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George F. R. Ellis
South African cosmologist

George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS and Hon. FRSSAf, is an emeritus professor of complex systems at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Co-author of The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking, Ellis is a leading theorist in cosmology. He served as president of both the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation and the International Society for Science and Religion. An active Quaker, Ellis opposed apartheid and received the Templeton Prize (2004) and the Order of the Star of South Africa from Nelson Mandela in 1999. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2007.

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Life

Born in 1939 to George Rayner Ellis, a newspaper editor, and Gwendoline Hilda MacRobert Ellis in Johannesburg, George Francis Rayner Ellis attended the University of Cape Town, where he graduated with honours in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics with distinction. He represented the university in fencing, rowing and flying.

While a student at St John's College, Cambridge, where he received a PhD in applied maths and theoretical physics in 1964, he was on college rowing teams.

At Cambridge, Ellis served as a research fellow from 1965 to 1967, was assistant lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics until 1970, and was then appointed university lecturer, serving until 1974.

Ellis became a visiting professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago in 1970, a lecturer at the Cargese Summer School in Corsica in 1971 and the Erice Summer School in Sicily in 1972, and a visiting H3 professor at the University of Hamburg, also in 1972.

The following year, Ellis co-wrote The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking, debuting at a strategic moment in the development of General Relativity Theory.

In the following year, Ellis returned to South Africa to accept an appointment as professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, a position he held until his retirement in 2005.

In 2005 Ellis appeared as a guest speaker at the Nobel Conference in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Work

George Ellis has worked for many decades on anisotropic cosmologies (Bianchi models) and inhomogeneous universes, and on the philosophy of cosmology.7 He is currently writing on the emergence of complexity, and the way this is enabled by top-down causation in the hierarchy of complexity.8 Recently Ellis has also collaborated with Teppo Felin, Denis Noble, and Jan Koenderink on a set of articles published in the journal Genome Biology.910 In terms of philosophy of science, Ellis is a Platonist.11

Publications

Books

  • ——; Hawking, S.W. (1973). The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. Cambridge: University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-20016-5.12
  • ——; Dewar, David (1979). Low Income Housing Policy in South Africa. Urban Problems Research Unit, UCT.
  • ——; Williams, Ruth (1988). Flat and Curved Space Times (2000 revised ed.). Oxford University Press.
  • —— (1993). Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained. Bowerdean/Marion Boyars.
  • ——; Lanza, A.; Miller, J. (1993). The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology (2005 paperback ed.). Cambridge: University Press.
  • —— (1994). Science Research Policy in South Africa. Royal Society of South Africa.
  • ——; Murphy, Nancey (1996). On The Moral Nature of the universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics. Fortress Press.
  • ——; Wainwright, John, eds. (1997). Dynamical Systems in Cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-55457-2.
  • ——; Coles, Peter (1997). Is The Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe. Cambridge Lecture Notes in Physics, vol. 7. Cambridge: University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56689-6.
  • ——, ed. (2002). The Far Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective. Templeton Foundation Press. ISBN 978-1-890151-90-4.
  • —— (2004). Science in Faith and Hope: an interaction. Quaker Books.
  • —— (2004a). Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity. Cambridge: University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-83113-0.
  • —— (2006). Handbook in Philosophy of Physics. Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-444-53002-8.
  • ——; Maartens, Roy; MacCallum, Malcolm A. H. (2012). Relativistic Cosmology. Cambridge: University Press.
  • —— (2016). How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context. Springer.

Papers

Ellis has over 500 published articles; including 17 in Nature. Notable papers include:

Honours

In 2019 Rhodes University in Grahamstown announced it would award Ellis an honorary doctorate in laws (LLD, hc)13

See also

Notes and references

Wikiquote has quotations related to George F. R. Ellis.

References

  1. Gibbs, W. W. (1995). "Profile: George F. R. Ellis – Thinking Globally Acting Universally". Scientific American. 273 (4): 50–55. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1095-50. /wiki/Scientific_American ↩

  2. Ellis, George F. R. (22 July 2014). "Physicist George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will". Cross-Check (Interview). Interviewed by John Horgan. Scientific American. Retrieved 13 October 2021. ↩

  3. "The Theology of the Anthropic Principle". Counterbalance Foundation. Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Retrieved 13 October 2021. https://counterbalance.org/ctns-vo/ellis4-body.html ↩

  4. Ellis, George F. R. (1993). "The Theology of the Anthropic Principle". In Russell, Robert John; Murphy, Nancey; Isham, Christopher J. (eds.). Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory. pp. 367–405. ISBN 978-0-268-03976-9. 978-0-268-03976-9 ↩

  5. Merali, Zeeya. "Is the Future Already Written?". Discover. Retrieved 19 November 2023. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-the-future-already-written ↩

  6. "Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities". Archived from the original on 24 February 2008. Retrieved 16 May 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20080224104019/http://www.templetonprize.org/news_templetonprize_2004.html ↩

  7. Ellis 2006, pp. 1183–1285. - —— (2006). Handbook in Philosophy of Physics. Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-444-53002-8. ↩

  8. Ellis, Maartens & MacCallum 2012, pp. 126–140. - ——; Maartens, Roy; MacCallum, Malcolm A. H. (2012). Relativistic Cosmology. Cambridge: University Press. ↩

  9. Felin, Teppo; Koenderink, Jan; Krueger, Joachim I.; Noble, Denis; Ellis, George F.R. (10 February 2021). "The data-hypothesis relationship". Genome Biology. 22 (1): 57. doi:10.1186/s13059-021-02276-4. ISSN 1474-760X. PMC 7874637. PMID 33568195. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7874637 ↩

  10. Felin, Teppo; Koenderink, Jan; Krueger, Joachim I.; Noble, Denis; Ellis, George F. R. (10 February 2021). "Data bias". Genome Biology. 22 (1): 59. doi:10.1186/s13059-021-02278-2. ISSN 1474-760X. PMC 7874446. PMID 33568166. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7874446 ↩

  11. Ellis 2004a, pp. 607–636. - —— (2004a). Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity. Cambridge: University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-83113-0. ↩

  12. Markus, Lawrence (1976). "Book Review: The large scale structure of space-time". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 82 (6): 805–818. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1976-14169-9. ISSN 0002-9904. https://doi.org/10.1090%2FS0002-9904-1976-14169-9 ↩

  13. "Rhodes University honours five of Africa's best". grocotts.co.za. 7 March 2019. Retrieved 7 March 2019. https://www.grocotts.co.za/2019/03/07/rhodes-university-honours-five-of-africas-best/ ↩