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Meet the Royal Astronomer

19 Oct 2006

Better known for his distinctive guitar tones in rock band Queen, Dr Brian May, astronomer, talks to Sarah Reed from BBC Sky at Night magazine. [ www.skyatnightmagazine.com ]

Brian May will be here soon. I keep wondering how everyone will react when he walks through the door. Stare from afar, barrage him with autograph requests, or chant Queen songs? It’s not as if this is a music awards bash full of other celebrities and hangers-on. As it turns out, little fuss is made when he turns up hand-in-hand with his wife, the actress Anita Dobson. I watch him join in a conversation a few astronomers are having, casually dressed in a plain white shirt and brown shorts, and he seems to fit in oddly well. Only his trademark thick, tightly curled black hair hints at his other life as a colossus of rock music.

I’m at Patrick Moore’s house in Selsey, Sussex, to talk to Brian at the informal launch party of Bang! The Complete History Of The Universe, a book he has co-written with Patrick and Chris Lintott. The guests keep on arriving – everyone from Patrick’s next door neighbours to renowned cosmologists and astronomers, and what had initially started out as a small gathering quickly turns into quite a party. Brian and I agree that this isn’t the best opportunity to talk one-on-one, so we both enjoy the party and agree to chat the following week on the phone.

Timeline	THE LIFE OF BRIAN
1947	Brian Harold May was born in Hampton, Middlesex. His father, Harold May, helped Brian to build his first telescope and his first guitar – the legendary Red Special.
1968	Brian graduated from Imperial College London with a BSc honours degree in Physics and Maths. He went on to study for a PhD at Imperial, but never completed it.
1970	Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor formed Queen following the demise of Brian and Roger’s previous band Smile. John Deacon joined the following year.
1975	Queen got their first number one album with A Night at the Opera. Tracks included Bohemian Rhapsody and 39, written by Brian about the twin paradox, which crops up in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
1985	Queen played at Live Aid – a concert organised to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Their performance confirmed their status as one of the world’s biggest live acts.
2002	Brian performed God Save the Queen on his Red Special electric guitar from the roof of Buckingham Palace as part of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations.

Three’s company
“It was all Patrick’s idea,” Brian tells me when we finally catch up, his voice just as soft and gentle on the phone as it is in person. “He asked me when we were on a trip to watch an annular eclipse in Scotland about three years ago. We were sitting outside a very nice pub and he said he’d like me to write a book with him. I said I didn’t think I could, and protested a little, but Patrick was determined.” No wonder he was hesitant – in 2005 and early 2006, Queen, with Paul Rodgers singing lead vocals, were on tour. At least Chris was about to help ease the workload. “It became apparent that Chris would be able to cover an area that Patrick and I aren’t strong in – the newest developments in star structure and theoretical astronomy,” Brian says.

Nevertheless, finding time to write the book wasn’t easy, especially when he wasn’t the only author with a busy schedule. “It was really hard to get us all together – it had to be planned like a military operation to find these windows when we could sit down together,” he explains. But apparently the effort was worthwhile. “The best stuff happened when we were all sitting there together,” he says. Not surprising when you’re writing with two other people – there’s only so much you can do via email, and writing as a group isn’t the easiest thing to do at the best of times. “It’s like three artists splashing paint onto a canvas,” Brian explains. “But I’m used to that, because that’s the way we made music with Queen over the years – we fought over every note.”

It certainly didn’t do them any harm: Queen released 15 studio albums since the band formed in 1970, 11 of them topping the charts in various countries. You might expect someone who has enjoyed this much success to be, perhaps, a tad egotistical, but Brian has an air of modesty. “To begin with, I was surprised Patrick kept ringing me up as a friend,” he says. “I thought I might be wasting his time because I don’t regard myself as a professional astronomer. I was a PhD student for four years, but apart from that I’ve been a professional musician and an amateur astronomer.” Of course, Patrick holds Brian in rather higher regard as an astronomer, and Chris admits that scientists have cited papers written by Brian on his PhD research more than his own.

Aside from their mutual respect for each other as astronomers, Brian believes he and Patrick have a lot in common. “We’re both public figures, and public figures have a strange kind of life. There are people who love and respect you, and there are people who really want to make fun of you and put you down. But I don’t think either of us take the high praise or the bad stuff seriously – I think we share that,” Brian says. “Obviously we share a love of music as well. I think Patrick’s compositions are very good and he’s rather underestimated,” he adds on
a lighter note.

A meeting of minds
Still, how did a rock star and an 83-year-old TV astronomer come to meet? “We first met many years ago, when I was in the infrared astronomy department at Imperial College London doing my PhD in zodiacal light. Patrick came to see Professor Jim Ring, who was my supervisor. I said ‘hello’, but I was just a research student and Patrick was a very important man, so there wasn’t much in the way of conversation,” he says. Brian goes on to tell me they didn’t become friends until much later, and due to completely different circumstances.

