Category: Podcasts

Listen to the interview: Interview with Simon Singh (8 MB)

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Fraser: I just finished reading Big Bang and I really enjoyed it. How did you choose it as a subject for your next book after the Code Book?

Simon Singh: I think I was in an airport lounge one day and started chatting with somebody about what do you do, and I started telling him that I was a science writer, or science communicator. We got to the subject of cosmology, and something struck me. This person was fairly intelligent and very curious about the world and yet they knew nothing about the Big Bang theory. In fact, they seemed to think that the whole thing was a fairy tale. So I started telling them about the Big Bang theory and the fact that it wasn’t just a fairy tail. There’s hard evidence to back it up. And I said hey, if this person doesn’t know about the Big Bang theory, maybe there are lots of other people who don’t know what the Big Bang theory is. That struck me as a huge shame because for years we’ve wondered where the Universe came from. We looked up into the sky and we wondered what was the origin of everything in being. Now we have a theory, and I just think it would be a great shame if more people didn’t know what that theory is. So that was kind of the motivation for writing the book.

Fraser: And in doing your research for the book, did you find you gained a deeper appreciation of the theory?

Singh: Oh yes. My background is not in cosmology; my background is as a particle physicist. So I tend to write about things that are familiar and known to me. I’m not a mathematician, so when I wrote Fermat’s Enigma I started from scratch and developed a whole new appreciation of number theory and pure mathematics. I’m not a cryptographer, so when I wrote The Code Book from scratch again, I learned about the history of cryptography and why privacy and security are so important; not just historically, but also today. As someone who really knew very little about astronomy and cosmology, it was a challenge but really rewarding to have to spend 2-3 years exploring the world of astronomy/cosmology and getting to grips with it myself.

On the one hand, that makes it tough, because I’ve got a huge amount of work to do. But on the positive side, I get a lot out of it. Maybe because I’m learning things for the first time, it helps me try to convey some of those difficult ideas to a more general audience. I look at people like Brian Greene. On the one hand, he’s got a huge advantage of having a great understanding of his subjects – he’s among the world’s experts on string theory. That must help him when he writes his book, but on the other hand, it’s all so familiar to him. He has to overcome the hurdle of not being blase about it; of not taking things for granted. It’s an advantage and disadvantage. There are clearly writers who are researchers in the field and writers who are more generalists. I’m certainly a generalist, with a background in particle physics, not astronomy.

Fraser: When I read Big Bang, you could really see the different pieces – the trains of evidence – all come together, and each one is quite amazing how a theorist made a prediction about perhaps what the nature of the Universe was going to be, and then the observers, in many cases found those observations to be true. The Big Bang is obviously still just a theory, like much else in science, but at the same time it almost holds a special place in scientific thinking.

Singh: In a way, what the book is really about is: what is science? Fermat’s Enigma is really a book about: what is mathematics? The Code Book is more generally about: what’s technology? And the Big Bang is partly about… it’s entirely about the Big Bang theory, but at a deeper level, it’s about: what is science? How does science work? How do we know a theory is true? How is a theory developed? How is it tested? How do they turn themselves from being maverick theories into mainstream theories? That’s really what I wanted to explain. The concept of paradigm shifts in science, when you have one idea – that maybe the world is flat – and then we all come to realize that the world is round. How does the community of science transform itself from having one belief to having another belief?

So that’s really what the book’s about. This maverick idea of the Big Bang comes along. Everybody else believes the Universe has been around forever; certainly in the science community. And over the course of half a century, there’s this paradigm shift to a Universe that hasn’t been here forever. One was created a finite time ago, in a very different state from the Universe we have today.

You use the expression “just a theory”, and what I try to explain in the book is that everything is “just a theory”. But the question is, how much evidence do you have to back up your theory? String theory is just a theory. It’s very speculative, it doesn’t have any evidence to back it up. The Big Bang is “just a theory”, but there’s a huge amount of evidence to back it up. The fact that we see the galaxies flying away from us shows us that the Universe is expanding; that it presumably started in a hot, dense compact state and then expanded outwards. The fact that we see the abundance of hydrogen and then helium in the Universe. That relative abundance can be explained by the fact that the Universe started out hot, dense, compact, and in that state there were nuclear reactions that turned hydrogen into helium, giving us the exact ratio that we have today. If there was a Big Bang, there should have been an afterglow of the Big Bang; a radiation following the moment of creation – the cosmic microwave background radiation. Sure enough we see that radiation in exactly the right wavelength you’d expect if there was a Big Bang. So, it is just a theory with a huge amount of evidence. So, that’s what I’m trying to do in the book.

On the other hand, although I believe that the evidence in favour of the Big Bang is now overwhelming, and it’s just accepted in the way that we accept that the continents drift around, or the same way that we believe that life developed through theory of natural selection and evolution. But there are gaps in that theory. It’s incomplete. Similarly, the Big Bang theory is incomplete. It’s not perfect. But on the other hand, it’s clearly fundamentally and basically correct. And that’s really what I wanted to stress in the book.

Fraser: In reading the book, I got to the end and I was actually surprised at how quickly it wrapped up. You wrapped up with the cosmic microwave background radiation, and I was kind of hoping to hear about some of the later advances about dark matter and dark energy. You really just added a few sentences at the end of the book. Why did you leave those out?

