Interview with Prof. Edward van den Heuvell (april 2017)
Edward Peter Jacobus (Ed) van den Heuvel (b. 2 November 1940 in Soest) is a Dutch astronomer and emeritus professor at the Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek of the University of Amsterdam.
Edward van den Heuvel is well known for his work on the formation and evolution of compact astrophysical objects such as neutron stars, black holes and white dwarfs in binary systems, and for his investigation of gamma ray bursts.
Edward van den Heuvel studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at Utrecht University. There, he obtained his PhD in 1968 for his research on the rotation of stars. During his career he held positions at (among others) the University of California, Utrecht University, the Institute for Advanced Study and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
For his work van den Heuvel has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Spinozapremie (1995) and the European Union Descartes Prize (2002). He has also been knighted in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1982), an honorary fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society and an honorary fellow of the Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, India.
(source: Wikipédia)
Extract
Marina Solvay: Do you think that the Solvay Conferences are still useful to scientific progress?
Prof. Edward van den Heuvel: In the 1920s and 1930s there were very few international conferences. Today there are, of course, many more. Busy periods such as the 1920s and 1930s when quantum mechanics and nuclear physics were discovered are excessively rare in the history of science, and the Solvay Conferences were tremendously important at the time. During the 1973 Conference, we were going through a similar period, with brand-new questions on ‘high-energy astrophysics’. Since the 1960s we have known that there are mysterious sources of X-rays in our galaxy, but until 1971–1972 no one knew what they were or where they came from. And in 1971–1972 we discovered that they are neutron stars and black holes in the binary systems. To me, holding a Solvay Conference on Physics after such a discovery was very useful. And in 1973 we came together at that Conference, each within our own field of research. That Conference really was a tremendous success and generated a lot of advances in that field.
(...)
On a very different but no less important level, I am almost certain that Kip Thorne is going to be awarded a Nobel Prize with his colleagues Rainer Weiss of MIT and Ronald Drever of Caltech: they were at the source of the discovery of gravitational waves on 14 September 2015. The LIGO antennae that detect gravitational waves have observed the fusion of a binary system consisting of two black holes with a mass of about 30 solar masses. We were hoping that they would receive the Nobel Prize last year already.
Thorne was not at the 1973 Conference, but he should have been. I learned a lot of important things at that Conference, and I am certain that he would have taught us a lot if he had attended.