Did you know that Brian May -- Queen's lead guitarist -- is an astrophysicist? Queen has disbanded, Freddie Mercury is dead, but May still rocks out with other bands today. Well, Sir Brian May, CBE, PhD also loves watching stars and writing books about them. This one is a bestseller:
Brian May is so cool and is such a geek he even builds his own guitars.
And then... I stumbled on another cool Brian that rocks in a band and rocks as a physicist too. That's Brian Cox. He used to be in a band called D:Ream. Today he is a full-time working physicist and university lecturer, so obviously all that couldn't accommodate D:Ream's tour sched. Here's his book, which bookslut says was a pretty good read:
Brian Cox's major gig these days is the Atlas section of the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is where they collide hadrons, accelerate protons and what-not to simulate conditions right after the Big Bang a.k.a the birth of the universe. Wow, huh?
I talk about this not because I am some science geek. Hardly. I just seriously enjoyed this TED Talk where Brian Cox does a bang up haha lame pun job explaining the Hadron Collider. He explains so simply and eloquently how particle physics is all about learning what everything is made of and how everything sticks together... and why that's important.
The likes of Sarah Palin won't like him though and may believe there is "demonry" involved in the LHC.... because one day it just may tell us the physics behind the story of creation. Or to me it could show God as The Ultimate Physicist. Whatever. That's just how significant those colliding hadrons are somewhere beneath the Franco-Swiss Border. In my limited knowledge of science, Cox's talk kind of blew my mind.
Precocious grade schoolers and high schoolers starting to tackle Newton's Laws should get something out of this little Physics lesson from Prof. Brian Cox. On a more shallow note, a way of showing them that look... cool rockers dig science. Geeks rock! Literally.