Singh: When I look around the book stores, I see lots of books that talk about dark matter and dark energy and string theory and inflation. So in a way, my book is deliberately different because it focuses on what we do know rather than what we don’t know. So while most people are working at the frontiers of cosmology, on the very latest speculative research, I’ve said, let’s look back at what we do know; let’s look at the core of the Big Bang model. Let’s understand who came up with that idea. How’s it put forward, and pioneered, how’s it tested, how do observations conflict, how did scientists resolve that conflict. As I was saying earlier, this is a book about how science works. And so I wanted to take as a scientific theory that was well developed, and tested, rather than a part of that theory that was still being challenged, or still under debate. So the core of the book is about the history of the Big Bang and why we believe it’s true. It’s fairly standard science. But on the other hand it hadn’t really been covered in sufficient detail for the lay reader. And then I came to the end of the book and I said, hang on, I can’t just ignore that there are gaps in the Big Bang theory, that there are gaps in cosmology, so I have an epilogue where I touch on the issues of inflation and dark matter and dark energy and so on. And then it becomes a really difficult issue because a writer wants you to get to a certain point. The reader just wants to know more and more, and there are more questions that need to be answered and suddenly you run into writing dozens and dozens of pages. So, I deliberately kept it brief at the end, and pointed people towards many of those other books that cover those other frontiers of cosmology that people are working on today.

Fraser: Right, I can imagine how just explaining any one of those topics would have kept you busy for a similarly sized book. Are there any pieces left with the Big Bang that people are working on now that maybe will fill in some outstanding pillars in the theory right now. What would you say is the big one that they’re working on right now?

Singh: For example, when I was an undergraduate, say about 20 years ago and I was doing my cosmology and astronomy courses, the question was: how does the Universe end? The assumption was that gravity would pull the Universe back, gravity would pull the galaxies back towards each other and certainly slow down the expansion of the Universe; maybe stop the expansion and maybe even cause the Universe to collapse in a Big Crunch. That was kind of the standard view. Gravity slows down the expansion, and then about a decade ago, a few observers started to try and measure that slowing down of the expansion by looking at supernovae. And the strange thing was that the Universe is not slowing down, it’s actually accelerating. It’s getting faster and faster and faster. There original measurements were made back around 1997. They were queried, they were made available, there were checked, they were double-checked, they were independently verified, and now it really does seem like we’re in a kind of runaway universe. And if the Universe is accelerating, as well as gravity, there must be some kind of anti gravity, some kind of long range anti gravity force that’s driving this expansion and that’s generally known as “dark energy”. So that’s probably one of the greatest discoveries that have shaken the Big Bang theory, but I don’t think it contradicts the Big Bang theory, I don’t think it even undermines it, but it certainly highlights a lack of understanding in one part of it. So that’s certainly an issue of great concern at the moment.

I remember some time ago I was traveling across North America and I was watching the Dave Letterman show and he was talking about a newspaper story in the New York Times. He opened the New York Times and he turned the pages and he eventually got to page 13 and he started telling the audience about this story that the Universe is accelerating. I think the headline was “Universe is going to rip itself apart”. And he said, well, that’s interesting for two reasons: first of all, the Universe is going to rip itself apart, and secondly, this is only on page 13. If this is really the case, it should be on the front page. So that’s certainly one of the areas that cosmologists chat about over their coffee in the morning.

Fraser: So I’ve got to know, what are you working on next?

Singh: I’m really not sure. I think this year I’ll spend a lot of time traveling, giving talks in Canada and America. I’ve just come back from Australia/New Zealand, Greece and Germany. And this year I’ll be going to Sweden and India and so on. It takes up a huge amount of time, once the book’s been published. I’ve just finished a theatre project, where we’re giving science lectures in a West End theatre in London, which has been a great success. But we’d originally did 9 shows with my colleague and myself Richard Wiseman, who’s a psychologist. It covers biology, psychology, physics, chemistry, astronomy and it’s been such a success we’ve extended the run. We’ve sold out new shows, we’ve sold out more shows, and that’s been great fun. But also, a lot of our time’s just been spent doing stuff I should have been doing for the last two or three years, but have just been too busy writing the book. Once I’ve cleared out my backlog, once we’ve finished the theatre of science, once I’ve finished giving talks around the world this year, next year I’ll start to focus on something new. But as of yet, I’m really not sure what that’ll be.

You can learn more about Simon Singh from his website at simonsingh.com

You can also read my review of Simon’s latest book, Big Bang.

Artist’s conception of the 25-million-year-old protoplanetary disk. Credit: David A, Aguilar (CfA). Click to enlarge
Listen to the interview: Planetary Disk That Refuses to Grow Up (6 MB)

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Fraser Cain: You’ve found the oldest planetary disk. Can you give me a sense of how unusual this is?

Lee Hartmann: This is about the oldest planetary or protoplanetary disk. The oldest one we’ve found before was something like 10 million years old, so this is about 2 to 2.5 times as old as anything we’ve found before.

Fraser: Was that a big surprise to find something that old?

