Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

Space is big. Really big. You just won t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it s a long way down the road to the chemist s, but that s just peanuts to space. Listen (Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hiker s Guide To The Galaxy)

Patrick Moore is big. You just won t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big he is. When he heaves down across the table from me it s with all the grace of an asteroid-impact. And he s not only squeezed into the confines of the chair, he s overflowing it. Patrick Moore creates a major blip on the space-time continuum just by being here. He has the mass and bulk of a minor planet. There are undisciplined sprouts of white hair tufting like the orbital paths of uncharted comet-tails around his head. And the distinctive monocle screwed into his left eye gives him the appearance of an eccentric Teutonic Mad Rocket Scientist from some old movie. Even stooped he s a towering frown of furrow and follicle.

This is Earth, he snaps abruptly, brandishing his fist. This is the Sun. His second fist, a precise inch from the first. So he demands where is the nearest star ? I m thinking fast where? where? The McDonalds across the road from this theatre? Erm Leeds City Centre, just beyond the Ring Road? No Bognor Regis, he declares triumphantly. Bognor Regis!
Tonight he s here in Bradford. And the St George s Hall is damn-near full. It s difficult to draw firm conclusions or make generalisations about his audience, but chances are that pretty much every street in every town has its secret Curly Watts. You know, the Coronation Street geek with the telescope in his attic? They re seldom visible. But statistically, city-by-city, that s a hell of a lot of people, a sizeable subculture to whom this massive presence exerts the gravitational attraction of a quasar. But then, be honest, who amongst us has not, at some time, gazed up into that vast starry firmament at midnight and asked those timelessly profound questions about Life, The Universe and Everything? Where does it end? What is the meaning of it all? And where s Captain Kirk?
There have been other Pop Astronomers. Heather Cooper. The late Carl Sagan. They had bigger budgets and more lavish special effects than the occasionally shambolic and frequently low-fi The Sky At Night. Sure, things have improved. But until relatively recently the late-night programme was known for its engagingly amateurish reliance on Patrick s latest pencil-sketches of planet Mars as viewed through his own twelve-and-a-half-inch reflector, and planetary alignments replicated with golfballs and selections of appropriately sized fruit. Yet such a strategy perversely succeeds in conveying a hands-on, touchy-feely reality.
Patrick Moore may be larger than life. He even has an asteroid Minor Planet 2602 named Moore after him. But he is real. An eccentric uncle who also happens to be a galactic guru.
Space is big. Does it go on forever? That s not me. That s ten-year-old Jim Logan from the audience posing the question no-one else would dare to ask. You ve hit the nail on the head there, concedes Patrick with breezy candour. Now look, either space is finite, or else it s not. If space is finite, what s outside it? If it ends we have to ask what exists beyond the end. Or else it goes on forever. And if it never ends, then you have to imagine something that goes on forever, and our minds won t take that in. Human beings aren t capable of dealing with such an idea. So, either way, it s a question no-one can answer. It s a multi-dimensional question. And I m a four-dimensional creature. So I have to say I haven t a clue. I can t answer your question. No-one can. Yet !

