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BRIAN ON EARTH AND SKY RADIO

18 Nov 2006

Earth and Sky Radio interviewed Brian by phone at the time of the launch of Bang! the Complete History of the Universe, and will be airing radio spots, set for broadcast in late December. They are available now to listen to or download and read.

Radio Spots:

Bang! An astrronomy book by Brian May

Rock star - spiritual lift from astronomy

The complete interview with Brian can be found here:

Astronomer to rock star, and back again

FROM Rock star Brian May of the legendary band Queen draws inspiration from the stars and tells the tale of the cosmos.

How did the universe begin? How will it end? And just how did the first galaxies, stars, and planets evolve to create beings capable of asking these questions? Brian May, guitarist and founding member of the band Queen, can tell you. He’s spent almost three years writing the book called Bang! – A Complete History of the Universe, along with astronomers Sir Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. May himself was once a Ph.D. student in astronomy at Imperial College. And he’s on a mission to tell the story of the evolution of the universe that’s accessible to anyone, without math or jargon. Brian May spoke with Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar about re-igniting his passion for the stars above.

Salazar: Hi, thanks for coming on Earth & Sky.

May: It’s my pleasure to be here. Where are you calling from?

Salazar: Earth & Sky is produced out here in Austin, Texas.

May: Austin, what a fabulous rock and roll town. Austin’s great, I love it.

Salazar: Thank you Dr. May.

May: You can call me Brian. It’s probably easier.

Salazar: What compelled you to want to write a book about the history of the universe?

May: Well, there have been a falling off in the number of students who are entering the sciences in this country. And, I must say, that I was first inspired by seeing Patrick Moore’s program on the T.V., which is called “The Sky at Night,” when I was a kid. And Patrick is the guy who I’ve collaborated with on this book. He’s the one who persuaded me to make, to take this step. I’ve actually known him for quite a while as a friend. And he said, “Look, Brian, we need to write a book together, and it needs to be a book to inspire young people. It needs to be understandable, and it needs to be the complete history of the universe.” And I said, “You’ve got your title right there, then.” “The Complete History of the Universe” is not a modest aim, but I said that you probably want another hook for it. And a couple of days later, I just thought that the idea of the word, “Bang!”

Salazar: The book which you’ve co-authored is titled as “The Complete History of the Universe.” In talking with astronomers, some have conveyed that such a book would be missing quite a few pages. What were some challenges that you encountered?

May: That’s a big question. Actually, there’s a lot of challenges. Part of it is because you’re trying to pin the tail on a moving donkey, because things are changing daily. And certainly, this week, there have been some findings which seriously challenge the ideas of red shift and the whole Big Bang fabric, if you like. So that was one difficulty, to find a consensus that we could write about. The other difficulty is that some of the concepts are quite difficult, or at least they’re unusual. They’re not things which you encounter every day. So trying to explain something like inflation, or anything which relates to relativity, takes a little bit of care.

I actually think that some of these concepts are not as hard as people think. It’s just that they’re unfamiliar. So the big challenge was to keep writing in English, and not in mathematics, not in the jargon that scientists pass between each other. We wanted to make this truly understandable to anyone who had an interest in the subject.

Salazar: What inspired you to become an astronomer?

May: A major part of it was Patrick Moore’s program. It’s really an English phenomenon, of course, but Patrick’s program, “The Sky at Night,” is the longest running program in the world, presented by one person. He’s been there 50 years, bringing science to the masses, and he’s done a wonderful job, really. He inspired not only amateurs, I mean I regard myself as an amateur although I’m returning to the fold, doing my Ph.D., but all of the professional astronomers, if you talk to them in England, they’re all inspired by Patrick. He instilled that feeling of awe and mystery about the universe, which sucked us all in for the rest of our lives.

Salazar: As you look out at the stars at night, what do you feel?

May: I find it a great help, spiritually, something which grounds you, and in times of difficulty, can give you hope, in my worst times. I’ve had some wonderful times in my life. But I’ve also had some quite severe depression. And in those times, I would go out and look at the sky and see perhaps Orion, in the sky, looking very strong and brave, and always the same. Always a friend that I could come back to. I remember looking up and thinking, and getting a feeling of bravery from the stars, a feeling that there was something that was eternal. And that I would get through, and I would find a better place.

