I was born in St Boniface, the francophone sister city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. I learned that I love physics as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba. I graduated in 1958 and moved to Princeton University for graduate study, and PhD in 1962. Professor Robert Henry Dicke was my thesis advisor. I remained at Princeton, and Bob Dicke remained my professor of continuing education. I am now Albert Einstein Professor of Science Emeritus.
I worked with Bob Dicke on consequences of the idea of fossil thermal radiation from a hot early state of the expanding universe. As the Princeton experimental search for this radiation was nearing completion we learned that five years earlier experiments in microwave communications at Bell Laboratories had detected unexplained excess noise. Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson deserve great credit for refusing to give up on searches for local sources of this radiation, and for complaining about it until Bernie Burke heard and directed them to Princeton. I realized that this thermal Cosmic Microwave Background, the CMB, would play an interesting role in the formation of galaxies and their clumpy distribution. This was the start of my continuing interest in measuring cosmic structure and seeking the theory of how it developed. My work has been analytic in part. The numerical part began with a visit to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, New Mexico, in 1969. In simulations of the growth of structure using a CDC 3600 computer I was proud to follow the motions of 300 particles in computer runs that lasted over the weekend. By the end of the 1970s we had reliable measurements of galaxy n-point correlation functions, included the slight rise above the power law in the two-point function at separation ~20 Mpc. (You can see it in Fig. 6 in Soneira and Peebles 1978). I was hoping our better simulations at larger N would agree with the galaxy functions. But that failed, then and now. I guess we must live with a curious situation, a galaxy two-point function that is much closer to a power law than is the mass function. I introduced the treatment of the collisional Boltzmann equation of radiative transfer for computation of the evolution of the distributions of baryons and the CMB. That includes the prediction of the BAO bump in the baryon two-point function (shown in Fig. 5 in Peebles 1981) that was detected decades later. I introduced the CDM cosmology in 1982, and the Λ CDM version in 1984. Bharat Ratra and I introduced the notion that Einstein's Λ may have evolved as the universe expanded. I am now now following with interest the great programs of numerical simulations of galaxy formation. The results are impressive but seem to me to be challenged on enough sides to suggest that there is room for improvement of the Λ CDM cosmology. I am author of three monographs on cosmology. Their increasing sizes reflect the growth of this subject. The first, "Physical Cosmology," was published in 1971. I meant the word "Physical" in the title to mean that I did not attempt to get into the subtleties of how astronomers set the extragalactic distance scale. Apart from that I was able to present in 275 pages a pretty complete survey of active research in cosmology. The second book, "The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe," 1980, 415 pages, had a good deal of discussion of what was interesting me: how to measure and compute the evolution of departures from homogeneity. I thought of this book as an addendum to "Physical Cosmology." Thus the "missing mass" I discussed at length in "Physical Cosmology" was not discussed in the second book. But a few years later, with the growing evidence that the CMB is much smoother than the baryons, it was easy for me to put together the CDM cosmology from the physics and data in the second book with the 'missing mass'' phenomena in the first. The third book, "Principles of Physical Cosmology," 1993, weighs in at 717 pages. Much of it remains relevant, and much is quite out of date. A review of the present situation in cosmology as complete as was "Physical Cosmology" in 1971 would require many volumes by authors with expertise in many different directions. Prizes and awards are capricious. But for what it's worth mine include the 1977 A.C. Morrison Award in Natural Science, NY Academy of Sciences; 1981 Eddington Medal, Royal Astronomical Society; 1982 Heineman Prize, American Astronomical Society; 1986 Doctor of Science, University of Toronto; 1986 Doctor of Science, University of Chicago; 1989 Doctor of Science, McMaster University; 1989 Doctor of Science, University of Manitoba; 1992 Robinson Prize, University of Newcastle upon Tyne; 1995 Bruce Medal, Astronomical Society of the Pacific; 1995 Lemîatre Award, Université catholique de Louvain; 1996 Doctor of Science, Université catholique de Louvain; 1997 Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; 1998 Gold Medal, Royal Astronomical Society, UK; 2000 Cosmology Prize, Peter Gruber Foundation; 2001 Harvey Prize, Technion University, Israel; 2003 Tomalla Foundation Prize, University of Geneva; 2004 ADION Prize, Nice Observatory; 2004 Shaw Prize, Hong Kong; 2005 Crafoord Prize, Stockholm; 2007 Doctor of Science, {honorus causa}, University of British Columbia; 2012 Queen Elisabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, St Boniface; 2014 Dirac Medal, ICTP Trieste; 2017 Order of Manitoba. |