Jon Willis - Five Way Interview

Jon Willis is a professor of astronomy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. His day job, if you like to call it that, is to study the physical contents of the Universe with a  particular focus upon giant clusters of galaxies both for what they can tell us about the large-scale properties of the Universe and the astrophysics of galaxy evolution. However, alongside astronomy, Prof. Willis is fascinated by the science of astrobiology: the search for life in the Universe. This interest has seen him travel the world in order to answer the questions not just of 'What does an astrobiologist actually do?' but also 'What does a scientific field look like as it approaches its defining moment of detecting life?' The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life is his current book.

Why science?

I like answering questions, finding things out and, for me at least, science provides the language and definitions to do these things. It is certainly not the only approach available to us as humans but I like the clarity and precision it offers - even when the answer is 'I don’t know.' Looking back, it was during my undergraduate education (at the University of Glasgow) that I first became aware of that subtle transition from being taught about subjects that were generally very well known to later encountering questions that had no current answer. My scientific training has helped me immensely from that day to today and is my constant guide as I continue to happily forage for insights on the edge of knowledge.

Why this book?

I still remember the day very clearly. I had just submitted the manuscript for my first book, All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life. Although that was also an astrobiology book, it followed a fairly standard template in terms of how it presented the science. On that day, I realised that I still had questions I had not really answered even to my own satisfaction, chief among them the one mentioned above, 'What does an astrobiologist actually do?' So I wrote out a single page book plan with all of my ideas for how to answer it. It turned out to be a rather messy spider diagram with subjects such as 'hydrothermal vents', 'ancient fossils', 'dolphins?', etc. I still have it, and when I look at it, it reminds me how naive I was to think that any of this might come off and how grateful I am that it did.

Usually we regard a single data point as unable to tell us much at all. Is this true here, or is this a special case?

You are quite right—a single data point generally does not tell us much. One can’t fit a model that describes life to a single point (or to put it more correctly, you can fit almost any model to a single point) and that single point cannot tell you much about the breadth of ways that the cosmos might have engineered life. However, in another way that single point is vital—if one is willing to make a couple of (hopefully very safe) assumptions. Life that is made of atoms has to follow rules. We call those rules physics and chemistry and, though we certainly don’t know all of the rules, we do know for certain that there is only one set (otherwise experiments wouldn’t work if they gave different results each time). 

We don’t know if that one set of physical and chemical rules always leads to the same biological outcome (us) or if we are just one of many possibilities. However, the key point in The Pale Blue Data Point, is that our planet gives us a valuable opportunity to observe just once how physics and chemistry is manifest as biology and, if we are very careful, we might learn something about those general 'rules of life' to apply as we search beyond Earth.

What’s next? 

I have been indulging myself by diving into to the current research concerning the origins and manufacture of the Antikythera mechanism. It is a fascinating archeological and astronomical detective story - one that remains largely unsolved to this day. However, the current imaging technology used to look inside the extant fragments is incredible and I recently treated myself to a 3D printed kit that allows one to build the device (according to our current knowledge) for oneself. I don’t know if it will lead to a book - nor should it - but I have created a new public talk that presents the device and uses it to tell the story of the astronomical and calendrical knowledge it reveals about the classical Greek world.

 What’s exciting you at the moment? 

I have been very fortunate of late. A remarkable and very distant galaxy cluster that I have been studying for over a decade was recently imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. It is rare as a professional scientist that one actually gets one’s mind blown but mine well and truly was. The images are incredible and, most unexpectedly, reveal the cluster to be a gravitational lens. I say unexpected as gravitational lensing usually only occurs where matter is extremely concentrated along the line of sight and in this case nature has clearly revealed a clue that this cluster of galaxies is very dense (which means that it likely formed very early in the history of the universe). If that wasn’t enough, the fact that the cluster itself is very distant means that JWST images of the lensed galaxies must represent objects at extreme distance. A follow-up proposal to determine just how distant is currently with the JWST time allocation panel and my fingers are crossed! 

Photo by Quoc Phuong Tran

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