Mr Chancellor, Mr Vice Chancellor, Distinguished Guests, Graduands and Diplomands.
I am deeply honoured to be here today to receive the degree of DSc Honoris Causa and of having the opportunity of addressing this audience. I must confess that when Dr Woods notified me of the decision of the Senate, I was overwhelmed and surprised because what we have achieved at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) has been a team effort. For the past forty years I have had the privilege of combining a life-long passion for astronomy and electronics with a challenging and fulfilling career. To then be rewarded for doing something that I have thoroughly enjoyed, was quite unexpected. I accept this honour with a sense of humility, recognising the efforts of the many people, and particularly the graduates and staff of Rhodes University, who have contributed to the success of HartRAO.
The twentieth century must surely go down in history as the golden age of science. Physics and astronomy have revolutionised our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter and of the origin and evolution of the Universe. Similarly, the rapid developments in molecular biology, and specifically the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, have given us insight into various forms of life at the cellular level.
However these developments have come at a cost. As science and technology have progressed, it has become necessary to build successively larger and more sophisticated instruments to advance our knowledge and understanding of nature. The first machines that were used to split the atom were built in university laboratories using university funds, whereas the machines used today require combined national and international resources such as the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. Recently we have seen a major effort to map the human genome. Again this was only possible by pooling resources across laboratories and national borders.
Given the size of the South African economy and the urgent requirements for basic needs such as clean water, housing, education and health care, can we afford to compete in the international scientific arena?
The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology gave an unequivocal answer to this question in its White paper of 1996 with the following statement:
"It is also important to maintain a basic competence in "flagship" sciences such as physics and astronomy for cultural reasons. Not to offer them would be to take a negative view of the future - the view that we are a second class nation, chained forever to the treadmill of feeding and clothing ourselves."
Clearly, the Department sees a role for basic science in South Africa, as well as for national facilities, especially where these take advantage of unique South African opportunities such as:
The National Research Foundation operates a number of national facilities, such as the observatories at Sutherland and Hartebeesthoek and the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Science near Somerset West. These provide centralised and advanced research facilities that are too costly for individual universities to establish and operate.
Two years ago the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology declared the former JLB Smith Institute for Ichthyology a new national facility under the NRF. It has since been renamed the "South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity", signifying that it has a broader role to play in South African Science than it had in the museum community where it was previously positioned.
The Institute has risen to the challenge of its new status by initiating a bold programme to investigate a colony of coelacanths that were discovered by a group of divers in a deep canyon off Sodwana Bay in November 2000. The Coelacanth Initiative has received support from the local and international scientific communities as well as substantial financial support from the Government. It is a cutting-edge, multidisciplinary project that not only takes advantage of the presence of the coelacanth colony off the coast of South Africa, but also draws on the expertise that has been developed at the JLB Smith Institute, at Rhodes University, and by other local role players. The Institute and Rhodes are to be congratulated for capitalising on this unique opportunity and I am sure that we all wish them success in this venture.
I return now to the part played in South African science by the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory, and our association with Rhodes University.
When we established HartRAO as an embryonic national facility in 1975 we invited the radio astronomers in the Department of Physics and Electronics at Rhodes to participate as users of the facility and allocated twenty percent of the telescope time to them. Over the years this has led to a highly fruitful partnership which has gone far beyond the usual relationship between a user and a service provider. The Rhodes Radio Astronomy Group has contributed conceptually to the design of the facility and has assisted in the development of both instrumentation and software.
Staff and postgraduate students at Rhodes have thus been able to embark on cutting edge-science with very little direct cost to the University, considering that HartRAO costs R14,000 per day to operate. Some twenty years ago, the Rhodes Radio Astronomy Group initiated the Rhodes/HartRAO survey of the southern sky at 2.3 GHz, commonly known as SKYMAP. This is widely considered to be the best survey of its kind and has found applications that were quite unforeseen at its inception. In particular, it has been invaluable in establishing the effects of foreground radiation from the Milky Way on observations of the universal cosmic microwave background radiation. The latter provides the best available evidence that our universe had its origin in a hot "Big Bang". Analysis of the cosmic background radiation has revealed information on the earliest stages of the Universe, before the formation of stars and galaxies, and it is satisfying to know that SKYMAP is contributing to such a fundamental area of knowledge.
SKYMAP has also provided an excellent platform for postgraduate training and four MSc and three PhD theses have been based on it. A further three PhD candidates have based their research on work they did at HartRAO on other joint projects. Today, a number of these graduates hold senior positions in scientific institutions, both locally and abroad, as well as in industry, and Rhodes can feel proud of its contribution to the global pool of skilled people.
While the 26-m telescope at Hartebeesthoek provides an important resource in its own right, it is also in great demand as a node in networks of radio telescopes that span the globe. In recent years HartRAO and the other telescopes in these networks have been upgraded to make them competitive for the next decade. Because of our unique geographic location, the contribution that HartRAO makes to these networks goes beyond the simple addition of an extra telescope and our participation significantly enhances the performance of networks in Europe and Australia. These global networks are used to produce images of astronomical objects with unprecedented detail, and it is in this area that I see the greatest potential for HartRAO in the next ten years.
Astronomers are now embarking on the design of the next generation of telescopes to address unsolved problems beyond the reach of existing instruments. The most ambitious of these new telescopes is the Square Kilometre Array or SKA. With a collecting area of one million square metres it will be one hundred times larger than existing networks of radio telescopes. It will require an excellent site that is free from radio interference and with an estimated cost of one billion US dollars, it must of necessity be an international project. It will probably comprise a central core of antennas spread over several hundred kilometres, with other individual elements distributed in a worldwide network.
In the Southern Hemisphere, Western Australia and the Northern Cape have been identified as potential sites for the SKA. The Northern Cape has certain advantages over Australia, and we have an excellent opportunity of promoting the construction of the SKA, or at least a part of it, in South Africa. Prof. Justin Jonas of the Department of Physics and Electronics at Rhodes is already working with the International SKA Steering Committee and I sincerely hope that South Africa will be able to participate in this exciting project when construction starts in about 2010.
Forty-two years ago when I graduated as an electronics engineer, I could not have conceived what life had in store for me any more than the graduates sitting here today can, although I am sure that you all have your own ambitions. When I joined the staff of the NASA satellite tracking station in 1960, I saw an opportunity of steering my career towards radio astronomy by using the 26-m antenna during periods when it would otherwise be standing idle, and fulfilling my dream of becoming an astronomer.
Whatever success I have achieved since then, has been largely because I have taken advantage of opportunities whenever they have presented themselves. Thus when NASA closed their Deep Space Station in 1974 and withdrew from South Africa, most people saw this as a loss, and in many ways it was. But for me it presented an opportunity of creating a new dedicated radio astronomy observatory. Building HartRAO from a defunct tracking station into an internationally recognised facility has not been easy but we have pursued our goals with single-minded purpose. For the first ten years we had to get by with minimal resources and by recycling old NASA equipment. Throughout the years we have had the support of our parent bodies, first the CSIR and since 1988 the former FRD and the National Research Foundation. The new democratic Government has been particularly supportive and I commend them for recognising that astronomy does have a place in a developing country like South Africa and for their continuing support.
My message for the graduates today, therefore, is to grasp opportunities when they arise for therein lies your future and the future of our wonderful country. It remains for me to again thank the University for the honour that they have bestowed on me and to wish the new graduates every success in the future.
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