Public Biography
Dr. Harold Wendt is a professor of gravitational physics at the University of Chicago and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has held the Chandrasekhar Distinguished Chair in Theoretical Physics since 2018, a title he accepted on the condition that the department stop referring to his field as “niche.”
Dr. Wendt received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 2001, where his doctoral dissertation on the geodesic deviation of test particles in Kerr space-time was described by his advisor as “technically flawless and completely unreadable by anyone outside this room.” He completed postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2006.
His research focuses on the experimental verification of general relativity in strong-field regimes, including the behavior of gravity near black holes and neutron stars. He was a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that detected gravitational waves in 2015, a discovery he has described as “the most important confirmation of a prediction that everyone already believed, which is what makes fundamental physics so thankless.”
Dr. Wendt is the author of Curvature: Why Everything Falls and Nobody Knows Why (University of Chicago Press, 2022), a popular science book that sold modestly and was praised by reviewers as “lucid, passionate, and unlikely to be read by the people who need it most.” He has appeared on NPR, PBS, and several podcasts with listener bases he characterizes as “self-selecting for people who already understand gravity.”
He is a frequent and increasingly exasperated commentator on scientific literacy in the United States, a subject he has described as “my second career, which I did not want.” He lives in Hyde Park, Chicago, with his wife, a musicologist, and their three children, all of whom can explain general relativity, a fact he considers “the absolute minimum.”