Remember yesterday’s mention of Les Horribles Cernettes, the spoof rock band made up of physicists? Well today we have the real deal — an actual rock star in a real band, and he’s also a physicist. I’m talking about Brian May, the guitarist for Queen, whose 77th birthday is today. He was born in Middlesex, England, and grew up to be an astrophysicist as well as one of the founding members of the band, along with Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor.
May was born in Middlesex, England, and was a bright student from the start. And a musician. He formed his first band when he was about 11, with his school friend Tim Staffell, who went on to collaborate with Queen occasionally. May earned a BS degree (with honors) at Imperial College London, and was invited to work at the Jodrell Bank Observatory while he continued to work on his PhD. He declined the offer, though, because he was in another band at Imperial College: Smile.
Then in 1970 May and Taylor met Freddie Mercury and formed Queen. May put his academic career on pause — for the next 45 years! He finally completed his PhD in 2007, basing it on the same work he’d begun decades before. It’s a real PhD, too, not an “honorary” one.
Along the way Queen became relatively successful, one of the top rock bands in the world, and May became known as a virtuoso guitarist. A poll by Planet Rock (a radio station in England) ranked him as the seventh best guitarist of all time, and another by Guitar World magazine put him at #2. He showcased another talent when he revealed that the guitar he most often played was called the Red Special — and he’d made it himself.
In addition to his guitar work, May wrote many of Queen’s most popular songs, and became a record producer as well. In his spare time, he received a CBE in 2005 for service to music and his charity work, and was knighted by King Charles III in 2023. He also served as Chancellor of John Moores University from 2008 to 2013, and worked with NASA on the New Horizons mission to Pluto as well as the OSIRIS-REx mission that collected samples from the asteroid Bennu. Unfortunately another asteroid, which would have been even more appropriate, was out of range. That would be the asteroid 52665 Brianmay.
May is also a prominent animal rights activist and anti-smoking advocate. He banned smoking at his concerts years before any such legislation existed. He’s been vegan since 2020. And if that’s not enough, he’s been awarded the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication (based on at least two books he’s written about astronomy) and the Lawrence Burpee Medal for outstanding contributions to geography. And on an episode of the English astronomy TV show The Sky at Night, Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, told May “I don’t know a scientist who looks as much like Isaac Newton as you do.”
