“He was understandably upset,” Dr. Duff, the British physicist, said. “I think they could have erred on the side of generosity and included Stanley as the fourth recipient.” (Dr. Zumino died in 2014.)
Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Witten, who were members of the committee that awarded the prize, declined to discuss the particulars of the decision, but Dr. Schwarz said, “It was a purely scientific decision.”
Dr. Deser worked at Brandeis until he retired in 2005. He then moved to Pasadena to be close to his daughter and obtained an unpaid position as a senior research associate at Caltech.
In addition to Abigail, he is survived by two other daughters, Toni Deser and Clara Deser, and four grandchildren.
His wife of 64 years, Elsbeth Deser, died in 2020. A daughter, Eva, died in 1968.
While Dr. Deser was an expert on gravity and general relativity, he was not infallible.
In the Caltech interview, he recalled a paper in which he suggested that gravity could solve some troubling infinities that were showing up in the quantum field theory of electrodynamics.
Other noteworthy physicists had similar thoughts but did not publish them. Dr. Deser did.
“It was garbage,” he said. During a talk at a conference, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who devised much of quantum electrodynamics, “without much difficulty shot me to pieces, which I deserved,” he said.
He added, “Everybody’s entitled to a few strikes.”
