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Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
Watch and share interviews with professors, lecturers, researchers, engineers, scientists and astronauts, right here! We talk to the most extraordinary people working on the frontiers for humanity, driving research forwards and changing the world that we live in. We dive deep with thinkers, academics and true icons - many of whom you won't yet have heard of.
Listen to us here and on podcast whilst you drive, exercise, do chores, and be inspired to pursue extraordinary in your own life.
www.sam-mckee.co.uk
Polymath World (00:01.024)
Hello and welcome to the Polymath World Channel and we're diving deep into the history of astronomy today with someone I've had the pleasure of working with a few times, Simon Mitten who is a life fellow of St Edmunds College at Cambridge, a historian of astronomy, a biographer, a fellow of three royal societies, the only person I've ever met to hold that accolade. Simon, it's wonderful to join with you today and talk about your amazing career and the incredible people you've had the opportunity to write about.
Dr Simon Mitton (00:30.51)
I'm really pleased that you'll find me interesting and I hope I can help you there. Go on.
Polymath World (00:38.56)
So you're a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Historical Society, and is it the Royal Geographical Society?
Dr Simon Mitton (00:44.109)
Yes.
Yes? No, it is not royal, it's the fellow of the geological society. Yeah. No. No. I haven't come across anyone else who's got that hand of three. There are quite a few fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society who are also fellows of the Royal Historical Society. I try not to say hysterical society.
Polymath World (00:51.158)
Geological society. Not geographical. Apologies for getting that wrong. Well, I'm-
Polymath World (01:14.294)
Yes, I suppose being in Cambridge, the two almost go hand in hand because there's such a rich, extraordinary history on your doorstep there of so much of what has made our understanding of astronomy and how it's impacted the world. And you've had a real privileged seat for much of it in the 20th in particular.
Dr Simon Mitton (01:36.782)
Yes, I've been in Cambridge for a long time. I came to Cambridge in 1968 as a doctoral student to work in Martin Ryle's radio astronomy group in the Cavendish Laboratory. Prior to that I had studied physics at Trinity College Oxford.
I'd like to say even today I took the precaution of getting properly educated before I came to the Fens.
Polymath World (02:08.053)
Yes, yeah quite a risque thing to be batting for both teams and Yes, you're a life you're a life fellow of st. Edmunds College so
Dr Simon Mitton (02:13.08)
Yeah, that's right.
Dr Simon Mitton (02:18.38)
Yes.
This is how that came about. I did my doctorate in radio astronomy mixing with people like Ryle, Tony Hewish, Jocelyn Bell and so on. Also, I used to go to some of the advanced mathematics classes in the Department of Applied Maths and it's there that I first came across people like Paul Dirac. I attended his class.
quantum mechanics in the last year he gave them and also Stephen Hawking who was a fellow in the department. After I got my PhD I was a postdoc at Fred Hoyle's Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. Now unfortunately I had only been there for a few months and he resigned. I don't know whether it was something I said but...
He resigned and I was one of several people who was then looking for a lifeboat because we were floating on soft money that Fred brought in and he resigned over the issue that the soft money was coming to an end and the university wouldn't replace it with hard cash.
I was very lucky because when the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy was merged with the Cambridge Observatories, I was offered the position of departmental manager. And I did that for a few years. Now that was important for my next career because every summer we had a large conference.
Dr Simon Mitton (04:14.478)
of theoretical astronomers coming to Cambridge and working in the Institute of Astronomy. I was responsible for looking after their accommodation and all that sort of thing. And so over a period of five years, I got to know an incredible number of astronomers, astrophysicists, theorists.
you name it, that came to Cambridge in the summer. And when I was at the Institute, I also, with the encouragement of the director, I began to branch out into book writing for the general public. That was, I began to, I began to branch, yeah.
