The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse
Page 2
In these pages, I’ve focused mostly on our astronomical pro-
jects—they’re what I know best, after all, and they say a lot about
xiv prefaCe
what modern astronomy has taught us about the Universe, and
what we still don’t know. My bias as a scientist is the same as it
was years ago when I was a schoolboy reading about Neptune
and Voyager—I care about space most of all—but a lot of the thrill of the Zooniverse has been the license to get interested in other
people’s research worlds and to draw ideas and inspiration from
scholars of the humanities, climatologists, zoologists, and more.
This book in particular was being written during the time the
Zooniverse team was participating in the Connecting Scientific
Communities project, funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council and led by Sally Shuttleworth, and it is a very
different beast because of the conversations we had.
As that implies, the book you’re now holding is very different
from the one I set out to write more than five years ago and many
people have had a role in getting it into your hands. As well as
support from many close friends, I want to mention Pedro
Ferreira—who was finishing his brilliant book on the history of
gravity, The Perfect Theory, as I was starting—who was a huge encouragement, and Rebecca Carter, my long-suffering agent,
deserves all my thanks too, along with the team at OUP led by
editor Latha Menon. Expert reviews of parts of the text were pro-
vided by Katharine Anderson, Chris Scott, and Brooke Simmons;
any errors that remain are, of course, still mine.
I’ve tried to write in a way that conveys how much fun I’ve had
in the Zooniverse for the last ten years, enjoyment that’s due
almost entirely to the efforts of our incredible community of
volunteers. A small number of names is included at the back of this
book, but I wish I could include them all. Their desire to get stuck
into almost any problem is continually a source of inspiration
and wonder, and it’s been a pleasure working for them. If you’re
one of them, even if you only participated for a few minutes,
thank you for what you’ve helped us all learn. If you haven’t yet
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dived in, then I hope that this book inspires you to become an
active participant in the grandest of all adventures—our attempt
to understand the Universe, and our place in it. See you in the
Zooniverse.
Chris Lintott,
Oxford, November 2018
Plate 1 The great Orion Nebula, with NGC 1981 (briefly known as Lintott 1) visible at the top of the image, above the smaller patch of nebulosity.
Plate 2 The Large Scale Structure of the Universe as seen by SDSS. Each dot is a galaxy, whose colour represents the galaxy colour; the Sloan Great Wall is visible in the top segment.
Plate 3 The protoplanetary disk around the young star HL Tauri, as seen by ALMA. The gaps in the disk may represent disruption of the disk by forming planets.
Plate 4 Schematic version of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, which
plots brightness against colour (which is equivalent to temperature).
Most stars spend most of their lives on the main sequence running from top left to bottom right.
(a)
(b)
Plate 5 Two famous galaxies. Top: M51 turns anticlockwise. Bottom:
NGC1300 turns clockwise
Plate 6 ‘The Mice’ as seen by Hubble. This pair of galaxies is in the process of colliding, an encounter which has already produced the long tidal tails visible in the image.
Plate 7 A coronal mass ejection as seen by the STEREO Heliospheric Imager. The Sun is just to the right of this picture, which also shows the Milky Way on the left.
Plate 8 A magnificent auroral crown as seen from Norway. The green
colour is caused by excited oxygen in the upper atmosphere, and the fine structure reveals the complex interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field with the solar wind.
Plate 9 Supernova 2014J in M82, as indicated by the arrow. The red
material here is flowing away from the centre of the galaxy, a wind which is perhaps powered by supernovae like this one.
Plate 10 The ‘Red Ring’ found by Space Warps volunteers as part of the Stargazing Live project. The image was taken as part of a survey by the Canada-France-Hawai’i Telescope.
Plate 11 Hanny’s Voorwerp as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The complex shape of the Voorwerp—particularly the presence of the apparent ‘hole’ towards the bottom of the object—is still mysterious.
1
HOW SCIENCE IS DONE
What does science look like? Is it a blackboard covered with
confounding equations, a set of seemingly mystical and
obscure symbols inscribed in chalk by a tweedy professor? Is it a
laboratory filled with bubbling chemicals, or an expedition deep
into the Amazonian jungle? Maybe it’s a set of staccato sentences,
delivered in front of dramatic backdrops by a suspiciously enthu-
siastic television presenter over a soaring soundtrack, or maybe
it’s just the mysterious set of knowledge that means I can have a
new iPhone but which ensures also that its battery life will be
measured in minutes. It’s why dropped things in the kitchen will
head for the floor, and also why toast lands buttered side down.*
It is all of these things, but to most people the need for science
to speak the language of mathematics, the associated rigour, and
a perception that to dedicate oneself to science means an
unswerving devotion to the passionless weighing of competing
hypotheses adds up to a vision of a grand but cold and imper-
sonal edifice. Science, whether encountered out in the wild or in
* Not as random an example as you might think! See Matthews, R. A. J., 1995, Tumbling toast, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants, European Journal of Physics, 16, 4: 172–6.
