David Stock
AS ASTRONOMER Royal, you have to assume Martin Rees isn’t in it for the money: £100 a year is the reward for advising the UK monarch on all matters astronomical.
It is just one of many hats Rees has worn, though – including president of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society and, since 2005, as an appointed member of the UK’s House of Lords. His work as a government adviser and public face of science has come on the back of an equally distinguished career in cosmology stretching back more than half a century, encompassing seminal research on the nature of the big bang and black holes, extreme phenomena throughout the cosmos, the search for life elsewhere in the universe and, latterly, humanity’s own fate within it.
Richard Webb: When you started out in cosmology, the idea that the universe began in a big bang wasn’t even accepted science. How have things changed in the past half-century?
Martin Rees: Amazingly. When I started research in the mid-1960s, the [late] astronomer Fred Hoyle was still advocating the idea of a steady state universe that had existed from everlasting to everlasting. Evidence for the big bang theory was very weak. The debate was settled in most people’s minds in 1964 when cosmic microwave background radiation was found – a relic of a hot, dense, early phase of the universe.
It was a good time to be starting research. Objects such as black holes and neutron stars were being found where Einstein’s general relativity was important, not just a tiny correction as it is in our solar system. At the…
