Matthew William Choptuik (born 1961) is a Canadian theoretical physicist specializing in numerical relativity.
Choptuik graduated from University of British Columbia with a master's degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. advised by William Unruh in 1986. He became an associate professor in 1995 at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1999 he became a member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and in the same year he became a professor at University of British Columbia.
In 1993, he discovered critical phenomena in gravitational collapse via numerical studies. He showed—under non-generic initial conditions —the possibility of the occurrence of naked singularity in general relativity with scalar matter. This had previously been the subject of a bet between Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill. Hawking lost the bet after Choptuik's publication, but renewed it under non-generic initial conditions.
Choptuik was the 2001 awardee of the Rutherford Memorial Medal. In 2003 he received the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. In 2003 he became a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2002, he became an honorary doctor of Brandon University.
External links
References
Choptuik, Matthew W. (1993). "Universality and scaling in gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field". Physical Review Letters. 70 (1): 9–12. Bibcode:1993PhRvL..70....9C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.9. PMID 10053245. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.9 ↩
Gundlach, Carsten; Martín-García, José M. (2007). "Critical Phenomena in Gravitational Collapse". Living Reviews in Relativity. 10 (1): 5. arXiv:0711.4620. Bibcode:2007LRR....10....5G. doi:10.12942/lrr-2007-5. PMC 5256106. PMID 28179820. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5256106 ↩
Only with precise fine tuning of the initial conditions, which is lost even with small perturbations ↩
Crenson, Matt (February 12, 1997). "The naked truth: Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking loses a bet". AP News. Archived from the original on May 12, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190512162621/https://www.apnews.com/7e02e4d3e6c9cc569aeb229e0e47efaf ↩