There Is No Cat - Karl Jansky and the birth of radio astronomy

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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Karl Jansky and the birth of radio astronomy

A friend of mine posted a link to a PDF on the web site of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, about an attempt in the 1990s to build a replica of the original antenna used by the first radio astronomer, Karl Jansky back in the 1930s. I happen to know a little about Jansky, because the site where he discovered / created the science of radio astronomy was at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where I worked for several years. In fact, while I was the webmaster for the Bell Labs site, we posted a story about a couple of Bell Labs scientists who decided that Jansky's work should be honored with a monument at the exact location where radio astronomy was born.

The monument took the form of a stylized rendition of the original, which you can see in both of the links in the first paragraph.

Sadly, Bell Labs moved out of the building in Holmdel a few years ago. There have been attempts to sell the building and redevelop the huge tract of land in the middle of a very wealthy community, but they've come to naught, and the property is blocked off and basically inaccessible at this point. Back in 2007, shortly before the barriers were erected, I visited the site and took some pictures. Lucent, the corporate father of Bell Labs, had fallen on hard times, and the maintenance of a monument to their glorious corporate and scientific past at a location they didn't even want to own any more took a pretty low priority.

The text of the monument reads:

At this location in 1931, Karl Jansky, a Bell Laboratories physicist and radio researcher, recorded for the first time radio signals from beyond the Earth. The source of these signals -- radio noise at a wavelength of 14.6 meters -- was the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

This sculpture commemorates Jansky's discovery, first announced in 1933, which gave birth to the science of radio astronomy. The sculpture is oriented as Jansky’s antenna was at 7:10 p.m. on September 16, 1932, at a moment of maximum signal. As his directional antenna rotated, the center of our galaxy came into view in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, low on the southern horizon.

Radio Astronomy pioneer Karl Jansky died in 1950, years before the scientific community realized the significance of his discovery. In 1973, the International Astronomical Union gave his name to the international unit of radio flux density. Jansky’s work led to a number of breakthroughs in astronomy: the discovery of quasars, pulsars, radio galaxies, and near this site in 1964, the Nobel Prize-winning discovery by Bell Laboratories scientists of the cosmic microwave background which has revolutionized our understanding of the origin of the universe.

It’s sad that the monument was left to the elements and blocked by barricades. I hope that someday it will be accessible again.

Tags: jansky

Posted at 9:00 PM

Comments

bittersweet story...I'm so glad you captured these photos. I wish you could sneak back in and create a historic Gowalla location.

Here's hoping the memorial stands and is revitalized in the future.

xxoo, Glenny

Posted by goodwitch at 9:26 PM, August 31, 2010 [Link]

For all that the neglect of history is sad on that, it still does look kinda cool all overgrown like that in a "Nothing But Flowers" sort of way.

Still, I hope like you do that it can be restored and the land used.

Posted by lilsis at 8:30 AM, September 1, 2010 [Link]

It's interesting how there are so many places marked as "George Washington Slept Here," but an important historical site for science is neglected.

Posted by Dev Gualtieri at 1:11 PM, September 30, 2010 [Link]

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"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio