Physicist specializing in high-energy particle physics and its
application to navigation and space colonization, and professor of
physics at Princeton University. His book "The High Frontier" won the
Phi Beta Kappa award as the best science book of 1977 and popularized
his way of looking at near-earth space "not as a void, but as a culture
medium, rich in matter and energy." O'Neill argued that colonization of
space is the obvious solution to such problems as overpopulation and
fossil fuel depletion. He designed one of the early particle
accelerators. It was O'Neill who suggested that the right place to
build the first non-terrestrial habitat was a point about equidistant
from the Earth and the Moon known as Lagrange 5, or L5.
