MONDAY 14 JULY 2003

RT HON KEITH HILL, MR DAVID MILIBAND, DR MARTIN WILLIAMS AND PROFESSOR IAN HALLIDAY

  Q200  Dr Turner: Professor, The Royal Astronomical Society tell us that they have had to have the help of amateur astronomers as observers to do things like tracking variable stars and so on. Do you agree that the work the amateur astronomy community in the UK is doing is vital in its support of professional astronomers?

  Professor Halliday: Vital is too strong. It is useful, it is serendipitous; they find comets, they do all sorts of things. Professional astronomy would continue without them, funded by PPARC. On the other hand, they play a serious role in the dynamic of producing astronomy students, producing people who want to do PhDs. In that area their role could be much greater. I have a hidden constituency, which I really was not aware of, which is that every town of any size in the UK has an amateur astronomy group full of mad enthusiasts who spend days, nights, weeks up Welsh mountains, exotic places, to escape light pollution and carry out this really passionate study as amateurs. Professional astronomy is not dependent upon them; they do interesting things which trigger thoughts. On the other hand, as a base just underlying the science world of the UK, they are remarkably strong and effective in many towns. I was brought into science as a 15- or 16-year-old first of all by being taken out to see the Northern Lights up in Scotland by my father, expressing interest, then getting engaged with a local society which was interested and is still there. It was one of the triggers way back. The example referred to, the famous Australian telescopes, the one in Hawaii and one in Australia, is not a bad thing. It is a good thing, because when it is daylight and in schooltime here, it is the middle of the night in Hawaii and kids in real time can use these resources as an active resource as opposed to yet more pictures and yet more passive things. Mr Faulkes, who helped fund these, and PPARC helped, DfES has helped, are an example of a growing partnership which we have finally got working. The professional astronomers in universities have always been very interested in engaging local astronomy societies, local schools and so on. Over the past couple of years we have finally got a debate going with DfES as to how to use that enthsiasm in the system. An example is the funding of the Faulkes telescope. We have an invitation from Charles Clarke to try to use space in a similar way, to get visibility in schools for things happening now in science.

  Q201  Dr Turner: If the amateur astronomy community were to disappear, it would have some impact on professional astronomy, if only that PPARC will have to look for another head because you would not be there.

  Professor Halliday: Whatever; yes. It is a real resource in the UK science structure that we have these extremely enthusiastic people putting in a huge effort. It is hard to compete, using a small three or four inch telescope on top of a Welsh mountain with the mist and the rain and everything else, with cutting edge £70 million objects on top of mountains in Chile. It is hard to compete but there are niches where just the effort and the skill pay off.

  Q202  Dr Iddon: Does PPARC see astronomy as a serious route to attract children to study physics later in life?

  Professor Halliday: If I go to university physics departments, PPARC has a problem, which is the number of faculties who do research in astronomy and therefore want to teach astronomy-type physics degrees. That is growing very fast compared with courses in, shall we say, more applicable physics. The reason that is happening is of course that 17-year-olds coming in with A levels really want to go to universities to study astronomy. At the other end of the discussions we have with schools, where the output is saying with its feet that it wants to do astronomy degrees, because it has a certain intellectual challenge, perhaps some of the big questions are hiding there. Whether that is where the UK should be investing in such degrees or more applicable areas nearer to wealth creation, is an interesting question which I place on the table and move on.

  Q203  Dr Iddon: Can you put a figure on the number of undergraduates who are studying astronomy at university either as a single subject or perhaps in other ways?

  Professor Halliday: I suspect nowadays practically all the physics departments in the country will teach one, two, three, some number of modules and there will be a sub-set of these people doing honours degrees. I probably have it in my notes, but I do not have it in my head.

  Q204  Dr Iddon: As a pure degree subject.

  Professor Halliday: That is a contentious matter because there is a strong feeling that the way to do modern astronomy is first to learn physics and then to do astronomy. So there is a tension between learning the basic physics underlying modern astronomy as opposed to studying with a telescope. I can get you the figures.

  Q205  Dr Iddon: Thank you; that would be useful. Do you support many post-graduates either at MSc or PhD level in this subject of astronomy?

  Professor Halliday: Yes; yes. At any given time we have about 600 PhD students and many more are funded by the universities. My memory is that about half of these are in astronomy.

  Q206  Chairman: How many UK universities have observatories attached to them?

  Professor Halliday: I am told—and I was a bit surprised—something of the order of 25 to 30. They are under threat from light pollution.

