Itzhak Bars
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Itzhak Bars (born 31 August 1943, İzmir, Turkey) is a theoretical physicist at the
University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...
in Los Angeles.


Education

After receiving his B.S. from
Robert College The American Robert College of Istanbul ( tr, İstanbul Özel Amerikan Robert Lisesi or ), often shortened to Robert, or RC, is a Selective school, highly selective, Independent school, independent, mixed-sex education, co-educational Secondary ...
in physics in 1967, Bars obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of
Feza Gürsey Feza Gürsey (; April 7, 1921 – April 13, 1992) was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. Among his most prominent contributions to theoretical physics, his works on the Chiral model and on SU(6) are most popular. Early life Feza Gürse ...
at
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
in 1971.


Academic life

After a postdoctoral research position at the
University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...
, he joined the faculty of the Physics Department at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
in 1973. He returned to Yale University in 1975 as a faculty member in the Physics Department, and after almost a decade, he moved to the University of Southern California in 1984 to build a research group in High Energy Theoretical Physics. He also served as the director of the Caltech-USC Center for Theoretical Physics during 1999-2003. His long term visiting appointments include
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
,
Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...
at
Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine ...
,
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. KITP is one of the most renowned institutes for theoretical physics in the world, and brings theorists in physics and rela ...
at Santa Barbara, the Theory Division at
CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...
, the Department of Physics at
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada where he holds the position of a "Distinguished Visiting Research Chair".


Work

Bars is a leading expert in symmetries in physics, which he applies in much of his research on particle physics, field theory,
string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interac ...
and mathematical physics in over 240 scientific papers. He is the author of a book on "Quantum Mechanics", a co-author of a book on "Extra Dimensions in Space and Time", and co-editor of the books "Strings '95, Future Perspectives in String Theory" and "Symmetry in Particle Physics". Some of his experimentally successful physics predictions include supersymmetry in large nuclei with even/odd numbers of nucleons, and the weak interaction contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, in the context of the quantized Standard Model, that was confirmed after 30 years. His contributions to the mathematics of supersymmetry are extensively used in several branches of physics and mathematics. In 2006, Bars presented the theory that time does not have only one dimension (past/future), but has two separate dimensions instead. Humans normally perceive physical reality as four dimensional, i.e. three-dimensional space (up/down, back/forth and side-to-side), and one-dimensional time (past/future). Bars' theory proposes a six-dimensional universe, composed of four-dimensional space and two-dimensional time. Physicist Joe Polchinski, at the
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. KITP is one of the most renowned institutes for theoretical physics in the world, and brings theorists in physics and rela ...
at UC Santa Barbara, has said "Itzhak Bars has a long history of finding new mathematical symmetries that might be useful in physics... This two-time idea seems to have some interesting mathematical properties." Quoted from Physorg.com article below. Itzhak Bars's theory was a featured cover story in ''
New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishe ...
'' magazine on October 13, 2007, and was again a featured cover story in Filosofia magazine on October 26, 2011. Because of a "gauge symmetry in phase space" at the basis of this 2T-physics theory, only gauge symmetric combinations of the six dimensions can be perceived by physical observers, and this is why humans think there are 3+1 dimensions rather than the underlying 4+2 large (not curled up) dimensions. However, with enough guidance, the 4+2 dimensional structure can be perceived indirectly by observers in 3+1 dimensions as predicted effects that, when correctly interpreted, reveal the underlying 4+2 dimensional universe. To explain to the layman how this gauge symmetry works, Bars makes an analogy between the phenomena in the 4+2 dimensional world and events happening in a hypothetical 3 dimensional room. In this analogy the two-dimensional surfaces that makeup the boundaries of the three-dimensional room (walls, ceiling, floor) are the counterparts of the 3+1 dimensional world humans live in as observers. In this setting, if you shine light from different directions in the room, you create two-dimensional shadows of the three-dimensional events projected on the surfaces surrounding the room. The shadows and their motions on some wall will look different than those on other walls, ceiling or floor. If observers were never allowed to exist in the room but were confined to live and crawl only on the surfaces of surrounding boundaries, the two-dimensional physicist at different boundaries would then write different physics equations to describe mathematically the shadows he/she sees from those different perspectives. He/she would also believe that the shadows at different boundaries are different physical systems because their equations would not match. Since all shadows come from the unique set of events in the room, it is evident from the perspective of the room that the shadows are not independent of each other. So, there must be a definite predicted relationship between the systems of the two dimensional equations at different walls. If the two dimensional physicists are very smart, with much effort they may begin to discover this hidden information by carefully comparing equations of apparently different systems and from this indirectly understand that what appeared to be many different physical systems are really simply understood as the many shadows of a single set of tree dimensional events that happen in the room. This would look like a fantastic unification of complicated systems in two dimensions as a single simple system in three dimensions. According to Itzhak Bars, this analogy conveys the relationship between 1T-physics in 3+1 dimensions (like the physics on the boundaries of the room) and 2T-physics (like physics in the room). The requirement of only gauge-symmetric combinations of 4+2 dimensions demanded by the gauge symmetry is what forces the observers to experience all phenomena as if they live in 3+1 dimensions. Bars has provided many examples of the hidden information as predictions for 1T-physics coming from 2T-physics at all energy levels, from everyday well understood classical and quantum physics to much less understood boundaries of physics in cosmology and high energy physics. He believes that the 2T-physics approach provides powerful new tools to explore the less known aspects of the universe and build the right unified theory. Itzhak Bars's current interests include String Field Theory, 2T-Physics which he originated in 1998, Cosmology and Black Holes and Particle Physics at accelerators. In 2006 he established that all the physics we know today, as embodied in principle in the Standard Model of Particles and Forces and General Relativity, emerges from a new kind of gauge symmetric theory (in position-momentum phase space) based on a space-time of 4 space and 2 time dimensions. The physical gauge invariant sector, of this 4+2 dimensional reformulation of all physics, yields a holographic projection (like a shadow) onto a "boundary" of 4+2 dimensions. This boundary is an emergent space-time with 3 space and 1 time dimensions where we exist as observers that interpret all phenomena that occur within the 4+2 dimensional universe. This reformulation of physics predicts new correlations among physical phenomena that are not provided by the traditional 1 time formalism and therefore yields new information that was not available before. An important prediction of this approach is that the Standard Model coupled to General Relativity must be invariant under local scaling transformations in 3+1 dimensions. This local Weyl symmetry in turn provides new tools to investigate new features of 3+1 dimensional space-time in the very early cosmological history of the universe and in the interior of black holes.


Honours and awards

* 1988 Elected
Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of American Physic ...
''"for formulation, development, and application of symmetry and supersymmetry principles in unified gauge theories, composite models of quarks and leptons, nuclear supersymmetry, feeble forces, superstring and supermembrane theories*'' * A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bars, Itzhak 1943 births Living people 21st-century American physicists Boğaziçi University alumni University of Southern California faculty Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Theoretical physicists Fellows of the American Physical Society Turkish emigrants to the United States People associated with CERN