Richard A. Muller
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Richard A. Muller (January 6, 1944 -) of San Francisco, California, USA, is a physicist who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Dr. Muller began his career as a graduate student under nobel laureate Luis Alvarez doing particle physics experiments and working with bubble chambers. During his early years he also helped to cocreate accelerator mass spectroscopy and made some of the first measurements of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background.
Subsequently, Dr. Muller branched out into other areas of science, and in particular the earth sciences. His work has included attempting to understand the ice ages, dynamics at the core-mantle boundary, patterns of extinction and biodiversity through time, and the processes associated with impact cratering. One of his most well known proposals is the Nemesis hypothesis suggesting that the sun could have an as yet undetected companion star, whose perturbations of the Oort cloud and subsequent effects on the flux of comets entering the inner solar system could explain an apparent 26 million year periodicity in extinction events.
Today, Dr. Muller teaches "Physics for Future Presidents" [1] which is a course designed to teach the concepts of physics relevant to important policy decisions such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, space travel, and energy policy. While aiming to be comprehensive, this course is intended to be accessible to non-scientists, and in particular does not require algebra nor SI units. Videos of the lectures are available for free from Berkeley's website.
Richard Muller is a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group which brings together top scientists as consultants for the United States Department of Defense.
Richard Muller won a "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1982. He also received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation "for highly original and innovative research which has led to important discoveries and inventions in diverse areas of physics, including astrophysics, radioisotope dating, and optics." More recently, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley [2].
For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT's Technology Review.
[edit] Published books
- Nemesis: The Death Star (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) ISBN 0-7493-0465-0
- The Three Big Bangs: Comet Crashes, Exploding Stars, and the Creation of the Universe (with coauthor Phil Dauber, Addison/Wesley 1996) ISBN 0-201-15495-1
- Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes: data, spectral analysis, and mechanisms (with coauthor Gordon MacDonald, 2002) ISBN 3-540-43779-7
- The Sins of Jesus (a historical novel, Auravision Publishing 1999) ISBN 0-9672765-1-9
- Physics for Future Presidents (Custom Publishing, 2006) ISBN 1-4266-2459-X free excerpts)
