Robert Kirshner

Robert P. Kirshner (born August 15, 1949) is an American astronomer, known as a leading expert on supernovae, and president from 2004 to 2006 of the American Astronomical Society. He was elected in 1992 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1998 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and in 2005 to the American Philosophical Society. Kirshner received in 2011 the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, in 2014 the James Craig Watson Medal and in 2015 the Wolf Prize in Physics (shared with James Bjorken).

Quotes

Edwin Hubble's classic article on the expanding universe appeared in PNAS in 1929 [Hubble, E. P. (1929) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 15, 168–173]. The chief result, that a galaxy's distance is proportional to its redshift, is so well known and so deeply embedded into the language of astronomy through the Hubble diagram, the Hubble constant, Hubble's law, and the Hubble time, that the article itself is rarely referenced. Even though Hubble's distances have a large systematic error, Hubble's velocities come chiefly from Vesto Melvin Slipher, and the interpretation in terms of the de Sitter effect is out of the mainstream of modern cosmology, this article opened the way to investigation of the expanding, evolving, and accelerating universe that engages today's burgeoning field of cosmology.
- (December 26, 2003) "Hubble's diagram and cosmic expansion". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (1): 8–13. DOI:10.1073/pnas.2536799100.

Let me just close by saying what kind of science is this. When I was president of the American Astronomical Society, every once in a while I would stand shoulder to shoulder with the presidents of other societies, and we would talk to congressmen basically, and explain to them the low road. We’d say, well, science is for technology and technology is gonna lead to economic growth, and we’d say it’s dangerous world and it’s important we have science for defense. And a lot of congressmen are kinda old guys, and so medicine, they’re big on that.
You know, there’s this idea that science should do all these things in the world. And honestly, it does do these things in the world, and those are pretty good reasons, but there’s more to it than that. Everybody, you came here. You didn’t come here because I was gonna tell you how to make a large detector or something. You came here because of the ideas. And we’re all interested. We wanna know where we came from. We wanna know where we’re going. We wanna know where we are.
- Berkeley Talks transcript: Astronomer Bob Kirshner on the accelerating universe to accelerating science. UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu) (October 24, 2018). (introduction by Chung-Pei Ma)

Bob Kirshner is one of the liveliest and most amusing lecturers in the world of astronomy so it was with great anticipation that I turned to his first popular book on astronomy. I was not disappointed. It’s wonderful. The Extravagant Universe is an entertaining and witty account of one of the biggest scientific stories of the past 10 years: how exploding supernovae show that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
Kirschner has worked on supernovae for the past 30 years and is one of the major figures in supernova research. Many of the most active younger astronomers working in the field are his students or postdocs.
- Michael Rowan-Robinson, (2 November 2002) "review of The Extravagant Universe by Robert Kirshner". New Scientist.