ANYONE who has a second-hand rocket for sale should contact Grote Reber in
Bothwell, Tasmania. It won鈥檛 be that easy to reach him because Reber doesn鈥檛
have a phone, but the local post office in Bothwell (population 241) will give
him a message next time he is in town. For Reber, now 83, is not a man to be
ignored. Back in the 1940s he won a place in the history of science by
creating the new field of radioastronomy virtually single-handed, despite
being spurned by the academic community. Today, he is still forging ahead with
his own ideas.
Reber would like the rocket for a research project he hopes will disprove
the big bang theory of the origin of the Universe. 鈥淣ow that the Cold War is
over, there are a lot of small rockets available,鈥� he says.
With this missile, Reber plans to launch a payload of hydrogen into the
upper atmosphere to absorb charged particles and 鈥渢urn off鈥� the ionosphere
over Tasmania for a night. This hole, he says, will allow long radio
wavelengths, which the ionosphere normally reflects to reach radioastronomers
on Earth. He hopes to see a distinctive pattern of radio-bright and radio-dark
patches that will show the big bang theory of the Universe鈥檚 origin to be
wrong.
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Whether or not Reber succeeds in getting his rocket, however, professional
astronomers view his proposed project with more than a little scepticism. But
Reber has had a lifetime of remarkable success as an iconoclast.
As a young radio engineer 60 years ago, Reber stumbled across a scientific
paper by Karl Jansky that reported the first-ever observations of radio waves
coming from space. Intrigued, Reber buttonholed astronomers from the
University of Chicago and Harvard to discuss follow-up observations, but found
only indifference.
鈥淪o it looked like if anybody was going to do anything, it was going to be
me,鈥� he recalls. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 say I didn鈥檛 try to find somebody else, because I
did.鈥� Working on his own, Reber designed and built a 31-foot radio antenna out
of wood and sheet metal in his mother鈥檚 backyard in Wheaton, Illinois.
Time after time, Reber trained this antenna on the heavens and found
nothing. After a year, he says, 鈥淚鈥檇 spent a lot of time, money and effort on
this, and I wasn鈥檛 getting anywhere.鈥� Finally, in mid-1938, he rebuilt his
radio receiver once more and tried again at yet another wavelength.
鈥淟o and behold, on the very first night I tried it out, I got some results.
It wasn鈥檛 faint, either 鈥� it was very conspicuous. I was dumbfounded.鈥� Once
again, however, professional astronomers greeted his discovery with
indifference. They were more interested in optical telescopes and thought that
radio observations would not yield anything new.
Reber continued to scan the night sky for several years, even after the US
joined the Second World War. 鈥淔rom my point of view,鈥� he says, 鈥淸the war] was
a good thing, because one of the major sources of interference was automobile
ignition noise.鈥� Because of gasoline rationing fewer neighbours were driving,
and Reber could record the radio waves undisturbed. The result was the first
radio map of the heavens, published in 1944.
After a short postwar stint at the National Bureau of Standards near
Washington DC, Reber decided to continue his radio observations where the
Earth鈥檚 ionosphere is weakest 鈥� near the magnetic poles. The choice was the
Canadian Arctic or Tasmania.
In 1954, Reber quit his job the last he would ever hold 鈥� and moved to
Tasmania, where he eventually set up an antenna array strung out across 130
hectares of sheep pasture near Bothwell in the centre of the island. With
this, he began to search the sky at a wavelength of 144 metres 鈥� far longer
than anyone had looked at before.
鈥淭his was just a shot in the dark,鈥� he recalls. 鈥淕o out and do something
nobody has done before, see what you catch, then try to interpret it. The
results were beyond expectation. The radio sky at [short] wavelengths is sort
of like the night sky at optical wavelengths. It鈥檚 dark all over with a bright
band along the Milky Way. The radio sky at 144 metres is more like the daytime
sky. It鈥檚 bright all over with a dark band coincident with the Milky Way.鈥�
That result, Reber maintains, undermines the standard theory which says
that the Universe started in a big bang. His dissent focuses on the red shift,
a key bit of evidence for the expanding Universe. Instead of marking a rapidly
receding galaxy, Reber thinks the red shift may be caused by photons losing
energy as they travel through space. He believes that space is full of protons
and electrons that intercept photons and re-emit them at lower energy. It is
these re-emitted photons that he thinks make space bright at longer
wavelengths 鈥� hence his eagerness to buy a missile and make more detailed
observations.
Professional astronomers may scoff at Reber鈥檚 reasoning and argue that
synchrotron radiation can explain why extragalactic space is bright. But Reber
holds fast, secure in the knowledge that he has been right before.