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00:00Thank you for listening.
00:30On a bleak day in December 1945, one determined man toured a trail of ex-army equipment into a muddy field in Cheshire.
00:40The place was called Jodrell Bank, and it would be here, experimenting with surplus radar kit, that he would accidentally find distant radio waves coming from space.
00:56They were basically mapping out something you couldn't see with your eyes.
01:00This Heath Robinson figure built contraptions of increasing complexity in order to listen to the heavens at the dawn of the space age.
01:17Of course, everybody was wondering what on earth's it going to be.
01:21Yet in 12 years' time, he will be standing in the same field in the shadow of the world's largest radio telescope.
01:30This strange vegetable was starting to sprout out from the Cheshire plane.
01:35This was the only instrument in the Western world capable of tracking both Soviet and American rockets at the height of the Cold War.
01:46Here's Jodrell Bank working for both the Americans and the Russians, tracking their material, and both sides knowing it's happening.
01:59I think it might have been just about the only thing that was remotely like that.
02:03But the pioneering work of Bernard Lovell wouldn't be defined by the Cold War.
02:08His telescope at Jodrell Bank would be at the forefront of a scientific revolution.
02:14He was a real scientist.
02:17If there was some scientific mystery which he could tackle, he was going to do it.
02:23The solution to one such mystery would redraw the known map of the universe
02:27and lie behind the most mind-bending discovery of the 20th century.
02:33That everything began in a big bang.
02:36So who was Bernard Lovell?
02:40And how did he put Britain at the forefront of the space race
02:43and the search for a new understanding of our place in the universe?
02:47It's a weekend in September 1959 and Bernard Lovell is playing cricket.
03:10For Lovell, every Saturday was reserved for the game.
03:14He was captain of the local First Eleven, so missing a match wasn't an option.
03:19But this wasn't an average day, because the Russians had launched a rocket to the moon
03:25and only Lovell's telescope could verify its landing.
03:28If the Russians' calculations were correct, their rocket would be the first man-made object
03:32to hit another celestial body.
03:35At the time, both the United States and the United States were in the universe.
03:37and the Soviet Union were obsessed with getting a rocket to the moon.
03:41It was hard for the Americans to admit that the Russian space program was more difficult.
03:46This led to rumours that the Soviets were somehow faking the rocket to the moon.
03:52It was hard for the Americans to admit that the Russian space program was more advanced than their own.
03:59This led to rumours that the Soviets were somehow faking it.
04:06But neither side had any instrument capable of tracking their own rockets.
04:12So Lovell's new radio telescope, in the heart of the Cheshire country,
04:16was a rocket to the moon.
04:18It was hard for the Americans to admit that the Russian space program was more advanced than their own.
04:23This led to rumours that the Soviets were somehow faking it.
04:28It was only after the cricket had a break for tea that Lovell engaged with this unfolding drama.
04:47Calling Jodrell Bank from a telephone box near the ground,
04:51he learned that he and his telescope were being summoned by both sides
04:55to confirm the events taking place.
05:04After finishing the match, he returned to the telescope, still in his whites,
05:08to a telex from Moscow, giving the precise frequencies and time of lunar impact for the Russian probe.
05:14It was a Jodrell in the evening, by which time the Russians had sent all the data necessary for him to track this rocket as it approached the moon.
05:25But in between, he was going to play cricket. And that was the balance.
05:29By Sunday, the world's press assembled at Jodrell Bank to listen as the signals from the probe ceased,
05:38indicating that the Russians had hit the moon.
05:41What we just heard were the signals from Lunik 2, recorded, picked up by the Lovell Tarscope here, recorded on the 13th of September 1959, and played back as a sound.
05:54The beeps effectively are the signal coming from the spacecraft, and when they stop, we'd actually tracked the spacecraft right down onto the moon.
06:13So it was possible to show that the Russians had sent the spacecraft to the moon.
06:21It was the first ever spacecraft to hit the moon, to actually reach the surface of another celestial body.
06:27How did this unlikely figure come to find himself at the epicentre of a new age?
06:39The son of a lay preacher and a shopkeeper, Bernard Lovell had not considered the prospect of a life in science,
06:45until, as an impressionable schoolboy, he was taken to a lecture by the eminent physicist A.M. Tindall.
06:51When he was a young boy in a village school, and in his own words, I remember them very clearly, he said,
06:59I was not a good student. In other words, precocious intelligence not being stretched.
07:05And he was taken to Bristol, and he walked into a lecture theatre, and he described to me the two globes,
07:14and the electric spark that was made to jump between them.
07:18And he talked in really vivid terms about the colour of the sparks in the room,
07:33and the sound of the arc lamps, and the smell of the electrical discharge,
07:38you know, the scorching of the air across the room.
07:40I found them quite enchanting and bewildered, and from that time I had a really great ambition to go to the university.
07:50But in 1939, this idealistic young scientist, like many others of his generation,
08:03was wrenched from his fledgling research position in the physics department and thrown into wartime work.
08:09The aspect of Father's work that is generally regarded as critical to the Allied war effort,
08:24was a development by his team of the short-wavelength radar,
08:30that enabled the war against the U-boats in the Atlantic,
08:35to be carried on successfully at night.
