Nobel Prize Dialogue
Saul Perlmutter
Saul Perlmutter shared the physics prize for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Prize laureate, sharing the prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, founding director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and currently serves as a member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. His interest in scientific-style critical thinking led to the development of the interdisciplinary courses “Physics & Music” and “Sense and Sensibility and Science,” which he has been teaching to undergraduates for more than a decade—and which is the origin of the new co-authored book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense. An author of hundreds of articles on cosmology, Perlmutter has also written popular articles and appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. In addition to other awards and honorary doctorates, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.