Edwin F. Taylor

Edwin F. Taylor was born in Oberlin, Ohio, where his father was Chairman of the Oberlin College Physics Department and a textbook writer. Edwin graduated from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University under Nicholaas Bloembergen, later a Nobel Laureate for work that had nothing to do with Edwin's thesis. Edwin was Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. During a junior faculty sabbatical at Princeton University, he met John Archibald Wheeler, the grand old man of general relativity, with whom he wrote Spacetime Physics, a special relativity textbook. Back at Wesleyan, he failed on tenure because of his preoccupation with textbook writing, and joined the Science Teaching Center, later the Education Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There he wrote An Introduction to Quantum Physics with A.P. French while he was completing Exploring Black Holes, an introductory general relativity text with John A. Wheeler. For five years he was Editor of the American Journal of Physics. Later he received the Oersted Medal, the highest honor of the American Association of Physics Teachers, for "notable contributions to the teaching of physics". He is now Senior Research Scientist, Emeritus in the MIT physics department and is endlessly preparing the Second Edition of Exploring Black Holes with Edmund Bertschinger, cosmologist and Head of the MIT Physics Department. Draft chapters for personal or class use -- with request for comments and suggestions -- may be freely downloaded from exploringblackholes.com