Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday
May eighteenth, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of
the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria. And as always, before
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Today's episode is episode six hundred to two. Thank you,
Thank you. All right, so let's get into it. This
week I had the opportunity to chat with doctor Emma Chapman.
She is an award winning astrophysicist. She's a royal Society
Research Fellow and lecture based at the University of Nottingham.
She's received many many commendations and prizes, including the Royal
Society Athena Metal. Her first book was called First Light,
and she has a new book out in the UK
the title is Radio Universe, but here in the US
it is called The Echoing Universe, How Radio Astronomy helps
Us See the Invisible Cosmos. So, without any further ado,
here she is doctor Emma Chapman. Well, Emma, thank you
so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to
having a.
Speaker 1: Chat absolutely, So we're going to be talking about your
new book, The Echoing Universe, How Radio Astronomy helps us
see the Invisible Cosmos. And like I usually do at
the very top of the show, before we dive into
any sort of specific content, I like to get a
little bit into process. I'm curious about your kind of
career trajectory, how you found yourself in astrophysics, what you
studied in school, and if it was sort of like
a linear path or if there were some twists and
turns in there.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna say linear chaotic. I do like that that's
a thing but like I've been on a straight path,
but it's been very weakly, there's been. Yeah, I did
not grow up loving space. I will say that straight away.
The first time I owned a telescope was I was
about thirty four. Oh wow, Okay, only a few years ago,
believe it or not. So I've been a professional astronomer
for far longer than I actually ever owned a telescope.
But I did grow up loving history, and I really
really wanted to be an egyptologist, So I did all
of my work experience in Egyptology, packaging five thousand year
old shoes into little like acid free paper cardboard boxes
a very famous museum in Oxford. And then I picked
up a book in the library that was about something
called special relativity, and all I really remember I was
about fifteen, and it had a blurb about, hey, this
is about time travel and how the faster you move,
the slower you age, and I genuinely thought somebody had
put it in the wrong section and that it was
a science fiction book. So I took it home and
I didn't understand ninety nine percent of it, but I
did understand that I wanted to understand it, and almost
overnight I switched on my options to study physics. I
love that. Yeah, it's It's what I tried to tell
to tell high school students now when I give talks,
is that you know what, if you don't know what
you want to do right now, that's fine. You can
have a few left turns in your life. That's okay.
And yeah, even even then I went to I went
to university to study physics, didn't I still didn't have
real interest in space until again I found out about
the way we can explore the Big Bang and the
era of the first stars. And then that little kid
who had been fascinated by history and wanting to explore
tombs in Egypt suddenly went, well, hang on a minute,
that's history. Yeah, yeah, but of like billions of years,
supposed a few thousand, And I was like, wait, nobody's
dug up this time, nobody's explored this first billion years. Well,
how do I do that? How do I do that?
And so I started a PhD. And I was told
that the only way I could do that was using
radio telescopes, And so I gave myself a very quick
crash course on radio astronomy during my PhD. And I've
never looked back. And yeah, I like to tell people
it's a bit tweet, but that I kind of I'm
still a historian. It's just that I've swapped the trowel
for a telescope.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And I mean so many things come up even
as you're sharing your story. One that is sort of
in the front of my mind has to do with
the way that we structure academia. And obviously the structures
are pretty different between the US and the UK, but
there's still a lot of crossover. You know, American students
can go study in the UK and vice versa and
still you know, be on the right path and get
the degrees that they are setting out to get. But
one thing that I do notice is that, especially at
the undergraduate level, and of course even worse as we
get to more specialized graduate training, I worry that we
don't do a great job of introducing these topics from
a top down approach first and then getting into the
bottom up training. I worry that so many kids are
subjected to fundamentals of physics before they ever understand why
we want to learn physics, that they are turned off
by the I don't know, not being able to connect
the dots between let's say, learning the mathematics and understanding that, yes,
this is like a historical enterprise for example.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree completely, so much I could say on this,
but it comes down to you need to inspire people
need to feel inspiration and or are is a big
word I use a lot. Is that. It's it's you
need to feel that or that like, wait, I just
don't understand this, but I feel something deeply. That feeling
is what I try and kind of inspire in younger
people for exactly that reason, to be like, hey, look
our physics curriculum. I don't know about the US particularly,
but in the UK is really quite dry. It's all
you know, right, We're going to learn about simple harmonic
emotion and this and that and oh my god, no wonder.
I wasn't planning on studying physics and it took a
popular science book for me to be like, wait, I'm sorry,
time travel what? And that's what made me do it.
But I think there's a bit of kind of almost
is it snobbery or gatekeeping, I'm not sure what the
right term is, but I think it's that people want
to feel like they're super smart once they've done all
of this training and they do understand general relativity and
they're like, well, I can't possibly explain it to a
thirteen year old, while no, you could. Actually, it's just
that you don't want to lower yourself as you see
it and break down that theory to the exciting fundamental blocks.