Patrick Alfred Moore was born in 1923. And when I was a very small boy, a very long time ago now, I began by reading some books, he explains. I read my first science-fiction story at the age of eight. I came across a 1908 copy of Young England, a now-defunct magazine for boys, and found there a long novel by Fenton Ash called A Son Of The Stars. I read it avidly, and journeyed with the two young heroes across space to Mars, a fascinating world with a red sky, towering mountains, and two shining moons. His reminiscence continues (in Science And Fiction, 1957): I held my breath when one of the heroes was carried off by one of the great bats that lived among the Martian peaks. Fired by stellar ambition, young Patrick began getting some background information. I bought a star-map and learnt my way around the sky. It doesn t take long. Then for those thinking of taking up astronomy do what I did, don t go out and buy a very small telescope. Get binoculars first, then see how you go. And above all, join a local society
He did. And soon after, Patrick achieved the unique distinction of being elected to the British Astronomical Association while still a schoolboy. However, the obvious academic future which could have followed was denied by the intervention of a hereditary heart problem, preventing him taking up a place at Eton. Instead, he lied about his age and cheated on the medical to join-up for the RAF at 16, in time to use star-charts to fly as a Bomber Navigator during World War II. But this early military service also had the unfortunate side-effect of preventing him taking a promised place at Cambridge. Also his sweetheart was killed in the wrong place at the wrong time , which is why he never married. A strange sad chaos theory of events which led to him subsequently devoting his life, not to a person, or to strict academia, but to a mission popularising astronomy with missionary zeal.
His own first novel, Master Of The Moon, arrived some considerable time later, in 1952, while Mission To Mars (1956) blurbed The Book For Boys With An Earnest Interest In Space Travel became the first of his Mars quintet. Here and now I pass a carefully-preserved first-edition of the novel, with its childish cover-art, across the table for him to sign. Oh goodness me, he exclaims, examining it critically as though it s a strange alien artefact from before the dawn of time. But here, within these hardback covers, his own young heroes are launched from the British Woomera rocket range in Australia, and also discover life on the red planet a creature in the nature of a huge bat, with a body as long as a man s, and flapping membranous wings that beat against the tenuous air as the creature hovered . Some coincidence here, perhaps? Fenton Ash remember? Then there s the sequel, The Domes Of Mars, in which Patrick s protagonist survives helmetless in the hostile Martian terrain by plunging his head into oxygenating plants.
Bearing in mind Patrick s occasional assertion that SF is useful largely as agitational-propoganda for Astronomy and Astronautics, did he believe that such prose presented an accurate portrayal of Mars as it was understood at the time?
Good heavens no, he burbles in absurd amusement. It was just fun. Science Fiction comes in two types. Star Trek and Doctor Who are one kind of Science Fiction. Space Opera, and they re just great fun. I must say I used to watch Doctor Who. I was especially fond of The Master . And I liked Star Trek with the original Captain. Before it became Politically Correct. They re hugely enjoyable, delightful fun. Jules Verne wasn t a Science Fiction writer. HG Wells was. And Arthur C Clarke is. I made one contribution to the film of Arthur s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was having dinner with Arthur discussing what music to use. I said use The Blue Danube . And they did. That was my idea
All of which neatly orbits his own fiction without ever quite making a soft-landing there. But returning to the theme, what are the realistic chances of finding life on Mars?
Well I wonder? I think that, after all with possibly Europa Mars is still the most likely abode of life in our solar system. There may be primitive life there. It s 50/50. And if so, if we do find any trace of life on Mars, if life has appeared in our solar system twice, then it must appear elsewhere too. That is why, after the moon, Mars must be the first world we get to. Europa is Jupiter s second satellite. It s a weird world. A bit smaller than our moon, with an icy surface. And there may well be an ocean of liquid water underneath there. There may be. I dare say there probably is. But after all, with the conditions there no sunlight I view the prospect of life there with a large pinch of cosmic salt. But again, we don t know. The jury s still out on that one.
But life on worlds beyond the solar system? I m quite sure there must be life out there. There are a hundred-thousand-million stars in our galaxy. And many of those must have planets going around them. Therefore there must be many suitable worlds, I m quite sure there must be. And surely why should we be unique? I m sure we re not. Why haven t they contacted us? They may know too much about us already, of course. But after all distances. You see, we can t exceed the speed of light. As far as we know, the speed of light in a vacuum seems to be a constant. Therefore, if we are about to receive interstellar travellers it will certainly be by some entirely new method of space-travel like Space Warps, Wormholes, Teleportation, Time Warps. Sheer Science Fiction. But television was mere Science Fiction a few decades ago

