Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as PhD, Ph.D., DPhil or D.Phil. (for the Latin ''philosophiae doctor'' or ''doctor philosophiae''), in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities. The academic level of degrees known as doctorates of philosophy varies considerably according to the country, institution and time period, from entry-level research degrees to higher doctorates.

The term "philosophy" does not refer solely to the modern field of philosophy, but is used in a broader sense in accordance with its original Greek meaning, which is "love of wisdom". In most of Europe, all fields other than theology, law and medicine were traditionally known as philosophy.

The doctorate of philosophy as it exists today originated as a doctorate in the liberal arts at the Humboldt University, and was eventually adopted by American universities, becoming common in large parts of the world in the 20th century. In many countries, the doctorate of philosophy is still awarded only in the liberal arts (known as "philosophy" in continental Europe, hence the name of the degree).

History

In the universities of Medieval Europe, study was organized in four faculties: the basic faculty of arts, and the three higher faculties of theology, (canonical and civil) law and medicine. All of these faculties awarded intermediate degrees (bachelor of arts, of theology, of laws, of medicine) and final degrees. Initially the titles of master and doctor were used interchangeably for the final degrees, but by the late middle ages the terms master of arts and doctor of theology/divinity, doctor of laws and doctor of medicine had largely become standard. The doctorates in the higher faculties were quite different from the current Ph.D. degree in that they were awarded for advanced scholarship, not original research. No dissertation or original work was required, only lengthy residency requirements and examinations .

This situation changed in the early nineteenth century through the educational reforms in Germany, most strongly embodied in the model of the Humboldt University. The arts faculty, which in Germany was labelled the faculty of philosophy, started demanding contributions to research, attested by a dissertation, for the award of their final degree, which was labelled Doctor of Philosophy (abbreviated as Ph.D.). Whereas in the middle ages the arts faculty had a set curriculum, based upon the trivium and the quadrivium, by the nineteenth century it had come to house all the courses of study in subjects now commently referred to as sciences and humanities..

These reforms proved extremely successful, and fairly quickly the German universities started attracting foreign students, notable from the United States. The American students would go to Germany to obtain a Ph.D. after having studied for a bachelor's degrees at an American college. So influential was this practice that it was imported to the United States, where in 1861 Yale University started granting the Ph.D. degree to younger students who, after having obtained the bachelor's degree, had completed a prescribed course of graduate study and successfully defended a thesis/dissertation containing original research in science or in the humanities.. The current triple structure of bachelor-master-doctor degrees in one discipline was therefore created on American soil by fusing two different European traditions - the medieval B.A. and M.A. degrees, awarded after a course of study and inherited from the British Universities, and the research based Ph.D. taken over from the early nineteenth century German educational reforms.

From the United States, the degree spread to Canada in 1900, and then to the United Kingdom in 1917. This displaced the existing Doctor of Philosophy degree in some universities; for instance, the DPhil (higher doctorate in the faculty of philosophy) at the University of St Andrews was discontinued and replaced with the Ph.D., (research doctorate). Oxford retained the DPhil abbreviation for their research degrees. Some newer UK universities, for example Buckingham (est. 1976), Sussex (est. 1961), and, until a few years ago, York (est. 1963), chose to adopt the DPhil, as did some universities in New Zealand.

Requirements

The detailed requirements for award of a Ph.D. degree vary throughout the world and even from school to school. In some schools in the US, Canada and Denmark, for example, many universities require coursework in addition to research for Ph.D. degrees. In other countries (such as the UK) there is generally no such condition. It is not uncommon, however, for individual universities or departments to specify additional requirements for students not already in possession of a bachelor's degree or equivalent or higher.

In schools requiring coursework there is sometimes a prescribed minimum amount of study — typically two to three years full time, or a set number of credit hours — which must take place before submission of a thesis. This requirement is sometimes waived for those submitting a portfolio of peer-reviewed published work. The candidate may also be required to successfully complete a certain number of additional, advanced courses relevant to his or her area of specialization.

A candidate must submit a project or thesis or dissertation often consisting of a body of original academic research, which is in principle worthy of publication in a peer-refereed context. In many countries a candidate must defend this work before a panel of expert examiners appointed by the university; in other countries, the dissertation is examined by a panel of expert examiners who stipulate whether the dissertation is in principle passable and the issues that need to be addressed before the dissertation can be passed.

Some universities in the non-English-speaking world have begun adopting similar standards to those of the Anglophone PhD degree for their research doctorates (see the Bologna process).

A Ph.D. student or candidate (abbreviated to Ph.D.c) is conventionally required to study on campus under close supervision. With the popularity of distance education and e-learning technologies, some universities now accept students enrolled into a distance education part-time mode.

Value and criticism

PhD students are often motivated to pursue the PhD by the desire for further education beyond the undergraduate level, scientific and humanistic curiosity, the desire to contribute to the academic community, service to others, or personal development. The motivation may include increased salary, but in many cases this is not the result. Research by Casey suggests that, over all subjects, PhDs provide an earnings premium of 26%, but notes that masters degrees provide a premium of 23% already. Whilst this is a small return to the individual (or even an overall deficit when lost earnings during training are accounted for), he claims there are significant benefits to society for the extra research training.. Some research suggests that overqualified workers are often less satisfied and less productive at their jobs. These difficulties are increasingly being felt by graduates of professional degrees, such as law school, looking to find employment. PhD students do not often have to take on debt to undertake their degree .

The Economist published an article citing various criticisms against the state of PhDs. Richard B. Freeman explains that, based on pre-2000 data, at most only 20% of life science PhD students end up getting jobs specifically in research. In Canada, where the overflow of PhD degree holders is not as severe, 80% of postdoctoral research fellows end up earning less than or equal to the average construction worker (roughly $38,000 a year). Only in the fastest developing countries (e.g. China or Brazil) is there a shortage of PhDs. Higher education systems often offer little incentive to move students through PhD programs quickly (and may even provide incentive to slow them down). Germany is one of the few nations engaging these issues, and it has been doing so by reconceptualizing PhD programs to be training for careers, outside of academia, but still at high-level positions. To a lesser extent, the UK research councils have tackled the issue by introducing, since 1992, the EngD. Mark C. Taylor opines that total reform of PhD programs in almost every field is necessary in the U.S., and that pressure to make the necessary changes will need to come from many sources (students, administrators, public and private sectors, etc.). These issues and others are discussed in an April 2011 issue of the journal ''Nature''..

Doctor of Philosophy degrees across the globe

Argentina

Admission

In Argentina, the admission to a PhD program at an Argentine University requires the full completion of a Master's degree or a Licentiate's degree. Non-Argentinian Master's titles are generally accepted into a PhD program when the degree comes from a recognized university.

Funding

While a significant portion of postgraduate students finance their tuition and living costs with teaching or research work at private and state-run institutions, international institutions, such as the Fullbright Program and the Organization of American States (OAS), have been known to grant full scholarships for tuition with apportions for housing.

Requirements for completion

Upon completion of at least two years' research and course work as a graduate student, a candidate must demonstrate truthful and original contributions to his or her specific field of knowledge within a frame of academic excellence. The doctoral candidate's work should be presented in a dissertation or thesis prepared under the supervision of a tutor or director, and reviewed by a Doctoral Committee. This Committee should be composed of examiners that are external to the program, and at least one of them should also be external to the institution. The academic degree of Doctor, respective to the correspondent field of science that the candidate has contributed with original and rigorous research, is received after a successful defense of the candidate’s dissertation.

Australia

Admission

Admission to a PhD program within Australia requires a Masters degree or a Bachelors honours degree (first or second class, upper division), or equivalent, and demonstrated capacity to undertake significant research in the proposed doctoral field.

Framework for Best Practice in Doctoral Research Education in Australia

Scholarships

PhD students are sometimes offered a scholarship to study for their PhD degree. The most common of these in Australia is the government-funded Australian Postgraduate Award (APA), which provides a living stipend to students of approximately A$ 22,500 a year (tax free). APAs are paid for a duration of 3 years, while a 6 month extension is usually possible upon citing delays out of the control of the student. Some universities also fund a similar scholarship that matches the APA amount. In recent years, with the tightening of research funding in Australia, these scholarships have become increasingly hard to obtain. However, APAs have become less competitive as the number of scholarships were to be doubled by 2012. Due to a continual increase in living costs, many PhD students are forced to live under the poverty line. In addition to the more common APA and University scholarships, Australian students have other sources of scholarship funding, with options listed on the JASON Postgraduate Scholarship Database.

Fees

Australian citizens and other eligible PhD and Research Masters students in Australia are generally not charged course fees as these are paid for by the Australian Government under the Research Training Scheme International students and Coursework Masters students must pay course fees, unless they receive a scholarship to cover them.

Requirements for completion

Completion requirements vary. Most Australian PhD programs do not have a required coursework component. The 72 credit points attached to the degree are all in the product of the research, which has to make a significant new contribution to the field. The PhD research product is sent to external examiners, experts in the field of research, who have not been involved in the work. In Australia a formal oral defense is generally not part of the doctoral examination (largely because of the distances that would need to be traveled by the overseas examiners). Examiners are nominated by the candidate's University (often by the Head of Department or Research Office), and their identities are often not officially revealed to the candidate until the examination is complete. Many New Zealand Universities have retained the oral examination requirement, but often external examiner's report is presented by one of the internal examiners. The Australasian Digital Theses Program provided access to PhDs produced recently, as there are generally automatically digitalised and added to this database available from http://adt.caul.edu.au/. As of March 2011, the site is being decommissioned.

Canada

Admission

Admission to a PhD program at a Canadian university usually requires completion of a Master's degree in a related field, with sufficiently high grades and proven research ability. In some cases, a student may progress directly from an Honours Bachelor's degree to a PhD program; other programs allow a student to fast-track to a doctoral program after one year of outstanding work in a Master's program (without having to complete the Master's).

An application package typically includes a research proposal, letters of reference, transcripts, and in some cases, a writing sample or GRE scores. A common criterion for prospective PhD students is the comprehensive or qualifying examination, a process that often commences in the second year of a graduate program. Generally, successful completion of the qualifying exam permits continuance in the graduate program. Formats for this examination include oral examination by the student's faculty committee (or a separate qualifying committee), or written tests designed to demonstrate the student's knowledge in a specialized area (see below) or both.

At English-speaking universities, a student may also be required to demonstrate English language abilities, usually by achieving an acceptable score on a standard examination (e.g., Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)). Depending on the field, the student may also be required to demonstrate ability in one or more additional languages. A prospective student applying to French-speaking universities may also have to demonstrate some English language ability.

Funding

While some students work outside the university (or at student jobs within the university), in some programs students are advised (or must agree) not to devote more than ten hours per week to activities (e.g., employment) outside of their studies, particularly if they have been given funding. For large and prestigious scholarships, such as those from NSERC, this is an absolute requirement.

At some Canadian universities, most PhD students receive an award equivalent to the tuition amount for the first four years (this is sometimes called a tuition deferral or tuition waiver). Other sources of funding include teaching assistantships and research assistantships; experience as a teaching assistant is encouraged but not requisite in many programs. Some programs may require all PhD candidates to teach, which may be done under the supervision of their supervisor or regular faculty. Besides these sources of funding, there are also various competitive scholarships, bursaries, and awards available, such as those offered by the federal government via NSERC, CIHR, or SSHRC.

