Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow
[ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: ] (born 23 June 1942) is a British
cosmologist
Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...
and
astrophysicist.
He is the fifteenth
Astronomer Royal
Astronomer Royal is a senior post in the Royal Households of the United Kingdom. There are two officers, the senior being the Astronomer Royal dating from 22 June 1675; the junior is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland dating from 1834.
The post ...
, appointed in 1995, and was
Master
Master or masters may refer to:
Ranks or titles
*Ascended master, a term used in the Theosophical religious tradition to refer to spiritually enlightened beings who in past incarnations were ordinary humans
*Grandmaster (chess), National Master, ...
of
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
, from 2004 to 2012 and
President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.
Education and early life
Rees was born on 23 June 1942 in
York, England.
[Anon (2017) ] After a peripatetic life during the war his parents, both teachers, settled with Rees, an only child, in a rural part of
Shropshire near the border with Wales. There, his parents founded
Bedstone College, a boarding school based on progressive educational concepts.
He was educated at Bedstone College, then from the age of 13 at
Shrewsbury School. He studied for the
mathematical tripos
The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. It is the oldest Tripos examined at the University.
Origin
In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was ...
at
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
,
graduating with
first class honours. He then undertook post-graduate research at Cambridge and completed a PhD supervised by
Dennis Sciama
Dennis William Siahou Sciama, (; 18 November 1926 – 18/19 December 1999) was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD ...
in 1967.
Rees' post-graduate work in astrophysics in the mid-1960s coincided with an explosion of new discoveries, with breakthroughs ranging from confirmation of the Big Bang
The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the ...
, the discovery of neutron stars and black holes
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can defo ...
, and a host of other revelations.
Career and research
After holding postdoctoral research
A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...
positions in the United Kingdom and the United States, he taught at Sussex University and the University of Cambridge, where he was the Plumian Professor until 1991, and the director of the Institute of Astronomy.
From 1992 to 2003, he was Royal Society Research Professor, and from 2003 Professor of Cosmology
Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher ...
and Astrophysics
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the he ...
. He was professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London, in 1975 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979. He holds visiting professorships at Imperial College London and at the University of Leicester. He is a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Fellow of King's College King's College or The King's College refers to two higher education institutions in the United Kingdom:
*King's College, Cambridge, a constituent of the University of Cambridge
*King's College London, a constituent of the University of London
It ca ...
, Clare Hall, and Jesus College, Cambridge
Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's full name is The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge. Its common name comes f ...
.
Rees is the author of more than 500 research papers,[ and he has made contributions to the origin of ]cosmic microwave background radiation
In Big Bang cosmology the cosmic microwave background (CMB, CMBR) is electromagnetic radiation that is a remnant from an early stage of the universe, also known as "relic radiation". The CMB is faint cosmic background radiation filling all space ...
, as well as to galaxy
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...
clustering and formation. His studies of the distribution of quasars led to final disproof of steady state theory
In cosmology, the steady-state model, or steady state theory is an alternative to the Big Bang theory of evolution of the universe. In the steady-state model, the density of matter in the expanding universe remains unchanged due to a continuou ...
.[
He was one of the first to propose that enormous ]black hole
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can defo ...
s power quasars, and that superluminal
Faster-than-light (also FTL, superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than the speed of light (). The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with z ...
astronomical observations can be explained as an optical illusion
Within visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual perception, percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide v ...
caused by an object moving partly in the direction of the observer.
Since the 1990s, Rees has worked on gamma-ray bursts
In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are immensely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the most energetic and luminous electromagnetic events since the Big Bang. Bursts can last from ten millis ...
, especially in collaboration with Peter Mészáros, and on how the "cosmic dark ages" ended when the first stars formed. Since the 1970s he has been interested in