David Kaiser | |
---|---|
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | Dartmouth College (A.B. 1993) Harvard University (Ph.D 1997, 2000) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics History of science |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Website | http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/ |
David I. Kaiser is an American physicist and historian of science. He is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a full professor in MIT's department of physics. He also served as an inaugural associate dean for MIT's cross-disciplinary program in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. [1]
Kaiser is the author or editor of several books on the history of science, including Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011), [2] and Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020). [3] He received the Apker Award [4] from the American Physical Society in 1993 and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. His historical scholarship has been honored with the Pfizer Award (2007) [5] and the Davis Prize (2013) [6] from the History of Science Society. In March 2012 he was awarded the MacVicar fellowship, a prestigious MIT undergraduate teaching award. [7] In 2012, he also received the Frank E. Perkins Award from MIT for excellence in mentoring graduate students. [8]
Kaiser completed his AB in physics at Dartmouth College in 1993. He completed two PhDs from Harvard University. The first was in physics in 1997 for a thesis entitled "Post-Inflation Reheating in an Expanding Universe," the second in the history of science in 2000 for a thesis on "Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America." [1]
Kaiser's physics research mostly focuses on early-universe cosmology, including topics such as cosmic inflation, [9] [10] post-inflation reheating, [11] [12] [13] and primordial black holes. [14] [15] [16] He has also helped to design and conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory, including the "Cosmic Bell" experiments [17] [18] [19] that Kaiser worked on with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger, [20] and which were featured in the PBS Nova documentary film Einstein's Quantum Riddle (2019). [21]
Kaiser's historical research focuses on intersections among modern natural sciences, geopolitics, and the history of higher education during the Cold War. His MIT course on "Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the Twentieth Century" is available via MIT OpenCourseWare.
In addition to his scholarly writing, Kaiser's work has appeared in The New York Times , [22] [23] [24] [25] the New Yorker magazine, [26] [27] [28] and in several PBS Nova television programs. [29] He also serves as Chair of the Editorial Board of the MIT Press and as Editor of the MIT Case Studies Series on Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch is believed to have lasted from 10−36 seconds to between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the Big Bang. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The re-acceleration of this slowing expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old.
The following is a timeline of gravitational physics and general relativity.
The ekpyrotic universe is a cosmological model of the early universe that explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. The model has also been incorporated in the cyclic universe theory, which proposes a complete cosmological history, both the past and future.
Rainer "Rai" Weiss is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
An axion is a hypothetical elementary particle originally theorized in 1978 independently by Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg as the Goldstone boson of Peccei–Quinn theory, which had been proposed in 1977 to solve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component of cold dark matter.
The Big Bounce hypothesis is a cosmological model for the origin of the known universe. It was originally suggested as a phase of the cyclic model or oscillatory universe interpretation of the Big Bang, where the first cosmological event was the result of the collapse of a previous universe. It receded from serious consideration in the early 1980s after inflation theory emerged as a solution to the horizon problem, which had arisen from advances in observations revealing the large-scale structure of the universe.
Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University.
A Bell test, also known as Bell inequality test or Bell experiment, is a real-world physics experiment designed to test the theory of quantum mechanics in relation to Albert Einstein's concept of local realism. Named for John Stewart Bell, the experiments test whether or not the real world satisfies local realism, which requires the presence of some additional local variables to explain the behavior of particles like photons and electrons. The test empirically evaluates the implications of Bell's theorem. As of 2015, all Bell tests have found that the hypothesis of local hidden variables is inconsistent with the way that physical systems behave.
In the interpretation of quantum mechanics, a local hidden-variable theory is a hidden-variable theory that satisfies the principle of locality. These models attempt to account for the probabilistic features of quantum mechanics via the mechanism of underlying, but inaccessible variables, with the additional requirement that distant events be statistically independent.
In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum state that is locally stable but does not occupy the most stable possible ground state. In this condition it is called metastable. It may last for a very long time in this state, but could eventually decay to the more stable one, an event known as false vacuum decay. The most common suggestion of how such a decay might happen in our universe is called bubble nucleation – if a small region of the universe by chance reached a more stable vacuum, this "bubble" would spread.
An atom interferometer uses the wave-like nature of atoms in order to produce interference. In atom interferometers, the roles of matter and light are reversed compared to the laser based interferometers, i.e. the beam splitter and mirrors are lasers while the source emits matter waves rather than light. Atom interferometers measure the difference in phase between atomic matter waves along different paths. Matter waves are controlled an manipulated using systems of lasers. Atom interferometers have been used in tests of fundamental physics, including measurements of the gravitational constant, the fine-structure constant, and universality of free fall. Applied uses of atom interferometers include accelerometers, rotation sensors, and gravity gradiometers.
Paul Joseph Steinhardt is an American theoretical physicist whose principal research is in cosmology and condensed matter physics. He is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where he is on the faculty of both the Departments of Physics and of Astrophysical Sciences.
Alexander Vilenkin is the Leonard Jane Holmes Bernstein Professor of Evolutionary Science and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 260 publications.
Erick J. Weinberg is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University.
Eternal inflation is a hypothetical inflationary universe model, which is itself an outgrowth or extension of the Big Bang theory.
In cosmology, primordial black holes (PBHs) are hypothetical black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang. In the inflationary era and early radiation-dominated universe, extremely dense pockets of subatomic matter may have been tightly packed to the point of gravitational collapse, creating primordial black holes without the supernova compression typically needed to make black holes today. Because the creation of primordial black holes would pre-date the first stars, they are not limited to the narrow mass range of stellar black holes.
David Tong is a British theoretical physicist. He is a professor at the University of Cambridge, working in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). He is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His research mainly concerns quantum field theory. He is the joint recipient of the 2008 Adams Prize and is currently a Simons Investigator. He is also known for his outreach activities and for his freely available lecture notes covering a wide range of topics in physics.
In physical cosmology, warm inflation is one of two dynamical realizations of cosmological inflation. The other is the standard scenario, sometimes called cold inflation.
Katelin Schutz is an American particle physicist known for using cosmological observations to study dark sectors, that is new particles and forces that interact weakly with the visible world. She was a NASA Einstein Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow in the MIT Department of Physics and is currently an assistant professor of physics at McGill University.
The Buchalter Cosmology Prize, established in 2014, is a prestigious annual prize bestowed by Dr. Ari Buchalter.