Photo courtesy of Coleman Miller
Miller with TASherry Suyu, graduate student at Caltech, teaching last
summer at University of Texas at Brownsville, South Padre Island.
Hillsdale alumnus Coleman Miller, a 1984 Hillsdale graduate, continues his study of the universe, now from the laboratory of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
After teaching physics at the University of Maryland for seven years, Miller, 36, was up for sabbatical this fall. Five minutes from campus, Goddard was an obvious and desirable choice for his work.
“We were delighted that Cole applied for a National Research Council fellowship to take a sabbatical at Goddard,” Joan Centrella, chief of the gravitational astrophysics laboratory at Goddard, said. “Cole is an outstanding colleague and his presence contributes to the exciting research environment here.”
Miller’s specialty is black holes and gravitational waves, and his focus at Goddard goes back a few 100,000 years.
Miller asks what the universe was like when it was one-tenth to a hundredth as old as it is now, a time when the universe was very smooth, gravitationally speaking. Because he can’t go back in time, he is studying the ripples caused by the violent collision of two black holes, which he said would be capable of shaking space and time.
“The ripples sent out can be observed by future instruments, some worked out here at Goddard,” Miller said in a phone interview. “If we can observe them, we can get a huge amount of information on how we went from very smooth to the way the universe is today.”
But Miller’s work on massive black holes in the center of galaxies including our own is physically done on his small laptop, the main tool for his study.
“If I imagine having multiple black holes in some environment, and they’re pushing each other around, it’s complicated enough that I can’t set down equations to solve it,” Miller said. “But what I can do is sit at a computer and observe simulations.”
Besides conducting intense research, Miller has done extensive traveling in the last year, attending conferences and giving talks all over the world. In the last nine months his visits have included India, Taiwa, and Amsterdam, while a trip to Sweden is scheduled for mid-December.
“The main purpose of this is to talk to other people about research,” he said. “Networking—just the fun of meeting people, many of whom I’ve seen before, talking to them and getting new ideas.”
Miller’s work centers on gravitation radiation work, but he maintains an interest in x-ray and gamma-ray studies and said he is delighted by the eclectic scientific atmosphere at Goddard.
“In the hallway I work in, next door are gamma ray [labs] followed by x-ray,” he said. “I get to walk up and down the hall and talk to whoever I want.”
For a physicist who loves research, the opportunity of a sabbatical is priceless.
“It means that I can do far more research than I would be able to otherwise,” he said. “Now I’m able to spend day after day pursuing research—and I’m hoping that by the end of this I will have acquired enough knowledge in this field that I can pursue productive lines during the school year.”
Miller continues to submit papers, mainly for review and publication, through the Royal Astronomical Society in England. This year, to date, he has published 45 papers in scientific journals and 30 write-ups (to be published in book form) following conference speeches.
Goddard provides Miller with an environment of scientific excellence that he couldn’t have on his own.
“One great advantage of being where I am is that the people in gravitational aid group come in two flavors: the ones that do computer work, the numerical black hole simulations, and other instrument builders, who will actually build the equipment to detect gravitational waves,” Miller said. “I learn as I go, and I don’t know much about either.”
“(Intermediate mass black hole) research is in a very exciting stage right now,” Centrella said. “[It’s] making impressive progress and Cole’s work is a key element in this field. Cole is of course very intelligent, but more importantly, is able to see the big picture, all the physical effects and how they play off one another, as well as the details [of] how any individual idea or mechanism fits into the whole.”