And I’ve always been someone who would go up and look. It’s not necessarily very common among astronomers. If you go to an observatory, I recently visited La Palma, in the Canary Islands, where they were building the GTC, which will be the biggest telescope in the world, the biggest optical telescope in the world when it opens next year. And there are a number of telescopes there, clustered around this beautiful, beautiful island, at the top of the clouds. And I said, “is there anyone looking through these telescopes at the moment?” And the guy who was showing me around said, “No, no, no. Nobody looks through telescopes. No. There’s a few cameras on the end of them. There’s spectroscopes. But nobody’s looking through.” The eye isn’t a very good means of looking into the universe. And that is a point. The eye can’t integrate. So all of these wonderful pictures that you see of nebulae and galaxies cannot be seen with the naked eye. They have to be photographed in some way.

But me, I still love to just go out and look up at the sky and feel that sense of awe, feel my place in the universe.

Salazar: How does what you’ve learned as an astronomer permeate your day-to-day living?

May: Interesting question. I do feel it gives me a balance. I’m very much immersed in music, a lot of the time. I’m also immersed in stereo photography, and 1850’s deguerotypists, and I’m immersed in astronomy. I just find that my brain needs to be stimulated in these different ways, and I think that it stops me from getting tired. There’s always something new. I think that each of them exercises a different part of the brain. And it gives me a sense of perspective. I think that rock stars could be accused of losing their sense of perspective quite often. And this is something that definitely keeps me with one foot in a different kind of world, where it’s necessary to be very humble. Because we are very small creatures in this universe, for sure.

Salazar: What was it like collaborating with the other astronomers, Charles Lintott and Sir Patrick Moore, in producing Bang!

May: I came to it as someone who had been really out of the mainstream of astronomy for 30 years, even though I was trained in it to begin with. And so there were many points during the writing of the book that I thought, “My God, I’m understanding this for the first time.” And that was an essential part, because an author has this ability to be a bridge. And that’s really how I regarded myself. I thought that If I could bring myself to understand it, I would then be able to write it in a form which anyone could understand it. There were lots of concepts like this, in the book.

The concept of the cosmic microwave background, the CMB, it wasn’t really apparent to me what it was. I had been talking about it, I had been aware of it. But I hadn’t really figured out how it could be an echo of the original moments of the Big Bang. So once they had explained it to me properly, I felt able to communicate that. I think it comes alive in the book. I think it’s fairly clear what that is.

Having said that, there are people who interpret it differently. And we’ve been very much aware of this, in writing the book. We’ve actually said in the book, this book will have to be rewritten in a few years time, because things are changing so fast. And many of the beliefs that are embodied in this book will definitely have changed. There are people who do not think that the CMB is the echo of the Big Bang. So we shall see.

Astronomy is changing faster than its ever done. I’m finding it very interesting. In this period of post-Big-Bang book, I’m finding myself drawn toward the alternative ideas. I’ve been reading a lot of Burbidge and Hoyle recently, and it’s very interesting to see a different point of view. You have to be at rather a high level to be able to form an opinion, though. Otherwise, you’re really at the mercy of whatever everyone else thinks.

Astronomy is a vast subject with lots of strange corners, so it’s almost impossible to understand it all.

Salazar: You’re referring to an alternative view that holds that the universe didn’t start with a bang, but instead has always existed?

May: That’s right, the steady-state theory, which still has adherence, and to be truthful, there are plenty of holes being shot in the Big Bang theory at this very moment. We shall see if it survives.

Salazar: How would you describe a universe that seems infinite, but actually has limits? What’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it, so to speak?

May: I think most astronomers would tell you that the universe is not infinite, that it’s very, very big, and it’s impossible to see it all. But it’s actually finite, but without boundaries. That’s the most popular view at the moment. That’s a little hard to explain. We have a neat little analogy in the book, which is an ant crawling on the surface of a football, I don’t know if you’ve come across this. It’s a fairly crude analogy, but it gives you some idea. This ant, assuming it can’t jump off, it’ll crawl over the surface of the football as long as it likes, and it will never come to a boundary. But the surface that it’s crawling on is nevertheless finite. And that’s kind of the view, translated into three dimensions of space, and one of time. That’s more or less the view that most cosmologists have of the universe at the moment.

Salazar: Thanks for sharing your thoughts today. Is there anything else you’d like tell the listeners and readers of Earth & Sky today?

May: We’d like you to visit our website, which is banguniverse.com, which we hope will become an interactive, thriving community of people who are interested in astronomy. We’ve already started to answer some questions which have been sent in from people who have read the book, and it will be a general little forum and a place to have fun with astronomy, we hope. We’re going to do some merchandise too. We really think that astronomy ought to be fun, and not regarded as this sort of unreachable thing that people sometimes view it as. So we’ll be doing mugs and t-shirts , which I love. I love the toys, and that’s pretty much the way we’ve been in Queen throughout the years.

Salazar: Thanks again.

May: Thank you. All the very best. Bye.

Reproduced by kind permission of Earth & Sky

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