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The Shoe

JILL BENN:

Hi, good evening, everyone. If I can have your attention, please. Hello and welcome. It's great to see so many of you here this evening. My name is Jill Benn and I'm from the University of Western Australia, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to this Raising the Bar event. This year, the University of Western Australia is bringing Raising the Bar to Perth. What is it? Well, it's ten academics across ten bars on one night, at the same time. We believe that research and innovation shouldn't just be limited to the laboratory, and we really want to get it out into the city's popular culture, and this is what tonight is all about. So that you can learn about the research that the university is undertaking, and about its impact on the community and the world. And we're very fortunate this evening here at The Shoe, to have Professor Peter Quinn.

In 1989, Professor Quinn led the International Dark Matter Search Project. He was the Australian representative on that project, and his discoveries have featured in journals across the world, including in 'Nature'. In August 2006, he became the professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Western Australia, and was appointed Director of the new International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research or ICRAR. He's also the Deputy Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Square Kilometre Array Coordination Committee. He's published over 300 research articles, and became the Western Australian Scientist of the Year in 2012. So, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Professor Peter Quinn.

(APPLAUSE)

PROFESSOR PETER QUINN:

Thanks Jill, very much. Good evening. I don't think I've ever spoken in a bar before, so this is a first time for many of us. You've probably never heard about astronomy in a bar before, either, but astronomers - My name is Peter, I'm an astronomer. I know that's like Alcoholics Anonymous or something, but most of the astronomers I know don't need help, I think. But, we're basically fairly normal people. Astronomers can come from anywhere, as they say. I grew up in New South Wales, in Country, New South Wales. Unfortunately, wrong football code, I know. My Dad was a fitter and turner, my mom was a doctor's receptionist. Not an academic family, but scientists can come...astronomers can come from anywhere. It requires a certain kind of combination of events, I guess, to make that happen.

One is kind of inspiration. I mean, astronomy is an incredibly inspiring thing. You're just going to talk to kids about spacecraft and aliens and rockets and goodness knows what. We have a easy sell, in some sense, so we can always attract people, and we have a great...I think we have a great sense of inquiring. We get bugged by the fact we can't figure things out, we can't go to the other side of the moon and look what's there, so this inquiring mind thing is part of it. But motivation, I guess, is also part of becoming an astronomer. I feel like someone with my hands cut off tonight, 'cause astronomy has these great pictures. I mean, pictures of galaxies and stars, and goodness knows what. I was told I can't show anything, so I've cheated a little bit, I've got a few props, but if I could show you pictures of the universe, you would be inspired and motivated, as well.

And I was inspired and motivated, particularly as a kid, growing up in the '60s and '70s. I went through this thing called The Apollo Moon Mission, and to me, that was a transformational event for

me as a kid - I was 14 at the time - to see that happen. I don't think anything in the world for me has happened, as significant or as motivating as that, for everybody. Everybody in the world can relate to that thing. It was incredibly exciting and motivating. And there's a whole generation of kids who became scientists. If you look at the number of people in my generation, the Sputnik generation as they call it, lots and lots of people became scientists in the '60s and '70s. I think it was on the back of that motivation we had from that Apollo landing.

JILL BENN:

Can you stand back a little bit?


Sure. OK, sorry. So as I said, motivation that came from something like a moon landing. It also came from a bunch of good teachers and good parents, and things like that, but motivation is part of the deal. So, being an astronomer has some perks. You get to carry one of these things. This is a green laser. So, I'm a card carrying green laser person. I can lase people and lase things. You've got to be an astronomer to have one of those. It's part of the law. I want to talk to you tonight about astronomy, about some of the things that excite me about astronomy, about some of the discoveries, I guess, we have made, and some of the mysteries we're trying to solve. And when you talk about astronomy, more or less, when you start out, you have problems, and one of the biggest problem is numbers.

Every time you try to describe something in the universe with a number that relates to the ground, whether it's centimetres or metres, or kilograms, or whatever it is, you end up with this enormous number of zeros on the back end of it, and you can't possibly relate to people what it really means. So, we have to figure out some way of talking about numbers in astronomy, which doesn't get you confused by the number of zeros. What I like to do is use something that's familiar. This is a 50 cent piece. Suppose the 50 cent piece is the size of the earth. OK, that's something you can relate to. So, you know, well, that's really good. On that scale, what would be the size of say, something else in the solar system? Say, the sun. If that's the size of the earth, the size of the sun is about 3m, so that's about twice my height.