“One of my best friends is Dirk Maggs, who has spent a lot of his life creating radio dramas and documentaries for the BBC. In 1996 he wrote a fictional story called Independence Day UK and put Patrick in playing himself. So it was really Dirk who re-introduced Patrick and I.”

In the meantime, Brian had found fame with Queen, leaving behind his PhD studies unfinished. “It was just something I had to do, there was no doubt in my mind,” he says “I knew that if we didn’t jump into the boiling pot and devote ourselves at that point, then the opportunity would just disappear.”

With three years of work on his PhD already done, this probably came as a shock to his supervisors, Professor Ring and Dr Ken Reay. But the warning signs had been there; Queen played several small gigs at Imperial College, and Brian tirelessly practised his guitar playing on observing trips. “I remember buying a nice little acoustic guitar in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, and I used to play it up the mountain in Spain, where we were observing. I think Ken thought it was quite funny: he had a sly little smile on his face that said obviously you’ll never get anywhere,” he says.

But Queen were going places and Brian was feeling the strain of juggling his music and PhD commitments. “My work was always done at night because I had so much on my plate. But this made me a little bit separate from the rest of the department who kept normal office hours. I was doing the work, but I was becoming a little bit on the edge.”

In July 1973, Queen released their eponymous debut album and by March 1974 the band were starting their first headline tour in the UK. It was around this time that Brian decided to abandon his studies. Even after leaving his PhD, though, Brian retained his interest in astronomy. Not very rock ’n’ roll, you might think. “I haven’t lived the stereotypical life of a rock star,” Brian admits. “I’ve never wanted to just be a rock star; it’s somehow not me. So I’ve kept in touch with astronomy and I enjoy it.” Sadly, the terrible light pollution in the major cities Queen toured made observing on the road impossible. But back at his home in Surrey, Brian has a 12-inch Meade telescope tucked away in an observatory he designed. However, he says he still does most of his observing with the 4-inch refractor he built as a child with his dad.

“If I see something and there’s a rare moment when the sky is fabulous, the quickest thing to do is just to pull the little telescope out,” Brian tells me. “I think it went through my mind that I wouldn’t need it anymore once I got the big telescope, but I really do. I still get a lot of pleasure out of that original 4-inch scope.”

Moreover, Brian is currently revisiting his PhD thesis that came so close to completion back in the ’70s. Dr Reay believes it was good enough to award him the doctorate had he completed a few minor changes before Queen took over his time.

“Before the tour we’ve just done I started looking for the typed version of my thesis and couldn’t find it,” Brian says. “But in a way I think it was fortuitous because I’m now re-typing it from the handwritten notes, which is enabling me to really get back into it and understand it.”

Brian plans to submit his thesis to the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, who were partners in his PhD research. He’s not doing this for the title ‘Dr’ though; he already has that, from an honorary degree of Doctor of Science given to him by the University of Hertfordshire. “I don’t like unfinished ends,” he explains. “And this is an opportunity to bring it up to date with new observations. I’m hoping I can make it something really useful.”

The light fantastic
All these years later, zodiacal light – a faint glow in the night sky due to sunlight being scattered by dust in the Solar System, and the subject of his PhD – still fascinates Brian. “Sometimes when you step back from a piece of research you can see it in much broader terms. I’ve actually managed to find out much more about the history of zodiacal light observations. And it has become something of a trendy area recently because zodiacal clouds are being found around other stars,” he says. In fact, Patrick and Brian have been discussing doing a Sky at Night programme on the subject. If it happens, this won’t be the first time regular viewers of the show will have seen Brian on the programme: he has appeared on numerous shows, including the 1999 eclipse special and the 2004 transit of Venus episode.

And he has been a regular viewer himself since he was a boy. “I used to beg my parents to let me stay up and watch it. Luckily, they indulged me. I was absolutely captivated from the moment those strains of Pelléas And Mélisande struck up,” Brian tells me. There aren’t many people who could name that tune…

So, can we expect more books from Brian? “We all breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was done, but I think we immediately felt a sense of emptiness because we had enjoyed the process. So at the launch party we did start talking about the sequel,” he chuckles. How do you follow the history of the Universe, though? “We’ll have to see. Whether there is life elsewhere in the Universe is something that continues to interest us because we disagreed so much about it when we came to cover it in the book. I think we all have the feeling we’d like to delve further into this area.”

Reprinted by kind permission of Bristol Magazines Ltd:
The Sky At Night Magazine

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