Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.
active c. 1941, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
American astrophysicist who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the binary pulsar and using it to verify general relativity's gravitational-wave prediction.
Born in Philadelphia and raised on a family farm in New Jersey, Taylor studied physics at Haverford College and earned his PhD at Harvard in 1968. At UMass Amherst he led the Arecibo pulsar survey during which his student Russell Hulse found PSR B1913+16 in 1974. Taylor's group then exploited the pulsar as a clock orbiting a neutron star, accumulating timing data that by 1978 demonstrated orbital decay consistent with gravitational radiation damping — a result refined over three decades. He moved to Princeton in 1981 and later led the development of the JT65 digital mode used by amateur radio operators.
Nobel-winning work
Taylor turned the 1974 discovery into a precision test of gravity. Because the pulsar clock is exceptionally stable and the orbit highly relativistic, pulsar timing yields the masses of both neutron stars and all orbital elements to extraordinary accuracy; the observed periastron advance and — critically — the shrinking orbital period matched the quadrupole formula of general relativity.
Published first by Taylor, Fowler and McCulloch in 1979 (Nature 277:437), the agreement between measured orbital decay and GR prediction — within ~0.2% in modern data — constituted the first observational evidence for gravitational waves.
Workplaces: Princeton University, University of Massachusetts Amherst
United States