At age 8, Horowitz achieved distinction as the world's youngest
amateur radio operator. He went on to study physics at
Harvard University (
A.B., 1965;
A.M., 1967;
Ph.D., 1970), where he has also spent all of his subsequent career. His early work was on
scanning microscopy (using both
protons and
X-rays). Horowitz has also conducted astrophysical research on
pulsars and investigations in
biophysics. His interest in practical electronics has led to a handful of inventions, including an automated voting machine and an acoustic mechanism for
landmine detection, and an electronic Morse Code/Baudot code keyboard using a diode matrix and 66 TTL integrated circuits for Amateur Radio use. Since 1974 he has taught a practical course in electronics whose lecture notes became one of the best known textbooks in the field:
The Art of Electronics (coauthored with
Winfield Hill and James MacArthur). Horowitz was one of the pioneers of the search of intelligent life beyond the
Earth, and one of the leaders behind
SETI. This work has attracted both admiration and criticism. Harvard biologist
Ernst Mayr has sharply criticized Horowitz for wasting the resources of the university and the efforts of
graduate students on such an endeavour.
Carl Sagan provided a strong rebuttal to Mayr's criticism, and pointed out that many eminent biologists and biochemists had endorsed SETI with the statement: Sagan was believed to have based the main character in his novel
Contact partly on Horowitz. Horowitz led the
META and
BETA SETI projects. Horowitz and Sagan reported that, in the course of project META, they had detected 37 signals "which survived all our cuts" and cannot be positively identified. On September 10, 1988 the university's 84-foot radio dish detected "an enormous spike which was 750 times noise. If you converted the radio signal into audio it would sound just like a tone. It would sound like a flute." All 37 signals, however, have been single events which have never been heard again. The software company
37signals has been named after these signals. Horowitz holds
professorial appointments at Harvard in both
physics and
electrical engineering. He has also served as a member of the
JASON Defense Advisory Group. ==Works==