Crusty ole Sir Patrick Moore

"Brian Cox? He's no astronomer! Patrick Moore turns his telescope on the young pretender - and concedes he's really rather good (for an ex-rock star)"

by

Jane Fryer

January 24th, 2012

Daily Mail

Sir Patrick Moore is 88 years old and he looks it. His huge body is battered by age — lurid purple bruises decorate his enormous forearms, his baby-soft hands are clawed with arthritis, and an old wartime spinal injury has left him dependent on a rotating team of carers who share his fairytale 15th-century cottage in Selsey, West Sussex.

They help him from bed to chair and back again, glue his famous monocle (yes, really) to his eyelid to stop it tumbling out, launder his lurid Hawaiian shirts and fix him a daily G&T at 12.30pm, on the dot.

His enormous brain, however, is as sharp as ever and flits from his beloved cats Jeannie and Ptolemy ('they rule the house), to his loathing of all Germans ('if I saw the entire German nation sinking into the sea, I'd help push it down') and the national obsession with Professor Brian Cox — the pop star-turned-physicist who idolised Moore as a child, presented the 700th episode of Sky At Night with him last year, and is adored by the British public.

Now, thanks to the BBC2 Stargazing Live show, Professor Cox has increased telescope sales by more than 500 per cent and is poised to take on Sir Patrick's mantle.

'These young ones come and they go, but he's a nice chap, you know,' barks Sir Patrick in his fabulously posh voice. 'Came on my show once. Can't say I've seen his, though. I've been so busy I keep forgetting. Sheer stupidity on my part. I think he and I could learn from each other.

'Though, of course, he's not an astronomer — he's a particle physicist!' he hurrumphs. 'And he was in a rock band! But I suppose the more people that come into astronomy the better. I'm all for it. And it's a good thing, because I'm ancient.'

So ancient, that he's planned his own death. In meticulous detail.

'I've got it all mapped out. I don't want a funeral. So they can take all my good bits and use them for medical science.'

What about the less 'good bits'?

'They can chuck it all away! I couldn't care less. But I've left some money in my will for a very good party. There will be a candle and a tape with a message from me, and they'll light the candle and play the tape, and at exactly the right moment I'll blow the candle out.'

And the message?

'I've already recorded it! I say: “I'll blow that candle out if it kills me”, ha ha ha!'

Goodness.

Sir Patrick may be cruelly incapacitated by a failing body, but it's hard to imagine his candle spluttering out any time soon. For one thing, he's too busy.

He's still filming The Sky At Night — the longest-running programme with the same presenter in the history of television ('I think we're on about instalment 760 . . . I can't see anyone beating it now, can you?') — recorded here in his cluttered study.

The first programme went out live on April 26, 1957, and he has missed just one since — in 2004, when he accidentally ate a rancid goose egg and nearly died of salmonella.

He has also just finished his Data Book of Astronomy — an enormous compendium of pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the cosmos, which took him ten years ('so much has happened — the probing of the planets, huge advances in astronomy') and is now sitting glossily on his desk, topped by Jeannie the cat.

But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past few years.

But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past few years.
Sir Patrick and his trademark monocle, pictured in his home in Selsey, Sussex

'I went to sleep one night about ten years ago and woke up like this,' he says, looking down in disgust at his crippled body. 'Look at my hands. I can't play the piano or the xylophone any more. It killed everything.' Including regular games of tennis, cricket (his unorthodox bowling style involving lots of leaps, bounds and whirling of arms), travelling and even walking.

'My active life came to an abrupt full stop. It was a tremendous shock and it was permanent. Unlike all those new telescope users out there, I can't even operate my telescope any more — I can't handle the controls. I try to make the best of it, but I could have done without the last ten years.' So he'd rather not have woken up that morning?

'It might have been better, yes,' he says. 'I'm not scared of dying. I believe in some form of afterlife: I just hope my uncle George isn't there — silly, bald-headed old coot. But you've got to make the best of things and that's what I've always tried to do.'

Patrick Alfred Cauldwell-Moore was born in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1923, only child of Charles, a soldier ('who survived the Great War with a Military Cross and a lungful of gas') and Gertrude, a trained opera singer.

He had a weak heart and so was tutored at home. In his spare time, he would lie on the sofa reading about the moon and the stars, and saved his pocket money until, aged 11, he had enough (£7 10s) to buy his first telescope and became the youngest member of the British Astronomical Association. Fifty years later to the day he was elected its president.

