Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr.

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American astrophysicist (1941–)

Born in Philadelphia, Taylor was educated at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and at Harvard, where he gained his PhD in astronomy in 1968. He moved to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1969 and was appointed professor of astronomy in 1977, a post he held until 1980 when he was elected professor of physics at Princeton.

In 1974 Russell Hulse, a research student of Taylor, while working at the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, discovered a binary pulsar. The pulsar orbited its invisible companion with a period of 7.75 hours, and rotated about its axis every 0.05903 seconds. Taylor and Hulse continued to observe the pulsar and to establish the details of its orbital behavior as precisely as possible.

Taylor also saw that the pulsar could provide an important observational test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. In 1916 Einstein had argued that an accelerating mass should radiate energy in the form of gravitational waves. Any such energy radiated by Hulse's pulsar, 16,000 light years away, would be so weak by the time it reached Earth as to be undetectable. In fact, so far no direct reproducible evidence has been obtained for the existence of gravitational waves, despite the experiments of Joseph Weber carried out since the 1960s.

Taylor realized there was another way for the gravitational waves to be detected. Any system radiating gravitational waves will be losing energy. This loss of energy will cause the pulsar and its companion to approach closer to each other and a consequent decrease in the pulsar's orbital period. The orbital shrinkage would amount to only 3.5 meters a year, too small to be detected; a decrease of 75 millionth of a second per year in the orbital period, however, should be detectable. After four years careful observation and analysis Taylor announced in 1978 that he had detected just such a decrease in the orbital period. “Hence 66 years after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves,” Taylor concluded, “an experiment has been done that yields clear evidence for their existence.” For his discovery of this evidence Taylor shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for physics with Hulse.

executive director; government official

Personal Information

Born c. 1942 in Fort Valley, GA; died of cancer on October 3, 2000, in Washington, DC; daughter of Earl Herman Hollingshed and Helen (Flowers) Southall Hollingshed; married Robert Joseph Taylor (a government manager), September 11, 1965.
Education: Howard University, B.A., 1964; Catholic University, M.A., 1973; received certificate in management from Texas Technical University, 1985, and from the University of California at Los Angeles, 1991.
Religion: African Methodist Episcopal.
Memberships: District of Columbia City Council, Advisory Committee on Child Care Facilities, chair, 1974-78; Washington Child Development Council, founder and member of board of directors, 1975-2000; Washington Association for the Education of Young Children, cochairperson 1978-80; National Association for the Education of Young Children, conference chairperson, 1982, board member, 1991-2000; Association for Childhood Education International, publication committee, 1983-85; Mayor's Advisory Committee for Early Childhood Development, Washington, 1986-2000; Delta Sigma Theta, Inc., chair of arts and letters committee, 1984-86; Coalition of 100 Black Women; National Black Child Development Institute, child care advisory committee, 1988-2000.

Career

Howard University, graduate assistant, 1964-65; National Child Day Care Association, social worker, 1966-68, Head Start program, director, 1968-70, preschool project director, 1971-78, chief executive officer, 1979-83, executive director, 1984-2000; Head Start Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, associate commissioner, 1994-2000.

Life's Work

Before her death in October of 2000, Helen H. Taylor served as director of the much-lauded, nationwide preschool program, Head Start, within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A social worker and teacher by training, Taylor enjoyed a long and honored career as an early-education expert, and was involved in the federally-funded preschool program almost since its beginnings in the mid-1960s. "Helen believed in the potential of every child to learn," the Washington Post quoted Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala as saying. "Millions of children have benefited from her vision, compassion and inspiration."

Taylor was born Helen Lavon Hollingshed in 1942 in Fort Valley, Georgia, but grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. She planned to become a teacher from an early age and enrolled at the Washington, D.C.-based Howard University as a young woman. She graduated in 1964, married Robert Joseph Taylor the following year, and in 1966 was awarded a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct graduate research at the Institute for Youth and Community Studies at Harvard University. Taylor went on to earn a master's degree in early childhood education curriculum and instruction from the District of Columbia's Catholic University in 1973, but by then she had already begun a long career with the National Child Day Care Association, also located in the nation's capital. Hired as a social worker there in 1966, Taylor was named director of its Head Start program in 1968. "We were the civil rights generation--idealistic--and this seemed like a wonderful thing to do and so I got involved," Taylor recalled in a 1997 interview with Kay Mills for the Los Angeles Times.

