About the Authors         

Stanislaw Olbert is a Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in Lwow Poland on May 9, 1923, and was a student at the University of Munich from 1946-1949, where he studied in Arnold Summerfeld's theoretical group. He received his PhD from MIT in 1953 under the supervision of Bruno Rossi. He was appointed an Assistant Professor in Physics at MIT in 1957, and became Professor Emeritus in 1988. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Rome and at the University of Florence in 1986 and 1987, and at the Institute for Cosmic Studies in Warsaw, Poland in 1991. From 1999 to 2003 he was an educational consultant on the TEAL project at MIT. He is co-author with Bruno Rossi of Introduction to the Physics of Space, MacGraw-Hill, 1970.

John W. Belcher is a Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in Louisiana in 1943, and graduated from Odessa High School in West Texas in 1961. He attended Rice University in Houston, graduating with a double major in math and physics in 1965, summa cum laude, and then went to Caltech for graduate school, working with Professor Leverett Davis Jr. on a thesis about interplanetary Alfven waves. He was Principal Investigator on the Voyager Plasma Science Experiment during the Voyager Nepture Encounter--the end of the Grand Tour. Voyager 2 crossed the solar wind termination shock in August of 2007.

Richard H. Price is a Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Texas at Brownsville. He received a Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1965, and a PhD from Caltech in 1971, working with Kip Thorne. In 2004, after serving as a professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Utah for 33 years, he joined the Department in Brownsville where he is also a member of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy and of the Center for Advanced Radio Astronomy. His research has focused on black hole astrophysics and gravitational waves.