LISTEN UP

I seldom manage to work myself up into a state of real anger about the news agenda any more. I may get miffed, I sometimes get irked, and I’m often irritated by it, of course, as anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with these pages could no doubt confirm, but I’m seldom made angry by it. After all, I just don’t seem have the energy any more. I’ve retired, defeated, from the ring in the realisation that it’s a hopeless cause, and come to the inevitable conclusion that for me to try and change the way things are in this vacuous modern world of ours is just a waste of time and effort.

On Tuesday the 6th of August this year, however, a sad event was announced which managed to annoy me in ways which I wouldn’t have been able to predict that morning when I got up to face the day.

I just happened to be sipping my mid-morning cup of coffee and idly kicked up Twitter to see what the world had been chatting about whilst I’d been tweaking and twiddling around with some design work.

Rather sadly, I chose the exact minute when Jodrell Bank made its sad announcement of the death of its founder, Sir Bernard Lovell, that rather brilliant pioneer of radio astronomy, and a bona fide British genius, at the age of 98, and I found that rather unsettling and upsetting.

What was more unsettling was how long it took the primary British news broadcaster to announce the story. ITN and Sky were fairly quick off the mark, and the University of Manchester, where he did much of his pioneering work, had an announcement up within minutes, but BBC News were, rather ironically, focussing their radar on a man not managing to jump far enough in a sand-pit and continued to fret about that for another two hours before they finally announced the “breaking news” of the passing of a truly great Briton, knighted more than fifty years ago for services to something far more fundamental than being able to go a bit faster than someone else.

He was, of course, a very old man, and, despite the great leaps and strides made in recent years, and the rip-roaring triumph of that remote landing on Mars the very same week, science still struggles to be considered “sexy” to the news media outlets, and it is very difficult to get the BBC to admit at the moment that there is anything other than the Olympic Games happening in the world, but there really was no excuse for their tardiness in announcing to the world the passing of someone of whom we could justifiably be very proud and who quite rightly deserved to be called a “legend”.

After all this was a man who helped develop the radar system that was part of what made our shores safer from invasion during the second world war and without whom… Oh, so very much really.

A man who built himself a static 60 metre parabolic dish just to prove a point, before raising the funds to build his masterpiece (only relatively recently renamed the Lovell Telescope), the radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank observatory, which is still at the forefront of astronomical research and one of the foremost astronomical radio telescopes in the world more than fifty years after it was first built with an expected lifespan of perhaps at best fifteen years.

Back when it was first completed in 1957, Jodrell Bank was able to prove its worth shortly afterwards by being able to track and confirm the orbit of the first Russian Sputnik at the start of the “Space Age” and Sir Bernard and his team (he was already well-known enough to give his first name to Professor Quatermass in 1953) were able to intercept the signals from the Soviet Luna probe and trump the Russians by being the first to show their pictures of the dark side of the moon, but since then, the work started in that field in Cheshire has taught us so much about the nature of the universe and our place within it that we should be grateful every single day that we had minds that were enquiring enough and fascinated enough to think beyond our little planet and make it possible for humanity to go out there and explore it.

I only hope that someone was able to tell him about the success of “Curiosity” and that he understood what had happened out there before he left us.

Sir Bernard Lovell, 31st August 1913 – 6th August 2012.