Dennis William Sciama

Dennis William Siahou Sciama FRS (November 18 1926–December 18 1999) was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. Sciama earned his Ph.D. in 1953 at Cambridge University under the supervision of Paul Dirac, with a dissertation on Mach's principle and inertia. His work later influenced the formulation of scalar-tensor theories of gravity. He taught at Cornell, King's College London, Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin, but spent most of his career at Cambridge (1950s and 60s) and the University of Oxford (1970s and early 80s). In 1983, he moved from Oxford to Trieste, becoming Professor of Astrophysics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA), and a consultant with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. During the nineties he divided his time between Trieste (and a residence in nearby Venice) and Oxford, where he was a visiting professor... full article at wikipedia