So tonight I'm going to give everybody a little bit of a feeling for the journey of discovery
of astronomy, so where astronomy started and where it's evolved to, some of the amazing
things that it's found along the way of that journey, but then looking at the big next
step, the big steps of discovery that come with new generation telescopes like the SKA.
The SKA is going to be the world's largest astronomical facility, it's going to be a
new generation of radio telescope, 10,000 times bigger than anything ever built before
for a science, so it's an amazing step into the unknown, into the discovery of the universe,
it'll push us back to that time in the universe when the very, very first objects were being
formed, so it's an extremely exciting time to be a scientist.
Many dishes because they're easier to build than one large one, because they're cheaper
and easier to build small ones than one big one, but also if you've got lots of little
ones you can actually spread them out across not just a kilometer by a kilometer, but actually
3,000 kilometers, the more you spread out radio dishes, the higher the fidelity, the
higher the resolution of the image that you make, so as well as having a collecting area
of equivalent of one square kilometer, you've also got this enormous extent 3,000 kilometers
that gives you incredibly high resolution in your pictures as well.
The SKA is something which is going to capture the imagination of everybody, not just astronomers
but young people because of astronomy and the things it'll discover, engineers because
of the incredible challenges it's going to produce in terms of building the SKA, computer
scientists because it's going to be the world's biggest computer science project, fiber optics,
networking people, command and control people, all sorts of engineering and technical skills
are going to be called upon to build the SKA and in many cases, particularly in this computer
science world, it's going to be the biggest project in the world, the world's largest
computer system, the world's largest data archives.
These are all going to be part of the SKA, so it's not just science, it's also the technology
and with great technology, with demanding technology comes innovation, it comes discovery.
The last time one of these big projects was going on like the Large Hadron Collider in
Geneva, that project as a byproduct invented the web, so the web is a pretty amazing part
of our lives today and so we can imagine the sorts of things that will come from the SKA
project.
I think the SKA has been designed to answer a number of really interesting questions about
the universe but the most exciting thing for me is the things that we don't know, the things
that we will see happen as part of the SKA being there, the serendipity, if you like,
the discoveries that are made, which the capacity and the potential of the SKA is enormous,
as I said, 10,000 times more capacity to discover than any telescope we've had before.
I think it's important that we build the SKA in the place where it can do the job it's
designed to do, it has to be in the place where it can do the science, it can produce
the results that it is designed to do.
In my mind that is Australia, in Australia we have the world's most radio acquired site,
we have a country which is exactly the right size to fit the SKA to do the kinds of science
that it needs to do, we have the conditions, the conditions are right and Australia wants
to make a home here in Australia for the world, this is a world telescope, it's not about
Australia and South Africa, it's about the world, there are 20 countries who want to
build SKA, we would like to give to the world our site, provide a home for the SKA and be
the home base for radio astronomy for the foreseeable future.
