John Preskill

John Preskill

John Philipp Preskill (born January 19, 1953 in Highland Park , Illinois ) is an American theoretical physicist (elementary particle physics, cosmology, quantum computer science ). He is a professor at the California Institute of Technology .

Life

Preskill attended high school in his birthplace (and was Valedictorian when he graduated in 1971), studied physics at Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in 1975 and at Harvard University with a master’s degree in 1975 and a Ph.D. . 1980 with Steven Weinberg with the work Unified Gauge Theories without Elementary Scalar Fields . He was then a Junior Fellow at Harvard in 1980/81, where he became Assistant Professor in 1981 and finally Associate Professor at Harvard. In 1983 he became an Associate Professor and in 1990 Professor at CalTech . From 2002 to 2009 he was John D. McArthur Professor and from 2010 Feynman Professor at Caltech. From 2000 to 2014 he was director of the Institute for Quantum Information, 2003 to 2011 of the Center for the Physics of Information and from 2014 of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.

John Preskill made a name for himself as a student in 1979 by publishing an essay on the cosmological production of heavy magnetic monopoles in connection with the Great Unified Theory, and showed that the density of heavy monopoles produced in the early universe was so high according to the current cosmological models was that this impact on the expansion and as the helium production would have had in the early universe that were not observed (which soon after another argument for the introduction of inflation (cosmology) by Alan Guth in 1980 was). Preskill already pointed out that monopoly production would possibly be suppressed if, instead of a second-order phase transition, there was a first-order phase transition in the Big Bang, which is the case with the inflation models. In 1983 he published an essay with Frank Wilczek and Mark B. Wise, who explored the cosmological effects of axions and suggested them as candidates for dark matter .

His public bets with Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne on the information paradox of black holes gained some notoriety . Later he dealt with quantum information theory and quantum computers. Since 1997 he has been giving regular lectures on quantum information theory at Caltech (partly with Alexei Jurjewitsch Kitajew ).

In 1991 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . Preskill was selected to deliver the 2017 Gibbs Lecture .

From 1982 to 1986 he was a Sloan Research Fellow and from 1984 to 1989 Presidential Young Investigator of the National Science Foundation.

He has been married since 1975 and has two children.

Fonts

• Magnetic Monopoles, Annual Review Nucl. Part. Sci., Vol. 34, 1984, pp. 461-530
• Monopoles and Vortices, in P. Ramond, R. Stora, Les Houches Lectures 44, 1985, Elsevier 1987

swell

1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ John Preskill in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ^ Preskill: Cosmological production of superheavy magnetic monopoles. Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 43, 1979, p. 1365.
4. ^ Preskill, Wise: Wilczek Cosmology of the invisible axion. Physics Letters B, Volume 120, 1983, pp. 127-132.
5. ↑ Heise Telepolis 2004: Black holes are not bald heads, but hairy monsters.
6. ^ Lecture Quantum Computation by Preskill with script.
7. ^ National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected. ( Memento of the original from August 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Press release from the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org) dated April 29, 2014.  

Web links

Commons : John Preskill  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Homepage at CalTech (English)
• CV (English)