John Preskill

John Phillip Preskill (born January 19, 1953) is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Preskill was born in Highland Park, Illinois. After earning an B.A. in physics at Princeton University, summa cum laude, in 1975, he received his Ph.D. in the same subject from Harvard University in 1980. His graduate adviser at Harvard was Steven Weinberg. While still a graduate student, Preskill made a name for himself by publishing a paper on the cosmological production of superheavy magnetic monopoles in Grand Unified Theories. This work pointed to a serious problem in the then current cosmological models, a problem which was later...