And that's how I write Actually is is very much
is kind of the second part of that. That question
you asked was kind of like the process of me
becoming an astrophysicist and in some way an author on
this is that's how I understand science. If somebody comes
to me with a scientific theory, now, I still to
this day can't absorb that one hundred percent and go,
oh yeah, it's very very clever. I have always been
the one in the room that is absolutely willing to
ask the air quotations stupid question, right, because otherwise you
can't advance. And so what I always do is I
go back. I go back to when that theory began,
and I like to read and watch how that theory
evolves over decades. And that's how I understand something is
by breaking it down. But you're right, unless you have
that knowledge of what's going to come, what's at the
end of this journey. Yeah, you know what, it can
look a bit dry at the start because you don't
know where you're going.
Speaker 1: You need both, and it's hard to not see that light, right,
the light at the end of the tunnel, to help
you get through the slog. Sometimes, you know, I think
that I see a similar I don't know if it's
a character trait or if it's just an insight. Really,
I think that's more than anything, it's a similar insight
amongst my peers and colleagues who work as both scientists
and science communicators, or individuals who yeah write kind of
trade publications, books for public consumption, or do television or
podcast that they see that there is that disconnect. And
I think about the fact that I had a friend.
He's an older adult, so which will matter as I
describe this, But he was lucky enough because he was
a non major when he attended university at Cornell, he
took a course from Carl Sagan called Physics for Poets.
Speaker 2: Oh my lord, can.
Speaker 1: You imagine that probably was the you know, the quintessential
course that does exactly what we're describing here, inspires awe
and wonder and assumes you guys aren't going to become
professional physicists. So here's some of the stuff that you
need to know in order for all of this to
make sense. But we're not going to get lost in
the minutia. And I wish we'd treat it all young
physicists as.
Speaker 2: Poets absolutely, and all poets like as physicists and physicists poets.
You know. It's it's it's this old idea that you
can send people to Artemis, or you can send a
probe to the moon. Sorry, that's very different from having
a human on board, especially someone who's got an artistic
or poetic disposition and he's able to describe that in
like a language that humans can understand. Yeah, And I
think when it comes to this kind of to extend
the analogy you just said about the light at the
end of the tunnel, you need to see it. To
see the light at the end of the tunnel, you
can't have a lot of stuff in the middle. And
that's where science communication comes in. It's about removing the
stuff in the middle. You need to give them the
inspiration the light at the end, and you need to
start them on the journey and give them the means
to get through that tunnel. But if you keep it
blocked up with all the equations and all of the like, oh,
this and that and all, we must be fair to
include exactly this. It's like, do you know what? Forget
your caveats sometimes, sorry, but what's important is this this
feeling that you inspire into people, and that I guess
that you help reduce their fear. You help reduce their
fear so that they can go on. And then the
next time they come across something with the title radio astronomy,
and for example, they'll be like, oh, actually, do you
know what, I am smart enough to read this article.
I am going to give that a day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, I think radio astronomy is such
a perfect example of a topic and an area of
inquiry where you do have to dig a little bit
deep to find that way in. And the reason I
say that is because when we think of popular science communication,
especially now that everybody is on their you know, cell
phones and everybody is connected to social media. One of
the ways that I think NASA has historically, for example,
had such a wonderful public outreach effect is through imagery.
And very often that imagery is it's visual you know,
it's like the visual spectrum imagery, and so I talk
to astronomers from time to time on the show who
are working within spectra that aren't as readily understood to
the eye. And so I'm curious if maybe you can
share with us right at the top, you know, what
is radio astronomy, Like what tools do you use to
detect it? And what does it look like physically? Like
can you print it on paper?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 1: Do you approximate it with visual representations?
Speaker 2: Sure? So radio astronomy it puts together two terms that
we're really familiar with. One is astronomy, which is the
study of the universe. I'm literally looking up and radios
we're used to in our daily life. The older of
us will have remembered actually having a physical radio with
an antenna, whether or on our car. The younger of
us will maybe surprised to know you do have radio
antennas but miniaturized in your phone, and what those are
doing are collecting a type of light. To optical light
is one part of the whole spectrum of light, but
the really long wavelength low energy light is called radio light.
And that's so good at communicating, It's really good at
keeping information and not getting kind of disturbed by the
atmosphere of the earth or clouds or all sorts of things.
So that's why we use it to broadcast on radio stations,
because it's just really good transferring information over long distances.
So radio astronomy is putting those two things together. It's
looking up and communicating. It's looking up and listening and
sometimes sending radio waves out into space and echoing them
back and seeing what information we can get when we
listen back. And to do that, I use the word listen.
I use the word listen loosely here, and that's because
when we think about radios, we think about listening, but
what it really is is seeing, and so we need
to build a different kind of eye. Now, our eyes
are evolved to see really really small wavelength light, so
you can kind of just really imagine like a very
drawing a wiggly line that's really really really really wiggly.
But the radio waves is march broader wiggles, and you
need a march bigger eye to be able to do that.
And the thing that works for us is a big
metal antenna. So what happens is we use an antenna
that you might even have on the side of your house.
