A starspangled life

Margherita Hack is virtually a youngster out to discover the world. There’s not an article dealing with her, though, that fails to underscore her chronological age of eightytwo.
Probably it’s because the interviewer is amazed to find a person whose curiosity and wit are undimmed and indeed as redoubtable as ever.
An astrophysicist of international fame, she is no less renowned as an excellent populariser of scientific lore thanks to her special knack for making her knowledge of complex theories, physical laws and mathematical equations sound simple and accessible to all.
The Socratic “I-know-not-to-know” expresses the awareness that knowing is limitless while at the same time feeding the desire for on-going discovery, but first and foremost the zest for deciphering that which others have retained gone a long way with a theory something may suddenly crop up that tears it to pieces, so that months, even years and a lifetime of work and effort get thrown in the bin.

The universe and the infinite: what can you tell us about these two concepts?
It’s difficult for us to visualise the concept of “the infinite”. And yet we are surrounded by many infinites. Numbers for instance. We can count from one to ten to a thousand to one million and so on infinitely.
Trying to conceive of space as having “n” dimensions is tougher, though. Conceiving of it as having four dimensions is already no easy task, let alone “n” dimensions! Human structure is tri-dimensional and this fact limits our powers of comprehension, hems in our knowledge domain.

What’s a limiting boundary that may be overcome?
In astrophysics we’ve come to understand that the matter that may be perceived by us when we observe the stars accounts for a mere five percent of the universe’s mass. We don’t know what the outstanding ninety-five percent may be given by.
We’re confident though that a theoretical abstraction will help us to understand what it’s all about in the near future.

Over the last century science has advanced far more than over the previous twenty or thirty centuries; can the same be said for man in general?
In the humanistic sphere there’s not been such a great leap forward. Humans with all their instincts have remained essentially unchanged, though overall man can be said to be more civilised now than in the past. One of the instincts that’s always been with us and that determines the way we look at the world is our sense of beauty.
It’s that complex set of perceptions that allows man to relate to a work of art, to an object in a special way. What may be deemed beautiful has changed again and again through history, but awareness of and responsiveness to beauty is intrinsic to our being; it’s our natural mode of approach to our surroundings.

What’s the discovery, you feel, that will completely rock our perception of reality?
Without a doubt the discovery of other planets similar to the Earth and hence with inhabitants like the Earth. The successor of the space telescope will bring a lot of things within our range of detection. To date, eighty new solar systems and a hundred planets beyond our solar system have been discovered at a distance of a hundred/two hundred and light years from us.
But our galaxy alone has a diameter of a hundred thousand light years and contains four hundred billion stars. If one considers that there are hundreds of known galaxies, the law of probability on such great numbers makes it highly likely that there’s a planet like ours somewhere out there. I’d say chances are so great that it’s close to being a certainty.

Is knowledge wealth?
It may be said that at present knowledge is concentrated in the hands of a few and this leads to a dictatorship of knowledge. Knowledge, I’m convinced, needs to be redistributed and transferred to developing countries, if nothing else even just from a utilitarian point of few, otherwise we’ll all be overwhelmed by the problems confronting them.
The International Research Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste awards grants and bursaries to students from developing countries also for the purpose of promoting knowledge redistribution.

What relationship is there between scientific research and enterprise?
In Italy there’s very little research that goes on in the corporate business sector. Illy with it’s Aromalab for investigating sensory perception is an exception, otherwise the general picture is dismal indeed.

What’s the reason: want of courage, short-sightedness, lack of an adequate cultural outlook?
Lack of culture that leads to short-sightedness that makes for lack of confidence. Focusing on immediate returns means doing the same thing over and over again. But sooner or later everyone else will be doing the same thing and for less so that we’ll end up not being competitive anyway. Research is upstream of any innovation. To forego expenditure in research leads to patents becoming obsolete, indeed now faster than ever before. Without on-going research our products and services are bound to quickly lose ground on the market.

Knowledge in the age of the net: what are your opinions on that?
The popularity of the net is currently largely due to its entertainment value. That’s not to say it can’t come in useful as a study aid, but I’m personally used to turning over pages and in the habit of biting my pencil when I sit down to study. The fact is that the web is an overwhelming source of information that just doesn’t allow time for decantation, reflection, or reasoned discussion. It’s like gazing at the starry sky without understanding anything of what one’s looking at. It may all be very spellbinding, but where’s the added value?

Is increasing specialisation, then, the only viable response to this massive onslaught of information?
Progress in some fields goes on at such a relentless pace that it’s difficult to keep abreast of it.
Even in my own field of astrophysics I can’t get through everything I want to, let alone the rest! It’s important to know
what ground others have covered in one’s field of study. But it’s an attitude that no longer seems to prevail. And that’s why there’s always someone who comes along and claims to have the umbrella.
Nowadays there’s no one who can be as eclectic as Pico della Mirandola or Leonardo anymore. They say the real specialist is an individual who knows everything about nothing.

What’s the way out of a this, then?
I’d say by promoting an extensive general knowledge that permits the development of an understanding for what goes on about us and a skill for screening information and sorting out what’s essential. It’s what endows an individual with sufficient mental flexibility to conceive different possible solutions even in one’s own field of study.