They tackle some Big Subjects at the Australian National University and on Tuesday this columnist, bypassing the campus' nearby School of Inconsequential Studies, hurried on to the consequential Leonard Huxley Theatre.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
There Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith was going to address, a flier promised, huge, consequential questions including: "How did the solar system form? Was Einstein right about the nature of gravity? Are we alone in the universe?"
These are some of the fundamental questions driving an international consortium from 10 nations (thus far, with more likely to join) as they contemplate designs for the much talked about Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Made of many thousands of radio receivers sited in Africa and Australia, the SKA will be the world's most powerful radio telescope. It is expected to revolutionise our understanding of our poorly understood universe.
Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith is an astronomer at the CSIRO and the project scientist for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, an SKA precursor.
She knows oodles about, is deeply involved with and enthuses about the prospect of the SKA. And she is sure that it really is going to happen.
She told us on Tuesday that the project has such cosmic "appeal" that even governments that are notoriously stingy about spending money on other things can feel wildly philanthropic about SKA. Our federal government has promised $293 million of early funding. She dares to dream that "there will be bobcats on the ground [preparing the SKA sites] within five or six years".
"She uses radio telescopes" Tuesday's flier informed, perhaps leaving some of us feeling that our own jobs are a teensy bit inconsequential, "to study the births and deaths of stars in the Milky Way and to measure interactions between colliding galaxies."
Not knowing that there was a journalist in the scholar-packed theatre, the youthful Dr Harvey-Smith had a little scoff at the way in which journalists struggle to get their minds around SKA. She says my calling imagines, from the project's name, that there will just be a square kilometre of advanced contraptions, when in fact the array will be arrayed across vast distances.
Why, she asked us rhetorically, have the world's astronomers agreed that we, our species, needs the SKA? Those astronomers came up with so many reasons, she rejoiced (she is disarmingly enthusiastic about all this and not a bit like your stereotypical boffin) that they have filled (she showed us a picture) two enormous folios.
She went into some detail, bewildering for a mere journalist, about how we have been a little slow to appreciate the enormousness of what there is out there to investigate, and hence to understand how little we know.
But relatively new-fangled radio astronomy has brought some revelations. Now we know, too, that the universe is expanding. And there turns out to be millions of galaxies, with often what we imagined to be sparkling individual stars in the studied firmament proving to be, instead, galaxies, mind-bogglingly far away.
And there are, she explained, with wondrous pictures, all sorts of galaxies of all sorts of shapes and personalities. There are quiet galaxies "that mind their own business" and then there are turbulent, trouble-making galaxies.
She ran through a list of what SKA may help us to do. For example, it may help us "to look at the evolution of galaxies", and to better understand things, such as transient radio emissions, "that go bang! and pop! in the night".
"And we also want to study our own galaxy."
At the end of her list of momentous research dreams she mused, ironically, "So it's not much, really. It's just everything."
Building the SKA, she bedazzled us, will pose some "huge challenges". There has never been anything like it. So, for example, far from only taking up a square kilometre it will brandish "one million square metres of collecting area".
"And how [for the African and Australian sites are remote and bleak] do you put 140,000 antennas [from their shape called Christmas Trees) in the desert?"
Then, SKA is going to need supercomputers more brainily bemuscled than we have now because "SKA's data is predicted to exceed the current global internet traffic, perhaps by 10 to 100 times. Exceeding all the cat movies on YouTube, all the emails, all the Netflix …"
But she told us that all of the super conceptual and technological challenges that SKA will pose, is already posing, are a big part of the overall allure of the project that is proving with all its intellectual excitements to have such appeal for governments, for corporations and for the people.
Of course, some of the appeal for the credulous people is that SKA may somehow help us to find out whether or not we are alone in the universe. I was reminded of that as, after her talk, I skipped across the campus to my car (intellectual engagement having put a spring in my step) and passed the famously UFO-looking Academy of Science Shine Dome. It has been famously characterised by artists as a parked flying saucer. One wit, artist Trevor Dickinson, has famously characterised it in his merchandise as the Martian Embassy.
Are there Martians? Will they ever care enough about us to have an embassy here? Will the keenly anticipated SKA help us answer these towering questions?
