Very few astronomers would consider descending from their mountain tops
to explain to a crippled pensioner why money should be spent on a new CCD
camera rather than on a new hip joint or even the services of a home help.
Some who do venture a view shrug and say that the government sets overall
spending priorities and not the Science and Engineering Research Council.
Others point out that Pounds sterling 65 million works out at only about
Pounds sterling 3 per annum per household – so why the fuss? This latter
view ought to be turned about. Why won’t the government divert Pounds sterling
3 from each household every year to fund those 20 000 hip joint replacement
operations? The key is to stop thinking of astronomy as a scientific endeavour
and regard it as a cultural activity. It (literally) expands our horizons
and puts our futile tribal conflicts into context.

Stunning visions of space have been brought into our homes for less
than the price of a single visit to the cinema each year. Astronomy, that
greatest of all cultural endeavours, costs us each year the price of a couple
of Van Gogh paintings.

And yet there is still the nagging question . . . Why should Britain
spend Pounds sterling 65 million each year on astronomy when, by diverting
that money into medical research, the pace of astronomical research would
be slowed down a little, not stopped? The same discoveries will still be
made a year or two later by other nations because no instruments operated
by Britain are unique.

Support for astronomy has to be regarded as a subsidy for a cultural
activity. Perhaps the funding of British astronomy should pass from the
SERC to the Arts Council, where it will compete directly with other artistic
activities for both government funds and commercial sponsorship? The Carlsberg
Transit Telescope on the island of La Palma is funded by a tiny part of
the profits of each glass of what is ‘probably the best lager in the world’.
The largest optical telescope in the world is currently being constructed
in the US mainly with private funding. Would it really matter if the Isaac
Newton Telescope were to be sponsored by and renamed after, say, a manufacturer
of condoms? At least some of those 20 000 hip joint replacement operations
could be performed with the money saved.

Geoff Kirby is an amateur astronomer open to offers of sponsorship.

The discovery of N-rays by the eminent French academic, Rene-Prosper
Blondlot in 1903, was a classic case. These mysterious rays were supposed
to be radiated by a heated wire. They passed through aluminium sheet up
to 70 millimetres thick but the thinnest iron foil stopped them dead.

How were N-rays detected? Only one method was reliable. When they were
shone upon an object they increased the ability of the human eye to see
it when the incident conventional illumination was just at the threshold
for detection. The lighting in a room was lowered until the test object
was on the verge of invisibility and N-rays then made the object easier
to see.

Blondlot spent years studying these rays. He found that a house brick,
left in sunshine for several days, stored N-rays and radiated them later.
If the irradiated brick was held close to the head, the visibility of faintly
illuminated objects was enhanced. The rays were refracted by aluminium prisms
and he measured the refraction index to a precision of three significant
figures. Many papers were published on the curious characteristics of N-rays
by Blondlot and others until one day, while he was demonstrating and measuring
their refractive properties, a visitor pocketed the aluminium prism without
his measurements being affected! N-rays were never heard of again. They
were figments in the minds of those sad characters, pathological scientists.

Nowhere has pathological science been more active, caused more embarrassment
and survived so virulently to the present day than in astronomy. Consider
the planet Mercury, for example. Mercury is notoriously difficult to observe.
It is small and is always close to the Sun so it can be studied for only
a few weeks each year. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries many
drawings of its surface were made. It was obvious that Mercury, being so
close to the Sun, must be in locked rotation as it turned about the Sun;
that is, that it always turned the same face to the Sun, just as our own
Moon always turns the same face to the Earth. So textbooks into the 1960s
described a world scorched on one face and unimaginably frigid on the other.
Features glimpsed through telescopes were carefully mapped and named. And
what superb names! Apollonia, Liguria, Pieria, Cyllene, Aurora . . .

Then, in 1964, radar measurements showed that Mercury was not locked
in position relative to the Sun. In fact, it rotated on its axis in 58 days,
while taking 88 days to travel once around the Sun. In desperation, the
best drawings made over two centuries were collected and mapped onto a globe
using the true rotation period. All that emerged were a few smudges; gone
were Persephones, Heliocaminus and the rest – the accumulated figments of
many imaginations.

Astronomers trying to observe at the threshold of their vision, driven
on by a false assumption about a rotation rate, drew what they thought they
ought to be seeing. William Herschel, probably the greatest amateur visual
observer of all time, stated 200 years ago that an object becomes much easier
to see once it has been seen for the first time. This, alas, is also true
of objects that do not exist.

The Canals of Mars must also rank high in the role of dishonour for
pathological astronomy. Seen only at the very threshold of visual resolution
under exceptional conditions, their observation and popularisation by Percival
Lowell early this century convinced many that Martians were conserving their
precious water locked up in polar icecaps and feeding the meltwater to make
the deserts bloom. Not until the space probes arrived at Mars and found
no canals was it finally proved that Lowell and many others had been deceived
by faint, irregular dappling on the Martian surface. Imagination and the
urge to believe in Martians did the rest.

