Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr.

Infobox Scientist
name = Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr.


imagesize = 180px
birth_date = birth date|1941|03|29|df=yes
birth_place = Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
nationality = United States
field = Physics
work_institutions = Princeton University
University of Massachusetts
Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory
alma_mater = Haverford College
Harvard University
doctoral_advisor =
doctoral_students =
known_for =
religion = Quaker
influences =
influenced =
prizes = Wolf Prize in Physics (1992)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1993)
footnotes =

Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. (born March 29, 1941) is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

Biography

Taylor was born in Philadelphia to Joseph Hooton Taylor, Sr., and Sylvia Evans Taylor, both of whom had Quaker roots for many generations, and grew up in Cinnaminson Township, New Jersey. He attended the Moorestown Friends School in Moorestown, New Jersey, where he excelled in math. [Seife, Charles. [http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_old/PAW95-96/02_9596/1011feat.html "Spin Doctor: Nobel Physicist Joseph Taylor Takes the "Pulse" of Dying Stars"] , "Princeton Alumni Weekly", October 11, 1995. Accessed October 26, 2007. "Born in Philadelphia in 1941, he grew up on a peach farm in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, that has been in his family for more than two centuries -"a plot of green," he recalls, in the industrial belt along the Delaware River north of Camden.... As a high school student at Moorestown (N.J.) Friends, Taylor excelled in mathematics, a subject he pursued at Haverford College before switching to physics."] He received a B.A. in physics at Haverford College in 1963, and a Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University in 1968. After a brief research position at Harvard, Taylor went to the University of Massachusetts, eventually becoming Professor of Astronomy and Associate Director of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Taylor's thesis work was on lunar occultation measurements. About the time he completed his Ph.D., Jocelyn Bell discovered the first radio pulsars with a telescope near Cambridge, England.

Career

Taylor immediately went to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's telescopes in Green Bank, West Virginia, and participated in the discovery of the first pulsars discovered outside Cambridge. Since then, he has worked on all aspects of pulsar astrophysics. In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered the first pulsar in a binary system, named PSR B1913+16 after its position in the sky, during a survey for pulsars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Although it was not understood at the time, this was also the first of what are now called "recycled" pulsars: neutron stars that have been spun-up to fast spin rates by the transfer of mass onto their surfaces from a companion star.

The orbit of this binary system is slowly shrinking as it loses energy because of emission of gravitational radiation. The rate of shrinkage can be precisely predicted from Einstein's theory, and over a thirty-year period Taylor and his colleagues have made measurements that match this prediction to much better than one percent accuracy. There are now scores of binary pulsars known, and independent measurements have confirmed Taylor's results.

In 1980, he moved to Princeton University, where he was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics, having also served for six years as Dean of Faculty. He retired in 2006.

Amateur Radio

Joe Taylor first obtained his amateur radio license as a teenager, which led him to the field of radio astronomy. Taylor is well known in the field of amateur radio weak signal communication and was assigned the call sign K1JT by the FCC. He wrote WSJT ("Weak Signal/Joe Taylor"), a software package and protocol suite that utilizes computer-generated messages in conjunction with radio transceivers to communicate over long distances with other amateur radio operators. WSJT is useful for passing short messages via non-traditional radio communications methods, such as moonbounce and meteor scatter and other low signal-to-noise ratio paths. It is also useful for extremely long-distance contacts using very low power transmissions.

Honours and awards

Taylor has used this first binary pulsar to make high-precision tests of general relativity. Working with his colleague Joel Weisberg, Taylor has used observations of this pulsar to demonstrated the existence of gravitational radiation in the amount and with the properties first predicted by Albert Einstein. He and Hulse shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this object.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taylor has been recognized with many other awards, including the first Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Tomalla Foundation Prize, the Magellanic Premium, the Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, the Albert Einstein Medal, the Wolf Prize in Physics, and the Karl Schwarzschild Medal. He was among the first group of MacArthur Fellows. He has served on many boards, committees, and panels, co-chairing the Decadal Panel of that produced the report "Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium" that established the United States's national priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period 2000-2010.

ee also

*Harold E. Taylor brother.

References

External links

* [http://pupgg.princeton.edu/www/jh/research/Taylor_Joseph.htmlx Joseph Taylor, Dept. of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey]
* [http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1993/ 1993 Nobel Physics laureates]
* [http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1993/taylor-autobio.html Nobel autobiography]