As a result of the pilot study we have concluded that we can't do it. More than that, we don't think it is do-able; Oxford Economics doesn't think it is do-able, either. So we're not continuing with the study. The problem is that one has to unravel a rich network of inter-relationships.
That is so extremely rare that it probably never happens. What does happen is that every scientific advance is part of an enormous international network. If you try to isolate the UK node in the network, you may isolate what you think is the UK contribution to the work, but you might miss out the fact that you've got to be part of the network to contribute and do the work in the first place.
It is extremely difficult — we concluded impossible — to do such an analysis and have it mean anything at all. In addition, much of the way in which astronomy makes a contribution is very long term, for very basic science, and how you trace it through the decades is difficult. This problem is very difficult to get across to government and the people who are insisting on changing the way in which we do our work. After a meeting with Science Minister Lord Drayson, one of his staff stressed to me the importance of quantitative measures of what we do.
Impressing our peers in astronomy is not the important issue for the government. It is interested in getting products out of astronomy that the public want. This does happen but, as we've found, it is very difficult to quantify and, in general, happens on a much longer timescale than governments typically consider.
I think this is in part because how we do science is not understood. I'd like to outline how I think we do sciences — and I know that every scientist has their own ideas about this, but these are mine. First, I think that serendipity plays a very important role in discoveries in many sciences, including astronomy. Roberts Roberts R Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science Wiley, New York writes on serendipity in science and argues, for example, that all important chemicals were discovered serendipitously.
He mentions one important process, for synthetic indigo, in which the catalyst is mercury. The role of mercury was discovered because someone broke a thermometer while measuring the temperature, mercury was released, and the reaction went much faster. It's a wonderful book, full of such stories, and the same pattern is there in astronomy.
The trouble is, serendipity sounds like luck. Worse, it sounds like gambling, which is what banks do. We're not like that! We are much more directed, but we benefit from serendipity and the mental equivalent of averted vision. If you want to see the Andromeda Nebula, you'll struggle to see it if you look at it directly.
You need to use averted vision, to look off to one side where your retina is more sensitive. You need to do that with your mind if you want to solve a problem: keep it in your head and play around with it, keep coming at it from different directions, and suddenly the answer will become apparent. A certain amount of pressure from grant-writing, observing time proposal writing, reviewing papers and so on is helpful; I think it focuses the mind to have to set out priorities.
But if you have to do enormous amounts of this, writing many many grant proposals because the success rate is very low, it becomes the enemy of thought — it becomes just a grind. We're getting towards that state now. I suggest that the pressure to obtain economic impact from our work is going to have disastrous consequences for our international competitiveness in basic research.
And I'm going to say something contentious, because I think it may be true. Why have there been no Nobel Prizes in physics to UK-based physicists for the past 30 years, since Neville Mott's award? I think that this is because in the Thatcher era there was an enormous emphasis on economic impact in physics, and many people I know in physics have one or two companies. None of them are driving round in Porsches, but none of them have Nobel Prizes either.
I think if you are to do work of the quality that wins Nobel Prizes, which is admittedly rare and takes a very special person, then there's a low probability that the identical person will be successful as an entrepreneur. It is a very very low probability that one person would have the qualities to achieve both. Such people do exist but they are very rare. I think that too many physicists in the UK have been distracted by the drive to pursue work of economic impact.
That's my theory, and it's not been tested, but it is based on observation. I also want to wonder why we do astronomy? Why am I passionate about doing astronomy? Why have I and so many others devoted our careers to astronomy? It's not for economic impact — and certainly not for the economic impact on our individual lives! The mathematician G H Hardy has something to say on this. I read that, as a child, he used to spend time in church factorizing the hymn numbers, so he was certainly unusual.
In later life he worked on the theory of numbers and he sounds to have been rather arrogant. No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, the least difference to the amenity of the world. None of his work was done with the direct intention that it would be useful — quite the opposite!
And that's one thing worth bearing in mind in terms of how to motivate scientists: telling them they have got to do things that are economically impactful is not effective. We tend to find things through serendipity. The term dates from Horace Walpole in , in a letter where he mentioned a Persian fairy-tale about the three princes of Serendip who happened to stumble on odd things.
Do you think before you look or look before you think? I want to use the idea of serendipity, plotted on axes of luck, preparedness and aim — although I have no idea what the units are and I'm not going to use a scale! Nevertheless, figure 6a shows some key points.
The circle represents the conventional idea of discovery, the sort of thing you're taught at school where you're highly prepared and have a very definite aim, and as a result you find something out. I would put serendipity somewhere up along the luck—preparedness axes, and it's got the shape of the three-dimensional solid, because it does depend on aims as well as luck and preparedness.
Most of the time in astronomy the astronomer has an aim, a reason to be looking in a particular direction, and it might even be related to what they discover. But they then stumble onto something, perhaps not completely unknown or completely different.
It's a complex thing, but that's how a lot of discovery takes place in astronomy. I've represented six dimensions so I've used three at the top and three below in figure 6b , to show how astronomical discoveries are made.
You can discover things in astronomy by looking deeper in space, by looking at fainter objects, by looking for longer times — or even shorter times if you want to discover pulsars — you can look in finer detail, with better spatial or spectral resolution, you can use other wavebands, such as X-rays, gamma rays, TeV, or polarization, and so on. That's how we tend to discover things, overall, although there are of course many ways to go about astronomy.
