TO PICTURE A SPACE ROCKET travelling at full speed is not easy. Seventeen
thousand mph – five miles a second – would get you from Hammersmith to
Heathrow in about the time it takes to say the word “traffic”, which is
extraordinarily difficult to freeze-frame, even in your head.
Fifty years ago, however, Sir Bernard Lovell found a way. It was October,
1957. He was behind schedule and desperately over budget with the huge radio
telescope at Jodrell Bank for which he is famous. The rest of the world was
obsessed with Sputnik; glued to the wireless, listening with awe and
alarm to the impudent bleeping of the first man-made satellite as it circled
the globe every 90 minutes.
“I had no intention of doing anything about [Sputnik] because one
could easily get the bleep on a conventional radio,” Sir Bernard says, the
image of calm composure at 94, despite having just spent an hour having his
picture taken by a Times photographer in the Jodrell arboretum. “But
I had a telephone call from London to say that we probably had the only
instrument in the country, and probably the West, that if turned into a
radar device could detect the satellite’s carrier rocket, which was a Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missile. And that really stimulated everybody.”
Lovell and his team worked non stop for 48 hours turning their giant listening
device into something that could also transmit. “A few days after the launch
we got this marvellous echo from the carrier rocket. In fact, I think I have
it here.” He pulls an old photograph from a pile on his desk – a photograph
of a man and a line across a screen. “There’s me pointing to the echo, which
no man had yet seen. I had a camera photographing the cathode ray tube and
this was shown to the press about an hour later. This was the ICBM moving
over Cumbria at 17,000mph. It was dramatic.”
Not half. For even without the lingering glamour of its serendipitous role in
the Cold War there is no more thrilling piece of mechanical engineering in
Britain that the 250ft dish at Jodrell Bank. It erupts from the Cheshire
countryside with total incongruity. Its shape, materials and scale bear no
relation to anything except its otherworldly purpose, and its impact on
those who encounter it, whether by chance from a distance, or close up, as
latterday pilgrims, can be visceral. It is gasp-inducing.
It is also to be the site of the First Move Literature Festival (June 15-17)
celebrating the telescope’s 50th birthday. The festival will include a
poetry competition for Times readers in which the winning poem will
be “bounced” off the Moon. Given that the telescope was built for science,
it may seem an unusual site for a literature festival, There are certainly
fewer bookshops and latte bars at Jodrell Bank than Hay-on-Wye, but what
could be more literary, in the purest sense, than astronomy’s epic quest for
answers to deep questions from deep space?
The festival’s organisers explain the event as a riposte to C. P. Snow’s fusty
prejudice about the meeting of art and science; he said it couldn’t happen.
Of course it can (think of Leonardo, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Adams). And
in fact it will, when the winning poem ricochets from the big dish to the
Moon and back. But the most compelling justification for marking the
telescope’s birthday with this sort of event is the story of its creation,
which could be fiction but happens to be nonfiction and features Lovell as
chronicler, narrator and chief human protagonist. It is a story that has
come to define him almost as much as his science – so much so that, but for
his fluent throwaway remarks about cosmic background radiation and the 21cm
hydrogen line, you might forget that besides building this beast he
practically founded an entire branch of astronomy.
As the title of his autobiography indicates, Lovell became an astronomer by
chance. At Manchester University before the war he was less interested in
stars than in high-energy cosmic rays that were thought to be pummelling the
ionosphere. He never found any, though not for want of trying.
He spent the war developing the Pathfinder airborne radar system that enabled
RAF bombers to find their targets at night, then returned to Manchester with
a borrowed radar system that had been used for directing ack-ack round
London. It was mounted on trailers and his idea was to point it at the
heavens and find those cosmic rays.
“I set up this equipment in Manchester and it was hopeless,” he recalls. “The
interference from electric fans made it impossible.” Did the university own
any land somewhere quieter, radiographically speaking? It did, at Jodrell
Bank. Lovell moved his trailers there in the late summer of 1945 and began
scanning the ionosphere in earnest.
Still no rays. But in looking for them, Lovell and his team made great strides
in the study of meteor showers and built a 218ft-wide aerial out of rented
scaffolding that captured the cacophonous radio emissions of a thin strip of
the Milky Way. The trouble was, it was always the same strip. “And that led
to the idea of a telescope which was a bit bigger and completely steerable.”
It is Jodrell Bank’s steerability that explains its extraordinary appearance;
its hulking shoulders of steel girders, rising 200ft to a pair of massive
cog wheels purloined from the gun turrets of two battleships (these take the
strain when the dish tilts); its very own circular railway tracks; and the
dish itself – 3,200 tons of perfect paraboloid focusing all the whisperings
of the cosmos on to a single short thread of copper wire attached to
receivers cooled by liquid nitrogen so that their vibrations won’t eclipse
those despatched millions of years ago by galaxies a mind-bogglingly long
way away.
Most engineers consulted by Lovell said that it couldn’t be built. Only a
certain H. C. Husband, of Sheffield, said it could, for £100,000. That was
in 1949. Eight years later the machine was still unfinished and £300,000
over budget. Its construction crew was on strike, not having been paid, and
the Public Accounts Committee wanted Lovell’s scalp. “We needed a miracle to
save us,” he recalls, “and that miracle was Sputnik.”
For three years at the height of the space race Jodrell Bank was the only
instrument capable of tracking the rockets and missiles being hurled aloft
by both superpowers. This had never been part of Lovell’s plan, but it
vindicated him in the eyes of the press, public and politicians. “We were,”
he notes, “in the middle of a sandwich between the Soviets and the
Americans.”
The former sought his help unannounced: one Saturday lunchtime in 1959 he was
heading out as usual to play cricket when the phone rang to tell him that
the Russians had launched a lunar probe called Lunik. Like Drake 400
years earlier, Lovell refused to change his plans, but returned to his
office after his cricket match to find “streams of telex from Moscow giving
us the exact coordinates of the probe” – which he duly tracked until its
impact on the Moon 36 hours later. Only his confirmation persuaded the
Americans that it had really happened.
For their part the Americans spent the next summer in caravans at Jodrell
Bank, tracking their Pioneer 5 probe on its first 10 million miles
towards Venus. Lord Nuffield was impressed.
“He came on the telephone. ‘Is that Lovell?’ (Lovell grins). ‘Yes, my Lord.’
‘How much is owing on that telescope of yours?’
‘Oh, I think we still owe £80,000.’ ‘That all? I’ll send you a cheque.’ I
tried to thank him. He said: ‘It’s all right, my boy, you haven’t done too
badly’. ”
It was a fairytale ending, the “boy” says. It was also the real beginning of
the telescope’s scientific work, unfettered by debt. For another three years that
included the Cuban missile crisis, Jodrell Bank stood in for Fylingdales as
Britain’s first line of radar defence.
But when not on military alert it probed the mysteries of the Universe as no
instrument had before. Not that it – or anything else – has solved them. On
the contrary. Apparently, if the theory of the Big Bang is true, then either
quantum mechanics or general relativity is destined for the recycle bin.
“I have never known in quite a long life to be faced with so many unanswered
questions as now,” Sir Bernard says. “It is quite extraordinary that young
people speak and teach about the evolution of the Universe and the Big Bang,
and yet we have no idea what 95 per cent of the matter and energy in the
Universe consists of.”
Plenty to be getting on with, then.
Speakers at the First Move festival include Jeanette Winterson and Alan
Garner. For the programme visit www.jb.man.ac.uk.
Book tickets on 01477 571339, 01477 571321 or e-mail thehotspot@jb.man.ac.uk.
The Times is the media partner and the festival is part funded by the
Science and Technology Facilities Council.
