Gerard Kitchen O'Neill
Gerard Kitchen O'Neill (born February 6, 1927 in Brooklyn , New York City , † April 27, 1992 in Redwood City , California ) was an American physicist and space pioneer.
Life
O'Neill was a navy radar technician during World War II. From 1946 to 1950 he studied physics at Swarthmore College and received his doctorate in 1954 from Cornell University . From 1954 until his death he worked at Princeton University , first as an instructor, from 1956 as an assistant professor and in 1959 as an associate professor. There he first dealt with experimental particle physics and accelerator physics . In the late 1950s and early 1960s he built the first electron storage ring / collider in the United States (Colliding Beam Experiment, CBX) in a Stanford-Princeton collaboration (with Wolfgang Panofsky , Burton Richter and others) in Stanford after his Storage ring / collider concept published in Physical Review in 1956. In the mid-1960s, he carried out colliding beam experiments with Burton Richter on the ring that was fed with particles from the SLAC's linear accelerator. In 1965 he received a full professorship at Princeton. From 1985 he was Professor Emeritus there. He died of leukemia in 1992 .
O'Neill is best known for his visions of space. He developed ideas for this in the early 1970s when he gave his physics students exercises in this direction. His first publication on the subject, The Colonization of Space , appeared in Physics Today in September 1974, after being repeatedly rejected by journals (even Science and Scientific American) for four years. In 1975 he organized a conference on technologies for the colonization of space at Princeton. In 1976/77 he and Henry Kolm from MIT designed the prototype of a mass driver , an electromagnetic catapult (see propulsion methods for space travel ). According to the original idea, materials should be shot from the moon to the Lagrangian point L 5, the place that O'Neill had envisaged for the first space colony. In 1977, O'Neill founded the Space Studies Institute , currently headed by Freeman Dyson . The institute is developing various plans for exploring and colonizing space .
From his first marriage between 1950 and 1966 with his fellow student in Swarthmore Sylvia Turlington he had a son and two daughters. In 1973 he married Renate Steffen, who at that time supported him on a cross-country glider flight through the USA. With her he had a son.
O'Neill was a passionate pilot, both as a motorized pilot and as a glider pilot. In the 1960s, he underwent NASA's selection tests for astronauts when this became possible for candidates from civil life as well. O'Neill was not taken. He was also one of the first people to be buried in space .
See also
Works
- The high frontier. Human Colonies in Space . William Morrow & Company, 1977, ISBN 0-9622379-0-6 .
- Space-Based Manufacturing from Non-Terrestrial Materials . Amer Inst of Aeronautics, 1977, ISBN 0-915928-21-3
- 2081. A Hopeful View of the Human Future . Simon and Schuster, 1981, ISBN 0-671-44751-3 .
- The Technology Edge. Opportunities for America in world competition . Simon and Schuster, 1983, ISBN 0-671-55437-9 .
- with Cheng Elementary Particle Physics , 1979
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | O'Neill, Gerard Kitchen |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist and space pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 6, 1927 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brooklyn , New York City |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 27, 1992 |
| Place of death | Redwood City , California |