Lord Martin Rees

The Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, Martin Rees was appointed to the House of Lords in 2005 as Baron Rees of Ludlow. One of the world's leading cosmologists, he is renowned for his pioneering studies of quasars, galaxies, black holes and the origins of the universe. His early study of the distribution of quasars helped discredit the "steady state" theory of the universe. He was the first to propose the now widely accepted idea that the engines driving the high-energy deep space quasars seen through the Hubble Space Telescope are actually enormous black holes. After studying at the University of Cambridge, and holding postdoctoral fellowships at distinguished universities on both sides of the Atlantic, at age 30 he was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge. Today, he is Master of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. In addition to his theoretical work, he has won praise for his ability to present sophisticated ideas in a language comprehensible to a general audience. His books include Gravity's Fatal Attraction and Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others, in which he proposes that the universe we know is but one particle in a much larger multiverse. From 2005 to 2010 he was President of the Royal Society. This podcast was recoded at the Academy of Achievement's 1999 Summit in Washington, D.C., after Baron Rees had received a knighthood, prior to his elevation to the peerage.