James B. Hartle ’60

Born in Baltimore, Jim graduated from the Gilman School. At Princeton, he joined Key & Seal and began his lifelong immersion in theoretical physics. Inspired by the legendary John Wheeler, he took gravity and cosmology as his early specialties and wrote his thesis on “The Gravitational Geon.”

Jim earned a Ph.D. at Caltech in 1964 and took a professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he spent his entire career. He visited other prominent physics venues, particularly Cambridge, U.K., where he worked with Stephen Hawking. At the Institute for Advanced Study he collaborated with Murray Gell-Mann, Kip Thorne *65, and many others. They are included in Jim’s compilation of essays, The Quantum Universe, on quantum mechanics, cosmology, and physics in general. His textbook, Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and his many other works earned him the sobriquet “the father of quantum cosmology.” He earned many honors, including the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society and membership in the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Sciences.

Jim had wide interests, especially history, archaeology, and music, all of which influenced his love of travel. He died May 17, 2023. Jim is survived by his wife, Mary Jo (John Wheeler’s niece); stepdaughter Sara; granddaughter Eliza; and sister Alice. Our sympathies to them all.