the times | Saturday December 18 2021 43
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the Kennedy administration, had
been complicit in the purging of
homosexuals from the federal
administration. While Webb must
have been aware of these actions,
there is no proof he supported or
took part in anti-gay discrimination.
An investigation by Nasa concluded
there was “no evidence at this time
that warrants changing the name”.
Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in
Hawaii, is the best place in the world
for stargazing, with conditions ideal
for optical astronomy. So far, some 13
telescopes have been sited there. But
the building of a 14th, the mighty
Thirty Meter Telescope, the largest
visible-light telescope yet, has
been delayed by protests.
Some Native Hawaiians
see the site as sacred, its
upper reaches as the realm
of Akua, the supreme
creator. Others claim
another huge telescope will
disrupt the habitat of
endangered species.
The battle over the
telescope has focused anger
over historical injustices,
notably the seizure of lands
from Native Hawaiians before
and after the United States
annexed the islands in 1898.
Meanwhile the launch of
the JWST from the Guiana
Space Centre has become
symbolic of chronic economic
disparity. It has so far cost
around $10 billion, while almost a
quarter of the population there is
unemployed, crime is endemic and
46,000 do not have access to clean
water. In 2017 several launches were
disrupted by protesters.
These are the concerns of our
time. Not the sanctity of holy
scripture that collided with science in
the early 17th century, but LGBT+
rights, indigenous beliefs, colonial
crimes, poverty and protecting the
environment.
Science will triumph, in the end,
over religion and politics, because it
always does. Knowledge will
continue to expand, like the universe
itself, and the great telescope will
take flight, despite the objections
back here on Earth. Science can be
slowed, sometimes briefly halted,
and yet it moves.Galileo faced an
inquisition from
the Catholic
Church over his
heliocentrism.
Today Native
Hawaiians object
to a 14th telescope
on Mauna Kea, a
“sacred” dormant
volcanoin philosophy, and
formally heretical”, since it
contradicted the fixed nature of the
Earth as described in the Bible.
Galileo was found “vehemently
suspect of heresy” and forced to
disavow heliocentrism. According to
popular legend, as he formally
recanted his theory that the Earth
moved around the sun, Galileo was
heard to mutter: “E pur si muove” —
And yet it moves. Galileo spent the
rest of his life under house arrest.
The inventors of the JWST have
also encountered hostility, not least
on account of the machine’s
astronomical cost. In modern times,
the opposition comes not from any
established church, but other, newer
forms of orthodoxy.
The name itself was challenged by
those arguing that James E Webb,
the Nasa administrator appointed byand intellectual ferment. For the
story of the telescope, then and now,
is of the collision between politics
and religion on one side, and science
on the other.
Harriot’s sponsor Raleigh fell from
favour and was executed. Another
patron, Henry Percy, was jailed in
connection with the Gunpowder Plot.
Harriot himself was interrogated and
briefly imprisoned. His findings
directly challenged the religious
orthodoxy of the unchanging
heavens with God-made Earth at the
centre, and supported the
heliocentric theory that the Earth
and planets revolved around the sun.
Galileo’s observations, and his
support of Copernican heliocentrism,
brought him into direct conflict with
the Catholic Church. The Inquisition
investigated and concluded that
heliocentrism was “foolish and absurdN
ext week, barring another
delay, the greatest
telescope yet invented
will be launched into the
heavens from French
Guiana. After a decade of planning,
the James Webb Space Telescope
(JWST) will travel to a point roughly
one million miles from Earth, orbit
the sun and, by focusing on a small
slice of deep space, peer into the
mysteries of the cosmic past.
The telescope will gaze back in time,
looking for the faint illumination of
an event that occurred some 13.5
billion years ago, the earliest light
from the stars that exploded into
being with the Big Bang.
The space telescope is a miracle of
engineering and the most ambitious
astronomical project ever conceived,
perhaps 100 times more powerful
than its predecessor, the Hubble
Space Telescope. At its destination, it
will unfurl 18 gold-plated hexagonal
segments to form a honeycomb-like
mirror and a radiation shield the size
of a tennis court.
This giant step for mankind seems
almost impossibly distant from the
moment, 412 years ago, when an
English adventurer and scientist
picked up a newly invented gizmo
called a “Dutch trunke”, the world’s
first refracting telescope, and pointed
it at the night sky. Some years earlier
Thomas Harriot had voyaged to the
New World, learnt the language
spoken by the Native Americans of
North Carolina and predicted that
“they may in short time be brought
to civility and the embracing of true
religion”. He brought back tobacco
and may have taught Sir Walter
Raleigh to smoke.