  Q207  Chairman: I was going to ask whether PPARC would invest in protecting them from light pollution.

  Professor Halliday: We give grants to university departments to keep the facilities working whatever. That always comes with a tag; this is not really cutting edge research. The tag we always attach is that this has to help schools in the neighbourhood. It is really—

  Q208  Chairman: You cannot have world class research going on in observatories at universities if they cannot see the sky.

  Professor Halliday: What I am saying is that the first class research is almost certainly being done using the telescopes in Hawaii rather than on the UK local telescopes.

  Q209  Chairman: I said world class research.

  Professor Halliday: Yes, world class research is done using the telescopes in Hawaii and Chile.

  Q210  Chairman: I was going to ask about that. You support that and the Canaries, do you not?

  Professor Halliday: And the Canaries; yes.

  Q211  Chairman: Why do you do that and not support the observatories in British universities?

  Professor Halliday: We are getting technical. To get the modern capability you need, these telescopes now cost £70 million each with all the bits and pieces. If you are investing that amount of money you want absolutely the best seeing conditions. Typically you want to get up to 14,000 or 15,000 feet up a very high mountain and at that level, where you are having real difficulty breathing, there is not too much light pollution.

  Q212  Chairman: Why do we not close down the observatories in British universities?

  Professor Halliday: Because they are useful for our community, teaching, educational, you can see the sky; it is not wonderful viewing. It is a teaching capability with old instruments which have a capability that the usual small amateur instrument does not have. These universities are affected by light pollution in the surrounding areas. That is a balance between the kinds of things we were hearing about earlier, which is general light pollution across the city as opposed to very localised, very bright lights on individual houses. That is what makes the measurement problem so hard. You have already banned very low powered lasers which have certain optical properties and they are banned because they can damage eyes.

  Q213  Chairman: Where is the best observatory facility at a university in the United Kingdom in your opinion?

  Professor Halliday: Pass. I shall let you know.

  Q214  Chairman: You do not have a league table then.

  Professor Halliday: We do not have a league table, because they are used for teaching, so we do not assess them for research.

  Q215  Geraldine Smith: If a government is not going to bring in any new legislation to help astronomers, which seems likely listening to our ministerial colleagues, what can PPARC and the government do to help astronomers without changing the law? Is there anything?

  Professor Halliday: It is clear that some of my astronomy constituency with local to telescopes are very good at creating noise, getting the local authority aware that there is a problem. It is a few-hundred-metre problem, it is not a city problem. It is the light in the immediate neighbourhood of the telescopes. There we have an effect, just political noise and pressure, this is something useful, why kill it or make the use of it very difficult. It is at that level just of awareness and so on.

  Q216  Geraldine Smith: Do you get involved in supporting efforts to mitigate the impact of wider light pollution on the activities of universities and other amateur societies?

  Professor Halliday: No, I am afraid we pass the buck.

  Q217  Chairman: Why do you not protect British universities? I am not really very clear about that. You put efforts and money and resources in to protect the Canary Islands and I can see that is good, but why not protect the observatories in Britain? Why do you not make them into research observatories? Why is that not one of your initiatives in PPARC?

  Professor Halliday: It is like in biology. There is one set of people using modern electron microscopes and another set of people using 1850 instruments—and some of them are 1850 telescopes. In the research game they are just not competitive. They do not have enough resolving power, they do not measure enough photons, they are in poor sites. If you are an astronomer trying to compete against world astronomy, that is not where you go for your one week, two weeks, three weeks of research.

  Q218  Chairman: Do you see what I am getting at here? I am asking why we do not have world class observatories here. Are you saying we have no unpolluted sky?

  Professor Halliday: We have no 14,000-foot mountains with nice dry conditions at the top. We have a world class facility in radio astronomy, where the atmosphere is irrelevant. So Jodrell Bank for the moment is a world class observatory because radio does not care, crudely speaking, about the atmosphere.

  Q219  Mr McWalter: You mentioned your disposition towards research in physics, or even astronomy but particularly in physics, that you regard as of more commercial value or whatever. On that basis, would you have said that the Mars Beagle probe was actually rather second rate and not really cutting edge either? All of the bits of it in a way were fairly basic. It was combining all the bits in the ingenious way it was done which created so much of the power of that project. You would regard that as cutting edge.

  Professor Halliday: That is definitely cutting edge. The technology which is flying is cutting edge. Do not let Colin Pillinger's slightly bucolic air fool you. The technology—