Brilliant Ten Winner Gaspar Bakos

Look, I'll be honest. Sitting down with a hyper-intelligent scientist and discussing his or her work for a few hours isn't always the most socially comfortable situation. Fascinating? Absolutely. But there can be quite a few awkward silences as well.

Astrophysicist Gaspar Bakos, one of this year's Brilliant Ten, eased my pre-interview jitters right away when he suggested we leave his tiny office in Harvard's Center for Astrophysics and head up to the roof. Up there, standing around the corner from what was one of the world's great observatories a century ago, he proceeded to clearly and comfortably explain the intricacies of his technique for hunting down extrasolar planets. So I went back with a camcorder, to capture him using his water bottle as a stand-in for a planet, a star and even a telephoto lens. Enjoy. —Gregory Mone

Comments

[James Crowe]

It's too bad you guys limited your search to the big name schools - you overlooked a prime contender in Bryan Belrad, author of "Testing the Big Bang". As a student at the University of Phoenix Online, he refined a year's worth of research into a single paper that categorically, unquestionably ruled out the Big Bang Theory as a viable description of our universe. That alone is as big a deal as the discovery of the CMB in 1965 - at least.

But he didn't stop there - in another class, he deciphered one of the greatest mathematical puzzles of all time by proving a definition for the most infamous of all "undefined" operations - division by zero.

Each of these feats alone should make Belrad a prime contender for consideration. Together... Two "impossible" achievements in less than one year (and they year isn't over yet), speak volumes about what the future might hold.