Edward Tryon
| Edward Tryon | |
|---|---|
| Born | Edward Polk Tryon September 4, 1940 (age 75) Terre Haute, Indiana United States |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions |
Columbia University Hunter College of the City University of New York |
| Alma mater |
Cornell University University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Steven Weinberg |
| Known for | Proposing the idea that our universe originated from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum |
Edward P. Tryon (born September 4, 1940) is an American scientist and a professor emeritus of physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He was the first physicist to propose that our universe originated as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum.
Tryon was born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana. He took his first physics course in his junior year at Wiley High School.
Tryon entered Cornell University in 1958. He was influenced by Noble Laureate Hans Bethe, who was one of his professors. He was especially affected by advice that Bethe gave him: "Our intuition is based on our experiences in the macroscopic world. There is no reason to expect our intuition to be valid for microscopic phenomena." He graduated from Cornell University in 1962, earning a bachelors in physics. He would then go on to do his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. There he was very much influenced by Steven Weinberg. He took courses taught by Weinberg, who would later become a mentor to him. His doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between general relativity and quantum field theory and was titled: "Classical and Quantum Field-Theoretic Derivations of Gravitational Theory." He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in physics in 1967.
In 1969, (some versions of this story say 1970), Tryon was at a lecture taking place at Columbia University being given by British cosmologist Dennis Sciama. And when Sciama paused for a moment in his speaking, Tryon suddenly said out loud: "Maybe the universe is a vacuum fluctuation?" Everyone laughed, assuming it was a joke. Embarrassed, he did not explain to anyone that this was not the case. Tryon says he only remembered this incident after he was reminded of it when he published a paper about this subject matter.
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Wikipedia