Requirements for completion

In general, the first two years of study are devoted to completion of coursework and the comprehensive examinations. At this stage, the student is known as a "PhD student" or "doctoral student". It is usually expected that the student will have completed most of his or her required coursework by the end of this stage. Furthermore, it is usually required that by the end of eighteen to thirty-six months after the first registration, the student will have successfully completed the comprehensive exams.

Upon successful completion of the comprehensive exams, the student becomes known as a "PhD candidate". From this stage on, the bulk of the student's time will be devoted to his or her own research, culminating in the completion of a PhD thesis or dissertation. The final requirement is an oral defense of the thesis, which is open to the public in some, but not all, universities. At most Canadian universities, the time needed to complete a PhD degree typically ranges from four to six years. It is, however, not uncommon for students to be unable to complete all the requirements within six years, particularly given that funding packages often support students for only two to four years; many departments will allow program extensions at the discretion of the thesis supervisor and/or department chair. Alternate arrangements exist whereby a student is allowed to let their registration in the program lapse at the end of six years and re-register once the thesis is completed in draft form. The general rule is that graduate students are obligated to pay tuition until the initial thesis submission has been received by the thesis office. In other words, if a PhD student defers or delays the initial submission of their thesis they remain obligated to pay fees until such time that the thesis has been received in good standing.

Denmark and Norway

Denmark and Norway were some of the first countries to introduce the Doctor of Philosophy degree, inspired by the German university system, in 1824. The degree was written as ''Doctor Philosophiae'', abbreviated ''dr. Phil.'' or ''dr. philos.'' The two countries' systems of higher education were more or less identical at that time; following the dissolution of Denmark-Norway in 1814, the only university of Norway (the Royal Frederick University) nonetheless followed the regulations of the only university of Denmark (and for centuries the only university of both countries), the University of Copenhagen, for several years.

The dr. phil. degree was used for all other fields than theology, law and medicine, which had separate degrees: ''doctor theologiae'', ''doctor juris'' and ''doctor medicinae''. In the 20th century new degrees were created in the fields of natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, but it was still possible to obtain the dr. phil. degree in any field. Most people who started at a doctoral degree had already studied for six or seven years and obtained a Candidate degree (six years) or a Magister degree (seven years), sometimes a Licentiate (a "smaller doctorate"). The former were considered entry-level degrees required before finding permanent employment as a researcher, while the dr. phil. degree was often obtained by people who were already well established academics, sometimes even full professors.

Following reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, both countries introduced a new Doctor of Philosophy degree, based upon the American PhD and written as Philosophiae Doctor (PhD). In Norway the PhD replaced all other doctoral degrees except dr. philos., while in Denmark, the traditional doctorates are still awarded. In Norway the new PhD and the dr. philos. are equivalent. In Denmark, the original dr. phil. degree is today considered a higher doctorate, as opposed to the PhD, which is considered a "smaller doctorate" at the same level as the former Licentiate. Unlike the PhD, the dr. phil. degree is not a supervised degree, does not include any coursework and requires a much larger degree of independent research in both countries.

France

Admission

Students pursuing the PhD degree must first complete a Master's degree program, which takes two years after graduation with a Bachelor's degree (five years in total). The candidate must find funding and a formal doctoral advisor (Directeur de thèse) with an habilitation throughout the doctoral program.

In France, the Masters program is divided into two branches: "master professionnel", which orientates the students towards the working world, and Master of Research (Master-recherche), which is oriented towards research. The PhD admission is granted by a graduate school (in French, "école doctorale"). A PhD Student has to follow some courses offered by the graduate school while continuing his/her research at laboratory. His/her research may be carried out in a laboratory, at a university, or in a company. In the last case, the company hires the student as an engineer and the student is supervised by both the company's tutor and a labs' professor. The validation of the PhD degree requires generally 3 to 4 years after the Master degree. Consequently, the PhD degree is considered in France as a "Bac +8" diploma. "Bac" stands for Baccalauréat which is the French High-school diploma.

Funding

The financing of PhD studies comes mainly from funds for research of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The most common procedure is a short-term employment contract called doctoral contract : the institution of higher education is the employer and the PhD candidate the employee. However, the student can apply for funds from a company who can host him/her at its premise (as in the case where PhD students do their research in a company). Many other resources come from some regional/city projects, some associations, etc.

India

Admission

In India, a Masters degree is required to gain admission to a doctoral program. In some subjects, doing a Masters in Philosophy (M.Phil) is a prerequisite to start PhD. For some prestigious universities it is required to qualify the all India level examination such as ‘National Eligibility Test for Lectureship (NET) conducted by ‘University Grants Commission' .

In last few years, there have been many changes in the rules related to PhD in India. According to the new rules, most universities conduct entrance exams in general ability and the selected subject. After clearing these tests, the short-listed candidates need to appear for interview by the available supervisor / guide. The students are required to give presentations of the proposal at the beginning, need to submit progress reports, give pre-submission presentation and finally defend the thesis in an open defence viva voce.

Germany

Admission

In Germany an advanced degree (Master, Diploma, Magister or Staatsexamen) and above-average grades are often required to gain admission to a doctoral program. The degree should usually be in a related field. The candidate must also find a tenured professor or Privatdozent to serve as the formal advisor and supervisor (''Betreuer'') of the dissertation throughout the doctoral program. This supervisor is informally referred to as ''Doktorvater/Doktormutter'' (literally 'doctor's father/mother').

Doctoral programs in Germany generally take one to four years – usually three, up to five in engineering – to complete, strongly depending on the subject. There are usually no formal classes or lectures to attend, and the doctoral candidate (''Doktorand/-in'') mainly conducts independent research under the tutelage of a single professor or advisory committee.

Many doctoral candidates work as teaching or research assistants and are thus actually doing most of the research and teaching activities at their home institutions, but are not paid a reasonably competitive salary for that (in most cases, only a half position is granted). However, external funding by research organisations and foundations is also common. Furthermore, many universities have established research-intensive ''Graduiertenkollegs'', which are graduate schools that provide funding for doctoral theses.

Other countries

In German-speaking countries, most Eastern European countries, the former Soviet Union, most parts of Africa, Asia, and many Spanish-speaking countries the corresponding degree is simply called "doctor" (''Doktor''), and is distinguished by subject area with a Latin suffix (e.g. "Dr. med." for , "Dr. rer. nat." for — Doctor of Natural Science, "Dr. phil." for , "Dr. iur." for , etc.).

In the former Soviet Union, the Doctor of Sciences is the higher of two sequential post-graduate degrees, with Candidate of Sciences (Russian – кандидат наук) being universally accepted as the equivalent of the PhD, while the Doctorate is a (Full) Professors' or Academicians' separate and subsequent degree, indicating that the holder is a distinguished, honoured, and outstanding member of the scientific community. It is rarely awarded to those younger than late middle age or lacking in achievement and is a symbol of success in an academic career.

Italy

The Dottorato di ricerca (research doctorate), abbreviated to "Dott. Ric." or "Ph.D.", is an academic title awarded at the end of a course of not less than three years, admission to which is based on entrance examinations. In case of MD/PhD the Ph.D. programme may last only two years.

Doctorate courses are open, without age or citizenship limits, to all those who already hold a "laurea magistrale" (master degree) or similar academic title awarded abroad which has been recognised as equivalent to an Italian degree by the Committee responsible for the entrance examinations.

The number of places on offer each year and details of the entrance examinations are set out in the examination announcement.

Poland

A doctor's degree (pl. Doktor), abbreviated to Phd (pl. dr) is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities in most fields as well as by the Polish Academy of Sciences, regulated by the Polish parliament acts and the government orders, in particular by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland. Commonly, students with a master's degree or equivalent are accepted to a doctoral entrance exam. The title of Phd is awarded to a scientist who 1) completed a minimum of 3 years of Phd studies (pl. studia doktoranckie), 2) finished his/her theoretical and/or laboratory’s scientific work, 3) passed all Phd examinations, 4) submitted his/her dissertation- a document presenting the author's research and findings, 5) successfully defended his/her doctoral thesis. Typically, upon completion, the candidate undergoes an oral examination, always public, by his/her supervisory committee with expertise in the given discipline.

Scandinavia

The doctorate was introduced in Denmark-Norway in 1479 and awarded in theology, law and medicine, while the Magister's degree was the highest degree at the Faculty of Philosophy, equivalent to the doctorate.

Scandinavian countries were among the early adopters of a modern style doctorate of philosophy, based upon the German model. Denmark and Norway both introduced the dr. phil(os). degree in 1824, replacing the Magister's degree as the highest degree, while Uppsala University of Sweden renamed its Magister's degree ''Filosofie Doktor'' (Fil.Dr.) in 1863. These degrees, however, became comparable to the German Habilitation rather than the doctorate, as Scandinavian countries did not have a separate Habilitation. The degrees were uncommon and not a prerequisite for employment as a professor; rather, they were seen as distinctions similar to the British (higher) doctorates (D.Litt., D.Sc.). Denmark introduced an American-style PhD in 1989; it formally replaced the Licentiate degree, and is considered a lower degree than the dr. phil. degree; officially, the PhD is not considered a doctorate, but unofficially, it is referred to as "the smaller doctorate", as opposed to the dr. phil., "the grand doctorate". Currently Denmark and Norway are both awarding the traditional (higher) dr. phil(os). degree, and American-style PhDs. Sweden is only awarding the Fil.Dr. degree.

Spain

Doctor Degrees are regulated by Royal Decree (R.D. 778/1998), ''Real Decreto'' (in Spanish). They are granted by the University on behalf of the King, and its Diploma has the force of a public document. The Ministry of Science keeps a National Registry of Theses called TESEO.

All doctoral programs are of a research nature. A minimum of 4 years of study are required, divided into 2 stages:

# A 2-year-long period of studies, which concludes with a public dissertation presented to a panel of 3 Professors. If the projects receives approval from the university, he/she will receive a "Diploma de Estudios Avanzados" (part qualified doctor, ''Literally: Diploma of Advanced Studies''). # A 2-year (or longer) period of research. Extensions may be requested for up to 10 years. The student must write his thesis presenting a new discovery or original contribution to Science. If approved by his "thesis director", the study will be presented to a panel of 5 distinguished scholars. Any Doctor attending the public presentations is allowed to challenge the candidate with questions on his research. If approved, he will receive the doctorate. Four marks can be granted (Unsatisfactory, Pass, "Cum laude", and "Summa cum laude"). Those Doctors granted their degree "Summa Cum Laude" are allowed to apply for an "Extraordinary Award".

A Doctor Degree is required to apply to a teaching position at the University.

The social standing of Doctors in Spain is evidenced by the fact that only PhD holders, Grandees and Dukes can take seat and cover their heads in the presence of the King. All Doctor Degree holders are reciprocally recognized as equivalent in Germany and Spain ("Bonn Agreement of November 14, 1994").

