On Sunday evening, Coleman Miller, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Maryland, juggled beanbags on stage in Phillips Auditorium. The packed room watched him intently, not for his juggling prowess, but to learn about the eccentric patterns of multi-starred systems and how stars are shot out of their system.
Miller visited Hillsdale College to deliver a presentation on "The Mysteries of Black Holes." Though he graduated here 25 years ago, he is only 37. He started college at the age of 15.
"It certainly was an interesting experience," he said. "I already knew one of the students, Jim Hunt. He was on the football team and a basketball coach for a summer camp."
Hunt introduced Miller to other football players and Miller quickly became one of the most protected students on campus.
In the early '80s, the physics department only had two professors: Jim Peters and Paul Lucas. Peters, Miller's faculty advisor, had Miller in most of his classes.
"I believed the students liked Cole," Peters said. "He loves people and people liked to have him around."
Miller grew up in nearby Reading Township and commuted to Hillsdale College. He recalled triggering the maternal instincts of the college women. He noticed that as the girls would ask him questions after a large class, their boyfriends would asses the situation and twist it to their advantage.
But Miller's age earned him no special academic treatment, with one exception: chemistry lab. He took the class like everyone else, just not around other students.
"I think the potential problems of a 12-year-old in a lab and near explosives worried some," Miller said.
As for adjusting to college life, Miller said he had a fairly easy time by being friendly and trying not to take himself too seriously. He played on intramural football and basketball teams, and had a near-championship run with a Delta Sigma Phi basketball team.
Miller graduated summa cum laude in the spring of 1984, with majors in mathematics and physics. That year, Malcolm Forbes was the guest speaker, and with an assembled crowd of about 2,000 people attending the ceremonies, Miller walked up to receive his diploma.
"It was an extremely emotional moment for me, because when I went up to get my degree, they gave me a standing ovation, which I felt really great about," Miller said. "It meant that they really accepted me, not just as some curiosity, but as somebody that they felt as a friend. It was probably the most powerful moment in my life thus far."
After graduating, Miller moved onto graduate school at the age of 16, and when he turned 21 in 1990, he received a PhD. He couldn't teach as a professor until he took up a post-doctoral position, but in 1999 he received a professorship at the University of Maryland, where he remains to this day.
His return to campus to lecture on black holes attracted attention from students and the outside community. Nicholas Payne, a student in the seventh grade at Hillsdale Academy, enjoyed the presentation.
"I thought he was a great speaker." Payne said. "He knew what he was talking about, and wasn't a dry, plain information professor. He kept his audience interested."
Miller's active demonstrations ranged from showing the effects of gravity without air resistance, to showing how waves travel the closer they get to the event horizon of a black hole.
His video demonstrations were no less engaging. As he played a video, two ghostly representations of galaxies traveled across the screen and passed through each other and then twisted themselves into abstract art as they were pulled back to each other over and over again.
Miller ended the presentation by discussing the possibility of finding gravitational waves, which would physically prove that black holes exist. Currently, he is involved in two experiments attempting to find these particles.
"This is an extremely exciting time to study black holes," he said. "Just within the last four years it has been possible for the first time to simulate, fully on a computer, what happens when two black holes spiral into each other: a full solution to the Einstein equation, a challenging enterprise."
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