It couldn’t happen today, could it? Alas, it could, and amateur astronomers
have failed to learn the lessons of Mercury and Mars and are tumbling into
the same old traps as did their predecessors. For decades, amateurs have
been recording features on the cloudy face of Venus: cusp caps, limb shadings,
bright spots and wisps of utmost subtlety. These observations are made right
at the limit of visual detectability – classical breeding conditions for
pathological science. And yet in 1896, in a series of experiments on Earth,
a Swiss-born astronomer called Villiger made a number of observations through
a telescope of featureless white balls at large a distances. He ‘saw’ all
of the major features that are still being recorded visually by amateur
astronomers on the real Venus. Observers are still deceiving themselves.

The amateur astronomical fraternity is badly sold on pathological science.
Cloud bands on Uranus and Neptune, markings on Jupiter’s moons, changes
in craters on the Moon, the mythical planet Vulcan and a moon for Venus;
all the result of straining to detect at the limit of visibility.

Bias and the urge to believe are strong in scientists; hence the use
of the ‘double blind’ technique. But the lone experimenter or observer has
few controls to temper the imagination. The lesson to be learnt, whatever
your scientific field, is simple: If it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb,
forget it!

Geoff Kirby is an amateur astronomer in Dorset.

‘A team of youths killed five toads, 50 worms and 90 beetles under the
wheels of their van during a raid on the University Animal Research Unit.
Five spiders were destroyed when the fence was cut. Six slugs were squashed
and 10 snails left mortally wounded, their shells crushed by the boots of
the raiders.

‘Fifteen hundred fleas were later poisoned, and the killers then ate
a meal, the preparation of which had involved the painful deaths of countless
insects.’ Why are we not stirred by the deaths of creepy-crawlies? We fret
over the welfare of animals that live with us (dogs and cats), that are
cute (seal pups and donkeys), that are beautiful (birds and butterflies),
that are exploited (cows, pigs and chickens) and that are rare (giant pandas).
But who speaks up for the slaughtered animals that do not fall into anthropomorphic
categories? Why does the death of a slug not fill us with as much remorse
and revulsion as the crushing of a butterfly? How many self-proclaimed animal
lovers grieve as they pour boiling water over an ants’ nest? How many vegetarians
bother about the trillions of insects killed to provide their ‘cruelty-free’
meals? What determines whether we grieve over an creature’s death or ignore
it? Size comes into the equation. If an animal is large enough for its entrails
to be a visible mess then its death is unacceptable – hence the Toad Patrols
but never Worm Patrols. A squashed worm on the road looks like a piece of
string but a squashed toad – Uggh! Cohabiting and cute animals are a substitute
for the young of our own species so our genes preserve them. We nurture
rare animals for their rarity but why? If evolution has driven the giant
panda into a cul-de-sac, should we fight to preserve it or allow it to pass
away? The giant panda is a failure. Isit the sympathy for the underdog (the
underpanda?) that spurs us to keep it alive while slaughtering without a
qualm the enormously successful ants? There are so many factors that determine
our attitudes to other animals: all of them specious and rank specism. When
are we going to be honest about ‘animal rights’ and offer the same respect
to slugs as to seal pups? An acquaintance of mine hunts slugs by the light
of a torch and chops them in half. I carry them from the vegetable plot
to the compost heap where they can feast on their preferred diet of rotting
plants. If ants invade my kitchen I break their chemical trail with a strong
odorous liquid and divert them. If blackfly invade my beans – well, their
lives depend on those succulent pods. Mine doesn’t so I leave them.

Geoff Kirby is a scientist writing from insect-ridden Dorset.

Swan co-invented the electric lamp with Edison at the age of 51; Ampere
conducted (sorry!) his classic experiments starting at the age of 46; Oersted
did his work on magnetism at 42; Daniel invented his battery at the age
of 46; and Galvani was making frogs’ legs twitch in thunderstorms at the
age of 54. Similarly, Chadwick discovered the neutron when aged 41 and Merrill’s
discovery of the element technetium was made when he was 65. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi,
who discovered vitamin C at the age of 35, was still actively publishing
research papers well into his nineties! I found that the mean age for seminal
work was 41. Only 14 per cent of great scientists had produced their master
work by the age of 30, and 12 per cent had yet to flower by 50. Thus, any
policy which prevents high-grade graduate scientists from specialising and
becoming experts in their field is wasting a vast amount of talent. Furthermore,
bright scientists do not necessarily become, in their mature years, competent
administrators of science.

Where does this leave me? I am 50 this year so I have only a 12-per-cent
chance left of getting that elusive Nobel prize; provided, that is, I am
destined to get one at all. But first I have to complete a spreadsheet of
project costings for my boss. Perhaps next year!

Geoff Kirby is a scientist with the Ministry of Defence at Portland,
Dorset.