Joseph Silk

Joseph Ivor Silk (born 3 December 1942) is a British-American 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 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected May 1999). He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe. 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. He obtained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968, under the direction of David Layzer.

Silk 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" 2020: Fellow of the American Astronomical Society 2020: Nick Kylafis Lecturer

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.

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.

Books by Joseph Silk The Infinite Cosmos, Oxford University Press, 2006, On the Shores of the Unknown: A Short History of the Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2005, , Google Link The Big Bang, W.H. Freeman, 2005, Cosmic Enigmas, Springer, 1994, , Google Link