2 How Science iS Done
a battered school textbook, seems established in ground far
removed from normal human concerns, more of a secret lab in
the desert than part of our everyday human lives.
It’s this perception that creates the stereotype of a scientist as
being outside normal culture, the high priest of a technocratic
caste, a group with their own language and concerns. Sometimes,
this perception can be flattering—a typical response when I tell
someone I’m an astronomer is for them to assume that I must be
‘smart’—but those of us who spend our time on this thing called
science know the reality is very different. Our scientific research
is as much part of the real world as last night’s takeaway. Science
is—it has to be—a human pursuit. When progress comes, it
arrives not out of the blue, but as the result of hopes and dreams,
followed by blood, sweat, and not infrequently the tears of nor-
mal human beings. What’s more, this is as true of the works by
Newton, Darwin, or Einstein that we celebrate as the great solo
masterpieces of the genre as it is of the great collaborative pro-
jects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the Human Genome
Project which bring together thousands of people from hun-
dreds of institutions to produce science on almost industrial
scales. It’s easy to forget when reading about the latest medical
astronomical discovery that requires liberal use of the word ‘bil-
lions’, but each advance in knowledge is won because someone
out there wanted it badly. Scientific truths don’t drop from the
sky; they are worked for and fought over.
Knowledge expands because of the effort we put in, and the
results can inspire. In the past few years we have come to know
for certain that when we look at the night sky we are seeing stars
that have planets in orbit around them, just as our own Earth and
its companions circle the Sun. Just knowing that fact really does
change how I look up at the heavens. I find it hard to think about
How Science iS Done 3
without being impressed at our species’ cleverness, and at our
ability to figure things out. I feel the shock, and the awe, of being part of a species capable—perhaps uniquely so—of understanding our place in the Universe.
The enormous changes wrought by digital technologies have,
as I’ve already mentioned, made it possible for everyone to take
part in that effort, perhaps for the first time in human history.
Whether you want to classify rare beetles at the bottom of the
garden, or be the first to explore part of the Martian arctic in
satellite images, it’s clear that we can no longer indulge in the
twentieth-century habit of leaving science to the scientists, but
in area after area we are finding that we must instead all pitch in.
I believe that finding places where we can all make contribu-
tions to science is good for the progress of research, accelerating
the pace of discovery and preserving all sorts of options that
would otherwise be closed off, but it is, I think, also good for each of us to find a little time to make a meaningful contribution to
our understanding of the world. Many of us need a new relation-
ship with science, one based on mutual respect and not only on
listening to the reporting of impressive feats of derring-do.
It’s become a cliché in writing or talking about science com-
munication to conjure up a ‘typical’ dinner party, usually in
North London for some reason.* Conversation has somewhat
inexplicably turned from house prices and schooling (the only
really acceptable topics for imaginary North London dinner par-
ties) to something sciency. Maybe it’s the recent arrival of the
European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe at Comet Churyumov–
Gerasimenko, whose pictures made the front pages of papers, or
* I think there’s been so much written about this stereotypical dinner party that we should doubt whether anything like it ever occurs. If anyone has actually been to a dinner party in North London and tried to discuss science, only to fail, then do get in touch. I’ll buy you a mid-price Portuguese wine as a reward.
4 How Science iS Done
maybe it’s the most recent appearance of an old perennial news-
friendly headline like the ‘discovery’ that red wine either causes
or cures cancer. The details don’t matter; driven to extremes by
such a swerve in conversation, so the story goes, someone will
quickly volunteer that they never understand science, that it left
them cold at school and they could no more distinguish an aster-
oid from an adenoid than design a rocket and fly to the Moon.
The point is, I suppose, that at such an imaginary dinner party
it’s much harder to believe that anyone would say that they don’t
read for fun, or that they never understand cinema, or politics.
