Ethan Tecumseh Vishniac is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 astrophysicist, son of Wolf V. Vishniac

Wolf V. Vishniac

Wolf V. Vishniac was an American microbiologist, son of Roman Vishniac. Educated at Brooklyn College and Stanford University, he was a professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. He died while on a research trip to the Antarctic while attempting to retrieve equipment down a crevice. The...

, and grandson of Roman Vishniac

Roman Vishniac

Roman Vishniac was a Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. A complete archive of his work now rests at the International Center of Photography....

. He is the Editor-in-Chief
of the Astrophysical Journal

Astrophysical Journal

The Astrophysical Journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering astronomy and astrophysics. It was founded in 1895 by the American astronomers George Ellery Hale and James Edward Keeler. It publishes three 500-page issues per month....

, Director of the Center for Astrophysical Sciences and a professor of Astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

 at McMaster University

McMaster University

McMaster University is a public research university whose main campus is located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land in the residential neighbourhood of Westdale, adjacent to Hamilton's Royal Botanical Gardens...

 in Hamilton, Canada. His wife Ilene Busch-Vishniac, an ex-Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins was a wealthy American entrepreneur, philanthropist and abolitionist of 19th-century Baltimore, Maryland, now most noted for his philanthropic creation of the institutions that bear his name, namely the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Johns Hopkins University and its associated...

, is the newly-appointed Provost and Vice-President (Academic) of McMaster University

McMaster University

McMaster University is a public research university whose main campus is located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land in the residential neighbourhood of Westdale, adjacent to Hamilton's Royal Botanical Gardens...

 (effective August, 2007).

Vishniac instability

His best known scientific work is the study of instabilities in expanding blast waves. In Vishniac (1983), he demonstrated that a blast wave expanding in a sufficiently compressible medium would be subject to a linear overstability growing as the square root of time. This is usually known as the Vishniac instability, and generally occurs in any thin enough slab bounded by a shock on one side and a contact discontinuity to a higher temperature region on the other. In Vishniac (1994) he then demonstrated that a thin-enough slab bounded by shocks on both sides is subject to a nonlinear instability, usually described as a nonlinear thin shell instability (NTSI).
He has also worked with success in cosmology

Cosmology

Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...

 and the theory of astrophysical dynamos

Dynamo theory

In geophysics, dynamo theory proposes a mechanism by which a celestial body such as the Earth or a star generates a magnetic field. The theory describes the process through which a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid can maintain a magnetic field over astronomical time...

.

External links

• Homepage
• http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?db_key=AST&db_key=PRE&qform=AST&sim_query=YES&ned_query=YES&aut_logic=AND&obj_logic=OR&author=vishniac%2C+e.+t.&object=&start_mon=&start_year=&end_mon=&end_year=2007&ttl_logic=OR&title=&txt_logic=OR&text=&nr_to_return=100&start_nr=1&jou_pick=NO&ref_stems=%2Bastro.ph.&data_and=ALL&group_and=ALL&start_entry_day=&start_entry_mon=&start_entry_year=&end_entry_day=&end_entry_mon=&end_entry_year=&min_score=&sort=SCORE&data_type=SHORT&aut_syn=YES&ttl_syn=YES&txt_syn=YES&aut_wt=1.0&obj_wt=1.0&ttl_wt=0.3&txt_wt=3.0&aut_wgt=YES&obj_wgt=YES&ttl_wgt=YES&txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1A current list of refereed papers from NASA ADS
  Astrophysics Data System
  The Astrophysics Data System , developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration , is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources...
  
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