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Chris Lintott - The Sunday Programme Interview, GMTV

15 Nov 2006

[Special thanks to Jen at www.brianmay.com for the transcipt and photos]

THE SUNDAY PROGRAMME
GMTV
5 November 2006
JOAN BAKEWELL INTERVIEWS CHRIS LINTOTT

JOAN BAKEWELL: Chris Lintott – it’s a strange medley the trio of you, Brian May, Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott writing this book. It isn’t strange to you but it is to us.

CHRIS LINTOTT: Yes, I kind of got used to it over the three years it took, but it was only when we came out to the glare of the Press that I realised what a strange trio we make, but we all brought different things to it. Patrick is an expert on the Solar System, I work way beyond our own galaxy and Brian, Brian’s always holding us together and making sure that we explain this in terms that everyone can understand.

JB: Well now what you said there was that its not lots of mathematics and indeed there aren’t mathematics in here, but there are lots of very very big numbers.

CL: There are.

JB: How old is the world?

CL: Thirteen point … the Universe is 13.7 billion years old.

JB: How do you conceive of that? How do you imagine it in your mind?

CL: You always get asked this question and I think you don’t after a while. You just get used to them. It’s something like three times the age of the Earth, but then the Earth is 4 billion years old and it’s difficult to get your head round that. The nice thing about astronomy is that we can actually see the early phases of the Universe’s existence because as we look up into the night sky, we’re actually looking back into our past. The light takes so long to reach us that we can actually see the Universe evolving to produce where we stand today.

JB: Right. Well it began with the Big Bang, or did it, because the phrase, “The Big Bang”, was conceived by Fred Hoyle, who didn’t believe in it. So can you explain that?

CL: Yes, of course. Hoyle was the great Cambridge astronomer of the 20th century and he never reconciled himself to the Big Bang and it was in a series of lectures on BBC radio back in the early 50’s that he coined the phrase, and it was supposed to be dismissive. It wasn’t “The Big Bang”. It was (forcefully) “This BIG BANG theory” and it stuck. So the name comes from the theory’s greatest opponent, but the evidence we’ve gathered, particularly in the last 20 years, almost leaves no room for doubt. It’s a theory. We’ll always test it but we’re fairly sure that we really did have a Universe that began in a very hot, very dense state all those billions of years ago.

JB: All right. Well we’re looking out from the Earth. Take us the journey. Let’s go to the nearest, which is Mars. We’ve learnt a great deal about Mars within the last 10 years.

CL: We have. If we were doing this interview 10 years ago, we’d probably skip past Mars rather rapidly because we thought it was a rather dead world with no hope for life, and the ideas that existed before the Space Race of a dead world have long gone.

But now we get pictures like this.

This is from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite and this is the largest mountain in the Solar System – Olympus Mons – so large it sticks up into space, and this is it beginning to rise up from the plain, and the resolution on these images is absolutely incredible.

We’re looking - you probably see things the size of a lorry on this picture, even though it’s taken from orbit around another planet - and what information from probes like this have revealed is that there’s lots of water on Mars in the form of ice, but it’s there.

JB: Now you’ve got a picture of ice haven’t you in this…. amazing to see ice on Mars, because what does that indicate? It indicates the possibility of life?

CL: That’s right, and this, we know this is water ice, rather than carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, and we think there’s an awful lot more water ice under the surface of the Red Planet. Now if that’s true, that might be a place where simple life – bacteria for example – could exist, and there’s a huge flotilla of space probes on Mars now, on their way to Mars, to investigate exactly this.

JB: But it also means that we might be able to exist there, does it?

CL: That’s right. If you want – the biggest problem with getting ourselves – humans – out into space is carrying material with you, and water is rather heavy, so we’d need to look for water elsewhere in the Solar System and those places, if we ever do expand beyond the Earth, will become our bases, and so that’s probably the tourist resort of the future – that crater.

JB: All right – take us a bit further still. Where do we go next?

CL: Well let’s look at where we came from, shall we?…

JB: Yes.

CL: … and this is the Orion Nebula. We can look at this giant cloud of gas glowing. You can see this in the winter sky if you get to a dark site and it’s visible with the naked eye, but the Hubble Space Telescope reveals a hugely complicated picture of gas that’s collapsing to form stars and those dots in the centre – the reddish ones – are newly-formed, massive stars, which are lighting up the surrounding gas.

JB: Are we one of those?

CL: We came from somewhere very like this.

JB: We moved away?

CL: That’s right.

JB: We‘ve been thrown out from there?

CL: Exactly. Once the stars are formed they interact with each other. They tend to get thrown away, OR they blow away the gas that surrounds them.

JB: So if we’ve been thrown away from that nebula, does that mean that other worlds have been thrown away and might be similar to us?

