James Maxwell Bardeen, husband, father and physicist, passed away Monday, June 20, 2022 in Seattle, WA. Jim was born on May 9, 1939 in Minneapolis, MN, and grew up in Washington, DC, Summit, NJ, and Champaign-Urbana, IL, where he prepared at attended University High School. In 1960, he received his A.B. magna cum laude in physics from Harvard College where he was a member of Adams House and the Class of 1960, and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1965.
During his graduate school years in California, Jim discovered a lifelong love for the mountains and made some of his closest friends and collaborators.
Jim spent the summer of 1966 doing research in Paris, where he met his wife of 53 years, Nancy, who was studying French. They married in 1968 and Jim began his academic career, first in the fledgling Astronomy Department at the University of Washington in Seattle, and then as a Professor of Physics at Yale.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were an exciting time in astrophysics and Jim was part of a community of young physicists making important contributions in the theoretical properties of black holes. In 1973, he co-authored, with physicists Stephen Hawking and Brandon Carter, a seminal paper on the four laws of black hole mechanics … and discovered the Bardeen vacuum, an exact solution of the Einstein field equation.
In 1976, after the birth of twin boys, and longing for the western mountains, Jim and Nancy returned from New Haven to Seattle. For the next forty years, Jim taught and conducted research in astrophysics and general relativity as a Professor of Physics at the University of Washington. He was happiest leading his family on hiking, skiing and wilderness explorations across the Pacific Northwest and especially near the family cabin on the Sauk River in the North Cascades. Like his father, a two-time Nobel Laureate in physics, and his mother, a trained zoologist, Jim was thoroughly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, not just within the sciences, but across history, literature and music. While soft spoken, his exceptional intellect, curiosity, integrity and kindness made him a quiet center of gravity wherever he went.
Jim generously supported a wide variety of charitable, political, community and professional organizations. He was a Sloan Fellow, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and, in 2012, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his significant contributions to the theory of relativistic stars and black holes, the theory of cosmological perturbations and the origin of structure in the universe.
Jim was preceded in death by his parents, John Bardeen and Jane Maxwell Bardeen, and his sister Elizabeth Bardeen Greytak. He is survived by his loving wife, Nancy Lucille Thomas Bardeen; his brother William Bardeen; his sister-in-law Marge Bardeen, his brother-in-law Thomas Greytak; his children William Thomas Bardeen (Alison Devine Bardeen) and David Peterson Bardeen (Eduardo Braniff); his granddaughters Eloise Devine Bardeen and Marguerite Drexel Bardeen; and a niece and three nephews.
Slightly modified from what was published by New York Times on June 26, 2022.
