physics

Stanley Deser

Stanley Deser is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Stanley Deser rather than just read about it. In short: Stanley Deser (March 19, 1931 – April 21, 2023) was an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology.

Key takeaways

Stanley Deser belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Stanley Deser to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Stanley Deser from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Stanley Deser (March 19, 1931 – April 21, 2023) was an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology.

Biography Born on March 19, 1931, in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). He and his family received visas from Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Bayonne, France on June 21, 1940 enabling them to cross into Portugal, thus saving their lives. They sailed from Lisbon in May 1941 and settled in New York. Deser earned his B.A. (Summa cum laude) in 1949 at Brooklyn College in New York, and his master's degree 1950 at Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953, with a thesis entitled "Relativistic Two Body Interactions". From 1953 to 1955, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was at the Niels Bohr Institute from 1955 to 1957, and a lecturer at Harvard from 1957 to 1958. He was an invited professor at the Sorbonne during 1966–1967 and 1971–1972, he held a visiting professorship at All Souls College in Oxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lectureship at Harvard in 1975. In the context of general relativity, he developed, with Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner, the ADM formalism, roughly speaking a way of describing spacetime as space evolving in time, which allows a recasting Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely the Hamiltonian formalism. In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities like energy or, equivalently, mass (so-called ADM mass/energy) which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all. With L. Abbott, Deser extended the notion of energy for gravity with a cosmological constant. And with Claudio Teitelboim he showed that supergravity has positive energy. Another of Deser's research interests was covariant quantum gravity. Deser applied the new formalism of covariant quantum field theory developed by Gerard 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman in the early 1970s. With Peter van Nieuwenhuizen he demonstrated the one loop nonrenormalizability of general relativity plus electromagnetism, plus Yang-Mills, plus Dirac fermions, and plus a cosmological constant. The apparent impasse revealed by these efforts was partially overcome in 1976, following a strikingly independent approach from the contemporary work of Daniel Freedman, Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, when Deser and Bruno Zumino demonstrated that a spin 3/2 field can be added to general relativity to produce a consistent, locally supersymmetric theory called supergravity. In 1994, Deser, along with Arnowitt and Misner, received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. Along with Misner he won the 2015 Einstein Medal. He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, received honorary doctorates from Stockholm University (1978) and the Chalmers Institute of Technology (2001), and he was a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, a conference in his honor was celebrated in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2021, one of only about 180 worldwide in all sciences. A conference in honor of Stanley Deser and the ADM collaborators was held in November 2009 at Texas A&M University on the 50th anniversary of their research.

Personal life and death Deser was married to Swedish artist Elsbeth Deser and had three children. His daughter Clara Deser is a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Deser's autobiography, "Forks in the Road", was published in September 2021. He died in Pasadena, California on April 21, 2023, at the age of 92.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Stanley Deser

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Stanley Deser claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Stanley Deser before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Stanley Deser ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Stanley Deser

In research: Stanley Deser appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Stanley Deser in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Stanley Deser is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1931 births, 2023 deaths, Albert Einstein Medal recipients, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Stanley Deser outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Stanley Deser in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Stanley Deser means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Stanley Deser out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Stanley Deser in simple terms?

Why does Stanley Deser matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Stanley Deser?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Stanley Deser.