On the outbreak of World War II, he lied about his age (he was 16) and his dodgy heart and joined the RAF ('I knew if I joined the Army or Navy I'd last ten minutes with my heart').

Today he's rather tight-lipped about his war years, admitting only to spending five years as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, losing all his teeth in an accident, sustaining the spinal injury that has finally caught up with him and, rather mysteriously, 'learning enough Norwegian to get by'.

With the war, though, came great personal tragedy.

'My girl, Lorna, was killed,' he says. 'We were both 20 and engaged. She was a nurse and she was in the wrong place when a German bomb fell. There was no question of anyone else — I still think about her all the time. Second best was no good for me. So I didn't marry and had no family.'

He lived with his beloved mother, Gertrude, until her death aged 94 in 1981 ('the worst day of my life after Lorna died'), became an amateur astronomer and travelled the world chasing eclipses, mapping the moon, reporting from meteorite craters for The Sky At Night and playing the xylophone on Morecambe And Wise.

Despite being 88, he continues to work and has left money in his will for an almighty party when he dies. He has also created a video, at the end of which he blows out a candle

'I never thought the programme would go on so long, but there are various reasons for it — it's cheap, it goes on late at night so it doesn't bother anybody, and it's not controversial. Though we had plenty of disasters.'

Like the time he swallowed a bluebottle live on air — 'it buzzed all the way down' — and his ten-minute interview in pidgin French with a Russian who spoke no English — 'we just about got away with it, ha ha!'

His high point was when he saw the dark side of the Moon for the first time after it was photographed from a space probe.

Nearly 760 Sky At Nights later, his letterbox is still overflowing with enthusiastic fan mail (they haven't all defected to Cox yet), which he answers in full — despite barely being able to type on his specially adapted computer keyboard — though he does now lean on a few stock replies for the bog-standard queries. 'You know . . . how do I take up astronomy? What's that bright thing in the sky? Is there life out there?'

And is there?

'I'm sure there is. I refuse to believe we're the only living things. But I can't prove it. The clue is maybe Mars — not little green men, or not any near here, anyway — but if we can find trace of any life on Mars, that will be our pointer.'

He is also a magnet for rather more eccentric correspondence — from the man convinced the Earth was shaped like a teacup, the women who wanted to send a carrier pigeon to the moon . . . He wrote back suggesting a parrot-pigeon hybrid, so it could say hello when it got there.

Celebrating a continuous 25-year run of the Sky at Night in 1957 with a piece of cake. To this day he still gets hundreds of letters of fan mail

'There are plenty of nuts — the “flat-earthers” and “hollow-globers”,' he says. And he replies to every letter he receives, no matter how nutty.

Sir Patrick is surprisingly cheerful for a man whose physical life is restricted to his downstairs bedroom, wood-panelled study and a view through the mullioned windows at his cats playing on their very own scale model of Saturn in their luxury cat run. (He's paranoid about keeping them safe — there's a typewritten sign by the front door: 'Patrick's cats are fiendishly clever masters of escape. Please observe the airlock procedures'.)

'I used to wake up and think: “What have I got time for today?” Now, I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I'm not in them, I'll get on with the day's work.'

He is not a man afraid to speak his mind, whether it's regarding his own disabilities, or sharing some of his rather more, er, trenchant views.

There was an uproar two years ago when he said the BBC had been ruined by women executives drowning us in soap operas, cooking and quiz shows, and advocated two separate television stations — one for each gender. 'There should be a mix of men and women — that's what I actually said,' he insists (not very convincingly) today.

When I ask him about his comparing of EastEnders to diarrhoea, he smirks naughtily and says: 'I've never been a fan of soap operas.'

And don't, whatever you do, get him onto the Germans.

'Eughhh! A Kraut is a Kraut is a Kraut. And the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.'

'Of course I'm a lot older than (Brian Cox),' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

Like many men of his generation, he is fervently anti-European (though he loves the Norwegians and the Greeks — 'the only people who fought gallantly all through the war'), is a keen member of UKIP ('if I were 20 years younger I'd be fighting for a seat next time') and frets about immigration.

'They need to be controlled. I'm not sure how, but let in the people you want and not the riff-raff,' he says. Perhaps it's time to change the subject, and ask if he wishes he'd made it to the moon himself. 'I had no chance,' he says, 'wrong age, wrong nationality and wrong medical grade.'

Yet he must take comfort in how many budding astronomers he has inspired and how much he has crammed into his 88 years.

