Sarah Wild Discusses Searching African Skies and the Square Kilometre Array at Love Books

 
The night before the official book launch at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre which featured Naledi Pandor, Minister of Science and Technology, as guest speaker, author Sarah Wild was in conversation with Professor David Block, Director of the Anglo American Cosmic Dust Laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand, for an intimate yet informative evening at Love Books in Melville.

In Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars, Wild explains in layman’s terms the importance of the SKA for South Africa not only in terms of scientific value but also in terms of the kind of political leverage that comes with being one of the forerunners in the field of radio telescope technology.

Searching African Skies is by no means a dense volume of scientific and astronomical jargon, but rather a story of how the SKA came about and how it came to be based in the Karoo, interspersed with Khoisan mythology about the stars. The 27-year-old Wild is currently the Science and Technology Editor at Business Day, a role she created for herself. She testified that the book is written in the same manner in which she speaks which, as her audience discovered, is a mixture of eloquence and wit.

Block, who used to do a regular slot with Jenny Crwys-Williams on Radio 702 some years back, asked Wild to elucidate on the content of the book, asking her what the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) actually entails. According to Wild, “The Square Kilometre Array will be the biggest scientific experiment on earth, it will be the biggest radio telescope ever, all celestial objects, everything that we see in the sky emits radio waves and it will be the most sensitive telescope that we have.” She explained that even though you can look at the sky with optical telescopes, what you can see is very limited compared to what you can see with a radio telescope.

Wild also briefly explained the technology behind the SKA: “It is called an interferometer, the idea behind it is that you have a radio dish and you have another radio dish and if you link them together they are effectively one big radio dish, so if you take over three thousand dishes and add them together you have a receiving area of one square kilometre, the Square Kilometre Array.”

“There are three different things which I do talk about in my book, the one is what we expect to find, habitable planets and to unravel what dark matter is, we kind of know it’s out there but we are not quite sure what it is, which is the scientific term for dark matter. Then there are the technological spin offs, you think your cell phone is fast now, just wait until we develop this data processing capacity that will find its way into you cell phone, into your computer and into your life [...] For me the really exciting thing is serendipity, which is the stuff we don’t know we are going to find, the stuff that we haven’t even imagined that we don’t know.”

Wild revealed how, though South Africa is splitting the telescope with Australia, we have the majority share. The SKA will be developed in these two countries because they are quieter – everything that humans do in the ‘civilised’ world is the anathema of radio telescopes. Wild said, “South Africa started off as the dark horse and Australia has been a world leader in radio astronomy since the Second World War and we ninja’d it.” The site advisory committee recommended South Africa when they took a number of factors into account – infrastructure, noise-levels and cost. She is, however, positive about the collaboration as she explained that sharing the project between the two countries “is the best way to cross-pollinate skills and get the best out of the instrument.”

Wild concluded the fascinating discussion by emphasising how the SKA will change the pace of data collection: “The SKA will collect more raw data than humankind have collected in the entire history of us, in just one week.” With Searching African Skies, Wild provides an accessible way of understanding the importance and projected impact of this ambitious project.

Michelle McGrane tweeted from the launch:

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Book details

• Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars by Sarah Wild
  EAN: 9781431404728
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