Joseph Silk

Biography

He was educated at Tottenham County School (1954–1960) and went on to study Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1960–1963), followed by a diploma in astrophysics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Roger Jennison. He obtained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968, under the direction of David Layzer. 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 of Astronomy 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 was Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College from 2015 to 2019.

Silk damping

Main article: Diffusion 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.

Honors and awards

• 1972 and 1974 Sloan Research Fellow
• 1975: Guggenheim Fellow
• 1995: Fellow of the American Physical Society
• 1999: Fellow of the Royal Society
• 2007: Inclusion in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2008: Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
• 2011: Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe
• 2014: Member of the US National Academy of Sciences
• 2018: Henry Norris Russell Lectureship
• 2019: Gruber Prize in Cosmology with Nicholas Kaiser "for their seminal contributions to the theory of cosmological structure formation and probes of dark matter"
• 2020: Fellow of the American Astronomical Society
• 2020: Nick Kylafis Lecturer

Publications

Silk has over 900 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.

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.

Books by Joseph Silk

• The Infinite Cosmos, Oxford University Press, 2006,
• On the Shores of the Unknown: A Short History of the Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2005, , Google Link
• The Big Bang, W.H. Freeman, 2005,
• Cosmic Enigmas, Springer, 1994, , Google Link

References

References

1. "Joseph Silk".
2. ""Max Tegmark / Professor of Physics"". MIT Department of Physics.
3. "New College, Oxford: Joseph Silk".
4. "Joseph Ivor Silk". [[Balzan Prize.
5. Zierler, David. [https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/47089 ''Interview of Joseph Silk by David Zierler on March 31, 2021'']. Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA. 2021 (accessed 21 June 2024)
6. [http://www.gresham.ac.uk/gresham-professor-of-astronomy "Gresham Professor of Astronomy"] on the Gresham College website (accessed 27 July 2015)
7. (2020-03-04). "Four Johns Hopkins faculty members named American Astronomical Society fellows". Johns Hopkins University.
8. "Nick Kylafis Lectureship {{!}} Institute of Astrophysics".
9. [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=%22Joseph+Silk%22&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=all&hl=en&lr=&safeoff Google Scholar]
10. "Starmus Festival and Stephen Hawking Launch the Book "Starmus, 50 Years of Man in Space"".