08:39Lovell's new short-wavelength radar allowed Allied night bombers to bounce radio waves off U-boats,
08:47as they surfaced to refuel at night.
08:50This revealed their positions, and left them vulnerable to attack.
08:54Britain was being starved to death by the success of the U-boat attacks on the convoys,
08:59and Father's team was instrumental in turning the tide of the battle in the Atlantic.
09:06During the war, Lovell was in charge of a team of scientists
09:09who developed an entirely new technology
09:12at a speed that would have made Steve Jobs' head spin.
09:16He made things work which nobody would have dreamed of before the war,
09:21so that he learnt a lot of radio engineering,
09:27but he also learnt about how to run a big project.
09:31The wartime work made Lovell understand pressure,
09:34and how to get things done with limited time and resources.
09:37So at the end of the war, with great relief,
09:40he was able to return with new drive to his great passion for pure science.
09:46Lovell had become intrigued by the possibility
09:48that radar might be used to do more than find Nazi U-boats.
09:52So when he returned to Manchester in 1945,
09:55he came with an army trailer full of now defunct radar equipment.
10:01All he needed was a quiet patch of land far away from the noise of the city
10:05to set up his radar and start work.
10:08My father went to Georgeville for the first time to see if it would be suitable,
10:12and had his army trailer delivered there in December 1945.
10:17The events I'm describing must have been very, very early in 1946.
10:21There was nobody there. It was just my father.
10:23Nobody else was on the staff at Jodrell.
10:25Jodrell Bank was a few acres of fields belonging to the university's botany department
10:37in the heart of Cheshire's countryside.
10:40One of Lovell's early research projects was the study of meteors.
10:46He wanted to prove that what you could see in the night sky with your eyes
10:50was echoed by what he could see on his radar.
10:53In this early work at Jodrell Bank, Lovell was joined by keen amateur astronomer Manning Prentice,
11:09who, on clear winter nights, would lie in a deck chair studying the night sky with his binoculars,
11:15shouting his observations to Lovell.
11:19I was allowed as an early treat, I must only have been about six,
11:24to go, to be wrapped up with every sweater I had
11:28and be allowed to go and sit in another deck chair next to Mr Prentice
11:35and be there during the night, far, far, far beyond bedtime,
11:40while Manning Prentice would bellow out the coordinates of his observations
11:46and inside the trailer, simultaneously, there would be the team
11:52picking up the reflections from these meteor trails.
11:57Lovell's enthusiasm doubled when this research unequivocally linked radio echoes with meteors,
12:03proving that astronomy could be done by using radar.
12:07This pioneering research quickly drew eager young graduate students
12:11to the fields of Jodrell Bank to build their own radio detection devices
12:16and the place started to look like some kind of strange fairground.
12:26Post-war period, there was lots of ex-army equipment
12:31that was being dumped into mine shafts and things.
12:34So they actually drove around the country with a truck,
12:36piling as much of the electronics in the back as they could.
12:39It was very much a sort of Heath Robinson sort of seat of the pants affair
12:43where basically people would build their own kit out of whatever they had to hand.
12:47Mr. Simon, someone to hold...
12:50We children were involved in this.
12:52We wanted to say, here's a piece of wire, this is a parabola,
12:56you're going to put a wire in the centre of it and help us listen to radio waves from space,
13:01which, looking back, was a slightly odd thing for a five-year-old to be told,
13:06but it was interesting. I'm sure it was interesting.
13:09It was a lot more fun than going to the park.
13:11It was a very good camaraderie amongst quite a small group of people,
13:18and they just made things work.
13:20It was a very great privilege, really, to be involved in that.
13:25Lovell and his team quickly realised that the success they were having
13:31from their tangle of wires and aerials would be greatly enhanced
13:34if they could connect their wires together and stretch them across the field
13:38to create a larger collecting area able to pick up weaker signals for more distant stars.
13:44But this early radio telescope couldn't move.
13:47It just picked up radio waves from the stars as the sky moved overhead.
13:52So he built a very large radio telescope, as we now call it,
13:58by stretching wires in the form of a dish
14:03and holding them up with scaffold poles,
14:06and it was quite a job to build it, which they did with their own hands.
14:13The diameter of the ball was determined by the distance between the hedge
14:19of the farmer's field and the truck, the army truck, that they had their equipment in,
14:24that had been dragged into the field some years before
14:26and had just sunk up to its axles in the mud.
14:29So that determined the size of the telescope.
14:31That's why it's 218 foot.
14:33So this was all very, you know, just seat-of-the-pants stuff,
14:36really great pioneering work.
14:39My only personal memory of it is being driven past it by my father
14:48and seeing what seemed to be a tangled mess of chicken wire
14:51with some kind of latticework girder poking into the sky.
14:58And my father said,
15:00that's some run kind of thing for looking at things.
15:05In 1950, using this contraption,
15:08two of Lovell's colleagues, Hanbury Brown and Cyril Hazard,
15:12made the first detection of radio waves from the nearby Andromeda galaxy.
15:17This was a revolutionary discovery,
15:20revealing that other galaxies, besides our own Milky Way, emitted radio waves.
