Paul Halpern

Professor, Physics

Education:

Ph.D, theoretical physics, State University of New York at Stonybrook.

M.A., physics, State University of New York at Stonybrook.

B.A., physics and mathematics, Temple University.

Expertise:

Time and time travel, extraterrestrial life and new planets, scientific predictions, apocolypse, chaos theory, the Big Bang and early universe.

Background:

Dr. Halpern is the author of many widely acclaimed popular science books, including Countdown to Apocalypse, The Quest for Alien Planets, The Cyclical Serpent, The Structure of the Universe, Cosmic Wormholes and Time Journeys. He has received accolades and praise from numerous publications, including Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Nature, Scientific American, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. The Cyclical Serpent was chosen as one of the best Sci-Tech books of 1995 by Library Journal, and Cosmic Wormholes was chosen as a main selection of the Astronomy and Natural Science Book Club. He has appeared on many television and radio shows, including the PBS series "Future Quest" and the National Public Radio show "Radio Times."

Dr. Halpern was the recipient of a prestigious 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award.  He was among 184 artists, scholars and scientists nationally selected to receive a fellowship from more than 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $6,750,000.  Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. He will use the fellowship award to examine the history of the notion of higher dimensions in science, as well as the impact of this idea upon popular culture.  His research, "The Concept of Dimensionality in Science," will cover the period from the mid-19th century, when the idea of the fourth dimension was first introduced, until the late 20th century, when scientists developed 10 and 11 dimensional models of the universe.

A recipient of the Athenaeum Society Literary Award, he has published numerous research articles in the fields of general relativity, cosmology, chaos theory and complexity. In 1996, he was a Fulbright Scholar to Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, where he studied evolutionary algorithms.