World-renowned cosmologist George Ellis, who spent nearly a decade in Trieste, proves that you can go home again.

Going Home

George Ellis

When George F.R. Ellis returned to Trieste last November to deliver the second Dennis Sciama Memorial Lecture at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), it was a voyage back in time. In fact, Ellis--who is now professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists--spent several years (1987-1994) at SISSA as professor of cosmic physics during the darkest period of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the country where he was born.
Dennis Sciama, who headed SISSA's Astrophysics Sector from 1982 to 1998, had created similar groups in England, first at Cambridge and then Oxford, where he taught a remarkable succession of gifted students who became eminent scientists: world-famous cosmologists and science writers Stephen Hawking and John Barrow, the UK's Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, and George Ellis.
"My time in Trieste was a happy time," Ellis recalls. "Dennis had many good people in the group, including John Miller, Antonio Lanza and Marek Abramowicz. He ran the group in a way that maximised its energy and output--concentrating on significant astrophysics problems, on the one hand, and the development of promising students, on the other. We had an excellent interaction with ICTP and I enjoined teaching students enrolled in the High Energy Physics Diploma Course."
Ellis studied mathematics and physics at the University of Cape Town, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1961. Three years later he received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, where he was Sciama's first research student. At Cambridge, Ellis also had the good fortune of collaborating with Stephen Hawking on the development of modern mathematical approaches to general relativity. Their partnership is described in the widely used textbook that they co-authored: The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge University Press, 1973).
After several years as a visiting professor in the United States, Europe and Canada, "finally," Ellis says, "in 1973 I came back to South Africa, partly for personal reasons (home is home, after all!) and partly to see what I could do to improve the situation here. In addition to my research, I became involved in economic development projects and housing policy, and later in science policy."
Ellis has published more than 200 scientific papers--most of them focussing on general relativity theory and its application to the large-scale structure of the universe. He has also written eight books, not only on pure science but on science policy, economic development issues, science education, and science and religion. Among them: Flat and Curved Space Times; Before the Beginning; On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics (with Nancey Murphy); and Is the Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe (with Peter Coles). In 2002, Ellis edited The Far-Future Universe. Eschatology from a Cosmic Perceptive, a collection of 18 provocative essays published by Templeton Foundation Press, which was based on a symposium that took place in Rome in November 2000.
"I am still working on cosmology," Ellis says. "For example, I have just developed a completely singularity free inflationary universe, called the 'emergence universe.' It's a universe that starts static in the past, then expands and becomes a standard inflationary universe. Apart from this, I am working on understanding the way that physics can underlie the existence of complex systems."
In 1999 Ellis was awarded the Star of South Africa Medal, presented to him by president Nelson Mandela.

George Ellis with Nelson Mandela

He expresses high praise for his home country's peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. "The Mandela government was amazing, and I think my country was truly blessed by the presence of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu at this critical time in its history."

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