Martin Rees
Biography
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, Kt, FRS (born 23 June 1942) is 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.
He was one of the first to propose that enormous black holes power quasars, and that superluminal astronomical observations can be explained as an optical illusion caused by an object moving partly in the direction of the observer. In recent years he 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 (from the 1970s onwards) been interested in anthropic reasoning, and the possibility that our visible universe is part of a vaster Multiverse. 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 the final disproof of Steady State theory.
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He is also a well-respected 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, now published as "From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons". Rees believes the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is worthwhile, even though the chance of success is small.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.