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Schmidt, Maarten, 1929-
Oral history interview with Maarten Schmidt, 1996 April 11 and May 2, 15.
An interview in three sessions in April and May of 1996 with Maarten Schmidt. He recalls growing up in Groningen, Holland, during German occupation in World War II; his early education and friendship with Jan Borgman, with whom he built a telescope; photographing the solar eclipse of July 9, 1945; his matriculation at Groningen University in 1946; and when, at an astronomy conference in 1949, Jan Oort asked him to become an assistant at the Leiden Observatory. Schmidt also discusses his graduate study at Leiden, where he worked with Oort on the brightness of comets; his time in Kenya making measurements of declination on the equator with G. van Herk; the 1951 discovery of 21-centimeter line; his radio observations of galactic structure with Oort and Henk van de Hulst; his Ph.D. from Leiden in 1956 and his thesis on the distribution of mass in Milky Way galaxy; coming to Mount Wilson Observatory on a two-year Carnegie Fellowship and his return to Leiden in 1958; coming to Pasadena in 1959 as an associate professor at Caltech, where he worked on exchange between stars and galactic gas, and on size, mass distribution and rotation of Milky Way galaxy; his time at Palomar in early 1960s, working with radio astronomer Tom Matthews and taking spectra of optical objects identified with radio sources, which lead to the discovery of quasars. Schmidt also recalls quasar work and contributions of Jesse Greenstein, John Bolton, J. Beverly Oke, Allan Sandage, Cyril Hazard, and later Richard Green, James Gunn, and Donald Schneider; the early arguments by Halton Arp, Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge that quasars were not cosmological objects; the use of CCDs in 1980s-1990s and the discovery in 1993 of a quasar with a redshift of 4.9, largest redshift on record. Schmidt comments on his work in X-ray astronomy and gamma-ray astronomy, with ROSAT [Rn̲tgen X-ray Satellite] and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory [GRO]; his graduate students, among them Nobel laureate Robert W. Wilson (co-discoverer of cosmic microwave background); his administrative career at Caltech - three years as executive officer for astronomy, three years as PMA division chairman, two years as director of the Hale Observatories; the concurrent deterioration of relations between Caltech and the Carnegie Institution; his presidency of the American Astronomical Society and his work on behalf of VLBA [Very Large Baseline Array] of radio telescopes and National Science Foundations astronomy budget. Schmidt concludes with a discussion of his chairmanship of AURA [Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy] board.
Maarten Schmidt (1929- ); Ph.D. physics, University of Leiden (1956); Carnegie Fellow for 2 years at Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories; professor, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (until 1996); director of the Hale Observatories (1978-1980). Awards: Bruce Medal (1992). Research interests: evolution and distribution of quasars, finding x-ray and gamma ray sources, and optical spectra.
Arp, Halton C.
Bolton, John Gatenby, 1922-
Burbidge, Geoffrey R.
Hulst, H. C. van de (Hendrik Christoffel), 1918-
Greenstein, Jesse L. (Jesse Leonard), 1909-2002-
Gunn, J. E. (James Edward), 1938-
Hazard, Cyril.
Hoyle, Fred, 1915-2001
Matthews, Tom R.
Oke, J. Beverley, 1928-2004.
Oort, Jan Hendrik.
Sandage, Allan.
Schmidt, Maarten, 1929-
Wilson, Robert R., 1914-2000-
American Astronomical Society.
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy
Gamma-Ray Observatory
Mount Wilson Observatory.
Palomar Observatory.
Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden
ROSAT (Artificial satellite)
Astronomy.
Quasars
Cohen, Shirley, 1922-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
California Institute of Technology. Institute Archives. 1201 East California Blvd. (Mail Code 015A-74), Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
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