You can see then, this earth is a very, very tiny object. It's not a big object when it comes to the scale of the solar system, so it's a tiny thing. But, you can visualise it in your head, if you look at a 50 cent coin and double a normal person's height. Well, what about something else? How far is it to the sun? That's a fairly interesting question. If I stacked 50 cent pieces up, how many would I need to stack up to kind of get me all the way to the sun? Answer, about 10,000 of those things, so there's lots. So you can see, the sun't pretty far away when it comes to 50 cent pieces. Let's change scale. Let's forget about the earth. Let's use the sun. Let's pretend now, this is not the earth, but this is the sun. That's good, so where's the next sun? Where's the next star kind of in this world? Well, that's really remarkable, because if that's the sun, the next sun is about a million of those away.

It's about (INAUDIBLE) moon distance, basically away, in terms of the size of the stars, so the stars are a terribly tiny object. The distance between stars, if that's a star, I'd have to go to the other side of the moon to find the 50 cent coin that corresponds to the next star, so stars are very, very thinly spaced around us in the universe. Maybe we'll change scales again, let's use...instead of using stars,

we'll use the distance between two stars as a ruler, as well. So, that can be a ruler. How big is this thing called a galaxy? We live in this thing called the Milky Way galaxy. It's our home kind of territory in the universe. It's about 100,000 million of these stars. That's about 10,000 of our new ruler. Our new ruler is the distance between the stars, so about 10,000 of those distances, so the galaxy is a very, very big place, as well. About 10,000 times the typical distance between two stars.

What about galaxies? If we change this now from stuff being stars or distance between stars, so just pretend that's a galaxy. Where is the next galaxy? That's also interesting, 'cause it's only about 3m away. So, if that's a galaxy, the next galaxy is inside this room, so galaxies are really quite close together. The universe is full of them. They're like the building blocks, if you like, of the galaxy, but they are a lot closer together than stars. This is some of the tricks, some of the reasons we try to do analogies, because you can't just talk about millions and millions and trillions of zeros. Astronomy has a number of really basic problems to solve.

In particular, how do you possibly measure anything? You can't go to the next star, you can't go to the edge of the galaxy. How do you measure things like, simple things like distances, and masses, and the overall size of things? There are some tricks. I can measure people's distance in this room. This lady here is fairly normal height. If I see somebody down the back of the room about the same not as you. They don't look the same size, 'cause they're further away. They look smaller. So if I've got things in the universe, like a star, I see it nearby. I see it further away. I compare how big they look. In some sense, that tells me how far things are away. That's a very simple kind of way of measuring distance. You don't have to go to the other star to do it. You might also have something like a standard...what they call a standard candle.

So, a star like the sun, is a very typical star. There's lots and lots of stars in the galaxy, just the same brightness as the sun. So if I look at the star next to me, the sun, I look at a star very far away and I assume it's much the same brightness as the sun. Then of course if it's a lot dimmer, then that ratio of the brightness...the ratio of the brightness of the sun and the brightness of that distant star, tell me straight away how far away that other star is. So I can use ratios and comparisons, to measure things like distances.

There are some other tricks like, parallax. Which is a really cool thing. If you line your thumb up, with just an object and you change your eyeball, your thumb moves. That little movement of the thumb again, tells you basically how far away the thing in the distance is. So these really simple geometrical analogies, that astronomers have in their bag of tricks, basically tells how far away things are and how big they are, in terms of meteors and things we see on the Earth.

One of the really complicated ones though is measuring how massive things are. It's very hard to measure how massive...I'm not just talking about people's masses, I'm talking about measuring the masses of galaxies or the masses of stars. How would you possibly even try to do that?

So that brings me to the topic of mathematics. OK so, you're not gonna escape completely from mathematics tonight. Math is amazing. Math to me is...the fact that you can take a piece of paper and write...somebody in a dark room 400 years ago, with a piece of paper and a pen, wrote down some scribblings on a piece of paper. And those scribblings on that piece of paper, allowed them to predict the motion of a planet or around a star. When the sun would come up and go down. Even how the universe expanded. So, man has this ability...mankind has the ability to write down a

mathematical description of nature. And for what ever reason, nature agrees that that's the language. That's the language to use.

