Teukolsky, Saul A. (Saul Arno), 1947-
Oral history interview with Saul Teukolsky, 2021 February 4.
Interview with Saul Teukolsky, Hans A. Bethe Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at Cornell and Robinson Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech. Teukolsky recounts his childhood born in a Jewish family in South Africa, and he explains the tensions between his parents politics, who were accepting of apartheid, and his own views which rejected this as a national injustice. He describes his undergraduate education at the University of Witwatersrand and the impact of the Feynman Lectures on his intellectual development. Teukolsky explains his interest in pursuing general relativity for graduate school, and he discusses the circumstances leading to his enrollment at Caltech, where he studied Newman-Penrose equations and perturbations of the Kerr metric under the direction of Kip Thorne. He discusses his year-long postdoctoral research position at Caltech and his subsequent decision to join the faculty at Cornell, where he developed the gravitational theory program. Teukolsky explains the significance of the Hulse-Taylor discovery at Arecibo on general relativity, and he describes the early impact of computers on advancing GR research and specifically on numerical relativity which he worked on with Bill Press. He discusses the rise of computational astrophysics, and he surveys his interests in pedagogical issues in physics and his early involvement in LIGO and the LISA collaboration. At the end of the interview, Teukolsky explains how he has tried to communicate astrophysical concepts to broad audiences, and he expresses optimism that massive advances in computational abilities will continue to drive forward fundamental advances in the field.
Saul Teukolsky is the Hans A. Bethe Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at Cornell and Robinson Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech. He completed his graduate studies and postdoctoral research at Caltech. Teukolsky has been involved in experiments at LIGO, as well as with the LISA project.
Bethe, Hans A. (Hans Albrecht), 1906-2005
Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988
Press, William H.
Shapiro, Stuart L. (Stuart Louis), 1947-
Teukolsky, Saul A. (Saul Arno), 1947-
Thorne, Kip S.
Wheeler, John Archibald, 1911-2008.
California Institute of Technology
Cornell University
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Astrophysics
Black holes (Astronomy)
General relativity (Physics)
Gravitational waves.
Neutron stars.
Perturbation theory. phys-t
Physics -- Study and teaching
Pulsars
Relativistic astrophysics.
Stellar dynamics.
South Africa -- History
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