George Cassiday

Not to be confused with the man who served as Congress's primary bootlegger during prohibition, George Cassiday is the recipient of the 2002 Distinguished Teaching award at the University of Utah and was professor of some of the most popular courses in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the U.

Known for teaching some of the more interesting, and arguably unconventional classes at the U, Cassiday taught a course titled "Does E.T. exist?"  According to a 2015 article in The Chronicle, the good professor did not want students to simply dismiss his class as an easy way to get past a general education requirement.

“This course is not simply a ‘watered-down’ version of an introductory class in some single scientific discipline, such as basic physics or chemistry,” Cassiday said at the time. “Students learn a lot about different scientific disciplines by attempting to answer a question in which I have never found a single person who is not interested.”

The question students attempt to answer in Cassiday’s course was how life emerged in the Universe. Students also discussed the probability that life could evolve into an intelligent civilization capable of establishing contact with another intelligent civilization, such as ours.

Now professor emeritus, Cassiday talks with KPCW's Cool Science Radio about being part of the original team searching for illusive particles at the sub-atomic level as well as the history of them.