Hartmann: Yeah, it seems like half or more of stars have some kind of extended dusty disk with something that would make planets. At an age of about a million years or so. And then by 10 million years or so, you’re down to like 10% of all stars or maybe even less than that. So to find this thing at twice the age was really pretty remarkable. We thought that by 20 million years we’d really be down to zero for anything that still had dust around it that was very much like a planetary disk.

Fraser: What could keep the disk stable for so long?

Hartmann: It’s not really clear. The central system in this case is actually a close binary star and so it’s possible – unlike a single star in our solar system – there are two, almost equal mass stars that are orbiting around in a very close orbit and although something the size of somewhere between Mercury’s orbit and Venus’ orbit; something that size. That could be kind of churning things up because each star has its own gravity, and as they move around they could be churning up the disk and agitating the particles. What we think happens to make planets is that the dust, the little dust bunnies, kind of stick electrostatically into small little lumps and then it grows bigger and bigger. And it makes rocks, and then it makes things that are more like asteroids, and finally planets. And the planet forming stage is what really clears out all this dust. And so that process is thought to be very delicate and things kind of settle down over timescales of thousands to millions of years. It’s possible that if you’re churning it up a little bit, keeping the particle suspended then they don’t really stick together that well and don’t go through the rest of the planetary formation process like most other stars do.

Fraser: How common would something like this be? Since this is the oldest one that’s been found, do you think that there are others nearby, or is this just a total fluke?

Hartmann: It’s hard to imagine that there’s only one of these things in the galaxy, let alone the entire Universe. But, this must be a very rare occurrence as far as we can tell. We can see large clusters of stars that are 30 million years old, 50 million years old, 100 million years old, and they haven’t found anything like this in several hundreds or even thousands of stars in total. It’s probably 1 in 1000, maybe, or something like that. That’s sort of what I would guess, but it’s hard to know. We haven’t looked carefully enough at these things. We haven’t been able to until very recently. The Spitzer space telescope has just so much more sensitivity than anything else we were able to do before. It’s just made factors of hundreds of thousands of times our ability to detect faint sources like this thing is. We’re just taking the first baby steps to explore what’s out there and in our own neighbourhood. With the Spitzer telescope, they start looking at some of these other clusters, they’re confirming that twice the age of this system, less than 1 in 1000 is like that. It’s really a fairly unique system. We must have caught it in some special circumstances.

Fraser: Do you think that it could go on for millions and millions of years more. Is this still an early age for it?

Hartmann: This is something that we don’t understand very well. And one of the reasons to study these kinds of systems is that we really need a lot of help in understanding the physics of this. The physics of how planets form out of basically dust bunnies to start with. It’s just such a complicated process, and there are all kinds of things that we don’t quite understand that we really need to have more surveys of these things. I don’t really know what’s going to happen with this system. My own opinion is that it’s probably not going to go on and coagulate into planets if it hasn’t done it already. The theory suggests that there’s kind of a threshold that you have to meet. You have to have just enough stuff to make it happen, to really get over the hump of making larger bodies which can then sweep up all the smaller dust and clear out the disk. If you don’t ever get to that threshold, you might not ever make any planets. My guess is that it might just peter out, and some of the dust grains will either get blown out or spiral in slowly into the star and that’s the end of it, but we don’t really understand.

Fraser: Have planet forming disks been seen around binary systems before?

Hartmann: Yes, if I can just qualify to say that we’re assuming these disks make planets. We haven’t really had the complete smoking gun to say that these dusty disks actually make planets. I think it’s a very strong likelihood because we see all this distributed dust around very young stars and then it’s all gone. We know that we have to coagulate all the dust and get the small stuff and put it into big things to make planets. So that’s the assumption we’re making, but I just wanted to say that we haven’t actually connected the dots on that issue.

Fraser: Right, so have disks been seen around binary systems like this?

Hartmann: Yes, they have. This issue is that basically, you can’t have the disk at the same size orbit as the binary orbit. The other star will just swallow up all the dust, or evaporate it, or blow it away. On the other hand, if you have a very wide binary, if you have something where the other star is very far way, you can have a disk well inside that binary and it doesn’t know there’s another star orbiting around. We orbit around the Sun, and Jupiter is out there at several astronomical units, and that only makes small perturbations on the orbit of the Earth. Similarly, you could have a system in which the two stars are relatively close together and the disk is well outside the outlying area. And so, to that disk, it almost looks like there’s a single star. It’s not exactly like that because the two stars are orbiting around so the gravity is churning it up a little. But it’s not that far away from just having a single object. So as long as the disk is either a lot bigger than the binary, or smaller than the binary, you’re okay. If the disk is a lot bigger than the binary, though, it can be so tenuous, and so spread out that it never really coagulates effectively into planets. That’s something we would kind of predict, but that’s not something that we’re able to demonstrate observationally yet.

Fraser: Do you have some follow on observations planned for this?

