| RefNo | EC/1993/46 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Salpeter, Edwin Ernest: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1991 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed on separate piece of paper, then pasted onto certificate |
| Citation | Professor Salpeter was born in Vienna and educated at the Universities of Sydney, Australia and Birmingham, England. He has been at Cornell University since 1949 apart from extended visits to Canberra, Sydney, Cambridge and Pasadena. He has received Honorary degrees from the University of Chicago and Case Western Reserve University, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and numerous other awards. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Deutsche Akademie Leopoldina. He is one of the most distinguished astrophysicists of the past several decades having made numerous important contributions which have had immense influence and which indicate an extraordinary breadth of interest. A common characteristic of his work is an emphasis on isolating the essential physics of a complicated problem through compelling logic and simple scaling arguments rather through complex modelling or mathematics. He has contributed to almost every area of importance in theoretical astrophysics and also to basic physic and observational astronomy. The following somewhat arbitrary subdivision into seven areas of greatest impact may indicate his remarkable accomplishments: (1) Basic physics, including the Bethe-Salpeter equation, which is the generalisation of Dirac's equation to more than one particle or to bound states, and an improvement on classical nucleation theory; (2) Nuclear astrophysics, including crucial contributions to the theory of the synthesis of light elements, especially the triple-alpha reaction to make carbon; (3) Stellar evolution, especially the Salpeter initial mass function, which describes empirically the initial distribution of stellar masses in the galaxy; (4) Interstellar chemistry, including the generally accepted theory of molecular hydrogen on grain surfaces; (5) Equation of state for cold matter with application to white dwarfs, pycnonuclear reactions and giant planets; (6) High energy astrophysics, including numerous contributions to the interpretation and modelling of X-ray sources, pulsars and quasars; (7) Observational astronomy, especially radio astronomy and theory of incoherent scatter of radio waves in a plasma. He has written more than 280 papers on these subjects. |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA4728 | Salpeter; Edwin Ernest (1924 - 2008) | 1924 - 2008 |