O’Neill, Gerard K.

Gerard K. O’Neill, in full Gerard Kitchen O’neill, (born Feb. 6, 1927, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died April 27, 1992, Redwood, Calif.), American physicist who invented the colliding-beam storage ring and was a leading advocate of space colonization.

Having studied physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (A.B., 1950) and at Cornell University in New York state (Ph.D., 1954), O’Neill joined the faculty of Princeton University and soon began experimenting with ways to increase the energy output of particle accelerators. His solution, the colliding-beam storage ring, utilized beams of particles moving through a ring-shaped chamber in opposite directions. With Wolfgang Panofsky of Stanford University in California, he constructed two storage rings at Stanford in 1959, and the technique soon was adopted for numerous high-energy installations.

In the late 1960s O’Neill turned his attention to the feasibility of space colonization. He designed a kilometre-long sealed cylinder, to be built primarily of processed lunar materials and powered by solar energy, capable of sustaining a human colony indefinitely at a point in space between the Earth and the Moon. In his book The High Frontier (1978) he suggested that space colonies might be the ultimate solution to such terrestrial problems as pollution, overpopulation, and the energy shortage. At the time of his death he was working on a high-speed vehicle powered by magnetic forces and traveling through a vacuum.