Dark Matters – writing about astronomy

Watching the very watchable Brian Cox talking about the universe last night on TV made me think what an amazing place we live in – and for once, the adjective seems precise, not hyperbolic. What is it if not amazing that – as the engaging Dr Cox was at pains to point out – the earth’s gravity is of exactly the right strength to keep us firmly attached to the surface of the planet, without being so powerful that we end up crushed to smithereens? How wonderful too, that matter – dark or otherwise – consists, mainly of nothing. And what about that most mysterious of objects – the Black Hole, whose gravitational force is so powerful that it can suck matter away from neighbouring stars, like a giant plug-hole in Space-Time? How on earth does one get one’s mind around a concept like that?

Astronomers are of course more at home with such ideas. The question of scale – that is, the vastness of the distances they are dealing with – don’t seem to bother them too much. They are equally unperturbed by enormous numbers – all those billions and trillions of Light Years that seem to have passed since the universe was created. They can discuss the repercussions of the Big Bang (or is it now the Big Crunch?) and contemplate the ‘heat-death’ of the universe with equanimity. For the non-scientist, like myself, contemporary astrophysics is a world apart – a realm so abstruse and difficult that even its most basic concepts seem impossible to grasp.

I think – because people like Brian Cox have explained it to me, with colourful metaphors (an apple thrown on a rubber sheet, anyone?) – that I understand Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as it affects Space-Time, but of course I don’t really understand it. To do that, you’d have to have at least a working idea of the mathematics. And while I can admire the beauty of, say, the Crab Nebula, I haven’t the faintest idea how it got to look like that. I mean, I know it’s made up of what was left after a supernova went bang several thousand years ago, but that’s all I know. Thinking about pulsars, and quasars, and all the rest of it just makes my head swim.

All of which presented something of a challenge when I came to write about astronomy, in my latest novel Variable Stars. Even though I wasn’t foolhardy enough to think I could take on twenty-first century astrophysics, I still found the prospect of trying to describe what astronomers actually do quite daunting. By the late eighteenth century, which is when the novel is set, astronomy had moved a long way from its antecedents in Ancient Greece and Egypt, to something resembling its present-day form. After Newton – arguably the first ‘modern’ scientist – astronomers across the world vied with each other to make bigger and better discoveries, using the very latest equipment. One of the most famous of these was William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, whose theories revolutionised the way the universe was perceived.

Herschel isn’t one of the main characters in Variable Stars, but he does get some good lines – some of them written by himself, I have to admit. Here he is talking to his friend Edward Pigott about the possibility that the Moon might be inhabited, and about his own desire to go to the moon (in this, as in many other things, Herschel was far ahead of his time):

In the more untrammelled of their late-night talks, he and Herschel had often speculated upon the nature and constitution of such Beings. For, said Herschel, it stood to reason, did it not, that in a Universe as vast as this, there must be other Worlds, and other Creatures. He himself believed the Moon to be inhabited.
‘Perhaps – and it is not unlikely – the Moon is the planet and the Earth the satellite,’ he had said. ‘Are we not a larger moon to the Moon, than she is to us?… And what a glorious view of the heavens we should receive from the Moon, were we able to visit it! For my part,’ Herschel concluded, with the smile, at once mischievous and childlike, with which he was wont to deliver his more outlandish pronouncements, ‘were I to have to choose between the Earth and Moon, I should not hesitate to fix upon the Moon for my habitation.’

In the end, of course, it wasn’t the technicalities of astronomy with which I had to concern myself in writing Variable Stars, but the passion my astronomers had for astronomy – and that, I hope, does come across in the novel. Another thing I’ve tried to convey is how risky and physically demanding astronomy was, and how uncertain its outcomes. Unlike modern astronomy, which is often more to do with sitting in front of a computer than standing outside looking up at the sky with a telescope, stargazing in the 1780s was just that. Observing the heavens meant spending one’s nights out-of-doors, often under freezing conditions, and with instruments that were not always reliable. Astronomers risked their health – and sometimes their necks – making their world-changing discoveries.

One night it has snowed heavily, but William is adamant they should continue in spite of this. For there is no time to lose, he says. Between them, they have already increased the numbers of known nebulae twenty-fold; they must not weaken now. It is ten o’clock at night when they begin – the clouds having lifted to reveal a few faint stars, glimmering high up in the ink-black heavens. William has already climbed up to the front of the telescope, and is making some adjustment to it. Something is not quite right with the lateral positioning of the apparatus, he informs her. This has to be shifted by hand.
It falls to Caroline to do this.
At either side of the telescope’s wooden framework are posts, furnished with great iron hooks – such as butchers use for hanging their meat – and to which the guy-ropes tethering the structure are attached.
‘Make haste!’ she hears her brother cry, from twenty feet above her head.
But as she runs to obey this injunction, she slips on a patch of melting snow and falls, impaling her leg on one of the hooks six inches above the knee.
The shock of it is so great that she does not at first cry out. Blood spurts from the wound and falls in a great arc across the snow.

Such accidents, one assumes, are rarer these days, for astronomers working with the giant telescopes of Chile, and Hawaii, and West Virginia – telescopes so huge they might have exceeded even William Herschel’s wildest dreams. Although even in the most technologically advanced observatories, weather conditions can still interfere with observing. A visit I once made to the South African Large Telescope at Sutherland, in the Karoo, springs to mind. I’d hoped to look at the stars, in one of the best ‘dark sky’ places in the world – but when I got there, it was snowing. In Africa. Perhaps, after all, what astronomers need even more than mathematical ability is an infinite supply of patience.