Today the BBC reports that Queen guitarist Brian May has submitted his doctoral dissertation in astronomy (titled “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”) at Imperial College, London.
Some theses take longer to write than others. May completed his after a 36 year gap.
Granted, during that gap he was kind of busy pursuing rock and roll.
But, as May notes, handing in the thesis is not the last step in his journey to complete his Ph.D. He still needs to defend that thesis:
The guitarist is scheduled to discuss his thesis with the examining board on 23 August, his spokesman said. The results should be known some time shortly after that date.
“If I fail I will fail big time,” May said. “It will be a very public failure with all this press.”
I’m hopeful, though, that May has had good advisement — which would mean he’d be strongly encouraged to go through another round of revisions if it didn’t look pretty likely that he could successfully defend the dissertation.
(Thanks to Margot for pointing me to the BBC story.)
Every British PhD student awaiting their viva (oral defence) has nightmares about failing (or passing but only after several hours of torturous interrogation and with several pages of corrections). It’s part of the very special rite of passage that is the viva. What we feared was not so much poor advice from our supervisors; it was the spectre of the Hostile External Examiner (who is God in the viva, but doesn’t have any real equivalent in the US system, from what I can make out). The horror stories about these monsters get passed on from generation to generation. There are horror stories about poor supervisors too, but these (I think) are becoming less common than they used to be, as universities are much more concerned with ensuring that their PhD students are properly taught in order to complete on time (if only because there are financial consequences for departments if they don’t).
The reality in the vast majority of vivas is that you have a thoroughly enjoyable conversation for an hour or two about the one thing you know more about than anybody else in the world, your thesis. I’m sure May will find this out too. And at least in the UK the viva is held in private – in much of Europe it’s a public event.
So, what you are saying is that while waiting for his viva, Brian May will be Under Pressure?
Get a cite when the thesis is published, or a paper resulting comes to press in a publication I can access. I want to know what data he uses as well as his results. Zodi dust was a big consideration in the COBE/DIRBE work in which I participated. But I always kept it in perspective: what I was studying was something my mother would have vacuumed up if she saw it.
“Mr May, the standard model posits that the earths spin is derived from a combination of its angular momentum and its distance from the Sun. You, on the other hand, state that its caused by ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. How do you explain this theoretical discrepancy ?”
Bit late to this one, but my external told me early on that they were going to pass me, thank God.
I did know one bloke whose thesis was savaged and failed, but that says possibly more about his supervisors than him. If it was wasn’t good enough to be submitted in the first place, then it should never have been seen by the external at all.
I have heard that the Oxford viva (my PhD office mate went to Magdelen) is in public, and anyone can turn up – that is hell.
Fail Brian May? Not a chance – far too many fans at IC!
“Mr May, the standard model posits that the earths spin is derived from a combination of its angular momentum and its distance from the Sun. You, on the other hand, state that it’s caused by ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. How do you explain this theoretical discrepancy ?”
“My colleague Mr Mercury and I asserted that fat-bottomed girls made the rocking world go round. Given your ongoing fascination with classical music, it follows that the world is not yet completely ‘rocking’, and that traditional cosmological mechanisms must therefore serve for the time being.”