Timothy Ferris

Timothy Ferris is the author of a dozen books – among them The Science of Liberty and the bestsellers The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which have been translated into fifteen languages and were named by The New York Times as among the leading books published in the twentieth century. He also edited the anthologies Best American Science Writing 2001 and the World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics.

A former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Ferris has published over 200 articles and essays in The New Yorker, TIME, Newsweek, Forbes, Harper’s, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic,  The New York Review of Books and other periodicals.  

His three PBS documentary films—The Creation of the Universe, (1986), Life Beyond Earth (1999), and “Seeing in the Dark (2007)—have been seen by over twenty million viewers. 

Ferris produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music and sounds of Earth launched aboard the twin Voyager interstellar spacecraft. Now exiting the solar system, the Voyagers are the most distant probes ever created by humans.

Called “the best popular science writer in the English language” by The Christian Science Monitor and “the best science writer of his generation” by The Washington Post, Ferris has received the American Institute of Physics prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. 

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Ferris has taught in five disciplines—astronomy, English, history, journalism and philosophy—at four universities. He is currently an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.