15:25This new astronomy effectively remapped the universe.
15:29I mean, for thousands of years,
15:31people will have looked at the skies just using their eyes,
15:34and sort of looked at the stars overhead, the moon, the planets,
15:37and they even build structures, you know, Stonehenge and others,
15:40that are sort of associated with what happens in the sky.
15:43400 years ago or so, Galileo was one of the first to use a telescope.
15:48So a telescope basically just enhances the view that your eye gives you.
15:52It collects more light, it zooms in on things.
15:55But all that involved visible light, the stuff your eye can see.
15:59Radio astronomy worked differently,
16:01opening up a view of the invisible universe.
16:08They were basically mapping out something you couldn't see with your eyes.
16:11So they were starting to pick up bright sources of radio waves,
16:15and then having to go and compare them to what we already knew.
16:18And quite often there was nothing there in the existing map.
16:21And that was one of the great stories of those early years of radio astronomy,
16:25was pinning down what these new radio sources were in the sky.
16:30Lovell's contemporary, the celebrated cosmologist Fred Hoyle,
16:41was particularly excited about the science of radio astronomy
16:44and the possibilities it was opening up.
16:46Its scope and reach was mind-boggling.
16:49What radio astronomy has done is to give us an extra window
16:55through which to look out at the universe.
17:01This new view might allow astronomers to look right back to the beginning of time.
17:06But Hoyle himself didn't believe the universe had a beginning.
17:10He was a leading advocate for steady state theory,
17:13the idea that the universe was in a process of continuous creation.
17:17Today we can peer far into the depths of space
17:20and see some of the many millions of island universes we call galaxies.
17:27Were they all created in a moment of time,
17:29the fragments of a tremendous explosion?
17:32Or is creation continuous,
17:34in a universe that had no beginning and will have no end?
17:39The world's greatest!
17:43Steady state theory were pushing those who believed in the Big Bang
17:48to find evidence to back up their claim.
17:49The debate spanned the era,
17:51and while an answer would eventually come,
17:54these were the very biggest questions.
17:57Once you're in this,
17:59once you understand what the questions are
18:01and start thinking in those terms,
18:05you can't ever stop.
18:07Bernard Lovell was fuelled by the exciting debates arising in astronomy and was becoming
18:15increasingly obsessed by the possibilities the research at Jodrell Bank was throwing
18:19up. The DIY telescope had proved its worth, but what Lovell really wanted was a telescope
18:26of epic proportions, one that could move to look at any part of the sky. He believed that
18:32if he could achieve this dream, it would change human understanding of the universe.
18:38They were just so determined that if they could build a steerable thing like this, it
18:44would be bound to be picking up some interesting things, but they couldn't say what they were
18:50going to be. They were right, of course.
18:57In 1950, Lovell met Sheffield-based engineer Charles Husband. Husband jumped at the opportunity
19:05to build something new, and construction tenders went out in June of that year.
19:17When Husband came to Jodrell to talk to Lovell, he said, well, that's really only rather like
19:24a bridge with a moving piece on top. So let's just see if we can't design it. And you have
19:30to realise that in those days, there was no computer at all. No question of computer-aided
19:37design. It was all done with a slide rule and pen and pencil.
19:43It was a marriage of ambitious engineering with cutting-edge science.
19:47There were sort of two like minds in a way, you know, Lovell driven by the pure research.
19:52Husband was a sort of, you know, go-for-it sort of engineer who really felt that he could
19:58build such a thing.
19:59Nobody had ever tried to build a device of this size that would operate with the precision
20:07of a watch. Nobody had done that before. They'd done it with small things, but they'd never
20:12done it with anything like that size. It was a huge engineering leap. There weren't prototypes,
20:18there was just the first fully steerable large radio telescope.
20:22A strange structure began to grow out of the Cheshire Fields, bemusing the local community.
20:28If we stood there, we could see across the trees and could see it coming higher and higher
20:38gradually. And, of course, everybody was wondering what on earth is it going to be.
20:49This strange vegetable was starting to sprout out on the Cheshire Plain.
20:56In order to get his new telescope built, Lovell needed support, and lots of it.
21:02People had to be persuaded that it's a good idea. The university had to be persuaded.
21:06People who fund universities had to be persuaded. The government department that funded scientific
21:10projects had to be persuaded. So all those had to be essentially lobbied to very skillfully
21:21in order to persuade them to part with what was an almost unprecedented amount of money for
21:27an astronomical project in Britain.
21:29We should require a radio telescope with a diameter of at least 250 feet. That is the smallest
21:36and cheapest instrument which will serve our purpose.
21:41Lovell was harnessing an enthusiasm for radio astronomy that had been fostered at the Festival of Britain.
21:48On top of the old shock tower, there's the latest radar equipment.
21:55This national exhibition, organised by the government, gave the public a feeling of recovery after the war,
22:05by showcasing the very best of British science and technology, and Jodrell Bank made an important contribution.
22:11The fact that the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain is the Dome of Discovery which is an exhibition
22:18that centres on the national contribution that science and engineering makes as part of a national story.
