In retirement, Nobelist takes up moon bouncing
A lifelong amateur radio enthusiast, Joseph Taylor sends signals via the moon
By Julia Rosen
If the moon is up, there’s a good chance Joseph Taylor is on his ham radio, using a homemade antenna in his backyard to bounce signals off the moon’s pockmarked face. It’s a skill Taylor began cultivating in 2003, shortly before he retired from Princeton University, where he used radio waves to probe the secrets of pulsars, the spinning, magnetized neutron stars that emit bursts of radiation with clocklike regularity.
The work earned Taylor and his Princeton colleague Russell Hulse the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993, for detecting a new kind of pulsar that shed light on the nature of gravity. In his Nobel lecture, Taylor said that scientific goals motivated him, but so did his affinity for “a good intellectual puzzle, and the quiet satisfaction of finding a clever solution.”