Date: October 21, 2010
Title: Connecting to Big
Podcaster: Ben Lillie
Organization: The Story Collider
Description: A story about the scale of modern science, and the moments when it becomes clear just how big it is.
Bio: Ben Lillie is a physicist who left the ivory tower for the wilds of New York’s theater district. How now writes and produces shows about science. He is a Moth StorySLAM winner, and hosts the monthly science storytelling show, The Story Collider, where guest are invited to share true, personal stories of the times in their lives when science has been important, inspiring, or simply absurd. He likes to say that life is different now, largely because it is. He has also earned 27 badges as a member of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique, which is 24 more than than the number of badges he earned as a Cub Scout.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Alice and Jason Enevoldsen, in honor of all the unborn future astronomers of the world.
Transcript:
Hi I’m Ben Lillie from The Story Collider, a live show and now podcast of personal stories about science. A few months ago I asked for people to send in the picture they think of when they think of science. Well, people did, and the gallery is now live at our website, storycollider.org. You can take a look at what we have, and send in your own.
Today I want to talk about big.
Sometimes the scale of modern science can be lost. Modern particle accelerator experiments can involve thousands of scientists. It’s not just in physics, the human genome project was an enormous collaborative effort, in geology there’s a project, called Earth Scope, to get high resolution maps of tectonic motion. It involves hundreds of scientists.
It can be tough to get a real, personal connection to these things when they’re so big. Astronomers, I think, have really internalized that notion, given that we have the Very Large Array, the Southern African Large Telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope, and of course OWL, the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.
(On a side note: This isn’t new. As early as the 1400s the king of Samarkand built a sextant with a radius of 36 meters.)
I first got a real sense of how big they are when I was a sophomore at Reed College, in Portland Oregon, and I got a call from my friend Fred saying that he has some time on a telescope in Victoria, and would I like to go along?
Yes, yes I would.
Now, this was unusual. Fred was a senior, but undergraduates don’t normally get telescope time.
So we drove up from Portland to Victoria, listening repeatedly to a tape with a Morphine album on one side, and Ween on the other.
One of the Astronomers met us there, and showed us to the telescope. And it was huge. I mean, first of all it’s a building. There’s an entire building for one telescope.
We met the astronomer who’d set the thing up. I totally forget her name, and I’m sorry about that. I’d like to make a sweeping generalization that undergrads aren’t very aware of things like that, and it’s probably true.
She showed us our project, something about measuring variable stars. Again, my undergrad brain didn’t pick up much more than that, but I knew we were supposed to go down a list of stars, point the telescope at each one, push a button that made something else happen (presumably recording data), and move onto the next one.
The other thing I remember was the cupboard full of instant soups. There was a whole kitchen area with a kettle, hot chocolate, and instant noodle soup. It was magical.
So we did that the whole first night. Push buttons, point, push buttons, eat soup. Point, push, eat. It was great.
The second night we did exactly the same thing, only it was just me and Fred.
The part I really liked that night was operating the computer, and entering the coordinates. You start to feel a personal connection to the thing. It’s yours, in a way. Not, obviously, yours, but you’re the one operating the computer and pointing it at the stars. And it’s at times like that, 2am, in the dark, when there’s a feeling of understanding how your small part connected to the big project.
And then the dome went, “chunk”. Fred and I looked at each other, then back at the screen. Then we did what any good scientist would do, we typed in the coordinates again, and pressed return. It went “chunk”. So we, we climbed upstairs, and took a look, and the dome was not moving. We tried a couple times again, and every time it went “chunk”.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a large piece of machinery go “chunk”, but it has a special quality and tone when that piece of machinery costs 10 million dollars and you’re the college sophomore who broke it. And, while the computer gave a sense of connection, having broken it gave a sense of the scale; of how huge and expensive it was.
The weird part, I think, is that we didn’t freak out. We were terrified, but we didn’t freak out.
What we did was call the emergency on-call number, explained the situation, and then sat there in silence, wondering how bad the damage was, and how much we’d have to pay. About an hour later the guy came. He didn’t even talk to us, just walked right in the door, up the stairs into the dome, straight to an unremarkable part of the wall, and shoved at a rectangular bit of metal that was slightly sticking out of the wall. Then he finally turned to us and said, “always check the breakers”, got in his car and left.
The rest of the night, everything worked fine.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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