22:26The fact that nine million people attended that exhibition. The fact that at that exhibition they saw radio telescopes being part of that story.
22:36Well, that means that radio astronomy is already part of that public image of science in post-war Britain.
22:43Participating in the Festival of Britain was a savvy move. It excited the visiting public with the new science of radio astronomy
22:51and was something the promoters of British science could really get behind.
22:55It's a good example of how Lovell can be extremely canny in presenting different audiences with different arguments for why Britain needs a giant steerable radio telescope.
23:17Throughout the 1950s, the construction of the telescope progressed steadily, but costs were escalating.
23:24Everybody's talking at me
23:27I don't hear words they're saying
23:30Only the echoes of my mind
23:36The telescope began to go over budget, which began to have quite an impact on domestic affairs in the family home.
23:49The original cost estimate they put together at the end of the 1940s, early 1950s was £120,000, and in the end it cost about £750,000.
24:01Going where the weather
24:05Sir Bannard had a great deal of trouble to get the thing up, and it's a well-known fact that he reached a stage of being on the point of criminal bankruptcy. Personal trouble for him.
24:18This was public money that Lovell was spending. His project began to caught score as Parliament's Public Accounts Committee mounted a formal inquiry into the telescope.
24:37The Public Accounts Committee could criticise the spending of government departments in such a way that whatever they said, their criticisms had to be listened to very carefully. To be censored by the Public Accounts Committee was an immense shame for government departments.
24:56The government tried to counter the bad press by commissioning a documentary film about the project. It was to be a propaganda piece for the telescope, showing both the British public and the wider world what an engineering achievement this was, and how important this new astronomy would be in the future.
25:21The script was a carefully worded defence against parliamentary criticism, shot in a very tear-style topped off with some wooden acting.
25:31Well, yes, of course, that's what I really want. A fully steerable telescope with a bell about 250 feet in diameter. But everyone says the engineering difficulties are too great.
25:40Oh, I don't know. The problem isn't entirely new. Large swing bridges and big dockside planes have many of the same features.
25:50In the film, what you see is very carefully stage-managed dialogue between the scientists and the engineers.
26:00But it wasn't a British government film that would save Lovell and his telescope. The miracle would come in the form of a small satellite launched into orbit by a Soviet rocket in October 1957.
26:18It must have been a school day morning. I think it was a Friday in October. And there was a tremendous kerfuffle in the early hours and bells ringing. There was a telephone in the hall at home, which just about woke you up.
26:34Charles' husband had telephoned and said, why don't you get Jodrell involved in this Sputnik? It'll help us with our financial troubles.
26:43We were saying, yeah, why don't you tune into Sputnik? And he just said, because it's trivial. It's easy. Anybody can do it.
26:51Lovell wasn't interested in trying to pick up the signals from Sputnik itself. So this sort of beach ball sized satellite that goes pink because you could pick up the signals from that with any sort of small radio receiver.
27:05radio receiver. You didn't need a giant radio telescope like this to do it. However, the media, the British public all thought that somehow Jodrell Bank must be associated with this project.
27:16And they were asking, you know, why? What are you doing for Sputnik?
27:19And it actually wasn't until he got a call from someone in government who pointed out that actually it would be quite interesting if Lovell could demonstrate that we could get a radar echo off, not off the Sputnik satellite itself, but the rocket that had carried Sputnik into space, which was itself also orbiting the Earth.
27:38And the reason was because that rocket was an intercontinental ballistic missile. And of course, the next thing it might launch into space might be something rather more threatening than this sort of beach ball sized thing that goes pink.
27:54Sputnik shocked the Americans. They were confident they had bigger and better missiles than the Russians. But here they were in second place with a big question to answer.
28:04A couple of months later, they tried to do the same thing and it blew up on the pad. It raised, I think, about four inches. That's as far as it flew.
28:19News about Sputnik sent scientists rushing to Jodrell Bank, as they knew it was the only place that had a hope of detecting Sputnik's carrier rocket.
28:27Everybody came back into work. I mean, the whole thing, you know, between the fourth of October, the following week, everybody was back in. They did probably a few months work in a matter of a few days.
28:40Jodrell Bank's radar equipment was being monitored around the clock.
28:47Lovell and his colleagues were looking for the unmistakable trace the Sputnik rocket would produce on their screens. This was all very exciting for one schoolboy.
28:56By the next Saturday night, they tracked it and I was there. He says quite correctly in his memoir of this that I pleaded with him to be present.
29:09I felt I'd earned it because I'd been cycling up and down with sandwiches and tea from home for all the press, who by now were everywhere at Jodrell.
29:17Jodrell had no experience of this. There's this place that is in the middle of fields in the middle of Cheshire and suddenly there's Raymond Baxter on the roof talking into microphones saying this is history being made.
29:28Everything's going on. And I was allowed to go in this heart and I saw this echo on the cathode ray tube. I can see it now. Incredible.
29:40Photographs taken of that cathode ray tube and developed and then magnified and projected in front of the assembled media.
29:48And Lovell was basically pointing out the trace, the black line that was the flash of the radar echo, the pulse being coming back from the rocket as it orbited the Earth.
29:59Father reports correctly that he did say to me, if the sight of that doesn't make you a scientist, nothing will.
