Phillip Helbig

I read very many books as a child, mainly about science. Many of these were by Isaac Asimov; I've read most of his books. (I had read several dozen of his non-fiction books before I read any of his science fiction.) He certainly had a big influence on me. Other influences: Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, George Gamow. I played the violin as a child but have now given up due to lack of talent---I was often the best at music theory but the worst at playing. A Latin teacher who spoke 8 languages got me interested in languages, an interest which I have retained, despite lack of conspicuous talent. I had a very enjoyable time working in academia for several years, after having studied physics and astronomy in Hamburg, but left for greener pastures due to a combination of lack of genius, poverty, and bad luck. (There were other reasons as well (you know who you are), but these three were sufficient. I think I could have survived any two, but all three at once were too much.). I worked full time outside of academia for a bit more than twenty years, then took early retirement. I later earned a PhD in astrophysics in Liège. Happily married, three children. Most of my free time is occupied with continuing my research in cosmology, going to concerts and listening to music on CD (baroque, rock (mostly some things from the 1960s and 1970s and music in a similar style), English traditional music and folk-rock, medieval, renaissance), learning languages (rather difficult since I have only one native language and no special ability at languages; I've managed to reach C2 level in German and English, B2/C1 in Swedish; B2 in Dutch, B1 in Norwegian, and French; Spanish and Latin might have been A2 at some time in the past but, like ancient Greek and Macedonian (the modern Slavic language, not the dialect of ancient Greek), they are A1 now; goals for the future are improving these (except Latin and ancient Greek), learning Low German, and perhaps learning Serbian and/or Croatian; no Klingon (though I was and to some extent still am a mild fan of TOS)), photography (in the old days a Ricoh KR-5 Super, these days a Pentax K10D and a Ricoh GR), cinema, sauna, swimming, not much cycling now but maybe again in the future, reading (mostly (e)books (I recommend ePub but no longer recommend the tolino reader) and magazines about science (including those I review for The Observatory) and music), travel., reading and commenting on blogs (search for my blog comments if you are interested in what I think). And, yes, trying to attain a beard like that of Tycho Brahe. A means to several ends, but a very enjoyable means, is running a VMS cluster at home. Other means to ends I've taken an interest in are Fortran, LaTeX, HTML, Rdb, PostScript, and Dave Jones's wonderful "OSU" web server. I hope to start a blog soon. I spent a lot of time adding publications here, then saw that some had been automatically imported from ADS. I'm leaving that as it stands now; it's pretty obvious I'm not trying to artificially inflate my list of publications. I don't see any way to merge them, and the imported ones apparently can't be edited. Since the information is not identical, maybe it makes sense to leave both entries for each publications, though some sort of merge would be better. In general, I don't like the idea of multiple lists of publications on the web (ADS, Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate, etc), at least not unless they are fully automatic and fully correct. In any case, the master list is at my own website.