; • Proofs of the classical and quantum tree theorems; • A careful statement of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics in the context of both measurement theory and the local ization-decoherence of macroscopic systems, which leads to the emer gence of the classical world; • A display of the many roles of the measure functional in the Feynman integral, from its relation to the Van Vleck-Morette determinant in semiclassical approximations to its justification of the Wick rotation procedure in renormalization theory; • Repeated use of the heat kernel in a wide variety of contexts, including a zeta-function computation of the chiral anomaly in curved spacetime; • An exhaustive analysis of linear systems, both bosonic and fermionic, and their behavior as described through Bogoliubov coefficients; • A novel approach to ghosts in non-Abelian gauge theories: use of the Vilkovisky connection to eliminate the ghosts in the closed time-path formalism that is used to calculate "in-in" expectation values; and • A proof of the integrability of the Batalin-Vilkovisky "master" equation.
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For his many contributions to physics DeWitt received the Dirac Medal of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste) , the Pomeranchuk Prize of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Moscow)
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Theory of radiative corrections for non-Abelian gauge fields.
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From page 67... ...
D 7:2814-2817. 1975 Quantum field theory in curved spacetime.
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D 46:2527-2537. 2003 The Global Approach to Quantum Field Theory.
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