Rusting from the days of satellite television, what you might
have something that looks a bit like a kind of
spindly Christmas tree on the side of your house, or
you might have a satellite dish. Both of those are
radio antennas. They are both able to receive radio waves,
and they're both able to receive radio information from the universe,
so you could call them radio telescopes as well. And
that's kind of what it is. It's using this antenna
to gather radio light and then translate it into something
that we can understand as humans. So the way I
like to think about that is a paint by numbers.
So if anybody has done a paint by numbers with
their kid or by themselves, I'm not judging. You have
like these images and they'll be broken down on a
canvas where it's kind of got like all of certain parts.
We'll say one is red, two is green, three is blue,
and you have a set of paints and you'll paint
all of the red, all of the number one's red,
and eventually you have an image. Now, that's all we
do with any wavelength of light that we're not evolved
to see. So it's almost like we take the rainbow
and we shift it to the radio wavelengths, and we say,
you know what, a two meter wavelength radio wave we're
gonna call red, and a two point five meter wavelength
radio wave we're gonna call blue, and we color the
image that we're getting in like a paint by numbers,
and then it's just that image looks like any other
kind of image that we might see in the optical light.
And I'll just finish by saying that that layer of translation,
you're right, does seem to provide an obstacle. It does
seem to be like, oh gosh, this is a little
bit hard until you realize that actually the optical images
you see from Hubble, for example, which is an optical telescope,
they have also been translated. They have been observed in
different optical well wavebands like red, green, blue, and they
put them together in a certain kind of way. So
that layer of translation is always happening. It's just people
are more fearful of it when it comes to something
like radio astronomy, which is just that touch less, tangible
right right.
Speaker 1: Just beyond what their I can see, But the data
are still there. And I think that's that's the important
kind of point here, is that you know you were
describing these these dishes on the side of your home.
I have a dear friend, doctor summer Ash, who's been
on the show before. For anybody who who remembers way
back when, I'm probably due to have her on again.
And for years she was a staff member at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and so she actually managed all
the tours and the visitor experiences at the Very Large Array,
which is very close to me here in Los Angeles.
It's in New Mexico, and so this is I think
what people usually, at least in the US. I think
if if you have heard of radio astronomy and an
image comes to your mind, I think it's probably the
Very Large Array that comes to your mind, these massive
satellite dishes that are actually telescopes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm so jealous to start with.
That's really I hadn't actually thought about what image might
come to you in the US, actually, because here it's Jodullbank.
It's the level telescope, which is big, kind of three
hundred foot ish two hundred and three I think diameter dish.
For me, it's always our Cibo in Puerto Rico that
comes why in this massive dish that's that was three
hundred meters across. But what those instruments do is just
this level of translation from light to electric signal, and
that's exactly what our eyes do. So this light comes
in through our our pupil, so I was struggling. That
comes in and it hits the retina and it produces
an electric impulse in the retina which then goes on
to go down the nerves into the brain and is
translated into an image that we can, you know, understand
a little bit more. And that's what an antenna's doing.
Is the radio light is falling on that metal, it's
introducing an electric voltage or current, and that current is
then going that that voltage is going down your cables
into your computers, and it's being translated into okay, that
means it's that bright in that wavelength over there. And
that's all we're doing. And we might steer our telescopes
in different ways. We can get into the weeds of
that a bit later if you like, but you can
have these dishes that kind of point in different directions,
like we turn our head. You can have a little
bit more clever stuff like the VLA, the very large array,
which can plug dishes together, telescopes together and create the
equivalent of a gigantic telescope as well. There's some really
cool stuff that you can do just with radio astronomy.
Speaker 1: And there's also I think when it comes to the
data itself, like what we are actually observing. You mentioned
the comparison. You know, you did such a beautiful job
of describing to us what those radio signals are and
how they do differ from optical signals, and how we
can sort of translate and interpret that data. But of
course that means that with radio astronomy you can quo
to see or hear things that you can't see with
just visible light. Isn't that true?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? Yeah, And it is the same with any wavelength.
I try not to get too tribal about it.
Speaker 1: Right, That's true.
Speaker 2: Like I do absolutely have a soft spot in my
heart of a radio astronomy obviously, which is why I
wrote the book, because I do find that it is underreported,
let's say, because of people's fear of it. And what
amazes me is that even though I'm a cosmologist by trade.
My areas the first stars, first black holes to exist
in the universe. I have always had a really strong
interest in other areas of astronomy and actually all popular science.
I read a huge amount popular science across the board,
always have, and I was fascinated that I just kept
reading these books that had nothing to do with radio astronomy,
and there'd just be a throwaway sentence saying, oh, and actually, yeah,
the first exoplanet, the first planet outside our solar system
was found by radio telescope. Oh, oh, okay, I didn't
actually know that. And then you know, and it would
be it be every area that I'd come across that
radio astronomy had kind of just been quietly getting on
with it and not really enjoying much attention, I suppose.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so so there's there's many many things that radio
astronomy can look at. It's looking at different physical processes.
