Gerald Feinberg (27 May 1933 – 21 April 1992) was a
Columbia University physicist,
futurist and populist author. He spent a year as a Member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, and two years at the
Brookhaven Laboratories. Feinberg went to
Bronx High School of Science with
Steven Weinberg and
Sheldon Glashow and obtained his bachelor's and graduate degrees from
Columbia University. His father was Yiddish poet and journalist
Leon Feinberg.
Among his students were
Scott Dodelson
Scott Dodelson is an American physicist. He is a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of its physics department.
Biography
Dodelson received his B.A., B.S., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His thesis supervisor was G ...
, physicist at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
.
Research
He coined the term
tachyon for hypothetical
faster-than-light particles and analysed their
quantum field properties, predicted the existence of the
muon neutrino and advocated
cryonics as a public service. He was a member of the
Foresight Institute's advisory panel.
Parapsychology
Feinberg wrote a foreword to
Edgar Mitchell
Edgar Dean Mitchell (September 17, 1930 – February 4, 2016) was a United States Navy officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, ufologist, and NASA astronaut. As the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 14 in 1971 he spent nine hour ...
's book ''Psychic Explorations'' (1974) in which he endorsed