The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 Read online

  08 morning star song, Venus rising comet dust string

  to a lorikeet dawn, ironwood fire cracking, reverberation of the verse

  stringybark sugarbag lines of song

  09 queen of the night aria accompanied by city lights

  anyone can be queen of the night star sequins

  dagger, drag, delusions of colorature

  10 the fifth four-notes-of THE SUN

  DNA, cells dividing, double helix uncoiling upper strings

  ribs, continents drifting, dunes sequoia, snowflake, rush hour

  variations on wasp, spindled shell, dolphins leaping

  Golden Gate Bridge, man with machete

  book page, swan sun horns floating through space

  11 flowing streams plum-blossomed ch’in

  silk-stop-strumming the water’s course

  heard and understood only by Chung Tzu-ch’i

  and so the world’s last reader of poetry

  upon whose death all strings will unriver or so we like to believe

  12 dark was the night his blade slid on strings, boy eyes burnt

  hot coins in his tin Texan sky, crab gumbo

  this moaning life, everything a sort of guddling

  then back into the gyre, like he ever left it

  another spinning sun forgotten stylus at record’s end

  Firefront

  Beyond the ‘Morning Star’

  Beyond the ‘Morning Star’

  Alice Gorman

  In September 2013, evidence suggested that the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 had finally crossed into interstellar space after a 35-year journey. It carried with it a golden record containing sounds, images and music from Earth. Its sister craft, Voyager 2 (following roughly 3.5 billion kilometres behind), carries an identical record.

  The records were designed to encapsulate the aural heritage of Earth in 90 minutes – but some preliminary investigation reveals that there were a few inaccuracies in the official NASA documentation about the golden records.

  When senior Aboriginal men Djawa, Mudpo and Waliparu gathered one night in 1962 on Milingimbi mission in Arnhem Land for a recording session with Australian anthropologist Sandra Le Brun Holmes, they little dreamt that their music would be heading to the stars. But more than a decade later, when American astronomer Carl Sagan put together a committee to discuss a ‘time capsule’ for NASA’s interstellar mission (which would be launched in 1977), astronomer Frank Drake suggested including a record rather than a plaque (as had been used on the earlier Pioneer 10 and 11 craft). Suddenly, music was on the table.

  The process of selecting this ‘world music’ is described in Sagan’s book Murmurs of Earth. Many factors determined the final cut: the quality of the recording, cultural diversity, geographic and chronological range. The ultimate hope was that the records could represent not only human culture, but also human cultural evolution.

  * * * * *

  In 1962, Le Brun Holmes and her husband, filmmaker Cecil Holmes, toured Methodist missions in the Top End. At Milingimbi, as she recalls in her autobiography, people would come to visit her after the day’s work was over:

  During such evenings […] I recorded a number of beautiful songs, didjeridu solos and stories from the men. One man named Mudpo was a virtuoso on the didjeridu, able to make the sounds of birds at the same time as the wonderful resonant music rolled on uninterrupted. There were fast songs and slow, ghostly music about morkois (ghosts). These men were masters of the instrument. It was the best music I had ever heard, in the true classical, ceremonial tradition.

  So who were these master musicians and custodians of their culture?

  Djawa was a well-known community leader and artist: a winner of the 1955 Leroy-Alcorso Textile Design Competition, numerous of his bark paintings are held by the National Museum of Australia.

  But Djawa’s voice did not make it onto the golden record: we only hear him playing clapsticks under Mudpo’s didjeridu in ‘Morning Star’. And first searches of Australia’s most easily accessible historical archives reveal almost nothing of the lives of Mudpo and Waliparu. In fact, there is little trace of them beyond the sleeve notes of the record Le Brun Holmes later released as Land of the Morning Star. One reason for this may be multiple different spellings of their names, a common problem when European ethnographers tried to convert complex Aboriginal sounds into English. To find out more about them, we would need to dive deeper into mission records and talk to the families of these men and other people who knew them.

  * * * * *

  In Murmurs of Earth, Sagan writes that the two songs were recorded in 1958, and that their 1 minute, 26 seconds on the golden records included ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Devil Bird’. However, Le Brun Holmes’ first visit to Milingimbi occurred in 1962. And when the golden record is compared with that original recording, it becomes clear that while the didjeridu and clapsticks (played by Mudpo and Djawa respectively) comprise the first 23 seconds of the track – with Djawa’s vocal cut off – the remainder is not the ‘Devil Bird’ song at all. It is Waliparu singing ‘Moikoi’. The details of Waliparu’s life may prove elusive, but his voice is now immortalised in a way that few others can claim. He is a kind of astronaut, disembodied, but still speaking into the void.

  ‘Morning Star’ itself is a clan song or manikay relating to the Barnumbirr morning star ceremonies – such songs were not unlike title deeds, expressing the relationship of families or clans to areas of land through the ancestral spirits. The ceremonies are about the journey of the souls of the dead to the land of the morning star. In comparison, ‘Moikoi’ is about the malicious spirits (the morkois) that try to entice newly deceased souls away from their clan country.

  The songs, in their new context of the spacecrafts’ voyage, could perhaps be read as a message about the journey of the human spirit between Earth and space – and coming home at last.

