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A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud
In the summer and autumn of 2006 I read several interviews with Brian May in which he mentioned his desire to complete the PhD that he had abandoned in 1974. I looked up the papers he had published while a PhD student, which were on spectroscopic studies of the motion of the dust responsible for the zodiacal light, and felt that there was a basis for a thesis. Since he had been a student at Imperial, I knew, as Head of the Astrophysics Group at Imperial, that it would be good for the Group if he came and worked with us. I got in touch with him by email and suggested he come and talk about it. He replied enthusiastically and said that he was working on typing up what he had completed by 1974. I gradually realized that I was the only staff member at Imperial who had previously worked on zodiacal dust, so that I would have to act as his supervisor. Eventually we met and I tried to assess whether he would be able to find time for the huge amount of work that finishing off a thesis involves, particularly if it has not been touched for over 30 years. Since some of Brian’s emails were coming from the recording studio I knew there was strong competition for his time.
- GenresPhysics
237 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
47 people want to read
About the author
Brian May
86 books125 followersBrian Harold May, CBE (born 19 July 1947) is a British musician and astrophysicist most widely known as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen.
As a guitarist he uses his home built guitar, "Red Special", and has composed hits such as "Now I'm Here", "Tie Your Mother Down", "We Will Rock You", "Who Wants to Live Forever", "Hammer to Fall", "Save Me", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "I Want It All" and "Too Much Love Will Kill You".
May earned a PhD in astrophysics in 2007 and is currently the chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.
He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for "services to the music industry".
In 2005, a Planet Rock poll saw May voted the 7th greatest guitarist of all time. He was ranked 39th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time", reflecting the magazine's editorial opinion.
As a guitarist he uses his home built guitar, "Red Special", and has composed hits such as "Now I'm Here", "Tie Your Mother Down", "We Will Rock You", "Who Wants to Live Forever", "Hammer to Fall", "Save Me", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "I Want It All" and "Too Much Love Will Kill You".
May earned a PhD in astrophysics in 2007 and is currently the chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.
He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for "services to the music industry".
In 2005, a Planet Rock poll saw May voted the 7th greatest guitarist of all time. He was ranked 39th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time", reflecting the magazine's editorial opinion.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 8, 2015
I am currently taking a Honors Physics course and I was told to read a thesis paper. So, I picked this one, which is by Brian May(guitarist of Queen and physicist).
January 10, 2021
Maybe one of the most entertaining theses I have ever read. Clearly written by someone whose career wasn't dependent on it.
January 7, 2024
I skimmed this in 2018 and have finally read it cover to cover almost 6 years later, with the time in between spent listening to Queen on repeat. Brian May is probably the only man I would willingly read 256 pages of physics dissertation for and thoroughly enjoy it. Not only is he a rock legend and an incredible human being, but also brilliant at maths and physics. On a serious note, very impressive for him to return to research decades later and type out this tome again based on his 1970s HANDWRITTEN notes. More light-heartedly, this dissertation was certainly dense and a bit difficult (me being deeply unversed in physics) but also truly one of the most entertaining theses I've ever read, even if some pages did entirely fly over my head! His liberal use of exclamation points and wonderful asides makes it seem as if he's speaking to us on all kinds of Zodiacal Light-adjacent topics and humanities-related ponderings... Can clearly tell he has great and undying passion for ZL and astrophysics as well. Also, was quite excited to understand some of his calculus (LOL) and besides his conclusions on interplanetary dust, it was fascinating to see the development of the field over the course of nearly four decades. And finally, can't ignore mention of Brian's small side-gig that detracted him from dissertation-writing in the first place... just a small group called Queen taking over the globe and releasing all sorts of magic into the world!
A few of my favorite quotes/components of the dissertation below:
-Kansas "Dust in the Wind" epigraph
-"Fechtig et al (2004) allow that the Aztecs (16th Century) may be correctly credited with having noticed the ZL, and that there are possible references from the Chaldeans (600 B.C.) and the ancient Egyptians, but such occasional mentions are few indeed compared with the liberal scattering of allusions in art of all kinds to other heavenly manifestations (for example, the works of Shakespeare contain a virtual catalogue of atmospheric phenomena!)."