Launched in 1965, Head Start was commended as one of the most important pieces of American social and educational legislation in the twentieth century. An outgrowth of the civil rights movement and President Lyndon B. Johnson's declared "War on Poverty," this preschool program for American children from low-income families was designed to counteract studies which showed that children from middle-class families often scored higher on tests for basic educational skills by the time they entered kindergarten. Head Start programs at schools and community centers in low-income neighborhoods helped preschoolers in economically-disadvantaged rural and urban pockets "catch up" with their peers from other strata by the time they entered formal elementary school.

Decades as Administrator

The National Child Day Care Association, Taylor served as preschool project director from 1971 to 1978 and was promoted to chief executive officer in 1979. She held that post for four years before being named executive director in 1984. In that capacity, Taylor oversaw 20 preschool facilities in the District of Columbia area with a combined enrollment of 1,300 youngsters in Head Start programs. She was also active in numerous other committees and organizations related to early education. Appointed to the District of Columbia City Council's Advisory Committee on Child Care Facilities, she was a founder of the Washington Child Development Council in 1975 and served on the Mayor's Advisory Committee for Early Childhood Development after 1986.

In the spring of 1994, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala announced that Taylor would become the associate commissioner of the Head Start Bureau inside the cabinet department. This appointment gave Taylor nationwide responsibilities, including a budget of $3.3 billion, for the federally-funded, but locally administered, preschool programs. At the time, 721,000 preschool children were enrolled in Head Start. Mary Jo Bane, an assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services Department, called Taylor's range of qualifications "exactly the type of experience that is needed to bring Head Start into the 21st Century."

"Listen to Your Parents"

Taylor rose to the challenge. By this point, welfare reform had ended nearly all direct subsidies to impoverished Americans, and the poorest, most uneducated and unskilled Americans were expected to find minimum-wage jobs. Instead of direct payments from state welfare programs, various incentives and tax credits were provided, such as transportation vouchers and child-care assistance. The Head Start program remained an important oasis against this era's undeclared "war against the poor." Taylor presided over the expansion of Head Start programs, winning new budget allocations from Congress to expand an Early Head Start program for infants and toddlers; she also implemented performance standards for Head Start facilities as well as a new computer-literacy program. She was especially passionate about urging more community and parental involvement in Head Start programs. "Keep the faith and trust the common sense of people," Taylor was quoted as once advising her Head Start administrators, according to the Washington Post. "Listen to your parents. The best programs involve families, local staff and communities."

In her six years on the job, Taylor saw her budget increased to $5.3 billion, and Head Start enrollment significantly enlarged to include 865,000 preschoolers. The Clinton Administration had declared a goal of expanding Head Start to include 1 million children by 2002. Taylor admitted that Head Start was focusing on an entirely new set of challenges at the century's close than it had been when the groundbreaking program was launched in the 1960s. As she told Mills in the Los Angeles Times, however, "Poverty is always a hard life. I don't care what era you're in. It's a mistake to say that poverty is harder now than it was 30 years ago. Poverty's hard, period. The external environment has changed and impacts very differently on families than it did in the '60s. In the '60s, we didn't have the scourge of drugs that we have now."

Witnessed Positive Impact

Taylor credited Head Start with making a positive impact on the communities it served, and studies had borne that out. However, enrollment in underperforming urban and rural public schools caused many of those statistical gains made by Head Start graduates to be lost in the first few grades. As Taylor pointed out to Mills in the Los Angeles Times interview, "We need to begin to look at what's happening to poor children in America--in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade." Still, she termed Head Start "an economic development institution" and noted that thirty percent of Head Start employees were current or former parents of children in the program. "That's the untold story of Head Start--what's happened to parents and families," Taylor said in the Los Angeles Times interview. "I'm astounded constantly as I move around, meeting people whose lives have been affected by this program. They come up to me and tell me their stories. They've gone back to school. They've gotten motivated, gotten jobs. It's an incredible story."

