High in the cold Atacama desert of Chile, scientists have been operating the most complex and powerful telescope the world has ever seen – the Alma.
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And its mission: to test the prevailing scientific theories of the history of the universe by studying the 13 billion-year-old star-making gases that only Alma’s stupendous eye can see...
Not much to ask for really – and it was nice of them to name the scope after a great Maitland cafe and former High Street pub!
And I love this stuff – I love the sheer power of will demonstrated by humans when they really decide to wrestle down complexity, when they decide to achieve things for the sake of knowledge, to know about stuff, about us – and all this...
The ingenuity and co-operation required to make something like Alma a reality replenishes my optimism and faith in us as a species, especially after sitting through something as harrowing and dispiriting as a news bulletin, or reading through the court reports in a local paper, or pondering how nightly television diminishes us.
The Alma project is being funded, researched and driven forward by an amalgam of European, Japanese, Chilean and North American scientists – their cultural differences outrun by the truth that they are, we are, all made of the same stuff – stars...
Meanwhile, and elsewhere on planet Earth, earnest and unrelenting scientists are looking through the prism of not telescopes, but microscopes, to unravel the mysteries, beauties and agonies of life.
They’re looking beyond the social, the cultural, the political – looking deep into our DNA, into our cosmic centres to find out all they can.
They’re looking at the minutia, at the tiniest pieces of the most remarkable puzzle – at the amazing story of life...
These scopes, both microscopic or telescopic, the devices that look out and look in – they give power to our limited sight, they help us see the unseen, they augment our imaginations in the search for answers and truths that we might otherwise not notice...
Inherent in them is an optimism which laughs in the face of the overwhelming immensity of the universe or the infinitesimal particle.
And I love that, love that they have the nerve to think that something so outrageous is possible; I love it that they don’t go quietly into the night, that they don’t meekly accept mad superstition, or blind faith as an explanation for this amazing place, this incredible dream...
It’s the very best aspect of us: it’s our determination, our will to do, our will for action – to do things not for money, but for knowledge, to light up the dark, to do it because it hadn’t been done, to do it because we ought to do it, because we’ve woken up in the universe and we should seek out complexity.
Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig was caught somewhere between
optimism and abhorrence, when he drew his brilliant and ominously accurate Understandascope cartoon in 1984.
The image has always been with me, both for it’s desire to explain things, and for its ghastly terror.
Perhaps, along with the beautiful Alma we could position an Understandascope atop every town hall across the land – and in every mirror – and understand, perhaps, the truth about ourselves.
And all this looking and seeking dear reader, the optimism that comes from finding out, from science and investigation, from looking into ourselves and the stars – well it goes well for me dear reader.
And so it goes...
Goodnight