Science can be dismissed without shame, and this says some-
thing about its status in our society. We could, and probably
should, make the same point by noticing that a claim to scientific
expertise is often followed by an admiring exclamation of
assumed authority, but both are essentially expressions of fear,
a sense that science is something ‘other’ to be pursued only by
specialists.
Pursued, in fact, by a grown-up version of the science-obsessed
schoolboy I was a few decades ago, when my own interest in open-
ing up science began. I spent much of my teenage years hanging
out (‘hiding from the world’ might, perhaps, be a fairer descrip-
tion) in the observatory my school was blessed with. A squat
brick construction for the most part, it was topped by a glorious
metallic rotating dome, under which sat a large and impressive
telescope. A frame made of blue aluminium rods supported a
mirror fifty centimetres across, an impressive size then and still
large by amateur standards today. (It was, for example, larger than
the telescope that sits on top of the building in Oxford in which
I now work, used for teaching undergraduates how to handle a
modern instrument.) The size of the telescope presented chal-
lenges. When it was pointed straight up at the zenith, any observer
was required to stand, usually on one leg, atop a stepladder and
How Science iS Done 5
lean across in order to reach the eyepiece. The telescope was also
slightly too large for its dome, the result of a sudden glorious
rush of blood to the head that had led the staff responsible to buy
something much larger than they had originally planned, and so
any attempt to look low in the North required some acrobatic
leaning out over the stairwell, something that added to the excite-
ment of any observing session. The whole thing was controlled
by a rather rickety old computer (a BBC Micro with a very sticky
‘4’ key) and was the pride and joy of the Physics Department’s
staff, many of whom had spent years fundraising for such a mag-
nificent facility.
The ringleaders were head of physics, Graham Veale, and the
physics technician, Ian Walsh, along with their friends from the
local Torbay Astronomical Society. They’d raised the money
partly by running discos for local teenagers, and it still staggers
me even now that those who’d endured such things for fundrais-
ing purposes would then turn around and hand the keys to a
bunch of 12 year olds, but they did, and along with a couple of
friends I set out to do some Proper Science.
Not that we got very far. Cloud was a problem, the fact that
we discovered that pizza delivery companies could be per-
suaded to find the observatory was a distraction, and the task of
lining up a faint object on the tiny chip of the digital camera
attached to the telescope remained almost entirely beyond us.
Nonetheless, I remember very clearly the sense that despite the
pathos of our limited efforts we were embarked on something
important. Something, in fact, that might add just a little to
humanity’s understanding of the Universe in all of its glory. We
were, it seemed, only a piece of good luck away from making a
discovery.
The closest I ever got wasn’t, as it turned out, at the observa-
tory, but at home, using a much smaller telescope I’d managed to
6 How Science iS Done
scrimp and save for. The house I grew up in was away from the
main road on a quiet cul-de-sac, making the front drive a reason-
a
ble enough place to set up for observing, especially once the
streetlights were off. A 14 year old immensely proud of a newly
acquired telescope, I was out early one spring evening, taking
advantage of the warmer weather to get a last glimpse of my
favourite object as it sank into the evening twilight.
The object in question was the Orion Nebula, a vast complex
of shining gas and silhouetted dust in turmoil as, deep within it,
stars are being born. William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus
and a pretty good writer as well as a sharp observer, described it
as ‘an unformed fiery mist, the chaotic material of future suns’,
and even through my modest telescope I could see what he
meant. Glowing with a gentle, green light, the three-dimensional
structure of the nebula was clear, and I would go on to spend
hours waiting for those moments when the sky suddenly stands
still, taking advantage of momentarily good seeing to try and
tease out fainter and fainter details.
Patience helped, as did allowing my eyes to get used to the
dark. I also spent a lot of time practising what astronomers call
‘adverted vision’—the technique of looking out of the corner of
one’s eyes in an attempt to use the rod cells which lie there and
are particularly sensitive to faint light, rather than the more cen-
tral cones which specialize in colour but are less good when the
going gets tough—but it was still a challenge. My telescope, pride
and joy that it was, was funded via a weekend job selling buckets
and spades to tourists bound for the beach, and it couldn’t be
described as sophisticated. One of its special features was to dis-
play, unless it was repeatedly nudged, a sad tendency to slump
slowly towards the floor.*
* I have yet to get this fixed. I should get round to it, I suppose.
How Science iS Done 7
On this particular evening, I’d become distracted by some-
thing on the street and had let the telescope slide away from the
nebula. When I returned to the eyepiece, framed perfectly in the
field of view was what seemed to me to be an especially beautiful