Talk - So you want to be an astronomer?

I ring Bob Turner to find out whether his talk, one of a series of monthly events held by the Lewes Astronomers Club, will be understandable to a layman like myself. Someone who enjoys gazing up at the stars on a cloudless night, someone who can identify The Plough, but someone who hasn’t got a clue about what makes the universe tick. “It will and it won’t,” he says. “What I’m going to do is to take the group through some of the difficult concepts in astronomy that you need to understand if you want to get involved,” he says. “Like the distance between stars. Like how long it would take to walk to the sun. Like the mass of stars, and what plasma is. And finally where did it all start, and what was out there before?”

“If you are going to become interested in astronomy, there are going to be some complicated concepts of quantum physics that you’ve got to latch onto,” he continues. “You have to start thinking about things in a different way. Like how the universe started. It’s a popular misconception that it exploded like a hand-grenade into an existing space. But there was no existing space. The universe was the size of a football and it exploded into nothing. There was nothing before then, because time started then.” Starting to get lost, I ask Bob how long it would take to walk to the sun. “I can’t remember exactly,” he replies. “I haven’t got my notes. I do know that it’s a 13-digit number. And that’s in years.” AL