Skip to main content

Stephen James O'Meara - Four Way Interview

Stephen James O’Meara is an award-winning astronomer and author/co-author of more than a dozen books, including the third edition of Oxford’s A Dictionary of Space Exploration (2018). He is a columnist and editor for Astronomy magazine, and former associate editor of GeminiFocus and Sky & Telescope magazines. Asteroid 3637 is named O’Meara in his honour. His latest book is Mars.

Why science?

Science is the key to understanding mysteries. I grew up during the golden age of science fiction and space exploration, when questions initially outweighed answers. 

What comes especially to mind from that era was the first episode of the 1963 TV programme, The Outer Limits, called The Galaxy Being. In it, a peaceful being from the Andromeda Galaxy is accidentally brought to Earth via radio transmission. The military tries to destroy the Being but fails. In response, the Galaxy Being simply tells the earthlings to stop using force, reminding them that there are powers in the Universe beyond anything they know. He then tells them, 'There is much you have to learn. You must explore. You must reach out. Go to your homes. Go and give thought to the mysteries of the Universe.' And that’s what I did, and have done ever since I saw that program at the age of six. The point is we fear what we don’t understand. We need science to alleviate those fears.

Why this book?

Mars has fascinated me since childhood when I began observing it with a 60-mm refractor from my back porch in the 1960s, followed by seeing the 1971 global dust storm at the age of 14 through the 9-inch Alvan Clark refractor at Harvard College Observatory — and  shown to me by the dust storm’s discoverer Dennis Milon. This global storm was the one that largely obscured the planet from the Mariner 9 spacecraft’s view when the craft achieved orbit around Mars on November 14th of that year, just two days before my 15th birthday. Admittedly, I was fascinated by the lore of the Red Planet — as presented by Lowell with his canals, and as depicted in science fiction (especially from the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs). To me, Mars was a planet alive with mysteries. Little has changed in that respect. Did Mars have water in the past? Does Mars have water today? Did life (microbial) once exist on the Red Planet? Does life still exist on the Red Planet today?  What happened to Mars’s atmosphere? Is Mars habitable? Are humans capable of colonising Mars? No other planet has captured human imagination the way Mars has, and I believe this book is simply a tribute to the ongoing investigation of a planet that was once seen as a mirror of the Earth — and to the imagination of a child who dared to wonder about that world and who continues to do so today.

What’s next?

I’ve always been fascinated with the visible phenomena of the daytime and twilight skies — it’s a part of the visible Universe that largely goes unnoticed. Yet each day offers us the possibility of seeing visual phenomena that capture the ever-changing mood of Earth’s ocean of air and the way light plays with it, or the way the human eye perceives it: the green flash, prismatic ice crystal displays, volcanic twilights, atmospheric glories and so much more. All these phenomena bring us closer to understanding the planet on which we live.  

What’s exciting you at the moment?

You mean aside from from life, nature, and the visible universe? I suppose I’m really looking forward to the upcoming missions to Mars, which should continue to unravel the mysteries surrounding what could potentially be humanity’s next home.

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more