Everything about George Ellis totally explained
George F. R. Ellis,
FRS, (born
August 11,
1939) is the Distinguished Professor of
Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the
University of Cape Town in
South Africa. He co-authored
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with
University of Cambridge physicist
Stephen Hawking, published in
1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in
cosmology. He is an active
Quaker and in
2004 he won the
Templeton Prize. From 1989 to 1992 he served as President of the
International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation
. Currently he's President of the
International Society for Science and Religion.
Ellis was a vocal opponent of
apartheid during the
National Party reign in the
1970s and
1980s, and it's during this period that Ellis' research has focused on the more philosophical aspects of
cosmology, for which he won the
Templeton Prize. He was also awarded the
Star of South Africa (Decoration) by
Nelson Mandela, in 1999. On May 18, 2007, he was elected a
Fellow of the British
Royal Society.
In 2005 Ellis appeared as a guest speaker at the Nobel Conference in
St. Peter, Minnesota.
Ideas
George Ellis proposed a
model universe that contains a
naked singularity as a recycling mechanism, which he claims gives almost as good a description of the real universe as the conventional model.
The Ellis universe is like a
cylinder-shaped universe, except that the
Earth is located on one side and a naked singularity on the other. There is no
cosmic inflation – the
galaxies are arranged very unevenly, with a great deal of material crowded round the singularity, and very little near the Earth. The effect of such a distribution of matter is to produce a
red shift of light that, at the Earth, has the same characteristics as if the galaxies were receding.
In terms of
philosophy of science, Ellis is a
Platonist.
Publications
Books
- (with Stephen Hawking):
- (with David Dewar): Low Income Housing Policy in South Africa, Urban Problems Research Unit, UCT, 1979.
- (with Ruth Williams): Flat and Curved Space Times, Oxford University Press, 1988, revised 2000.
- Before the Beginning, Bowerdean/Marion Boyars, 1993.
- (with A Lanza and J Miller): The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology. University Press, Cambridge 1993; paperback, 2005.
- Science Research Policy in South Africa, Royal Society of South Africa, 1994.
- (with Nancey Murphy): On The Moral Nature of the universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics. Fortress Press, 1996.
- (with John Wainwright, Eds.):
- (with Peter Coles): Is The Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- (Ed.): The Far Future Universe. Templeton Foundation Press, 2002.
Papers
Ellis has over 500 published articles including 17 in
Nature. Notable papers include:
"Cosmological perturbations and the physical meaning of gauge-invariant variables" (with Marco Bruni, Peter K. S. Dunsby) The Astrophysical Journal, volume 395 (1992) - cited 117 times.
"Cosmological models (Cargèse Lectures 1998)" (with Henk van Elst) - Cited 93 times
"The case for an open Universe" in Nature 370, 609 - 615 (25 August 1994) (Cited 60 times)
A paper in Nature arguing that physics has no adequate explanation of design
Notes and references
Further Information
Get more info on 'George Ellis'.
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