Professor Brian Boyle, Chair of the International SKA
Steering Committee.
Image by Kristen Clarke

It's not often that a scientist sees a Nobel Prize as small fry, but the award would likely be the least of the achievements of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, according to the Chair of the International SKA Steering Committee, Professor Brian Boyle.

In Perth last week for the International SKA forum, Professor Boyle believes the scientific information and knowledge that will come from the SKA will dwarf anything the scientific community has ever seen.

“If the only thing the SKA won was a Nobel Prize I’d be disappointed,’’ Professor Boyle said.

“Within one week of turning on the SKA, information equivalent to more than all the words ever spoken by the human race will have been collected.

“With the SKA we will be able to look back through the course of time to an era in the universe just a few hundred thousand years after the big bang. We will see the first stars assembling, we will see what are the building blocks of the universe.”

Professor Boyle said that such information would put to the test some of the most basic tenants of science, including the laws of gravity, the origin of elements, the states of matter and the dimensions of space and time.

“I do believe the SKA will be truly revolutionary in what it discovers,” he said.

“It was once said that the universe is not stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine and I am sure that among all the things that the SKA discovers there will be something that we hadn’t even imagined.”

He said that while discoveries coming from the SKA would be unlikely to directly change people’s everyday lives the discoveries would push the boundaries of human knowledge in almost every way.

“Are we going to discover a new form of energy? No, nothing as obviously useful as that, but the things we learn from astronomy, such as the theory of general relativity, already make technology such as global positioning devices possible,” Professor Boyle said.

“The wireless technology that exists in our laptops today was the result of work by a group of radio astronomy engineers.

“While some people would say to me ‘who cares about how stars were formed’, you’d be surprised at how many people, once they know I’m an astronomer start asking me about black holes and what happens to the laws of physics when you near a black hole. I think that while these things don’t make a difference to people’s everyday lives they do push the boundaries of human knowledge and it’s this that ultimately makes a difference and inspires new technologies and understandings.”

Professor Boyle said his personal wish would be to see the SKA unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter.

Scientists believe dark matter makes up about 90 per cent of the universe, but that it cannot be detected with current technology because it is too cold and dark to see or measure; and that dark energy is the gravitational effect caused by dark matter which is causing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

“I’d like the SKA to change the paradigm of our understanding of the universe,” he said.

“Proving the nature of dark energy is probably one of the most fundamental discoveries left for us today. We talk about dark energy and dark matter, but at the moment they are just scenarios, I would like to see the SKA tell us that we actually have the model of our universe wrong, that we don’t have dark energy or dark matter because the universe is actually quite different to what we imagine.”

On the likelihood of discovering extraterrestrial life, Professor Boyle said that although he felt it was a “very, very, very long shot,” it was “in humankind’s nature to inquire and search at the limits and who knows what will be found when we do search there.”