  * * * * *

  This is how Sagan summed up the purpose of the golden records in 1978, the year after their launch:

  Our concern with time and our sense of the Voyager message as a time capsule is expressed in many places on the record – greetings in Sumerian, Hittite and !Kung, photographs of Kalahari Bushmen, music from New Guinea and from the Australian Aborigines, and the inclusion of the composition ‘Flowing Streams’, whose original structure antedates Pythagoras and perhaps goes back to the time of Homer.

  Interestingly, the indigenous groups mentioned here are among those most often singled out in early anthropology and popular conceptions as the most ‘primitive’ on Earth. They are mentioned in the same breath with long-dead cultures known mainly from archaeology. But these were not dead and dying cultures. Throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Yolngu people in Arnhem Land were fighting to maintain their land and culture against an onslaught of missionisation, mining, and exploitative art dealers.

  In 1962, when the recording was made, Aboriginal people were still subject to the pernicious assimilation policy that supported the stolen generations and denied them just wages for their labour. In the 1970s, the decade of the Voyager missions, assimilation was superseded by self-determination – yet the rights of the Yolngu people were easily discarded when mining interests were at stake. Even now, in the 2000s and 2010s, the battles against government policies go on.

  Le Brun Holmes does not mention the Voyager missions in her 1999 autobiography, Faces in the Sun. In 1977, when the probes were launched, she was busy campaigning for Davis Daniels, an Aboriginal man from Roper River who was standing for election in the Northern Territory. Perhaps Djawa, Mudpo and Waliparu never knew that their music had swept past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and – as of September 2013 – into interstellar space, on Voyager 1.

  But in contrast to Sagan’s well-meaning conception, this music is not the preservation in copper of a vanishing way of life. It is a mark of the resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal culture, as it sails out of the solar system, far, far beyond the morning star.

 
The eye in the sand

  Liner notes, Voyager Golden Record

  The oldest known star

  Bianca Nogrady

  Astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, born in the fiery wake of a first generation supernova after the big bang. The star, which goes by the catchy name of SMSS J031300.362670839.3, came to the attention of an international team of astronomers because its unique chemical fingerprint showed it contained almost no iron.

  Lead author Dr Stefan Keller says the first generation of stars that formed immediately after the big bang contained mostly hydrogen, helium and a small amount of lithium. ‘They were made out of this very primordial mix of hydrogen and helium and that led them to become very massive stars, hundreds of times the mass of the Sun,’ says Keller, a research fellow at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University. ‘When you have a star that big, it lives fast and dies young. They explode in a supernova and they start to seed the rest of the universe.’

  The resulting explosion contains heavier elements, such as carbon, silicon and iron.

  ‘As soon as we’ve got a little bit of iron in the universe, that enables much smaller stars to form and that’s what we’re seeing in this finding – one of those stars from the second generation,’ says Keller.

  The star, which is drifting around the outskirts of the Milky Way around 6000 light years from Earth, offers a remarkable snapshot of conditions in the early universe.

  ‘Imagine you’ve got a first [generation] star that’s popped into existence; it’s a huge, massive thing. It explodes and then the shockwave from that drives the wind out and forms the star that we’re observing,’ he says. ‘Stars act as little time capsules and when they form they encapsulate this chunk of gas from that time in which they formed. When we find a particularly old star we have this sample of the universe as it was close to the formative phases of the Milky Way.’

  That snapshot suggests the supernova that led to this star’s formation was very different to supernovae seen today.

  ‘It’s completely unique in the sense that supernovae should emit large amounts of iron and various other materials. But this particular supernova evidently didn’t release any iron; it released a little bit of magnesium and quite a bit of carbon,’ says Keller.

  From this, researchers were able to deduce that this first supernova was a relatively low-energy explosion that led to the formation of a black hole. ‘The primordial star’s supernova explosion was of surprisingly low energy,’ says Keller. ‘Although sufficient to disintegrate the primordial star, almost all of the heavy elements such as iron were consumed by a black hole that formed at the heart of the explosion.’ This led to the low level of iron found in the star.

  The research team is now collecting data from large telescopes in Chile to build up a more detailed picture of the star in the hope this will reveal more about the universe’s first generation of stars.

  High-tech treasure hunt

  Life, the universe and Boolardy

  The quantum spinmeister: Professor Andrea Morello

  Stephen Pincock

  It’s 10 o’clock on a steamy summer’s night when Andrea Morello hits the stage of a small bar in the hip Sydney district of Surry Hills. There’s a tropical sunset painted on the wall and plastic vines draped over the bar. So many people have crammed into this over-stuffed room that there is barely space to stand, let alone sit. If there’s a fire, we’re in trouble.

  The crowd is here for a monthly event called ‘Nerd Nite’, where scientists talk about their research to a young and enthusiastic audience. (As the website says, ‘It’s like the Discovery Channel – with beer.’)

  Tonight the mob has already cheered talks about the Higgs boson and the molecular anatomy of bacterial flagella from a couple of sharp and funny young science guns. Now the compere introduces Morello, an associate professor in quantum nanosystems at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, based at UNSW Australia.