Taylor's post required adroit political skills, since she and the Head Start program were answerable to all of Congress. She admitted that at times her job was a tough one, but she admitted to Mills in theLos Angeles Times that when she experienced job-related stress, she liked to visit Head Start "centers and see real children and real families and talk to them." She said, "That reminds me why I'm doing what I'm doing when I think it all gets ridiculous. That keeps me focused on what my mission and my goals are. That gives me the energy to keep up the fight."

Taylor died of cancer on October 3, 2000, at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 58.

Awards

Recipient of service awards from the Administration for Children, Youth and Families, 1986, and the National Head Start Association, Alexandria, VA, 1988; community service award, D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, Washington, 1990; Guardian award, National Black Child Development Institute, 1994; Martin Luther King community service award, United Planning Organization, 1994; National Public Service Award, American Society for Public Administration; Lifetime Leadership Award for Quality Child Care, National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Jet, April 4, 1994, p. 12.
• Los Angeles Times, August 10, 1997, p. M3.
• Washington Post, October 6, 2000, p. B6.

— Carol Brennan

Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr.
Born	29 March 1941 (1941-03-29) (age 68) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Princeton University University of Massachusetts Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory
Alma mater	Haverford College Harvard University
Known for
Notable awards	Wolf Prize in Physics (1992) Nobel Prize in Physics (1993)
Religious stance	Quaker

Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. (born March 29, 1941) is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

Contents 1 Biography 2 Career 3 Amateur Radio 4 Honours and awards 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Biography

Taylor was born in Philadelphia to Joseph Hooton Taylor, Sr., and Sylvia Evans Taylor, both of whom had Quaker roots for many generations, and grew up in Cinnaminson Township, New Jersey. He attended the Moorestown Friends School in Moorestown, New Jersey, where he excelled in math.^[1] He received a B.A. in physics at Haverford College in 1963, and a Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University in 1968. After a brief research position at Harvard, Taylor went to the University of Massachusetts, eventually becoming Professor of Astronomy and Associate Director of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Taylor's thesis work was on lunar occultation measurements. About the time he completed his Ph.D., Jocelyn Bell discovered the first radio pulsars with a telescope near Cambridge, England.

Career

Taylor immediately went to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's telescopes in Green Bank, West Virginia, and participated in the discovery of the first pulsars discovered outside Cambridge. Since then, he has worked on all aspects of pulsar astrophysics. In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered the first pulsar in a binary system, named PSR B1913+16 after its position in the sky, during a survey for pulsars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Although it was not understood at the time, this was also the first of what are now called recycled pulsars: neutron stars that have been spun-up to fast spin rates by the transfer of mass onto their surfaces from a companion star.

The orbit of this binary system is slowly shrinking as it loses energy because of emission of gravitational radiation, causing its orbital period to speed up slightly. The rate of shrinkage can be precisely predicted from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and over a thirty-year period Taylor and his colleagues have made measurements that match this prediction to much better than one percent accuracy. This was the first confirmation of the existence of gravitational radiation. There are now scores of binary pulsars known, and independent measurements have confirmed Taylor's results.

In 1980, he moved to Princeton University, where he was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics, having also served for six years as Dean of Faculty. He retired in 2006.

Amateur Radio

Joe Taylor first obtained his amateur radio license as a teenager, which led him to the field of radio astronomy. Taylor is well known in the field of amateur radio weak signal communication and was assigned the call sign K1JT by the FCC. He wrote WSJT ("Weak Signal/Joe Taylor"), a software package and protocol suite that utilizes computer-generated messages in conjunction with radio transceivers to communicate over long distances with other amateur radio operators. WSJT is useful for passing short messages via non-traditional radio communications methods, such as moonbounce and meteor scatter and other low signal-to-noise ratio paths. It is also useful for extremely long-distance contacts using very low power transmissions.

