MICHAEL NORMAN

Explore & Discover with Michael Norman:
Gravity in the Universe

In His Words: My Path to the Stars

I became hooked on astronomy at the age of twelve, when my parents bought me a small telescope for graduation from 6th grade. The first thing I trained it on was the moon. I was captivated by what I saw. I felt like I was looking out the port-hole of a spaceship orbiting the moon. This was 1965 and the Apollo program had its sights set on the moon. There, with my little 2/1/4" refracting telescope, I felt that I had beaten the astronauts to their goal.

When I was in high school, I spent countless cold winter nights looking at the planets, stars, and nebulae with that little telescope. I was exploring the cosmos. What I saw, together with beautiful astronomical photographs in books and magazines, never failed to excite in me a sense of awe and mystery. I still feel that way.

As my career developed, I have used my training as a computational astrophysicist to satisfy two needs. The first is my curiosity about what is going on out there. What is the physics behind the beautiful images? Using supercomputers I can carry out numerical simulations that recreate the conditions which govern stars, galaxies, even the universe as a whole. Using computer animations, I can watch my model universes evolve before my very eyes.

The second is my desire to journey out into the cosmos, far beyond the orbit of the moon, as if in an imaginary spaceship that can go anywhere and anywhen. Carl Sagan used such a device in his ground-breaking PBS series Cosmos, which made a lasting impression on me. Through computer simulation and scientific visualization, I am able to do this in a scientifically accurate way. For example, the big bang animation sequence in my lecture embodies our current theories of the expanding universe and how galaxies form. This animation was done in collaboration with computer artists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where I used to work before coming to UCSD in 2000.

Contact Michael Norman at mnorman@cosmos.ucsd.edu