United Kingdom

Further information: Doctorate#United Kingdom

The top ten UK universities ranked by research quality according to the Times Good University Guide with their designatory letters:

PhD PhD PhD PhD

University !! Letters !! University !! Letters
University of Oxford	Oxford	DPhil	Durham University>Durham
University of Cambridge	Cambridge	|	University of St Andrews>St Andrews	PhD
London School of Economics	LSE	|	University of Warwick>Warwick	PhD
Imperial College London	Imperial	|	Lancaster University>Lancaster	PhD
University College London	UCL	|	University of Exeter>Exeter	PhD

Admission

Universities admit applicants to PhD programmes on a case-by-case basis; depending on the university, admission is typically conditional on the prospective student having successfully completed an undergraduate degree with at least upper second-class honours, or a postgraduate master's degree, but requirements can vary.

In the case of the University of Oxford, for example, "The one essential condition of being accepted...is evidence of previous academic excellence, and of future potential." Commonly, students are first accepted on to an MPhil programme and may transfer to PhD regulations upon satisfactory progress and is referred to as APG (Advanced Postgraduate) status. This is typically done after one or two years, and the research work done may count towards the PhD degree. If a student fails to make satisfactory progress, he or she may be offered the opportunity to write up and submit for an MPhil degree.

In addition, PhD students from countries outside the EU/EFTA area are required to comply with the Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS), which involves undergoing a security clearance process with the Foreign Office for certain courses in medicine, mathematics, engineering and material sciences. This requirement was introduced in 2007 due to concerns about terrorism and weapons proliferation.

Funding

In the United Kingdom, funding for PhD students is sometimes provided by government-funded Research Councils or the European Social Fund, usually in the form of a tax-free bursary which consists of tuition fees together with a stipend of around £13,000 per year for three years (higher in London), whether or not the degree continues for longer. Scientific studentships are usually paid at a higher rate, for example, in London, Cancer Research UK, the ICR and the Wellcome Trust stipend rates start at around £19,000 and progress annually to around £23,000 a year; an amount that is tax and national insurance free. Research Council funding is sometimes 'earmarked' for a particular department or research group, who then allocate it to a chosen student, although in doing so they are generally expected to abide by the usual minimum entry requirements (typically a first degree with upper second class honours, although successful completion of a postgraduate master's degree is usually counted as raising the class of the first degree by one division for these purposes). However, the availability of funding in many disciplines (especially humanities, social studies, and pure science subjects) means that in practice only those with the best research proposals, references and backgrounds are likely to be awarded a studentship. The ESRC (Economic and Social Science Research Council) explicitly state that a 2.1 minimum (or 2.2 plus additional masters degree) is required – no additional marks are given for students with a first class honours or a distinction at masters level.

Since 2002, there has been a move by research councils to fund interdisciplinary doctoral training centres such as MOAC which concentrate on communication between traditional disciplines and an emphasis on transferable skills in addition to research training.

Many students who are not in receipt of external funding may choose to undertake the degree part time, thus reducing the tuition fees, as well as creating free time in which to earn money for subsistence.

Students may also take part in tutoring, work as research assistants, or (occasionally) deliver lectures, at a rate of typically £25–30 per hour, either to supplement existing low income or as a sole means of funding.

Completion

There is usually a preliminary assessment to remain in the programme and the thesis is submitted at the end of a 3- to 4-year program. These periods are usually extended pro rata for part-time students. With special dispensation, the final date for the thesis can be extended for up to four additional years, for a total of seven, but this is rare. Since the early 1990s, the UK funding councils have adopted a policy of penalising departments where large proportions of students fail to submit their theses in four years after achieving PhD-student status (or pro rata equivalent) by reducing the number of funded places in subsequent years.

There has recently been an increase in the number of Integrated PhD programs available, such as at the University of Southampton. These courses include a Masters of Research (MRes) in the first year, which consists of a taught component as well as laboratory rotation projects. The PhD must then be completed within the next 3 years. As this includes the MRes all deadlines and timeframes are brought forward to encourage completion of both MRes and PhD within 4 years from commencement. These programs are designed to provide students with a greater range of skills than a standard PhD.

Other doctorates

In the United Kingdom PhD degrees are distinct from other doctorates, most notably the higher doctorates such as D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters) or D.Sc. (Doctor of Science), which may be granted on the recommendation of a committee of examiners on the basis of a substantial portfolio of submitted (and usually published) research. However, most UK universities still maintain the option of submitting a thesis for the award of a higher doctorate.

Recent years have seen the introduction of professional doctorates, which are the same level as PhDs but more specific in their field. These tend not to be solely academic, but combine academic research, a taught component and a professional qualification. These are most notably in the fields of engineering (Eng.D.), education (Ed.D.), occupational psychology (D.Occ Psych.) clinical psychology (D.Clin.Psych.), public administration (D.P.A.), business administration (D.B.A.), and music (D.M.A.). These typically have a more formal taught component consisting of smaller research projects, as well as a 40,000–60,000 word thesis component, which collectively is equivalent to that of a PhD degree.

United States

Overview

In the United States, the Ph.D. degree is the highest academic degree awarded by universities in most fields of study. American students typically undergo a series of three phases in the course of their work toward the Ph.D. degree. The first phase consists of coursework in the student's field of study and requires one to three years to complete. This often is followed by a preliminary, a comprehensive examination, or a series of cumulative examinations where the emphasis is on breadth rather than depth of knowledge. The student is often later required to pass oral and written examinations in the field of specialization within the discipline, and here, depth is emphasized. Some Ph.D. programs require the candidate to successfully complete requirements in pedagogy (taking courses on higher level teaching and teaching undergraduate courses) or applied science (e.g., clinical practice and predoctoral clinical internship in Ph.D. programs in clinical or counseling psychology).

Another two to four years are usually required for the composition of a substantial and original contribution to human knowledge in the form of a written dissertation, which in the social sciences and humanities typically ranges from 50 to 450 pages in length. In many cases, depending on the discipline, a dissertation consists of (i) a comprehensive literature review, (ii) an outline of methodology, and (iii) several chapters of scientific, social, historical, philosophical, or literary analysis. Typically, upon completion, the candidate undergoes an oral examination, sometimes public, by his or her supervisory committee with expertise in the given discipline.

As the Ph.D. degree is often a preliminary step toward a career as a professor, throughout the whole period of study and dissertation research the student, depending on the university and degree, may be required or offered the opportunity to teach undergraduate and occasionally graduate courses in relevant subjects.

Admission

There are 282 universities in the United States that award the PhD degree, and those universities vary widely in their criteria for admission, as well as the rigor of their academic programs. Typically, PhD programs require applicants to have a Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (and, in many cases in the humanities, a master's degree), reasonably high grades, several letters of recommendation, relevant academic coursework, a cogent statement of interest in the field of study, and satisfactory performance on a graduate-level exam specified by the respective program (e.g., GRE, GMAT). Specific admissions criteria differ substantially according to university admissions policies and fields of study. Some programs in well-regarded research universities may have very low acceptance rates and require excellent performances on the GRE and in undergraduate work, strong support in letters of recommendation, substantial research experience, and academically sophisticated samples of their writing.

Master's degree "en route"

As applicants to many Ph.D. programs are not required to have master's degrees, many programs award a Master of Arts or Master of Science degree "en route", "in passing", or "in course" based on the graduate work done in the course of achieving the Ph.D. Students who receive such master's degrees are usually required to complete a certain amount of coursework and a master's thesis or field examination. Not all Ph.D. programs require additional work to obtain a master's en route to the Ph.D. (e.g., a master's thesis). Depending on the specific program, masters-in-passing degrees can be either mandatory or optional. Not all Ph.D. students choose to complete the additional requirements necessary for the MA or MS if such requirements are not mandated by their programs. Those students will simply obtain the Ph.D. degree at the end of their graduate study.

Time

Depending on the specific field of study, completion of a PhD program usually takes four to eight years of study after the Bachelor's Degree; those students who begin a PhD program with a master's degree may complete their PhD degree a year or two sooner. As PhD programs typically lack the formal structure of undergraduate education, there are significant individual differences in the time taken to complete the degree. Many U.S. universities have set a ten-year limit for students in PhD programs, or refuse to consider graduate credit older than ten years as counting towards a PhD degree. Similarly, students may be required to re-take the comprehensive exam if they do not defend their dissertations within five years after submitting it to their self-chosen dissertation advisors. Overall, 57% of students who begin a PhD program in the US will complete their degree within ten years, approximately 30% will drop out or be dismissed, and the remaining 13% of students will continue on past ten years.

Funding

PhD students are usually discouraged from engaging in external employment during the course of their graduate training. As a result, PhD students at U.S. universities typically receive a tuition waiver and some form of annual stipend. The source and amount of funding varies from field to field and university to university. Many U.S. PhD students work as teaching assistants or research assistants. Graduate schools increasingly encourage their students to seek outside funding; many are supported by fellowships they obtain for themselves or by their advisers' research grants from government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Many Ivy League and other well-endowed universities provide funding for the entire duration of the degree program (if it is short) or for most of it.

PhD candidacy

A PhD program candidate, or PhDc (sometimes called Candidate of Philosophy), is a postgraduate student at the doctoral level who has successfully satisfied the requirements for doctoral studies, except for the final thesis or dissertation. As such, a PhDc is sometimes called an "ABD" (All But Dissertation or All But Defended). Although a minor distinction in postgraduate study, achieving PhD Candidacy is not without benefit. For example, PhDc status may coincide with an increase in the student's monthly stipend and may make the student eligible for additional employment opportunities.

Some programs also include a Master of Philosophy degree as part of the PhD program. The MPhil, in those universities that offer it, is usually awarded after the appropriate MA or MS (as above) is awarded, and the degree candidate has completed all further requirements for the PhD degree (which may include additional language requirements, course credits, teaching experiences, and comprehensive exams) aside from the writing and defense of the dissertation itself. This formalizes the "all but dissertation" (ABD) status used informally by some students, and represents that the student has achieved a higher level of scholarship than the MA/MS would indicate – as such, the MPhil is sometimes a helpful credential for those applying for teaching or research posts while completing their dissertation work for the PhD degree itself.

PhDc is not to be confused with Candidate of Sciences, an academic degree that has been used in certain countries in place of PhD.

Models of supervision

At some universities, there may be training for those wishing to supervise PhD studies. There is now a lot of literature published for academics who wish to do this, such as Delamont, Atkinson and Parry (1997). Indeed, Dinham and Scott (2001) have argued that the worldwide growth in research students has been matched by increase in a number of what they term "how-to" texts for both students and supervisors, citing examples such as Pugh and Phillips (1987). These authors report empirical data on the benefits that a PhDc may gain if he or she publishes work, and note that PhD students are more likely to do this with adequate encouragement from their supervisors.

Wisker (2005) has noticed how research into this field has distinguished between two models of supervision: The technical-rationality model of supervision, emphasising technique; The negotiated order model, being less mechanistic and emphasising fluid and dynamic change in the PhD process. These two models were first distinguished by Acker, Hill and Black (1994; cited in Wisker, 2005). Considerable literature exists on the expectations that supervisors may have of their students (Phillips & Pugh, 1987) and the expectations that students may have of their supervisors (Phillips & Pugh, 1987; Wilkinson, 2005) in the course of PhD supervision. Similar expectations are implied by the Quality Assurance Agency's Code for Supervision (Quality Assurance Agency, 1999; cited in Wilkinson, 2005).