30:08In the early years of the space race, Jodrell Bank was the only place in the world with radar capable of tracking the first rockets both Russians and Americans were launching into space.
30:22So it was relied on by both superpowers. But Lovell's telescope wasn't designed for tracking and some of the astronomers on his staff were dubious about giving the telescope up for this purpose.
30:33You read the original design study for the Lovell telescope as it was, tracking these space missions was not part of the, not part of the remit.
30:41We were supposed to be looking at the planets and things much farther out in space. And of course that work did continue.
30:47But suddenly this new arena opened up and not only the sort of peaceful use of space, but also this great tension between these, these, these two superpowers.
30:56And I think Jodrell sort of forged that, um, path between the two.
31:06I mean, this instrument was so far ahead of its time as a, as an engineering achievement, it was astonishing.
31:13And as a scientific instrument, it was uniquely capable of performing some of these tasks for both the Russians and the Americans.
31:20On the one hand, Lovell allowed the U.S. Air Force to base themselves at Jodrell Bank to use the telescope for tracking.
31:41And on the other, he invited Russian scientists to search for those space probes.
31:47Given the political climate, working with both sides at the time was totally unorthodox.
31:52Three, two, one, zero.
31:56Here's Jodrell Bank working for both the Americans and the Russians, tracking their material, um, and both sides knowing it's happening.
32:02I think it might have been just about the only thing that was remotely like that.
32:13Space tracking was a big coup for Lovell.
32:16His collaboration with the Americans in particular did much to restore his standing.
32:21Princess Margaret visited Jodrell Bank to send signals to the most successful American satellite, Pioneer 5, as it sped out into space.
32:28This rubber stamp of approval, on behalf of the British establishment, did a lot to ease the pressure on Lovell.
32:35One wealthy benefactor, Lord Nuffield, a pro-business, staunch anti-communist, was particularly impressed with Lovell's work.
32:43These various activities, although they were, as I said, a small portion of the work of the telescope, were very important.
32:54And one result was that the funding of the telescope, which had actually still lagged behind, was completely cleared by Lord Nuffield,
33:06who telephoned Bernard Lovell one day and said, how much more money do you need, and said, don't worry, we'll pay that.
33:16My impression is that Lovell's achievement was fantastic, given the situation in the country, given the fact that it was nearly bankrupt,
33:24given the fact that nobody was interested in doing kinds of things like this.
33:27We were very inward-looking, very negative. It was a dirty, dark place in those days.
33:35And I think for him to have collected some of the money together, and gone at it so hard to do it,
33:41and get to within, what was it, 50,000? The phone call paid. I'll pay for that. Bingo.
33:46I mean, it was brilliant. It said a lot, I thought, for the steely purpose behind that charming and urbane exterior.
33:55Oh, give me your attention. There's been a new invention. It isn't any larger than an adding machine.
34:07It's only fair to mention, though it's a new invention. It's one that you have heard about, but few have ever seen.
34:15I tick, tick, tick, tick. Why do I tick, tick? What amazing...
34:19By involving himself in the space race, Lovell tactically saved the telescope from ruin.
34:25But in 1962, as the Cold War intensified, a confrontation between the United States and Russia over Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba escalated.
34:34A dramatic standoff between the two superpowers brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
34:40Lovell's telescope was the only radar system in the UK capable of detecting incoming missiles, so it became the first line of defence.
34:47This sent Lovell into a torment of anxiety.
34:51And at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a team of trained military personnel, trained to use the telescope, who were on standby to walk in here into the control room to take over at the control desk here and to drive the telescope round to point east and to send out the radar pulses looking for the echoes from the missiles rising.
35:11And although we could have done nothing about it, we couldn't have prevented those missiles from hitting, it would have provided that several minutes for some people at least to get into the bunkers.
35:24A new phone with a green handset appeared on Father's desk in his study at home and that phone was not for use for any outgoing calls and certainly not for use by any of us.
35:43That was the hotline. That was the hotline. That was the phone on which Father was going to be told to make ready for the telescope to be used by the state as part of the Western defence because a missile strike was considered likely.
36:02Once again in his career, Lovell found himself engulfed by the threat of war, his scientific work threatened by political forces quite beyond his control.
36:17The Russians then invited him on a state visit, only a matter of months after the drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
36:24Because Jodrell had had this important role in defence, Lovell asked whether it was appropriate for him to be actually going to the Soviet Union so soon, soon after that.
36:37And actually nobody seemed to be worried, it was okay, it was fine for him to go.
36:42He went along and the surprising thing was that they actually, he was surprised by this, they took him to see what was their top secret facilities down on the coast of the Black Sea.
36:53So he was shown around this whole place and then, I think maybe even gently persuaded, might he consider the possibility of staying, you know, they could offer him some money to build his own large telescopes there in Russia.
37:10He didn't, he didn't want to stay in Russia, of course, he actually said he was an Englishman, he wanted to return to England.
37:16Upon his return, Lovell fell ill, suffering fatigue, headaches, depression and despondency.
37:23The authorities blamed his mysterious illness on radiation exposure that the Soviets had tried to poison him in an attempt to remove his memories.
