Otto Rossler

Biography

Rossler was born in Berlin, into an academic family: his father, also named Otto Rossler, was an Austrian Nazi and a scholar of Semitic languages who was affiliated with the Ahnenerbe and later held a professorship at the University of Marburg.

Rossler was awarded his MD in 1966. After postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Bavaria, and a visiting appointment at the Center for Theoretical Biology at SUNY-Buffalo, in 1969 he became Professor for Theoretical Biochemistry at the University of Tubingen. In 1994, he became Professor of Chemistry by decree.

Rossler has held visiting positions at the University of Guelph (Mathematics) in Canada, the Center for Nonlinear Studies of the University of California at Los Alamos, the University of Virginia (Chemical Engineering), the Technical University of Denmark (Theoretical Physics), and the Santa Fe Institute (Complexity Research) in New Mexico.

Research

Rossler has authored hundreds of scientific papers in fields as wide-ranging as biogenesis, the origin of language, differentiable automata, chaotic attractors, endophysics, micro relativity, artificial universes, the hypertext encyclopedia, and world-changing technology.

His most heavily cited publication is the 1976 paper in which he studied what is now known as the Rossler attractor, a system of three linked differential equations that exhibit chaotic dynamics. Rossler discovered his system after a series of exchanges with Arthur Winfree as detailed by Letellier & Messager (2010).

Advocacy

Rossler and his wife Reimara have been involved with a long-running series of disputes with their employer, the University of Tubingen, which they accuse of discrimination and of violations of academic freedom. In 1988, Reimara Rossler, a professor of medicine, was transferred to a different department within the university; in protest, she began working from home. The state of Baden-Wurttemberg sued her for failure to perform her assigned duties, as a result of which by 1996 she lost her job and was forced to give up a second home to refund her back pay. Meanwhile, in 1993 and 1994, Otto Rossler had been assigned to teach an introductory chemistry course according to the prescribed curriculum for medical students, but insisted instead on teaching his own material. After he was replaced in the course by another lecturer, he continued trying to give the lectures himself, and was removed by police several times. Because of these incidents, in 1995 a state official tried to force Rossler to undergo psychological tests, but after international protests by many academics this plan was dropped. Rossler continued protesting against his and his wife's treatment by the university and in August 2001 he was caught defacing the university auditorium with spray paint in an attempt to draw attention to his protests.

In June 2008, Rossler publicly criticized the Large Hadron Collider experiment supervised by CERN in Geneva and was involved in a failed lawsuit to halt it. He argued that the experiment could plausibly generate dangerous miniature black holes that could bring about the end of the world. Hermann Nicolai, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics' quantum gravity division, later described Rossler's arguments as being "... based on an elementary misunderstanding of the theory of general relativity".

Rossler has also been an honorary editor of the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, which came under fire in 2009 for allegedly publishing papers without as strict peer review as would be expected for a scientific journal. In a subsequent libel suit brought by former journal editor Mohammed El Naschie in response to this criticism, Rossler testified on behalf of El Naschie, stating in court that peer review "is dangerous" and "delays progress in science".

Books

Rossler is the author or co-author of: