Engelbert Levin Schucking

Engelbert Schucking, cosmologist, died in his Greenwich Village apartment on January 5, 2015. Although he had been sick for some time, he continued to meet his classes at NYU almost up to his last day. In his research, he concentrated on understanding the origin and structure of the universe. The Einstein equations were his principal tool, but that did not exclude the study of Newtonian theory, of its relation to general relativity, and of alternative cosmologies.

Engelbert Levin Schücking was born in Hoerde, Germany, on May 23, 1926. His family had a long academic history and were active in liberal politics, in opposition to the Nazis. His father was forbidden to practice law and died under persecution in 1943. Nonetheless, with help of his teachers, Engelbert was able to complete his education in Germany. His interest in cosmology began very early on. Still a child, he was given a small telescope to look at the stars. At 14 he counted sunspots for the Zürich Observatory. At Göttingen, he studied with Werner Heisenberg and Richard Becker. In 1952, he rang the doorbell of Pascual Jordan’s home and announced that he wanted to study general relativity. By 1956 he had done sufficient work, on Jordan’s theory related to Dirac’s large numbers hypothesis, to obtain the Doctor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Hamburg.

Engelbert arrived in the United States in 1961 to join Peter Bergmann’s group at Syracuse University. That year resulted in a paper with Bergmann and Ivor Robinson exploring the limitations of an asymptotically flat space time. They showed that at spatial infinity there will always be a deficit in closing a parallelogram due to the curvature induced by the enclosed mass. After Engelbert spent a semester at Cornell University, Alfred Schild brought him to Austin, TX, where he became Professor of Physics in 1963. Together they built a strong research group in general relativity. Then, with Ivor Robinson in Dallas and Peter Bergmann in Syracuse, they organized the 1963 Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. Engelbert opened this first of the biennial Texas Symposia saying, “We Texans welcome you to Dallas.” This meeting focused on the novel observation of quasars and on gravitational collapse and subsequent meetings on pulsars and cosmological acceleration. The importance of the first meeting is shown in that Physics Today published a report on it by H. Y. Chiu in 1964, and again at the 25th anniversary, in the August 1989 issue, a very vivid account by Engelbert. And in 2014, at the 50th anniversary held in Dallas, Engelbert delivered an hour long history by video as he was not well enough to come to the meeting. In 1966, Engelbert left Texas for New York City. After a year at Yeshiva University, he was appointed Professor of Physics at NYU where he remained to the end of his life.

Engelbert’s research was devoted to understanding how the Einstein equations can be used in the description of the universe. His first appointment was to Hamburg Observatory where he worked with Otto Heckmann. They studied cosmological models with an anisotropic and rotating flow of matter. A systematic study of this problem required the use of three-dimensional Lie groups acting as isometries on space. Engelbert found a novel approach to the description of the corresponding Lie algebras, providing an essential simplification of the original work by Luigi Bianchi. Engelbert presented his results at a seminar in 1957, but never published them himself. His idea became known and of standard use thanks to Wolfgang Kundt who, impressed by the tenfold reduction in the steps of the derivation, took notes of Schucking’s talk and made them accessible to the specialists. Only in 2003 were they published in the General Relativity and Gravitation Journal in an article edited by Andrzej Krasiński and co-authored by several scientists active in the dissemination of these results. Engelbert was much interested in Ernst Mach’s principle that local inertial frames are determined by the large scale distribution and motion of masses. It was conjectured that this principle is a consequence of Einstein’s theory. Engelbert, in collaboration with István Ozsváth, found a modification of the Kurt Gödel universe, an “anti-Mach metric”, providing a counter-example to that conjecture. Heckmann and Schucking also overcame some of the conceptual difficulties of Newtonian cosmology and wrote several influential articles on relativistic and Newtonian cosmology that appeared in the Encyclopedia of Physics and in journals. After settling in New York, Engelbert continued to work and publish papers on relativistic astrophysics, fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. During his last year, he was preparing, with Eugene Surowitz, a study of the Navier-Stokes equations on the three-sphere.

Engelbert was an excellent teacher. Not only did he guide 20 students to their PhD but he also taught more than 6.500 students and reached a nationwide audience for two years in the 1960’s teaching a Sunrise Semester television course on astronomy. In Physics Today and the American Journal of Physics, with collaborators and alone, he wrote articles on various topics related to cosmology and astrophysics. Shortly before his death, together with Eugene Surowitz, he completed a book, Einstein’s Apple: Homogeneou Enstein Fields, that has been released by World Scientific publishers. He also had a strong sense of history and wrote about Jordan, Pauli, Einstein, Nordström, and Bergmann.

Engelbert’s qualities as a person, scientist and teacher earned him many devoted friends and grateful students. In 1996, at the occasion of Engelbert’s 70th birthday, there was a Symposium at NYU. Its proceedings, edited by Alex Harvey, dedicated to Engelbert and published by Springer under the title On Einstein’s Path, contain essays by over 40 authors; among them are Abhay Ashtekar, Peter Bergmann, Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Jürgen Ehlers, George Ellis, Malcolm MacCallum, Ezra Ted Newman, István Ozsváth, Roger Penrose, Jerzy Plebański, Ivor Robinson, Dennis Sciama and Edward Spiegel.

In a letter addressed to Engelbert’s family, Roger Penrose wrote: Engelbert was certainly an extraordinary man. Not only did he possess an almost unique combination of depth of technical knowledge and genuine originality of thought, but he was perhaps the most generous and selfless person that I have ever met.

In Yiddish there is a word to describe a person of wisdom, humor, sensitivity, and human concern. With respect to his friends, colleagues, and especially his family, Engelbert Schucking was a Mensch.

Joshua N Goldberg, Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University
Andrzej Trautman, Professor Emeritus, Warsaw University