So at the Institute of Astronomy, as it was then, I started into some popular science in the quiet times during my job as a departmental manager. And so my first book,
exploring the galaxies. This was published in 1972 and that set me going. The publisher of that quickly came along and said, can you do a book like that on the Crab Nebula? And I said, no, there's too many people out there who want to write books on pulsars and the Crab Nebula. But I said, what I can offer you is
a book about the sun. And so my next book was Daytime Star. And thus it went on. In 1976-77, as an activity of the department, I put together and organized the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.
Dr Simon Mitton (06:20.43)
and that sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 12 languages. That led to a phone call, Cambridge University Press, asking me if I could possibly pencil something in for my diary to come down and see us over a cup of coffee. Yeah, okay. So I pedaled down there.
and what happened next is they offered me a position as a senior editor in the physical sciences responsible for in theory, not just physics but earth sciences, the physical sciences generally. And when I arrived there,
I found that there were three astronomy books in the list. Just three. One was by Sir Arthur Eddington. Another one was was SMART's Spherical Astronomy. And another one was a book by James Jeans. I, well this is rather, this is rather extraordinary.
Polymath World (07:44.691)
Wow.
Dr Simon Mitton (07:48.544)
This is Cambridge University Press. There's all these incredibly bright people here. And this is the list. Three books by three people, long deceased. So I was absolutely able to hit the ground running on that in doing commissioning. To start with, using all my contacts.
Polymath World (07:57.034)
That's something of a travesty. Yes.
Polymath World (08:02.983)
Yes.
Dr Simon Mitton (08:16.174)
in the Institute of Astronomy. I can give you an example. This is the first serious monograph that I commissioned. you see there's a bit of a puzzle there because it says edited by C. Hazard and S. Mitten.
I had the idea for that particular book before I joined the press. That was one of my quick hits saying to them, next Friday I've got a proposal of something we can publish. It was all such a lot of fun. I had a fantastic time.
as a publisher at Cambridge University Press and I wouldn't have missed any of it. enjoyed the whole lot and the phenomenal opportunities for travel. I made, in a period of 22 years, I made 110 trips to the United States of America.
Polymath World (09:40.287)
Wow.
Dr Simon Mitton (09:40.558)
to attend editorial meetings in the New York office of Cambridge University Press, but much more important than that, visiting universities with large and small astronomy departments, theorists, physicists. In that time, I lived in the United States for three and a half years without living there.
Polymath World (10:08.789)
You
Dr Simon Mitton (10:09.516)
Okay. And I clocked up a total of 36 states in which I had spent at least one night in a hotel. So...
Quite often when you talk to Americans, how many states have you visited? It's phenomenal how many of them include going to a place called Four Corners, you can stand in four states simultaneously. That's why I set myself the rule that you've got to a state overnight. Driving through on Route 66 doesn't count. I've done that as well actually, but that doesn't count.
Polymath World (10:53.396)
Night.
Dr Simon Mitton (10:56.59)
You
Polymath World (10:56.949)
You've had a really terrific career and I feel like you've had a front row seat for one of the glory periods of astronomy. We had the pleasure of talking to Martin Rees recently on this channel and I asked him about this because in the Institute of Astronomy there's this famous class photo where you have a very young Stephen Hawking, very young Martin Rees and many other figures who people would have heard of.
in this large class photo. And that was the period when you were doing your PhD, your postdoc, and then at Cambridge, while all this stuff was going on, I mean, you mentioned radio astronomy, the cosmic microwave background had only recently been discovered. And so you're there during this incredible bubbling time. What was it like?
Dr Simon Mitton (11:33.1)
Yes.
Dr Simon Mitton (11:50.638)
It was very stimulating and just an incredible thing to be witnessing. I wasn't in a position to contribute to any of that directly, but because I got my second career of being a science writer going, just being there at that time is what
what established my reputation, myself and John Gribbin and Nigel Henvest. I mean the three of us had a period in the late 70s and into the 80s of being among the leading science writers.
on astronomy and cosmology in the country. So that was the excitement I got from it. yeah, I witnessed a lot of interesting stuff.
