2 minutes with... Prof. Richard Schilizzi

In August, SKAO HQ welcomed former SKA Director Richard Schilizzi, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at The University of Manchester and the lead author of a forthcoming book on the history of the project.

Welcome back to the HQ, Richard! Tell us about the meeting you’ve been holding.

I’ve been here for a writers’ week for the SKA history book. This covers the period from 1993 when the International Union of Radio Science created a Large Telescope Working Group, to 2012 when the telescope site decision was made, just after my tenure as director ended. We’re working towards submitting the book later this year for publication next year by Springer Nature as part of their series of books on Historical and Cultural Astronomy.

What’s the scope of the book?

It’s a narrative of what happened and what went on behind the scenes to set up decisions, but also our reflections on why things happened. Many people know parts of the story, and those who have read draft chapters have said how much comes back to them which they had forgotten. I often say human memory is a leaky storage device; it is amazing what people remember and don’t remember!

So it’s the first time all this history has been written down in one place.

Yes, and it really makes you realise just how complex the project is because it’s global. There were many nations involved, different funding cycles, different working cultures, and many national activities feeding into the overall picture. That’s what we try to draw together in the 500 pages of the book. I’ve always thought there should be a volume two for the pre-construction and construction phase, exploring the different problems that came up and how they were tackled. That would be a good project for [SKAO Director-General] Phil Diamond when he retires!

What do you think when you see how far the project has come now?

It’s a fantastic achievement. To see what started off all those decades ago turn into the SKA Observatory, a treaty organisation like CERN, ESA and ESO, is just brilliant. And now of course construction has started. The telescope design we foresaw a decade or more ago is pretty much what is being built.

We know it’s going to do amazing things; we can see that already happening in the precursors and pathfinders, and the SKA is bigger and will do even more transformational work. We also know from history that a large fraction of what the telescope becomes known for is not written down in the science case – that’s the discovery of the unknown.

“The Square Kilometre Array: a Science Mega-Project in the Making, 1993-2012” by Richard Schilizzi, Ron Ekers, Phil Crosby, and Peter Dewdney will be published in 2023.

Prof. Richard Schilizzi

SKAO