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

Biography

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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

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  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. ^ a b 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.
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