Laurance Doyle
{{short description|American astronomer}}
{{BLP sources|date=April 2021}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Laurance Doyle
| image =
| image_size = 180px
| caption = Dr Laurance Doyle
| occupation = Astrophysicist
SETI Institute
NASA Ames Research Center
| education = M.S. San Diego State University (1982)
Ph.D. University of Heidelberg (1986)
}}
Laurance R. Doyle (born 1953) is an American scientist who received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.
Doyle has worked at the SETI Institute since 1987 where he is a principal investigator and astrophysicist.{{cite web |url=https://www.seti.org/our-scientists/laurance-doyle |title = Laurance Doyle {{!}} SETI Institute}} His main area of study has been the formation and detection of extrasolar planets, but he has also worked on communications theory.{{Cite book|last=Oberhaus|first=Daniel|title=Extraterrestrial Languages|date=2019-09-27|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=978-0-262-35527-8|pages=51–53|language=en|oclc=1142708941}} In particular he has written on how patterns in animal communication relate to humans with an emphasis on cetaceans.
Early life
Doyle grew up on a dairy farm in Cambria, California and therefore, didn't have much access to information about stars. But by reading books at the local library, Doyle was able to develop his knowledge in astronomy, and eventually obtain his Bachelor's and Master's of Science degrees in astronomy from San Diego State University.
Career
His first job was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an imaging engineer, where he was in charge of analyzing pictures of Jupiter and Saturn sent from the spacecraft Voyager. He moved to Heidelberg, Germany, to help analyze images of Halley's Comet. He got his doctorate in Astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg.
In 2011, Doyle led the team which discovered Kepler-16b, the first confirmed circumbinary planet, nicknamed "Tatooine" after the fictional planet from Star Wars.{{Cite news |last=Overbye |first=Dennis |date=15 September 2011 |title=NASA Detects Planet Dancing With a Pair of Stars |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/science/space/16planet.html}}
Doyle is currently seeking to compare dolphin whistles and baby babble in an attempt to make predictions about extraterrestrial communications. He believes that by measuring the complexity of communications for different species on Earth, we could get a good indication of how advanced an extraterrestrial signal is using an application of Zipf's law.{{Cite journal |last1=Doyle |first1=Laurance R. |date=2016-11-18 |title=Why Alien Language Would Stand Out Among All the Noise of the Universe |url=http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/54/listening-for-extraterrestrial-blah-blah |url-status=dead |journal=Nautilus Quarterly |language=en |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200729120031/http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/54/listening-for-extraterrestrial-blah-blah |archive-date=2020-07-29 |access-date=2020-08-30}}{{Cite book|last=Kershenbaum|first=Arik|title=The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens--and Ourselves|title-link=The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy|date=2021-03-16|publisher=Penguin|isbn=978-1-9848-8197-7|pages=251–256|language=en|oclc=1242873084|author-link=Arik Kershenbaum}} His study determined that babies babble over 800 different sounds with the same amount of frequency as dolphins. As they grow older, those sounds decrease to around 50 and become more repetitious. The study found that baby dolphins develop similarly in regards to their whistling.
Doyle is faculty at Principia College and the founding Director of Principia College's Institute for the Metaphysics of Physics, founded in 2014.
In popular culture
In May 2005, he appeared on a National Geographic Channel special titled Extraterrestrial. In 2012, he appeared in the episode "Will We Survive First Contact," of The Science Channel series Through the Wormhole narrated by Morgan Freeman.[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3456274/ "Laurance Doyle"]. IMDb.
Selected works
- Reflections of a SETI Scientist (2022)
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
{{Library resources box|about=no|by=yes}}
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20060903080122/http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bjmccowan/Pubs/McCowanetal.JCP.2002.pdf NASA workshop]
- {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060903080122/http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bjmccowan/Pubs/McCowanetal.JCP.2002.pdf |date=September 3, 2006 |title=Paper he co-authored on communications }}
- [http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_doyle_whale_060126.html Essay by him on Space.com about whales]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20060704193126/http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=277932 SETI Profile]
- [http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0601/seti/index.html Profile of the Drake equation led by Doyle]
- [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/alien.html Wired article]
{{authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Doyle, Laurance}}
Category:21st-century American astronomers
Category:American Christian Scientists
Category:Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Category:Heidelberg University alumni