William A. Edelstein is an American physicist. One of the key developers of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), he was part of the team that developed the first full-body MRI scanner at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and was the primary inventor of spin-warp imaging, which is still used in all commercial MRI systems.[1]
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Edelstein was born in Gloversville, New York, and graduated from Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois in 1962. He received a BSc in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1965 and a PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1974. His thesis, on nuclear physics, was supervised by Robert Pound.
Following the completion of a post-doc at Glasgow University where he worked on gravitational wave detection, Edelstein moved to a post as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen from 1977 to 1980, where he was part of the group that performed the first full-body human MRI scan. Aberdeen recognised Edelstein for this work with an honorary doctorate in 2007.[2]
Edelstein worked for the General Electric Research and Development Centre in Schenectady, New York, from 1980 to 2001, where he continued to work on developments to MRI technology.[3]
Edelstein became a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Radiology at Johns Hopkins University in 2007.
In 2010, Edelstein presented a paper at a meeting of the American Physical Society in which he disclosed his findings that the reason that space travel at the speed of light had not been achieved is that according to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, spaceships would be exposed at such speeds to a dose of radiation that would be fatal to crew members. Edelstein suggested that his calculations showed the crew of the Starship Enterprise would have suffered this fate if their travels had not been fiction. Star Trek fans protested volubly on numerous internet discussion boards.[4]