Richard A. Muller (born January 6, 1944) is an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In early 2010, Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller founded the group Berkeley Earth, an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit aimed at addressing some of the major concerns of the climate change skeptics, in particular the global surface temperature record. In 2016, Richard and Elizabeth Muller co-founded Deep Isolation, a private company seeking to dispose of nuclear waste in deep boreholes.
Early life, education and career
Muller, who grew up in the South Bronx, attended public schools in New York City, including PS 65 (on 141st St), Junior High School 22 (on 167th St), and the Bronx High School of Science. Muller obtained an A.B. degree at Columbia University (New York) and a Ph.D. degree in physics from University of California, Berkeley. Muller began his career as a graduate student under Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez performing particle physics experiments and working with bubble chambers. During his early years he also helped to co-create accelerator mass spectrometry and made some of the first measurements of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background.
Subsequently, 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 the Sun could have an as yet undetected companion dwarf 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.
In March 2011, he testified to the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee that preliminary data confirmed an overall global warming trend. On July 28, 2012, he stated, "Humans are almost entirely the cause."
Along with Carl Pennypacker, Muller started The Berkeley Real Time Supernova Search, which became The Berkeley Automated Supernova Search. It then became the Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, for which Muller's graduate student, Saul Perlmutter, shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Positions and recognition
In the 1980s, Muller joined the JASON advisory group, which brings together prominent scientists as consultants for the United States Department of Defense.
He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1982. He also received the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1978 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".
Muller is a founder and board member of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ("BEST") project, which has published an independent analysis of the Earth's surface temperature records.
In 1999, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley. 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 and has been published in book form. It has been one of the most highly regarded courses at Berkeley. In December 2009, Muller officially retired from teaching the course, although he still occasionally gives guest lectures.
In 2015 a team including Muller received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the Supernova Cosmology Project.
MIT Technology Review
For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT's Technology Review. In his August 2003 column on the polygraph machine used in lie detection examinations, Muller asserted that "the polygraph procedure has an accuracy between 80 and 95 percent". The National Academy of Sciences found that there is "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy".
In his April 2002 column on the anthrax attacks, Muller claimed "I think it likely that the anthrax terrorists were working for Osama bin Laden, and intended to murder thousands of people."