He has mapped the moon (when the Russians and Americans went to the moon, they used his guides), played duets with Einstein ('exactly what I expected — charming, old-worldly, courteous and never wore socks'), excelled as a musician and composer ('one thing that is no credit to me is perfect pitch and perfect timing') and written more than 70 books on astronomy.

And he is surely one of the very few people to have met the first man to fly, Orville Wright, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

He's done an extraordinary amount in his 88 years. So would he feel happy to be passing on the stargazing baton to Professor Cox? 'I'm not dead yet!' Oh dear.

And, er, Professor Cox? 'Well, he's not the only one taking on the mantle. But he is very good . . .'

That's high praise indeed from the great man.

And with that I leave him planning his next project — 'I think it's high time I started concentrating on my composing' — fussing over his beloved cats and rubbing his vast hands at the thought of all those budding astronomers with their shiny new telescopes — ('a wonderful thing').

Sir Patrick is an exceptional man and one whom, for all his outrageously un-PC views, it's impossible not to like enormously.

After all, there aren't many octogenarians who can wear a glued-on monocle and a lurid green Hawaiian shirt and still exude gravitas. Professor Brian Cox has some very large shoes to fill.


More on Moore

An interview with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw on physics

Academic life after retirement...way to go Ed Gerjuoy

Ed Gerjuoy, 93, is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. He works in his campus office during the week and often returns to work on Saturdays and Sundays. “Sometimes I’m the only one there on weekends,” he says.


"Recollections of Oppenheimer and Schwinger", a talk given by Prof. Edward Gerjuoy, (University of Pittsburgh) at the Institute for Theoretical, Atomic and Molecular and Optical Physics, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge Massachusetts, November 3, 2009

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was born on April 22, 1904, was celebrated in a June, 2004 Los Alamos Symposium, wherein I recalled my experiences as a Ph.D. student of Oppenheimer's in Berkeley, California during the period August 1938 to January 1942. I shall recount some of these recollections, concentrating on conveying a portrait of Oppenheimer as creator and inspiration of probably the most important pre-war United States school of theoretical physics. During a portion of this period (the 1940 academic year) Julian Schwinger, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of the modern formulation of quantum electrodynamics and deservedly has been termed a genius, was employed as what today would be termed Oppenheimer's post doc. Therefore, especially because Schwinger now seems almost forgotten, although he died only fifteen years ago (on July 16, 1994), I also will recall some of Schwinger's interactions with Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer's students including myself, in an attempt to convey some comprehension of Schwinger's astonishing theoretical physics talents.

"Recollections of Oppenheimer and Schwinger"

Soooooooooo, is the Earth safe for 2012?...NASA knows

Much like Y2K, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline. Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.

Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Q: Could phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.

Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-switch to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway.

Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

Mr. Wizard times two

Betty Sue Albert learns about "vibrations" from Mr. Wizard [Don Herbert].

Offering is in three parts unfortunately.

Vibrations

Part 1



Vibrations

Part 2



Vibrations

Part 3

And a rare color episode...

Electromagnetism

Watch Mr. Wizard [Wikipedia]

Mr. Wizard...missed mentor

Mr. Wizard--more

"Watch Mr. Wizard"--1954 episode

Many scientists are bereft of knowledge of the philosophy of science

It is certainly true here too.

"Philosophy is a weak point for science students"

by

William Reville

January 19th, 2012

The Irish Times

It is important to know the nature and strength of the pillars on which scientific knowledge is based, writes WILLIAM REVILLE

IRISH AND UK science suffers from a defect – there is no formal and mandatory coursework in the history and philosophy of science for third level science students. Although many scientists educate themselves in this regard, this is a haphazard way to go about things.

A scientist who has never pondered the history and philosophy of science cannot reflect deeply on science. He/she will know how to use the scientific method to investigate nature but will not have a sophisticated grasp of the scope of the method, the reliability of the knowledge it reveals, or the ethical implications of pursuing certain investigations, and cannot benefit from a knowledge of science history that could usefully guide current developments.

University philosophy departments teach courses on the philosophy of science, but science departments do not send their students to these courses and philosophy departments do not promote it outside their own discipline. We recently introduced an introductory university-wide module at UCC on science in society and another on the history/philosophy of science. These modules are popular and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be mandatory. It is time to deflate the old witticism that “the average scientist knows as much about the philosophy of science as the average fish knows about hydrodynamics”.

