Martin Rees: Early life

Chris Smith met up with Martin Rees at his Cambridge home to hear about his life's work...

Martin - Well, I was very lucky because I grew up in this village in the South Shropshire Hills - beautiful natural world. My parents were teachers and I was sent away to boarding school (which wasn't quite so happy) when I was 13. But I was very well taught and I did get into Cambridge and I read mathematics. I wish actually I'd done a broader curriculum at university because, when I got to university, I realised I wasn't quite the same as other geeky people doing mathematics in that I like to think in a more synthetic or synoptic way. I became a research student in 1964, and that's when quasars had just been discovered, the evidence for the Big Bang from the radiation, the so-called afterglow of creation and lots of other exciting things and theoretical work by Hawking and Penrose on Black Holes was being done. Advice I would still give to any young person starting is, if you pick a subject, pick something where new things are happening and then the experience of the old guys is at a heavy discount and you can immediately make an impact. Don't go into some sterile subject because then you'll be trying to do the problems the old guys got stuck on.

Chris - Do you think then you got lucky with the subject? Did you have some foresight? Because you've said to me, go and pick something that's an exciting, emerging, evolving area. That is current. Don't get stuck on the old stuff. Did it find you or did you already have that view and therefore you were seeking out that kind of thing and you were able to say - well, I'm good at maths. I've got the kind of mind that would suit this, that's where I'm headed.

Martin - It was really just luck rather than careful planning. I had decided I didn't really want to pursue mathematics as a career. I liked the idea of something academic. I thought quite seriously about economics because I had some good friends who had defected from maths to economics and did very well as economists. I might have tried to follow that route and I might have been happy if I'd done that too, but I was very lucky to get a place as a graduate student in Dennis Sciama's group. And it was luck because some other person who'd got the job in preference to me dropped out, and so I just managed to get my position as a graduate student.

Chris - What was going on in Dennis Sciama's domain that really drew you in and what did you think were the areas that were going to be the exciting ones to pursue?

Martin - Well, I realised that I liked a style of thinking where you try to make sense of something from limited information rather than doing complicated deductive reasoning like in mathematics - a bit like engineering where you try to make something that works from given specifications. We had these objects that are very bright, flashing away, which we now think are massive black holes in the centre of galaxies, which are called quasars, and I wrote some papers trying to understand that sort of thing and also to understand the expanding universe where the idea of an evolving universe was a fairly new one. I think it was a style of thinking that I quite enjoyed. I mentioned Dennis Sciama. He was very plugged into what was going on in all these fields, and he'd come in excitedly every day with some new preprint for the new paper he'd been sent and circulated. He had students like Stephen Hawking, who was two years ahead of me, and he told those students to go and listen to Roger Penrose in London who had exciting new ideas. They duly did and followed them up spectacularly. He was someone who exemplified that you can be a great coach without being a great player. He didn't do any amazing science himself, but he was an enthusiast and he inspired us all, a whole group in Cambridge, and then he moved to Oxford in the 1970s where, again, he had an equally strong stable of students there.