Jeremy Bernstein

Jeremy Bernstein (born December 31, 1929) is an American theoretical physicist and popular science writer.

Bernstein's parents, Philip S. Bernstein, a Reform rabbi, and Sophie Rubin Bernstein named him after the biblical Jeremiah, the subject of his father's masters thesis.

Philip's parents were immigrants from Lithuania, while Sophie was of Russian-Jewish descent.

The family moved from Rochester to New York City during World War II, when his father became head of all the Jewish chaplains in the armed forces.

Bernstein studied at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1951, masters in 1953, and Ph.D. in 1955, on electromagnetic properties of deuterium, under Julian Schwinger.

As a theoretical physicist, he worked on elementary particle physics and cosmology.

A summer spent in Los Alamos led to a position at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961 to 1995, authoring scores of articles.

He has also written regularly for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American, among others.

Bernstein's biographical profiles of physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, John Stewart Bell and others, are able to draw on the experiences of personal acquaintance.

In 1962 he became a faculty member at New York University, moving to become a professor of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in 1967, a position that he continues to hold as professor emeritus.

He has held adjunct or visiting positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford, the University of Islamabad, and the Ecole Polytechnique.

Bernstein was involved in Project Orion, investigating the potential for nuclear pulse propulsion for use in space travel.

Bernstein is a popular science writer and profiler of scientists.

Bernstein's latest publication was in 2018 with A Bouquet of Dyson: and Other Reflections on Science and Scientists