37:31I don't think there was anything in that story, but it was an important thing for him.
37:50I mean, later in life, father rather warmed to the idea that the KGB had nobbled him, but I don't quite believe that.
38:01What I do remember is that after years and years, a tremendous strain in dealing with the telescope,
38:08and of going through the Cuban Missile Crisis with the telescope as an instrument of defence for the West,
38:16and an exhausting trip to Russia, that I think father was just wiped out.
38:23Rather than a Soviet poisoning conspiracy, it seems more likely that conflicting moral pressures caused Lovell's breakdown.
38:39And despite a knighthood, he considered abandoning his work at Jodrell Bank entirely.
38:45He had devoted enormous energies, long periods of time, wading against the currents of ignorance,
38:54to get his dream, his vision, made real and concrete and operational.
39:01And he was a pure scientist, and when it became the interest of the military and the politicians,
39:13he was deeply depressed, really shaken to his foundations of belief.
39:21And he had spoken about this, and he said that at one point he considered resigning and entering the priesthood.
39:30The father announced at one meal time that he was thinking of joining the priesthood.
39:47So this, I don't know how many of us children were there, but let's say there was quite a number of us,
39:53and this was pretty funny. We want to be clear, the atmosphere in the family home was not reverential to anybody.
40:02Everybody just had to fight their corner, including my father.
40:06And so there were gales of laughter at this. We thought this was really funny.
40:11And I can't remember the detail, but I'm sure one of us attempted an imitation of a sermon given by Bernard Lovell,
40:18explaining how God might well not exist.
40:23The priesthood clearly wasn't for Lovell, but his Methodist upbringing never left him.
40:30And when the BBC invited him to deliver the wreath lectures, it was to his spirituality that he turned.
40:38I am certainly not competent to discuss this problem of knowledge outside that acquired by my scientific tools,
40:44and my outlook is essentially a simple one.
40:48Simple, in the sense that I am no more surprised or distressed at the limitation of science when faced with this great problem of creation,
40:57than I am at the limitation of the spectroscope in describing the radiance of a sunset,
41:03or at the theory of counterpoint in describing the beauty of a fugue.
41:07He really had a real sense of beauty, and when he talked about the universe, you know,
41:16people think that scientists just see everything in numbers, but scientists see everything in numbers,
41:21and the numbers are beautiful.
41:24The wreath lectures really gave him a sense of the legitimacy of the work here,
41:30and what he was doing, and how important it was, and how valued it was in society.
41:35And certainly, I think, positioned him as a thinker as well as a scientist.
41:39I think it was an emergence of a new kind of public figure.
41:46While Lovell was now a public intellectual, the Jodrell-Bank story had also found its way into popular culture,
41:52via a BBC drama starring a new acting talent, Julie Christie.
41:57A-Fan Dromter was a BBC series that was aired in 1961,
42:08which just happens to be a story that is eerily similar to the Jodrell-Bank story.
42:14It was set at a large radio telescope in Yorkshire, managed by a charming and affable professor.
42:20Sound familiar?
42:22What's that one, Harvey? Number 103, Professor.
42:25At this new telescope, just as it's opening, something dramatic happens, just like Jodrell-Bank.
42:32It's not Sputnik, this case, but it's the picking up of a mysterious signal.
42:37The signal is found to be coming from the Andromeda galaxy.
42:43So this is a direct lift from the Jodrell-Bank story.
42:46Perhaps if it wasn't for that fluke, we should never have heard it.
42:50It was written by Fred Hoyle.
42:53He was, alongside Lovell, the most visible, famous astronomer in the country.
43:03Throughout the 1960s, Lovell and his telescope continue to generate stories,
43:08somehow always finding their way to the centre of dramatic space-age moments.
43:12Those weird sounds came from a spacecraft called Lunar-9, again recorded here at Jodrell-Bank in 1966.
43:29Lunar-9 was an unmanned spacecraft. It landed on the surface of the Moon.
43:42It took a photograph of the surface of the Moon, developed it, scanned it, and transmitted that photograph back to Earth in the form of a radio signal.
43:50Lovell used the telescope to hack into this signal, and deploying an early kind of fax machine, printed off the first pictures from the surface of the Moon.
44:03These were soon all over the news. Nothing like this had ever been seen before.
44:13After Lunar-9, Bernard Lovell was soon thrust back into the spotlight, when James Burke, the BBC's main reporter on the Space Race, asked him to contribute to his coverage of the audacious quest to put men on the Moon.
44:26We asked Lovell on the show, because he was a fantastic performer, the audiences absolutely loved him.
44:33You know, charming, urbane, affable, articulate, spoke with great clarity about what he was talking about.
44:39He was also, of course, the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, so a big wheel.
44:45And he gave the programmes kudos, he gave them authority.
44:49If somebody like that would come on our show, it would make it look better than it was.
44:54And it did, and he did.
44:59Apollo 8, launched in 1968, was the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth's orbit and fly around the Moon, recording the now iconic Earthrise footage.
45:11It's hard to believe now, because we're so blasé about it, but to look up in the sky and think that there were people on the other side of the Moon was just unbelievable.
