Life
Sexy In The Eye Of The Beholder
He’s a PhD from Harvard, an expert in planetary science, fluid mechanics, hydrology, geodynamics, and physical volcanology. He’s been voted amongst the “Brilliant Ten” by Popular Science magazine, but the editors of People magazine saw something else in Michael Manga, associate professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Berkeley, when they decided to include him in their “Sexiest Man Alive” issue!
Manga, who is Indian Canadian, says they probably picked his name from the list of winners of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Was he stunned to suddenly become a sex object? “The most embarrassing thing was having the word ‘sexy’ associated with me,” he says. But we’ve seen Manga’s pictures …. and he does look pretty hot. Is he under-rating himself? He says, “I guess, maybe. I don’t know. I think that’s why it’s funny to me, because I never think about these things. I don’t get up in the morning and think it’s something important or matters to me. It doesn’t affect how I live my life or any decisions I make in my life.”
So, what’s his passion, what gets him really moving? “Science in general, understanding things which seem to make no sense,” he says. “I look outside my window and I see mountains, an ocean, and a valley and I like to understand why those things exist, why earth is an active planet when other planets of the solar system are dead. This is what excites me. It doesn’t feel like a job.” Any regrets about his stint as a sex god? He says, in spite of all the ribbing he had to take from students and professors, “Doing these things is actually good, because this was the only mention of science anywhere in the whole issue of People and there’s not a lot of science there. But something’s better than nothing!” |
