Interview: My life with Einstein

Francis Everitt was born in Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1934. After a first degree in physics he took a doctorate in palaeomagnetism at Imperial College London in 1960. Then he switched back to physics, and moved to the University of Pennsylvania to work on liquid helium. He also became interested in using gyroscopes cooled to very low temperatures to make sensitive tests of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In 1962, testing Einstein became his main focus when he moved to Stanford University in California where the Gravity Probe B experiment was born. As Stanford’s professor of physics, he has written…