Timothy Ferris

Timothy Ferris (born August 29, 1944) is an American science writer. He is best known for Coming of Age in the Milky Way, a history of astronomy which won the Science Writing Award. He also wrote The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (1997), a popular overview of cosmology. In The Science of Liberty (2010), he argues that scientific thinking played a role in democracy. Ferris has produced three PBS documentaries: The Creation of the Universe (1985), Life Beyond Earth (1999), and Seeing in the Dark (2007). He was a producer of the Voyager Golden Record, a sample of the sights and sounds of Earth sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft.

Background and education Ferris is a native of Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of Coral Gables Senior High School in Coral Gables, Florida. He attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1966 with majors in English and communications. He studied for one year at the Northwestern University Law School.

Career After departing Northwestern Law School, Ferris joined United Press International as a reporter, where he worked in New York City.

After starting his career as a newspaper reporter, Ferris became an editor at Rolling Stone. Ferris produced the Voyager Golden Record, an artifact of human civilization containing music, sounds of Earth and encoded photographs launched aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft. He has served as a consultant to NASA on long-term space exploration policy, and was among the journalists selected as candidates to fly aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986; the planned flight was cancelled due to the Challenger disaster. He was also a friend of and collaborator with American astronomer Carl Sagan.

Ferris has taught astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy at four universities. He is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

He has been a columnist for Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Science Digest magazines and a commentator for National Public Radio, MSNBC, and the PBS News Hour.

Honors Ferris is a Guggenheim fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He won the Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1986, and has twice won the American Institute of Physics science-writing medal and the American Association for the Advancement of Science writing prize. He was named a CNN "Voice of the Millennium" in 1999. Coming of Age in the Milky Way was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times. Steven Weinberg included The Whole Shebang on his list of the 13 best popular science books.