Much of my work is related to X-ray astronomy. Most people are more familiar with X-ray absorption images, which are widely used in medicine, security and manufacturing, while emission images are more familiar in astronomy, for example in images of the Sun. X-ray astronomy started entirely serendipitously. In , Giacconi used a rocket to launch a detector to look for X-rays from the Moon and did not find any. Instead he and his colleagues found a much brighter source, Sco X-1, which started the field.
We can compare the optical sky with the X-ray sky and they are very different. Most of the objects in the X-ray sky are accreting black holes, so we're seeing processes that we can't pick out from optical images. Pulsars were discovered serendipitously, as were magnetars.
In an eruption on a magnetar produced an enormous flash of energy, the brightest thing that has ever been detected in astronomy, and the oscillations that followed the outburst ionized the Earth's atmosphere in a periodic manner, which led to the Earth's magnetic field oscillating. This object exploding on the other side of the galaxy twanged our whole magnetic field — in terms of impact, this is where astronomy can have an impact.
It can gather clues about the nature of the physical, chemical and biological universe itself. If you think an astronomer treks up mountains to spend night after night behind the eyepiece of a giant telescope, think again. That includes space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope. People very often confuse astronomy with astrology. Observational astronomy can be traced back to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia as far back as 3, B.
Modern astrologers attempt to do something similar, making predictions about human lives based on pseudoscience. Astronomy and related fields are at the forefront of science and technology; answering fundamental questions and driving innovation.
A wealth of examples — many of which are outlined below — show how the study of astronomy contributes to technology, economy and society by constantly pushing for instruments, processes and software that are beyond our current capabilities. The fruits of scientific and technological development in astronomy, especially in areas such as optics and electronics, have become essential to our day-to-day life, with applications such as personal computers, communication satellites, mobile phones, Global Positioning Systems , solar panels and Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI scanners.
Although the study of astronomy has provided a wealth of tangible, monetary and technological gains, perhaps the most important aspect of astronomy is not one of economical measure. Astronomy has and continues to revolutionize our thinking on a worldwide scale.
In the past, astronomy has been used to measure time, mark the seasons, and navigate the vast oceans. It inspires us with beautiful images and promises answers to the big questions. It acts as a window into the immense size and complexity of space, putting Earth into perspective and promoting global citizenship and pride in our home planet. On a more pressing level, astronomy helps us study how to prolong the survival of our species.
Only the study of the Sun and other stars can help us to understand these processes in their entirety. In addition, mapping the movement of all the objects in our Solar System, allows us to predict the potential threats to our planet from space.
Such events could cause major changes to our world, as was clearly demonstrated by the meteorite impact in Chelyabinsk , Russia in On a personal level, teaching astronomy to our youth is also of great value. It has been proven that pupils who engage in astronomy-related educational activities at a primary or secondary school are more likely to pursue careers in science and technology, and to keep up to date with scientific discoveries National Research Council, This does not just benefit the field of astronomy, but reaches across other scientific disciplines.
Astronomy is one of the few scientific fields that interacts directly with society. Not only transcending borders, but actively promoting collaborations around the world. In the following paper, we outline the tangible aspects of what astronomy has contributed to various fields. Some of the most useful examples of technology transfer between astronomy and industry include advances in imaging and communications.
For example, a film called Kodak Technical Pan is used extensively by medical and industrial spectroscopists, industrial photographers, and artists, and was originally created so that solar astronomers could record the changes in the surface structure of the Sun. In addition, the development of Technical Pan — again driven by the requirements of astronomers — was used for several decades until it was discontinued to detect diseased crops and forests, in dentistry and medical diagnosis, and for probing layers of paintings to reveal forgeries National Research Council, In Willard S.
Boyle and George E. Smith were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of another device that would be widely used in industry. The sensors for image capture developed for astronomical images, known as Charge Coupled Devices CCDs , were first used in astronomy in In the realm of communication, radio astronomy has provided a wealth of useful tools, devices, and data-processing methods.
Many successful communications companies were originally founded by radio astronomers. The computer language FORTH was originally created to be used by the Kitt Peak foot telescope and went on to provide the basis for a highly profitable company Forth Inc. It is now being used by FedEx worldwide for its tracking services. Some other examples of technology transfer between astronomy and industry are listed below National Research Council, :.
The first patents for techniques to detect gravitational radiation — produced when massive bodies accelerate — have been acquired by a company to help them determine the gravitational stability of underground oil reservoirs. Larry Altschuler, an astronomer, was responsible for the development of tomography - the process of imaging in sections using a penetrating wave - via his work on reconstructing the Solar Corona from its projections. Schuler, M. The aerospace sector shares most of its technology with astronomy — specifically in telescope and instrument hardware, imaging, and image-processing techniques.
Since the development of space-based telescopes, information acquisition for defence has shifted from using ground-based to aerial and space-based, techniques. With war on the horizon across Europe, the applications beyond astronomy quickly became obvious. During the Manhattan Project, Bethe was even appointed to lead the theoretical group at Los Alamos, where he worked on the first nuclear bombs. He later spoke out against the weapons. There are now hundreds of nuclear power plants around the world.
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