Joseph Silk

For the American politician, see Joseph Silk (politician).

Joseph Silk FRS
Silk in 2015
Born	(1942-12-03) 3 December 1942 (age 82) London, England
Citizenship	UK United States^[citation needed]
Alma mater	Clare College, Cambridge University of Manchester Harvard University
Awards	Royal Society Bakerian Medal (2007) Balzan Prize (2011) Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2019)
Scientific career
Fields	Cosmology
Institutions	Institut d'astrophysique de Paris University of Oxford University of California, Berkeley Johns Hopkins University
Doctoral students	Max Tegmark[1]

Joseph Ivor Silk FRS (born 3 December 1942) is a British-American ^{[citation needed]} astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011.

He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford^[2] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected May 1999). He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe.^[3] Silk has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.

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.^[4] He obtained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968, under the direction of David Layzer.^[4] 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.^[5]

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"^{[citation needed]}
• 2020: Fellow of the American Astronomical Society^[6]
• 2020: Nick Kylafis Lecturer^[7]

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.^[8]

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.^[9]

Books by Joseph Silk

• The Infinite Cosmos, Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-953361-9
• On the Shores of the Unknown: A Short History of the Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-521-83627-1, Google Link
• The Big Bang, W.H. Freeman, 2005, ISBN 0-7167-1812-X
• Cosmic Enigmas, Springer, 1994, ISBN 1-56396-061-3, Google Link

References

1. ""Max Tegmark / Professor of Physics"". web.mit.edu. MIT Department of Physics. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
2. "New College, Oxford: Joseph Silk". Archived from the original on 22 December 2011. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
3. "Joseph Ivor Silk". International Balzan Prize Foundation. Archived from the original on 27 June 2016. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
4. Zierler, David. 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)
5. "Gresham Professor of Astronomy" on the Gresham College website (accessed 27 July 2015)
6. "Four Johns Hopkins faculty members named American Astronomical Society fellows". The Hub. Johns Hopkins University. 4 March 2020. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
7. "Nick Kylafis Lectureship | Institute of Astrophysics". www.ia.forth.gr. Retrieved 4 June 2021.
8. Google Scholar
9. "Starmus Festival and Stephen Hawking Launch the Book "Starmus, 50 Years of Man in Space"".

External links

• Introduction videos to Professor Silk and his work, upon his appointment to Gresham College in 2015 Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
• Joseph Silk International Balzan Prize Foundation