BY CATRIN BAILEY, DANIEL YOON, JORDAN WONG, SASINAN SANGTEERASINTOP, YU LUO LAUREN ZHU, VIDYUN BAIS, GEORGIA KIRN Dr. Richard Muller is a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. His many interests include particle physics, geo- physics, and astrophysics. He has studied the extinction of the dinosaurs, the affect of the planets on ice ages, the beginning and end of the universe, and the nature of time. He teaches the class Physics for Future Presidents. How did you get involved in physics, specif- BSJ ically astrophysics? in physics dated back to high school; DM I My loved interest all sciences and I found biology to be too difficult, I didn’t really get excited by chemistry, all the things I loved in science turned out to be physics....Now, I consider myself to be an engineer as well as a physicist, but back then, it was the physics that looked like the field that held the answers to the most interesting questions. You’ve done a lot of research in glacial cy- BSJ cles. If you were first a physicist, how did you come to correlate the two? very backwards way, it came about because DM my In a closest associate, my mentor, Louie Alvarez, had gotten involved in geology through his son Walter. They had addressed the question of “what killed the dino- saurs?” I got involved in that too to some extent; I wrote some papers on the subject, and at the end of their work, my thought was “what a surprise this was, that something from space, astronomy, could cause such a big impact on things on the Earth, what else could there be?” I started thinking about the Ice Ages, and if those could be caused by astronomy, maybe by the impacts of asteroids and comets? I looked into it and discovered it was an as- tronomical theory that explained the cycles of the Ice Ages in terms of the changes of the planetary positions. It was a widely accepted theory, but as I read into it, I realized this theory must be wrong. Typically when I read something new, if it makes a lot of sense that’s great, but if you looked at it critically rather than accept authority, as scientists are taught, I found severe flaws in the theory. That’s when I started playing with the theory, trying some alternatives, finding an approach that worked much better than the FALL 2016 | Berkeley Scientific Journal