The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Read online

  In these pages, I’ve focused mostly on our astronomical pro-

  jects—they’re what I know best, after all, and they say a lot about

  xiv prefaCe

  what modern astronomy has taught us about the Universe, and

  what we still don’t know. My bias as a scientist is the same as it

  was years ago when I was a schoolboy reading about Neptune

  and Voyager—I care about space most of all—but a lot of the thrill of the Zooniverse has been the license to get interested in other

  people’s research worlds and to draw ideas and inspiration from

  scholars of the humanities, climatologists, zoologists, and more.

  This book in particular was being written during the time the

  Zooniverse team was participating in the Connecting Scientific

  Communities project, funded by the Arts and Humanities

  Research Council and led by Sally Shuttleworth, and it is a very

  different beast because of the conversations we had.

  As that implies, the book you’re now holding is very different

  from the one I set out to write more than five years ago and many

  people have had a role in getting it into your hands. As well as

  support from many close friends, I want to mention Pedro

  Ferreira—who was finishing his brilliant book on the history of

  gravity, The Perfect Theory, as I was starting—who was a huge encouragement, and Rebecca Carter, my long-suffering agent,

  deserves all my thanks too, along with the team at OUP led by

  editor Latha Menon. Expert reviews of parts of the text were pro-

  vided by Katharine Anderson, Chris Scott, and Brooke Simmons;

  any errors that remain are, of course, still mine.

  I’ve tried to write in a way that conveys how much fun I’ve had

  in the Zooniverse for the last ten years, enjoyment that’s due

  almost entirely to the efforts of our incredible community of

  volunteers. A small number of names is included at the back of this

  book, but I wish I could include them all. Their desire to get stuck

  into almost any problem is continually a source of inspiration

  and wonder, and it’s been a pleasure working for them. If you’re

  one of them, even if you only participated for a few minutes,

  thank you for what you’ve helped us all learn. If you haven’t yet

  prefaCe xv

  dived in, then I hope that this book inspires you to become an

  active participant in the grandest of all adventures—our attempt

  to understand the Universe, and our place in it. See you in the

  Zooniverse.

  Chris Lintott,

  Oxford, November 2018

  Plate 1 The great Orion Nebula, with NGC 1981 (briefly known as Lintott 1) visible at the top of the image, above the smaller patch of nebulosity.

  Plate 2 The Large Scale Structure of the Universe as seen by SDSS. Each dot is a galaxy, whose colour represents the galaxy colour; the Sloan Great Wall is visible in the top segment.

  Plate 3 The protoplanetary disk around the young star HL Tauri, as seen by ALMA. The gaps in the disk may represent disruption of the disk by forming planets.

  Plate 4 Schematic version of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, which

  plots brightness against colour (which is equivalent to temperature).

  Most stars spend most of their lives on the main sequence running from top left to bottom right.

  (a)

  (b)

  Plate 5 Two famous galaxies. Top: M51 turns anticlockwise. Bottom:

  NGC1300 turns clockwise

  Plate 6 ‘The Mice’ as seen by Hubble. This pair of galaxies is in the process of colliding, an encounter which has already produced the long tidal tails visible in the image.

  Plate 7 A coronal mass ejection as seen by the STEREO Heliospheric Imager. The Sun is just to the right of this picture, which also shows the Milky Way on the left.

  Plate 8 A magnificent auroral crown as seen from Norway. The green

  colour is caused by excited oxygen in the upper atmosphere, and the fine structure reveals the complex interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field with the solar wind.

  Plate 9 Supernova 2014J in M82, as indicated by the arrow. The red

  material here is flowing away from the centre of the galaxy, a wind which is perhaps powered by supernovae like this one.

  Plate 10 The ‘Red Ring’ found by Space Warps volunteers as part of the Stargazing Live project. The image was taken as part of a survey by the Canada-France-Hawai’i Telescope.

  Plate 11 Hanny’s Voorwerp as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The complex shape of the Voorwerp—particularly the presence of the apparent ‘hole’ towards the bottom of the object—is still mysterious.

  1

  HOW SCIENCE IS DONE

  What does science look like? Is it a blackboard covered with

  confounding equations, a set of seemingly mystical and

  obscure symbols inscribed in chalk by a tweedy professor? Is it a

  laboratory filled with bubbling chemicals, or an expedition deep

  into the Amazonian jungle? Maybe it’s a set of staccato sentences,

  delivered in front of dramatic backdrops by a suspiciously enthu-

  siastic television presenter over a soaring soundtrack, or maybe

  it’s just the mysterious set of knowledge that means I can have a

  new iPhone but which ensures also that its battery life will be

  measured in minutes. It’s why dropped things in the kitchen will

  head for the floor, and also why toast lands buttered side down.*

  It is all of these things, but to most people the need for science

  to speak the language of mathematics, the associated rigour, and

  a perception that to dedicate oneself to science means an

  unswerving devotion to the passionless weighing of competing

  hypotheses adds up to a vision of a grand but cold and imper-

  sonal edifice. Science, whether encountered out in the wild or in

  * Not as random an example as you might think! See Matthews, R. A. J., 1995, Tumbling toast, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants, European Journal of Physics, 16, 4: 172–6.

