James Hartle

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Jim Hartle at Harvard University

James B. Hartle is an American physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) since 1966. . He is known for his work in general relativity, astrophysics, and interpretation of quantum mechanics. Together with Stephen Hawking, he proposed the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the Universe - a specific solution to the Wheeler-deWitt equation meant to explain the initial conditions of the Big Bang cosmology.

In collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann and others, Hartle helped formulate the modern Copenhagen interpretation based on consistent histories. With Dieter Brill he discovered the Brill-Hartle geon, an approximate solution realizing Wheeler's suggestion of a hypothetical phenomenon in which a gravitational wave packet is confined to a compact region of spacetime, by the gravitational attraction of its own field energy. He is the author of a recent textbook on general relativity.

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geon

[edit] References

Hartle, James B. (2003). Gravity: an Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity. San Francisco: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-8053-8662-9.
Brill, D. R.; and Hartle, J. B. (1964). "". Phys. Rev. 135: B271.