Scientific laws are generalisations that describe a natural behaviour, often in the form of a mathematical formula, following exhaustive observations of the behaviour. Such derivation of laws is called inductive reasoning. Thus, no exception has ever been noted to the observation that two material bodies attract each other by a force we call gravity, and the strength of this attraction is proportional to the product of the masses of the bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Innumerable measurements have formalised these observations into the Law of Universal Gravitation. But the fact that no exceptions have been found does not mean that exceptions will never be found. David Hume (1711-1776) was the first philosopher to point out that, although the inductive method works empirically, it cannot be proven on rational grounds.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) pointed up the weakness of induction with the following story. A farmer bought some turkeys and fattened them up by feeding them every morning at 9am. The more rigorous thinkers among the turkeys drew up a law stating – “turkeys are fed every morning at 9am”. This law held up well until several days before Christmas, when . . .

Much of science ultimately depends on the expectation that the world will continue to behave according to its present and past behaviour. The early modern scientists felt safe in having this expectation because of their belief in a faithful creator, but if you remove that grounding you are left with something that can flap around a bit. And that grounding must be removed. The modern and mature understanding of science is that it stands alone in a natural sphere and has no connection with the supernatural.

So, if science cannot prove that its findings can never be wrong, what differentiates it from other ways of investigating the world? Philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) made a very useful contribution here by proposing that the essential characteristic of a scientific proposal is that we are able to imagine circumstances under which the proposal could be disproved.

Although it is not possible to have certain objective knowledge of anything, science comes closer to this standard than any other means of acquiring knowledge. However, it is important to know the nature and strength of the pillars on which scientific knowledge is based, the ethical implications of pursuing scientific investigations, and the history of how science has unveiled the secrets of nature and how this knowledge has been applied.

[William Reville is a professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC.... ]

Deceased--James Arnold

James Arnold
May 5th, 1923 to January 6th, 2012

"James Arnold dies at 88; pushed to unlock secrets in moon rocks"

Nuclear chemist James Arnold, whose efforts helped lead NASA to preserve and analyze a treasure trove for lunar research, also founded UC San Diego's chemistry department.

by

Elaine Woo

January 22nd, 2012

Los Angeles Times

When President John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that America was committed to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade, winning the race became the paramount objective of the national space program.

But UC San Diego nuclear chemist James R. Arnold played a crucial role in drawing official attention to another goal: preserving and studying the soil and rock samples that Apollo astronauts would bring back with them.

Arnold, 88, who died Jan. 6 in La Jolla from complications of Alzheimer's disease, was a member of a group of four scientists — dubbed the Four Horsemen by colleagues — who sounded the alarms that led NASA to establish a program for analyzing what proved to be a treasure trove for lunar research.

Along with fellow scientists Paul Gast, Bob Walker and Gerald Wasserburg, Arnold recognized that the moon rocks were "not just souvenirs but the subject of important scientific investigation," Wasserburg, a Caltech emeritus professor of geology and geophysics, said last week. "He was a sound and resolute fighter on behalf of doing science."

The precious specimens — more than 800 pounds were retrieved between 1969 and 1973 — yielded clues to many of science's most important questions, including the age and composition of Earth's closest celestial neighbor and the history of the sun.

"They are a major source of information about how things happen in the solar system," said Caltech geochemistry professor Donald S. Burnett, who was also involved in the early efforts to safeguard the moon rocks. He said the efforts of Arnold and his colleagues more than 40 years ago have left a rich legacy, including the discovery of water in moon rocks in 2008.

"Every few years some breakthrough is possible because these rocks are available to science," Burnett said.

For Arnold, who grew up on the science fiction of Jules Verne and idolized Buck Rogers, unlocking the secrets within the lunar materials was essential.

The problems they could solve, he told The Times in 1989, include "how to understand why our solar system got here, and ultimately perhaps whether our sun and planets are typical of the stars we see at night, or whether we are rare, or whether we are alone."

The son of a lawyer and archaeologist, Arnold was born in Metuchen, N.J., on May 5, 1923. At 16, he entered Princeton University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in chemistry. His 1946 doctorate was awarded for his work on the Manhattan Project, the military program that produced the atomic bomb and stirred the fears of nuclear fallout that led him to join the Union of Concerned Scientists.

After earning his doctorate, he helped University of Chicago chemist Willard Libby develop radiocarbon dating in 1949. The process, which enabled archaeologists and paleontologists to estimate the age of long-dead specimens, later earned Libby a Nobel Prize.

