“Governments, including here [South Africa], should fund science well across all scientific disciplines.” That is the belief of Professor Donald Kurtz who was speaking at the U3A meeting in the Don Powis Hall at Settlers Park Village on Thursday, May 26. Professor Kurtz says more funding for science will lead to exciting discoveries that will ultimately have monetary rewards. He said if money is invested in science, there is value for money because there will be exciting new discoveries which might lead to big payoffs.
“Many of those will only produce knowledge that’s interesting to know, but won’t have any economic pay off. But you don’t know ahead of time where the big payoffs are coming from so if you have a government that only funds directed science to say we know if we discover this we will make this money, and only fund that then you’ll miss the big things. You don’t see them coming, they come as surprises.” Professor Kurtz said.
A prime example of this is the 1970s when Prof Kurtz was still a student and astronomers were working on devices to take better pictures of the sky, which Kurtz explains is the camera phone nowadays. “It wasn’t our intention to find out what ended up being your phone, our intention was to get better pictures of the sky and we were funded for that and then this big payoff comes,” he explained.
Prof Kurtz talk at a packed Don Powis Hall about the idea that science is exciting and he explained that the intellectual reward for studying science is the excitement of knowing things, much like enjoying a fine art. “For science, we learn how the universe works and just the thrill to understand things, but there can be big economic pay offs,” he said.
The U3A talk on Thursday was a 400 year story of how astronomers tried to figure out why the planets move in the sky and what the stars are, and Professor Kurtz explained that in the process of trying to figure that out, just out of intellectual interest, astronomers discovered how to control the power of the stars. “And that will be the future energy source, probably in this century, for all of humans and probably for the rest of time,” Professor Kurtz predicted.
For the talk, Prof Kurtz highlighted key characters in the development of astronomy such as Nicolaus Copernicus who died without knowing how his important his discovery of formulating a model of the universe that placed the Sun in the centre of the orbit system, mathematician Tycho Brahe who discovered the supernova star in 1572, and Cecilia Payne who was academically excluded from Cambridge University because of her gender, but was accepted at Harvard University and wrote the greatest PhD thesis in astronomy with her discovery that the universe is made of the lightest element, hydrogen. With Payne’s story, Professor Kurtz hammered the message that “you need to give opportunities to everybody”.
“This was the story of the people, along the way, who were just trying to understand how the universe works, but out of that have tumbled upon this incredible discovery of how to make energy by the same way the stars make energy,” he explained as the message he wanted the audience to take out from his talk.
“Just doing the science ultimately has a big pay off, but it’s also exciting and fun along the way,” he adds.
Professor Kurtz also mentioned one of the biggest scientific projects on the planet currently under way, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is an intergovernmental radio telescope project being built in Australia and South Africa. This, he explained, are radio telescopes being built up which will ultimately cost 2 billion euros and the project is funded by 14 countries and South Africa is providing expertise, facilities and land for the headquarters in the Karoo.
According to the SKA public website, the project represents a huge leap forward in engineering research and this development is one of the largest scientific endeavours in history.
