Tom Abel, from a small village in Lower Bavaria, German, submitted his PhD thesis to Ludwig-Maxemillian University in Munich in 1999. Title: Formation of the First Objects in the Universe. Since 2004 he has held the position of a computational cosmologist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and a Professor both at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Physics Department at Stanford University. Since August 2013, he has been Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. From 2002 until 2004, he was on the faculty at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University in State College Pennsylvania. Before that he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK. From 1993 through 1998 he was a visiting scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
The Asian Miracles: Free Renewables Made it all Possible
By Tom Abel, Prosperous Way Down
Traditionally, extended families were the unit of reproduction, and thus the unit that requires inputs and maintenance. In rural communities, a large proportion of those inputs were from free renewables.
Sociocultural Boundaries
By Tom Abel, A Prosperous Way Down
As an anthropologist, I see planetary problems from a cultural and evolutionary perspective that could offer a different take on the subject.
When cow love meets car love
By Tom Abel, A Prosperous Way Down
For an anthropologist like myself raised on stories of the Nuer and Dinka (and the other tribes in the region), the latest news from the Sudan is jarring.
Culture in cycles
By Tom Abel, A Prosperous Way Down
There’s an often-told story that the Earth rests on the back of a turtle, and that turtle rests on the back of another, and that on another.
Goodbye faculty: What’s the point of a University anyway?
By Tom Abel, Prosperous Way Down
Education has a remarkably inelastic demand curve and even in a contracting economy people will spend their last dollars to educate their children. Along with healthcare, high-tech weaponry, food, water, drugs, and internal ‘security’, Americans will pay almost any price for education, which is why the Right has furiously worked to privatize it and as well the rest of these. In a time when economies around the globe are stagnating (due to flattening or declining net emergies) they are the last growth industries of the capitalist growth economy.