45:17I mean, people went out in the street and stared up, and couldn't believe that it was happening.
45:21But Lovell saw getting to the Moon as a circus event and had mixed feelings about it.
45:26He was one of the first to question the value of the American missions.
45:30When Bernard was in the studio, inevitably the subject of the scientific purpose of the missions came up, and he was understandably ambivalent about it, as indeed many scientists were at the time.
45:42And so what, then, does this particular exercise add to our knowledge, in terms of observing the Moon's surface, Sir Bernard?
45:49I don't honestly think that you must search too much for any new vivid scientific facts which are going to arise from these photographs or from this slide.
45:59It's important to emphasize, this is not really the point I would draw.
46:02We must treat it as a really tremendous human adventure and a superb engineering achievement.
46:06And I think, later in life, he said he became even more ambivalent about the question of whether or not you should send men anywhere.
46:12He did, on Apollo 8 and later, say that these were great technological triumphs, which, of course, they were, if you think about computing, for example, the amount of computer power they had.
46:24You know, I've got more on my cell phone today, but they got to the Moon and back.
46:35If you like, the space race helped us get the telescope working and financed a lot of good scientific work.
46:44But in itself, the space race, the race to launch rockets and get them going and put people in rockets, that was not really our business at all.
46:57As the space programs went on, tracking equipment was developed all over the world and the reliance on Lovell's telescope declined.
47:05So Jodrell Bank was able to dedicate itself entirely to science.
47:14The kind of discoveries that Berner was making with his own telescope were immensely more important than Apollo, immensely more important.
47:19I mean, Apollo, let's face it, was, we're better than you.
47:23It was a political statement. Really, 99% of it was that.
47:26If the space race was mainly metal bashing and Buck Rogers, then the really big scientific question of the age wasn't can man walk on the moon, but how did the universe begin?
47:40Radio astronomy was at the very centre of this debate and Lovell one of those leading it.
47:46Sir Bernard, it seems to me that the scientist's choice between the Big Bang theory and the theory of continuous creation is really entirely an arbitrary one until somebody does some experiments or make some observations to prove it one way or the other.
48:02Now, is this telescope going to hell?
48:04Oh, certainly. We think that it's penetrating so far back in time and out in space that it is giving us information about these regions,
48:14which probably hold the key to this great problem.
48:21It was the radio astronomers who were the only ones capable of looking far enough back into time and space to picture the very beginning of the universe.
48:30They dealt the final death blow to the steady state hypothesis by discovering the radiation left over from the Big Bang.
48:38But rather than settling debates, this probing into the outer reaches of the universe would yield even more fantastic discoveries.
48:46And Jodrell Bank would have a hand in the next big breakthrough.
48:50One gifted student was inspired by a formative summer at Jodrell, being introduced to the cutting edge of experimental radio astronomy.
49:05Jocelyn Bell Burnell went on to do pioneering research at Cambridge University, from where she would make one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.
49:17I began to notice there was something slightly curious on the records.
49:21They came out as paper charts.
49:23And, of course, on these charts, you could see radio sources.
49:27But there was also something that didn't quite fit either bill.
49:31It wasn't exactly a twinkling radio source, and it wasn't exactly interference either.
49:36And it finally turned out to be this signal that goes blip, blip, blip, blip.
49:46Typically, when you look at radio waves coming from outer space, if you were to play those signals through a speaker, you'd hear a hiss, sort of a white noise.
49:55There'd be no pattern detectable in there.
49:57Now we have this regular pulsing pattern.
50:01And that was, in a sense, that would be exactly the sort of thing you might expect if someone was sending a deliberate signal.
50:08The natural assumption is it's artificial.
50:11It's Earth man-made.
50:14Only it wasn't Earth man-made because it moved around the sky with the stars.
50:18So is it ET?
50:21Is it little green men out there?
50:23But when Jocelyn found similar signals across the sky,
50:26it was soon realised that they were, in fact, exotic astronomical objects.
50:31And then about the same time, I found the second, the third and the fourth.
50:35And then it gets really incredible that these things are little green men.
50:39It has to be something much more natural.
50:41And it was soon realised, actually, that these things were not extraterrestrials,
50:46but actually perhaps something just as exciting for a physicist.
50:49They were things that we now call pulsars.
50:51They're actually the remnants of exploded stars.
50:55So when stars, more than about eight times the mass of the Sun, reach the end of their lives,
51:02they run out of nuclear fuel and they're collapsing on themselves.
51:06And we see them because they beam out radiation from their magnetic poles.
51:11And as the star spins, it behaves exactly like a lighthouse.
51:15So this beam sweeps around and you see a flash, flash, flash.
51:20These distant beacons from the very depths of the universe turned out to be ideal for Lovell's telescope to study,
51:32because it could point at any part of the sky.
51:35Astronomers could test physics to its extremes using these objects,
51:39and Jodrell Bank has been studying them for over 40 years.
51:44I think it is a lovely story that Jocelyn did in fact come to Jodrell Bank first,
51:49then went to Cambridge and made this magnificent discovery.
51:53Now back in Jodrell, Jodrell is in fact one of the world centres, I should dare say the world centre for pulsar research.
