Professor Carlos Frenk

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2018

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Professor Carlos Frenk is a cosmologist and one of the originators of the Cold Dark Matter theory for the formation of galaxies and the structure of the universe. He has worked at Durham University since 1985, where he was appointed the inaugural Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics in 2001 and has been Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology since 2002. Born in Mexico in 1951, he is the son of a German Jewish immigrant father and a Mexican mother with Spanish roots. After completing his physics degree in Mexico, he came to Cambridge University in the mid-1970s to do a PhD in Astronomy. His first postgraduate job took him to the University of California where he worked on a computer simulation of the universe with three fellow cosmologists, disproving the idea that the universe contains hot dark matter and establishing the theory of cold dark matter instead. Professor Frenk's papers have received more than 100,000 citations, making him one of the most frequently cited authors in the field of space science and astronomy. He has won a number of prizes for his work, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was awarded a CBE in 2017. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	The music is the most important part of the music.
0:35.0	The music is the most important part of the music.
0:40.0	The music is the most important part of the music.
0:45.0	My cast away today is the cosmologist, Professor Carlos Frank,
0:50.0	whilst most of us are fretting about office politics or how to get the moss out of the lawn.
0:55.0	He spends a week at night brooding on the origin and development of the universe,
1:00.0	widely regarded as one of the most influential scientific minds of his generation.
1:05.0	He spends his time grappling with the galaxies,
1:09.0	and as one of the originators of something called cold, dark, matter theory.
1:13.0	We'll get there.
1:14.0	He's predominantly interested in how galaxies form,
1:18.0	where the large scale structure of the universe comes from and what's its fate.
1:23.0	It works mostly building model universes using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
1:29.0	Born and raised in Mexico, he was beguiled at school by the elegance and beauty of mathematics,
1:35.0	going on to study at Cambridge and in California.
1:39.0	He has spent the last 30 years of his academic life at the University in Durham,
	...

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