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Born 1950 New York, New York
Final Confirmation of the Binary Hypothesis (detail); 1974
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During the summer of 1974, Russell Hulse was a 23-year-old graduate student compiling data from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Nineteen years later, the importance of the discovery he made that August would be recognized with the Nobel Prize in physics.
A native of the Bronx, Hulse built his first radio telescope while a student at the Bronx High School of Science. At Cooper Union, where he received his undergraduate degree, he was introduced to computers, using fortran to create orbit simulations. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and was awarded a postdoctoral appointment at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since 1977, he has worked at the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.
While at Amherst, Hulse was approached by Dr. Joseph Taylor about doing pulsar research for his thesis. The search for pulsars - rapidly spinning neutron stars - would combine physics, radio astronomy and computers, all subjects of particular interest to Hulse. After eight months of observation in Puerto Rico, Hulse detected an anomaly that he first thought was a mistake: evidence of a binary pulsar, i.e., two pulsars in orbit of one another. After several weeks of analysis, Hulse reported to Taylor (who would later share the Nobel Prize with Hulse) that the pulsar was indeed in a high-speed binary orbit, a discovery that would come to be considered as one of the most striking confirmations of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
For Hulse, the moment of scientific discovery is an aesthetic experience. In his Nobel lecture, he describes his journey as one of “intense preparation, long hours, serendipity, and a certain level of compulsive behavior that tries to make sense out of everything that one observes.”
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