Professor Emeritus Curt Michel Dies
“F. Curtis (Curt) Michel, the Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor Emeritus of Space Physics and Astronomy, died Feb. 23 at the age of 80. Although he retired in 2000 after 37 years at Rice, Michel continued to keep an office on campus, where he pursued his studies of solar winds, radio pulsars and numerical methods. He was part of the fourth class of astronauts chosen by NASA in 1965 as the agency ramped up the Apollo moon program. He was one of six scientist-astronauts in the class, the first on a roster that until that point had been largely limited to test pilots.”
Curt Michel, Wikipedia
He was one of my professors at Rice. Good teacher. He will be missed.
I read a couple of his papers when I was educating myself about pulsars. He disagreed with accepted theory and wrote with elegance, fire, and not a little anger. I don’t know whether he was right or wrong but his 2003 review of the state of pulsar theory ranks with Worden’s Self Licking Ice Cream Cone and Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses for naming names and kicking butt.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-…