Telescopes and databases

Astronomy changes.  So do the kind of people who become astronomers.

As we’ve mentioned, our astronomer attended last month’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  Perhaps the most important observation he made there is that the way the science is being done has changed.  Of course telescopes, instruments, computers, all the tools, are much more powerful than they were even a decade ago; that’s expected.  The sub-fields that get most attention (and, thus, funding and jobs) have shifted, but that’s also expected: questions get answered, inspiring new questions that lead in different directions.  But he noticed that the way astronomy works, how astronomers function, is different; and that means astronomers as people are different.

This is not a new phenomenon.  In the nineteenth century an astronomer had good eyesight, the stamina to operate a telescope all night, and a mastery of accurate trigonometric calculations.  In the first half of the twentieth century, skill with photography and familiarity with several branches of physics were necessary.  The types of people who became successful astronomers changed.  What happened to those who would have made excellent 1850s astronomers, but were born too late?  Did they become birdwatchers or accountants?  Or those who would have enjoyed the techniques of the 1930s, but were born too early: photographers or chemists?  It’s hard to imagine that any fascination with the subject itself would overcome a strong disinclination toward the work involved.

We are now in the age of the enormous database, produced by a collaboration of dozens to hundreds of individuals and mined by another collaboration of similar size.  These are not piddly collections of a few hundred objects, like the catalog our astronomer put together with so much trouble years ago.  Nowadays projects collect data automatically on a scale that dwarfs manual effort: hundreds of thousands of objects (stars, galaxies) or more.  Similarly, making use of these data requires an automatic way of sorting through far more than any individual could possibly read.

Of course it’s all done by computer programs.  But again these are not the kind that our astronomer used to write, short hand-built routines to carry out specific tasks; or those he uses, to carry out specific calculations.  These are large projects with many parts, produced by many coders.

So the astronomers to come will be those comfortable working in large groups, part of large projects, mostly producing and using sophisticated computer software.  There will probably be a differentiation between the few capable of leading and managing such enterprises, and the many necessary to produce the results.

We’re not sure what this will mean for the mass of academic astronomers, scattered in small groups among many schools.  Perhaps they can all participate electronically; perhaps they will find themselves confined to teaching, as the large institutions centralize research.  It is already a problem for the old method of judging a scientist by the number and impact of papers, when there are hundreds of authors on each one.  It will become more acute as hiring and funding sources try to work out how to evaluate applicants whose work is a small part of a big project.

We wonder, though, about the people who would have been happy in turn-of-the century astronomy.  They are good at working in small groups, making careful observations of a small number of objects; mastering all, or most, of a project that could fit in one building, or one office; not inclined toward large organizations.  Where will they go?