ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

ASTRONOMY doesn’t fare too well when pursued by developing countries without
collaboration with Western countries. Research is stagnant, telescopes remain
unused and astronomers who are educated there often leave. Observatories are
regarded as little more than educational tools for children, or as political
symbols of scientific prestige. Indigenous projects often wither and die.

I’ve seen it happen. In 1993 I joined a Sri Lankan government committee whose
job was to decide what to do with a 45-centimetre reflecting telescope donated
by Japan. The panel was made up of technical experts in meteorology, computer
science and engineering. But they were more concerned with issues of security
and convenience than science. Instead of looking for somewhere clear and dark to
site the telescope, they looked for an urban location. In the end, the telescope
was installed with great fanfare in the middle of a town located in the remains
of a tropical jungle. It is a bright, wet and utterly useless location.

The telescope has yet to produce a single meaningful data point. Instead, it
drains about $5000 per year from the government to pay for a simple
maintenance programme. Students from a nearby university tell me they do not
benefit from it at all.

Compare that to a 35-centimetre telescope on the campus of the University of
Auckland, New Zealand. On a shoestring budget it has managed over 400 hours of
observation every year for the past three years and has produced three
publications and trained more than 150 students.

What is the crucial difference that ensured one observatory was a success and
the other a failure? Red tape and bureaucracy are only part of the story. The
real issue is that Sri Lanka has neither the desire nor the ability to run a
telescope. The country has only eight professional astronomers, all of whom live
abroad. Like most developing countries, it will have to import some experts to
take full advantage of its potential in astronomy. It may even have to import a
new way of thinking.

The philosophical base for modern science—the pursuit of knowledge
through deductive reasoning and facts—has often been attributed to the
Renaissance of Western Europe. W. T. Jones made this point in 1952 in his book
A History of Western Philosophy: Hobbes to Hume in which he argued that
the pursuit of science emerged from a society that became increasingly
disillusioned by religion. I’d go even further than Jones and argue that a
desire for pure science might actually depend upon that historical development.
Thus countries such as Sri Lanka that did not experience the Renaissance do not
have the cultural attitudes—such as a willingness to confront authority
and status quo—that are necessary to the pursuit of pure science.

Although science in the West has led to many beneficial technologies, in many
ways it goes against the grain. Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin were hardly
popular figures in their time. Worldwide, people still seem to find pure science
rather distasteful.

Even in the US today science is properly tolerated and funded mostly when it
leads to useful technologies or bolsters industry. In the developing world, it
is even more reluctantly pursued. Their hearts aren’t in it and it isn’t in
their hearts.

You might argue that poorer countries should not be investing in pure science
at all—that it’s a waste of their precious resources. But science can
benefit everyone. It can enrich a country’s education system. It can give people
experience in problem solving and provide a sense of perspective on humankind’s
place in the Universe. No one should be denied such an opportunity.

Wonderful, productive observatories do exist in the developing world: Cerro
Tololo in Chile, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the Udaipur
Solar Observatory in India are three examples. But all of them are Western-led,
or have staff composed largely of Britons and Americans. These collaborations
are different from the old colonial set-ups, and they seem to be a necessary
ingredient for successful astronomy in the developing world.

The Bosscha Observatory in Indonesia has trained some fine astronomers, but
the government has never given it enough money to be productive. In Chile, with
some of the finest sites for astronomical observation on the planet, the past 30
years of research have yielded exciting results only from projects led by
foreigners. Expensive observatories in Egypt, Venezuela and Iraq have produced
nothing whatever of any significance. Some of these countries are working to
improve their performance and are building new observatories, but I am not
optimistic that they will be successful without collaboration from the West.

For astronomical research to work well in these countries, governments need
to import more than just the bricks and mortar of research labs and
observatories. They need to import the whole culture behind astronomy.