Sze-Hoi Henry Tye (; born 1947 in Shanghai, China) is a

Chinese-American Chinese Americans are Americans of Han Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans along with their ancestors trace lineage from m ...

cosmologist Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...

and theoretical

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

most notable for proposing that relative

brane In string theory and related theories such as supergravity theories, a brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions. Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime accordin ...

motion could cause

cosmic inflation In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity ...

as well as his work on

superstring theory Superstring theory is an attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modeling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings. 'Superstring theory' is a shorthand for supersymmetric string theor ...

brane cosmology Brane cosmology refers to several theories in particle physics and cosmology related to string theory, superstring theory and M-theory. Brane and bulk The central idea is that the visible, three-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane i ...

and elementary particle physics. He had his primary and secondary school education in Hong Kong. Graduated from

La Salle College La Salle College (LSC) (, Demonym: Lasallian) is a boys' secondary school in Hong Kong. It was established in 1932 by the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic religious teaching order founded by St. John Ba ...

. He received his

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

and his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

under Francis Low. He is the Horace White Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

and a fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

. He joined the

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is a public research university in Clear Water Bay Peninsula, New Territories, Hong Kong. Founded in 1991 by the British Hong Kong Government, it was the territory's third institution ...

in 2011 and was the Director o
HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study
during 2011-2016. Together with

Gia Dvali Georgi (Gia) Dvali ( Georgian: გიორგი (გია) დვალი; born May 30, 1964) is a Georgian theoretical physicist and science communicator in Georgia. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the Ludwig Maximilian Universi ...

, he suggested the idea of brane inflation in 1998 in which inflation arises because of the weak forces supersymmetry allows between identical branes. A variant of this proposal based on branes and antibranes was later put on concrete string theoretic grounds by

Shamit Kachru Shamit Kachru (born 1970) is a theoretical physicist, a professor of physics at Stanford University, and the Wells Family Director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. He served as the Stanford Physics Department Chair from 2018 to ...

and collaborators. He went on to work out many details of brane inflation with his research group at Cornell. He was responsible for the revival of the interest in cosmic strings. Cosmic superstrings are produced at the end of brane inflation due to brane-antibrane annihilation. Apart from the details of brane inflation, he has been working on issues related to the string landscape and quantum cosmology with his collaborators.

Alan Guth Alan Harvey Guth (; born February 27, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). He is Victor Weisskopf Professor of ...

, in his book ''The Inflationary Universe'', tells the story of how he was led to think about issues that resulted in the original idea of cosmic inflation due to the influence of Henry Tye. At that time they were both postdocs at

. Tye went to China for six weeks in 1979 during the time that Guth came up with his historic inflation breakthrough. "Had he not gone to China, Henry surely would have been a coauthor on the first inflation paper," Guth said.Steve Nadis. "The most important cosmologist you've never heard of." Astronomy. October 2006, pp. 64-69. Earlier on in his career Tye was involved with many important ideas such as the construction of fermionic string models with Kawai and Lewellen (Kawai-Lewellen-Tye), fractional superstrings, grand unified string models, brane world.

Personal life

Henry Tye is married to Bik Kwoon Yeung. His daughter is Kay Tye.

References

External links

Tye's homepageHenry Tye papers and citations
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tye, Henry 1948 births California Institute of Technology alumni MIT Department of Physics alumni American astronomers Cornell University faculty Cosmologists Living people 21st-century American physicists American people of Chinese descent American string theorists Scientists from Shanghai