Who We Are

Edward is 8 and David is 11. They have given several talks about the material in this book in front of family, friends, at school, and at science festivals aimed at attracting children to science. We expect that in time, the book will grow with them. The images used so far were drawn by Edward and David in 2014 when they were 4 and 7 years old, respectively. If you want to learn more about their daily adventures, Edward and David also have their own blogs where they sometimes remember to write.

The picture above is from the part of Tenerife that looks like Mars. We traveled there with our share of the money from the Breakthrough prize for the detection of gravitational waves. Edward's father Andy was Detector Characterization Chair when the gravitational wave arrived at the LIGO sites, and happened to be the second person to sight it and the first to understand it was real.

Ruxandra is Edward’s mother. She holds a Physics PhD from Cornell University. She was one of the few students not old enough o drink legally at the beginning of graduate school, despite holding both a Bachelor and a MS degree and having worked on some of the most powerful computers in the world and being trusted with sensitive data.

Mihai is David’s father and Ruxandra's brother. Like Ruxandra, he stared Physics in Timisoara. He graduated Freie Universitat Berlin as the youngest graduate in Germany. Afterwards, he completed his PhD at Caltech. He learned how to teach from David Politzer (Nobel Prize 2004), and made movies with Kip Thorne (executive producer or Interstellar). Later, he taught himself at the University of Mississippi where he was the youngest faculty member in the Physics Department.

Mariana is the mother of Mihai and Ruxandra and grandmother to David and Edward. Before she retired to shape the children’s world, she worked as a surgeon. She was ranked 4th in Romania at the end of medical school, and continued to be at the top of her profession since while bending backwards for her children and grandchildren.