No preamble. The stage plunges into a darkness illuminated by a single glowing slab of blurry colour onto which he sequences his slides. His theme tonight is Explorers Of The Skies, detailing the history of astronomy from its pre-scientific origins in myth and superstition, through slow ages of gradually increasing understanding of the mechanics of space-time, into speculation for the near-future. Twenty-First Century Astronomers, he says, are Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants. He s quoting Isaac Newton. Probably totally unaware he s also quoting Oasis. Or possibly not. Also, his slides frequently come jumbled in the wrong sequence, rewinding when they should fast-forward and visible only as a hugely exaggerated silhouette against a cosmic window he drops his monocle with an audible clink in irritated agitation.
The slides also seem to have got mixed in with his holiday snaps. There s Galileo s place of exile in Florence. With Patrick leaning up against the wall. The weird monument to Wilhelm Herschel in Slough, with Moore himself standing beside it, just in front of the A1 Used Car Lot . Then Moore with Clyde William Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto. Briefly there s an uninterrupted Lord Rosse of Birr Castle, discoverer of the spiral structure of the galaxy. Then Galileo Galilei s telescope. And guess who s holding it ? Yup.
These are pictures of Patrick s Good Guys . The Giants on whose shoulders today s science of astronomy is standing. While the Bad Guys along the way include the Catholic Church who got it spectacularly wrong on Galileo Papal persecution, Inquisition, you know, the full deal even if they did eventually get around to saying ooop sorry in 1992 ! He savours the punchline with delicious irony. He derides Astrologers too. Astrology proves just one scientific principle. There s a mug born every minute . And UFO-ology. It has all the crackpots crawling out of the woodwork, Conspiracy Theorists, Flying Saucer People, all kinds of weird people. Mind you I did once see some lovely Flying Saucers. I was in my observatory, looking through my telescope, when I saw something drifting across my field of vision that looked very like Flying Saucers. Pollen. It turned out to be drifting pollen.
Then he snipes at the European Parliament the world s most useless society . And the French. He doesn t like the French. A recent Observer profile charts his shift into oddball xenophobia. Which is strange and a little disappointing. For a mind capable of spanning a trillion billion light years of space and giga-mindboggling eternities of time, to dislike a people located a short hop across the channel from his own private back-garden observatory in Selsey seems illogical, Captain. Journalist Ewan Ferguson cites this fierce, mad contradiction in his internal logic as evidence of the twin capacity for human greatness and human failing. The sublime and the ridiculous personified. But perhaps it s a cantankerous affectation? A deliberate crankiness to add extra character-dimension? Or perhaps it s genuine and I m naive to even expect logical consistency in those who profess to the emotionless clarity of science?

