David Layzer

David Layzer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 31, 1925. In 1943 he applied to Harvard and was was accepted. After three semesters, he was drafted into the army and spent two years in the Signal Corps. He returned to Harvard and graduated in 1947 with a degree in mathematics. He enrolled in the graduate program in astronomy at Harvard and received a PhD degree in 1950, having written his thesis under Donald Menzel on theoretical calculations of atomic spectra. After postdoctoral positions at Michigan, Berkeley and Princeton he joined the faculty of the Astronomy Department at Harvard in 1953. He was tenured in 1959, and appointed the first Donald H. Menzel Chair of Astrophysics in 1979, a position he held until his retirement in 1997 at age 73.

David published three books focused on the creation and evolution of order in the cosmos:

“Constructing the Universe” in 1984, “Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe” in 1990, and his final book, “Why We Are Free.” The final book, published posthumously in 2021, builds on the fundamental idea, expressed in his earlier books, that the growth of information in the universe is inconsistent with the concept of a deterministic universe.