James M. Bardeen (1939-2022) was an American physicist renowned for his work on general relativity and particularly on black hole mechanics. He was a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington, where he worked for over 30 years; he also held positions at Caltech, Yale, and University of California, Berkeley. In 1972, Bardeen theorized the doughnut shape of a black hole's shadow, which was confirmed in 2019 in imagery captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. He co-authored a watershed paper titled "The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics" with Stephen Hawking and Brandon Carter.
– The New York Times: Space & Cosmos, "James Bardeen, an Expert on Unraveling Einstein's Equations, Dies at 83", nytimes.com (accessed December 4, 2024)
Collection organized in files within one box. Files in original order.
Professional correspondence, lectures, article drafts and reprints, and dissertation. The papers document Bardeen's work on general relativity, particularly on black hole mechanics. Correspondents include Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
No restrictions on access.
Creator's copyrights transferred to the University of Washington Libraries.
Donated by the UW Physics Dept., October 2024
Correspondence to and from James M. Bardeen, mostly from colleagues and peers regarding physics subjects, employment recommendations, and conferences. Also includes copies of papers written by physicists Jacobus A. Petterson and Bernard F. Schutz.
Manuscript for a lecture titled "Rapidly Rotating Stars, Disks, and Black Holes", which Bardeen presented at a black hole summer school in Les Houches, France where he was one of six invited speakers, among them Stephen Hawking.
Manuscripts for lectures given at the Second Guo Shou-jing Summer School on Particle Physics and Cosmology, Nanjing, July 1988.
Correspondence to and from James M. Bardeen, including with noted physicists Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Brandon Carter, Kip Thorne, and James Hartle, as well as astronomer Fred Hoyle.
Manuscripts and booklets of Bardeen's papers, including a copy of the Les Houches booklet on the astrophysics of black holes.
Correspondence with Chinese physicist Yu Yunqiang regarding a cosmology summer school, collaboration between physicists at Peking University and the University of Washington, and more.
Manuscripts and booklets of Bardeen's papers, including a copy of his 1965 PhD thesis, titled "Stability and Dynamics of Spherically Symmetric Masses in General Relativity".