Henry Tye

Henry Tye (born 1947) is a Chinese-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist most notable for proposing that a brane and an antibrane attraction and annihilation with one another, causes cosmic inflation and his work on superstring theory, brane cosmology and elementary particle physics. He received his B.S. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Francis Low. He is currently the Horace White Professor of Physics at Cornell University and a fellow of the American Physical Society.cite web|url=http://www.physics.cornell.edu/profpages/TyeH.html|title=Henry S.-H. Tye|accessdate=2006-11-24|publisher=Cornell University]

Together with Gia Dvali, he suggested the idea of brane inflation in 1998 which was later put on concrete string theoretic grounds by Shamit Kachru and collaborators. He went on to work out many details of brane inflation with his research group at Cornell. He was responsible for the revival of the interest in cosmic strings. Cosmic superstrings are produced at the end of brane inflation due to brane-antibrane annihilation. Apart from the details of brane inflation, he has been working on issues related to the string landscape and quantum cosmology with his collaborators.

Alan Guth in his book has the story of how he was led to think about issues that resulted in the original idea of cosmic inflation due to the influence of Henry Tye. At that time they were both postdocs at Cornell University.

Earlier on in his career Tye was involved with many important ideas such as the construction of fermionic string models with Kawai and Lewellen (Kawai-Lewellen-Tye), fractional superstrings, grand unified string models, brane world.

Wise words

Among Henry's students, the "Henry Tye test" is well known. This is a test to be employed in cities one does not know well when one wishes to locate acceptable restaurants. The idea is to find a restaurant that is full of people, which suggests that the food is acceptable. Such a restaurant is said to "pass the Henry Tye test."

References

External links

* [http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/%7Etye/ Tye's homepage]
* [http://www.unjobs.org/authors/henry-tye Henry Tye papers and citations]