That's the way we can think about it. All the
wavelengths of light probe different physical processes. So the James
Web Space telescope, it's really good at getting through kind
of the dusty parts of our galaxy and looking at
stars being born. It's really good in that radio telescopes
radio waves. Sorry. As I've mentioned, their superpower is kind
of being able to travel unperturbed, which means that they
can glide not just to our own atmosphere, but through,
for example, the atmosphere surrounding Venus, which is entirely impenetrable
to optical like we've never seen the surface with optical
light sent from Earth. We've sent a few probes down
there that have been horrifically crushed after thirty minutes, but
just before they die horribly after thirty minutes, these metal
probes not crude, I should be vocalar. They have sent
that twelve twelve images, and that's all we've got. Whereas
radio waves, we can from Earth press a button, send
some radio waves along. A few minutes later, it'll bounce
off the surface of Venus, having just slid through that
almost impenetrable atmosphere. It'll come back and we will get
these incredible three D renderings of the volcanoes on the
surface of Venus. And yeah, I could go on and on,
but I don't know how much you want me to
talk about it now. But you know, my absolute favorite
in the Solar System is ice on mercury. So that
blew my mind. I could not wait to share that
with people. I found this out and I was like,
I have to write about this now because I mean
I literally felt like coming out of the pub and
tapping people on the shoulder and be like, seez I
did you know there is ice on mercury? I was like,
because I feel like you should not go home not
knowing that. It became this compulsion in me to tell
people like this is this is why I write, is
so I don't alienate all of my friends and family
because I just tell my word process so instead.
Speaker 1: Of and so the only way that we know that
is is because of because of detection with with radio.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because where you can't where you can't kind of
shine a light an optical light on something you can't
you can't see it with an optical camera. And mercury
has some really deep craters and parts of its surface
never ever see sunlight because of this weird way it rotates.
It rotates so weirdly that actually the sun sometimes comes
up halfway, goes backwards and then comes back up to
fini vicious onset. It's really very strange. But anyway, there
are places that optical light just cannot get in even
if you're write up close and so radar what that
can do radar, by the way, is just the method
of sending radio waves and then echoing back towards you,
and you listening to how that echo is changed to
work out how big the cave or the crater is
in this sense, And what happens is when that light
bounces off the bottom of the crater. Usually it would
come back and we'd be like, Okay, this crater is
about this big, this deep. Fine, This light came back
ever so slightly changed in its kind of direction of waviness.
We're going to call it that, but polarization, the direction
the wave is traveling kind of yeah, at ninety I'm
not sure I can be bothered to get into this
right now unless you ask a follow up question on that.
But because honestly, you know what I said earlier about
the caveats, let's just you know what the cool thing
is here, not the polarization, is the fact that the
light came back changed, and it can be changed in
such a way that it could only have been reflected
by something really shiny and frozen like ice. And yeah,
sure enough, they then knew what to go look for
with other probes, and they confirmed it. It was indeed
water ice on Mercury from comets millions of years ago
that has sat there frozen on the hottest planet, well
not the hottest planet, but the closest planet to the Sun. Yeah,
in incredible temperatures.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. It's I mean the fact that it's not
just about sort of.
Speaker 2: Tools.
Speaker 1: Obviously, these are tools that are used to answer questions.
I think science is interesting in this way because sometimes
when I talk to folks who aren't scientists, I notice
certain assumptions that are completely reasonable assumptions. And I'm going
to take a hard left turn to explain or to
prepare for the for the discussion. I'm teeing up here.
I'm remembering. So I'm a psychologist and I work in
a cancer center, and I'm remembering talking to a patient
who had a very rare kind of cancer. But that
very rare kind of cancer has all of these really
like cutting edge treatments available that are you know, nearly
curative and just very very almost sci fi in nature.
And I remember this patient asking me, like, why would
they have that for what I have? When so many
more people have, you know, breast cancer, prostate cancer, all
these different types. And I was like, oh, right, because
sometimes in science we ask questions and then we go
try to work to find answers, and other times in
science we are asking broader or somewhat related questions and
then we stumble upon things where we're like, you know
what that would be good for you know what that
would probably help us. And that's why certain cancers have
certain treatments available that feel light years ahead of others.
It's because somebody stumbled on some genetic quirk or some
cool way that the cells were reacting to something in
the lab and they go, oh, this actually isn't working
for this solid tumor, but look what it can do
in the blood. And I'm curious. I mean, I can
only imagine that physics, and especially astrophysics, works in a
similar way that sometimes it takes those really innovative minds
who were working so hard and so narrowly to solve
a problem, but then said, I wonder what would happen
if I apply this technique to this question over here,
and then something breaks wide open? Absolutely, yeah, like what
kinds of questions has radio astronomy been able to answer
in that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to give you the less in a minute,
but just to like comment on that question, yeah, yeah,
I couldn't believe more. How do I put this? People
will often talk about a serendipitous discovery, as in like, oh,
it just came out of nowhere. That's very really true.
It is exactly what you describe, is that somebody was
trying to ask a broader question. They had the education
and the curiosity is absolutely key, I think to answer
that question. But that curiosity carries them further than the knowledge,
than the education, because it's that curiosity which when you
find a radio signal, like Jocelyn Bellbanel in the nineteen sixties,
and she's sat there for months looking at a print
out of what is basically a straight line with some
wiggles on, and she's looking for one kind of wiggle,
and over football field length pieces of paper, she has
the curiosity to notice a very small, different kind of wiggle,
and most people would have walked away. Most people have said,
that's not the wiggle I'm looking for. I'm not interested
in this wiggle. I haven't got time for this wiggle.