Hartmann: What I think we would like to try and do is to get longer wavelength observations to see where the disk ends, because in this set of observations, we’re basically saying that there is a disk, but we don’t know how big it is. The question is, is there anything outside this system that could be perturbing the disk as well. It might even be a triple system for all we know, with a very much wider companion that is low mass and we haven’t seen. And that could really be churning it up and preventing the disk from letting planets coagulate, at least. And then the other thing that we’re trying to do, is that we’re trying to identify other systems like this which are also 20 million years old, 30 million years old. If we can find any more of these things, just to see how common they are, and whether they’re all binaries, or what’s special about them that enables them to last so long. Basically, what we’re trying to do is see the process how a disk turns into planets, but of course that takes millions of years, so you can’t follow that through – at least, I can’t follow it through. It’s like taking a snapshot of a population. You’ve got old people and young people and babies and so on. And you try and infer how the evolution goes from putting the various pieces together. And then some people are largish, or better nourished, and they have a different culture or whatever, and you try to see what different effects have on the population from that snapshot. To try and find other systems that are like this is a way of doing the experiment to see what happens if you have a much wider binary, or what happens if it’s a different mass star in the middle. We can’t really do the experiment, but if we find enough different kinds of objects like this, then nature has done the experiment in different places, and we just need to go out and look at it.

This discovery was originally announced on Universe Today on July 19, 2005.

Possible lake on Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge.
Listen to the interview: Summer at the Lake… on Titan (6 MB)

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Fraser Cain: Let’s say I’m standing on the surface of Titan beside this feature, what would I be seeing?

Carolyn Porco: Well, we’re not absolutely sure, but if it is, in fact, a lake of hydrocarbons, then you would see something that would look rather dark. It may have some materials disolved in it and perhaps waves would be lapping up at the shore which would of course be ice, water ice. Mind you, it’s incredibly cold. Overall, the scene would be very dark because high noon on Titan is like deep Earth twilight, and it might even be possibly raining methane because this feature has been found in the place on Titan where there seems to be the most clouds and therefore the greatest likelihood of rain. Not that Titan is a very cloudy place, mind you. We haven’t seen many clouds on Titan. Where we’ve seen clouds is mostly in the south polar region where this feature the size of Lake Ontario has been found.

Fraser: Now I know that images of Titan taken by Voyager and other telescopes show it as a very smoggy, cloudy world. So, how can we see the lake?

Porco: There’s a difference between smog, haze and then clouds. Clouds are particulates of some condensable material; it could be liquid droplets or the fact is if they’re high enough they could be solid particles. On the Earth, cirrus clouds are made of water ice, unlike your normal cumulous clouds that rain on you; they rain liquid water. So we could have a similar thing going on Titan, except the material, of course, is methane. But as I said, there aren’t many clouds. It’s not clouds which are making the surface of Titan so difficult to see from high above. It’s haze particles – these are haze particles, like smog particles on Earth – probably made, almost certainly made, of hydrocarbon materials, polymers probably, of carbons all linked together. These are very small particles, but the atmosphere is very very thick; hundreds of kilometres thick with this stuff. If you’re standing on the surface, you can, of course, see the surface and see even to the horizon, and a bit through it. Mind you, recall what the images taken by the Huygens probe looked like. We could see to the horizon, once the probe was on the surface and took pictures, we could see to the horizon. But if you look up through the very thick atmosphere, or if you’re above looking down, then your path through this thick atmosphere filled with haze is so long, that it’s difficult for visible light to get through. And of course, we see with visible light. In images taken with Voyager, and Voyager had a camera that could look only to the long end of where humans see with their eyes; in fact, a little beyond where we see with our eyes. But nonetheless, not far enough to see down to the surface of Titan. But with the Cassini cameras, we have used a trick that was discovered basically by ground-based astronomers. If you go to the longer wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, you go into the near-infrared, you can in fact see down to the surface of Titan. Those are the wavelengths that we have used to image the surface of Titan with our cameras, and of course, it is in those wavelengths that we discovered this lakelike feature on the surface.

Fraser: Now, if it isn’t a lake of liquid hydrocarbon, what else could it be?

Porco: Well, we’re not completely sure, 100% sure, that it’s filled with liquid. Perhaps it was a depression that once was filled with liquid, and all the liquid has since evaporated, and we’re now seeing the residue of what was left behind. So it could be solid hydrocarbons that still would form a flat surface. You could imagine a salt lake bed on the Earth; the salt having been left behind after the water evaporated. So we could be seeing something that is just solid material. That’s the two basic possiblities: it could be solid material or it could be liquid. We won’t know for sure whether or not it’s liquid until we have the opportunity to see a reflection of the Sun in the surface of this body; a specular reflection, or mirror like reflection like you can see if you’re flying in an airplane over Minnesota for example. Looking down on the ground and it’s daylight, you can see specular reflections; you can see the image of the Sun glinting off the surface of all the many lakes that dot the landscape of Minnesota.

Fraser: That’s incredible, you’ll be able to see that?

Porco: We won’t be able to see that with our cameras, probably, because the geometry won’t allow us to. The solar illumination geometry and the fact that, at the wavelengths that even the Cassini cameras can see, if we look through too long a path length in the atmosphere, things get very hazy and fuzzy, and we don’t get a clear view of the surface. However, there are other instruments on Cassini that work at longer wavelengths than we do, and they go further into the near infrared. They have an easier time seeing down to the surface, and it’s possible – we have to check the upcoming encounters with Titan. So this is not a certainty yet, but at least in principle it’s possible that they could see a mirror like reflection off the surface of this body, if in fact it’s liquid. The jury is still out on this, and we may be lucky to have the kind of circumstances on future flybys of Titan to catch whether or not it’s truly liquid.