So, I've got one of these things here. So I've got to show you, here is all the maths you ever need to know, OK. So this is basically the formula that tells you about gravity, OK. So this little thing, little 'g', in this equation, is basically how strong gravity is. And it equals to a number, that big 'G', is just a number. There's a big 'M', which is our mass. And there's a little 'd', which is our distance. So if I get a big object, like the sun and I multiply that mass by 'G', just a number, divide by the distance away from the sun, that tells me how strong the gravity is at the Earth, caused by the sun. So, Mr Newton came up with this. It's a really...I mean, you can't get much more basic than this. It's a division and a multiply, alright. But that is all you need to know, to predict how a planet goes around a star. How a meteorite goes around the Earth, etcetera. So this is a really cool thing. So you can actually use this cool mathematical description of nature, to measure masses of things. To measure in particular say, the mass of the sun.

So I scratched around my desk draw to do this, right. So I found an Earth and a piece of string...well this is actually not a piece of string, it's a (INAUDIBLE). But, this is a demonstration on how you would use that particular piece of mass, to measure the mass of the sun. So this goes around, this is the Earth going around the sun. And that piece of string is, taught, it's tight. Sort of like the forces of gravity. So if my thumb was the sun and I measured basically, how fast that ball's going around, that tells me what the mass of the sun would be. So the Earth is going around. The sun only goes around once every year. So I know how fast it's going around. I know the distance to the sun, because I can do one of these fancy parallax kind of things and measure the distance to the sun. And so, given the velocity, given the time, I can put it all in to this equation and come up with 'M', the mass of the sun. So, this is really cool. This tells us basically how, to measure a mass. How to actually measure things we can't actually go and do. So you've got to use mass. Mass is basically the language, if you like, of the universe, that astronomers use every day.

We also have a lot of tools, in astronomy. OK so, we have to have tools to be able to look at things. Obviously it's easy to look at the sun. It's easy to look at the moon. It's easy to look at the planets, even. But we've got to look at...we want to look at the entire universe. So we need tools. We need things to go out exploring with. And the one that you probably all know about is a telescope. So a telescope, is an interesting little machine. So, it does a trick, OK. So the trick the telescope does is the following. So I have an eye and in my eye there's a little pupil. A little tiny hole. And all the light from the world, goes in to that whole. If the whole was bigger, I would see more stuff. I would see more light, coming in to my brain. I'd see fainter things and sense things that are further away from us. So, that would be cool if we could make the whole bigger, we could have more light. So suppose I could make the whole, that big, alright. So that's, a piece of glass. It's a lot bigger than my eye. So if I could manage to make, all the light that falls in to this whole, go in to my little eyeball, I would be happy as an astronomer.

So the man who kind of put this two and two together was, Mr Galileo. So Mr Galileo discovered that if this particular piece of glass, has a particular kind of property which is, basically being a lens. So that is a lens. So it brings light to a focus. If I shine sunlight through that whole, it'll form an image on a screen. I probably can't do it for you here. But you can see...there we go. So there are bright dots on that blue background. That's focusing those lights over there. So it's a lens, which focuses

light. So I can focus all the light down in to my eyeball. So telescopes, are nothing more then a fancy way of bending light and putting your signals through your eyeball, that you couldn't otherwise do. So carrying around big eyeballs, in some sense, is easy. So telescopes are, ways of collecting lots and lots of information from the sky.

And people have been building telescopes for hundreds and hundreds of years. Not only telescopes that see things your eye can see but, telescopes that see things that you can't see with your eyeballs. Like radio waves. You can equally well have a radio telescope. Telescope, big dish, collects radio waves, focuses just like a lens and they go in to a receiver, just like our eyeball. So you can make maps of the sky, in the radio part of the spectrum or in the visible part of the spectrum, that's easy. The question is, why would you even bother to do that? And the answer is kind of interesting. Basically, because the universe looks different. So if I look at the sky with my eyes and I look at the sky, say with infrared eyes, or x-ray, eyes or gamma ray eyes, I see different energies. Different spectra. Different phenomena in the universe. So, we have to add all those things up together to make, the story.

It reminds me of a real interesting story about Aboriginal astronomy. So, you should be all aware that the world's oldest astronomers, are the Aboriginal people of Australia. They've been doing astronomy for probably about, 60,000 years. Much, much further back in time, then the Aztecs, or the Mayans, or the Chinese, or anybody. And they drew maps of the sky. They drew constellations in the sky. They drew all sorts of pictures and stories about the sky. Long before, all the classical constellations were even thought of. In fact, they created constellations out of stuff, which was really strange.

