About Dr. SETI

About Dr. SETI ®

Dr. H. Paul Shuch (AKA Dr. SETI ®), now Executive Director Emeritus of the grassroots, nonprofit SETI League (which he helped to found in 1994), is a distinguished engineering professor credited with designing the world's first commercial home satellite TV receiver. Thrice retired, he was recently appointed Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Heidelberg University of Applied Sciences. A member of the International Academy of Astronautics, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Fellow of the European Radio Astronomy Club, vice-president of the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, Hertz Foundation Fellow, and Fellow of the Radio Club of America, he is the author of more than 500 publications, and has received numerous honors and awards. He lives on a radio-quiet hilltop in northern Pennsylvania with his biologist wife, two of their seven recombinant DNA experiments, ten networked computers, three motorcycles, three radio telescopes, and an antique MG-TD roadster. His airplane doesn't live with them, but is hangared in nearby Lock Haven PA.

Paul wrote all the songs in the three SETI League songbooks (and performed them on his two currently available CDs). He has been using his filk music in the classroom for the past three decades, believing that lyrics make memorable mnemonics. A few examples:

"Karl Jansky" teaches the conversion factor that bears the subject's name, with its final verse:

"We Measure flux density these days in Janskys.
They equal (you may be aware)
Just ten to the negative twenty six Joules
Per second per Hertz meter squared."

He wrote "L, S, C, X, and Ku" to teach his students the MIT Radiation Laboratory standard designations for the microwave fequency spectrum, with this chorus:

"L, S, C, X, and Ku --
Outside the lab, nobody knew
What the frequencies mean,
What the wavelengths had been.
'Twas a classified scheme
Through and through."

And "Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me" is a musical rendition of the classical memory aid taught to generations of astronomers, to help them recall the Harvard stellar classification system in order of luminosity. Thus, it is a mnemonic for a mnemonic, making it perhaps the first ever mnemonic squared!

One of Paul's greatest joys in 35 years of teaching has been hearing his students singing to themselves during final examinations.

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