Fraser: When will Cassini have a chance to revisit the area?

Porco: I’m not quite certain of that. There are people on my team who are busy planning the Titan flybys; planning the imaging sequences for each of the upcoming Titan flybys would know that better than I do. But I think it may not be until later on in the tour when we really have a good look again at this feature. As I’ve said many times, it’s going to take us years to work out what’s truly going on on the surface of Titan. We come by it many times during the course of this mission, which ends nominally in the middle of 2008. If we’re lucky enough, and the American Congress is willing, we’ll get an extension, and we could be observing bodies in the Saturn system for the next decade. But right now we have something like 39 further encounters with Titan.

Fraser: And if it does turn out to be liquid hydrocarbon, what does that tell you about Titan’s geology or its history?

Porco: It tells that at least in part, the thinking that we had about the methane cycle on Titan, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere is correct. Because there had been predictions that the surface of Titan would have some liquids on the surface. And we haven’t seen as many as some of the models had predicted, but if there is any at all, that gives a source of the methane that’s in the atmosphere, if there’s some liquid on the surface. Of course, the next question is: how did that amount of methane get into the atmosphere to begin with? Did it come from volcanoes, or did it come from some other source? The question of how methane can even exist right now on the surface of Titan, when we know it’s being broken up in the upper atmosphere. But still, it confirms for us, at least in part, some of our thinking about what is going on between the surface and the atmosphere, and that’s interesting to know. This is another atmosphere, in many ways similar to our Earth. It gives us another example to study in learning about our own atmosphere. Bear in mind that Titan also has a kind of mild greenhouse effect going on. It’s surface temperature is 12-degrees Kelvin greater than it would be otherwise, if there were no methane in its atmosphere. So, we stand to learn a lot about our own planet, and what makes our own planet unique, and what makes it have anything in common at all with some other body, like Titan, by studying Saturn’s largest moon.

Fraser: Have you imaged Titan well enough now to know that this is the only feature like this on the planet?

Porco: Oh, not by a long shot. We’re just beginning here. These are early days. I don’t know what percentage of the surface has been covered yet, but it’s still a small fraction at the kind of resolution that we would need to see these kinds of features. So no, we have a long way to go, and I think there’s going to be a lot more exciting discoveries in store, so stay tuned is the message really.

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Story Musgrave on the launch pad for the space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-33. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge.
Listen to the interview: Interview with Story Musgrave (10 MB)

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Fraser Cain: We’re just about two weeks away from the next space shuttle going up to return to flight after the Columbia tragedy. How would you feel if you were in the space shuttle?

Story Musgrave: I was never comfortable with the shuttle, of course. The risk is a lot higher than I ever wished to tolerate. I’m not a risk taker. I’ve survived in the aerospace world for 53 years, and I’m a professional who wants to come back and do it again next year. I’ve never been happy with the amount of risk that the shuttle is. But, I think the current mission will probably be one of the safest ever. I think they will have done as much as they can, and they will have looked after the details, so I think this current launch will be as safe as any they’ve ever done.

Fraser: What’s the experience like of launching on board the shuttle? Pretty violent, I guess.

Musgrave: Uh yeah, I’d call it violent. It’s a lot of vibration, a lot of noise, and you’re just hoping that butterfly will just stick to that bullet.

Fraser: There’s been a lot of controversy about the Hubble Space Telescope, about whether to continue the repairs or not. You led the team for the first repair mission. How do you feel about bringing Hubble back to service?

Musgrave: I think we’ll give it one more shot. I think we will go and service it one more time. That’s not over, that game is not over yet, and I expect we’ll service it one more time. It may not be on the books now; what is on the books is don’t preclude it, not to preclude that possibility. I think once we get the shuttle flying again, and certainly the public wants that done. There’s nothing much more important to the public. The public doesn’t understand the space station, they don’t know what’s there, they don’t know what we’re doing, they don’t see anything from it. Once we get the shuttle flying again, and we’ve got an idea about the difficulties there with ice or foam and the thermal protection system, then we’ll get that confidence back. I think we’ll get the confidence to take the shuttle to somewhere other than space station. As you probably know, the only issue is – it’s not a matter of money or anything – the issue is that every time you fly the shuttle until it’s flown out its lifetime, which people are talking 2010; should you take it to the space station every time? You do have a lifeboat, you do have a means of inspection, possibly of repair, and a place for the crew to hang out until rescue if there is a problem. It gets down to the basic question: are you willing to take the risk to fly the shuttle anywhere other than the space station, such as Hubble? You can not make it to Hubble, and then make it to space station. They’re in different planes, and it takes to much fuel to change planes. So you can’t do both. If you go to Hubble, you can’t make it to station.

Fraser: How do you feel about the new Vision for Space Exploration?

