Former Ireland amateur boxer now investigating 'black holes'
“I’m an accidental academic,” said Prof Taylor, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Astrophysics and Relativity (CfAR) in the School of Mathematical Sciences, who is an expert on Black Holes. “My parents both left school early and it was all about sports in our house, especially boxing. I fought a couple of times for Ireland as an amateur and thought seriously about pursuing boxing as a career.”
Prof Taylor, from Bray, and the older brother of former Olympic champion and current undisputed world champion Katie, was discovered to have a talent for mathematics while attending St. Kilians Community School, Bray. His mathematics teacher encouraged him to enter the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. He did, and he won it, which gave him the self-confidence to believe that science might be a career option.
“I grew up in a council estate in Bray, in quite a rough area. Back then in the late 1980s and 90s there was a heroin epidemic going on. The environment was gloomy. I went to the local community school where very few people progressed to university,” said Prof Taylor. “I had very supportive parents but neither had any academic background. As such, there was no real infrastructure for education in our house.”
The connection with the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition remains strong, and for the past nine years, Prof Taylor has been a judge at the event, in the Technology section.
After school Prof Taylor did his undergraduate science degree at UCD, and then went to the renowned Cambridge University to do his masters. While at Cambridge, which he said was a ‘beautiful place’ he won a coveted ‘Blues’ blazer for fighting in the 100th varsity boxing against Oxford University.
At Cambridge he encountered some of the biggest names in theoretical physics, such as Prof. Stephen Hawking, who made some of the most important contributions in the study of Prof. Taylor’s own particular research area of Black Holes.
“I was a few minutes late for a seminar,” Prof Taylor recalled. “I sat in at the back of the lecture theatre next to the wheelchair bay, it was one of the few seats left. It was a lecture given by Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose. Then after a few minutes, Stephen Hawking came in, assisted by his carer, and sat just beside me. I felt like a fanboy. I’m in Cambridge listening to Roger Penrose while sitting beside Stephen Hawking.”
He was inspired by his experience at Cambridge to want to pursue a career in science full-time. He was offered a fully funded PhD, but he was engaged to be married to his now-wife Kimberley, and decided to come home to do a doctorate at UCD.
Research
Prof Taylor is a theoretical physicist which involves trying to come up with mathematical models that describe reality at a fundamental level. In practice, this means he spends a lot of time thinking and considering ideas while standing at his whiteboard. In particular, he is interested in Black Holes, an area, he said, that scientists are using as a ‘playground’ to figure out the links between the subatomic quantum world and gravity which governs the world at larger scales.
“The two great theoretical pillars of the twentieth century are quantum mechanics, which describes reality at the smallest scales, and Einstein’s theory of gravity, which describes reality at the largest scales. But it’s proven very difficult to come up with a single theory that can describes both the big and the small,” said Prof Taylor. “I’m interested in Black Holes because they are objects where both theories can play an important role so maybe Black Holes could give us a clue as to how to get these theories to `talk’ to each other.”
This perspective on Black Holes originated with Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, who discovered that Black Holes are perhaps not as black as we thought; they emit some radiation. It had been thought that nothing whatsoever could escape a Black Hole, not even light, but Hawking proved this picture was not quite right when quantum effects are taken into consideration.
“The energy from the emitted radiation from a Black Hole has to come from somewhere,” said Prof Taylor, “and that radiation is given off at the cost of reducing the mass of the Black Hole. So, we’ve found that as energy radiates from a Black Hole, that hole gets smaller. That process is now called Hawking evaporation.”
This Hawking evaporation is a quantum effect. Many of the mathematical equations around quantum field theory involve infinity, explained Prof Taylor, but infinity needs to be removed from these equations if they are to have any physical meaning. This can be done in a precise and controlled way that is called ‘renormalisation’ and this forms a large part of Prof Taylor’s recent work.
“My collaborators and I came up with a new computational scheme for making sense of the infinities that arise when considering quantum effects near black holes, a process known as renormalization. There had been little progress on computational aspects of this problem in three decades” said Prof Taylor. “Strangely enough, an Israeli group came up with a similar idea around the same time as us, totally independent of ourselves. I’ve spent much of the last few years trying to work out all the implications and applications of the new prescription.”
Coffee, with oatmilk due to a slight dairy intolerance, is a crucial point of his work, Prof Taylor joked. “I spend a lot of time thinking and drinking cups of coffee. There’s much more time spent thinking than doing anything `concrete’, and most avenues of thought turn out to be dead ends. It can be frustrating, but then when an idea produces something interesting, it’s very rewarding.”
The communication of research is a challenge, he says, as it can be difficult to transmit the abstract mathematical ideas about black holes to the general public. However, he says, there appears to be a very strong appetite for science among the general public in this generation. Prof. Taylor spent two years as a research fellow at Cornell University, where he was inspired by the legacy of the late physicist and arguably the most successful science popularizer, Carl Sagan, who spent most of his career as a professor at Cornell. His portrait and quotes still decorate the halls of the Astronomy department at the Ivy league school.
As well as admiring Sagan’s ability to communicate, Prof. Taylor also respected that he was an academic that was intellectually adventurous.
“He was prepared to speculate, he was a visionary. Many of his speculations turned out to be correct. I think we need more creative scientists like that today.”