Life in optical

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by the excellent Christina Scott to take part in her weekly radio show ‘Science Matters’. The main item of news that was going to be covered was the official signing of the agreement between the South African government and the International Astronomical Union to host the IAU’s Office for Astronomy Development and I was there as a foreign researcher, having just landed in the country.

Having just arrived, I wanted to brush up on the status of various projects that are funding my position in case the journalist asked me about them. I had long phone conversations with Kim de Boer, manager of the the SKA Human Capacity Development programme and Prof. Justin Jonas, Associate Director for Science and Engineering in the SKA South Africa Project Office.

As it turns out I wasn’t asked about SKA during the radio show: the main news was the astronomy development office. But since I got this great update, I thought I’d share a bit about the status of the SKA and MeerKAT projects in this country, because what is happening here is really cool.

First thing: there is way more to the South African SKA project than just the bid to host it.

There is a wealth of investment in people and when you invest in people, you don’t add up assets, you multiply them. And with MeerKAT well under way, cutting edge science and technology are already happening.

So what is happening with the telescopes?

© SKA South Africa

First, there was KAT-7, the Karoo Array Telescope, a 7-dish array that was proposed as a prototype to the SKA. Quickly, this was complemented by MeerKAT, aka more of KAT, which would consist of 80 such dishes.

Well guess what, KAT-7 is being commissioned as I write this. 7 dishes are built, 4 are operating as an interferometer already. All of it on budget, on specs – and ahead of schedule.

There is also C-BASS, installed and operating. Members of the scientific collaboration from South Africa, the U.S. and the U.K look forward to the full-sky temperature and polarization map at 5GHz that will help extract CMB signal from other experiments and observe the synchrotron radiation from relativistic electrons in the galaxy.

What about MeerKAT?

MeerKAT prototype dish at HartRAO in 2007 (Wikipedia)

MeerKat has undergone a ‘concept design review‘, during which international teams and experts come to evaluate the idea. This has all gone swimmingly with positive comments and useful input.

Now, the project is going through the ‘design review process‘, which basically turns the science goals into technical requirements, which then get translated into concrete choices of appropriate technologies and if all goes well, the selected technology should deliver the science.

While the design is being finalised, there are some things that can already be installed, and the team are not wasting any time. The telescopes will need solid foundations in the ground and excellent data connections to transfer the observations to the computers that are going to process them. Those are in an advanced planning stage.

Exciting times! The teams involved are working very hard on this, and on everything at once. Sometimes I wish I could be a fly seeing it all happen…

The Human Capacity Programme of the SKA project is well worth its own blog post and being one of its postdocs, I look forward to meeting SKA scientists and students at the next SKA Postgraduate Bursary conference where everyone will get together.

Universe Awareness at the International SKA Forum 2010 from carolune on Vimeo.

This event was organised to celebrate children and what Astronomy can do to broaden their minds.
The documentary was produced to describe and summarise the event. It was made by Rolf Muggen > www.rolfmuggen.nl
… This is what I do :)

I don’t like claims like “I hope that my accession to this high office gives confidence to women everywhere” (Irina Bokova, upon her accession to the post of DG of UNESCO). What a clumsy sentence. I don’t know if those are her words or those of the journalist editing the interview but such proclamations taste of self-justifying delusion with an aftertaste of inaction.

I am not questioning that we need role models, but being a role-model cannot be a self-assigned role. One is a role-model if there are actual people looking up to one and wanting to reach that place. And for that, we need action. One doesn’t become a role model by ambition, one becomes a role model by popular acclaim. We need the women in high positions not to be just looked at by others thinking ‘it’s possible’ – we need the women in high positions to engage other women so that when they are looked at the thinking goes ‘it could be me’.

I wish Irina Bokova the best but most of all, I hope she becomes a true instrument of change because she is in a position now to bring something to lots of other people’s best too.

PS: International Women’s day on March 8 every year is a good day to take a minute to think about women as a group, be aware of what they bring and try to engage them more, to think of what it means to be a woman, what we can achieve as a group of people sharing something, etc. – but that’s a whole other topic :)

The only way to make ‘development’* sustainable, is to make sure there are people to keep it up and keep developing.

This means making sure that there are people in developing countries who can initiate new developments from scratch, thereby ensuring that the society is flexible and creative in the face of the “only constant in life: change” and consequently who can also take over whatever developments that have been brought there by the outside world, maintain them, improve them, etc.

So what’s the best way to reach that? It’s to have a good education. I’m not talking Ivy league for the few. I mean a good educational grounding given to all.

What this entails is learning to think. Not learning things by heart. In my book learning ridiculous amounts by heart is equivalent to brain washing, unless you are a law student or a medical student and you really need to have an encyclopedia in your head to perform your job.

Learning to think.

What is it that teaches us to think like nothing else? Science.

Science is inquisitive, it is deductive, it is rational, it has a language that makes reasoning something that can be done by groups of people (maths). And if you think about it for a minute, that’s the sort of learning we need to survive.

Toddlers need to acquire the skills to be independent. How do they do that? They prod and push, and touch and pull, and taste, and ‘gaah’ at, in an attempt to see how things in their environment react, how they work. Based on this they learn how the world works:

If I let go of my spoon, the food falls on the ground and I go hungry. Every time. I’ve learnt that and I don’t have a word for it but in adult-speak, I’ve just learnt gravity.

That’s science for you. Science is the first thing we do as babies to learn to be independent. The more science we know, the more resourceful we are. That’s not because we have a better brain than others, it’s simply because we have learnt to use that brain. We have learnt to think.

