Sorry view of the sky at night

Published in Tribune, 15 February 2008

NEARLY 50 years ago, CP Snow, scientist, sometime politician and mediocre novelist, gave an influential speech in which he decried the rift between what he called the “two cultures” of science and humanities. How could it be, he asked, that at a dinner party he had held, the highly educated guests’ eyes had glazed over when he asked them about their views on the second law of thermodynamics? He argued that they would never have admitted to such ignorance about the works of Shakespeare.

I was never entirely convinced by Snow’s argument, mainly because he didn’t compare like with like. Technical knowledge in science is not equivalent to simply having read a book, and a guest who launched into a monologue on the metre of Shakespeare’s sonnets would likely have got just as “cold and negative” a response. If, instead of blinding his guests with science, Snow had opened their eyes, talking of the majesty of the knowledge we have gained of the universe, he might have had a more enjoyable dinner party. If he had talked about how the afterglow of the big bang is still reaching us, letting us see the moment of creation, Snow and his guests might have agreed that science, at its best and most inspiring, answers many of the same questions as philosophy. Perhaps the two cultures have more in common than we think.

So if we are worried about the cuts that face British theatre, we should also be concerned about the crisis facing astronomy. Hundreds of jobs are at risk, Britain’s involvement in international observatories is in question and the future of the discipline is threatened.

Science funding has had a good innings recently. Under this Government’s first science minister, David Sainsbury, research flourished. Budgets grew, money was made available for young researchers to study for doctorates and start their careers without falling into debt. For the first time in years, academic pay could compete with private sector graduate salaries.

This makes what has happened since particularly galling.

It is worth stepping back a moment to see quite how serious the current mess is. Thanks to mismanagement at the Science and Technology Facilities Council and a miserly financial settlement from the Government, particle physics and astronomy face across-the-board cuts of 25 per cent or more. This means fewer students, less spent on facilities, less on recruiting staff and highly skilled jobs being lost.

The Astronomy Technology Centre, which builds precision scientific instruments, is particularly badly hit and faces cuts of 50 per cent.

Britain’s participation in major international projects has been radically cut back too. British astronomers risk ejection from the Gemini Observatory, in which this country has invested £70 million. After years of work, Gemini is just starting to come into its own as a world-class facility – and Britain may have to withdraw. Negotiations are ongoing and the threat of British astronomers being kicked out with immediate effect has been delayed for a few months. However, at the very least, our participation will be scaled back. It is quite possible Britain could end up with no access at all, despite paying for a quarter of the building costs.

The list doesn’t stop there. Ground-based solar physics – a small but important field which complements the more glamourous work done by satellites – will no longer be funded at all. Britain’s participation in fundamental physics is under threat, too. The STFC has announced its intention to pull out of the International Linear Collider programme, on which we have spent £30 million. The result of this wave of slash-and-burn is that Britain could end up without any access at all to world-class telescopes in the northern hemisphere, and be left with just one in the south. Literally half the sky could go dark for British astronomy, which means less data, fewer publications and a smaller contribution to human knowledge.

It’s easy to shrug off this work as being of little practical use. But science funding never really was about direct applications being found – partly because it is more or less impossible to know in advance where these will come from (who would have guessed, after all, that Einstein’s work on the speed of light would lead to nuclear power stations?) and partly because there is a broad acceptance that funding fundamental research is a good thing. Astronomy, for centuries, has been a potent tool for inspiring people and discovering the origins of our universe.

Without telescopes such as Gemini, that cutting-edge work is finished. Astronomers need modern, sensitive equipment like this to see the most distant, faintest objects in the sky, the oldest parts of the visible universe, whose light is only reaching us today after billions of years crossing the void.

To put it bluntly, so what if it has no commercial value? Finding out about the origins of the universe, where we’ve come from and where we’re going is far more valuable than that. In the coming years, as British astronomers move abroad, universities scale back their astronomy departments and poor prospects scare teenagers away from studying astronomy, the big discoveries will not be coming from our shores.