  2 How Science iS Done

  a battered school textbook, seems established in ground far

  removed from normal human concerns, more of a secret lab in

  the desert than part of our everyday human lives.

  It’s this perception that creates the stereotype of a scientist as

  being outside normal culture, the high priest of a technocratic

  caste, a group with their own language and concerns. Sometimes,

  this perception can be flattering—a typical response when I tell

  someone I’m an astronomer is for them to assume that I must be

  ‘smart’—but those of us who spend our time on this thing called

  science know the reality is very different. Our scientific research

  is as much part of the real world as last night’s takeaway. Science

  is—it has to be—a human pursuit. When progress comes, it

  arrives not out of the blue, but as the result of hopes and dreams,

  followed by blood, sweat, and not infrequently the tears of nor-

  mal human beings. What’s more, this is as true of the works by

  Newton, Darwin, or Einstein that we celebrate as the great solo

  masterpieces of the genre as it is of the great collaborative pro-

  jects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the Human Genome

  Project which bring together thousands of people from hun-

  dreds of institutions to produce science on almost industrial

  scales. It’s easy to forget when reading about the latest medical
r />   advance in the newspaper, or when listening awestruck to an

  astronomical discovery that requires liberal use of the word ‘bil-

  lions’, but each advance in knowledge is won because someone

  out there wanted it badly. Scientific truths don’t drop from the

  sky; they are worked for and fought over.

  Knowledge expands because of the effort we put in, and the

  results can inspire. In the past few years we have come to know

  for certain that when we look at the night sky we are seeing stars

  that have planets in orbit around them, just as our own Earth and

  its companions circle the Sun. Just knowing that fact really does

  change how I look up at the heavens. I find it hard to think about

  How Science iS Done 3

  without being impressed at our species’ cleverness, and at our

  ability to figure things out. I feel the shock, and the awe, of being part of a species capable—perhaps uniquely so—of understanding our place in the Universe.

  The enormous changes wrought by digital technologies have,

  as I’ve already mentioned, made it possible for everyone to take

  part in that effort, perhaps for the first time in human history.

  Whether you want to classify rare beetles at the bottom of the

  garden, or be the first to explore part of the Martian arctic in

  satellite images, it’s clear that we can no longer indulge in the

  twentieth-century habit of leaving science to the scientists, but

  in area after area we are finding that we must instead all pitch in.

  I believe that finding places where we can all make contribu-

  tions to science is good for the progress of research, accelerating

  the pace of discovery and preserving all sorts of options that

  would otherwise be closed off, but it is, I think, also good for each of us to find a little time to make a meaningful contribution to

  our understanding of the world. Many of us need a new relation-

  ship with science, one based on mutual respect and not only on

  listening to the reporting of impressive feats of derring-do.

  It’s become a cliché in writing or talking about science com-

  munication to conjure up a ‘typical’ dinner party, usually in

  North London for some reason.* Conversation has somewhat

  inexplicably turned from house prices and schooling (the only

  really acceptable topics for imaginary North London dinner par-

  ties) to something sciency. Maybe it’s the recent arrival of the

  European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe at Comet Churyumov–

  Gerasimenko, whose pictures made the front pages of papers, or

  * I think there’s been so much written about this stereotypical dinner party that we should doubt whether anything like it ever occurs. If anyone has actually been to a dinner party in North London and tried to discuss science, only to fail, then do get in touch. I’ll buy you a mid-price Portuguese wine as a reward.

  4 How Science iS Done

  maybe it’s the most recent appearance of an old perennial news-

  friendly headline like the ‘discovery’ that red wine either causes

  or cures cancer. The details don’t matter; driven to extremes by

  such a swerve in conversation, so the story goes, someone will

  quickly volunteer that they never understand science, that it left

  them cold at school and they could no more distinguish an aster-

  oid from an adenoid than design a rocket and fly to the Moon.

  The point is, I suppose, that at such an imaginary dinner party

  it’s much harder to believe that anyone would say that they don’t

  read for fun, or that they never understand cinema, or politics.

