Quotes by Martin Rees

About Martin Rees:

Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can't-afford-it attitude.

Martin Rees

There's now, for the first time, a huge gulf between the artefacts of our everyday life and what even a single expert, let alone the average child, can comprehend. The gadgets that now pervade young people's lives, iPhones and suchlike, are baffling ...

Martin Rees

[The fine structure constant] ... defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodi...

Martin Rees

The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

Martin Rees

The Blair government perhaps ranks as the best the U.K. has had for 50 years. It cannot match the scale of Attlee's reforms, but has a fine record of constitutional reform and economic competence. In my own areas - science and innovation - there have...

Martin Rees

Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly...

Martin Rees

The 'clean energy' challenge deserves a commitment akin to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.

Martin Rees

The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.

Martin Rees

From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

Martin Rees

During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, ...

Martin Rees

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.

Martin Rees

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

Martin Rees

Ironically, it is only when disaster strikes that the shuttle makes the headlines. Its routine flights attracted less media interest than unmanned probes to the planets or the images from the Hubble Telescope. The fate of Columbia (like that of Chall...

Martin Rees

Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

Martin Rees

When scientists are asked what they are working on, their response is seldom 'Finding the origin of the universe' or 'Seeking to cure cancer.' Usually, they will claim to be tackling a very specific problem - a small piece of the jigsaw that builds u...

Martin Rees

There are strong reasons for believing that space goes on beyond the limits of our observational horizon. There are strong reasons because if you look in opposite directions, conditions are the same to within one part in 100,000. So if we are part of...

Martin Rees

There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.

Martin Rees

I'm not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.

Martin Rees

I've got no religious beliefs at all.

Martin Rees

Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

Martin Rees

Author Bio

  • NameMartin Rees
  • DescriptionBritish cosmologist
  • BornJune 23, 1942
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPhysicist; Astronomer; Politician
  • AwardsFellow Of The Royal Society; UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal; Albert Einstein World Award Of Science; Templeton Prize; Balzan Prize; Crafoord Prize