He may be standing on the shoulders of giants, but Patrick Moore has lived through the most eventful period of astronomy in the history of the world. He met Orville Wright, who took that first ever flight ( yes, I met him only once, at the very start of the war. A very quiet, very unassuming man. ). Yet, he points out, Orville Wright could conceivably have met Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. He didn t. But their lifetimes overlapped. So the entire history of flight could be contained in a shared lifespan. And if so, how much more will be achieved in the lifetimes to come?
Later on in Orville Wright s career, Patrick confides, he quit aviation in disgust at its military applications. Yet much of the momentum behind the development of space flight was a direct spin-off from World War II and the Cold War Arms Race. Does Moore feel comfortable with the morality of that? He shrugs massively.
It was war. Wernher Von Braun was in Germany, in Peenemunde, developing the V2 missiles to bombard London during the final stages of the war. In 1943 the RAF bombed Peenemunde. I wasn t on that raid. But I might have been. I could have been. Then, only a matter of years later, he was heading the team of leading rocket engineers behind the American Space Programme and we were both having lunch together in New York
He lets both the contradiction and the moral hang without any clean resolution, beyond a dismissive it was war then it was not. But I do believe that when history is written in the far future assuming that the Earth is still habitable, and homo sapien has not wiped itself out dates such as 1066, 1914 and 1939 will be forgotten, but 4th October 1957 when Russia s miniature Sputnik 1 ushered in a new era, will be very well remembered.
The Sky At Night began on the evening of 24th April 1957, when most readers of this journal were less than a sparkle of DNA in their father s scrotum. Often it gets shoved late and lost in the schedules, but it still goes out monthly where it remains a tribal focal point for generations of quasi-Curly Watts and comet-spotting anoraks. When it began, Lonnie Donegan was no.1 on the Pop charts and the cosmos was a smaller and simpler place. Planets, at best, were blurry discs the size of coins, viewed from exclusively groundbased observatories. No robot-probes or Hubble space-telescopes. Even the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe was the lesser and unlikeliest of two hotly disputed contentions. The other, championed by Yorkshire-born Astronomer Fred Hoyle, was the now-maligned Steady State idea that a constantly renewing universe had always been as it is now, and always would be. A calmer, less spectacular, more poetic concept.
Somewhere around this time, Patrick Moore wrote a regular column for Arthur Mee s Children s Newspaper where, I confess, I first encountered his contagiously boundless enthusiasm. He wrote Guide To The Moon, The Boys Book Of Space and Guide To The Planets, the first of an island universe of heavy and authoritative volumes that continue to appear with the regularity of pulsars to this day, over 100 and counting. Over that same span of years he got to meet Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong.
When Neil and Buzz touched down, all kinds of questions were still unanswered, Moore reflects. They had no idea what the surface was like. No-one knew quite how moving around on the Moon in one-sixth gravity would be. And what is not widely appreciated is that with Apollo there was no provision for rescue. If they d had a faulty landing, if anything had gone wrong on the moon, there was no way they could have got back. I was doing the commentary. And when I heard Neil s voice coming through the Eagle has landed I felt overwhelming relief, believe me. Because they d got over the first two obstacles.
Then Buzz Aldrin told him of the magnificent desolation of the Mare Tranquillitatis (OK, the Sea of Tranquillity to you and me). And the last man on the Moon, Eugene Cernan. I talked to him the other day. He said his greatest thrill was standing on the Moon and seeing the Earth, a quarter-of-a-million miles away. Quite something.
His most cherished Sky At Night moment?
Probably it was the programme shown in October 1959 when the Russians, using my lunar cartography, sent the first unmanned probe to the dark side of the Moon. The pictures were beamed directly onto TV while I was live, on air.
An exciting time. The fulfilment of dreams. And his enthusiasm remains undiminished by recent setbacks in space exploration. The resumption of manned flights to the Moon? Within ten years. A colony on Mars? Within the life-time of people here tonight. And I m sure, probably, the first man on Mars has been born now. And I hope he ll send me an e-mail when he gets there ! But manned space flight is only one of the aspects of space research he emphasises. And probably not the most important one. Astronomical science alone has been changed beyond recognition.

Now Patrick Moore deals on a regular month-by-month basis with astrophysics of staggering complexity. Black Holes where all the laws of common sense break down, just like in the House of Commons . Then there are Pulsars, Cold Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, Quasars, E=MC er, Hammer. And Eleven-Dimensional Big Bang Superstring theory. Surely there must be times I struggle to phrase the question in a way that will avoid giving offence, surely there must be times when even you find yourself overwhelmed by the advances in astronomical data, and you feel out of your depth in the sheer weight and complexity of the new science?
Oh yes, almost all of the time, he chortles happily, no offence taken. I m constantly out of my depth. I try my best as far as I can to keep abreast. But for all I know about it, when I do The Sky At Night, I just get my guests onto the programme, I sit them down, and leave them get on with it.
Engagingly self-deprecating. Yet some false modesty there too, perhaps, for Patrick Moore retains the knack of asking those same guests the most pertinent and incisive question. He s in his seventh decade, sure, but he is still there where the galactic action is at its hottest.
So tell me Patrick what Star-Sign are you ? No. I didn t say that. I bottled out. But I thought of saying it. I really did. Space might be big. Vastly hugely mindbogglingly big. But it
isn t big enough to ask a question like that.