  Science can be dismissed without shame, and this says some-

  thing about its status in our society. We could, and probably

  should, make the same point by noticing that a claim to scientific

  expertise is often followed by an admiring exclamation of

  assumed authority, but both are essentially expressions of fear,

  a sense that science is something ‘other’ to be pursued only by

  specialists.

  Pursued, in fact, by a grown-up version of the science-obsessed

  schoolboy I was a few decades ago, when my own interest in open-

  ing up science began. I spent much of my teenage years hanging

  out (‘hiding from the world’ might, perhaps, be a fairer descrip-

  tion) in the observatory my school was blessed with. A squat

  brick construction for the most part, it was topped by a glorious

  metallic rotating dome, under which sat a large and impressive

  telescope. A frame made of blue aluminium rods supported a

  mirror fifty centimetres across, an impressive size then and still

  large by amateur standards today. (It was, for example, larger than

  the telescope that sits on top of the building in Oxford in which

  I now work, used for teaching undergraduates how to handle a

  modern instrument.) The size of the telescope presented chal-

  lenges. When it was pointed straight up at the zenith, any observer

  was required to stand, usually on one leg, atop a stepladder and

  How Science iS Done 5

  lean across in order to reach the eyepiece. The telescope was also

  slightly too large for its dome, the result of a sudden glorious

  rush of blood to the head that had led the staff responsible to buy

  something much larger than they had originally planned, and so

  any attempt to look low in the North required some acrobatic

  leaning out over the stairwell, something that added to the excite-

  ment of any observing session. The whole thing was controlled

  by a rather rickety old computer (a BBC Micro with a very sticky

  ‘4’ key) and was the pride and joy of the Physics Department’s

  staff, many of whom had spent years fundraising for such a mag-

  nificent facility.

  The ringleaders were head of physics, Graham Veale, and the

  physics technician, Ian Walsh, along with their friends from the

  local Torbay Astronomical Society. They’d raised the money

  partly by running discos for local teenagers, and it still staggers

  me even now that those who’d endured such things for fundrais-

  ing purposes would then turn around and hand the keys to a

  bunch of 12 year olds, but they did, and along with a couple of

  friends I set out to do some Proper Science.

  Not that we got very far. Cloud was a problem, the fact that

  we discovered that pizza delivery companies could be per-

  suaded to find the observatory was a distraction, and the task of

  lining up a faint object on the tiny chip of the digital camera

  attached to the telescope remained almost entirely beyond us.

  Nonetheless, I remember very clearly the sense that despite the

  pathos of our limited efforts we were embarked on something

  important. Something, in fact, that might add just a little to

  humanity’s understanding of the Universe in all of its glory. We

  were, it seemed, only a piece of good luck away from making a

  discovery.

  The closest I ever got wasn’t, as it turned out, at the observa-

  tory, but at home, using a much smaller telescope I’d managed to

  6 How Science iS Done

  scrimp and save for. The house I grew up in was away from the

  main road on a quiet cul-de-sac, making the front drive a reason-

  a
ble enough place to set up for observing, especially once the

  streetlights were off. A 14 year old immensely proud of a newly

  acquired telescope, I was out early one spring evening, taking

  advantage of the warmer weather to get a last glimpse of my

  favourite object as it sank into the evening twilight.

  The object in question was the Orion Nebula, a vast complex

  of shining gas and silhouetted dust in turmoil as, deep within it,

  stars are being born. William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus

  and a pretty good writer as well as a sharp observer, described it

  as ‘an unformed fiery mist, the chaotic material of future suns’,

  and even through my modest telescope I could see what he

  meant. Glowing with a gentle, green light, the three-dimensional

  structure of the nebula was clear, and I would go on to spend

  hours waiting for those moments when the sky suddenly stands

  still, taking advantage of momentarily good seeing to try and

  tease out fainter and fainter details.

  Patience helped, as did allowing my eyes to get used to the

  dark. I also spent a lot of time practising what astronomers call

  ‘adverted vision’—the technique of looking out of the corner of

  one’s eyes in an attempt to use the rod cells which lie there and

  are particularly sensitive to faint light, rather than the more cen-

  tral cones which specialize in colour but are less good when the

  going gets tough—but it was still a challenge. My telescope, pride

  and joy that it was, was funded via a weekend job selling buckets

  and spades to tourists bound for the beach, and it couldn’t be

  described as sophisticated. One of its special features was to dis-

  play, unless it was repeatedly nudged, a sad tendency to slump

  slowly towards the floor.*

  * I have yet to get this fixed. I should get round to it, I suppose.

  How Science iS Done 7

  On this particular evening, I’d become distracted by some-

  thing on the street and had let the telescope slide away from the

  nebula. When I returned to the eyepiece, framed perfectly in the

  field of view was what seemed to me to be an especially beautiful