Mihai
My blogs
| Introduction | I became a scientist to bend space and slow down time -- first, on supercomputers. I held the National record for the youngest Diplom Physiker in Germany in my year, at the age of 21. My PhD is from Caltech. I worked with Kip Thorne on the theoretical design of the main laser in LIGO, the largest gravitational wave detector built on Earth. I was the student who got the teacher to teach my way and publish the course with me as a joint author. With two Nobel prizes among lecturers (Kip's and Barry Barish's), the web course we published has been #1 in the world ranking of gravitational waves courses since 2002. I have worked with five Nobel prize winners, contributed to work that achieved the Nobel prize for three of them and shared weekly office hours with David Politzer. I learned to do order of magnitude calculations -- the sort of physics that has amazing power. One can estimate 1) the number of the atoms in the sea, 2) the mass of the atmosphere, 3) how much I slow down your time (I really do!! The closer you come to me, the slower you time will flow. It's not just me though. I'm just like any other massive object. But don't be scared. The effect is very, very small. ) |
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| Interests | impacting people's lives and improving our understanding of the universe and of everything that is around us |
| Favorite movies | Gravitational Waves with Kip Thorne, Interstellar |
| Favorite books | Physics for Future presidents, Relativity Visualized, Thinking Physics |