Brandon Carter

Who is Brandon Carter?

Brandon Carter, FRS is an Australian theoretical physicist, best known for his work on the properties of black holes and for being the first to name and employ the anthropic principle in its contemporary form. He is a researcher at the Meudon campus of the Laboratoire Univers et Théories, part of the CNRS.

He studied at Cambridge under Dennis Sciama. He found the exact solution of the geodesic equations for the Kerr/Newman electrovacuum solution, and the maximal analytic extension of this solution. In the process, he discovered the extraordinary fourth constant of motion and the Killing–Yano tensor. Together with Werner Israel and Stephen Hawking, he proved the no-hair theorem in general relativity, stating that all stationary black holes are completely characterized by mass, charge, and angular momentum. More recently, Carter, Chachoua, and Chamel have formulated a relativistic theory of elastic deformations in neutron stars.