-His quoting of the Rubaiyat
-"Perhaps we can call it the “Lucky Find Syndrome” (LFS, for short, of course!)."
-"It is interesting to note that the era of space-borne observations of the interplanetary medium was just beginning, and at this stage, things were not going as well as might have been hoped!"
-"We can note in passing that the Doppler effect became a pillar of the evidence for the ‘Expanding Universe’ as we perceive it today."
-"My first observation was that, in keeping with the acronymic style of pigeon-holing now so universal, in which everything from espionage organisations, to diseases, to furniture warehouses, find themselves summed up in three letters, interplanetary dust particles are now referred to as 'IDP's."
-"It was the data gathered from the IRAS satellite in 1983 (while my rock group Queen was touring football stadia in South America)..."
-His point that the Zodiacal Light can no longer be thought of as smoothly symmetrical about the ecliptic plane (actually very interesting stuff!)
-"...the Gegenschein receives only four mentions, three in an (excellent) historical review, and one in the glossary."
-"This supports my proposition (sections 1.4.4 and 4.11) that radial velocity measurements may indicate a significant interstellar component in the dust which produces the optical Zodiacal Light."
-"...around the area of the break in the Zodiacal dust spectrum, the Galactic Interstellar Medium (ISM) and the DIRB near peak intensity, but beyond about 500 microns the CMB (cosmic microwave
background, echoes of the Big Bang) becomes completely dominant. This dominance
continues all the way up to 5cm wavelength!"
-the diagram of the "fluffy" interplanetary dust particle
-"...Keller et al (2003), ascertained that typically just one of the many tiny particles making up a fluffy IDP was of interstellar origin … the so-called Stardust. Determination of the mechanism of the capture of such a grain is a challenge!"
-"Where did they come from … ?"
-"If my interpretation paper had been published as planned around 1975, this discovery might
have been less of a surprise!"
-"This ingenious device, first devised and described by Griffin in 1967, correlates the Doppler-shifted spectrum under study with an unshifted reference spectrum, using a photographically produced optical mask, and gives a single output, recorded by a single detector, in which the information on radial velocity content is immediately available."
-"They have been the first observers since my experiment to measure the behaviour of the width of the line with elongation."
"It may seem strange to be making measurements on a line only about an angstrom wide with such a
wide instrumental profile, but the choice for optimum resolved width has to be made
based on the information sought, and the method used to elicit it."
-"The Testa Grigia observatory (in the perennial snow above Cervinia, Italy)..."
-Brian including a photo of himself with the coelostat and concrete plinth
-"The timer was completely new, designed and constructed by myself, since the old timer was the source of many problems. It is simple in design, but gave a new level of accuracy and reliability."
-"Figure 2.20b provides a key to the internal circuitry of the nand gates, which, prior to the invention of multiple Integrated Circuits, were the ‘state-of-the-art’ elements for constructing the controllers and computers of the 1970’s."
-"To facilitate on-the-spot scrutiny of counts recorded, a somewhat unreliable paper tape punch was replaced by a Nuclear Enterprises print control unit and an Addo line printer."
-"In this way the wavelength drift due to compression in the spacers and springs was crudely balanced against the drift due to temperature change, and stability was easier to obtain."
-"These are the sky scan's associated finesse scans, so called because they are also used to test whether the finesse was good enough, or not, in which case the plates needed realignment."
-"It is sometimes useful to know how many photons are arriving in total for a given count rate. The equivalent width of the F-P pass-band was typically 1.5 Å, so 1 count represents 6960 photons."
-"It was thus a very time-consuming business to ‘debug’ a new program, and much patience was
needed."
-"The minimum point can be found for each curve, the distance of these from the zero position giving the shift directly. See Appendix 3 for the program MINIPT used to implement this operation. The figure below is included mainly as a reminder to myself!"
