Profile of Claudio Bunster

In life and work, Claudio Bunster prefers extreme challenges. Bunster, a physicist who contemplates brain-warping theories of space and time, returned to his native Chile from the United States precisely when most intellectuals would have stayed clear—during the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. Shut out of the universities by the military government, he broke the conventional mold by founding a research institute that he then moved from Santiago, the capital, to Valdivia in southern Chile, against the flow of minds and money. He led the presidential science advisory committee during the administration of Eduardo Frei, and served on the Dialogue Board of Human Rights to reconcile Chilean military and civil society. Claudio Bunster For his achievements, Bunster was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. In his Inaugural Article, which appeared in the July 24, 2007 issue of PNAS (1), he showed that after a black hole swallows a magnetic monopole, the space–time singularity starts rotating. During high school in Santiago, Bunster taught himself physics. He had to. “My teachers were extremely boring,” he says. At first, he did not know what physics was, just that he liked the name. There was something magic in the way “física” rolled off the tongue. Then he became intrigued more and more by the nature of time. When he was 15, he found a book on relativity theory in a bookstore. “I remember being astonished to think,” he says, “that when I saw a leaf in a tree moving with the wind, I was observing the past, since it had taken some time for the light to travel from the leaf to my eye.” When he entered the University of Chile in Santiago in 1965, he enrolled in the new and experimental “Institute of Sciences,” an oddity in the system of …