Musgrave: A vision of “out there”, I am very happy with, to go beyond Earth orbit. Space station was a terrible strategic error. We’ve not had a solid vision, of course, since the Moon and Skylab. For Skylab, our first space station, I was involved in developing, and as a backup crew member on the first one in 1973. Now the Apollo and the Skylab programs had a vision. We knew where we were going and what we wanted to do, and it was exploration and discovery. It kind of lost the way from that point on, in terms of staying in touch with the public, who wants exploration and discovery, wants a little further out there. The Voyagers, of course, were fantastic successes and this year they’re planning to pull the plug on them just for money purposes when, in fact, the Voyagers are defining the edge of the Solar System. A new vision at least has words “back to the Moon and to Mars”, so it’s a little further out. How that unfolds, of course, no one knows. Where the resources will come from when we transition from the current efforts we’re doing. Until we get out of the current efforts, there’ll be no money for the further out explorations. But they also have to be done right; we can’t leap off and go. We have to lead with the robots. They have to go first to establish habitats and science centres. They need to go first. So then you can do space optimally, low cost option for space. Lead with the robots. We have to do that this time.

Fraser: And do you feel that the US, and maybe the world in general are more interested in space and space exploration then maybe the governments give them credit?

Musgrave: Oh yeah, the people are. The people are usually interested in exploration and discovery; they’re very interested in what kind of Universe they’ve got; what’s their place in it. They’re interested in the big questions. So, that’s what they’re after. That’s what’s exciting about space. Not the spinoffs, not the technical spinoffs, not just the technology. They’re interested in discovering their Universe. They want some answers to their existential questions. What’s life mean here? What’s the meaning of hope? What am I doing here? So things like Hubble tend to bridge those gaps between cosmology and theology, philosophy and astronomy. And that’s why Hubble has always meant so much to people. That’s why for that kind of exploration and discovery, you can do it in a microscope as well. You could do it with really cutting edge science, all those things are exciting to people. But space, going out to beyond Earth, whether you do it with telescopes or other robots or eventually humans, that’s why people are excited about space.

Fraser: Astronomy and the search for life on Mars and so on has a chance to really put things in perspective here in the Universe.

Musgrave: You’ll never know. You can’t know what happened here until you find one other. Of course, contact, you know with linear time and linear distances is going to be very difficult, but no way will we understand how creation, evolution and intelligent beings and the information age all came to pass on this planet. We’ll never understand that until we see how that happened on some other body. And so that is critical, very critical. We’re dealing, as scientists, we’re dealing with a sample of one; how it happened and why it happened. With a sample of one, usually you can’t make conclusions from one. So all those things are highly important. But we can take small steps before we make contact. You can make steps in that the human species accepts the other long before you get the proof of contact. That’s part of our growth, part of our Copernican growth; do we accept other living creatures, and accept other intelligent creatures. It’s all part of the Copernican thing – the Universe does not go around the Earth. It’s part of the Darwinian thing about evolution, it’s part of Freud, of the subconscious, which is very important to human behaviour even though you can’t get at it. It’s Einstein’s Relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty. Those kinds of things, they are part of our species’ growth. And so I think that long before we get to physical proof of it, that part of our growth will be universal among the species acceptance of the other.

Fraser: Do you think that humans are emotionally ready to make contact with other alien species?

Musgrave: No, they’re not. They’re not, and it won’t happen. Anything that is so advanced as to be doing interstellar travel, and you know with the trillions of planets out there that could support life, there is interstellar travel going on. They wouldn’t come here, we’re not ready. We’re not ready because we are not ready to meet members of our own species. I mean, there are 60 wars this week on planet Earth. So, if we’re not ready to meet – to embrace – members of our own species, let alone other creatures or a sustainable behaviour with Earth, we are not advanced enough in our globalization and in our moving further out until we think of ourselves as galactic creatures on the journey together. No, we’re not ready to meet them, and we would not welcome them – we’d send the guns first. It would be a national defense. It would be a national security issue, as opposed to a communications issue. I’m not a cynic, and I’m not being skeptical, I’m pointing at the facts… the pure facts. But it also points out that humans have got to get it together. They’ve simply got to get the will, the desire, to get it together. And that has not become more important than protecting the tribalism and protecting our provincial interests. You know, globalization of the species, where we become global creatures, and then solar system, and then galactic kinds of creatures which would live at a different transcendent level. That’s obtainable to us today if we only have the desire.

Fraser: Do you think that the universities and the schools and even the popular culture are doing a good job of popularizing space and astronomy and science right now?

Musgrave: Yes, I think they do a good job. That’s not the problem: what do we give them? What are we handing them? For example, let me come back to you and ask you a question, what are we giving them today?

Fraser: On the news, people are interested in Michael Jackson’s trial more than the things being discovered in space.

Musgrave: I absolutely agree that the Michael Jacksons to Britney Spears and the Donald Trumps are running the world. There’s no question about that, and I’m serious, they really are. If you look at the internet, if you look at the explosion of information with 100 television channels, and the massive number of books, magazines, print and the satellite communications, the internet, all the rest of that; if you look upon that as we’re almost forming a global brain here, or we have already – it may even be conscious. That’s a stretch, but how are we to know? You know, a single brain cell doesn’t know it’s part of a brain; it can’t see that great big picture. But the gate guarders, the people who run the media and the like. There are people who, when they sneeze, the entire system reverberates; they kick off huge waves that go through this massive global brain that we have. And it’s not the scientists, and it’s not the scientific information. That’s not necessarily just a problem with the space program, that’s a cultural problem. You want to build the people; you want to make the people so that when they sneeze, the whole brain shivers. You make them, and then you mine money from them. But that’s a process where we really do need to get our priorities and get beyond that.