International PhD equivalent degrees

Belgium (Dutch-speaking): Doctor

Belgium (French-speaking): Doctorat

Brazil: Doutorado

Bulgaria: Доктор

China: 博士

Colombia: Doctorado

Croatia: Doktor

Czech Republic: CSc. was used till 1998, since 1998 PhD written as Ph.D. is used

Ecuador: Doctorado

Egypt: Doctorat

Estonia: Doktor

Finland: Tohtori

France: Doctorat

Germany: Doktor

Greece: Διδακτορικό

Hong Kong: 博士Doctor

Indonesia: Doktor

Iran: دکترا(Doktora)

Iraq: دكتوراه (Duktorah)

Israel: דוקטורט ("doctorat")

Italy: Dottorato di ricerca

Japan: 博士

Korea: 박사

Latin America: Doctorado/Doctorate

Latvia: Zinātņu doktors

Lithuania: Daktaras

Macau: 博士Doutoramento

Malaysia: Doktor Falsafah

Mexico: Doctorado

Mongolia: Эрдэмтэн

Netherlands: Doctor

Norway: :no: Doktorgrad

Peru: Doctorado

Philippines: Doktor

Poland: Doktor

Portugal: Doutoramento

Romania: Doctorat

Russia: Кандидат наук (Candidate of Sciences)

Singapore: Doctor

Serbia: Доктор

Spain: Doctorado

Syria: دكتوراه (doktorah)

Taiwan： 博士

Thailand: ดุษฎีบัณฑิต

Turkey: Doktor

Ukraine: Кандидат наук

Vietnam: Tiến sĩ

See also

Related terminology:

Doctor of Education – Preparation for academic, administrative, clinical or research positions in education.

PhD in Management – A program designed for students interested in becoming professors in Business.

Doctorate – A general term describing a set of degrees analogous to the PhD.

Terminal degree – The highest degree awarded in a field, usually a PhD.

Graduate student – A student pursuing education past the bachelor's degree, such as Masters Degree or a PhD.

C.Phil. (also ABD) – Term, usually used unofficially, for a graduate student who has completed all PhD coursework but has yet to defend his or her dissertation.

Доктор наук – Degree awarded by USSR and post-Soviet states (for example Russia, Ukraine).

Licentiate – Degree awarded in various countries, including Portugal, Belgium, the UK, Argentina, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Poland.

Sandwich PhD Programme

PhD in popular culture:

Piled Higher and Deeper – Life (or the lack thereof) in Academia, a comic strip by Jorge Cham

Notes

References

Delamont, S., Atkinson, P. & Parry, O. (1997). Supervising the Ph.D.: A guide to success. Buckingham: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-19516-4

Dinham, S. & Scott, C. (2001). The experience of the results of disseminating the results of doctoral research. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 25 (1) 45–55. ISSN: 1469-9486

Drury, V., Francis, K., & Chapman, Y. (2006). Walking the void – being a rural PhD student. Australian Journal of Rural Health, 14, p233.

MacGillivray, Alex; Potts, Gareth; Raymond, Polly. ''Secrets of Their Success'' (London: New Economics Foundation, 2002).

Phillips, E. & Pugh, D.S. (1987). How to get a PhD : managing the peaks and troughs of research / Estelle M. Phillips and D.S. Pugh. Milton Keynes: Open University Press ISBN 0-335-15537-5

Simpson, Renate. ''How the PhD came to Britain: A century of struggle for postgraduate education'', Society for Research into Higher Education, Guildford (1983).

Wellington, J. Bathmaker, A._M., Hunt, C., McCullough, G. & Sikes, P. (2005). Succeeding with your doctorate. London: Sage. ISBN 1-4129-0116-2

Wilkinson, D. (2005) The essential guide to postgraduate study. London : SAGE ISBN 1-4129-0062-X (hbk.)

Wisker, G. (2005) The Good Supervisor: Supervising Postgraduate and Undergraduate Research for Doctoral Theses and Dissertations. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-0395-6.

Philosophy, Doctor of

bn:পিএইচডি cs:Ph.D. da:Ph.d. de:Ph.D. eo:Doktoro de filozofio fa:پی‌اچ‌دی fr:Philosophiæ doctor hi:पीएचडी is:Philosophiae Doctor it:Doctor of Philosophy nl:Doctor of Philosophy ja:Ph.D. no:Filosofisk doktorgrad ru:Доктор философии si:දර්ශන ආචාර්ය fi:Filosofian tohtori sv:Filosofie doktor uk:Доктор філософії ur:علامۂِ فلسفہ yi:דאקטאר (פילאסאפיע) zh:哲學博士

Name	John Hagelin
Birth date	June 09, 1954
Birth place	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Death date
Resting place coordinates
Residence	Fairfield, Iowa, USA
Known for	Three-time candidate for U.S. President, physicist, and administrator
Education	Ph.D. Harvard University, 1981
Doctoral advisor	Howard Georgi
Alma mater	Dartmouth College, Harvard University
Employer	Maharishi University of Management, US Peace Government
Occupation	Professor
Title	Raja of Invincible America, President of the US Peace Government, and others
Party	Natural Law Party
Spouse	Margaret (1985–1993) divorced Kara Anastasio (2010)
Awards	Kilby, Ig Nobel
Website	http://www.hagelin.org
Footnotes	}}

John Hagelin (born June 9, 1954) is an American particle physicist, three-time candidate of the Natural Law Party for President of the United States (1992, 1996, and 2000), and the director of the Transcendental Meditation movement for the US.

Hagelin was a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and is now Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management. He has conducted research into unified field theory and the Maharishi Effect.

Hagelin was appointed Raja of Invincible America by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and is also President of the US Peace Government. He is Executive Director of the International Center for Invincible Defense, Executive Director of the Global Financial Capital of New York, Executive Director of the Center for Leadership Performance, Director of the Board of Advisors for the David Lynch Foundation, Honorary Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Maharishi University of Management, and International Director of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace.

Early life and education

John Samuel Hagelin was born June 9, 1954, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During childhood, he played soccer, hockey and the piano. Hagelin won a scholarship to Taft School for boys, where he received a perfect score of 165 on a school-administered IQ test and, according to Neil Dickie of The Iowa Source, "(...) was also a dare-devil". In 1970, while at Taft, he was involved in a motorcycle crash that led to hospitalization and a full body cast. During this time, one of his teachers introduced him to quantum mechanics, and he also learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, both of which had major impacts on his life.

Hagelin later graduated from Taft and attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship. After his freshman year, a continued interest in Transcendental Meditation led him to Vittel, France, where he completed the studies necessary to become a qualified teacher of the Transcendental Meditation technique. While at Dartmouth, he earned an undergraduate degree in physics in three years with highest honors (summa cum laude). He also co-authored and published papers in physics research and won a fellowship to study physics at Harvard. While at Harvard, Hagelin worked under the noted physicists Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow, best known for their work in Grand Unification theory (GUT). He received a Master's degree from Harvard in 1976, and a Ph.D. in 1981.

Professional careers

Scientist and academic

By the time Hagelin had received his Ph.D. from Harvard, he had already published "several serious papers" on particle theory. In 1981, Hagelin won a postdoctoral research appointment at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) in Switzerland, and in 1983 was recruited by SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), CERN's North American counterpart.

In 1984, Hagelin shifted his appointment from SLAC to Maharishi International University (MIU), where he continued his research in physics, pursued a long-time interest in brain and cognitive science research, and established an accredited doctoral program in theoretical physics. Hagelin's move to MIU in 1984 surprised and puzzled his colleagues. Howard Georgi and John Ellis tried to talk him out of it. But, according to Georgi, Hagelin "continued to do good physics anyway." Nobel Laureate, Sheldon Glashow was quoted in a 1992 article as saying, "His papers are outstanding. We read them before he went to MIU and we read them now." Hagelin remained in contact with colleagues from Harvard, Stanford, and CERN, and continued to collaborate with them. While at MIU, his contributions to the field of theoretical physics were supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

Hagelin is a Professor of Physics at Maharishi University of Management (formerly MIU). Hagelin is also identified as the Founding President of Maharishi Central University, which was announced in 2007. Central University was under construction in Smith Center, Kansas at the site of a previously-announced Peace Palace until early 2008, when, according to Hagelin, the project was put on hold while the TM organization dealt with the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Theoretical physics research

During his time at CERN, SLAC and Maharishi University of Management (MUM), Hagelin worked on supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and grand unification theories. In the years 1979-1996, Hagelin collaborated with many leading figures and published more than 70 papers in the fields of particle physics, electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry, and cosmology, most of them in prestigious scientific journals. Several were described as "core papers" that were among the 20 most cited references in physics in their respective years, according to Current Contents magazine. This includes his work on the "flipped SU(5), heterotic superstring theory" that is considered one of the more successful unified field theories or "theories of everything" and was highlighted in a cover story in ''Discover'' magazine.

Hagelin co-authored a 1983 paper entitled "Weak symmetry breaking by radiative corrections in broken supergravity", which is included in a list of the 103 articles in the physical sciences that were cited the most times during the years 1983 and 1984. A 1984 study titled "Supersymmetric relics from the big bang", had been cited over 500 times as of 2007.

Critics of Hagelin have included physicist Peter Woit and journalist Christopher Andersen. Peter Woit in his book, ''Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity In Physical Law'', precedes his critical remarks by acknowledging Hagelin as having published papers in prestigious journals that would eventually be cited in over a hundred other papers. Christopher Anderson wrote in a 1992 news article in ''Nature'' that Hagelin, co-developer of one of the "better-accepted" unified field theories known as the Flipped SU(5) model, "is by all accounts a gifted researcher well known and respected by his colleagues".

Research on consciousness and the unified field

In 1987 and 1989, Hagelin published two papers in the Maharishi University of Management's ''Journal of Modern Science and Vedic Science'' on the relationship between physics and consciousness. These papers discuss the Vedic understanding of consciousness as a field and compares it with theories of the unified field derived by modern physics. Hagelin argues that these two fields have almost identical properties and quantitative structure, and he presents other theoretical and empirical arguments that the two fields are actually one and the same — specifically, that the experience of unity at the basis of the mind achieved during the meditative state is the subjective experience of the very same fundamental unity of existence revealed by unified field theories.

Research on the Maharishi Effect

As evidence for this explanation, Hagelin points to the body of research supporting the positive effects created by Transcendental Meditation and the more advanced TM-Sidhi program (which includes a practice called "Yogic Flying") which are said to have measurable effects on social trend parameters. This phenomenon is called the "Maharishi Effect". Hagelin cites numerous studies of such effects, and in the summer of 1993, he conducted a large scale study of the same type. Approximately 4,000 TM-Sidhi program practitioners gathered in Washington, D.C., where they practiced the TM-Sidhi techniques twice daily in a group for several weeks. Using data obtained from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for 1993 and the preceding five years (1988–1992), Hagelin and collaborators followed the changes in crime rates for the area before, during, and after the 6 weeks when the group was gathered in Washington, D.C. In 1999, the study, which controlled for effects of temperature changes and showed a highly statistically significant drop in crime, was published in ''Social Indicators Research''. During the eight weeks of the study, the overall level of violent crime (homicides, rapes, and assaults) decreased by 23%, with rapes declining by 58%. Homicides averaged 10 a week during the study—the same as in the weeks preceding and following the study. For most of the eight weeks of the study the homicide rate declined, but gang fighting resulted in ten murders in a 36 hour period. Robert L. Park, research professor and former chair of the Physics Department at the University of Maryland and well known skeptic of paranormal claims, dismissed the study as a "clinic in data manipulation" and accused Hagelin and his team of scientific misconduct. Maxwell Rainforth, Assistant Professor of Physiology and Health and Statistics at Maharishi University of Management and a coauthor of the Washington, D.C. study, characterized Park's criticisms of the study as "superficial, highly polemical" and "willfully misleading".

