21 Facts About Paul Steinhardt

Paul Joseph Steinhardt was born on December 25,1952 and is an American theoretical physicist whose principal research is in cosmology and condensed matter physics.

Paul Steinhardt is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where he is on the faculty of both the Departments of Physics and of Astrophysical Sciences.

Paul Steinhardt is well known for his exploration of a new form of matter, known as quasicrystals, which were thought to exist only as man-made materials until he co-discovered the first known natural quasicrystal in a museum sample.

Paul Steinhardt subsequently led a separate team that followed up that discovery with several more examples of natural quasicrystals recovered from the wilds of the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia.

Paul Steinhardt has written two popular books on these topics.

Paul Steinhardt grew up in Miami, Florida, where he attended Coral Gables Senior High School while attending classes at a local university.

Paul Steinhardt received his Bachelor of Science in physics at Caltech in 1974, and his Ph.

Paul Steinhardt was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978 to 1981; rose from junior faculty to Mary Amanda Wood Professor at the University of Pennsylvania between 1981 and 1998, during which he maintained a long-term association with the Thomas J Watson Research Center; and has been on the faculty at Princeton University since the Fall of 1998.

Paul Steinhardt co-founded the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science and served as its Director from 2007 to 2019.

The Albrecht-Paul Steinhardt paper was the first to note the effect of Hubble friction in sustaining inflation for a sufficiently long period, setting the prototype for most subsequent inflationary models.

Eternal inflation and the multiverse: In 1982, Paul Steinhardt presented the first example of eternal inflation.

Imprint of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background: In 1993, Robert Crittenden, Rick Davis, JR Bond, G Efstathiou and Steinhardt performed the first calculations of the complete imprint of gravitational waves on the B-mode temperature maps and on the polarization of the microwave background radiation.

The unlikeliness problem: In 2013, Anna Ijjas, Abraham Loeb and Paul Steinhardt added to the criticisms in a widely discussed pair of papers that the inflationary model was much less likely to explain our universe than previously thought.

Early models with a big crunch: In 2001, Steinhardt presented the first examples of these bouncing and cyclic models, referred to as "ekpyrotic," in papers with Justin Khoury, Burt A Ovrut and Neil Turok.

Paul Steinhardt has made significant contributions researching the "dark side" of the universe: dark energy, the cosmological constant problem and dark matter.

Self-interacting dark matter: In 2000, David Spergel and Paul Steinhardt first introduced the concept of strongly self-interacting dark matter to explain various anomalies in standard cold dark models based on assuming dark matter consists of weakly interacting massive particles.

The first natural quasicrystal: In 1999, Paul Steinhardt assembled a team at Princeton University to search for a natural quasicrystal.

Expedition to Chukotka: Two years after identifying the museum sample, Paul Steinhardt organized an international team of experts and led them on an expedition to its source, the remote Listventovyi stream in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the northern half of the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia.

Peter J Lu and Steinhardt discovered a quasicrystalline Islamic tiling on the Darb-e Imam Shrine in Isfahan, Iran constructed from girih tiles.

Hyperuniform disordered solids : Working with Salvatore Torquato and Marian Florescu, in 2009 Paul Steinhardt discovered a new class of photonic materials called hyperuniform disordered solids, and showed that solids consisting of a hyperuniform disordered arrangement of dielectric elements produce band gaps with perfect spherical symmetry.

Paul Steinhardt constructed the first computer generated continuous random network model of glass and amorphous silicon in 1973, while still an undergraduate at Caltech.