William Kamkwamba is one of those people who logically put A + B together and generated electricity for his house, and now he has become a worldwide celebrity**.

So if applying the scientific method in life is so helpful, then that is what we should teach in our schools, right? We should have good science education.

Now there we have a problem. Science education, that’s scary! No primary school teacher became a primary school teacher because they liked science. Primary school teachers became primary school teachers because they liked children; anyone liking science is supposed to become a scientist or an engineer or something like that. So we need to change the image of science, especially science education!

Imagine this. You are in a classroom and you are supposed to teach something that you feel extremely insecure about, and that you don’t really like, and that you always found boring when you were a school pupil yourself. What do you do? You rely on the text book. You regurgitate what’s in the book and don’t allow anyone to stray from the path given by the book because you don’t know what’s there. And fair enough, I would do the same. But science cannot possibly be confined to a book! Moreover, that’s not going to teach anyone science, that’s the same as the brain-washing as above, and it’s only going to perpetuate the feeling you had when you were in that classroom and your teacher tried to make you learn what you think is science. Not cool.

By the way, I know of schools that are dedicated to sticking to exactly what’s written in a book and where straying from the narrow path set out by the book is reprimanded. Does it remind you of something?…

Let’s get back to why science is this cool thing that equips us for life. Science is inquisitive. It is reliable – you can reproduce things that work endless times. It is experimental, it is speculative and it evolves! If something doesn’t work, then you have to change our understanding of it. It teaches you flexibility.

And that’s where hands-on science education comes in. It’s not in a book. It’s not a demonstration that kids witness passively. It’s doing it. Kids doing what they’ve been doing since they were babies. The only difference is, they are given specific setups to do it with, which are chosen so that new subjects and new properties about the world around them can be discovered. It’s guided discovery, but it remains discovery. And it’s fun.

Back to the teacher. Something like this can’t be improvised. Teachers can’t just go ahead and set up experiments. And lab gear is expensive! Well, let’s break another misconception here. If science is what babies do in everyday life, it means that science is everywhere. Not only in expensive, specifically tailored equipment that can only be bought form commercial companies… And some people have dedicated their lives to showing precisely that, and to making such resources available to teachers and to kids.

One of those is Arvind Gupta an all his resources are available for free on his website. And remember – Free does not mean of low quality! In fact, these are great for children’s curiosity, unlike most formal education curricula.

So if that’s what science is, that’s what we need to put in schools. And yes, it is possible to ‘just do it’. Everything is out there. Now what we need is for society to value thinking and teachers – and for teachers to value science. There is a long way to go but it can be done. Anyone who trusts that thinking is the way forward, please help. Say it. Do it. Be an example. Value teachers for what they bring (children’s education!), value science for what it brings (thinking!), do it demonstratively and the rest will come…

The bottom line is – make sure kids keep exploring the world! Science is not confined, science is the real world, and science equips for thinking.
Science fertilizes the mind.

Teachers – give them guidance but don’t be afraid of not knowing! Let them go, and follow them yourself. You are not a preacher; you are a guide, an igniter and a safety net.

The goal is not to bring children up to where you know they can be and stop there. The goals is to take our imperfect tools to equip kids to discover new worlds of knowledge so that what they teach their own kids brings them even further.

(*): I put quotes around the word development because it is often seen as: Let us put a bridge between two towns separated by a river, then there will be trade between those towns and the economy will grow and [insert all the other expectations that 'development' carries with it]. I personally think this is an antiquated view of development, which is why I use quotes. What I mean with development is stuff for another blog post. Let’s just say for the sake of this post that I’m aiming for a skilled, flexible and creative society, able to tackle challenges and minimise the impact that world problems (disease, environment, economy, resources) has on it.

(**): What William Kamkwamba has done is brilliant, and should be lauded – but isn’t it terribly patronising of a society that just buys and consumes and generally doesn’t display much resourcefulness on average – to be so surprised that he is so clever … because he doesn’t have much? I would like to see those who have the opportunity of good education actually use it sometimes instead of remaining idle and then congratulating someone like William with misplaced superiority… But that’s a whole other debate.

Humans have done it again. They’ve sent a big eye out into space to explore further and that eye has looked back, time to catch a glimpse the Earth. It’s a rare occasion when the whole planet fits into a picture frame. In this case, we are seeing an Earth-wide sunset, or perhaps a sunrise? … and lots of night.

Were it not for the sunlight, we would in fact see nothing, nothing at all. So between nothing and nothing, what is it that tears us apart? What are those lines we draw between people on land, in the seas, in our minds? What are those tools we use to draw them – pens, fences, concrete walls, country borders, beliefs, personal convictions?

What can such things possibly mean when we are capable of sending out a spacecraft that, looking back, captures this thin crescent of Earth – let alone building it, designing it, or dreaming it in the first place?

Isn’t this Earth an incredibly special place if only because it is inhabited by people who can dream that big?

So why are we wasting so much life on breaking it apart, tearing it into small pieces, separated by barriers so high that we lose the perspective that this image gives back to us, the feeling of floating out in an immense and beautiful expanse of space, the urge to hold on to each other and to what we share?

Images like these carry possibly the strongest message that science has brought us. Our place in the universe. And that place is this little blue crescent. What a tribute to Carl Sagan who would have turned 75 a few days ago and who knew how to express this vision like no other:

“Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. “

Thank you Rosetta for this beautiful image. (More information on this image)