Reception of Hagelin's connection of unified field of physics to the Maharishi Effect

Hagelin's interest in the connection between quantum physics and the Maharishi Effect has been discussed by both colleagues and critics. Hagelin was invited to be a plenary speaker at the 2007 Quantum Mind conference in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Stuart Hameroff (University of Arizona) and Gustav Bernroider (University of Salzburg). Hagelin was a featured scientist in the popular movies, ''What the Bleep Do We Know!?'', ''What the Bleep? Down the Rabbit Hole'' (2006) and ''The Secret'', which renewed interest in the quantum mind paradigm. Science writer Simon Singh questioned the credibility and motives of the interviewees in the film, and advised against seeing ''What the Bleep Do We Know!?'' as it would leave viewers misinformed.

Both Woit and Anderson have commented critically on Hagelin's interest in and publications on consciousness research. Woit says identifying a unified field of consciousness with a unified field of superstring theory is wishful thinking. He also asserts that most physicists think Hagelin's views are nonsense. Anderson says Hagelin's investigations into how the extension of grand unified theories of physics to human consciousness could explain the way Transcendental Meditation is said to influence world events "disturbs many researchers" and "infuriates his former collaborators." Dallas Observer political reporter Jonathan Fox wrote that "Once considered a top scientist, Hagelin's former academic peers ostracized him after the candidate attempted to shoehorn Eastern metaphysical musings into the realm of quantum physics." According to Woit, Hagelin began connecting consciousness and the unified field in the late 1970s as a Ph.D. student at Harvard. Hagelin's collaborative work in particle physics continued until 1994. Anderson says that John Ellis, director of CERN, was worried about guilt by association. Anderson quotes Ellis as saying "I was afraid that people might regard [Hagelin's assertions] as rather flaky, and that might rub off on the theory or on us."

Hagelin's linkage of quantum mechanics and unified field theory with consciousness was critiqued by University of Iowa philosophy and sociology professors Evan Fales and Barry Markovsky in the journal ''Social Forces''. They wrote that Hagelin's equating consciousness with the unified field relies on a similarity between quantum mechanical properties of fields and consciousness, and that his arguments rely on ambiguity and obscurity in characterizing these properties. They dismiss Hagelin's parallels between the Vedas and contemporary unified field theories as a reliance on ambiguity and vague analogy supported by constructing arbitrary similarities. David Orme-Johnson and Robert Oates, retired colleagues of Hagelin from MUM, replied to this critique in the ''Journal of Scientific Exploration'' and said, in part, that Fales' and Markovsky's accusation of "vagueness" and "ambiguity" on Hagelin's part are in themselves vague and ambiguous and that there is no standard against which they can be evaluated.

Entrepreneur

In 1990, Hagelin founded Enlightened Audio Designs Corporation (EAD) with electronics engineer Alastair Roxburgh. As President and Director of Research of EAD, Hagelin designed and manufactured high-end digital-to-analog (D-to-A) converters that were critically acclaimed. In 1996, EAD was the first company in the world to develop and commercialize home theater surround-sound processors incorporating multi-channel digital surround-sound technologies, such as Dolby Digital and DTS. In 2001, EAD Corporation was sold to the Oregon-based company Alpha Digital Technologies.

Politician

Natural Law Party

The Natural Law Party (NLP) was founded in 1992 in Fairfield, Iowa by Hagelin and a group of 12 educators, scientists, business leaders, and other professionals who desired a more scientific approach to national administration that would promote field-tested solutions to the nation's problems. The party platform included preventive health care, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy technologies. During his campaigns, Hagelin favored abortion rights without public financing, campaign-finance law reform and improved gun control. He proposed a flat tax and no tax for families earning less than $34,000 a year. Hagelin also campaigned to eradicate PACs and soft money campaign contributions and advocated safety locks on guns. He endorsed school vouchers and efforts to prevent war in the Middle East by reducing "people's tension".

The party chose Hagelin and Michael Tompkins as its presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 1992 and 1996.

Hagelin ran for President again in the 2000 Presidential election, being nominated both by the NLP and by the Perot wing of the Reform Party, which disputed the nomination of Pat Buchanan. Hagelin's running mate in the 2000 election was Nat Goldhaber, an entrepreneur who, like Hagelin and Tompkins, was a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation.

A dispute over the Reform Party's nomination generated "legal action" between the Hagelin and Buchanan campaigns. In September 2000, the Federal Election Commission ruled that Buchanan was the official candidate of the Reform Party, and hence, was eligible to receive federal election funds. As part of the ruling, the Reform Party convention that nominated Hagelin was declared invalid. In spite of the ruling, Hagelin remained on several state ballots as the Reform Party nominee, due to the independent nature of various state affiliates. He also was the national nominee of the Natural Law Party, and in New York was the Independence Party nominee.

During his 2000 campaign, Hagelin appeared on ABC's ''Nightline'' (2000) and ''Politically Incorrect'' (2000), NBC's ''Meet the Press'' (2000), CNN's ''Larry King Live'', PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, ''Inside Politics'', CNBC's ''Hardball with Chris Matthews'', and C-SPAN's ''Washington Journal''.

Hagelin's Presidential electoral results: 1992 - Ballot status in 32 states - 39,212 votes 1996 - Ballot status in 43 states - 113,659 votes 2000 - Ballot status in 39 states - 83,714 votes

In the middle of the 2000 campaign, Hagelin said that having the party's principles reach the "marketplace of ideas" and be co-opted by the Democrats and Republicans would be a victory.

In April 2004, the U.S. Natural Law Party officially disbanded its national organization, although a few state parties may still be active. In the 2004 primary elections, Hagelin and the Natural Law Party endorsed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich.

In 2010, Hagelin married Kara Anastasio, the former vice-chair of the Natural Law Party of Ohio.

Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy

Hagelin is the Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, a think tank at Maharishi University of Management. According to their website, he has met with members of Congress and officials at the Department of State, and the Department of Defense on the issue of terrorism.

Hagelin helped to write a paragraph in Hillary Rodham Clinton's 10,000-page health proposal. He says that it was the only paragraph in the document that concerned health and preventive care.

In 1998, Hagelin gave testimony to the National Institutes of Health, DNA Advisory Committee on germ-line technologies, stating that recombinant DNA technology is inherently risky because of the high probability of unexpected side-effects.

Hagelin moderated a panel on stress at a June 3, 1999 Congressional Prevention Coalition caucus.

US Peace Government and Invincible America

Hagelin established the US Peace Government (USPG) on July 4, 2003, as an affiliate of the Global Country of World Peace. The US Peace Government and the Global Country of World Peace were created to promote evidence-based and sustainable solutions as well as policies of governance that are aligned with Natural Law. As president of the USPG, Hagelin presides over a national assembly of USPG state representatives or governors, who in turn preside over US Peace Government assemblies and capital buildings in their respective states. The USPG announced plans to build a national capital in Washington Township, Smith County, Kansas, near the geographic center of America. The offices for the U.S. Peace Government are located in Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa, and the office of the President was at The Jefferson hotel, Washington, D.C. in 2004.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi appointed Hagelin as the "Raja of Invincible America" on November 19, 2007. Hagelin organized the Invincible America Assembly in Fairfield, Iowa which began in July 2006. The assembly consists of a group of individuals practicing the Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi techniques in a group, twice daily. Hagelin stated in a press release announcing the project that "for the United States, with a population of just over 300 million, the required number of peace-creating experts is 1,730". According to the Global Good News website "on 28 November 2006, the United States achieved invincibility and is stabilizing the number of Yogic Flyers—rising from 1,600 to 1,730—assembled at the Invincible America Assembly in Fairfield, Iowa". In addition, Hagelin's Institute for Science Technology and Public Policy web site says that the Invincible America Assembly in Iowa "is rising quickly toward its target of 2,500".

In July, 2007, Hagelin predicted that when the number of assembly participants reached 2,500, which he said would happen within a year, America would have a major drop in crime, and see the virtual elimination of all major social and political woes in the United States. Hagelin said that the Assembly was responsible for the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching a record high of 14,022 earlier that month, and predicted that the Dow would top 17,000 within a year.

Awards

In 1992, Hagelin was honored with a Kilby International Award which "recognizes scientists who have made major contributions to society through their applied research in the fields of science and technology". The award was given for his work in particle physics leading to the development of supersymmetric grand unified field theories, for his innovative applications of advanced principles from control systems theory and optimization theory to digital sound reproduction, and for his research on human consciousness. Chris Anderson questioned the value of the award in an article about Hagelin published in ''Nature''.

In 1994, Hagelin received the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace, an annual parody award presented at Harvard University which "honor[s] achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think". The Master of ceremony and award's founder Mark Abrahams called it the world's most "(un)coveted award for achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced" which are given to "honor the world's largely overlooked scientists and other contributors to modern culture, who bring smiles and guffaws to others, whether intentional or not." Hagelin received the prize for his "experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C."

Books

References

Further reading

Hagelin, J.S. ''Manual for a Perfect Government: How to Harness the Laws of Nature to Bring Maximum Success to Governmental Administration''. Maharishi University of Management Press, 1998.

Freedman, David H: The new theory of everything. ''Discover'', 1991, pp 54–61.

Hagelin, J: Is consciousness the unified field? A field theorist's perspective. ''Modern Science and Vedic Science'' 1, 1987, pp 29–87.

Hagelin, JS: Restructuring physics from its foundation in light of Maharishi's Vedic Science. ''Modern Science and Vedic Science'' 3, 1989, pp 3–72.

External links

Official site

MUM Faculty

PBS Bio

Invincible America Assembly daily tally

Political Platform

PBS Interview, 2000

LA Yoga Interview 2006

Category:1954 births Category:Dartmouth College alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Ig Nobel Prize winners Category:Living people Category:Particle physicists Category:Politicians from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Category:Quantum mysticism Category:Transcendental Meditation practitioners Category:Transcendental Meditation researchers Category:United States presidential candidates, 1992 Category:United States presidential candidates, 1996 Category:United States presidential candidates, 2000 Category:Natural Law Party (United States) politicians

fr:John Hagelin it:John Hagelin pt:John Hagelin ru:Хагелин, Джон sv:John Hagelin

Dr. Bruce Lipton (born October 21, 1944) is an American developmental biologist, who is best known for promoting the idea that genes and DNA can be manipulated by a person's beliefs. He teaches at the New Zealand College of Chiropractic.

Biography & Education

Lipton was born in Mt. Kisco, an affluent town in New York. In 1966 he received a B.A. in Biology from C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University and then his PhD in developmental biology from the University of Virginia in 1971.

Academic Work

In 1973 he taught anatomy as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin School Of Medicine before coming to St. George's University School of Medicine, where he became a Professor of Anatomy for 3 years. From 1987 to 1992 he was involved in research at Penn State and Stanford University Medical Center. Since 1993 he has been teaching in non-tenure positions at different universities.

His publications consist mainly of research on the development of muscle cells.