In 1955, Arnold joined the faculty at Princeton, where he expanded his investigations into the effects on meteorites of cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that speed through space. His work produced a method for recording the age of rocks, which helped scientists understand "how long a meteorite has been a rock in space and where it might have come from," Arnold once explained.

His research on cosmic rays drew him to the young UC San Diego, where he founded the chemistry department in 1960. He became a consultant to NASA, which in 1970 gave him its top medal for "exceptional scientific achievement." In 1980, two colleagues named an asteroid after him, after he created a computer model describing how meteorites traverse the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

He held UC San Diego's Harold Urey Chair in chemistry from 1983 until his retirement in 1993.

In Arnold's last decades, he advocated the colonization of space.

It was, Wasserburg said, "an obsession he had. We would fight about it. I thought it was nonsense. But he pressed hard to search for water on the moon, which was a cause for subsequent NASA missions. They found some water. He always worried that you have to have water if you go there."

Arnold's survivors include his wife, Louise, and three sons.

Reverence or a clever enterprise?...human ashes into beads

"South Korea firm turns human ashes into beads"

South Koreans who dread the idea of keeping relatives' ashes in urns can opt to have the remains turned into gem-like beads and placed in a dish.

by

Jung-yoon Choi

January 21st, 2012

Los Angeles Times

When Jeon Gyeong-suk lost her husband to cancer three months ago, she agonized over how to keep his remains.

Because land is at a premium, burial was out, and she found the idea of a heap of ashes stored in an urn sort of creepy. So the 51-year-old widow paid $900 to transform her husband's ashes into a few handfuls of tiny bluish beads that have the look of beluga caviar.

Even though the beads look like pebble-sized gems, they aren't meant to be strung into a necklace. Instead, some mourners keep them in dishes and glass containers, the point being to keep a lost loved one close by.

"I miss my husband so much," said Jeon, who buried his beads in her front yard.

For Jeon and others here, the image of ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust just seems like unfinished burial business. Death beads, they say, are a thing of beauty. But the beads are not without their critics, who insist that they dishonor the dead by needlessly manipulating human remains.

Bae Jae-yul, founder and CEO of the "death bead" firm Bonhyang, says he's served more than 1,000 customers in 10 years. He remembers one client who didn't want to burden his children with overseeing the tomb where their grandparents were kept. So he razed the grave and created a group of beads with the mixed remains of both parents. Now the beads are kept at home, where they're accessible to the whole family.

Bae, 56, and his business-partner wife, Hong Yang-ja, say the work has changed their outlook on death.

"The name of the company itself means 'returning to one's homeland,'" he said. "Death is not something that one should be fearful of or dread. It's a natural process."

In Confucian South Korea, paying regular respects at the grave site of elders was for generations the preferred practice. But by the late 1990s, when the nation acknowledged its shortage of buildable land, cremation slowly became more popular.

Nearly 70% of those who died in 2010 were cremated, nearly twice the percentage only a decade before, according to government statistics. Whereas some South Koreans bury the ashes, most store them in mausoleums.

Death beads, Bae says, were just the next step, with the unique process receiving government approval in 2000. A few competitors also cropped up.

Bae got into the ashes-to-beads business by accident. The former real estate and construction businessman was looking for a use for a patch of rural land he owned outside Seoul. As he considered establishing a crematorium, he met some people interested in exploring the burial bead business.

"They had the idea but didn't have capital for R&D," he said.

Bae quickly got involved. "My father ran a machine construction company, so I had knowledge of the basics of machines. I wanted to challenge myself and make a bead-making machine."

After years of trial and error, he developed a mechanism to make the death beads. At first he couldn't attract customers, but slowly the idea caught on.

"They're very beautiful to look at," said Bae, running a few samples through his fingers. "You don't feel that these beads are creepy or scary. In fact, there's a holiness and warmth to them."

The ashes-to-beads process takes about two hours. In a corner of a massive room in an industrial area an hour outside Seoul, Bae keeps an altar to hold rites for the dead. He often leads the rites with family members present.

"This is an important process, because I am announcing that I will take good care of the deceased and handle it with utmost care," he said.

The ashes are ground inside a special machine into a finer powder, which is reheated and shaped into beads. "The color and density of the beads vary from person to person," Bae said, adding that the finished colors range from coral and topaz to gray and black.

Jeon Gyeong-suk is one of Bae's happy customers. Recently, she called him to express her appreciation for the beads. "I was so moved by how beautiful they were," she said. "The pearly blue color calmed me."