Marlan Scully

His wife Judith Bailey Scully and he have three sons: James, an American Airline captain; Robert, a writer and Caterpillar diesel mechanic; and Steven, an electrical engineer with Dallas Semiconductor. Rob (with an introduction by his father) wrote a book entitled “The Demon and the Quantum: From the Pythagorean Mystics to Maxwell's Demon and Quantum Mystery” which was published by Wiley-VCH in October 2007. The book is directed toward the layperson as well as the professional physicist and examines the connection between Maxwell's Demon and the role of the observer and quantum eraser.Marlan is a Christian.

The foundation of quantum mechanics is another area which Scully has made pioneering contributions. Aharonov and Zubairy in their 2005 Science article on "Time and the Quantum" describe one facet of his work as follows:

After completing his graduate work at Yale University, Scully became an instructor at Yale and then proceeded to become an assistant professor at MIT, where he received early promotion to associate professor and moved to the University of Arizona to become professor before age 30. While there, he worked with Willis Lamb, Peter Franken, and others to build the Optical Sciences Center there. In 1980, he took a joint position between the Max Planck Institute für Quantenoptik and the University of New Mexico as distinguished professor. In 1992, he moved to Texas A&M, where he is now Burgess Distinguished Professor of Physics, holds the TEES Distinguished Research chair, and is director of the Center for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Studies. In 2003, he was appointed visiting professor at Princeton University. In 2005, he accepted a joint professional appointment between Texas A&M and Princeton Universities.

Scully is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the Max Planck Society. He has also received numerous awards including the Adolph E. Lomb Medal of the OSA in 1970, the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1990, the Charles Hard Townes Award of the OSA in 1998, the Quantum Electronics Award of IEEE in 2003, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished Faculty Prize, the APS Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in 2005, and has been appointed to a Harvard Loeb Lectureship. In 2011, Scully was honored with the Herbert Walther Award and in 2012 with the Frederic Ives Medal of the OSA. In December 2016, he has been elected as a Foreign Member Of Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he was elected as a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a Chinese name 司嘉理 (pinyin: Sī Jiālǐ).

Scully was born in Casper, Wyoming, where he attended public schools including Casper College, and finished his undergraduate studies at the University of Wyoming and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his PhD under the guidance of Willis Lamb at Yale University in 1965.

Marlan Orvil Scully (born August 3, 1939) is an American physicist best known for his work in theoretical quantum optics. He is a professor at Texas A&M University and Princeton University. Additionally, in 2012 he developed a lab at the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative in Waco, Texas.