Telescope Innovator Shines His Genius On New Fields

You may not be familiar with the name Roger Angel, but if there were ever a scientist with a creative streak a mile wide, it would be he.

Angel is an astronomer. He’s famous for developing an entirely new way of making really large, incredibly precise telescope mirrors. But his creativity doesn’t stop there. He’s now turned his attention to solar power, hoping to use the tricks he learned from capturing distant light from stars to do a more cost-efficient job of capturing light from the Sun.

“Roger’s always been someone who has lots of wild ideas; some of them are superb, some of them probably not so good. But he’s incredibly creative,” says Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra. “That creativity coupled to sort of a genius is quite rare. So Roger’s well-known around the world for having these brilliant insights of how to solve problems.”