George B. Field

George B. Field
George B. Field in 1987
Born	(1929-10-25)October 25, 1929 Providence, Rhode Island
Died	July 31, 2024(2024-07-31) (aged 94) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Alma mater	MIT (B.S., Physics) Princeton University (Ph.D.)
Occupation(s)	astrophysicist; professor; institution director
Known for	theoretical astrophysics; advances in understanding the physics of the interstellar medium (ISM); founding director of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Scientific career
Institutions	Princeton; University of California, Berkeley; Harvard; Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Doctoral advisor	Lyman Spitzer
Doctoral students	Eric G. Blackman, Sean M. Carroll, Carl E. Heiles, Christopher McKee, Péter Mészáros, Paul R. Shapiro, Ira M. Wasserman

George B. Field (born October 25, 1929, in Providence, Rhode Island; died July 31, 2024, in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American astrophysicist.

Early life, family and education

Field was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His father Winthrop Brooks Field and mother Pauline Woodworth Field were Harvard and Radcliffe graduates, respectively. He was interested in astronomy at an early age, but at the urging of his father he studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Disliking engineering, he later switched to physics and astrophysics. After MIT, he attended graduate school at Princeton University, where his PhD advisor was Lyman Spitzer.

At Princeton he had his first child, Christopher Field in 1957. Four years later, he had a daughter, Natasha Field, both with former wife Sylvia Field. From 1981 onward he was married to Susan Field.

Career

He first worked on plasma oscillations and took up a postdoctoral position at Harvard with Edward Mills Purcell. His interests evolved toward cosmology and the physics of the interstellar medium of galaxies. He eventually became a faculty member in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley where he remained until 1973. He then left to become the founding director of the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) | Harvard & Smithsonian, an organizational structure that unified the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (a government agency) and the Harvard College Observatory (a private institution) under a single management. Field served as Director until 1982, after which he remained the Robert Wheeler Wilson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard until retirement. He was succeeded in the CfA Directorship by Irwin I. Shapiro.

In the early 1980s, Field chaired an influential National Academy of Sciences decadal study that recommended priorities for US astronomical research. It was the third of what has become an extended series of Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Surveys, with format and goals now emulated by similar surveys in other disciplines.

After his CFA Directorship years, his research spanned topics in the theory of accretion disks of active galactic nuclei; cosmic birefrengence; magnetohydrodynamics and magnetic fields in astronomy,; and the structure of molecular clouds.

Doctoral students

Among his doctoral student mentees were Eric G. Blackman, Sean M. Carroll, Carl E. Heiles, Christopher McKee, Péter Mészáros, Paul R. Shapiro, and Ira M. Wasserman.

Awards

• 1978 Karl Schwarzschild Medal
• 1989 Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
• 2014 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship

External links

• George B. Field at Harvard.edu
• Oral history interview transcript with George B. Field on 14 July 1980, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives - Session I
• Oral history interview transcript with George B. Field on 15 July 1980, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives - Session II
• Oral history interview transcript with George B. Field on 5 December 2007, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives