Bryce DeWitt: Physicist & UT Austin Professor Dies at 81

[robphy]

Bryce Seligman DeWitt, Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor in Physics,
Emeritus, at the University of Texas of Austin, died of pancreatic cancer
on September 23, 2004. He was 81.

 

[selfAdjoint]

A great loss. The DeWitt equation remains the gold standard in efforts to quantize GR.

 

[marcus]

A great loss. The DeWitt equation remains the gold standard in efforts to quantize GR.

You may know this story and where to find it on the web. I don't have a link at the moment:

the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (the "quantum Einstein equation" to which I think you are referring) was invented at the Raleigh-Durham airport in North Carolina, where John Wheeler had to spend some time waiting between planes.

when Wheeler discovered he was going to have a long wait he telephoned Bryce DeWitt, a friend at a nearby university, who offered to come out to the airport, keep him company and work on an idea. So the two of them got together at the airport and made up a quantized version of the Einstein equation. I think I read that Wheeler considered it to be really the work of DeWitt (he downplayed his own role) but all the same people usually call it DeWitt-Wheeler, after both of them. I have a notion that would have been in the Sixties sometime