Polymath World (12:56.627)
You are.
Polymath World (13:00.723)
I'm sure. I feel like you're intersecting three different points. You're there at the tail end of Jirak's generation. And you're then in the thick of it, the peak period where you have everyone from Stephen Hawking and Reese, but also that's Richard Feynman's generation, I kind of think, of the 60s and 70s. And then the latter end, sort of the 90s, when you're really writing way,
Dr Simon Mitton (13:10.392)
Correct. Yes.
Dr Simon Mitton (13:23.33)
Yes.
Polymath World (13:30.389)
The Hubble Space Telescope is out and there's massive advances in everything from the kind of instruments that you use to the kind of discoveries that are being made. And you're sort of intersecting these three different chapters.
Dr Simon Mitton (13:45.218)
Yes, I mean what's going on in the 90s is I'm building up the astronomy list at Cambridge University Press from three books by three long deceased people into a vast publishing programme.
of many books a year from outstanding people of all ages and seriously putting Cambridge University Press on the map eventually ahead of other university presses and second only to the big continental houses like
like Springer, who have a different model. They have always been what in the trade we call content aggregators, whereas university presses do not have the capital to do that sort of thing. Their capital is the people in the universities.
Polymath World (14:57.267)
Now you've been the biographer for some very, very big important names, some of you you've mentioned. I'd love to ask you about Fred Hoyle and your work on his life. What makes him such a fascinating individual and your biography on him?
Dr Simon Mitton (15:17.27)
Okay, so when I took early retirement from Cambridge University Press, because I wanted to move away from publishing and back into mainstream pure research in the University of Cambridge, which I was able to do because I'd got my position at St Edmunds College as a fellow. So I didn't need to go begging to any university department and say, excuse me, can you
me an affiliate. I decided to do Fred because I knew him very well and all of his papers had recently become available in the library at St John's College.
So there was this huge amount of stuff which nobody had worked on. And that's how it all began.
Dr Simon Mitton (16:30.744)
Fred was an ideal person to choose as the first one of whom I would do a biography because I knew so much about him and I knew all the people he'd argued with. I I think I'm the only person who at one time was...
as it were, in Martin Ryle's department and then the next day I was a postdoc in Fred's department. course, this caused some astonishment in the radio astronomy group at the time. Fred is a fascinating character for a biography because he was a controversialist.
Polymath World (17:19.252)
Yes.
Dr Simon Mitton (17:19.686)
And that, I mean, I wrote that book 25 years ago, and that's the important pivot in the entire book. And the book isn't written as the progress of a hero.
as a controversialist, not just over well-known things like the steady state theory, but who should be in charge of the university? Who in the university is deciding what money is going to be spent where? So yeah, on absolutely everything he was controversial, not because he wanted to be irritating.
but because he was curious and he was incredibly creative and his mind was always fizzing with ideas. you know, what could be better than doing the biography of such a person given that I had no experience of doing that kind of work? The way in which I express it is because of the archive in St John's College.
My biography is...
Here it is, still in print. My biography is in the biographical style where you get the person to be doing most of the talking and the storytelling in the book.
Polymath World (18:45.535)
Terrific.
Polymath World (19:08.821)
Now whoops.
Dr Simon Mitton (19:10.156)
Yeah, so my.
My approach to the biography was to get Fred doing the talking. The simple way of doing that is to go through all the correspondence and the letters and the notebooks and then write a book in which you've got lots and lots of quotations. And I rejected that because I thought for a popular book in a large market...
That's just a terrible approach. Because actually, if you think about it, the reader is being asked to do quite a lot of work. So I wove all the stuff into a neutral narrative. And narrative in which I give a lot of background, context, the sort of...
Who else is out there in the hinterland? Who are the other people this week who are taking notice of Fred and think he's wrong? So you get the picture.