So if you look at the Milky Way...we're really lucky here in Australia. That our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is kind of a big dinner plate sort of shaped galaxy. And we live in the dinner plate. When you look up in the sky, you see this ban of stars, that's the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, we live in. And if you're out on a dockside, away from the bright city lights, you'll see it's full of black stuff as well as bright stuff. There's milky things, which is kind of, all the stars in the Milky Way. But also, black stuff. And that black stuff is real. It's actually black dusty clouds, that live inside our galaxy. So what the Aboriginal people did is, they actually drew pictures of those black dusty clouds. And one of the biggest constellations in the sky is a thing called, the Big Emu. And it covers most of the sky and it's in fact, made of this black stuff. It's not stars at all. So it's a totally different idea about constellations. Why did I mention this? Well because, if you look with your eyeballs, it looks black. It turns out that if you look with infrared eyeballs, infrared light will go through the Big Emu. So you get a really clear view of the middle of the galaxy, if you want to study that thing. Because you're using infrared telescope. So, different kinds of telescopes are a way to remove feature...

Remove obscuration that you can otherwise see. OK so, we've got telescopes, we've got concepts, we got Mathematics. We've got all sorts of good things, what the hell are we spending all your money doing astronomy? Probably the most important question that people ask all time is are we alone? Is this the only place in the whole Universe that has, you know, The Shoe bar and various other things. So, to me it's inconsiderable that life doesn't exist elsewhere in the Universe 'cause the ingredients that make us exist elsewhere, that's one of the things that I've learned in Astronomy. That the molecules and the atoms that make us live elsewhere. And the Physics that puts it all that together lives elsewhere as well. It's all the same Physics as well as we can see everywhere. So, you

know it's bound to happen. But the most remarkable thing is what's happened with respect to looking for this life.

So, when I was a student, you know, there were nine planets and then we demoted Pluto all over sudden. Pluto is on the way back. Pluto is coming back. (STUDENTS LAUGH) They sent a space craft to Pluto and the more they looked, the harder they looked, the more it looked like a real planet. So it's coming back, alright. So don't worry about Pluto. (STUDENTS GIGGLE) But there were nine planets around the sun. That's all the Planets we knew, we didn't know any other Planets in the entire Universe? Wind down in 30 years and now most Astronomists tell you that every single Star you can see in the Sky has a planetary system just like ours. So the whole Sky is full of Planets. Thousands and millions, and billions of Planets in the Sky.

This Planets building thing is a part of the Star building story. When you build a star, you build planets. It's what goes hand in hand. So the Planets are there, the quick big question is whether they're all life bearing Planets whether they're all in the right circle Goldilocks zone, whether they're not too hot not too cold to basically have people on them or animals or whatever it is. One of the other feisty things or causes that took us about four billion years to evolve up to the point where we can drink beer in the bar. So four billion years is an interesting number because it's also about the age of a Star. So stars like the sun live about this long. Other stars live less times, some longer times. So, it's an interesting question. You know, do you get to be drinking beer in the bar before your star dies or not. So this are interesting. Natures provided an interesting switch there at the time to determine whether you're going to become a successful society or not. But now we align this kind of one of the biggest questions. And as I said, to me the real revelation to me is the number of Planets that people have actually found is increased and also...

And how do they actually find planets? Right. How do you actually do that because you got this bright star out there and the planets that you have there, they are kind of rocks and things. They don't show any of them. If you...if the sun wasn't shining on the moon, you don't see it. OK, it's just a black thing. So, how do you see a planet out there if it's made of rock and things like that? And you've got this incredible bright stars nearby. So, you have to again be clever. OK, so how do you be clever? Astronomists try to be clever most of the time. Suppose you've got the sun, or a star or a planet skying around the sun. Ocassionaly, that planet will come between you and it's star, and some other time it will be around the back. So, if you were just measuring the brightness of that star, you see the brightness be constant and then over sudden go down, come back up again. Because the littlest...planet is resting in front of the star.

So if you take lots and lots of stars and monitor their brightness really carefully, ocassionaly you'll see these little blips and that's the presence of a star... the presence of a planet, pardon me. So there's techniques of doing this. The other really interesting one is the planets going around the star. The planet and the star cannot join together, they go around each other and the common center. So if you look at the star by itself, it actually wobbles a little tiny bit on the sky. So, if you look for wobbling stars, that's another evidence basically on the presense of fairly massive planets. So we use Mathematics, then we use the same old formular here that tells how things go around other things and it tells us basically how to measure the mass of those planets even.