Honours and awards

Taylor has used this first binary pulsar to make high-precision tests of general relativity. Working with his colleague Joel Weisberg, Taylor has used observations of this pulsar to demonstrated the existence of gravitational radiation in the amount and with the properties first predicted by Albert Einstein. He and Hulse shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this object.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taylor has been recognized with many other awards, including the first Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Tomalla Foundation Prize, the Magellanic Premium, the Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, the Albert Einstein Medal, the Wolf Prize in Physics, and the Karl Schwarzschild Medal. He was among the first group of MacArthur Fellows. He has served on many boards, committees, and panels, co-chairing the Decadal Panel of that produced the report Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium that established the United States's national priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period 2000-2010.

See also

• Harold E. Taylor, brother.

References

1. ^ Seife, Charles. "Spin Doctor: Nobel Physicist Joseph Taylor Takes the "Pulse" of Dying Stars", Princeton Alumni Weekly, October 11, 1995. Accessed October 26, 2007. "Born in Philadelphia in 1941, he grew up on a peach farm in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, that has been in his family for more than two centuries -"a plot of green," he recalls, in the industrial belt along the Delaware River north of Camden.... As a high school student at Moorestown (N.J.) Friends, Taylor excelled in mathematics, a subject he pursued at Haverford College before switching to physics."

External links

• Joseph Taylor, Dept. of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
• 1993 Nobel Physics laureates
• Nobel autobiography

v • d • e Wolf Prize in Physics Laureates Chien-Shiung Wu (1978) · George Uhlenbeck/Giuseppe Occhialini (1979) · Michael Fisher & Leo Kadanoff & Kenneth G. Wilson (1980) · Freeman Dyson & Gerardus 't Hooft & Victor Weisskopf (1981) · Leon M. Lederman & Martin Lewis Perl (1982) · Erwin Hahn/Peter Hirsch/Theodore Maiman (1983/4) · Conyers Herring & Philippe Nozieres (1984/5) · Mitchell Feigenbaum/Albert J. Libchaber (1986) · Herbert Friedman/Bruno Rossi/Riccardo Giacconi (1987) · Roger Penrose & Stephen Hawking (1988) · Pierre-Gilles de Gennes & David J. Thouless (1990) · Maurice Goldhaber & Valentine Telegdi (1991) · Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. (1992) · Benoît Mandelbrot (1993) · Vitaly Ginzburg/Yoichiro Nambu (1994/5) · John Wheeler (1996/7) · Yakir Aharonov/Michael Berry (1998) · Dan Shechtman (1999) · Raymond Davis, Jr. & Masatoshi Koshiba (2000) · Bertrand Halperin & Anthony Leggett (2002/3) · Robert Brout & François Englert & Peter Higgs (2004) · Daniel Kleppner (2005) · Albert Fert & Peter Grünberg (2006/7) Agriculture · Arts · Chemistry · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Physics Burton Richter / Samuel C. C. Ting (1976) · Philip Anderson / Nevill Mott / John van Vleck (1977) · Pyotr Kapitsa / Arno Penzias / Robert Wilson (1978) · Sheldon Glashow / Abdus Salam / Steven Weinberg (1979) · James Cronin / Val Fitch (1980) · Nicolaas Bloembergen / Arthur Schawlow / Kai Siegbahn (1981) · Kenneth G. Wilson (1982) · Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar / William Fowler (1983) · Carlo Rubbia / Simon van der Meer (1984) · Klaus von Klitzing (1985) · Ernst Ruska / Gerd Binnig / Heinrich Rohrer (1986) · Johannes Bednorz / Karl Müller (1987) · Leon M. Lederman / Melvin Schwartz / Jack Steinberger (1988) · Norman Ramsey / Hans Dehmelt / Wolfgang Paul (1989) · Jerome Friedman / Henry Kendall / Richard E. Taylor (1990) · Pierre de Gennes (1991) · Georges Charpak (1992) · Russell Hulse / Joseph Taylor (1993) · Bertram Brockhouse / Clifford Shull (1994) · Martin Perl / Frederick Reines (1995) · D. Lee / Douglas D. Osheroff / Robert Richardson (1996) · Steven Chu / Claude Cohen-Tannoudji / William Phillips (1997) · Robert B. Laughlin / Horst Störmer / Daniel C. Tsui (1998) · Gerardus 't Hooft / Martinus J. G. Veltman (1999) · Zhores Alferov / Herbert Kroemer / Jack Kilby (2000) Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976–2000) | (2001–present)

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