CL: Well exactly – this is the book…. stars form in clusters and you expect there to be similar stars coming from similar places and we know in the Orion Nebula, just in the last month, that most of the stars there have what look like forming solar systems around them, and again in the last 10 years we’ve discovered planets around other stars. We now know of something like 200 planets orbiting other stars.

JB: It becomes inconceivable that there isn’t life out there.

CL: That’s certainly my view. You need to ask a biologist for the details…

JB: Yes.

CL: … I think, but we’re beginning to tick the boxes. We now know planets are common. The next question is whether Earth-like planets are common. Now we can’t detect them, but again, the next few years we should begin detecting other earths. Once you’ve done that, we can look at the atmosphere, even across these great distances, and you might see oxygen in the atmosphere. If you see that, that’s a really strong sign that we’ve found another planet that has life on it.

JB: All right. Let’s move even further still from the Earth and where are we going next?

CL: Well let’s go to our future. We’ve just seen where we came from and in Two Billion years time, there’s going to be a spectacular event. The Milky Way is going to collide with our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, and we can get a taste of what that looks like by looking at other galaxies that are literally colliding with each other.

JB: I mean, aren’t we speaking about rocks banging into each other…

CL: No.

JB: … or just a lot of gas, fusing?

CL: We’re talking about gas fusing essentially because, although the galaxies collide, there’s enough distance between the stars, that none of the stars in these galaxies will hit each other, but what it does do, apart from creating these fantastic shapes, is trigger a huge burst of star formation. It will be like a firework display and the night sky will light up. Should be absolutely spectacular, but we’ve got two billion years to wait for that.

JB: Yes. Well we won’t be around at the time. Okay – do we go any further than this?

CL: Well, let’s go as far as we can and the Hubble Space Telescope has created a series of what they call “deep fields”. Essentially you pick a boring part of the sky and you leave the camera shutter open for months, and then you just add up the light and this enables us to see right back to the point in the Universe when the galaxies are forming. So if we look at something like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most recent of these, every point of light in this image isn’t a star, it’s an individual galaxy, and these are the building blocks that came together and collided to produce what we see today, and the light from these galaxies has travelled something like seven billion years to reach us.

JB: It makes us pretty insignificant here on Earth, doesn’t it?

CL: But isn’t it wonderful that can look up and that we can ask these questions? In one sense we’re insignificant, we’re just part of this; but we’re the only species we know of that asks these questions and can investigate this and that to me makes us pretty special.

JB: This book is an account of what happened as the Universe grew. There’s no reference to the theories that are contained in the Bible and the idea of intelligent design. Do you want to avoid that, or are you just ignoring it, or do you just dismiss it?

CL: Well, we certainly don’t dismiss it, but it’s a scientific book. We’ve stuck only to the story as we’re told by, the story that’s told to us by observing the Universe and things that we can test. Now we can go right back, for example, to a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang and we can make predictions that we can test by looking at the Universe today, but beyond that, at the minute, science cannot go, and we say in the book that we can’t write the first two pages. That’s beyond the reach of science at the minute, so there’s still a place if people personally want to believe a Creator, you can have all that and this story.

JB: Yes, presumably Creationists will simply say “Fine, it’s all true, but God put it there.”

CL: Absolutely fine. There’s no way we can test that.

JB: Where are we going next? I mean, we’re, people like you, are looking further and further. Are you expecting any surprises?

CL: Oh, there are always surprises. One of the great things about this story is we couldn’t have written this book 10 years ago, because only recently have the different observations that tell us how old the Universe is, how much stuff there is in it – they’ve only just started to agree with each other. So we have a picture that’s coherent, but it’s not especially satisfactory. We get 95% of the Universe’s energy is in forms that we don’t understand. Not that we don’t understand the detail, but we have no clue what particles these are in, what form that energy takes, so the big challenge for the next hundred years is to try and answer that question. We know how old the Universe is. We now need to know what’s in it.

JB: (laughs) Well your wonderful book has this amazing cover. Is that how the Big Bang looks? I know it’s meant to represent it, but…

CL: It’s a bit of fun really. Of course we can never see the Big Bang from outside. We’re trapped inside it. So in one way the cover’s misleading, but we see other explosions. We can see stars ending their lives dramatically on the other side of the Universe, so perhaps that’s one of them.

JB: So we are inside the Big Bang, which is going on right now.

CL: Absolutely. We’re in the aftermath of this expansion that began dramatically all that time ago.

JB: It makes something like global warming look pretty puny, doesn’t it?

CL: Well I suppose so, but of course global warming is what we have to deal with now and our planet’s still very important to us.

JB: Chris Lintott, thank you very much.

CL: Thank you.

ENDS

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