Carl H. Brans

Who is Carl H. Brans?

Carl Henry Brans is an American mathematical physicist best known for his research into the theoretical underpinnings of gravitation elucidated in his most widely publicized work, the Brans–Dicke theory.

A Texan, born in Dallas, Carl Brans spent his academic career in neighboring Louisiana, graduating in 1957 from Loyola University New Orleans. Having obtained his Ph.D from New Jersey's Princeton University in 1961, he returned to Loyola in 1960 and, in 1970, was appointed professor of physics. Since then he has held visiting professorships at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Koeln, Germany.

Brans is well known among those engaged in the study of gravity and is noted for his development, with Robert H. Dicke of the Brans–Dicke theory of gravitation in which the gravitational constant varies with time, a leading competitor of Einstein's theory of general relativity. The work of Brans and Dicke actually was closely related to earlier work of Pascual Jordan, but was developed independently. Properly this should then be called the Jordan–Brans–Dicke scalar–tensor theory of gravity.