Music
Brian May
Guitarist of Queen and astrophysicist
Born 1947
Photo: Raph_PH · CC BY 2.0
«I never gave up on the PhD. It was just interrupted for 30 years.»
Brian May wrote We Will Rock You and Bohemian Rhapsody's guitar orchestration, and plays a guitar he built with his father out of a fireplace mantelpiece. He is also a published astrophysicist and worked on NASA's asteroid sample return mission.
Key achievements
- Guitarist and songwriter of Queen since 1970
- Completed his astrophysics PhD in 2007, 37 years late
- Collaborated with NASA on the New Horizons and OSIRIS-REx missions
Universities
London, South Kensington
Took his physics degree in 1968 and began a PhD on interplanetary dust, abandoning it for Queen and completing it in 2007, 37 years later.
Facts
- The Red Special guitar he built as a teenager cost about eight pounds in materials and he has used it on nearly every Queen recording.
- He returned to finish his thesis on zodiacal dust in 2007 and had to check whether anyone had solved the problem in the intervening decades.
- He was a science team collaborator on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, producing stereoscopic images of the asteroid Bennu.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.