The Edge of Physics

"I worked with Anil at New Scientist when he was an editor there and I was writing for him, and we have remained friends ever since. But I haven’t just chosen the book because we are friends! When I read his book I was struck by how he is like a pilgrim on a journey. He is a man who is searching for understanding and his place in the universe and he does this by travelling to these observatories and these great scientific establishments and trying to understand the drive and the reason for looking into the universe and also trying to understand the universe. He went all over the world and one of the most interesting places he went to is the place on the front cover of the book, which is the European Southern Observatory’s rather uninspiringly named Very Large Telescope! The observatory is at Mount Paranal in the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile. Yes exactly – water vapour is very unhelpful when looking into the atmosphere, so the drier conditions are the better it is. And it is very high as well so they are above quite a lot of the atmosphere. This observatory is on a really remote site, touching the sky. Anil went there and he describes his conversation with the gardener. Built into the side of the mountain is the residencia for the astronomers and the workers. Once you are at the observatory there is no commuting. Scientists typically have one week on and one week off. In the residencia , which is a hotel built into the side of the mountain, you need water. There is no water elsewhere. You need a tank of water that will humidify the place, so why not make that into a swimming pool and also plant around it a big tropical atrium. So when you walk down the long path into the mountain you come across a lush underground jungle, which is an extraordinary sight. When Anil spoke to the gardener he discovered that the man felt he was contributing to this great effort towards understanding the universe. Yes, because this was the only way he could help. He knew plants and gardening and yet he could still take part in this adventure of trying to understand the universe and have access to these people. And I think that is a key message for anyone who is interested in astronomy. It doesn’t matter if you are not a mathematician or if there are some concepts or distances you just can’t wrap your head around. No one really can wrap their head around the distances – they just have to accept them. So at some level just let the wonder of it all wash over you and that will help you become comfortable with these ideas of planets and stars and then it becomes a part of you. Every great advance in our understanding of the universe has come about because we have seen movements in the universe that we can’t explain. And trying to find the forces or the reasons for those movements has produced great advances. The first one was Galileo and whether the earth moves around the sun. At the moment we are still seeing strange movements that we are trying to make sense of. All the galaxies in the universe seem to be rotating more quickly than we understand. It is not just one or two, it is pretty much all of them, so there is something else there. Is it vast reservoirs of matter that we can’t see that are contributing to the gravity of these objects or is it a misunderstanding of the ways that the laws of gravity works? That is one of the key focus points for astronomy at the moment."