The golden age of black hole astrophysics began with the death of James Bardeen in Seattle on June 20. The man was 83.
William said his father died of cancer. The retired professor of physics at the University of Washington had been living in Seattle.
Dr. Bardeen was related to many physicists. His father, John, won the physics prize twice for his invention of the transistor and the theory of superconductivity.
Dr. Bardeen worked on unraveling the equations of general relativity. The bending of spacetime is called gravity by that theory. Black holes, places so dense that they became bottomless one-way exit ramps out of the universe, were its most disturbing consequence.
Dr. Bardeen would use his life's work to investigate the mysteries of the universe.
Michael Turner is a professor at the University of Chicago and he said that Dr. Bardeen was a gentle giant.
James Bardeen was born in Minneapolis. His mother was a teacher and a zoologist. He attended the University of Illinois Laboratory High School after moving to Washington, D.C., Summit, N.J., and then to Illinois.
Despite his father telling him that biology was the wave of the future, he obtained a physics degree from Harvard in 1960. He said in an oral history interview that he didn't feel the need to compete with his father. He said it was not possible.
He obtained his PhD from the California Institute of Technology. His thesis was about the structure of stars millions of times the mass of the sun, and they were starting to suspect that they were the source of the quasars being discovered.
He joined the astronomy department at the University of Washington in 1967. He was attracted to the school by its easy access to the outdoors.
The golden age of black hole research was underway and Dr. Bardeen was swept up in international meetings. He met Nancy Thomas, a junior high school teacher in Connecticut, in Paris in 1967. Their marriage took place in 1968.
William is a senior vice president and the chief strategy officer of The New York Times Company, as well as his brother, William. She died in 2000.
His father and brother were members of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Bardeen didn't write as fast as he spoke. William Press was sent to Seattle to finish a paper that was supposed to be written by Dr. Bardeen. No one had written anything. The two were told to sit on a couch with a piece of paper. Dr. Bardeen would write a sentence and send it to Dr. Press. Dr. Press said that the sentences took a few minutes. The paper was written within three days.
The summer school in 1972 featured all the leading black hole scholars. Dr. Bardeen was a speaker. It was during that meeting that he, Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University and Brandon Carter wrote a landmark paper entitled "The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics."
Dr. Bardeen calculated the shape and size of a black hole's "shadow" as seen against a field of distant stars.
The shape was made famous by the observations of black holes in the galaxy M87 and the movie "Interstellar."
Dr. Bardeen was a big fan of astronomy. The density of matter and energy in the early universe would grow and give rise to the pattern of galaxies we see today.
Dr. Turner said that Jim was happy that we used his formalism.
The doctor moved to Yale in 1972 He moved back to the University of Washington after four years because he was unhappy with the academic bureaucracy in the East and wanted to go outside again. He stopped working in 2006
He continued to work. They reminisced about hiking and camping trips they used to take with their families during a recent phone conversation. Dr. Bardeen suggested that recent ideas about what happens as a black hole might change into a white hole.
He was thinking deeply about physics in creative new ways right up to the end of his life.
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