Astrophysics professor receives million-dollar Dan David prize

Professor John Bahcall, a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study and a lecturer at the University, has been awarded the Dan David Prize for the Future of Cosmology and Astronomy for his longterm groundbreaking work in astrophysics.

The prize, which includes a $1 million award, is "granted to individuals or institutions with proven, exceptional, and distinct excellence in the sciences, arts, and humanities that have made an outstanding contribution to humanity," according to the Dan David Prize website.

"I'm delighted," Bahcall said, "And my family is delighted."

Though Bahcall has worked on a number of problems within the field of particle astrophysics, he said he believes the work that most directly prompted his receipt of the prize is his study of neutrinos' behavior in relation to the sun.

Neutrinos, Bahcall explained, are special particles that have almost no mass. They travel nearly at the speed of light, and practically never interact with other particles. Such properties make them useful, he said.

"We use them to look into the sun, to test how the sun is shining," Bahcall said. "We use them to see the process by which nuclei are burned in the center of the sun to produce energy — to produce sunshine . . . It's like an x-ray of the sun."

Bahcall's real work began when there was a discrepancy between the number of neutrinos he calculated from a detailed model and those found by other scientists.

"For many years, the question was whether my calculations were wrong or whether there was new physics needed to explain this that wasn't in textbooks," Bahcall said. "In the last decade, it has become clear new physics is required."

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Though the prospect of challenging textbooks is daunting — a process that makes "you keep checking your equations for forty years," Bahcall said — it is also a great deal of fun.

"That's what makes me get up at 6 a.m. and work until l0 at night," Bahcall said. "It's a thrill to be engaged in a problem which is this challenging."

Bahcall said he was first inspired to study astrophysics by a quote from philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell.

"He once said if he was going to educate people, he would teach them two really important things," Bahcall said. The first was to be impressed with the majesty of the human mind, and to understand its atomic and subatomic structure so as to see what splendid things it is capable of. The second was to understand the insignificance of man in the scale of the universe.