The Heavens; Interview with Eugene Parker

. . . . . . .. Well, we can kind of hit the whole scheme of things, but particularly solar astronomy. I would say that probably most agrarian people were most motivated by solar astronomy, and that part of the assumption among me and who I know that astronomy sent me to a night, you look at stars, it's a planet and so... And the sun is just a damn nuisance, because it spoils it all the way up. Yeah, we have to wait until it goes away when exactly here it is, such an important part in our lives, and very, very helpful in the field.

If I could, just to begin with, this observatory is remarkable for its capabilities and its location. Can you say something about why this is such a good location for an observatory and why these are such good telescopes? It's not the best location, but it's one of the best telescopes in the world, yeah. Okay, sure, we can talk about that. Okay, well that's my first is... Can you tell me why this is such a great facility? I see, facility. Okay, this is an unusual facility because the so-called Vacuum Tower Telescope is probably the best single instrument in the world even today, 20-some years after it was built. The problem with looking at the sun is that you need to see the small details, that's what the action is, and the atmosphere over your head blurs things a little bit. I'm sure you've all had the experience of being out on clear sparkling night when the stars are dancing and they're out bright. That's a terrible night from the point of view of astronomy because the picture that you're trying to get of the stars is just dancing all over the photographic plate. And the same way with the sun, you don't notice it so much because the sun is broad, but it's the same problem.

It wiggles and jiggles and you simply cannot see the small details. And so the Vacuum Tower Telescope is an optical device where you pump the air out of the inside of the telescope, because that was one of the worst offenders. And for that reason, this instrument was a real leader in its day, and it's still one of the best instruments available. This, again, is pretty far reaching, but astronomy has played an important role in human history and civilization, whether it's really simple agrarian life or the most sophisticated high-tech civilization. It's been this way for centuries. How does it continue to play an important role in our lives today? Well, it continues in the way it always has in the past, which we've largely forgotten. Namely, it provides you with a calendar, so the farmer knows when to plant. The weather varies so much from one year to the next, that if you simply waited for the weather to warm up, you might very well, in some years, plant your crops too late and other years too early.

And one of the first things that happened in ancient times was that the astronomer could say, now is the spring equinox, now is what we call the 21st of March. And so in two weeks you should plant and don't worry about the weather, that'll have to take care of itself. Nowadays, the astronomy that's being done is of more general intellectual interest, the structure of the universe, and things like that. But solar physics has come back into a problem that varied directly impacts us all. And that has to do with the variation of the luminosity of the sun. In the last couple of years, a lot of evidence has fallen together now, which makes a pretty firm case, that the luminosity of the sun varies. By only a small amount, but it's enough to make our climate vary by a small amount, and that small amount has devastating effects on agriculture. To give you a specific example, in the 17th century, the sun became very inactive. And from what we know now, the luminosity was smaller by a fraction of a percent, sounds innocent enough.

The mean annual temperatures were smaller by about one or two degrees. Again, sounds innocent enough, but if you look at the records, it was not so innocent. In northern latitudes, the farmers simply could not get their crops out. In China, they had the same difficulties. The rice farmers along the Yellow River were accustomed to getting two rice crops in the year, and then they were reduced to one. And you can think of what hard times that brought on. The few people of the few Europeans who traveled in the northern prairies at that time recorded that you expected killing frosts, at least once or twice, during each summer. I think what that does to the Nebraska corn crop were the Illinois bean crop. So we have a problem here, and the sun is at least a major player, not necessarily the only one, because the atmosphere of the earth and the oceans combined to make a very complicated system. But it's urgent that we study it because this is going to happen again, and we should at least understand what's happening so we can plan intelligently.

On the other hand, there's other centuries when the sun has been exceedingly active and excessively bright. The last time that happened was in the 12th century, and since this is the southwestern part of the United States, one should be reminded that in the 12th century, the southwestern United States was at desert. Apparently because the climate was so much hotter, just a degree or so, but it was enough to dry things out. The Kansas Prairie for a time was blowing sand. The Mesa Verde Indians had to move out of their pueblos. It was really rough going. And this is going to happen again, maybe not right away, but at least to understand what's happening. In terms of a lot of the environmental problems that people cite, greenhouse effect, and depletion of the ozone, deforestation, et cetera, how do those, how is solar astronomy going to play into that, or how will those concerns affect solar astronomy? Well, one of the most immediate problems is the greenhouse effect.