Books

2005 ''The Biology of Belief – Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles''

2009 ''Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here'' (co-authored with Steve Bhaerman.

Other Work

Lipton has appeared on several radio shows as well as ''The Elaine Smitha Show''

In addition to his appearances on radio and television, he has been a speaker at the Institute of Noetic Sciences's 13th international conference, the Spiritual Science Fellowship International Conference, and various other conventions.

He also has appeared in the Kymatica Documentary.

Awards and honors

2009 Goi Peace Award

References

External links

Nature, Nurture, & the Power of Love: Conscious Parenting (part 1 of 2)

Nature, Nurture, & the Power of Love: Conscious Parenting (part 2 of 2)

Bruce Lipton - The New Biology - Where Mind and Matter Meet 1of 2.avi

Bruce Lipton - The New Biology - Where Mind and Matter Meet 2o f2.avi

Genetics, Epigenetics, and Destiny - Interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton

Category:1944 births Category:Living people Category:American academics Category:American biologists Category:Developmental biologists Category:Pennsylvania State University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty Category:University of Virginia alumni Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty

es:Bruce Lipton it:Bruce Lipton

name	Timothy Leary
birth name	Timothy Francis Leary
birth date	October 22, 1920
birth place	Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
death date	May 31, 1996
death place	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
nationality	American
occupation	Psychologist Author
employer	UC Berkeley Kaiser Family Foundation Harvard
known	Psychedelic therapy
spouse	}}

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an influential American psychologist and writer, known in particular for advocating the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs. A controversial figure during the 1960s and 1970s, he defended the use of the drug LSD for its therapeutic, emotional and spiritual benefits, and believed it showed potential in the field of psychiatry. Leary also popularized the phrases "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and "Set and setting". Both proved to be influential on the 1960s counterculture. Due to his influence in this field, he was attacked by conservative figures in the United States, and described as "the most dangerous man in America" by President Richard Nixon.

Early life and education

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of an Irish American dentist who abandoned his wife Abigail Ferris when Leary was thirteen. Leary graduated from Springfield's Classical High School.

Timothy Leary attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts from September 1938 to June 1940. Under pressure from his father, Leary enrolled as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point. In his first months he acquired numerous demerits for rule infractions and then got into serious trouble for failing to report infractions by other cadets when on supervisory duty. He was alleged to have engaged in a bout of drinking and then failed to be forthright about it. For violating the Academy's honor code, the Honor Committee asked him to resign. When he refused, he was "silenced", that is, shunned and ignored by his co-cadets as a tactic to pressure him to resign. Though acquitted by a court-martial, the silencing continued as well as an onslaught of demerits for minuscule infractions of the rules. When the treatment continued in his second year, his mother appealed to a family friend, U.S. Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who conducted a personal investigation. Behind the scenes, the Honor Committee revised its position. The Honor Committee announced that it would abide by the court-martial verdict and then Leary resigned and received an honorable discharge. Almost fifty years later, Leary said that it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".

Leary transferred to University of Alabama where he received a B.A. degree in psychology in 1943. His obituary in the ''New York Times'' said he "finally earned his bachelor's degree in the U. S. Army during World War II," when he was a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He received an M.S. degree in psychology at Washington State University in 1946, and his Ph.D. degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. The title of Leary's Ph.D. dissertation was "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process." He became an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950–1955), director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation (1955–1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959–1963). He was fired from Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures, though he claimed that he had fulfilled all of his teaching obligations. The decision to dismiss him was allegedly influenced by his role in the popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and faculty members.

Leary's early work in psychology expanded on the research of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney regarding the importance of interpersonal forces in mental health. Leary focused on how the interpersonal process might be used to diagnose disorders and patterns found in human personalities. He developed a complex and respected interpersonal circumplex model, published in ''The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality'', which offered a means by which psychologists could use MMPI scores to determine a respondent's characteristic interpersonal modes of reaction.

Leary married Marianne Busch in 1945, who gave birth in 1947 to their first child, Susan, while he was working on his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. Susan was followed two years later by a son, Jack. In 1952 the Leary family spent a year in Spain, subsisting on a research grant awarded to Leary. A Berkeley colleague of Leary's, Marv Freedman, later recounted that "…Something had been stirred in him in terms of breaking out of being another cog in society…".

In 1955, Leary's wife committed suicide, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone. He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."

Psychedelic experiments and experiences

On May 13, 1957, ''Life'' magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented the use of psilocybin mushrooms in the religious ceremony of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, experienced psychedelic (or entheogenic) Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms during a trip to Mexico, and related the experience to Leary. In August 1960, Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico with Russo and ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary commented that he "learned more about... (his) brain and its possibilities... (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology."

Upon his return from Mexico to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (in this case, prisoners, and later, students of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary) using a synthesized version of the then-legal drug—one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms including Psilocybe mexicana. The compound was produced according to a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, famous for synthesizing LSD.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg asked Leary to participate in the experiments after hearing about the Harvard research project. Leary was inspired by Ginsberg's enthusiasm and the two shared an optimism in the benefit of psychedelic substances to help people ‘turn on’ (discover a higher level of consciousness). Together they began a campaign of introducing other intellectuals and artists to psychedelics.

Leary argued that psychedelic substances, used at proper dosages, in a stable set and setting could, under the guidance of psychologists, alter behavior in beneficial ways not easily attainable through regular therapy. Leary's research focused on treating alcoholism and reforming criminals. Many of Leary's research participants reported profound mystical and spiritual experiences, which they claim permanently altered their lives in a very positive manner. According to Leary's autobiography, ''Flashbacks'', LSD was given to 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers and 75 percent of the test subjects reported the experience as one of the most educational and revealing experiences of their lives.

The Concord Prison Experiment was designed to evaluate how the effects of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy would rehabilitate prisoners upon being released. After being guided through the psychedelic experience ('trips') by Leary and his associates, 36 prisoners allegedly repented and swore to give up future criminal activity. For prisoners in USA, the average recidivism rate is 60 percent; the recidivism rate of the subjects involved in Leary's project dropped to 20 percent. The Concord Prison experiment concluded that long-term reduction in overall criminal recidivism rates could be achieved with a combination of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy (inside the prison) along with a comprehensive post-release follow-up support program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. The results of this experiment were later largely contested by a follow-up study, citing several problems, including time differences monitoring the study group versus the control group, and other methodology factors, including the difference between subjects re-incarcerated for parole violations versus those imprisoned for new crimes. The study that contested Leary's research concluded that only a statistically slight improvement could be shown by using psilocybin (as opposed to the significant improvement Leary reported).

Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was run by Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning), a disciple of Leary and one of his many lovers. Their research attracted a great deal of public attention and, as a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments, but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics developed near the Harvard University Campus.

According to Andrew Weil, Leary was fired for not showing up to his lecture classes, while Alpert was fired for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment. This version is supported by the words of Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, who, regarding Leary's termination, released the following statement on May 27, 1963:

On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted, because Timothy F. Leary, lecturer on clinical psychology, has failed to keep his classroom appointments and has absented himself from Cambridge without permission, to relieve him from further teaching duty and to terminate his salary as of April 30, 1963.

In 1963 he had a televised debate with Jerry Lettvin of MIT.

Leary's activities interested siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an estate in the town of Millbrook (near Poughkeepsie, New York), where they continued their experiments. Leary later wrote:

We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.

Later, the Millbrook estate was described by Luc Sante of ''The New York Times'' as:

the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy.

Others contest this characterization of the Millbrook estate; for instance, in ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'', Tom Wolfe portrays Leary as only interested in research, and not using psychedelics merely for recreational purposes. According to "The Crypt Trip" chapter of Wolfe's book, when Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters visited the residence, the Pranksters did not even see Leary, who was engaged in a three-day trip. According to Wolfe, Leary's group even refused to give the Pranksters acid.

In 1964, Leary co-authored a book with Alpert and Ralph Metzner called ''The Psychedelic Experience'', based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it, they wrote:

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key—it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid by G. Gordon Liddy, Leary told author and Prankster Paul Krassner: "He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."

On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents, based on a "freedom of religion" argument. (Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF International Foundation for Internal Freedom.) On October 6, 1966, LSD was made illegal in the United States and controlled so strictly that not only were possession and recreational use criminalized, but all legal scientific research programs on the drug in the US were shut down as well.

In 1966, Folkways Records recorded Leary reading from his book ''The Psychedelic Experience'', and released the album, ''The Psychedelic Experience: Readings from the Book "The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Based on the Tibetan...".''

During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a multi-media performance "The Death of the Mind", which attempted to artistically replicate the LSD experience. Leary said the League for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its membership limit, but he encouraged others to form their own psychedelic religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called ''Start Your Own Religion'', to encourage people to do so (see below under "writings").

Leary was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In by Michael Bowen the primary organizer of the event. Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered the famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that Marshall, "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"

At some point in the late 1960s, Leary moved to California. He made a number of friends in Hollywood. "When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of ''Bonanza''. All the guests were on acid."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary (in collaboration with the writer Brian Barritt) formulated his circuit model of consciousness, in which he claimed that the human mind/nervous system consisted of seven circuits which, when activated, produce seven levels of consciousness (this model was first published as the short essay, "The Seven Tongues of God"). The system soon expanded to include an eighth circuit; this version was first unveiled to the world in the rare 1973 pamphlet "Neurologic" (written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison), but was not exhaustively formulated until the publication of ''Exo-Psychology'' (by Leary) and in Robert Anton Wilson's ''Cosmic Trigger'' in 1977. Wilson contributed significantly to the model after befriending Leary in the early 1970s, and has used it as a framework for further exposition in his book ''Prometheus Rising'', among other works.

Leary believed that the first four of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits" or "Terrestrial Circuits") are naturally accessed by most people in their lifetimes, triggered at natural transition points in life, such as puberty. The second four circuits ("the Stellar Circuits" or "Extra-Terrestrial Circuits"), Leary claimed, were evolutionary off-shoots of the first four that would be triggered at transition points that we will have when we evolve further, and would equip us to encompass life in space, as well as the expansion of consciousness that would be necessary to make further scientific and social progress. Leary suggested that some people may "shift to the latter four gears" (i.e. trigger these circuits artificially) by utilizing consciousness-altering techniques such as meditation and spiritual endeavors such as yoga, or by taking psychedelic drugs specific to each circuit. An example of the information Leary cited as evidence for the purpose of the "higher" four circuits was the feeling of floating and uninhibited motion experienced by users of marijuana. In the eight circuit model of consciousness, a primary theoretical function of the fifth circuit (the first of the four developed for life in outer space) is to allow humans to become accustomed to life in a zero or low gravity environment.

Legal troubles

Leary's first run-in with the law came on December 20, 1965. Leary decided to take his children and Rosemary to Mexico for an extended stay to write a book. During a border crossing with his girlfriend Rosemary Woodruff and two children Jack and Susan from Mexico into the United States, marijuana was found in his daughter Susan's underwear. They had crossed into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico in the late afternoon and discovered they would have to wait until morning for the appropriate visa for an extended stay. They decided to cross back into Texas to spend the night and were on the bridge when Rosemary remembered she had a very small amount of marijuana in her possession. It was impossible to throw it out on the bridge so Susan put it in her underwear. After taking responsibility for the controlled substance, Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to 30 years in jail, given a $30,000 fine and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Soon after, however, he appealed the case, claiming the Marihuana Tax Act was, in fact, unconstitutional, as it required a degree of self-incrimination. Leary claimed this was in stark violation of the Fifth Amendment. On December 26, 1968, Leary was arrested again, in Laguna Beach, California, this time for the possession of two roaches of marijuana, which Leary claimed were planted by the arresting officer. He was later convicted of this offense. On May 19, 1969, The Supreme Court concurred with Leary in ''Leary v. United States''. The Marihuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional, and his 1965 conviction was quashed. On the day his conviction was overturned, Leary announced his candidacy for Governor of California, running against Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was "Come together, join the party." On June 1, 1969, Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal Bed-In and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song called "Come Together".