52:08So pulsars weren't a message from E.T.
52:12But the idea of alien life was somehow in the ether.
52:16Both Bernard Lovell and Fred Hoyle were prepared to entertain the notion with a good deal of enthusiasm.
52:23But now it seems unlikely that the Earth is unique and our own planetary system is unique.
52:28In fact, the modern ideas about the formation of planetary systems makes it seem quite certain
52:34that planetary systems, of which the one around the sun is an example,
52:38must be of extremely frequent occurrence in the universe.
52:41Nature doesn't do things in ones and twos.
52:44She does not mean there are millions of planets,
52:47millions of stars and millions of galaxies,
52:50and very likely up there, millions of other different kinds of intelligent creatures.
52:59What was once the sole concern of B-movies
53:02was now being seen as a legitimate scientific query,
53:05backed up by the nation's leading astrophysicists.
53:14Stanley's interest really was, is there life elsewhere in the universe?
53:18So the only possibility that we could find out whether there was extraterrestrial life
53:26was of course through radio astronomy.
53:28Could we pick up signals from other civilizations?
53:32And radio astronomy, of course, was the way to do it.
53:35At the end of the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick would make a visionary film
53:39about the question of life in the universe.
53:41He wanted it to be a serious work that engaged fully with hard science.
53:46But in order to do so, he would have to talk to a number of leading figures.
53:50First on the list was Sir Bernard Lovell, Britain's leading astrophysicist.
53:54He chose Sir Bernard Lovell because he was, I mean, the nearest thing we've ever had in this country
54:03to a celebrity star astronomer.
54:05So he was very visible at the time.
54:07And in a sense, he was quite a natural person for Kubrick to come and speak to about 2001.
54:14And I also think Lovell was very aware that it's by connecting people to stories
54:21and narrative and imagination, you know, that they then become connected to the science.
54:26I think there's a great similarity between Stanley's work and Sir Bernard Lovell.
54:40And I think it can be summed up in one word, determination.
54:45Lovell made an impossible dream into a reality, turning a muddy field into an installation capable
54:56of giving Britain a key role in the space age.
55:00I think he did a tremendous amount in simply getting that telescope onto the public consciousness,
55:06which he did, partly because of his hard work and partly because of his charm.
55:10And every time he went on television, he was a winner, you know, he did, he had audiences.
55:20From a speculative beginning, the Lovell telescope is now an icon of British science.
55:27This telescope is still doing cutting-edge scientific research.
55:30And actually, Jodrell Banks is now the home of the next great radio telescope,
55:34the Square Kilometre Array, which will see the future of radio astronomy for at least the next 50 years.
55:40The theme here isn't conflict, isn't defence, isn't spies, isn't what turns out to be ephemeral stuff.
56:00It's science. It's people seeking knowledge.
56:04The telescope is obviously an impressive scientific instrument.
56:15But what Lovell built far exceeds its initial purpose
56:19and has inspired more than a small group of astrophysicists.
56:23From science fiction creators to small children who wanted to build it out of Meccano,
56:28the telescope is more than the sum of its parts.
56:32You walk onto that site and look at it and you just think, wow, I mean, it's overwhelming.
56:37I mean, this beautifully sculptured form.
56:39I mean, it certainly sort of knocked me for six.
56:43I mean, I was lost for words, you know.
56:46I think people have a really strong response to it because it's so big.
56:49And I think it's kind of a sort of visceral human thing.
56:52You know, I'm from the northeast of England and the Angel of the North has had a similar impact on people.
56:58You know, there's a real sort of sense of ownership in place, really.
57:01And people regard it as something that signals home or signals their own sense of belonging and heritage.
57:07And I think that connected to the fact that they also know it's picking up signals from way out in space,
57:14which is a really fascinating thing for everybody.
57:17Lovell, the son of Methodists, who listened to the heavens the better to understand the science of the universe,
57:29is a very modern kind of hero who leaves behind a very special legacy.
57:34Sir Bernard Lovell died in August 2012, but the telescope which bears his name has fused itself into both the Cheshire landscape and the popular imagination.
57:49People say, and where are you from?
57:53We said, well, you wouldn't know really, it's way depth in the heart of Cheshire.
57:58Right near the telescope.
58:01You don't need to mention Jodrell Bank telescope.
58:06Oh, yes, I know, I've been there.
58:09We have been put on the map because of the telescope.
58:14It's fitted in.
58:19I think it's fitted in beautifully.
58:21And when you're looking at it, going along the road from Twenlow towards Cheltenham,
58:27it's just a magnificent sight, really.
58:30Especially in the sunset, when the sunset's going down.
58:35The light's shining on it.
58:37It's a wonderful sight.
58:39And previous episodes of Time Shift are available to buy from the BBC store.
58:47Next tonight here on BBC4, the face that launched a thousand rumours, myths and sightings.
58:52Brand new Storyville tells a tale of Jimmy Ellis, who posed as Elvis back from the dead.
58:58I will focus on you, Chrisamı.
59:08Tell us about you later on, 1996, 1-577-111-663-私達-Qué wholesaler from www.Laranglast.org.
59:12The truth rends more the light above you from the world,
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