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6 unusual facts about Howard Percy Robertson


Alexander Friedmann

The classic solution of the Einstein field equations that describes a homogeneous and isotropic universe is called the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric, or FLRW, after Friedmann, Georges Lemaître, Howard Percy Robertson and Arthur Geoffrey Walker, who worked on the problem in 1920's and 30's independently of Friedmann.

Howard Percy Robertson

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

During the war years, Robertson was Chief American Liaison with British Scientific Intelligence, when he became close friends with Dr. Reginald Victor Jones.

He completed his PhD at Caltech in mathematics and physics in 1925 under Harry Bateman, with the dissertation, “On Dynamical Space-Times Which Contain a Conformal Euclidean 3-Space”.

Sticky bead argument

The anonymous referee, who—as the current editor of the Physical Review recently confirmed, all parties now being deceased—was the combative cosmologist, Howard Percy Robertson, pointed out the error described below, and the manuscript was returned to the authors with a note from the editor asking them to revise the paper to address these concerns.

Uncertainty principle

The most common general form of the uncertainty principle is the Robertson uncertainty relation.



see also