Richard Muller
Richard A. Muller (born January 6, 1944) is a noted American professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Muller began his career as a graduate student under Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez doing particle physics experiments and working with bubble chambers. During his early years he also helped to co-create accelerator mass spectrometry and made some of the first measurements of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background.
Subsequently, Muller branched out into other areas of science, and in particular the Earth sciences. His work has included attempting to understand the ice ages, dynamics at the core-mantle boundary, patterns of extinction and biodiversity through time, and the processes associated with impact cratering. One of his most well known proposals is the Nemesis hypothesis suggesting the Sun could have an as yet undetected companion dwarf star, whose perturbations of the Oort cloud and subsequent effects on the flux of comets entering the inner Solar System could explain an apparent 26 million year periodicity in extinction events.
Along with Carl Pennypacker, Muller started The Berkeley Real Time Supernova Search, which became The Berkeley Automated Supernova Search.[4] It then became the Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, for which Muller\'s graduate student, Saul Perlmutter, shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