Lemme return to this rather amazing formular of measuring masses and planets. There was a guy called Fritz Zwicky. So Fritz Zwicky was a Switz Astronomer, he worked in the United States most of

his life. He worked in a place called Caltec which I spent some time at as well and we had interesting times there. And he was very, he wasn't a great mathematician, he wasn't a great sort of theoretical person. He's very practical person. So, he... infact he used to criticize Astronomists more that join them. He wasn't a great critic of Astronomists. He used to criticize the way Astronomists described things. Astronomists occassionally described things in the simplest ways possible.

So you've got a galaxy which kind of flat, and maybe has something sticking out of it. And it's gonna...you know some Astronomists would say let's just assume it's a sphere, alright. So the right assumption is it's a sphere. Sometimes usually called the spherical cow approach. So you imagine a cow is not...certainly not spherical, but most Astronomists wanted approximate it to be spherical to start their analysis of cows. So Zwicky once described somebody as a spherical bastard. And the reason why he did that was because they looked like a bastard in every direction. (STUDENTS LAUGH) So that's why he described... So the spherical cow model is... is part of Zwicky story. So, one of the things which he did do though is he...he kind of like us, he was interested in measuring masses. And he was particularly interested in measuring masses of galaxies and particularly galaxies in big groups. So galaxies as I told you. You know, the galaxies here in about 30 or so diameters away is the next one.

Well galaxies are very good (INAUDIBLE), they tend to come in family groups. Sometimes in very very big clusters of galaxies. And so what he wanted to do was to measure the mass. How much mass, you know how much mass is in all this...this big galaxy clusters. And so he was gonna do exactly this. So he was going to basically measure how fast the galaxies are moving. That's the... so, little G thing. He knows what big G is. He can measure on the sky how far the galaxies are. So we can then mark and work out then with the mass of those galaxies is going to be. So, he did this and he did this in the 1930s. So this is quite some time ago. And he found something rather strange. He found that when he... he had two ways of measuring the mass, right. So, you see a galaxy, you know it's made of stars. You can count out how many stars, you know how much that the sun weighs. So this is a typical (INAUDIBLE). If I just add up all the light that's coming from the galaxy, I get a pretty good estimate of the mass.

So this then...well I know what the velocity is gonna be. I'm gonna measure our velocity which is consistent with that mass I see when I add up the little bits. So, what he found was invector velocity which is about three times bigger. So, all of a sudden, instead of this parallel galaxy moving out 300km per second, it's moving at 1000km per second and that's way way way too big. It doesnt make any sense, it doesn't make any sense with this formular if you just plug in the mass of the galaxy you see in the stars. So what he concluded was we're being fooled that somewhere along the road, there's a bunch of mass in and around the galaxy, or in or around these clusters which is black. It doesn't register on the stars. You can't see it with your eyeball, you can't see it with a telescope. And this was the very first time people thought there's a problem in the Universe called missing mass, or missing matter, or dark matter. It's the sexy way of kind of describing them.

That there is about a huge amount of the mass of the Universe which doesn't appear to be viisible or radiating, or shining. We can tell it's there because it's making galaxies go around really fast, OK. There has to be some mass there according to Mr. Newton, you know there has to be mass there. So, this missing mass problem is very very embarassing. Because it basically means it's...Astronomers are kind of like trying to describe the iceburg, alright. The iceburg is the stuff sticking above the

waves, with this like nine tenths of it is sitting below the waves. And we're stuck in a situation now where a lot of the mass we wanna understand where it came from, or where it's going to, or how it works. Is actually being visible to us. So I'll come back to the missing mass problem a bit later on. One of the things about Astronomy we've talked about is that it gives us a way of measuring mass and distance, various other things. The really other cool thing about Astronomy is that it gives us a time machine. So, Astronomy is all about as well as telescopes and measuring things about time machines. And thats a really interesting story too. It's simple to explain.

So if something is far away from you and it meets a flash of light that light travels to you, at a very thick speed remarkably enough called the speed of light. OK, so it moves towards you very fast and it takes some amount of time, you divide the distance, you divide the velocity and you get your time. If the object is further away, the light takes longer to get to you, and so on, and so on and so on. So the sun, for example, the light from the sun takes about eight minutes to travel all the way here to earth. So what we see when we look at the sun is a picture of the Sun about eight minutes old. If the sun got sucked by aliens or whatever it is and it exploded eight minutes ago, we wouldn't know for eight minutes that that has actually happened, right? So the thing gets worse and worse and worse, the further things are away. So if you're in a galaxy, you can be hundreds of millions of years in the past, it could take hundreds of millions of years for the light for the picture for the image of the galaxy to reach us.

