Pitt physics professor awarded Einstein Prize

Ezra 'Ted' Newman is honored for his work in relativity

Ezra "Ted" Newman recently was told that he has been selected by the American Physical Society for one of the most prestigious awards in his field -- the Einstein Prize -- for a lifetime of seminal work in the field of relativity.

While appreciative, Dr. Newman, a University of Pittsburgh physics professor emeritus, didn't throw any parties.

"Intellectually, I'm opposed to these awards," he said in an interview in his Oakland office, the one with the stylized poster of Albert Einstein on the door with the equation E=mc2 printed on the border. "I think I've gotten more than enough reward from working in physics."

Maybe so, but Jorge Pullin, a Louisiana State University physics professor who chaired the American Physical Society's selection committee, said choosing Dr. Newman was easy.

"The general feeling was that recognition of Ted was long overdue," he said. The society intends to fete Dr. Newman in April.

Dr. Newman's work was the main reason he was selected, but not the only reason.

The citation the committee wrote also praised Dr. Newman "for his intellectual passion, generosity and honesty, which have inspired and represented a model for generations of relativists."

Gary Horowitz, a University of California at Santa Barbara physics professor, who was also on the selection committee, said: "Everyone who knows Ted knows his passion for physics and his enthusiasm. I know it had an impact on my life."

Dr. Newman was born and raised in Bronx, N.Y., to a dentist who hoped his son would someday become a dentist, too.

But the physical world had long taken hold of the son's imagination.

"I remember as a child playing with magnets and just being fascinated with what kept them together and what kept them apart," Dr. Newman recalls.

That interest led him to major in physics and math at New York University for his undergraduate work, and then on to Syracuse University for graduate and doctoral work -- a place he sought out above all others for one reason.

"I wanted to work with Bergmann, whose book I had started to read but didn't fully understand at the time," said Dr. Newman.

Peter Bergmann, a world-renowned physicist who had worked with Einstein, became Dr. Newman's mentor and, later, the first recipient of the Einstein Prize.

After getting his Ph.D. in 1956, Dr. Newman took a post at Pitt, where he has been ever since, despite the occasional attempt at luring him and his family away.

The University of Texas, Syracuse and Kings College of London all came calling at one time or another and he turned them all down.

"Just to go looking on the other side of the fence? Why?" he said. "I was in a place that wasn't a rat-race and dog-eat-dog, and I got to do my work."

Married for 52 years to Sally, their son, David, is a physics professor, and their daughter, Dara, has a doctorate in molecular biology.

Dr. Newman is 81 and officially retired but still comes to the office every day in Allen Hall in Oakland to continue his research in gravitational physics. And he continues to get his latest revelations and observations published in scientific journals -- 25 such articles in the last five years alone.

For him, the work is the thing, and he has no intention of slowing down.

"I still think I have a reasonable amount to contribute," he said.

The work he has done includes some of the most important findings during the era from 1955 to 1975 that is referred to as the golden age of general relativity that helped revitalize Einstein's famous theory from half a century earlier.

The theory of general relativity, which Einstein completed in 1915, gave us the concepts that gravity bends light rays, the universe is expanding at the speed of light, and clocks move slower in places of lower gravitational potential.

But the theory had fallen out of favor in part because the mathematics that Einstein used were so dense and difficult. But also because the theory of quantum mechanics came into vogue in the 1920s, overtaking general relativity as the popular theory of the time.

The work by an international array of researchers during the golden age of general relativity "really set up the foundation for our theories today," said Dr. Horowitz. "And Ted played a key role in that."

Much of the work helped streamline Einstein's theories into manageable techniques to work with.

Perhaps the most significant of them is the Newman-Penrose formalism, which Dr. Newman and his colleague from the University of Oxford, Roger Penrose, collaborated on in 1962, six years after Dr. Newman began his career at Pitt.

The formalism is significant because it not only allows for special conditions to be imposed that Einstein's original equation didn't allow, but because it streamlines the entire process.

"People had spent months doing these theorems before" to prove Einstein's general relativity equations, Dr. Newman said. But after coming up with their formalism "we could do them in a couple of hours."

The small group of international researchers working on general relativity in that era regularly gathered to discuss their ideas. It was during one of these mass gatherings at Syracuse in 1961, that Dr. Newman and Dr. Penrose discovered they "saw eye-to-eye on so many different things," Dr. Penrose said in an interview from his home in England, even though they did their research in completely different ways.

Dr. Penrose, who thinks visually, is known for making elaborate drawings to explain his work, while Dr. Newman spends much of his day thinking through a problem via equations he sees in his head as if they were drawn on a blackboard -- "which makes us a good team," Dr. Penrose said.

Dr. Newman has been working for years on a new avenue of general relativity, null foliation, which are the patterns light rays form as they fill space-time.

He isn't sure if it will be important work, but Dr. Penrose trusts it will be interesting.

"He's just guided by what he finds beautiful," Dr. Penrose said, "and if it turns out to be important, that's great. But if not, that's OK, too."

First published on November 29, 2010 at 12:00 am