Arthur Valerius Sterling
Arthur Valerius Sterling (1918–1991) was a Cambridge-trained physicist whose career at Princeton gradually turned toward biophysics and the question of how biological systems preserve the past.
Born in Cambridge, England, Sterling was the son of a military engineer and a mathematics teacher. He began physics at Cambridge in 1936. During the war, from approximately 1940 to 1945, he worked in British scientific-technical research related to radar, instrumentation, signals, and calibration. The exact institution and appointment remain unresolved. After returning to Cambridge, he completed his doctoral training around 1952–1953; the supervisor and formal institution are not established.
His Princeton career began in 1953. Sterling first worked in a temporary research appointment in the Princeton/Institute for Advanced Study environment and then pursued a faculty career in physics. His 1963 paper, Causal Structure and the Physical Address of a Past State, examined physical information, inheritance, and memory as an open problem. From the mid-1960s his work moved increasingly toward biophysics and biochemical sciences. He completed Inheritance Without Memory in 1972.
Sterling’s wife, Elizabeth Crawford, was a British historian of European cultural and intellectual history. They met in Cambridge in 1948, married in 1951, and moved to Princeton in 1953. Their only child, Catherine—Kate within the family—was born in 1955. Elizabeth died around 1984. Sterling retired in 1988 and later lived in Bétera, where he worked on CÓDIGO TEMPUS, an unfinished manuscript joining scientific notes and personal reflections.
Documentary limits
Sterling officially disappeared on 14 March 1991. His fate remains unresolved. The archive does not supply an explanation where the record does not establish one, nor does it fill pending biographical details with invention. For the archive's editorial framework and reading conventions, see the Editorial Framework.