So the further and further we look out into the universe, the more distant the more dim things we look at, the older they are, the further back into the history of the universe we see them. The analogy is like the earth in some sense, if I'm standing here, it's the stuff that falls on the floor fell on the floor today. If I dig down a few meters, I find McDonald's wrappers and things from 10 years ago, if I got 100 meters, I find old Holden's, if I go further down I find dinosaurs. So as I dig down into the earth, I'm going backwards into the history of the earth. As I dig outwards into the universe, I'm going backwards into that history of the universe as well. So if I can see something which is really far, which is really faint, then I can go backwards in time.

This is fantastic because right now it's like having a novel with only the last chapter in place. We can see the end of the story here around the earth. We cannot see the beginning of this cosmic story, and so if we could have these ability to look further and further away we'd actually feel in your-recover the first 10 chapters of the book and be able to see how things started some time ago. So to do that you have to, of course, have bigger eyeballs and bigger eyeballs see further away. So you can work it out. You can work on how big an eyeball would I need to be able to see back to some really interesting place in the universe in history. Maybe when the very first stars were formed. OK? so the universe we think is a cosmic story. It takes about 13.7 billion years from the very beginning of that story to today, about 1 billion years from the beginning was the very first objects, we think the very first stars to form. So we'd love to see that, we'd love to able to see right back 12 or so billion years back into the past to these very first hours.

You can work out how big an eyeball you need because obviously, they're really far away, they're going to be really, really faint, so how big does the eyeball need to be? How big you know, one of these do we need? The answer is a million square meters. Alright? So this is a little, this is less than one square (INAUDIBLE) one way, a million square meters of eyeball is about how big an eye you need to be able to get back to that particular part of the story. So that's a bit of a challenge as you

can imagine to do that, and some crazy Astronomers have been thinking about this, for probably the last 30 years of actually how you go about doing that. How would you actually ever even think about building some sort of receiving system, which had a million square meters of eyeball space.

So of course, that's where the square kilometer array comes in. OK, so a square kilometer it's an extremely bad name because it's not square and it's a kilometer. Alright, so it's if you add all the receivers up, or the area you get a million square meters of collecting area, and hence a square kilometer. So that's basically the challenge and the will and the motivation to build that thing, is the desire to get back to the beginning of the story, to get back to this first light point, the dawn point in the universe, and then watch what happens, and of course if we can watch what happens and maybe make some of these kinds of measurements, make these kinds of years wiki kind of measurements, see what that dark matter is doing as time goes by, is it always been there? is it just a recent thing? so if we can get back through the history of the universe is what we want to do. So this is incredibly motivating, and we're just now reaching the point where we can actually do this.

There are some enormous challenges to doing it. So you can't just say, "Oh, yes, I'm going to grab this one and build a square kilometer array. You've got to solve a number of problems. Money, collaboration, politics, all sorts of things need to be made to work, but technology needs to be made to work in particular. So the square kilometer array is something which collects a prodigious amount of data for a start. So the data flowing from the SKA is thousands of times bigger than any project we've done before. If you take one of these little sorts of thumb drives just about 10 gigabytes, you're going to feel a billion of these every day. Alright? so a billion of those, and that's just one day's worth of work. OK? so it's basically got the same data flowing inside the telescope as the entire internet has today. OK

So you do have to deal with yet another internet today as a scientific experiment. So the challenges are huge and this is where astronomy becomes important. This is where astronomy does become important for lots of reasons. It's not just about discovering the donor means of the universe, it's about solving tough problems. And so other big experiments have solved tough problems. The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, that smashes items, the guys who built that invented the web, and I think the web's changed our lives in very many ways. Guys in CSI and go around in cities looking for black holes with a telescope in bags invented Wi-Fi, right? So doing tough physics, doing tough astronomy, you have to solve tough problems which are technological problems and you got to create things which are useful for people for lots of reason, and that's why the government gives us money to do astronomy, to be honest with you. The government doesn't love stars and galaxies, the government loves innovation and technology and that's what we try to do as well.

So that to solve this ASK's problem, to solve some of these (INAUDIBLE) in particular, it's gonna require the world's largest data systems, the world's largest data complexes and processing complex, and some really smart people, and a lot of these really smart people in these really big facilities, are gonna land on your doorstep here in Perth real soon. So it's a transformational not just for the world, but it's also transformational for Western Australia to be able to have these incredible big challenges to solve, because it's not just about the astronomy, it's about making the astronomy happen, solving the problems that you need to solve, that's what astronomy is all about.