-Figure 4.5 (Hicks, May and Reay data of wavelength shift vs. elongation)
-"It was my intention to publish this view in a further paper in MNRAS, but unfortunately my work at Imperial College ceased before this could be achieved" + Brian finally explaining his 1973 model decades later
-"It is worth noting here that for the future it would be useful to confirm this view of the spectral content of distant starlight, both in theory, in different populations of stars and regions of nebulosity, and in practice, by direct spectroscopy of such regions, without the interference of the ZL. Of course, this requires a viewpoint outside the Solar System."
-"If these data had come to my attention in 1977, I would doubtless have felt depressed, since they do not in any way support our results. It is therefore something of a comfort that as time went on, no other observers’ findings conformed with these of Fried. This is not, of course, to say that there is anything wrong with these observations."
-"As for instrumentation, with the benefit of 30 years’ hindsight, it seems to me that, as
far as maximising flux is concerned, we, that is, all the F-P radial velocity observers of the time, missed the obvious. The Fabry-Perot instrument was used because of its high throughput at a relatively high resolution, but, by using the pre-monochromator, we actually threw away 3,000 Å of information in the visible alone..."
-"Often it is hard, among the wealth of technical details published on such a subject, to form, in the head, a clear picture of the physical shape of the Zodiacal Cloud – the kind of graphic visual we would like to present to our children, and those who follow us."
-"The ‘artist’, by the way, is me."
-The gorgeous ZL images at the end!
In conclusion... Brian May is brilliant and I have been schooled quite thoroughly in the ZL phenomenon.
A few of my favorite quotes/components of the dissertation below:
-Kansas "Dust in the Wind" epigraph
-"Fechtig et al (2004) allow that the Aztecs (16th Century) may be correctly credited with having noticed the ZL, and that there are possible references from the Chaldeans (600 B.C.) and the ancient Egyptians, but such occasional mentions are few indeed compared with the liberal scattering of allusions in art of all kinds to other heavenly manifestations (for example, the works of Shakespeare contain a virtual catalogue of atmospheric phenomena!)."
-His quoting of the Rubaiyat
-"Perhaps we can call it the “Lucky Find Syndrome” (LFS, for short, of course!)."
-"It is interesting to note that the era of space-borne observations of the interplanetary medium was just beginning, and at this stage, things were not going as well as might have been hoped!"
-"We can note in passing that the Doppler effect became a pillar of the evidence for the ‘Expanding Universe’ as we perceive it today."
-"My first observation was that, in keeping with the acronymic style of pigeon-holing now so universal, in which everything from espionage organisations, to diseases, to furniture warehouses, find themselves summed up in three letters, interplanetary dust particles are now referred to as 'IDP's."
-"It was the data gathered from the IRAS satellite in 1983 (while my rock group Queen was touring football stadia in South America)..."
-His point that the Zodiacal Light can no longer be thought of as smoothly symmetrical about the ecliptic plane (actually very interesting stuff!)
-"...the Gegenschein receives only four mentions, three in an (excellent) historical review, and one in the glossary."
-"This supports my proposition (sections 1.4.4 and 4.11) that radial velocity measurements may indicate a significant interstellar component in the dust which produces the optical Zodiacal Light."
-"...around the area of the break in the Zodiacal dust spectrum, the Galactic Interstellar Medium (ISM) and the DIRB near peak intensity, but beyond about 500 microns the CMB (cosmic microwave
background, echoes of the Big Bang) becomes completely dominant. This dominance
continues all the way up to 5cm wavelength!"
-the diagram of the "fluffy" interplanetary dust particle
-"...Keller et al (2003), ascertained that typically just one of the many tiny particles making up a fluffy IDP was of interstellar origin … the so-called Stardust. Determination of the mechanism of the capture of such a grain is a challenge!"
-"Where did they come from … ?"
-"If my interpretation paper had been published as planned around 1975, this discovery might
have been less of a surprise!"
-"This ingenious device, first devised and described by Griffin in 1967, correlates the Doppler-shifted spectrum under study with an unshifted reference spectrum, using a photographically produced optical mask, and gives a single output, recorded by a single detector, in which the information on radial velocity content is immediately available."
