Who was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and whose 2005 biography won the 2008 Duff Cooper Prize, Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and "Discover Magazine" Best Science Book of the Year?
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American Prometheus American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2005. Twenty-five years in the making, the book was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It also won the 2008 Duff Cooper Prize, Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and "Discover Magazine" Best Science Book of the Year.
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J. Robert Oppenheimer Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico; Oppenheimer later remarked that it brought to mind words from the "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
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Samuel Jackson Barnett Samuel Jackson Barnett (December 14, 1873 – May 22, 1956) was an American physicist. He was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Lyman Page Lyman Alexander Page, Jr. (born September 24, 1957) is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics at Princeton University. He is an expert in observational cosmology and one of the original co-investigators for the WMAP probe that made precise observations of the cosmic background radiation, an electromagnetic echo of the Universe's big bang phase.
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David Lindley (physicist) David Lindley (born 1956) is a theoretical physicist and author. He holds a B.A. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University (1975 – 1978) and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sussex (1978 – 1981). Then he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University. From 1983 to 1986, he was a Research Fellow in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He then served as Technical Editor and Writer with the Central Design Group for the Superconducting Supercollider at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California. He was an Associate Editor at "Nature" (1987 – 1993), a Senior Editor of "Science" (1994 – 1995), and an Associate Editor of "Science News" (1996 – 2000). Since 2000, he is a freelance science writer and consultant.
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John L. Heilbron John Lewis Heilbron (born 17 March 1934, San Francisco) is an American historian of science best known for his work in the history of physics and the history of astronomy. He is Professor of History and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus (Vice-Chancellor 1990–1994) at the University of California, Berkeley, senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and visiting professor at Yale University and the California Institute of Technology. He edited the academic journal "Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences" for twenty-five years.
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Andrew Strominger Andrew Eben Strominger ( ; born 1955) is an American theoretical physicist who is the Director of Harvard's Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. He has made significant contributions to quantum gravity and string theory. These include his work on Calabi-Yau compactification and topology change in string theory, and on the stringy origin of black hole entropy. He is a senior fellow at the Society of Fellows, and is the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics.
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Edward Witten Edward Witten ( ; born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist and professor of mathematical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Physics for Future Presidents Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines is a 2008 book by University of California, Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller. It attempts to explain many physics concepts to the educated layperson, with specific applications to current issues like terrorism, energy, and climate change.
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K.C. Cole K.C. Cole (born August 22, 1946) is an American science writer, author, radio commentator, and professor. She has authored 8 nonfiction books, notably the bestseller "The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty", which has been translated into a dozen languages, and her memoir about her late mentor, Frank Oppenheimer, "Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up". In 1995, she was awarded the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award and has covered science for "The Los Angeles Times" since 1994. She is currently a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Cole is a resident of Santa Monica, California, United States.
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Spencer R. Weart Spencer R. Weart (born 1942) was the director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. Originally trained as a physicist, he is now a historian of science. He earned his B.A. in Physics at Cornell University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1968.
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Life Science Library The Life Science Library is a series of hardbound books published by Time Life between 1963 and 1967, popular in its prime. Each of the twenty-six volumes explore a major topic of the natural sciences. They are intended for, and written at a level appropriate to, an educated lay readership. In each volume, the text of each of eight chapters is followed by a "Picture Essay" lavishly illustrating the subject of the preceding chapter. They were available in a monthly subscription from "Life" magazine. Each volume takes complex scientific concepts and provides explanations that can be easily understood. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is explained in a cartoon about a spy drama involving a train traveling very close to the speed of light; probability is explained with poker hands and the atomic table with common household items. Although progress has overtaken much of them, their explanations of basic science and the history of discovery in an area is still excellent. The Consulting Editors of the series are microbiologist René Dubos, physicist Henry Margenau, and physicist and novelist C. P. Snow.
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Keith Symon Keith Randolph Symon was an American physicist working in the fields of accelerator physics and plasma physics. Born March 25, 1920, he died December 16, 2013. Symon graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Harvard in 1942 with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. In 1948 he was awarded a PhD in Physics. He taught physics at Wayne State University in Detroit until 1955. Symon was professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin until his retirement in 1992 when he became emeritus professor. From 1956 to 1967 he was on the staff of the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), a collaboration of Big Ten universities, the University of Chicago and Notre Dame. In 1982 and 1983 he was acting director of the Madison Academic Computing Center and from 1983 to 1985, acting director of the UW-Madison Synchrotron Radiation Center. His textbook, "Mechanics", has been a staple in physics classes since publication of the first edition in 1953. It has been published in multiple languages and is still in use around the world.
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Julian Schwinger Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order. Schwinger was a physics professor at several universities.
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Philip Morrison Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics and high energy astrophysics.
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Curtis Callan Curtis Gove Callan, Jr. (born October 11, 1942) is a theoretical physicist and a professor at Princeton University. He has conducted research in gauge theory, string theory, instantons, black holes, strong interactions, and many other topics. He was awarded the Sakurai Prize in 2000 ("For his classic formulation of the renormalization group, his contributions to instanton physics and to the theory of monopoles and strings") and the Dirac Medal in 2004.
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A. P. Balachandran Aiyalam Parameswaran Balachandran (born 25 January 1938) is an Indian theoretical physicist well known for his extensive contributions to the role of classical topology in quantum physics. He has been the Joel Dorman Steele Professor of Physics in Syracuse University since 2000. He has also been a Fellow of the American Physical Society and awarded a prize by the U.S. Chapter of the Indian Physics Association in recognition of his outstanding scientific contributions. In 1990, Syracuse University honored him with a Chancellor's Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement.
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J. Marvin Herndon J. Marvin Herndon (born 1944) is an American interdisciplinary scientist, who earned his BA degree in physics in 1970 from the University of California, San Diego and his Ph.D. degree in nuclear chemistry in 1974 from Texas A&M University. For three years, J. Marvin Herndon was a post-doctoral assistant to Hans Suess and Harold C. Urey in geochemistry and cosmochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. He is the President of Transdyne Corporation in San Diego, California. He has been profiled in "Current Biography", and dubbed a “maverick geophysicist” by "The Washington Post".
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Brian Greene Brian Randolph Greene (born February 9, 1963) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
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Benjamin Zuckerman Benjamin Michael Zuckerman (born August 16, 1943) is an astrophysicist and an emeritus professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA. His recent work focus primarily on formation and evolution of planetary systems around various types of stars.
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Robert Wald Robert M. Wald ( ; born June 29, 1947 in New York City) is a physicist who specializes in general relativity and the thermodynamics of black holes. He is the son of the mathematician and statistician Abraham Wald. Wald's parents died in a plane crash when he was three years old. He is the author of a graduate textbook, "General Relativity". Wald is a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute and the University of Chicago. Wald has taught undergraduate courses across a range of physics topics, and has been honored as a particularly effective teacher.
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Physics of the Future Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 is a 2011 book by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, author of "Hyperspace" and "Physics of the Impossible". In it Kaku speculates about possible future technological development over the next 100 years. He interviews notable scientists about their fields of research and lays out his vision of coming developments in medicine, computing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and energy production. The book was on the New York Times Bestseller List for five weeks.