User:Don N. Page

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF DON N PAGE

Don Page grew up in Alaska, where his parents taught elementary school in small isolated Amerindian and Inuit villages without roads, telephones, or televisions. After completing high school at home by correspondence, he went to William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, USA, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in 1967. Then he completed a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy in 1976 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, USA, under the supervision of Professor Kip Thorne and, during one year, of Visiting Fairchild Scholar Stephen Hawking. He titled his doctoral thesis "Accretion into and Emission from Black Holes," but he now wishes he had called it "The In's and Out's of Black Holes." Richard Feynman described the second part as calculating the color of a black hole.

Page was a postdoctoral researcher under Hawking at his home University of Cambridge in England 1976-79, where he worked on quantum gravity, the incompletely developed theory of gravity at very short distances, where the uncertainty principle is important for it. Then he took up a faculty position in the Physics Department at Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA, where he rose to the rank of Professor in 1986 (just after getting married to an Edmontonian University of Alberta medical graduate, Cathy). He remained a faculty member there until 1990, though with many summer visits to the University of Cambridge and winter visiting positions to the University of Texas at Austin, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the University of Alberta. The latter visit induced him to accept a faculty position in the Physics Department here in 1990, where he was made a Fellow of the Cosmology Programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He and Cathy have two sons and three daughters, two of whom they adopted in Haiti. Page currently works on black holes and quantum cosmology, and he has an interest in relating quantum mechanics and consciousness.