We have lots of kids comes through the door. We have 85 graduate students right now studying with us. I bet you two-thirds of those people are going to go off into the data science industry. So we're

not just training the astronomers we're training people to solve problems which are tough, and that's what astronomy is all about, teaching people to think about solving tough problems. So I want to go back to kind of being motivated OK? So I told you at the beginning I was motivated by the moon, the polar landings. That was incredible, that was a once in a lifetime kind of thing, and interestingly enough, if you went from the Earth's orbit to the moon, that's a factor of 3,000 in distance from the Earth's orbit to the moon. So 3,000 was a huge step in which nobody had gone and beginning to (INAUDIBLE) was an amazing thing. But making us different the factor of 3,000 for the Apollo program was incredible.

The factor of 3,000 is exactly what the square kilometer array also requires to get from our current generation of telescopes, the SKA is 3,000 times more capable than anything we have to do. So we're in typically in one generation, we might get things better by a factor of 20, but now we're gonna get things better by a factor of 3,000. So we're back to the Apollo kind of dynamic, and I love the Apollo, I love the SKA to be as motivating for this generation of kids as it was the Apollo learning was for me. I don't want you to go without understanding how important this is for where we are right now. Western Australia is front row center of the square kilometer array project. It's going to be half of it being built up in the Murchison Shire near Geraldton. A billion Australian dollars worth of investment just to build the first bit. The kids in (INAUDIBLE) right now, are going to be able to use this thing and then learn how to be astronomers, and be other science sorts of things as well. So we've got this incredible transformational thing happening on our doorstep here in Western Australia.

20 international countries billions of dollars lots of federal investment as I said, it's really setting a future for us.


As a community, and also setting a future for our kids, which is inspirational. So, motivation, inspiration, Inquisition all those good things is what astronomy is all about. Thank you.

AUDIENCE:

(APPLAUSE)


I'm happy to take questions. Because I love the questions. Yes?

STUDENT 1:

(INAUDIBLE CONVERSATION)


If we're led to believe that the universe has continually expanding.

STUDENT 1:

Yes,


The SKA...

STUDENT 1:

Yes.


Is looking at a billion, whatever years, back in time. Wouldn't it have to be bigger exponentially, as you go? Fortunately, it's doing it fairly slowly. So we don't have to worry too much about on human timescales. It's been doing it for 14 billion years. So, it's -you know, we're not going to be around for much of that, but the universe -we are able to capture like a snapshot if you will, of that expanding universe and that's what we're going to be doing. It will be great actually, when in fact, one of the really interesting experiments is -is to get people who can only 50 years from now, do the same experiment. They would actually see the expansion, not us.

STUDENT 2:

I have two quick questions. The first one, will you be with the square kilometer array, Will you be using the Pawsey Supercomputing Center in W.A, for processing?


So, over the -over the course of the build up of this project, the Square Kilometer Array, which started about say, 2008-2009 to today. The federal government has spent $400 million in this state -money. Part of that money was for the Pawsey Centre, so the Pawsey Center is a big Supercomputer Center, sits here in Perth, but it's got a fiber optic cable that runs 800 kilometers up to the north and plugs into the telescope, right? So it's… Yeah, very much so.

STUDENT 2:

The second question is going back to dark matter you were talking about earlier, what's the current consensus or what's the likeliest thing that...(INAUDIBLE) Yeah,


I wish, I wish I knew what it was, in fact, the rest of my career, I want to find that out. Look, we've tried lots of the things, we tried the simple things, maybe it's just rocks, you know, maybe it's just the rocks are nice and black and they.... So this macho project that I lead was a project that looked for rocks, big and small, basically didn't find any.

We've said, well, maybe it's subatomic particles, maybe it's really a little tiny things we've been looking for those with 20 years haven't gottem. So, we're running out of possibilities here, right. So, there's a is a school of thought that says, "Oh, we just... you know, this is just plain wrong, right? This is just not right anymore." "I don't believe that. I think Mr. Newton was correct." But there are other -there are other kinds of candidates, there is a particular class of subatomic particles, which hasn't been looked for, which are very, I think, very promising. So, we're actually using radio telescopes to look for those.

STUDENT 3:

I'd like to know what kind of approaches you're taking EWA, to solve the problems of big data in astronomy.


Sure. So, big data is, is a very, it's challenging for technological reasons. Because, you know, you kind of -we can't afford the biggest computers in the world necessarily, to solve this. So, we're going to be cleverer than that. So, we have to take the algorithms and things we use today and scale them. So, many of the algorithms that we have on computers today, if you try to double the size of the problem, or triple the size of the problem, they fail. So, now, we've got a lot of people working on scaling of algorithms, that's one task. The other task is, is really the AI machine learning task, because the volume of the data is so big that you can't possibly spend your life looking at the images you create. It's just not -even if you had a horde of graduate students, you wouldn't be able to do it. So, we have to get machines to do some of the stuff we used to do ourselves, right? To just get rid of some of the bulk of the data, to the point where we're interested in. So, machine learning, AI and algorithms research, those are things we do.Any more questions? Yes?

STUDENT 4:

You were talking about life on other planets?

SPEAKER 1:

Yes.

STUDENT 4:

Is there a reason why we assume that life on other planets would be something that's similar to ours, and something that we would recognize, or are we looking for other things that could possibly...?


Yeah sure. I think everybody -most of the scientists, who think about this for a living, are completely convinced that most of the stuff we'll find will be completely alien, in some sense. So, bacteria and worms and goodness knows what. The things that we, might recognize some level but not completely, because if you look at even on the earth, I mean, you look down at these black smokers, these things underneath the ocean, which are hot vents, there's all sorts of critters living around them, that nobody's ever seen before. So, there's going to be things like that, that we find, which live in very harsh environments, which we haven't encountered before. So, there's going to be a huge diversity of stuff.

STUDENT 4:

(INAUDIBLE) assume that it's the same basic... (INAUDIBLE)


I think that's a bit of Hollywood, rather than bit of science, you know, life is very adaptable and very robust, and it'll adapt to whatever conditions it's going to have to face. Yeah, well -I mean, again - my personal feeling is that there's probably, you know, intelligent life in the galaxy, but it's probably spread fairly thinly. So, getting to see them, and them getting to see us, is a big challenge, because it's so far, right. So, we might not actually ever do it. But the possibility exists, but you know, waiting and see.

By the way, just say, before I did get, one of the science cases for The Square Kilometer Ray, in fact, the one that scientists don't usually talk about is, it's an ET trap, right? So, it's the world's biggest ears for listening in on ETs. In fact, I think the number, if I get this, right, it's potentially able to listen to a cell phone conversation and 1000 light years. So if there's a T cell phone in 1000 light years, be careful. Okay, one more,

STUDENT 5:

I just wanted to know, when you talk about dark matter, is different from black holes? And if it is different. Then what's difference?


So black holes are a different story again, and they are perfectly good candidates for dark matter. So, you can imagine, let's just make all the dark matter of these black hole thingies. People have searched for that, because black holes of all sorts of other effects, and they didn't find them either. So, we know it's - we know it's not dark matter, but the black holes exist, they seem to be really common. Their -when stars go through their life story, and they come to the end of that story.

One of the common outcomes is the formation of a black hole. Galaxies, like ours seems to have a black hole living in the middle. Every big galaxies seems to have, you know, a million solar mass black holes sitting in it's core. So, they are quite common. They probably play a really important role in the evolution of galaxies. But they're probably not the dark matter.

The difference is, that basically, a black hole is a space -a piece of space, which is incredibly dense, so dense that light doesn't leave it. So it's black. Dark matter is anything that's black. So that's why black holes can be dark matter, the dark matter can be more things than black holes.

STUDENT 6:

How big is the square kilometer? Like, is it like 500 meters by 500 meters, or?


So, as I said, it's a bad name. So, the actual Square Kilometer Array will be individual elements. And those elements will be spread over about 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers. So, it's a big -it's the world's largest science facility, in Western Australia. So, it's 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers. There's 130,000 receiving elements. So, if you multiply those receiving elements by the area to get a square kilometer.

STUDENT 6:

(INAUDIBLE)


They actually look a bit like a Christmas tree. So, imagine this about twice as big, made of metal Christmas tree. That's the individual elements, there's about -the first phase of deployment. The telescope is 130,000 of those.

STUDENT 6:

(INAUDIBLE)


I wish I could, but as I said, I grew up in the wrong part of the country for that question. Anymore? It's been really a great pleasure. Thank you very much.

JILL BENN:

So, that wraps up this evening's event. Thank you very much for attending this evening. Thank you.

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