Bernard J. Carr is a British

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professo ...

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and

astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, g ...

Queen Mary University of London , mottoeng = With united powers , established = 1785 – The London Hospital Medical College1843 – St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College1882 – Westfield College1887 – East London College/Queen Mary College , type = Public researc ...

(QMUL). His research interests include the early universe, dark matter,

general relativity General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...

primordial black hole Primordial black holes (also abbreviated as PBH) are hypothetical black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang. Due to the extreme environment of the newly born universe, extremely dense pockets of sub-atomic matter had been tightly packed to ...

s, and the

anthropic principle The anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect", is the hypothesis, first proposed in 1957 by Robert Dicke, that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, bec ...

Education

He completed his BA in mathematics in 1972 at

Trinity College Trinity College may refer to: Australia * Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales * Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

. For his doctorate, obtained in 1976, he studied relativity and cosmology under Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. He was the president of the Cambridge University Buddhist Society and is friends with Ajahn Brahm.

Academic career

In 1976 he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity and he also became an advanced SERC fellow at the Institute of Astronomy. In 1979 he was awarded a Lindemann Fellowship for post-doctoral research in America and spent a year working in various universities there. In 1980 he took up a senior research fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. In 1985 he moved to the then Queen Mary College, University of London, where he is now professor of mathematics and astronomy. He has held visiting professorships at

Kyoto University , mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture , established = , type = Public (National) , endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 billion USD) , faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff) , administrative_staff = 3,978 (Total Staff) , students = ...

Tokyo University , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

and the

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operat ...

, and is a frequent visitor to other institutes in America and Canada. He is the author of more than two hundred scientific papers and his monograph, ''Cosmological Gravitational Waves'', won the 1985 Adams Essay Prize.

Interests outside academia

He has interests outside physics, including psychic research. He has been a member of the

Society for Psychical Research The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a nonprofit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. It describes itself as the "first society to co ...

(SPR) for thirty years, serving as its education officer and the chairman of its research activities committee for various periods. He was president of the SPR from 2000 to 2004. He is also a director of Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) in the UK. He has been the co-holder of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a project entitled ''Fundamental Physics and the Problem of our Existence''. He is the editor of a book based on a series of conferences funded by the Foundation, entitled ''Universe or Multiverse?'' Bernard Carr also made an appearance in the documentary film '' The Trouble with Atheism'', where he discussed these concepts, and also appeared in the science documentary film ''Target...Earth?'' (1980).

Publications

* Bernard Carr (ed.): ''Universe or Multiverse?'' Cambridge University Press, 2007,

Media

*In 2014, featured in "

The Principle ''The Principle'' is a 2014 American independent film produced by Rick DeLano and Robert Sungenis. It rejects the Copernican principle and supports the long-superseded notion and pseudoscientific principle that Earth is at the center of the Uni ...

", a documentary examining the

Copernican Principle In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle states that humans, on the Earth or in the Solar System, are not privileged observers of the universe, that observations from the Earth are representative of observations from the average position ...

References

External links

Page at QMUL
{{DEFAULTSORT:Carr, Bernard Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Academics of Queen Mary University of London California Institute of Technology alumni Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Members of the Eurasian Astronomical Society Parapsychologists