John N. Bahcall

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John N. Bahcall

John Norris Bahcall (born December 30, 1934 in Shreveport , Louisiana , † August 17, 2005 in New York City , NY ) was a leading American astrophysicist . He found new ways to study the sun and was the initiator of the Hubble space telescope .

Life

Bahcall was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1934. He initially wanted to become a rabbi before studying physics at the University of California, Berkeley (Bachelor 1956) and University of Chicago (Master 1957). He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1961 .

From 1960 he was at Indiana University and from 1962 at Caltech , where he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in 1965. In 1967 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . From 1968 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton , where Albert Einstein had also taught, and was Professor from 1971 and Richard Black Professor of Natural Science in the School of Natural Sciences at IAS from 1997 . He dealt with the so-called solar neutrino problem and quasars and has thus made a decisive contribution to current astronomical research. Since the 1970s he was the initiator of the Hubble space telescope .

John N. Bahcall was President of the American Astronomical Society from 1990 to 1992. Among other things, he was an advisor to NASA and the Nobel Prize Committee. Bahcall has published around 500 academic papers, books, and articles about his research.

He was married to Neta A. Bahcall , also an astrophysicist and professor at Princeton University , since 1966 . They have three children (Safi, Dan and Orli).

Quote

  • John Bahcall described the universe as "unattractive, implausible, crazy, but beautiful." (Interview with the newspaper The Star-Ledger of Newark in February 2003)

Literature (selection)

  • Neutrino Astrophysics . Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-37975-X
  • with Alan Lightman: Time for the Stars. Astronomy in the 1990s . Warner Books, 1994, ISBN 0-446-67024-3
  • with Jeremiah P. Ostriker : Unsolved Problems in Astrophysics . Princeton University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-691-01607-0
  • WC Haxton and K. Kubodera: Neutrino Physics. Its Impact on Particle Physics, Astrophysics, and Cosmology . World Scientific Publishing Company, 2001, ISBN 981-02-4472-X
  • with Raymond Davis Jr. and Peter Parker: Solar Neutrinos . Westview Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8133-4037-3
  • with Steven Weinberg and Tsvi Piran: Dark Matter in the Universe . World Scientific Publishing Company, 2004, ISBN 981-238-841-9
  • with Roger Ulrich: Solar models, neutrino experiments and helioseismology , Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 60, 1988, pp. 297-372
  • The solar neutrino problem , Scientific American, May 1990

Awards

In 1976 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 2001 a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 2004 he was Vice President of the American Physical Society, a fellow of which he had been since 1969.

Many colleagues regularly expected the Nobel Prize for John Bahcall, but he was denied it. The neutrino researchers Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba wanted to share their 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics with him. John Bahcall refused out of modesty.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 65124
personal data
SURNAME Bahcall, John N.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bahcall, John Norris (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Shreveport , Louisiana
DATE OF DEATH August 17, 2005
Place of death New York City