I want a PhD on the other kind of wiggle.
She said, wait a minute, that weird, Hang on, what
is that? And everything stops and she has a curiosity
to look, and she finds after a small amount of time,
finding that this signal is repeating, and it's like, what
is this signal? Is it aliens? And they famously wrote
LGM in the margins of this print out, being like
could it be little green men? Until they realized there
were four on the disky and it was very unlikely
that aliens were communicating to them from four different areas
at the same time. And they eventually found that this
was a completely new kind of astronomical object called a pulsar,
which was a spinning neutron star, so a star that
has collapsed at the end of its life to such
a compact little sphere that it's only about ten kilometers
in diameter, so a star, but about the width of
a city small city, completely composed of one type of particle, neutron,
and it's spinning so fast, it's spinning thousands of times
a second, and in doing that it triggers a physical
process where beams of radio light come out of it
like a like a jet of like a lighthouse beam
and that beam is passing over Earth, and that is
creating a wiggle in Joscelyn Bell Bernell's radio telescope where
she was least expecting it. And if that person hadn't,
if she hadn't been curious and open at that moment,
and I'm going to get political slightly here, hadn't had
the funding and the time to be able to explore that.
It's so important in science to give people time to
study this curiosity driven research. Then you know what, that
pulsos wouldn't have been discovered in nineteen sixty seven, I
think it was. They would have been discovered in let's
say nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty three. It would
have happened. It's just you need both the knowledge and
education and the cure real stina time to be able
to do that.
Speaker 1: So before you before you continue with the examples more examples,
I guess from radio astronomy, I feel like that is
a point that so bears repeating. When you said, you know,
get political for a second, obviously, it speaks to exactly
this concept that so many people in I think positions
of political power in you know, who have the power
of the purse who are sort of setting policy on
who gets funded and who doesn't and where we spend
our tax dollars. They are thinking and not not nefariously. Simply,
I think naively that the way to answer questions in
science is to make sure you are asking the correct question,
to fund the thing that we think is the best,
you know, current way to investigate the thing, and then
to report on those results and that you know the
truth of the matter is a lot of discovery comes
from interdisciplinary collaboration and conversations and crossover and having exactly
what you said. The empowerment which comes from privilege, it
comes from funding, it comes from backing, and it just
comes from like having you know, people in positions of
power to say, yeah, you have I don't know, you
are empowered to do this thing, to be able to
chase down a side quest from time to time, because
if we didn't have that latitude to do that, everything
would be siloed. We would have a bunch of false
stops and starts. And actually I think that the political
machine would become disillusioned because they would say, no, we
funded you to do this thing and you couldn't do it.
So clearly you're not you know, you're not the right
person for this, or this lab is not the right lab,
or you guys aren't good at your jobs. Well, sometimes
we just can't do certain things because we don't have
the technology yet, but we have other things that not
being able to do that thing taught as we could do.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you can use the technology that you didn't expect
at the start of the grant, for example, to suddenly
do something else, or you know, if you're expected. Sometimes
people think that they want a question answered and that
there should be one group of people that are best
tasked to answer that. That's not true. You have to
have people working all the different little parts and then
you know what, trying every combination. It's a buffet. You're
going to try every combination of things to make something work.
And the temptation to seek a shortcut, and you're right,
it's not nefarious. The people don't want to waste taxpayers money.
They shouldn't want to waste taxpayers money. What we fail
to communicate sometimes is that they are wasting taxpayers money
by seeking these single solution questions. We're undergoing what are
quite catastrophic cuts to UK science at the minute, as
I'm sure. I'm sure you share the pain, so you
understand this. And we're trying to communicate with people that
have that are really trying to do the best by
their constituents that that actually, you know what, you need
curiosity driven science. And it's not it's not a case
that by allowing people that space to do the side quest,
I love that to pursue the side quest, that you're
giving them a blank check. No, right, we're not. We're
not saying, hey, you go do your thing and you know,
book first class and do whatever you like. We won't
check on you, not at all. We're saying, here's some money,
here's your main quest. Yeah, sure, you know what, have
some side quests, and having the confidence in those people
that they are going to do some wonderful science and
it might not be what you expected, but it is
going to be darn good.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and it's going to make some sort of difference.
And I think that's where the communication of science, not
not to go off on a comple lee tangent, but
the public communication of science is so fundamental to the
scientific enterprise. And while I am somebody who agrees wholeheartedly
that there are scientists who are phenomenal scientists who probably
shouldn't be the people that we are putting out in
front to communicate their science. I don't think that a
lab should exist on the planet where there are not
individuals whose entire maybe not their entire career, but their
a portion or their entire emphasis is being able to
communicate what is coming out of that lab, both for
other scientists, but also for policy makers and for the public.