Polymath World (20:17.949)
Yes. There's just a magnificent mind and very combative. I feel like it's similar with Eddington in that a terrific mind contributed a great bit but known quite popularly for being on the wrong side of certain debates. With Eddington it was the Chandra Seeker and Black Hole's affair. With Fred Hoyle it was the Big Bang. So...
What do you consider to be Fred's greatest achievements and greatest landmark?
Dr Simon Mitton (20:51.766)
Without question, his greatest achievement was a paper published in 1946, which was nothing whatsoever to do with general relativity and expanding or contracting or stationary universes. This was a key paper on the origin of the chemical elements in which he explained how by starting with carbon
and adding alpha particles, essentially helium nuclei, you could build up the elements as far as iron. And that's the greatest thing he did. And that then went on to a famous paper called B squared F H, published in 1957 by...
Margaret Burbage, Jeff Burbage, Willie Fowler and Fred Hoyle and that's been the great foundation of the origin of the element so ever since.
Dr Simon Mitton (22:07.054)
So, more recently, I've stopped giving talks on Fred and the steady state theory because the steady state theory was in the 1940s and that's an incredibly long time ago for people born in the 21st century, you know, when I was doing...
first getting interested in these things as a teenager, I'd got no interest at all in what people had done 70 years in the past. so I've got a couple of talks which I'm about to give in which the whole context of these talks is that the enduring work which Hoyle did was on the origin of the chemical elements.
the periodic table.
Polymath World (23:05.981)
Yeah, outstanding contribution. It's hard to imagine a time before it was known with many of these things. But then the first half of the 20th century of astronomy is very much learning a lot of elementary things that were a complete mystery beforehand, sort of the structure of stars and how they behave and their life cycle. But then it seems like the second half of the 20th century is such a rapid development with this golden generation. You mentioned Martin Ryle, who you had the
Dr Simon Mitton (23:10.68)
You
Polymath World (23:35.753)
pleasure of studying under. You've written a biography of him as well.
Dr Simon Mitton (23:42.954)
I've done fragments on Martin. Martin's a very difficult person to write a biography. There isn't a lot of material, although his papers are all in one of college, although all his papers are in Churchill College, Cambridge.
It's all very much a matter of fact stuff and minutes of committees and that kind of thing.
I've done pieces on Martin where I'm comparing Martin, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and other people, showing them in the midst of their...
conflicting theories and ideas in the 1950s and the 1960s. Martin was a very interesting case because he read physics at Oxford.
Then he professionally, he was working on radio engineering. He started in Cambridge on a doctorate to do with the propagation of radio waves. Then he had to do his war service. He found the war service incredibly traumatic. In some ways, he never recovered from it.
Polymath World (25:26.569)
show.
Dr Simon Mitton (25:31.63)
And the controversy between Martin and Fred, if I can put it simply, there were two kinds of controversies. One was the controversy between an experimenter and observer and a reducer of data on the one hand.
and on the other hand, the person who wanted that data in order to construct theories of how the world works. Martin wouldn't really do early release on any of this stuff. In those days, nobody did. If the 1960s, doing scientific research with graduate students, you didn't leak stuff out.
halfway through because these people had got to get their doctorates. So that was one of the things about Martin. The other was that as an engineer, his understanding of astrophysics was very limited, so he got into a great big argument with Fred.
quite unnecessarily actually, about whether these strong radio sources were a new kind of star or distant galaxies. Anyway, that was an interesting period for me to go through and these days, half a century later,
Polymath World (26:53.877)
Hmm.
Dr Simon Mitton (27:02.67)
I'm quite informed by all of that in terms of writing about the people in the middle of the 20th century and Why was it that everything was so difficult? Well, there are are there are little expressions of this one is that in the in the 19th in the 1970s
Observational cosmology became a search for two numbers, know, the speed at which the universe is expanding and the distance scale. Cosmology, actually, until the very end of the 20th century, is a data-poor scientific endeavor.