On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of the tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped. Leary claimed his non-violent escape was a humorous prank, and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, out of the United States and into Algeria. He sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the separatist USA Black Panther party's "government in exile." After staying with them for a short time, Leary claimed that Cleaver attempted to hold him and his wife hostage.

In 1971, the couple fled to Switzerland, "where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an 'obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers,' but mostly had a film deal in mind." In 1972, President Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month, but the Swiss refused to extradite him back to the U.S. In that same year, Leary and Rosemary separated. Leary became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier Árpád Plesch. Leary "married" Harcourt-Smith at a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced; she used his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners", Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary. That interpretation of the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."

At a layover in the United Kingdom, as Leary was being flown back to the United States, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's Government, but to no avail. He was then held on five million dollars bail ($21.5 mil. in 2006). President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America." The judge at his remand hearing remarked, "If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas." Facing a total of 95 years in prison, Leary hired criminal defense attorney Bruce Margolin and was put into solitary confinement in Folsom Prison, California.

Leary made somewhat of a pretense of cooperating with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys, by giving them information that they already had or that was of little consequence; in response, the FBI gave him the code name "Charlie Thrush".

Leary would later claim, and members of the Weathermen would later support, that no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI.

The Weather Underground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was "we understand".

While imprisoned Leary remained a productive writer, sowing the seeds for his incarnation as a futurist lecturer with the StarSeed Series. In ''Starseed'' (1973), ''neurologic'' (1973), & ''Terra II: A Way Out'' (1974), Leary transitioned from Eastern philosophy and Aleister Crowley to a belief that outer space was a medium for spiritual transcendence as his principal frame of reference. ''Neurologic'' also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. ''Terra II'' is his first detailed proposal for space colonization. Leary's muse peaked with ''Exo—Psychology'', ''Neuropolitics'', and ''Intelligence Agents''.

Last two decades

Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown. After briefly relocating to San Diego, Leary established residence in Laurel Canyon and continued to write books and appear as a lecturer and (by his own terminology) "stand-up philosopher." In 1978, Leary married filmmaker Barbara Blum, also known as Barbara Chase, sister of actress Tanya Roberts. Leary adopted Blum's son and raised him as his own. Leary and Blum divorced in 1992.

Leary cultivated a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy, the notorious Watergate burglar and conservative radio talk-show host. They toured the lecture circuit in 1982 as ex-cons (Liddy having been imprisoned after high-level involvement in the Watergate scandal) debating about different social and fiscal issues from gay rights and abortion to welfare and the environment with Leary generally representing the voice from the left and Liddy representing the voice from the right. The tour generated massive publicity and considerable funds for both figures. Along with the personal appearances, a successful documentary called ''Return Engagement'' that chronicled the tour, and the concurrent release of the autobiography ''Flashbacks'', helped to return Leary to the spotlight. In 1988, Leary held a fundraiser for Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.

While his stated ambition was eventually to cross over as a mainstream Hollywood personality, reluctant studios and sponsors made certain that it would never occur. Nonetheless, constant touring ensured that he was able to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle by the mid-1980s, while his colorful past made him a desirable guest at A-list parties throughout the decade. He also attracted a more intellectual crowd, which included John Frusciante (Leary appeared in Johnny Depp's and Gibby Haynes' 1994 film ''Stuff'' which showed the squalid conditions that Frusciante was living in at the time), Robert Anton Wilson, David Byrne, science fiction ''wunderkind'' William Gibson, and Norman Spinrad amongst its ranks.

While he continued to use drugs frequently on a private basis, rather than evangelizing and proselytizing the use of psychedelics as he had in the 1960s, the latter day Leary emphasized the importance of space colonization and an ensuring extension of the human lifespan while also providing a detailed explanation of the eight-circuit model of consciousness in books such as ''Info-Psychology'', among several others. He adopted the acronym "SMI²LE" as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension). Leary credited L5 co-founder Keith Henson with helping develop his interest in space migration.

Leary's colonization plan varied greatly throughout the years. Because he believed that he would soon migrate into space, Leary was opposed to the ecology movement. He dismissed many of Earth's problems and labeled the entire field of ecology "a seductive dinosaur science." Leary stated that only the "larval," intellectually and philosophically backward humans, would choose to remain in "the fouled nest." According to his initial plan to leave the planet, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. This idea was inspired by the plotline of Paul Kantner's concept album ''Blows Against The Empire'', which in turn was derived from Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. In the 1980s, he came to embrace NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's more realistic and egalitarian plans to construct giant Eden-like High Orbital Mini-Earths (documented in the Robert Anton Wilson lecture ''H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange'') using existing technology and raw materials from the Moon, orbital rock and obsolete satellites.

During the 1980s, Leary became fascinated by computers, the Internet, and virtual reality. He established one of the earliest websites in existence and referred to the Web as "the LSD of the '90s" He became a promoter of virtual reality systems, and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in ''From Psychedelics to Cybernetics''). Around this time he cultivated friendships with a number of notable people in the field, including Brenda Laurel, a pioneering researcher in virtual environments and human–computer interaction. With the rise of cyberdelic counter-culture, Leary became a consultant to Billy Idol in the production of the latter's 1993 album, ''Cyberpunk''.

In 1990, Leary's daughter, Susan, committed suicide after years of mental instability. After separating from Barbara Leary in 1992, Leary formed a new entourage of Baby Boomer and Generation X artists and cultural figures that included people as diverse as actors Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon and Dan Aykroyd, and his granddaughters, Dieadra Martino and Sara Brown; grandson, Ashley Martino; son, Zach Leary; author Douglas Rushkoff, publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and goddaughters: actress Winona Ryder and artist/music-photographer Hilary Hulteen. In spite of his declining health, Leary maintained a regular schedule of public appearances through 1994.

From 1989 on, Leary had begun to reestablish his connection to unconventional religious movements with an interest in altered states of consciousness. In 1989 he appeared with friend and book collaborator Robert Anton Wilson in a dialog entitled ''The Inner Frontier'' for the Association for Consciousness Exploration, a Cleveland-based group that had been responsible for his first Cleveland, Ohio appearance in 1979. After that, he appeared at the Starwood Festival, a major Neo-Pagan event run by ACE, in 1992 and 1993 (though his planned 1994 WinterStar Symposium appearance was cancelled due to his declining health). In front of hundreds of neo-pagans in 1992, he declared, "I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan." He also collaborated with Eric Gullichsen on ''Load and Run High-tech Paganism: Digital Polytheism''. Prior to his passing on May 31, 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary recorded the "Right to Fly" album with Simon Stokes. It was released in July 1996.

Death

In early 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. He did not reveal the condition to the press upon diagnosis, but did so after the death of Jerry Garcia in August.

Leary authored an outline for a book called ''Design for Dying'', which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. Leary's entourage (as mentioned above)—updated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a predilection for nitrous oxide, cigarettes, his trademark "Leary Biscuits" (a snack cracker with cheese and a small marijuana bud, briefly microwaved), and eventually heroin and morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved in, with an array of surreal ornamentation. In his final months, thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. Until the final weeks of his illness, Leary gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.

For a number of years, Leary was reported to have been excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension, and Leary publicly announced in September 1988 that he had signed up with Alcor. Leary had appeared at Alcor's grand opening a year previously. He did not believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he believed that cryonics had important possibilities and stated the chance was "one chance in 1,000". He called it his "duty as a futurist", and helped publicize the process and hoped it would work for his children and grandchildren if not for him, although he said he was "light-hearted" about it. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, originally Alcor and then CryoCare, which delivered a cryonic tank to Leary's house in the months before his death. However, Leary subsequently requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family.

Leary died on May 31, 1996 at the age of 77. His death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words. During his final moments, he said, "Why not?" to his son Zachary. He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations, and died soon after. His last word, according to Zachary Leary, was "beautiful."

The film ''Timothy Leary's Dead'' (1996) contains a simulated sequence in which Leary allows his bodily functions to be suspended for the purposes of cryonic preservation, and his head is removed and placed on ice. At the end of the film is a sequence showing the creation of the artificial head used in the film.

Seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend at Celestis to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 other people including Gene Roddenberry (creator of ''Star Trek''), Gerard O'Neill (space physicist), Krafft Ehricke (rocket scientist), and others. A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on April 21, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere.

Influence

Leary is often considered one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s, and since those times has remained incredibly influential on pop culture, literature, television, film; and especially music.

Timothy Leary's ideas heavily influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. This influence went both ways and Leary admittedly took just as much from Wilson. Wilson's book ''Prometheus Rising'' was an in depth, highly detailed and inclusive work documenting Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness. Although the theory originated in discussions between Leary and a Hindu holy man at Millbrook, Wilson was one of the most ardent proponents of it and introduced the theory to a mainstream audience in 1977's bestselling ''Cosmic Trigger''. In 1989, they appeared together on stage in a dialog entitled ''The Inner Frontier'' in Cleveland, Ohio hosted by the Association for Consciousness Exploration, (the same group that had hosted Leary's first Cleveland appearance in 1979). Wilson and Leary conversed a great deal on philosophical, political and futurist matters and became close friends who remained in contact through Leary's time in prison and up until his death. Wilson regarded Leary as a brilliant man and often is quoted as saying (paraphrase) "Leary had a great deal of 'hilaritas', the type of cheer and good humour by which it was said you could recognise a deity".

Owsley Stanley, one of the pioneers of the era, would later write of him:

Leary was a fool. Drunk with "celebrity-hood" and his own ego, he became a media clown—and was arguably the single most damaging actor involved in the destruction of the evanescent social movement of the '60s. Tim, with his very public exhortations to the kids to "tune in, turn on and drop out", is the inspiration for all the current draconian US drug laws against psychedelics. He would not listen to any of us when we asked him to please cool it, he loved the limelight and relished his notoriety... I was not a fan of his.

Author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey remained a supporter and admirer of Leary throughout his career,

Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking.

World religion scholar Huston Smith was turned on by Leary after the two were introduced to one another by Aldous Huxley in the early 1960s. The experience was interpreted as deeply religious by Smith, and is captured in detailed religious terms in Smith's later work ''Cleansing of the Doors of Perception''. This was Smith's one and only entheogenic experience, at the end of which he asked Leary, to paraphrase, if Leary knew the power and danger of that with which he was conducting research. In ''Mother Jones Magazine'', 1997, Smith commented:

First, I have to say that during the three years I was involved with that Harvard study, LSD was not only legal but respectable. Before Tim went on his unfortunate careening course, it was a legitimate research project. Though I did find evidence that, when recounted, the experiences of the Harvard group and those of mystics were impossible to tell apart—descriptively indistinguishable—that's not the last word. There is still a question about the truth of the disclosure.

The slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out", signified a conceptual way of thinking wherein a person would turn on to their own way of thinking, tune in to themselves, and drop out of society. This constituted a concept of inward self reliance.

In popular culture

''The Psychedelic Experience'' was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" on The Beatles' album ''Revolver''. Leary once recruited John Lennon to write a theme song for his California gubernatorial campaign (which was interrupted by his prison sentence), inspiring Lennon to come up with "Come Together", based on Leary's theme and catchphrase for the campaign. Leary was also present when Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono recorded ''Give Peace a Chance'' during one of their bed-ins in Montreal and is mentioned in the lyrics of the song. He appears in the world television broadcast of "All You Need is Love" as well. The Moody Blues also recorded a track about Leary, ''Legend of a Mind'', on their 1968 album ''In Search of the Lost Chord'' in which the refrain is "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in".

While in exile in Switzerland, Leary and British writer Brian Barrett collaborated with the German band Ash Ra Tempel, and recorded the album Seven Up. He is credited as a songwriter, and his lyrics and vocals can be heard throughout the album. For some reason he left this experience out of his autobiography.

Works

Leary authored and co-authored over twenty books and was featured on more than a dozen audio recordings. He had an acting career that included over a dozen appearances in movies and television shows, over thirty appearances as himself in the same, and produced and/or collaborated in both multi-media presentations and computer games.

In June 2011 The New York Times reported that the New York Public Library had acquired Leary's personal archives, including papers, videotapes, photographs and other archival material from the Leary estate, including correspondence and documents relating to Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and other prominent cultural figures. Following an archiving period of up to two years, the material will be open to scholars.

See also

8-Circuit Model of Consciousness

References

External links

TimothyLeary.us – biography, archives, links and more

Lectures from the Leary Archive in audio format

References in Richard Alperts book, "Be Here Now!" which is his transformation into Baba Ram Dass and his life in India with Baba's Guru and LSD experience.

Category:1920 births Category:1996 deaths Category:People from Springfield, Massachusetts Category:American neopagans Category:American occultists Category:American psychologists Category:American people of Irish descent Category:Cancer deaths in California Category:Chicago Seven Category:College of the Holy Cross alumni Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Converts to Hinduism Category:Deaths from prostate cancer Category:Drug policy reform activists Category:Harvard University faculty Category:American writers of Irish descent Category:LSD Category:People associated with the Human Potential Movement Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Psychedelic drug advocates Category:Psychedelic researchers Category:Space burials Category:University of Alabama alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Washington State University alumni Category:ESP-Disk artists Category:Expatriates in Algeria bs:Timothy Leary bg:Тимъти Лири cs:Timothy Leary da:Timothy Leary de:Timothy Leary el:Τίμοθι Λίρι es:Timothy Leary eo:Timothy Leary fr:Timothy Leary hr:Timothy Leary it:Timothy Leary he:טימותי לירי la:Timotheus Leary hu:Timothy Leary nl:Timothy Leary ja:ティモシー・リアリー no:Timothy Leary pl:Timothy Leary pt:Timothy Leary ro:Timothy Leary ru:Лири, Тимоти simple:Timothy Leary sk:Timothy Leary sr:Timoti Liri sh:Timothy Leary fi:Timothy Leary sv:Timothy Leary tr:Timothy Leary zh:蒂莫西·利里

name	Michio Kaku
birth date	January 24, 1947
birth place	San Jose, California, United States
residence	New York City, New York, United States
nationality	American
field	Theoretical physics
work institutions	City University of New YorkNew York UniversityInstitute for Advanced Study
alma mater	Harvard University (B.S., 1968)University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.,1972)
doctoral advisor	Stanley Mandelstam
known for	String field theory, Popular science
footnotes	}}

is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and he writes extensive online blogs and articles.

Early life and education

Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.

At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parent's garage for a science fair project. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated ''summa cum laude'' from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.

During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

Academic career

Kaku became a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.

Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Popular science

Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science. He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.

Books

Kaku is the author of various popular science books.

''Physics of the Future''

''Physics of the Impossible''

''Hyperspace''

''Einstein's Cosmos''

''Parallel Worlds''

''Beyond Einstein'' (with Jennifer Thompson)

''Hyperspace'' was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both ''The New York Times'' and ''The Washington Post''. ''Parallel Worlds'' was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.

Radio

Kaku is the host of the weekly, one-hour radio program ''Explorations'', produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. "Explorations" is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.

In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting ''Science Fantastic'' on 90 commercial radio stations, the only nationally syndicated science program on commercial radio in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM. The program is formatted as a live listener call-in show, focusing on "futurology," which he defines as the future of science. Featured guests include Nobel laureates and top researchers on the topics of string theory, time travel, black holes, gene therapy, aging, space travel, artificial intelligence, and SETI. When Kaku is busy filming for television, ''Science Fantastic'' goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months. Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs, where he is outspoken in all areas and issues he considers of importance, such as the program "Coast to Coast AM," where on 30 November 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.

Kaku has appeared on ''The Opie and Anthony Show'' a number of times, discussing popular fiction such as ''Back to The Future'', ''Lost,'' and the theories behind time-travel that these and other fictional entertainment focus on. Steven G. Spruill's novel ''The Janus Equation'', which describes the time travel of a post-op transsexual mating with her past self and thereby becoming father and mother to her present self, prompted Dr. Kaku's comment: "Well, you're in deep doo doo if that happens."

Television and film

Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including ''Good Morning America'', ''The Screen Savers'', ''Larry King Live'', ''60 Minutes'', ''Nightline'', ''20/20'', ''Naked Science'', CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, ''Conan'', The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, ''Countdown with Keith Olbermann'', ''The Colbert Report'', ''The Art Bell Show'' and its successor, ''Coast To Coast AM'', ''BBC World News America'', ''The Opie & Anthony Show'', ''The Covino & Rich Show'', ''Head Rush'', ''The Late Show with David Letterman'', and ''Real Time with Bill Maher.

We Are the Guinea Pigs (1980)

Borders (1989)

''Synthetic Pleasures'' (1995)

Einstein Revealed (1996)

''Future Fantastic'' (1996)

''Stephen Hawking's Universe'' (1997)

Bioperfection: Building a New Human Race (1998)

Exodus Earth (1999)

Me & Isaac Newton (1999)

Space: The Final Junkyard (1999)

''Big Questions'' (2001)

''Parallel Universes'' (2001)

''Horizon'': "Time travel" (2003)

Robo sapiens (2003)

Brilliant Minds: Secret Of The Cosmos (2003)

''Nova'': "The Elegant Universe" (2003)

''Hawking'' (2004)

''The Screen Savers'' (2004)

''Unscrewed with Martin Sargent'' (2004)

''Alien Planet (2005)

''ABC News'' "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing" (2005)

''HARDtalk Extra'' (2005)

''Last Days on Earth'' (2005)

Obsessed & Scientific (2005)

''Horizon'': "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" (2005)

Prophets of Science Fiction (2006)

''Time'' (2006)

''2057'' (2007)

''The Universe'' (2007)

Futurecar (2007)

''Attack of the Show!'' (2007)

''Visions of the Future'' (2008)

''Horizon'': "The President's Guide to Science" (2008)

Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008)

''Horizon'': "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole" (2009–2010)

''Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible'' (2009–2010)

''Horizon'': "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2010)

''GameTrailers TV With Geoff Keighley'': "The Science of Games" (2010)

''How the Universe Works'' (2010)

''Through the Wormhole'' (2011)

In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists profiled in the feature-length film ''Me and Isaac Newton'', directed by Michael Apted. It played theatrically in the United States, was later broadcast on national TV, and won several film awards.

In 2005, Kaku appeared in the short documentary ''Obsessed & Scientific.'' The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It screened at the Montreal World Film Festival and a feature film expansion is in development talks. Kaku also appeared in the ABC documentary ''UFOs: Seeing Is Believing'', in which he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special ''Alien Planet'' as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.

In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary ''Time'' which seeks to explore the mysterious nature of time. Part one of the series concerns personal time, and how we perceive and measure the passing of time. The second in the series deal with cheating time, exploring possibilities of extending the lifespan of organisms. The geological time covered in part three explores the ages of the earth and the sun. Part four covers the topics of cosmological time, the beginning of time and the events that occurred at the instant of the big bang.

On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series ''2057.'' This three-hour program discussed how medicine, the city, and energy could change over the next 50 years.

In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary ''Visions of the Future'', on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's ''Universe'' series.

On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly TV series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called ''Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible'', based on his best-selling book. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, star ships, light sabers, force fields, teleportation, invisibility, death stars, and even superpowers and flying saucers. Each episode includes interviews with the world's top scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with sci-fi fans, clips from science fiction movies, and special effects and computer graphics. Although these inventions are impossible today, the series discusses when these technologies might become feasible in the future.

In 2010, he began to appear in a series on the website Gametrailers.com called ''Science of Games'', discussing the scientific aspects of various popular video games such as ''Mass Effect 2'' and ''Star Wars: The Force Unleashed''.

Kaku is popular in mainstream media because of his knowledge and his accessible approach to presenting complex subjects in science. While his technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances cover a broad range of topics, from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel. In January 2007, Kaku visited Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers climate change and terrorism as serious threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.

On October 11, 2010, Michio Kaku appeared in the BBC program "What Happened Before the Big Bang" (along with Laura Mersini-Houghton, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, Neil Turok, and other notable cosmologists and physicists), where he propounded his theory of the universe created out of nothing.

Social policy advocacy

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over matters including the anthropogenic cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power and the general misuse of science. He was critical of the Cassini–Huygens space probe because of the of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Conscious of the possibility of casualties if the probe's fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth, Kaku publicly criticized NASA's risk assessment. He has also spoken on the dangers of space junk and called for more and better monitoring. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Edward Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media. Kaku joined with others such as Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, ''Explorations,'' that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even ''know''.", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".

Personal life

Kaku is married to Shizue Kaku and has one daughter.

Bibliography

References

External links

Getting Physical: Dr. Michio Kaku Explains Einstein's Genius

Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids, op-ed on asteroid defense, Wall St. Journal, Jan. 5, 2010

''The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe'' interview

Michio Kaku on National Public Radio

Category:City College of New York faculty Category:American physicists Category:American radio personalities Category:City University of New York faculty Category:Princeton University faculty Category:Futurologists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:American academics of Japanese descent Category:American people of Japanese descent Category:Japanese-American civil rights activists Category:Pacifica Radio Category:String theorists Category:Theoretical physicists Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:People from San Jose, California Category:1947 births Category:Living people

ar:ميتشيو كاكو bg:Мичио Каку ca:Michio Kaku cs:Michio Kaku de:Michio Kaku et:Michio Kaku es:Michio Kaku fa:میچیو کاکو fr:Michio Kaku id:Michio Kaku it:Michio Kaku he:מיצ'יו קאקו ht:Michio Kaku hu:Michio Kaku nl:Michio Kaku ja:ミチオ・カク no:Michio Kaku uz:Michio Kaku pl:Michio Kaku pt:Michio Kaku ro:Michio Kaku ru:Митио Каку sk:Michio Kaku fi:Michio Kaku sv:Michio Kaku tr:Michio Kaku uk:Мічіо Каку zh:加來道雄