Richard Muller Biography

Richard A. Muller is a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and a Jason consultant on U.S. national security.

He is particularly well known for the diversity of his scientific work, which spans particle physics, astrophysics, and geophysics. He received his Ph.D. in elementary particles under the direction of Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez. He created a program at Berkeley to measure the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave radiation, and is credited with the discovery of the great "cosine in the sky" that yields the velocity the Milky Way with respect to the rest of the Universe. He was the first to suggest and use "Accelerator Mass Spectrometry," a technique that improves the sensitivity of radiocarbon dating by a more than a thousand. He initiated a supernova discovery program at Berkeley, eventually taken over by his student Saul Perlmutter, who went on to discover the acceleration of the Universe's expansion and the "cosmological constant." His most notorious work is as coauthor of the "Nemesis theory," proposing that the sun is part of a widely-spaced double star system. His measurements of Ar-Ar ages of lunar spherules yielded the ages of over 135 lunar craters. He has done experimental and theoretical work on the origins of the ice ages, and on geomagnetic reversals.

He is the author of four books: "Nemesis", "The Three Big Bangs", "Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes", and "The Sins of Jesus" (a novel). He is currently writing a textbook, "Physics for Future Presidents," based on a course he teaches at Berkeley.

He has been awarded the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the Texas Instruments Founders Prize, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, and a University of California Distinguished Teaching Award. His website is http://muller.lbl.gov.