Born West Newton, Massachusetts, USA, 4 March 1881
Died Pasadena, California, USA, 5 September 1948
American chemist and mathematical physicist Richard Tolman was a pioneer in applying the ideas of general relativity and of thermodynamics to the large-scale structure of the Universe. He received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] in 1903, and, after a year of study and work in an industrial chemistry laboratory in Germany, entered the MIT graduate program in the chemistry laboratory of Arthur Amos Noyes, receiving a Ph.D. in 1910 with a thesis on measurement of the electromotive force in rotating, conducting solutions. In 1909, Tolman and Gilbert N. Lewis (a fellow chemist, and also a native of West Newton, working in Noyes’s lab) wrote the first American exposition on special relativity.
Tolman held academic positions at the universities of Michigan (1910/1911), Cincinnati (1911/1912), California (1912–1916), and Illinois (a full professorship of physical...
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Gale, George and John Urani (1999). “Milne, Bondi and the ‘Second Way’ to Cosmology.” In The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity, edited by Hubert Goenner et al., pp. 343–375. Boston: Birkhauser. (Describes Tolman’s views about philosophy and cosmology.)
Hubble, Edwin and Richard, C. Tolman (1935). “Two Methods of Investigating the Nature of the Nebular Red-Shift.” Astrophysical Journal 82: 302–337.
Kirkwood, John G., Oliver R. Wulf, and P. S. Epstein (1952). “Richard Chace Tolman.” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences 27: 139–153.
Kragh, Helge (1996). Cosmology and Controversy:The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. (This is the best general source on modern cosmology.)
North, John David (1994). The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology. New York: W. W. Norton.
Tolman, Richard C. (1932). “Models of the Physical Universe.” Science 75: 367–373.
— (1934). Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology. Oxford Clarendon Press.
— (1938). The Principles of Statistical Mechanics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Reprint, New York: Dover, 1987.)
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Gale, G. (2014). Tolman, Richard Chace. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1388
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