Willem Jacob van Stockum

Van Stockum, Toronto, c. 1935

Willem Jacob van Stockum (November 20 1910-June 10 1944) was a physicist who made an important contribution to the early development of general relativity.

Van Stockum was born in Hattem in the Netherlands. His father was a mechanically talented officer in the Dutch Navy. After the family (less the father) relocated to Ireland in the late 1920s, Willem studied mathematics at the Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a gold medal. He went on to earn an M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from University of Edinburgh.

In the mid nineteen thirties, van Stockum became an early enthusiast of the then new theory of gravitation, general relativity. In 1937, he published a paper which contains one of the first exact solutions in general relativity which modeled the gravitational field produced by a configuration of rotating matter, the van Stockum dust, which remains an important example noted for its unusual simplicity. In this paper, van Stockum was apparently the first to notice the possibility of closed timelike curves, one of the strangest and most disconcerting phenomena in general relativity.

Van Stockum left for the United States in hope of studying under Albert Einstein, eventually gaining a temporary position under Professor Oswald Veblen at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies in early 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War occurred while he was teaching in the United States. Anxious to join the fight against Hitler, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, eventually earning his pilots wings in July 1942. Because of his advanced knowledge of physics, he spent much of the next year as a test pilot in Canada, which must have been vexatious, because van Stockum personally knew many persons who were suffering under Nazi occupation. Finally, van Stockum was able to transfer to the Dutch Air Force (in exile), and in 1944 became the only Dutch officer posted to No. 10 Squadron of the RAF Bomber Command, which was stationed in Yorkshire and flew combat missions in the Halifax heavy bomber over Europe. On June 6, van Stockum participated in the massive air raids which accompanied the Normandy invasion.

A few days later, on June 10 1944, van Stockum and his crew took off on their sixth combat mission, as part of another 400 plane raid. Near their target, the plane was hit by flak, and all seven crew members were lost. They are buried in Laval, near the place where their plane went down.

References

• Willem Jacob van Stockum: A scientist in uniform, De Vliegende Hollander, June 2004 (English translation by Carlo Beenakker). A newspaper article by an officer in the Dutch Air Force, on which this article is largely based.
• A soldier's creed, an essay written by van Stockum and published (under the byline "a bomber pilot", due to wartime security restrictions) in December 1944.
• Stockum, W. J. van (1937). "The gravitational field of a distribution of particles rotating around an axis of symmetry". Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh. 57: 135. The original paper presenting the van Stockum dust solution.