Bernard Carr

Prof. Bernard J. Carr, MA, PhD, joined the Society in 1962, was co-opted to Council in 1975, and became an elected Member of Council in 1977. He was the SPR Education Officer from 1985 to 2000, organising Study Days and the Annual International Conference. Formerly a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he is now Professor in Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He was President of the Society from 2000 to 2004. He is also a Director of Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) in the UK.

He completed his BA in mathematics in 1972 at Trinity College, Cambridge. For his doctorate, obtained in 1976, he studied relativity and cosmology under Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. He was the president of the Cambridge University Buddhist Society and was friends with Ajahn Brahm.

In 1976 he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity and he also became an advanced SERC fellow at the Institute of Astronomy. In 1979 he was awarded a Lindemann Fellowship for post-doctoral research in America and spent a year working in various universities there. In 1980 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. In 1985 he moved to the then Queen Mary College, University of London, where he is now Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy.

He has held visiting professorships at Kyoto University, Tokyo University and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and is a frequent visitor to other institutes in America and Canada. He is the author of more than two hundred scientific papers and his monograph, Cosmological Gravitational Waves, won the 1985 Adams Essay Prize.

He has been the co-holder of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a project entitled Fundamental Physics and the Problem of our Existence. He is the editor of a book based on a series of conferences funded by the Foundation, entitled Universe or Multiverse? Bernard Carr also made an appearance in the documentary film The Trouble with Atheism, where he discussed these concepts, and also appeared in the science documentary film Target...Earth? (1980).

Selected Publications

Bernard Carr (ed.), Universe or Multiverse? Cambridge University Press, 2007.