Fraser: I see a few glimmers of hope, with shows like CSI where the scientists and geeks are the heroes. Back in the 60s and 70s, the astronauts were seen as heroes and as rock stars in that world, so it’s definitely possible. It’s almost as if, this is what’s currently in focus, so that’s all people care about.

Musgrave: I guess it boils down to a sense of values. What are our values? What are our species, what are our cultural, what are our national, what are our values in terms of what do we value?

Fraser: I wanted to go a bit into the recent CD that we reviewed here on Universe Today a little way back. Can you give me some background on what went into doing this CD, and the people that you worked with?

Musgrave: Well, it was mostly my son who was instrumental in that. And we have some other musicians which I adore: Jonn Serrie writes a lot about space music. Harry Roberts, we discovered him. He was just living across the street from Todd in Austin. Brian Eno, I’ve always adored his stuff, the Apollo track, and that. It’s basically a montage of things we recorded some of my poems in the studio, and then Harry added some music to them. It kind of evolved in that way to be a space themed audio.

Fraser: And having finished Cosmic Fireflies, do you think you’ll do another CD?

Musgrave: Yes, I think we will. I think it may focus a little more heavily. The poetry I wrote were mostly class assignments. One poem, the longer poem about orbit about the Earth I wrote for National Geographic magazine. But if I’d had it in mind ahead of time, that we’d put the poems to music, then I would maybe do some different things. But I didn’t know that’s where those things would end up, when I wrote them, or when I recorded them. So it’s possible that with the specificity in mind, it’s possible that I could do a better job although, there’s nothing much like spontaneity. I think a live audience is very nice too, so you might do a live poetry reading. And I do live programs to record on DVDs. I’m just wrapping up one now on Australia from space. I’m going down to Sydney in two weeks and probably put the wraps on that. We’ve been in post production here for a year.

Fraser: One question I get a lot from readers, is how do they become astronauts. One suggestion I’ve heard is to save up $20 million and pay for a trip to space. Do you have any advice for the next generation of astronauts out there?

Musgrave: I disagree with money, I disagree, I think that’s the wrong thing to do. Money, just like we were talking about earlier, who runs the world, with celebrity running the world with celebrity money and power, they all go together of course. I disagree with the idea that money should go into space. The artists, the poets and scientists and other teachers and stuff, they don’t get to go because they don’t have money. So I disagree with that grab for resources. We had a wonderful communicator in space program, teacher in space program, but of course, Christa McAuliffe died on Challenger and we haven’t had the courage to reinstitute that program. We took her backup, Barbara Morgan, we took her on as a regular astronaut so that we would eventually get a teacher into space. The wider range of people you put in space, the more richly you’re going to communicate what space is about. I’ve always been highly in favour of flying a diversity of people in space. Money should not be the deciding factor. Your ability to have the experience and bring it home for others should be the deciding factor. Now, new things are happening; there’s SpaceShipOne, and the Ansari X-Prize. So new things are happening, but it’s not going to open a huge door right away. Space is so critical, you have to do it right. You can’t just do it, you know. You can’t just do it to pull it off. So you have to do more deeper engineering, and backup systems, and safety systems, and escape systems, and you have to get more into those kinds of things. Tourism in space by private enterprise will be a little slower to happen than maybe we perceive now, as we see private ventures getting into it. It’s very important to have those innovative kinds of things happening. It’s exceedingly important because NASA’s not doing it.

Apple has released their latest version of iTunes, 4.9, with support for podcasting. The Universe Today podcast is located in their directory, currently it’s the 63rd most popular podcast… woohoo! So, if you’re using iTunes for music, you might want to download the latest version and transfer your subscriptions into iTunes. Just do a search for Universe Today in the podcast directory, and then click on the “subscribe” button. You don’t actually need to own an iPod to listen to these shows, just a computer that can play music/sound.

Thanks for all your support, I’d better hurry and do some more interviews.

Fraser Cain
Publisher, Universe Today

Giant balloon carrying the BLAST instrument into the high atmosphere. Image credit: Joe Martz. Click to enlarge.
Listen to the interview: Having a BLAST in the Arctic (4.5 MB)

Or subscribe to the Podcast: universetoday.com/audio.xml

Fraser Cain: It’s nice to finally have a chance to talk to someone from my home town. How’s the weather there?

Gaelen Marsden: Oh, it’s pretty nice today, nice and sunny.

Fraser: And how does it compare to northern Sweden?

Marsden: Well, it gets dark, which is pretty great.

Fraser: Right, right, 24 hours of sunlight. Can you give me some background on the mission that you just came back from in the North?