Polymath World (27:55.754)
Yes, we were talking with Martin Rees about this. are just, there are tools and there's now ways of getting data that there just weren't there before. so it's, it's, look, looking at students at the Institute of Astronomy today, that there's so much data available to them, so much data that they're working with. I think it helps you appreciate the, magnitude of the work done by people like Fred Hoyle and Martin Rao before that time.
Dr Simon Mitton (28:04.599)
Yeah.
Polymath World (28:25.407)
what they were able to accomplish.
Dr Simon Mitton (28:27.16)
Yeah, yeah. Of course, another of the people I worked with in these controversial times was Stephen Hawking. I first came across him...
in the middle of the 1970s when I was the graduate manager of the Institute of Astronomy because Stephen by then was a half-time professor in the Institute of Astronomy. So he used to work his mornings in the mathematics department and his afternoons in the astronomy department.
And for obvious reasons there needed to be somebody on hand who would be dealing with helping him out of his car and settling him in the office. I remember funny things. In the afternoons I was responsible for giving him his medication or making sure he took it. There we are.
Polymath World (29:32.255)
Wow.
Dr Simon Mitton (29:32.384)
interesting times. And then some pool, 15 years later, when I was I'd been working for the press for quite a long time, I kept in touch with Stephen all the time. He asked me to go round and have a look at a typescript. This was an early draft of what became a brief history of time.
I looked through him and I looked through it and I could immediately see that there was a big problem. I told him what the problem was. There was another draft and I said the problem is still there Stephen. And then the third time we had a meeting I said to him Stephen.
you must not have this calculus in which you've got dy by dt and you've got integrals. And he said, he said, well, why not? My kids understand all of this. He said it's taught in the sixth form. It's just ordinary maths, not a big deal. And...
Polymath World (30:42.165)
you
Dr Simon Mitton (30:53.834)
So we were arguing about 22 equations and it was a matter of principle for him that, you know, I'm a great theorist, he didn't say that, the great theorist who's feeling I want to share the beauty of these equations with other people and that was what it was all about. So on about the fourth time I went to see him,
Polymath World (31:12.713)
Right.
Dr Simon Mitton (31:22.71)
He's still not willing to do this. I said to him, look, Stephen, as you know, I'm a director of science publishing at Cambridge University Press. I know what I'm talking about. Where do you want this book to be on sale?
that's easy, Simon. It has to be on sale in the airport bookshop in every large airport throughout the world so that people will pick it up just as they are boarding their flight because they've only got a few minutes and the flight's going to close. I said, right, now I understand. said, well, let me tell you how those people behave. I said...
The gates closing, they've got two minutes. They go into the bookshop, they look for stuff that catches their eye. If something catches their eye, they'll pick it up and they'll just flick it. And they're just looking at what does the page look like? Is this the kind of book I might like to read on this flight to Chicago? And I said the moment they see one of those equations, you're finished. Every equation halves the market.
Polymath World (32:30.929)
I'm
I wish that could have been a
Dr Simon Mitton (32:35.582)
Absolutely did it and in the in the in the author's preface of a brief history of time right at the end He just says she just says a publisher told me that every equation halves of the market But I've left one of them in e equals MC squared actually that made the marketing even better
Polymath World (32:57.237)
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that. That's incredible. Well, you're one of the few people who's won an argument with Stephen Hawking then.
Dr Simon Mitton (33:00.494)
Dr Simon Mitton (33:07.673)
yeah.
Yeah.
Polymath World (33:11.903)
Well, you have an upcoming release to celebrate the centenary of George LaMettra's famous paper translated into English by Eddington. To mark the centenary of that, you're releasing a biography of George LaMettra. Incredible man, incredible history.
Dr Simon Mitton (33:20.15)
Yeah.
Dr Simon Mitton (33:30.03)
I'm still working on it at the moment. I've got quite a way to go, but yeah.
Polymath World (33:35.317)
Well, I know you can't give us all the goodies here and now, but tell us a little bit about your work on Lemaître and why he's so interesting.
