TEDxTaipei miniTalks - Jiun-Huei Proty Wu - 02

Professor Jiun-Huei Proty Wu is a cosmologist teaching at National Taiwan University, jointly appointed by Academia Sinica and National Cheng-Chi University. Growing up in Taiwan, he developed a fighting spirit from the challenging experience of military service, an attitude he carried throughout his life. At 12 years of age, he built two telescopes using surplus wood and a PVC water pipe, hoping to prove the existence of the goddess of the moon. Two years later, while using these two telescopes to observe the universe, he successfully captured the astonishing moment when the Comet Halley passed, sparking his career in cosmology. At 28, he obtained his PhD in cosmology from the Relativity Group at Cambridge, led by Professor Stephen Hawking. After working at U.C. Berkeley and NASA, he returned to Taiwan and has been back for over a decade. He is currently the Project Scientist of the cosmological telescope, AMiBA, in Hawaii, and plans to build a time machine at the South Pole to search for the origins of the cosmos.