Because if we can't do a good job as scientists
to get people to understand why what we are doing matters,
it is all done. It's a tree falling in the forest,
like nobody is going to be able to justify continuing
to fund it, and the public is going to become
disillusioned and they're not going to want their taxpayer dollars
to go towards that funding. And I think part of
the problem sometimes is that there are fields like biomedical
science that have done a phenomenal job of saying, look,
this directly impacts you. If you don't help us work
in this Alzheimer's research, you personally may suffer in the future.
And I think it can be more difficult when we
talk about questions like what is the origin of the universe.
But you know, these are also very existential questions. And
I think people like you are so important in your
fields because you take the time to say, this is
why this matters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's that I'm a minded of a
time I visited Stanford, and I visited Stanford once in
my life. I do not come I come from like
a like a middle class kind of UK family. So like,
you know, we we did fine, but we certainly weren't rich.
We had to watch money and everything like that, and
we I certainly would have never been able to go
to kind of like anywhere I like Stanford. So I
was so scared when I went. And this was only
like five years ago, okay, so well into my career,
and I was still that intimidated by everything I'd had.
And I got there and yeah, do you know what.
I was so intimidated, and I was thinking, oh my gosh,
people are just going to be awful. And then I
found out that this astrophysics department in Stamford hired full
time a science narrator. And I was like, I'm sorry,
what is this? And I had never come across this,
and it was the most wonderful thing. This whole department
was completely versed in the fact that they would do
their amazing astrophysics research. And then there was this person
who had who you had done astronomy research previously, but
had like also like a really good like science communication background,
and their job was to listen to this scientist and go, Okay,
now this is the narrative of what you have studied,
and it is about picking out exactly what the problem
is that they have moved towards solving. And I always
come away from that because I went with such of
my own prejudice. I was so freared, like I was
so scared of big kind of the victim of like
this prejudice, and I went with my own thinking like, oh,
these like super rich universities that they're not going to
care at all about science communication. Actually, I've taken that
lesson back to all of like the lesser privileged universities
that seem to think we must do pure science to
be respected. And I'm like, no, no, no, do you
want to know what they're doing. They know this matters,
they know that this is how they get more funding,
they know that this is how they do public good
as well. And you're right, It is hard in astrology.
It's both easier to be in astronomy because people love
space from like the minute they understand it, right four
years old.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like space and paleontology already have that built.
Speaker 2: It's space and dinosaurs exactly that, and so we already
have that that people are naturally like, oh wow, tell
me more. Also, they don't really want to listen after
five minutes, so you'll tell them something amazing about black hole,
but ah, that's amazing. But then they'll go around the
day and they'll not understand that. Let's say, some of
the technology that's used to develop the telescope has actually
been used in retinal implants because we're so good at
detecting incredibly low levels of light in our telescopes that
we've managed to transfer that technology into that kind of
medical application. Nobody wrote to Grant saying I'd like to
study dark energy and also solve the problem of partial sight. No,
it came out of it, and there were there were,
you know, plenty of things, plenty of examples like that.
But it's yeah, it's both hard of and easier.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. You know, I'm curious kind of going back to
this this uh opening conversation about you know, what is
radio wave and how do we detect it? And and
you know, you told this wonderful story about the discovery
of pulsars by this this blip on radio wave data
print outs that was not what was being you know,
originally observed. What other things about our universe? I mean,
obviously I can imagine that it's like pretty much name
name an aspect of inquiry, and you can you can
identify what radio waves have helped us understand. But you know,
you mentioned, for example that personally you were interested in
the early universe kind of the immediate outcome of the
Big Bang and what was happening kind of when everything
was very hot and not very differentiated. And I'm curious,
what does radio astronomy tell us about a really long
time ago.
Speaker 2: Well, that is a difficult question for me to answer,
because at the moment we're still in the very early
stages of exploring it. We have started building these incredible
telescopes like the square kilometer array in the Western Australian
Desert one hundred and thirty thousand antennas we're going to
pluck together eventually.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And the reason we're doing that is because very early
in the universe, it's very hot, it's very chaotic, nothing
much can form apart from hydrogen and helium, the two
lightest elements there are hydrogen and helium, and eventually, over
tens of millions of years, this begins collapsing into the
very first stars, which were completely different, completely different species
to the stars that we see around us today. They
were one hundred times the mass of our sun. They
were bright blue, they were really astonishing objects. And what
they did in that era was they kind of heated
and changed all of the rest of the universe, all
of the hydrogen lying around, and it emitted radio waves.
And those radio waves have been traveling to us for
thirteen and you know, change billion years, thirteen point eight
billion years. And as I said right at the beginning
of this conversation, if you want information to last a
long time, what do you use radio waves? Because they
are the ultimate communication device basically. So, yes, did a
lot of stuff in the early universe give out UV light,
optical light, infrared light. Absolutely, it's all there. It's just
that we can't detect any of it anymore. Whereas the
radio light are like the hieroglyphics on the walls of
the ancient Egyptian tombs. They have these ancient messages which
were written over thirteen billion years ago, and we're just
uncovering now. And so our job is to get those
radio waves and looking at those what we will be
able to work out is how many of these first
stars were there, because we've never seen this kind of
first few hundred million years of our big bang. We've
never seen the first stars, we've never seen the first
black holes or the first galaxies, and we'll be able
to work out, okay, well, how many of them were there.
