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Cosmologist John Barrow, who died at the age of 67 from colon and liver cancer, was a renowned popularizer of science. He combined mathematical and physical reasoning to increase our understanding of the very first moments of the universe.
It did this by providing elegant mathematical characterizations of inflationary models, in which a high vacuum energy density causes a dramatic exponential expansion of the universe in the very early moments before gradually evolving into the expansion we see today. He analyzed the stability of such models in a range of gravitational models that allowed for slight deviations from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Specifically, he was interested in the possibility that physical constants could vary over time, at a level of parts per million over 10 billion years, and was a member of a team that claimed to detect such variations, although this claim is not widely accepted. . .
Since 1999 he has been Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and founding director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, an awareness program for students, teachers and the general public. In more than 20 excellent books on astronomy, mathematics and physics, he particularly enjoyed addressing and making understandable abstruse philosophical questions.
They included The Left Hand of Creation: The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe (1983), The Book of Nothing (2000), The Artful Universe (1995), Pi in the Sky (1992), The Infinite Book: A Short Guide al Boundless, Timeless and Endless (2005) and Impossibility (1998). What they said was always unexpected, and they were carefully studied and brilliantly written. With Frank Tipler he wrote The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), exploring whether the fact that intelligent life exists has implications for the nature of the universe.
I first met John in 1978 in California, when he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and he was always great company, like when he talked about astronomy, public affairs and other astronomers. He adapted Groucho Marx’s comment to the universe: “I would not like to belong to any club that would accept me as a member”: “A universe simple enough to understand is too simple to produce a mind capable of understanding it.”
His Italian opera, Infinities, premiered in Milan in 2002 and won the Ubu Award for Italian theater. It consists of five vignettes, starting with an exploration of David Hilbert’s famous thought experiment concerning the infinite hotel, and continuing with Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel and a debate between 19th-century German mathematicians Georg Cantor and Leopold Kronecker on the nature of infinity.
Born in Wembley, John was the son of Lois (née Tucker) and Walter Barrow. From the Ealing School of Male Grammar he went to Durham University and graduated in mathematics and physics (1974). For his doctorate in astrophysics (1977) he studied models of non-uniform cosmological models, exploring deviations from the usual assumption that the universe begins completely smooth and the same everywhere, with Dennis Sciama at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1975 he married Elizabeth East and they had three children.
After stints as a junior research lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, and as a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley, John joined the Sussex University astronomy center as a lecturer in 1981, becoming a professor eight years later, and from 1995 to 1999 the center the director. He then moved to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge, where in 2006 the Millennium Mathematics Project received the Queen’s Anniversary Award for academic achievement.
Invitations to other institutions included two periods of public lectures at Gresham College London – as Professor of Astronomy (2003-07) and of Geometry (2008-12), the only person since the 17th century to hold two different posts of this type. . His lessons included “100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know About Math and Art”, “Let’s Go Spinning Again: Throwing, Jumping, and Spinning” and “100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know About Sports”.
In his youth he was a passionate athlete, attracted mostly to cricket and football and had had a trial for Chelsea juniors. In Durham he represented the university in cross country; there is a photo of him holding the tape in front of a young Steve Ovett. He was proud of having lectured at 10 Downing Street, Windsor Castle, and the Vatican, but he firmly refused to appear on television.
In 2006 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for “his writings on the relationship between life and the universe and the nature of human understanding, which have created new perspectives on issues of fundamental interest to science and religion”. He was a member of the United Reform Church, which he described as teaching “a traditional deistic image of the universe”. Earlier this year he was elected to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
During the recent lockdown, and knowing he didn’t have long to live, he wrote his latest book, yet to be published, One Plus One. He has also completed 11 scientific papers, adding to his total of more than 400 published during his career.
He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. His awards include the Royal Society’s Faraday Award for Excellence in Science Communication in 2008, the 2015 Paul Dirac Award from the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Gold Medal Society in 2016.
They leave him Elizabeth, his children David, Roger and Louise and five grandchildren.
• John David Barrow, cosmologist and writer, born November 29, 1952; died on September 26, 2020
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