From the ABC Science Desk The European Extremely Large Telescope will dwarf all other telescopes. In 1609 Galileo's 'Old Discoverer' could boast a lens an inch in diameter. Now the Keck Observatory on top of a mountain in Hawaii has two mirrors, each of them 10 metres across but so smooth and so perfect that even if they were stretched out to the width of the world their irregularities would still only be inches high. The Extremely Large Telescope - its name so deliberately prosaic that it becomes almost poetic - will, providing it is completed by 2018, be the width of five double decker buses placed end-to-end and will be able to see (rather than infer) Earth-like planets revolving around distant stars. We could, in effect, be looking at ourselves (or at least our alter egos) through the looking glass. The Extremely Large Telescope will probably be located in the Canary Islands, but you really can try something like this at home and at no extra cost. Look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? Look very carefully. Obviously your left eye is where your right eye ought to be, but there is more than that, something practically impossible to notice and yet fundamental to making sense of the universe. Your reflection is no longer you. The difference between you as you are right now, and you as the mirror represents you, is measurable. This is what you used to look like, a short time ago. And when I say 'short', I mean: very short indeed - a matter of a few nano-seconds. But if the speed of light is finite - something that Galileo realised - then everything you see is history. To see the more distant past, it is only necessary to hold the mirror further away from the object. Assuming instantaneous matter transportation and an XXL telescope, if we want to finally work out who really killed Kennedy, all we need to do is nip over to a planet some 46 light years from here and we should be able to inspect the grassy knoll at our leisure. Similarly, the Battle of Waterloo, the birth of Christ or the building of the Pyramids - we just need to go the extra few million miles. Or take my old friend Sidney, whose funeral I went to a while ago. On yet another planet I can still see him on his bike visiting his patients, looking surprisingly fit and healthy, having assumed the form of light. If every day we are seeing the sun as it used to be eight minutes ago, then, by extension, there should really be no difficulty about seeing what was going on some 13.7 billion years ago and bearing witness to the birth of the universe. As one quantum physicist friend of mine once put it, 'You can see God'. Genesis now or, in the words of the English Prayer Book, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The Extremely Large Telescope is reaching out towards the sublime. Not long ago, I had the opportunity to look through the Keck, the highest observatory in the world, and saw a star (well, it looked more like a red dot to be exact) 13 billion light years away, therefore one of the first stars, from the kindergarten phase of the universe. This is getting close to seeing the absolute origin of time and space. If we can see that far - and that far back - it ought to be possible, you would think, to go all the way. But there's a small hitch. Unlikely though this may seem, we just run out of photons to look at. Beyond a certain point, it's just plasma, pre-light, a very interesting cocktail but, sadly, inaccessible to YouTube. So the Extremely Large Telescope will get us, if not all the way back to the Genesis moment, 'in the beginning,' at least to a very short time after the beginning, the 'Let there be light' period of stellar formation. Any time before that and it looks like cosmic censorship has been applied and a veil has been thrown over what we most devoutly wish to know. But all is not lost, in fact, nothing is lost. We just need to transcend light. If we cannot quite see everything, perhaps it is possible to hear it. Gravitational waves are the solution. They pass right through matter, refreshing the parts that photons cannot reach. Every event generates vibrations, pulses, like ripples in a pond. The whole universe is forever sending out signals about itself, it's just a question of picking them up. Which is how I came to go to LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory in Washington State. It is like an immense divining rod, with a couple of tubes four kilometres long at right angles to one another, with laser beams bouncing through them designed to catch the gravitational wave. I stuck my head inside one of the tubes (having taken the precaution of switching the lasers off first): it was like looking down the barrel of infinity. There is another (extremely) small hitch with gravitational waves though. The waves are so small - about one-thousandth the width of a proton - no one has managed to detect one yet. Extremely Large Telescopes and Laser Interferometers provide the kind of visionary experiments, at the intersection of science and fantasy, that encapsulate our dreams. If we cannot get to the stars, we can at least get the stars to come to us. We are made out of stardust, ex-stars, stuff that didn't quite fit in anywhere else. It is only natural that we should wish to look out - and listen out - for word about where we came from in the first place. This is a narrative that is built into cosmology and theology alike. Scientists look forward to launching LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), which would be the greatest equilateral triangle ever built, with sides made out of light and five million miles long. Or to hooking up all the giant telescopes on earth so that our planet will be turned into a single omniscient eye, peering into space, capable of seeing everything there is to see. Galileo, Copernicus, Bruno (who was executed for his sins) helped us to see and conceive of other worlds. The Extremely Large Telescope will enable us to scrutinise them closely. Shakespeare may well have been registering the impact of the first telescopes when he wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy". But what if we really could see the point at which there are no more things? To infinity and beyond, all the way back to before the beginning? I am tempted to call this the 'holy grail' of science and philosophy and religion alike and represent it as a noble and impossible quest. But in fact it seems to me a perfectly reasonable goal and, given enough time and space, not only attainable but inevitable. Peter Cook once joked that he was a specialist in "the universe and all that surrounds it". The Ultra Large Telescope or space-based Interferometer of the future or some other device might well equip us to go beyond a joke and glimpse the all that surrounds it. Just as we used to think this world was the world and we were at the centre of everything, but eventually broadened our horizons, so, by the same token, we have come to understand that there is no reason why this universe should be the one. Welcome to the multiverse, where everything moves in mysterious ways. In one world, Elvis is slim and making another comeback. In another President Kennedy married Marilyn Monroe and their best man was Lee Harvey Oswald. In this world I am married with two kids; in another I am a lonely bachelor; or I do not exist. If the 'many worlds' thesis turns outs to be true, then fiction becomes impossible. Odysseus, Oedipus and Madame Bovary must be out there somewhere. Or, as the poet Walt Whitman put it over a hundred years ago, and is still putting it: "Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes". ____________________________________________________________ The death knell tolls for creationism. Destiny will reveal the iniquity of its dogma and the poverty of reason it represents. It is approaching faster and faster with every day. The space-time interval is like the blink of a human eye. Never more apt than today is Carl Sagan's observation. "Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves, but to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." OriginalBiggles, Prime
Unfortunately, rules of management preclude me from providing a URL link to the article. In being notified of this I was struck by the quaint, almost self-efacing, redefinition of the word MOMENTARILY. Is there no end to American inventiveness? In another group, the Greek word KUDOS is treated as a plural. It is a way of attaching one's approval to a post, so that one approval is one KUDO. I almost fell out of my chair when first noticing this. By this naive redefinition we can be assured that there are several COSMOS and just one COSMO, several CHAOS and just one CHAO. The ABC in this case is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. OriginalBiggles, Prime
