Charles W. Misner

Charles Misner is a Professor Emeritus of Physics and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland (2000-present). Other institutional affiliations include Princeton University. His research interests include general relativity and numerical relativity.

Misner received his B.S. degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1952. He then moved to Princeton University, where he earned an M.A. in 1954 and completed his Ph.D. in 1957. His dissertation, Outline of Feynman Quantization of General Relativity; Derivation of Field Equations; Vanishing of the Hamiltonian, was completed under John Wheeler.

Prior to completing his Ph.D., Misner joined the faculty of the Princeton Physics Department with the rank of Instructor (1956–1959) and was subsequently promoted to assistant professor (1959–1963). In 1963 he moved to the University of Maryland, College Park as an associate professor and achieved full professor status there in 1966. 

Since 2000, Misner has been Professor Emeritus of Physics, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, where he continues to be a member of the Gravitation Theory Group in the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics. During his career, Misner advised 22 Ph.D. students, primarily at Princeton and at the University of Maryland.

Misner has held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (also known as the Albert Einstein Institute); the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Pontifical Academy of Cracow (Poland); the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow (during the time of the Soviet Union); the California Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, and the University of Cambridge.

Most of Misner's research falls into the area of general relativity, which describes the gravitational interactions of very massive bodies. He contributed to the early understanding of cosmology, where he was one of the first to point out the horizon problem and the role of topology in general relativity, quantum gravity, and numerical relativity. In the areas of cosmology and topology, he first studied the mixmaster universe, which he devised in an attempt to understand the dynamics of the early universe better, and developed a solution to the Einstein field equation that is now known as Misner space. 

Together with Richard Arnowitt and Stanley Deser, he published a Hamiltonian formulation of the Einstein equation that split Einstein's unified spacetime back into separated space and time. This set of equations, known as ADM formalism, plays a role in some attempts to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity. It is also the mathematical starting point for most techniques for numerically solving Einstein's equations. In 2015 the Albert Einstein Society presented the Albert Einstein Medal to Deser and Misner for their work; Arnowitt had died the previous year.