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Blandford, Roger D.
Oral history interview with Roger Blandford, 2021 April 29.
Interview with Roger Blandford, the Luke Blossom Professor at the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Professor of Physics at SLAC. He discusses his current work developing alternate understandings of the Event Horizon Telescope image, on fast radio bursts, and on the notion that handedness has astrophysical origins. Blandford describes the history of cosmology as a respectable discipline within physics, and he credits the rise of VLBI in the 1960s and 1970s for demonstrating the evidence of black holes. He recounts his childhood in England, his early interests in science, and his education at Cambridge, where his thesis research on accretion discs and radio sources was supervised by Martin Rees. Blandford discusses his postdoctoral work on astrophysical particle acceleration and plasma and QED processes in pulsars and a formative visit to the Institute for Advanced Study and to Berkeley. He describes his initial impressions of Caltech where he joined the faculty and where he worked closely with Roman Znajek, and he explains the distinctions between radio jets and relativistic jets. Blandford explains his reasons for moving to Stanford to set up the Kavli Institute and he describes his involvement with the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. At the end of the interview, Blandford contends that the most exciting developments in the field have been on exoplanet research, why the possibilities in astrobiology give him cause for optimism, and why the concept that astronomical discovery arrives as logically unscripted resonates with him.
Roger Blandford is a theoretical astrophysicist. He is the Luke Blossom Professor at the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Professor of Physics at SLAC. Blandford completed his graduate studies and postdoctoral research at University of Cambridge, and he previously was on faculty at Caltech.
Blandford, Roger D.
Hoyle, Fred, 1915-2001
Lynden-Bell, D.
Rees, Martin J., 1942-
Ryle, Martin, 1918-1984
California Institute of Technology
Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, N.J.)
Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Stanford University. Department of Physics
University of California, Berkeley
University of Cambridge
Astronomy
Astrophysical jets -- Congresses.
Astrophysics
Black holes (Astronomy)
Cosmology
Exobiology
Molecular spectroscopy.
Quantum electrodynamics
Quasars
Standard model (Nuclear physics)
Steady state cosmology.
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA
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