Dr Simon Mitton (33:46.166)
Okay, so Lemaitre is the first person. So, Lemaitre is actually the second person to find a solution to Einstein's equations when applied to the whole universe, which allows the possibility that the universe might expand or contract. The first person,
I'm trying to be too specific. Let me start again. Lemaître is very interesting indeed because he is the first to publish a solution to Einstein's equations which demonstrates that it is possible, in theory as they say, that the universe could expand or contract.
Whereas Einstein, for example, no less, favored a standstill static universe. So it's with Lemaitre's paper that people first start to look at this and think, there anything in it?
Dr Simon Mitton (35:06.753)
The paper was published in 1927 in a journal published in Brussels by the National Scientific Society of Belgium in French.
absolutely nothing happened. And the situation was rescued by Eddington in late 1930 when he arranged for a translation of this to be published by the Royal Astronomical Society and Lemaître's reputation then never looked back. In the 1930s
He was among the most celebrated theorists in the world, particularly by newspapers in the United States.
and is very attractive as the person who was a theorist on the origin of the universe and was a diocesan priest in Belgium. So this led to lots of interesting things in his day about is there conflict between science and religion.
and that continued until probably the late 1940s. then people had stopped quoting La Maitre and for
Dr Simon Mitton (36:51.342)
something like 25 years until the cosmic microwave background there was very little interest in the in the matrix work and then it all took then it all takes off again and got another boost
with the discovery at the beginning of the Pleasant century that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. So, Lemaitre is again a really interesting person for a biography because there's no sort of straight direct path of, you know, the hero who goes to the right school meets the right people.
And of course the big job he ended up with was becoming president of the Vatican Academy of Sciences. So that's a very rich story.
Polymath World (37:55.584)
But he did have quite a brush with the Pope, didn't he? He was quite opposed to people jumping on his discoveries as a proof of God. Is that correct?
Dr Simon Mitton (38:06.318)
That's absolutely correct. You're talking about Pius XII. There was a big meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Rome.
Dr Simon Mitton (38:30.316)
those big assemblies occur, it's usual for a head of state or a minister of the government to give an opening talk. So getting the Pope to do it from the Vatican rather than whoever was running Italy at the time. That was a great thing. What happened was that the Pope's advisors
were very keen on the whole idea that there were elements of overlap between Lemaître's scientific statements and the book of Genesis.
and Lumetra became really really worried because one of the advisors has said this opening speech is going to be, you know, a priest has discovered the real evidence for Genesis and it didn't lead to a falling out. Lumetra was listened to and
and the speech was changed. of course, Le Maitre went on to become president of the Vatican Academy. But yeah, very interesting.
Polymath World (40:05.493)
Yes, it's phenomenal and when you were, I was mindful when you were talking about Ryle and Hoyle that an incredible amount of fruitfulness has come out of conflict in these disagreements seem to have accelerated discovery in some very, very helpful ways. There's lots you could point to. I mean, you even mentioned James Jeans and Arthur Eddington. I mean, they went at it.
like like wildcats you know it was very explosive you have stories in the history of astronomy about a royal astronomical society meetings going on until two three o'clock in the morning still being full with people arguing
Dr Simon Mitton (40:44.429)
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not like that anymore actually so social media and the internet and the cloud Have just have just completely changed all that kind of thing however, let me let me make a very general point Sam which is
Polymath World (40:51.677)
No.
Dr Simon Mitton (41:08.78)
Historians try to take care when writing about conflict.
of not overdoing it, especially when we're talking about university people, because if we go back to the Greek concept of the symposium, and that's a word we use all the time, the whole idea of that was that people would share different ideas and they would criticize each other.
and learn from each other. Some of the really big famous conflicts have actually been conflicts which have been driven by power. So with Galileo...
You've got the whole business of the power of the church. In Galileo's time, the church is an enormous secular world power with an army and all kinds of things, diplomacy. Theology is only a small part of what they were dealing with.
