Star Trek, Lego and other things…

I’ve tried to deny my inner geek many, many times. I know, to some of you I may seem like the suave, sophisticated, somewhat mysterious man-about-town (jokes) but truth be told I am a geek plain and simple. My passion? Outer Space.

As a child the adventures of James T Kirk aboard the Star ship Enterprise, or the trials and tribulations of the Battle Star Galactica were all I needed to propel me into a frenzy of 3D design and build projects (with Lego mostly). But they also inspired me to look at the real universe out there and inspired a lifetime interest in Astronomy.

My own personal journey in the field of Astrophysics culminated in a Masters-thesis on the physics required to detect super-massive black holes in extra-galactic nuclei, a topic that even today is still burning as technological advances in space-telescopes and signal detection improve to greater and greater degrees of clarity the understanding of gravitational torrents at the centres of these mini-universes.

However what really gets me is the search for exo-planets, or “other earths” and the science behind the detection mechanisms in this subject is really fascinating. To think that we on our tiny little polluted ball of rock and water can peer into the cosmos and detect from the way the light profile of a distant star varies, or the way it’s orbit of the galactic centre “wobbles” can reveal the presence of another world is both mind-boggling and inspiring at the same time. My limited exposure to advanced astronomy peaked at the Mount Teide Observatory on Tenerife, where my final year practical involved commissioning and implementing a new CCD (Charged-Couple Device or digital camera to you and I) at the University de la Canarias teaching telescope, which was then taken back to sunny Sheffield and installed at the Bole Hill observatory (not quite so glamorous). But on those moonlit nights, 3000m above sea-level where I saw with my own eyes, the division in the rings of Saturn and peered through an eye-piece so powerful it looked like I was only a mile above the moon’s surface will never leave me.

Does this have any relevance in today’s media/economy-driven and more and more inwardly looking society? I think it does. It’s only by looking outwards that we truly come to understand our significance in the grand scheme of things and by doing that, bring some degree of calm and clarity to the pursuit of advancement in other fields. To me, the advances in engineering that drive the development of larger and larger telescope mirrors, space telescopes and arrays of radio telescopes as well as the semiconductor physics driving greater degrees of resolution in digital imaging combined with the computing advances of resolving what those images signify as just another small step towards our next giant leap, be that a return to the Moon, a manned mission to Mars, or maybe even the launch of a Star Ship.