Martin Rees
Martin Rees
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, FRS, FREng, FMedSciis a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. Rees currently sits on the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 June 1942
god space princeton
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
war europe space
To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as what NASA does. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
careers training scientist
Science isn't just for scientists - it's not just a training for careers.
technology errors design
In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.
real hands fields
Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just virtual reality.
essence together atoms
During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.
strong cancer thinking
It used to be controversial whether smoking caused lung cancer, it used to be controversial whether HIV caused AIDS. Now, there are a few mavericks who deny those things. In the case of climate change, I think the debate is going the same way in that there is a strong consensus that it is a serious matter.
nuclear weapons nuclear-weapons
Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented.
hands years personality
Charles Darwin [is my personal favorite Fellow of the Royal Society]. I suppose as a physical scientist I ought to have chosen Newton. He would have won hands down in an IQ test, but if you ask who was the most attractive personality then Darwin is the one you'd wish to meet. Newton was solitary and reclusive, even vain and vindictive in his later years when he was president of the society.
stars challenges insects
An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.
commitment moon challenges
The 'clean energy' challenge deserves a commitment akin to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.
lying past thinking
Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity's role in nature. One thing we've learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.
moon technology reality
I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains They could be staring us in the face and we just Don't recognise them. The problem is that we-re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.
moon self civilization
Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. . . . Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos.