Filed under: People Looking at the Stars | Tags: Astronomy, Astrophysics, ATLAS, black hole, boy band, Brian Cox, CERN, D:REAM, Higgs boson, Labour Party, Large Hadron Collider, Things Can Only Get Better
Thanks to this week’s Special Guest Author, Iain B. (my husband)
Dr. Brian Cox
A personal ad for Dr. Brian Cox might look something like this:
“Good looking former member of successful boy-band seeks fellow Ph.D. for cozy nights in studying particle physics, the origins of life, the universe and everything.”
We seem to be seeing a lot of Dr. Cox in TV and online media recently. Apple used him to promote the use of Macbook Pro laptops for “serious power computing users,” and he’s a regular on Discovery/PBS/National Geographic documentaries. But those are far from being his first forays into the limelight.
“Things Can Only Get Better” was the song title of what was perhaps his most well-known previous public work, as a keyboardist in the 90s boy band D:Ream–famous for its rather questionable punctuation practices and its slightly more than a one-hit-wonder status in the UK. (The “Things Can Only Get Better” track was used in 1997 as the UK Labour Party conference anthem, when Labour Party beat the incumbent Conservatives and brought Tony Blair into power.)
But Dr. Cox is a boy band member no more. Like the greek god Proteus, he has reinvented himself as an astrophysicist. Now he is a serious researcher doing serious research into serious physics and serious astronomy. He gets to travel the world to conferences and hang out with all the “big boys toys” – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN for example, and the ATLAS project in particular.
Most people will have heard of the LHC by now, but probably in a negative way–as the “the search for the God particle,” or “the black hole-making machine,” or “the expensive machine that blew up the first time it was used,” or “the experiment that could end the world.” But actually the LHC is a collection of separate experiments all built around the perimeter of the particle accelerator itself, with ATLAS being the largest single part.
ATLAS, itself, is the detector at the very core of the LHC, and is the single largest man-made experiment in particle physics ever. The scale of this thing is truly staggering–it weighs 7000 tons and is about quarter of a city block in size–but what it’s looking for is incredibly small: the Higgs boson particle. First theorized in the early 1960s, the Higgs boson has yet to be actually found and observed; but it is thought to be the possible source of dark matter, dark energy, and the underlying binding force in the whole universe. For something so small, it sure has a large reputation to live up to.
So good luck with ATLAS, Dr. Cox. For sure, it’s about as sexy a job as we “geeks in white coats” can possibly aspire to. But the thing is, underneath it all we know you’re still the pretty boy with a nice smile and a good sense of humor from those halycon boy band days. And what’s great is that you might not even have to leave your musical roots behind you in your new line of work. It looks like you could branch out into some hip hop collaborations with your new colleagues, given the success of their “Large Hadron Rap” (see YouTube video below.) We live in hope!
Apologies to faithful reader Alison for any false advertising in this post–the author has since discovered that Dr. Brian Cox has been married since 2004.
Filed under: People Looking at the Stars | Tags: Astronomy, BBC, Patrick Moore, Sir Patrick Moore, The Sky at Night
Thanks to this week’s Special Guest Author, Iain B. (my husband)
Sir Patrick Moore, host of the BBC's "The Sky at Night"
Ask anyone from the UK to name an astronomer, and chances are it’ll be Patrick Moore. He is to the UK what Carl Sagan was to the USA, or Einstein is to–well, everyone.
Patrick Moore, or Sir Alfred Patrick Caldwell-Moore (CBE) to be precise, is a musician and composer. But the root of his fame is that since the late 1950’s – well before manned spaceflight – Patrick has been an amateur astronomer and presenter of a monthly BBC TV program called The Sky at Night.
The show covers a different topic each month related to astronomy, and well before the invention of online media it regularly issued a quarterly newsletter that could be obtained by viewers on mail-order for just the price of return postage.
Although he modestly describes himself as little more than an amateur stargazer, his lifelong dedication to the field has made him into a pillar of both the amateur and professional branches of the astronomical community.
Perhaps this is apocryphal, but I’ve often heard it repeated that the maps of the moon he created using a small telescope from his backyard in Selsey were the maps used by the Russians when they were planning their moon probes in the early 1960s, so accurate were the details of its features (particularly at the edges of the orb.) Whether that particular anecdote is true or not, Sir Patrick has actually made a huge contribution to virtually every one of the telescopes you can currently buy at places like Sears, Costco and BJ’s. That contribution is the Caldwell Catalogue - a list of the 100 or so brightest or most interesting “must see” sky objects for school kids and budding amateur astronomers to aim their new toys at.
(In fact, these days its even easier – many telescopes now come with internal computers for “go to” positioning, and all that’s needed is to press a couple of buttons -[C for Caldwell, for example] and punch in a number, for the telescope to drive itself to the correct place in the sky.)
Nobody is perfect; and Patrick Moore is certainly no exception, having taken some rather controversial stances on immigration and women in television during his long career (he is now 85.) But despite his political views, I think it’s important that we don’t obscure the man’s scientific accomplishments because of a few provocative statements. There are very few of us who will make the contributions to society that he has consistently made through the years.
So here’s to Patrick Moore – long may he continue to inspire popular interest in astronomy, as he did for me back when I was 8 or 9 years old begging my parents to let me stay up and watch him in his late-night TV timeslot.
