Joseph Silk

Joseph Silk
Born (1942-12-03) 3 December 1942
London, England
Residence UK
Nationality British
American
Alma mater Clare College, Cambridge
Harvard University
Awards Royal Society Bakerian Medal (2007)
Balzan Prize (2011)
Scientific career
Fields Cosmology
Institutions Institut d'astrophysique de Paris
University of Oxford
University of California, Berkeley
Johns Hopkins University

Joseph Ivor Silk FRS (born 3 December 1942) is a British astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011.

He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford[1] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected May 1999). He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe.[2] Silk has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.

Biography

He was educated at Tottenham County School (1954–1960) and went on to study Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1960–1963).[3] He gained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968. Silk took up his first post at Berkeley in 1970, and the Chair in Astronomy in 1978. Following a career of nearly 30 years there, Silk returned to the UK in 1999 to take up the Savilian Chair at the University of Oxford. He is currently Professor of Physics at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (since in 2010), and Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College since 2015.[4]

Silk damping

The structure of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is principally determined by two effects: acoustic oscillations and diffusion damping. The latter is also called collisionless or Silk damping after Joseph Silk.

Publications

Silk has over 800 publications, nearly 200 as first author, of which 3 have been cited over 1000 times, over 50 have been published in Nature and 12 in Science.[5]

In 2011, Silk delivered a talk, "The Creation of the Universe," at the first Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands. The talk was subsequently published in the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space.[6]

Books by Joseph Silk

  • The Infinite Cosmos, Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-953361-9
  • On the Shores of the Unknown: A Short History of the Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-521-83627-1, Google Link
  • The Big Bang , W.H. Freeman, 2005, ISBN 0-7167-1812-X
  • Cosmic Enigmas , Springer, 1994, ISBN 1-56396-061-3, Google Link

References

  1. ↑ "New College, Oxford: Joseph Silk". Archived from the original on 22 December 2011. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
  2. ↑ "Joseph Ivor Silk". International Balzan Prize Foundation. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
  3. ↑ "Astronomy chair filled by expert in cosmology". Oxford University Gazette. 22 October 1998. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
  4. ↑ "Gresham Professor of Astronomy" on the Gresham College website (accessed (27 July 2015)
  5. ↑ Google Scholar
  6. ↑ http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/starmus-festival-and-stephen-hawking-launch-the-book-starmus-50-years-of-man-in-space-274263251.html
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