It's like working out how many dinosaurs were walked the earth.
We know that we're there, how many were there? And
when did the first black holes come first? That's something
really recent totally upended our understanding. We thought the first
stars came first collapsed into the first black holes. Now
with the early kind of data, we're starting to think,
actually it's the other way around, and the first black
holes formed alongside the first stars, which is which is
just a fascinating area. So yeah, that's that's what we're
trying to work out, and doing that, we're going to
be able to create images of the early times hundreds
of million years after our big band, but like the
first billion years, let's say, let's round it up, the
first billion years of our big band will be able
to actually create an evolving image of these radio waves
and that will tell us how it's changing over time.
So it's like going on to Netflix and streaming, you know,
like a live action film of something going on for
a few hours and working out. And that's what we're doing.
We are streaming the universe. We're downloading like a historical documentary,
historical footage of our universe growing up and watching it,
watching I would press fast forward and watching it over
that billion years. When did the first stars come? When
did they die? Oh?
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. And so is this one of the areas
that you were digging into for your dissertation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is exactly my area. It's the area that
my first book was written about. And yeah, so this
is my bread and butter is what I studied. My
job specifically is to kind of use these really huge
radio telescopes. I use one in the Netherlands to try
and get this radio signal from the cosmic dawn that
we call it the problem that we're trying to solve,
is that that signal's really faint because you can imagine
you try shouting, you know, it's a few, like a
few tens of meters before somebody can't hear you, right,
you try doing that over thirteen billion years of distance,
it's a long long way. So my job is to
dig that signal out. Like the archaeologist. I always wanted
to be from something ten thousand times brighter, which is
our own galaxy. And it's really hard, which is why
I'm still doing that about fifteen years after I started
to dick. But we're getting ever, ever, ever closer, so
it's really exciting. It really is like just one of
those little brushes kind of like you know, dusting away
one layer at a time.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious. Then that leads me to wonder. You know,
as you're putting together this most recent book, you've obviously
been studying radio astronomy throughout your career. You are a
radio astronomer. You've been digging deeper and deeper into this,
you know, kind of time in our universal past where
there are so many more questions than answers. Right now,
you probably already knew quite a bit going in. But
of course, in order to write a book for public
consumption about a topic, you want to be somewhat thorough.
You want to ensure that you're, you know, doing research
in areas where maybe your understanding wasn't there. Is there
anything that you discovered? I mean, I think that you
already gave us a beautiful example with the is mercury.
But were there things that you came across or maybe
you knew them, but you were like, oh, I forgot
I knew that, or like, wow, I can't believe I
didn't know that about radio astronomy that surprised you.
Speaker 2: Every chapter that might undermine my authority, but I don't care.
I once had a publication when I admitted that in print.
This was years ago for a different things. But I've
been like, oh, I actually didn't know much about this
going and they were like, our readers do not appreciate
knowing the same amount as our experts. One must provide
an air of expertise. I'm like, no, like you know
what I think we're done here? No, I will admit
that you know, I knew the headlines. Of course I did.
I am a radio astronomer. What I discovered it again
and again and again, is that I didn't know how
rich this history was and how some of the major
discoveries like that. The one that comes to mind after
the Eyes of Mercury is that the first ever ever
planet outside our Solar system was discovered using radio astronomy.
The reason it's forgotten is because it was around a pulsar,
which luckily I've already talked about today, which is this
spinning neutron star. The reason that that was quickly forgotten
was because we're very we're human centric and life centric,
and when we're looking for planets, we want them to
be habitable because we want to find aliens. And so
you can't live around a pulsar because the radiation is
ridiculous and it's a dead star. So we wanted to
find the next planet around a sun like stuff. So
the minute that happened, it's like the radio one didn't exist.
But the technical ability of being able to do that,
and so yeah, going into this that the pleasure of
this book was starting from exactly the point you say,
which is like, Hey, I'm a radio astronomer doing cosmology,
I'm going to write a book about like that. That
that kind of stuff. Oh what else can I write about? Right?
Solar system? Honestly, I started writing this book where the
solar system was one or two chapters. As I dug,
I was like, my god, this is this is part
one of three, Like this is this is half the book?
You know, you know I need to go planet about
planet here because I had no idea. It was that rich.
Like again I knew the headlines, but like, yeah, just
it just it got me again and again. And I'm
such a nerd for the actual instrumentation itself, I think
because I feel like I owe it something. By instrumentation,
I mean the actual tell because I the first time
I ever saw a radio telescope, I was deeply disappointed.
I was like, are you kidding me? Like I've got
to spend four years in a really flat, wet place
in the Netherlands where all my optical colleagues get to
go to Hawaii? Are you kidding me? Like? They literally
look like TV aerials. And then that completely flipped as
I just so after a few months and I realize
that wait, wait, wait, wait, with just a few TV aerials,
we can look back to the first stars. Damn, We're smart.
