Richard A. Muller (January 6 1944 -) of San Francisco, California, U.S., is a physicist who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Muller began his career as a graduate student under nobel laureate Luis Alvarez doing particle physics experiments and working with bubble chambers. During his early years he also helped to cocreate accelerator mass spectroscopy and made some of the first measurements of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Subsequently, Dr. Muller branched out into other areas of science, and in particular the earth sciences. His work has included attempting to understand the ice ages, dynamics at the core-mantle boundary, patterns of extinction and biodiversity through time, and the processes associated with impact cratering. One of his most well known proposals is the Nemesis hypothesis suggesting that the sun could have an as yet undetected companion star, whose perturbations of the Oort cloud and subsequent effects on the flux of comets entering the inner solar system could explain an apparent 26 million year periodicity in extinction events.
Richard Muller is a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group which brings together top scientists as consultants for the United States Department of Defense.
Richard Muller was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1982. He also received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation "for highly original and innovative research which has led to important discoveries and inventions in diverse areas of physics, including astrophysics, radioisotope dating, and optics." More recently, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley [1]. His "Physics for Future Presidents" series of lectures, in which Muller teaches a synopsis of modern qualitative (i.e. without resorting to complicated math) physics, has been released publicly on YouTube by UC Berkeley. For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT's Technology Review. He is married to architect Rosemary Muller.
Published books
- Nemesis: The Death Star (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) ISBN 0-7493-0465-0
- The Three Big Bangs: Comet Crashes, Exploding Stars, and the Creation of the Universe (with coauthor Phil Dauber, Addison/Wesley 1996) ISBN 0-201-15495-1
- Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes: data, spectral analysis, and mechanisms (with coauthor Gordon MacDonald, 2002) ISBN 3-540-43779-7
- The Sins of Jesus (a historical novel, Auravision Publishing 1999) ISBN 0-9672765-1-9
- Physics for Future Presidents (Custom Publishing, 2006) ISBN 1-4266-2459-X free excerpts)
External links
- Muller's Website
- Free Webcast of Physics for Future Presidents
- Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents - Spring 2006 (streamable videos of Dr. Muller's introductionary physics course.)
- Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents, Berkeley webcast, Winter 2006
- Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents, Berkeley webcast, Spring 2007
