(d. 1996)
Robert Weingard was a professor at Rutgers from 1970 until his sudden death at the age of fifty-four in 1996. His research initially dealt with problems of space and time, such as time travel and philosophical aspects of black holes. The philosophy of spacetime was a subject which never ceased to interest him. (One of his last projects involved the foundations of spacetime topology.) Then, from the early 1980s, his publications also concerned quantum theory, and particularly the philosophy of quantum field theory, in which area he was one of the pioneers. He was later to collaborate intensively in this area with his graduate student Nick Huggett. Bob Weingard was probably the first philosopher to write about the technical foundational aspects of superstring theory. He also had very strong interests in the foundations of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, and particularly the de Broglie-Bohm ‘pilot-wave’ interpretation. Most of his work on this interpretation, in the context of cosmology, was written in collaboration with Craig Callender, another of his graduate students.
[Further information: see the obituary in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 28 (1997), pp. 145-146]