It's like and so like I'm a real nerd for
kind of just just explaining to people that, yeah, you
know what, you look at it and you might be like,
that's not as kind of cool as a rocket launch
and like you know, flying to the moon and everything.
It's like, yeah, but I just want you to spend
three minutes thinking about the fact that somebody can switch
like send some radio waves boiler kettle and come back
and have answers about Venus that Souls Space Probe was
able to answer. And I think the breadth of radio
telescopes as well always amazes me. So like a lot
of optical telescopes will kind of be designed to look
at galaxies or to look at this. Radio telescopes they
tend to be Do you have Swiss army knives over there?
I'm not sure what you good and we can do
the same thing. Yeah, okay, good. I don't know why
I didn't assume it because the Swiss and I'm not Swiss,
but anyway, but the Swiss army knife of telescopes basically
like any pretty much any radio telescope is able to
look for aliens while checking for pulsars, proving general relativity,
looking at the central black hole of our galaxy, which incidentally,
actually is how the whole of radio astronomy was invented
in the nineteen thirties. We talked about serendipity earlier. It
was about this guy called Cultski putting on some headphones
basically and hearing a hiss over this this telephone line
and being like, hey, I wonder what that hiss is
and building this antenna that could look at the sky
and he found out that that was actually that hiss
was coming from the central black hole of the super
massive black hole at the central of the Milky Way.
And yeah, in nineteen thirty three, which is she that's
how it all began.
Speaker 1: That's incredible, and we're very young. Yeah, I mean and
at the time like questioning even the existence of some
of these like cosmic kind of objects, and you know,
do they exist? Even are they theoretical is how can
we measure them and detect them and continue to collect
evidence for their existence? Like a what a cool thing
to be involved in a field, in a you know,
particular endeavors within that field where there are so many
brilliant and innovative people using so many just interesting tools
to try to answer similar questions from different perspectives, where
at the end of the day you can say, you know,
we're pretty confident that that is what's happening here, that
there is a giant black hole in the middle of
our you know, solar system or in the middle of
our galaxy, because we can we're actually in the middle
of the galaxy. Are there a lot of them?
Speaker 2: There are so many you're not going to sleep at night.
There are black holes roaming around our Milky Way quite happy.
But there's one super massive one, the essential right in
the middle. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so in the middle of our galaxy, this
super massive black hole that was you know, at one
point in time, highly theoretical in nature. Now we're able
to say, because of the these measurements and those detections
and these equations and those observations, we were able to
freaking image a black hole recently. I mean there you do.
Speaker 2: Just pop that in there. People think that image was optical.
It was not. It was radio.
Speaker 1: Waves phenomenal, And now I think, too, right, we've imaged
too yeap, oh, that's so cool. I mean that's what
science is really all about, right, It's about saying, you know, huh,
I'm just sitting back, feeling the vibes, noticing that something
feels peculiar or interesting. How do we explain this, How
do we describe this? Let's build some stuff, Let's start
to investigate an interrogation. Oh, you over there, you want
to try it that way?
Speaker 2: Cool?
Speaker 1: Try it though, And then at the end of the
day everybody gets together and goes, hmm, your thing and
my thing and their thing. Yeah, seems like maybe there's
something going on here and what a cool thing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the universe is the biggest laboratory that you
can you can find is that you know, you can
kid yourself that maybe, oh, astronomy is the pretty subject
is It's like, no, no, excuse me. You can't find
magnetic fields that are that are more intense than around
neutron stars and black holes. You can't find denser matter
than is near a black hole. You can't find hot
temperatures colder temperature's. Nuclear fusion could solve the energy crisis
on Earth. Do you know the only place we've seen
at work in a star? So for me, like, I think,
just just bookend in this conversation. You asked how I
got into this. I very much came into this not
as somebody who loved space. I do love it as
certainly as increases i've got older, but like I do
love it. But I came into it as a physicist
wanting to test the frontiers of our of our understanding
of our universe. And that comes to the very small
as well, so general relativity, onto physics, condense matter, physics,
all these like crazy terms that you can test by
looking at this massive laboratory. And there comes a level
of patience with astronomy as well, where you know your
line of work and a lot of different places will
have laboratories, but they'll set up a hypothesis, they'll test it. Right.
We can't always do that as astronomers. We can't say, hey,
I want that start to explode tomorrow because it's during
my grant. We have to be quite creative about working
out where to look and when to look, and how
to combine data to get to the answers we want.
And it's that ingenuity that I really enjoy in astronomy broadly,
but especially in radio astronomy, where you have to go
with that step further because you don't have the intuition
of your optical sensors.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, gosh, so many fascinating stories to continue to tell,
and so much you know are and one to inspire
in us, and hopefully for those listening their appetite has
been whetted a little bit to be able and curious
to dig even deeper. And should you do so, the
place to start is with the book The Echoing Universe.
How Radio Astronomy helps Us See the Invisible Cosmos, by
doctor Emma Chapman. Emma, thank you so much for being
here with us.
Speaker 2: Thank you and.
Speaker 1: Everybody listening, thank you for coming back week after week.
I'm really looking forward to the next time we all
get together to talk Merity