Ignazio Ciufolini

Ignazio Ciufolini (born 1951) is an Italian physicist active in the field of gravitational physics and general relativity.

Biography

Ignazio Ciufolini graduated magna cum laude in 1980 at Sapienza University of Rome, and received a PhD in Physics in 1984 at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Richard Matzner.^[1]

From 1982 to 1988, he worked at University of Texas at Austin as a teaching assistant, lecturer and research associate. As of 2014, he is an Associate Professor of General Physics at University of Salento (Italy),^[2] tenured since 1999, and a member of Centro Fermi, Rome.^[3] He collaborated with John Archibald Wheeler in 1995 to write Gravitation and Inertia,^[4][5] for which they won the PROSE Award for the best professional and scholar book in physics and astronomy.^[6] He works mainly in the field of General Relativity and Gravitational Physics, proposing a method to measure the effects of gravitomagnetism using the data from the laser ranged satellites LAGEOS and LAGEOS-2.^[7][8][9] He was featured on the cover of the September 6, 2007, issue of Nature, dedicated to his review paper on Dragging of Inertial Frames and General Relativity.^[7] He is the Principal Investigator for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) on the Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES) mission, a space mission aimed to improve the accuracy of the measurement of frame-dragging.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, he won the Giuseppe Occhialini Medal and Prize, jointly awarded by the Italian Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.^[10]

In 2014, Ciufolini was accused of publishing papers on the scientific pre-print archive arXiv.org under pseudonyms, such as G. Felici^[11] and G. Forst,^[12] which is a violation of the arXiv terms, but the accusation was later retracted.^[13][14][15]

References

1. Clippard, Lee (20 February 2012). "UT Researchers Send Experimental Satellite into Space". The Alcalde. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
2. "Ignazio Ciufolini personal card" (in Italian). Archived from the original on 9 January 2014. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
3. "Ignazio Ciufolini personal page on Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi web site". Archived from the original on 9 January 2014. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
4. Ignazio Ciufolini and John Archibald Wheeler. Gravitation and Inertia. Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey (1995). ISBN 0-691-03323-4.
5. Schucking, Engelbert Levin (1996). "Review of Gravitation and Inertia by Ignazio Ciufolini and John A. Wheeler". Physics Today. 49 (6): 58. Bibcode:1996PhT....49f..58C. doi:10.1063/1.2807658. S2CID 120135060.
6. "AAP PROSE Awards 1995 Winners".
7. Ciufolini, I. (6 September 2007). "Dragging of inertial frames". Nature. 449 (7158): 41–47. Bibcode:2007Natur.449...41C. doi:10.1038/nature06071. PMID 17805287. S2CID 4314575.
8. Ciufolini, I. (1986). "Measurement of the Lense-Thirring drag on high-altitude, laser-ranged artificial satellites". Physical Review Letters. 56 (4): 278–281. Bibcode:1986PhRvL..56..278C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.278. PMID 10033146.
9. Ciufolini, I.; Pavlis, E. C. (2004). "A confirmation of the general relativistic prediction of the Lense–Thirring effect". Nature. 431 (7011): 958–960. Bibcode:2004Natur.431..958C. doi:10.1038/nature03007. PMID 15496915. S2CID 4423434.
10. "Occhialini medal recipients". iop.org. Institute of Physics. Retrieved 13 February 2020.
11. Felici, G. (2007). "The meaning of systematic errors, a comment to "Reply to on the Systematic Errors in the Detection of the Lense-Thirring Effect with a Mars Orbiter", by Lorenzo Iorio". arXiv:gr-qc/0703020.
12. Forst, G. (2007). "A critical analysis of the GP-B mission. I: On the impossibility of a reliable measurement of the gravitomagnetic precession of the GP-B gyroscopes". arXiv:0712.3934 [gr-qc].
13. Retraction Watch (3 June 2014). "Journal retracts letter accusing physicist of using fake names to criticize papers". Retrieved 24 May 2019.
14. Retraction Watch (16 June 2014). "Retraction of letter alleging sock puppetry now cites "legal reasons"". Retrieved 24 May 2019.
15. Neuroskeptic (10 May 2014). "Science Pseudonyms vs Science Sockpuppets". Retrieved 25 October 2023.

External links

• CV at LARES-mission.com Archived 9 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine