If the efforts of over 10,000 people who have designed and assembled the James Webb Space Telescope indicate that the era of the independent scientist is finally over. Newton, Galileo, Keppler and Copernicus have all fundamentally changed mankind’s understanding of our place in the universe, of their own accord, but with the formalization and professionalization of the field in the Victorian era, these events of an amateur astronomer using home-made equipment all the more so less common.
In his new book The Invisible World: Why there is more to reality than meets the eye, University of Cambridge public astronomer Matthew Bothwell, tells the story of how we discovered an entire, previously invisible universe beyond mankind’s natural sight. In the following excerpt, Bothwell recounts the exploits of Grote Reber, one of the world’s first (and for a while only) radio astronomers.
Oneworld Publishing
Courtesy of The Invisible Universe by Matthew Bothwell (One World 2021).
The only radio astronomer in the world
It’s a little strange looking back at how the astronomical world reacted to this Jansky’s results. With hindsight, we can see that astronomy was on the verge of being turned on its head by a revolution at least as great as that sparked by Galileo’s telescope. The detection of radio waves from space marks the first time in history that humanity has glimpsed the vast invisible universe that lurks behind the narrow window of the visible spectrum. It was a momentous occasion that was all but ignored in academic astronomy circles for one very simple reason: the world of radio engineering was just too distant from the world of astronomy. When Jansky published his first results, he tried to bridge the gap by spending half the paper giving his readers a crash course in astronomy (explaining how to measure the position of things in the sky and why exactly a signal repeated every 23 hours and fifty-six minutes meant something interesting). But ultimately the two disciplines suffered from a communication failure. The engineers spoke a language of vacuum tubes, amplifiers, and antenna voltages: incomprehensible to scientists more used to talking about stars, galaxies, and planets. As Princeton astronomer Melvin Skellett later put it:
The astronomers said, ‘Man, that’s interesting – you mean there’s radio stuff coming out of the stars?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what it looks like’. ‘Very interesting.’ And that was all they had to say about it. Anything from Bell Labs they had to believe, but they saw no benefit or reason to investigate further. It was so far from their idea of astronomy that there was no real interest.
After Jansky turned to other issues, there was only one person interested in hearing radio waves from space. For about a decade, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, Grote Reber was the world’s only radio astronomer.
Big Rebers History is unique in all of twentieth-century science. He single-handedly developed an entire field of science, taking on the task of building devices, making observations, and researching the theory behind his discoveries. What makes him unique is that he did all of this as a complete amateur, working alone outside of the scientific establishment. His job designing electrical equipment for radio broadcasts had given him the skills to build his telescope. His fascination with scientific literature brought him into contact with Jansky’s discovery of cosmic statics, and when it became clear that no one else in the world seemed to care much, he took it upon himself to invent the field of radio astronomy. He built his telescope in his back garden in Chicago using equipment and materials that were readily available to everyone. Its thirty-foot telescope was the talk of his neighborhood (with good reason — it looks a bit like a cartoon doomsday device). His mother used it to dry her laundry.
He spent years scanning the sky with his homemade machine. He observed with his telescope all night, every night, while still going about his day’s work (apparently he snagged a few hours of sleep in the evenings after work and again at dawn after he was done with the telescope). Realizing that he didn’t know enough about physics and astronomy to understand the things he was seeing, he took courses at the local university. Over the years, his observations painted a beautiful picture of the sky as seen with radio eyes. He spotted our Milky Way moving with bright spots in the galactic center (where Jansky had taken his star statics) and again towards the constellations Cygnus and Cassiopeia. By this time he had learned enough physics to be able to make scientific contributions. He knew that if the Milky Way’s hiss was caused by thermal emission — thermal radiation from stars or hot gas — it would be stronger at shorter wavelengths. Given that Reber was picking up much shorter wavelengths than Jansky (60 cm compared to Jansky’s 15 meter waves), Reber should have been bombarded with invisible radio waves ten thousand times stronger than anything Jansky saw. But it wasn’t him. Reber was confident enough in his equipment to conclude that whatever was generating those radio waves had to be “non-thermal” — that is, something other than the standard “hot things glow” radiation , which we discussed in Chapter 2. He even suggested the (right!) solution: that hot interstellar electrons whizzing past an ion — a positively charged atom — are spun around like a Formula One car taking a tight turn. The cornering electron will emit a radio wave, and the combined effect of billions of these events is what Reber discovered from his garden. This only happens in hot gas clouds. As it turned out, Reber picked up radio waves emitted by clouds of newborn stars scattered across our galaxy. He literally listened to stars being born. It was a sound no human had ever heard before. To this day, radio observations are used to track the formation of stars, from small clouds in our own Milky Way to the birth of galaxies in the farthest reaches of the Universe.
Reber’s story seems like an anachronism in many ways. Hundreds of years have passed since the golden age of independent scientists who could make groundbreaking discoveries using only home-made devices. With the end of the Victorian era, science became a complex, expensive and above all professional business. Grote Reber is, as far as I know, the last amateur “outsider” scientist; the last person without a scientific education built his own devices in his garden and managed to change the scientific world through painstaking and meticulous work.
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