-"They have been the first observers since my experiment to measure the behaviour of the width of the line with elongation."
"It may seem strange to be making measurements on a line only about an angstrom wide with such a
wide instrumental profile, but the choice for optimum resolved width has to be made
based on the information sought, and the method used to elicit it."
-"The Testa Grigia observatory (in the perennial snow above Cervinia, Italy)..."
-Brian including a photo of himself with the coelostat and concrete plinth
-"The timer was completely new, designed and constructed by myself, since the old timer was the source of many problems. It is simple in design, but gave a new level of accuracy and reliability."
-"Figure 2.20b provides a key to the internal circuitry of the nand gates, which, prior to the invention of multiple Integrated Circuits, were the ‘state-of-the-art’ elements for constructing the controllers and computers of the 1970’s."
-"To facilitate on-the-spot scrutiny of counts recorded, a somewhat unreliable paper tape punch was replaced by a Nuclear Enterprises print control unit and an Addo line printer."
-"In this way the wavelength drift due to compression in the spacers and springs was crudely balanced against the drift due to temperature change, and stability was easier to obtain."
-"These are the sky scan's associated finesse scans, so called because they are also used to test whether the finesse was good enough, or not, in which case the plates needed realignment."
-"It is sometimes useful to know how many photons are arriving in total for a given count rate. The equivalent width of the F-P pass-band was typically 1.5 Å, so 1 count represents 6960 photons."
-"It was thus a very time-consuming business to ‘debug’ a new program, and much patience was
needed."
-"The minimum point can be found for each curve, the distance of these from the zero position giving the shift directly. See Appendix 3 for the program MINIPT used to implement this operation. The figure below is included mainly as a reminder to myself!"
-Figure 4.5 (Hicks, May and Reay data of wavelength shift vs. elongation)
-"It was my intention to publish this view in a further paper in MNRAS, but unfortunately my work at Imperial College ceased before this could be achieved" + Brian finally explaining his 1973 model decades later
-"It is worth noting here that for the future it would be useful to confirm this view of the spectral content of distant starlight, both in theory, in different populations of stars and regions of nebulosity, and in practice, by direct spectroscopy of such regions, without the interference of the ZL. Of course, this requires a viewpoint outside the Solar System."
-"If these data had come to my attention in 1977, I would doubtless have felt depressed, since they do not in any way support our results. It is therefore something of a comfort that as time went on, no other observers’ findings conformed with these of Fried. This is not, of course, to say that there is anything wrong with these observations."
-"As for instrumentation, with the benefit of 30 years’ hindsight, it seems to me that, as
far as maximising flux is concerned, we, that is, all the F-P radial velocity observers of the time, missed the obvious. The Fabry-Perot instrument was used because of its high throughput at a relatively high resolution, but, by using the pre-monochromator, we actually threw away 3,000 Å of information in the visible alone..."
-"Often it is hard, among the wealth of technical details published on such a subject, to form, in the head, a clear picture of the physical shape of the Zodiacal Cloud – the kind of graphic visual we would like to present to our children, and those who follow us."
-"The ‘artist’, by the way, is me."
-The gorgeous ZL images at the end!
In conclusion... Brian May is brilliant and I have been schooled quite thoroughly in the ZL phenomenon.
April 26, 2013
The guitarist of Queen wrote his Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics on movement of space mess.
October 13, 2021
Yeah, I read it because...well... BRIAN MAY. But dang if I didn't understand big chunks of it (not all, because...well...astrophysics...) I was totally chuffed at myself. Dust, who knew you could be that interesting? Seemingly annoying and "unimportant" stuff is actually amazingly important (and still annoying to those who want to look into space clearly.)
I so want to go look at it now, see the doppler shifts myself and ponder our make-up and being. Dr. May may just help a whole batch of new scientists emerge. We found him through music and he helped us find the music of the spheres. Now that, sir, is some talent.
I so want to go look at it now, see the doppler shifts myself and ponder our make-up and being. Dr. May may just help a whole batch of new scientists emerge. We found him through music and he helped us find the music of the spheres. Now that, sir, is some talent.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews