Martin Rees

The Right Honourable The Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS FREng FMedSci FRAS
Martin Rees in 2005
President of the Royal Society
In office 2005–2010
Preceded by	The Lord May of Oxford
Succeeded by	Sir Paul Nurse
Personal details
Born	Martin John Rees (1942-06-23) 23 June 1942 York, England, United Kingdom
Spouse(s)	Dame Caroline Humphrey[1]
Website	www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~mjr/
Scientific career
Fields	Astronomy, astrophysics
Institutions	Trinity College, Cambridge University of Sussex
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Thesis	Physical processes in radio sources and inter-galactic medium (1967)
Doctoral advisor	Dennis Sciama
Doctoral students	Roger Blandford Craig Hogan Priyamvada Natarajan
Known for	Cosmic microwave background radiation quasars Astronomer Royal President of Royal Society
Notable awards	Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics (1984) Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1987) Balzan Prize (1989) Bower Award (1998) Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2001) Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2003) Michael Faraday Prize (2004) Crafoord Prize (2005) Order of Merit (2007) Templeton Prize (2011) Isaac Newton Medal (2012) HonFREng[2] (2007) Nierenberg Prize (2015)
Martin Rees' voice Recorded June 2010 from the BBC Radio 4 programme the Reith Lectures

Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, FRS, FREng, FMedSci, FRAS^[2] (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995^[3][4] and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.^[5] Rees currently sits on the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Early life

Rees was born on 23 June 1942 in York, England.^[1][6] 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 that continues to thrive to this day.^[7] He was educated at Bedstone College, then from the age of 13 at Shrewsbury School, Shropshire. He studied for the Mathematics tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge,^[1] graduating with first class. He then undertook post-graduate research at Cambridge and completed a PhD degree under Dennis Sciama in 1967.^[8][9] Rees's 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 discovery of neutron stars and black holes, and a host of other revelations.^[7] Martin Rees is an atheist but has criticised militant atheists for being too hostile to religion.^[10][11]

Scientific career

After holding post-doctoral research 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 and Astrophysics. 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 and is an Honorary Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge.

Lord Rees has received honorary degrees from a number of universities including Sussex, Uppsala, Toronto, Durham, Oxford, Yale, Melbourne and Sydney. He belongs to several foreign academies, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[12]

He has been President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1992–94) and the British Association (1995–96), and was a Member of Council of the Royal Institution of Great Britain until 2010. Rees is the author of more than 500 research papers, and he has made important contributions to the origin of cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as to galaxy clustering and formation. His studies of the distribution of quasars led to final disproof of Steady State theory.^[5]

He was one of the first to propose that enormous black holes power quasars,^[13] and that superluminal astronomical observations can be explained as an optical illusion caused by an object moving partly in the direction of the observer.^[14]

In recent years, Lord Rees has worked on gamma-ray bursts, especially in collaboration with Peter Mészáros, and on how the "cosmic dark ages" ended when the first stars formed. In a more speculative vein, he has, since the 1970s, been interested in anthropic reasoning, and the possibility that our visible universe is part of a vaster "multiverse".

Lord Rees is an author of books on astronomy and science intended for the lay public and gives many public lectures and broadcasts. In 2010 he was chosen to deliver the Reith Lectures for the BBC,^[15] now published as From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons. Rees believes the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is worthwhile, although the chance of success is small.^[16]

In 2005, Rees was elevated to a life peerage, sitting as a crossbencher in the House of Lords as Baron Rees of Ludlow, of Ludlow in the County of Shropshire.^[17] In 2005, he was awarded the Crafoord Prize.^[18]

He became President of the Royal Society on 1 December 2005^[19][20] and continued until the end of the Society's 350th Anniversary Celebrations in 2010. In 2011, he was awarded the Templeton Prize.^[21]

Aside from expanding his scientific interests, Rees has written and spoken extensively about the problems and challenges of the 21st century, and the interfaces between science, ethics and politics.^[22][23] He is a member of the Board of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, the IPPR, the Oxford Martin School and the Gates Cambridge Trust. He co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk^[24] and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute.^[25] He has formerly been a Trustee of the British Museum and the Science Museum. He is a foreign member of Science Academy of Turkey^[26]

In August 2014, Lord Rees of Ludlow was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.^[27]

In 2015, he was co-author of the report that launched the Global Apollo Programme, which calls for developed nations to commit to spending 0.02% of their GDP for 10 years, to fund co-ordinated research to make carbon-free baseload electricity less costly than electricity from coal by the year 2025.^[28]

Honours

Awards

• Heineman Prize (1984)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1987)
• Balzan Prize (1989) for High Energy Astrophysics
• Knight Bachelor (1992)^[29]
• Bruce Medal (1993)
• Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden^[30] (1995)
• Bruno Rossi Prize (2000)
• Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2001)
• Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2003)^[31]
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society (2004)
• Lifeboat Foundation's Guardian Award (2004)
• Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for science communication (2004)
• Life Peerage (2005)^[32]
• Crafoord Prize, with James Gunn and James Peebles (2005)
• Order of Merit – the personal gift of The Queen (2007)^[33]
• Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum (2007)
• Honorary Fellow^[2] of the Royal Academy of Engineering^[2] (2007)
• Templeton Prize^[34] (2011)
• Isaac Newton Medal (2012)
• Honorary Doctorate, Harvard University (awarded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA on 26 May 2016).

Named after him

• Asteroid 4587 Rees

Publications

• Cosmic Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology (co-author John Gribbin), 1989, Bantam; ISBN 0-553-34740-3
• New Perspectives in Astrophysical Cosmology, 1995; ISBN 0-521-64544-1
• Gravity's Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe, 1995; ISBN 0-7167-6029-0, 2nd edition 2009, ISBN 0-521-71793-0
• Before the Beginning – Our Universe and Others, 1997; ISBN 0-7382-0033-6
• Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe, 1999; ISBN 0-297-84297-8
• Our Cosmic Habitat, 2001; ISBN 0-691-11477-3
• Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century—On Earth and Beyond (UK title: Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?), 2003; ISBN 0-465-06862-6
• What We Still Don't Know ISBN 978-0-7139-9821-4 yet to be published.
• From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons, 2011; ISBN 978-1-84668-5033

See also

• Rees's Six Fundamental Numbers
• Gresham Professor of Astronomy

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Martin Rees.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Martin Rees

• 2005 talk: Is this our final century?, ted.com; accessed 31 August 2014.
• Interviews with Charlie Rose, 2003 and 2008, charlierose.com; accessed 31 August 2014.
• New Statesman Interviews Martin Rees, newstatesman.com, 6 April 2010; accessed 31 August 2014.
• Talk by Martin Rees, March 2017. Posted on the official YouTube channel of Casina Pio IV.
• Martin J. Rees at Library of Congress Authorities, with 23 catalogue records