Harriot was a mathematician and
astronomer. The “trunke” he
purchased in 1609 had been invented
a year earlier by a Dutch spectacles-
maker named Hans Lipperhey: a
tube with two glass lenses “for seeing
things far away as if they were
nearby”. Harriot’s rustic telescope
(the word would not be coined for
several more years) brought six-
times magnification. He was the first
scientist to draw a detailed map of
the moon, including such identifiable
features as craters, preceding Galileo
Galilei by several months. He
observed sunspots, which he called a
“strange spottednesse”. Harriot’s
pioneering observational work was
swiftly eclipsed by that of Galileo.
The great Italian astronomer,
physicist and engineer vastly
improved the telescope. With it, he
deduced that the moon was neither a
sphere, nor translucent; he observed
Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus,
Saturn, Neptune and the Milky Way.
But like the creators of the JWST,
both Harriot and Galileo found
themselves mired in controversy at a
time, like ours, of profound culturalBen
MacintyreLooking at the sky is an act of defiance
The connecting thread in the history of astronomy is that science will always triumph over the orthodoxies of the period
ALAMY@benmacintyre1
tank. It is only a matter of time
before she is lying in state in
Westminster Hall. The mortician’s
make-up is already excellent.
Algorithms are being written to
forecast future Covid cases based on
the latest data from Dominic Raab.
On Tuesday he was asked on Sky
News at 7.20am how many
omicronners were in hospital:
“250 the last time I looked,” said
Dr Raab, with his usual bedside
manner. Twenty minutes later
on BBC Breakfast he said it was
just nine. At that rate we’d be
Covid-free by lunchtime.
But an hour later on ITV
he said it was up to ten.
This is what statisticians call
an exponential dope.
After this week’s huge
rebellion, all Conservative
MPs must be tracked around
the clock. (Although thanks tothe good people of North Shropshire
the number is marginally more
manageable.) A new alert will sound
if Marcus Fysh, Tory MP for Yeovil,
goes within a mile of a microphone
after he opposed modest Covid
measures by declaring: “This is not
Nazi Germany.” He seemed to think
that having to open an app on his
phone to see Mother Goose at the
Octagon Theatre was just like
Kristallnacht. He later tried to make
amends, writing for the Jewish
Chronicle that the Holocaust was “one
of the most horrible things”, before
somehow pivoting on to the ethics of
“artificial intelligence”, although
frankly any intelligence would be nice.
Hang on. An alarm is sounding.
The graphs are turning. Live data is
coming in showing that Covid cases
are falling dramatically. Hurrah! No,
wait. That’s the PM’s personal ratings.
Somebody push the panic button.Now we’ve got
our very own
situation room
its first job is
to keep tabs
on Rishi
J
ohnson, we have a problem.
Warning lights are flashing on
every dashboard in No 10’s
newly unveiled Situation
Centre. Described as a “state-
of-the-art facility” in a press release
that one suspects was faxed over, it is
based on the situation room in the
White House.
In reality there are seven desks
facing two big screens: one showing
the gov.uk website, the other a live
TV feed. Where Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton once sat watching
the moment Bin Laden was killed, in
photos of the British version the
screens show how many people have
got coronavirus and footage of
Andrew Bridgen on the BBC News
channel facing tough questions
about his latest nonsense. I haven’t
seen an arse under so much pressure
since Gina Coladangelo got goosed
on Matt Hancock’s CCTV.
JFK ordered the creation of the
US situation room after the invasion
of the Bay of Pigs. Boris Johnson got
his after the invasion of Peppa Pig
World. The “SitCen”, as absolutely
nobody is calling it, is the brainchild
of Dominic Cummings. Obviously.
The Nasa-obsessive wanted to create
his own mission control, although
the closest he ever got to a moon was
his bum hanging out of his trousers.
Just think what this nerve centre
will be monitoring. Is Rishi Sunak
really in California? Or is he just
meeting Nick Clegg in the
Metaverse? How many people have
drowned on Priti Patel’s watch?
What’s the share price of Owen
Paterson’s food firms? Who is not at
the parties which did not happen?
One live feed is dedicated to Liz
Truss’s Instagram, monitoring her
Thatcher tribute act. We’ve had the
1980s fashion. We’ve had posing in aMatt Chorley
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