That is to say it's a fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 20%. And it's a fact that that has increased the greenhouse effect. Now exactly how that affects the climate is a very complicated question because of the atmosphere and the earth is a complicated thing. So what people are doing is monitoring the rise of temperature along with the increase in the carbon dioxide. And the thing that we have to recognize is that the activity on the sun has been increasing for the last 20 or 30 years. And the sun, the luminosity of the sun, has also been increasing. And the question is how much of the warming has been due to solar increase and how much has been due to the greenhouse effect. And the sun may be only 10% of the effect, in which case it doesn't amount to much, or it could be 80% of the fact. Nobody knows. So the immediate problem would be to get that little thing straightened out. So we can study the greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide in the methane and the rest of it. Okay.

What first... Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Say, what first interested you in astronomy? Oh, I don't know. When I was a little kid, I was mildly curious about things. When I was a student in college studying physics, which is my field, I got hold of these old Harvard books on astronomy, which at the time weren't so old. And I read everyone, every volume in the series of something like seven or eight volumes. And I found it very interesting. And when I went to graduate school in physics, I sort of, well, more or less by accident, got involved in some astronomical problems. And there's a lot of new physics, a lot of things that happen out there that don't happen in the laboratory, because of different scales and so forth. And it was just fun. Problems that you could actually solve. On the other hand, some problems are so speculative that you don't bother with them, because even if you could think of a possible answer, there was no way of checking it up. But there's some in the middle where you can think of an answer, and you can check it out to see if you're right.

Well, I'm kind of wondering, how would you say today's astronomers are different from the astronomers of old, and how would you say that they're the same? Part of a very ancient tradition. Well, if you refer to the entire field of astronomy, I would say that there's been an explosion in astronomy, so that the number of astronomers and the fascinating things they're discovering, far exceeds anything that ever happened before. Whereas in previous centuries, you might count the number of prominent astronomers in a country on the fingers of your hand. Now you're talking about a few thousand. In that sense, it's changed. In other respects, I don't know that it's changed. People have the same aspirations, the same curiosity, and so forth. So it's a lot, the same, the one practical difference is that the more as technology advances and opens up new windows, so does the cost of building the equipment.

And that's a limiting factor, and that's probably the major thing. Now, it was possible in the old days, let's say two centuries ago, for a man to make his own telescope and have his good at telescope as anybody. You can't do that anymore. I'd just couple more questions then. I guess really ultimately, before I ask what ultimately astronomy is trying to, what it's about, I guess perhaps a mirror for what we as humans are trying to do. But it's interesting, as we talked in the tower, the fellows told me that it's interesting that the telescope technology is as long as you're dealing with optical telescope. The telescope has not really changed much. And it made me think of like a thread of areas, how interesting, how 20-some years ago, you could design something so well. And yet, as we went around, the computers were enormous when it began, and now they're in a little tiny box. So I was just wondering if you could say something about how, is that true, the essential technology is not that different?

Or just tell me the sense of what the nature is. I would say that the basic principles of a telescope have not changed in the slightest. But one is able to exploit them now. With clever designs, gradually people realize that you can pull this trick or that trick. The technology for making mirrors, for instance, is enormously enhanced, and you can go over here on a patchy point. And there's a three and a half meter telescope. That's what nearly about 11 feet in diameter, that's being made for a fraction of the cost. That it would take 20 years ago to build a telescope of half the size. But again, the principles are exactly the same. If you studied optics in the year 1900, you'd understand instantly how the thing was being built. So it's been that kind of thing. Instead of using photographic plates, now one uses CCDs and electronic device that reads out, it's much more sensitive, much more efficient, and reads out your data. And then you can project it on a video screen.

But again, the principles are the same. And the old days, you printed pictures in the dark room, and then you hung them up and looked at them. And of course, before photography, you simply looked. And if you wanted to show somebody, you set up the telescope, and he came and looked too. And you might draw a picture on a piece of paper. So the principles in some sense are the same, but the technology is completely different, and much more versatile, and much more powerful. You can see things with CCDs that the photographic plate can't begin to pick up just because the photographic plate's not that sensitive. So the technology is in a sense enhanced this sense of scientific community, where it's also remarkable that people from all over the world use this equipment, and then the information can be shared that way. That's right, yes. There's communication now, and people all over the world know what's going on. And of course, when you build something new, you normally would try to optimize it. So you remember that somebody living here had this scheme which worked beautifully, and somebody living there had another scheme. So you put those together, and you make your telescope better than any other.