Polymath World (42:25.621)
Yes, of course, we forget that because we bring our own context to how we read history. Of course, you're particularly close to Lemaître's history because Lemaître did stay at St Edmunds College for a short while, didn't he? Where you are now a Life Fellow, so you have a much closer connection to him.
Dr Simon Mitton (42:31.67)
Yes. Yeah.
Dr Simon Mitton (42:40.738)
Yes.
Dr Simon Mitton (42:48.482)
Well, very close. see, in something like 28, 29, John Barrow, now deceased, said to me, Simon, you're at St Edmunds. Now, when La Maître was in Cambridge for eight months,
Where did he stay? And I said to him, well actually we don't know. But there are two places he could have stayed. The great big Catholic Church in the centre of Cambridge. Or he could have stayed at St Edmund's House, which was a designated residence for Roman Catholics doing degrees at Cambridge. Now, history.
You can't do history based on myth, things that are generally accepted. We don't do that in history. We need the proof. One of my colleagues found the proof in the college archives. We know the date on which he arrived.
in 1923 and the date on which he left in 1924. Now, so having got the hard evidence that then gave me the opportunity to start doing research on Eddington, sorry, that gave me the incentive to start doing research on Lemaitre.
And I gradually built up a story of what he was doing in Cambridge. I found good sources. And I've moved it on from there. But it was the fact that he was, as we would say today, an alumnus of the college that gave me the incentive to do the work. that connects with much of what I've done.
Dr Simon Mitton (45:01.518)
You know with Hoyle the fact that I knew him made Made a difference also work. I've done about Thomas Gold for instance. I knew I knew Tommy And so that's my style of that's my style of work of working We a good example of that is
Polymath World (45:20.245)
Hmm.
Dr Simon Mitton (45:29.678)
this recently Published book on Vera Rubin. My Jacqueline Mitten was the main author on that But Vera Rubin is now so revered There's been a 25 cent coin quarter released in enormous numbers by the US Mint So, yeah
Polymath World (45:52.532)
Yes, I just went through Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin's biography. And again, a glorious period in astronomy at Cambridge that had a huge knock on effects there. Just...
Dr Simon Mitton (45:58.328)
Yeah.
Dr Simon Mitton (46:08.032)
Is that one entitled The Dyer's Hand?
Polymath World (46:12.07)
No, it's what stars are made of.
Dr Simon Mitton (46:15.07)
right, okay. Go ahead.
Polymath World (46:17.205)
Just finally, I'd love to get your thoughts on the history of astronomy now, given that the last decade has seen the first recording of gravitational waves. We have the James Webb telescope. There's been the DESI project has told us a huge amount about dark energy. We're in us. I was talking to Martin Rees about this, saying we're kind of in a new
Dr Simon Mitton (46:40.599)
Yeah.
Polymath World (46:46.395)
explosive period, sort of revolutionary period in astronomy. What are you most excited about going forwards?
Dr Simon Mitton (46:48.451)
Yes.
Dr Simon Mitton (46:55.31)
I am excited about the whole concept of having humongous amounts of reliable data because it has always been the case in cosmology that it is the data
which secures each step forward. A fancy new idea or a new kind of mathematics is no more than a pointer. It's the data that anchors you.
Polymath World (47:26.409)
Yes, very well said. If people want to find out more about you or if people want to find your books, where can they go?
Dr Simon Mitton (47:40.377)
The Fred Hoyle book, the Vera Rubin book, these are available over the internet easily and that's way to do it, know, Amazon.
Polymath World (47:56.445)
Excellent. And everyone keep an eye out for the George Lemaître Centenary in a couple of years.
Dr Simon Mitton (48:04.096)
Indeed, indeed, Which reminds me... I need to get on with that right now.
Polymath World (48:13.557)
Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Mitten. It's always a pleasure to chat to you. It's always so interesting digging into the history and thank you for your time today.
Dr Simon Mitton (48:17.698)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr Simon Mitton (48:24.408)
Good, okay, well, talk to you any time soon if you wish. Bye now.