Marsden: So, it’s a balloon borne telescope, and carries a 2 metre mirror. BLAST stands for balloon borne large aperture submillimeter telescope. We fly in a balloon to an altitude of 40 kilometres. The 2 metre mirror, which is fairly large for a balloon – it’s nothing compared to ground-based telescopes – but it’s big for a balloon and comparable to current satellite telescopes. We’re measuring in the submillimeter, which is a new frontier. There are a few ground-based telescopes that measure in the submillimeter, but we’re the first ones to do it from near space, not quite space. The advantage to submillimeter is that you’re looking at – in the case of the extragalactic science targets – reprocessed light from very large stars; bright heavy stars as their galaxies first turn on with a flash of star formation. Along with the star formation, you have dust, and the dust absorbs the light from the stars and re-radiates it in the submillimeter. So that’s what we’re looking at.

Fraser: How does a balloon stand as a platform for having an observatory?

Marsden: Right, it’s a quick, cheap, dirty alternative to a satellite. We’re actually piggybacking on the European Space Agency’s called Herschel, which has an experiment on board called SPIRE. We’re using the same detectors and a similar mirror, and they will fly, I believe in 2007; although, it’ll probably be 2008. They’ll do a better job than us. They’re in space, there’s no atmosphere at all, they’ll have much longer observing time, but on the other hand, it costs 100 times as much and takes 10-15 years. Whereas, we put this together in about 5 years. That’s the read advantage; it’s very quick and it’s much cheaper.

Fraser: What other kinds of observations do you think could be done from a balloon-based observatory?

Marsden: Ballooning is nothing new. It’s been going on for probably 30-40 years. One of the most famous ones is the Boomerang telescope, which flew from Antarctica in, I believe, 1998-2000. And that’s CMB, Cosmic Microwave Background studies. There’s been a whole slew of balloon-borne telescopes looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background. And then also it’s very common in atmospheric sciences to use balloons.

Fraser: You launched the balloon a couple of weeks ago from Sweden. Where did it go, and what happened to it?

Marsden: Right, so we launched it Saturday morning. First it goes up, it takes about 3 hours to get to the destination altitude of 38 km, actually we were a little higher than that at first, I think we were closer to just over 39 km. The winds are fairly predictable, these high altitude winds. This is why we do it from Sweden, or from Antarctica. During the summer, the winds go in a circle. Not that we know exactly what it’s going to do, but you know it’s going to go West during the summer. And it did go West. It ended up going quicker than were hoping. The wind models were showing about 20 knots and we were going as fast as 40 knots some of the time. That ended up slowing us down. We were hoping to take 5 days to get across to the Northwest Territories, and it actually ended up being 4 days. And another problem is that we drifted north which caused problems because we wanted to fly all the way across to Alaska, but we ended up being too far north, and we had to cut down to Victoria Island instead, which cut off another 18 hours.

Fraser: So the balloon came around the pole and then drifted over northern Canada. How did you retrieve it?

Marsden: Two members of the team, Mark Devlin and Jeff Klein, both from the University of Pennsylvania, left Sweden after the first day. When the balloon launches, we get line of site telemetry. We get all of the data through a dish. For the first 18 hours or so, we’re getting all of the data. We’re all looking at it carefully, and it’s really important that we get everything set up properly for the rest of the flight to go smoothly. Eventually it passes over the mountains, and we don’t get that high data rate any more, and we get much less – by a factor of like a 1000 or so – data rate. So, for the rest of the flight, we just had a trickle of data coming in. But as soon as the line of sight data was over, Mark and Jeff left Sweden, flew back to Philidelphia, and then quickly left for Northwest Territories, and they were nearby when the balloon came down. It sounds like a fairly difficult task because it was quite remote, and they had to fly in by helicopter. They had to cut the thing up into fairly small pieces to retrieve it all.

Fraser: Now, if I understand correctly, the submillimeter is at the high end of the radio spectrum, and it’s really good for looking at cold objects. So, what exactly were you looking at?

Marsden: From the beginning, the science proposal stated that we had two cases: the extragalactic and also the galactic. Extragalactic was what I was talking about earlier, this high star formation in very young galaxies, and redshifts of up to 3, and possibly 5. That was the extragalactic case. There’s also the galactic case, where we’re looking at planet formation and dust in our own galaxy which is, at this point, not very well known. And it actually turned out that due to the sensitivity of the telescope being lower than we had hoped, we decided that it wasn’t the best use of our time to spend a lot of our time looking at the extragalactic sources. We actually spent most of our time looking at galactic sources because they’re closer, larger, brighter, easier things to see. In the galactic case, I actually myself don’t know a whole lot about the science because I’ve been spending my time studying extragalactic. But we’re looking at cold dust clouds in our own galaxy. Some of them will be forming stars and planets, which at this point is not well known. There are many wavelength observations of all these things, and we’re trying to add the submillimeter portion of it, so that you can look at these sources in the radio, although, I suspect you don’t see them very brightly in radio, but certainly optical. You see these pretty pictures from Hubble of these dusty nebulae, and we’re just adding the submillemeter presence to that curve to see if we can figure out what’s actually going on there.

Fraser: Do you have any more missions planned, or follow up observations?

Marsden: Yeah, definitely. We’re hoping to learn from the things that went wrong here. We had some problems in the flight, certainly we got a lot of science, and we’re very excited about it. There will be a lot of good things coming out of it, but we still want to go after the extragalactic stuff. We’re going to spend the next year or so putting everything back together and then try to get a handle on the things that went wrong with the flight. We’re hoping to turn around for another flight in 18 months from Antarctica.

BLAST Website