And then the other people see that, and they say, oh, that's a good one to copy. And so the things advance steadily like that. Lastly, and this is purely personal, but what is the ultimate objective of astronomy, which you say today? Astronomy as a whole is an effort to look at the universe in which we live, and the far universe just as much as the near universe. I've had people ask me what uses it, and my response is always, it is not of the slightest use, except for those of us who like to know what's going on around us. And it's curiosity. Curiosity in some quarters is now considered a dirty word, but I don't think so. I think as humans, we naturally would like to know what's going on. And that's the ultimate gain. Great. Well, I think that'll do with then. Thank you very much. Sure. That there's this image here, too, just behind us. Yeah, like that one again. We use that one.

Oh, for later. Alrighty. Okay. You specifically study your solar astronomer, if you could put into a simple terms as possible, why is it important to study the Sun? Well, there's several reasons. One is the Sun provides all the light and heat that we get at the Earth, and it does change with time, on a very slow time scale, relative to our day-to-day lives. And it's very important to understand how that change occurs and how it influences us. It's also important because we learn a lot about the physical processes that take place in nature by studying what happens on the Sun. And we can then apply that to a lot of other stars that we observe in the sky and the characteristics and how they evolve and that kind of thing. How would you characterize this, the tower here?

I'm fascinated by that. We're working out quite surprisingly. Things are quite old, much older than we had anticipated where our intelligent product, our two, three years, you got to update. And here's a decades-old telescope that still one of the leaders in the world. Can you give me a sense of how that can be in astronomy? That, okay. Yeah, well, many of the procedures that are used to observe have been around for a long time and are still valid now. When we collect data, though, that's where we can update by bringing in computers to help in the analysis of the data and help taking the observations. So the basic structure, the basic telescope can remain the same, but it's the periphery equipment and analysis that allows us to update. Well, you work then obviously a very highly technical end of things with crunching numbers from the satellite. If you couldn't explain how the improvements in computer technology have, I'm assuming they've revolutionized what astronomers can do now.

Oh, very much so. We have a lot of light coming from the Sun. That means we can gather a lot of information. With computer technology, improve data storage, accessing the data, we can process a lot more of the data at once. Look at high resolution images of the Sun and understand a lot more of what the processes are that are taking place on the Sun. In terms of predictability, how has predictability in terms of solar phenomena changed? Has it improved your ability to predict solar flares or see them before they reach a point on the Sun where they have an effect on us? It has improved some, principally because we're able to observe better time resolution and many of the parameters that we need to in order to predict. It's still more of an art than a science because we don't observe everything we need to.

This is kind of a general, generalized look at it too because I'm using this in various levels specifically in more general terms. Astronomers play at such an important part and I'm using the term very loosely in human civilization and culture, probably for as long as there's been human civilization and culture. How does it continue to do that now? How does it continue to do so now? I mean, whereas a person in a agrarian society would be very keen where the Sun is in the sky. Today, frankly, most of the folks I know aren't even like they look up its noon, it's setting, it's rising and that's about the extent of it. But I'm assuming that you feel differently that it probably still has a tremendous impact on us today. Oh, certainly. Well, long ago, it was important in terms of trying to decide when to plant your crops and harvests and that kind of thing.

But now we've reached a technological level that we're influencing our environment a lot with pollution and that kind of thing. In order to understand what the long-term effect is on the Earth environment, we also have to understand what the Sun is contributing to that change. Historically, there are periods where the Sun, excuse me, where the Earth has been cool for periods of a few decades or very warm. And we think that the Sun is somehow influenced that kind of climactic change, but to really pin it down and understand what's happening. Oh boy, but to pin it down if you could pick it up just right there. To pin down what we are doing to the atmosphere and how it will affect global warming, for example.

We also have to understand what the Sun is, how it's influencing the Earth as well. Ultimately then, as we face all these extraordinary atmosphere, I guess you'd call them changes where greenhouse effect, depletion of the ozone, things like this. Can you give me some sense of what role solar astronomy will may likely play in the coming decades where we may in fact have some serious atmosphere concerns? Well, in a few ways, one is we are monitoring the energy output of the Sun. This is a project that's been going on for almost 10 years, little over 10 years, in fact. And we do see variability. What we are trying to do now is continue that because what we observed over the last 10 years may not be what's going to happen in the next 10 years or the following 10 years, etc. We also want to be able to understand why the Sun did what it did.

There is activity on the Sun that varies on very short time scales days. We want to be able to understand how that reflects back into an overall luminosity change in the Sun. The energy output change in the Sun. Well, I think that'll cover us then. That's great. Thank you very much.