  Six-foot-something and greyhound thin, Morello, aged 41, wears his long wiry hair pulled back into a luxuriant ponytail. There’s a soul patch under his lower lip and a dangerous twinkle in his eye. And you can forget about the usual young-scientist’s uniform of faded T-shirt and jeans. This researcher is dressed for impact in a pair of skin-tight burgundy pants, pointy black shoes and a snowy white shirt with origami pleats and a kind of vampire collar.

  Over the past couple of years, Morello and his colleagues have emerged as frontrunners in a scientific race to build a computer that harnesses quantum physics, the laws that govern the physical world at the smallest scale. Their hope and expectation is that such a machine will one day solve problems beyond the capacity of regular computers. With their extraordinary characteristics, quantum computers promise a step change when it comes to solving computing problems, especially those to do with ‘optimisation’. The classic example is that of the travelling salesman. With dozens of stores on his beat, what route will deliver the best efficiency in terms of time and distance travelled? Optimisation problems like this crop up in applications as varied as stock market trading, medical treatments, scheduling airlines and designing drugs. A classical computer has to crunch through each option sequentially to find the answer. A quantum computer promises to do it simultaneously. In hope of paving the way to a quantum computing world, Google and NASA have teamed up to buy a D-Wave quantum computer, while chemists at Harvard University hope the same computer will help them find the most energetically stable way to fold a protein chain, an aid to designing new drugs.

  But companies such as D-Wave have got where they are on the back of experimental technology that has raised many a cynical eyebrow. By contrast Morello and his colleagues, Andrew Dzurak and Michelle Simmons, have captured the international limelight by providing a proof of concept that such a machine could be built using the material that forms the basis for every computer you’ve ever owned – the good old silicon chip.

  For his ‘intellectual leadership in developing the silicon components to make quantum computing possible’, Morello received the prestigious Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, awarded by the Prime Minister at a black-tie event in Canberra in October 2013.

  For anyone who gives credence to the tired stereotype of scientists and engineers as unimaginative plodders and pocket protector-wearing, unworldly, antisocial geeks, Morello offers a startling corrective. Uncompromising, charming, and intellectually rigorous, he’s a demon in the lab and on the dance floor.

  He’s also a willing and entertaining science communicator, with a facility for charming explanations of the quantum world. Tonight, he wants to convince his audience that quantum physics is not as mysterious as people describe it. ‘Every time I go to a cocktail bar, this is the conversation I have,’ he says with a knowing smile. ‘So this talk is just my usual pick-up line, which I’m going to regurgitate for you.’

  For the following 15 minutes or so, he’s got the overheated audience in the palm of his hand. As he talks, he gestures in front of him, as if massaging the concepts of quantum physics out of the thick summer air. And indeed Morello in full flight has the ability to make you believe you’re starting to comprehend the complexities of the quantum world, if only for a moment.

  He calls two volunteers up to help him with a demonstration of the mysterious phenomenon of ‘entanglement’. It’s the word quantum physicists use to describe the fact that the characteristics of two quantum particles can become inextricably linked, so that if you measure a property of one, the other will instantly be found to have a value that correlates, no matter how far apart they are.

  He flirts and cajoles as he hands ‘Bruce’ a piece of paper and two pens, one red, one blue. He also hands ‘Angela’ a coin and asks her to flip it.

  If it’s heads, Bruce’s job is to take the blue pen and write +1 on the left and −1 on the right of the paper, or the reverse if it’s tails. Angela repeats the
coin-toss. Bruce is told to turn the paper over and follow the same instruction, this time writing the numbers using the red pen. Lastly he is told to cut the paper in half. Bruce keeps one side; Angela takes the other. They each have a piece of paper with either +1 or −1 written in blue on one side and +1 or −1 written in red on the other. They seal their pieces of paper in envelopes and send them out into the crowd. When a guy in the audience opens the first one, he calls out that it’s a +1 written in blue. This means, of course, that the other envelope must contain a piece of paper with a −1 in blue on it.

  ‘We say that the cards are “classically” correlated,’ explains Morello. ‘Angela and Bruce could go to their homes and at midnight Bruce could check his paper and instantly know what blue number Angela has on her paper.’ Nothing surprising here, he says, as Bruce already knew that the correlation was there.

  But in the quantum world, this isn’t the case, he explains. In entangled quantum systems the numbers are not ‘pre-written’ on the paper: they only ‘appear’ when you perform a quantum measurement. And the outcome of the measurement depends on which side of the paper you decide to look at.

  In other words, if the pieces of paper were quantummechanically entangled, when Angela and Bruce went home, the numbers that appear on Angela’s paper would actually depend on which side of his paper Bruce had decided to read.

  And so the audience gets an inkling of the weirdness of quantum entanglement.

  Albert Einstein famously dismissed it as ‘spooky action at a distance’, but Morello tells us that scores of experiments have shown that this really is the way quantum particles work.

  In fact, entanglement is the basis for the very chemical bonds that hold the molecules of our own bodies together, he says before reaching for a sip of beer.

  ‘It’s just the way the world works, so suck it up, OK? If you think this stuff is weird, then you’re weird.’