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slash Radio 4. My guest. C.

Kowd.

My guest this week is Astronomer Royal Martin Reese, Baron Reese of Ludlow.

He's Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, author of over 500 scientific

papers and many books and is on record suggesting that humanity may not last beyond the 21st century, but the good news is that our universe is one of many,

so intelligent life, possibly more intelligent life, may survive elsewhere.

Lord Reese, whom have you chosen as your great life and why? I've chosen Professor

Joseph Rotblatt. He is a scientist who I got to know when he was already at a fairly advanced

age and he was someone who was greatly

concerned about nuclear disarmament and he had devoted the last years of his life

to this cause. The more I learned about him, the more remarkable he seemed to me to be, because he had started out in 1998 in Poland, gone through tremendous hardship in World War I.

Here then, with great difficulty in university education,

become quite a distinguished nuclear physicist before World War II broke out, and then he escaped to Britain

and went to Liverpool University where he embarked on nuclear physics, but then he got involved in the bomb project.

But in his later years he devoted himself to doing all he could to promote nuclear disarmament,

to control the powers he had helped unleash when he had worked

on the bomb project during World War II and he was remarkable in his commitment and the fact that he maintained four

vigorous to his 90s and led a campaign which was originally thought to be

rather on the fringe but eventually became closer to the mainstream to aim towards a world where there were zero nuclear weapons.

...