Stand Outs
Searching for Anomalies
Science is a learning process. Anomalies are nature’s way of teaching us something new. First, we have to look for them.
My mother said that when she saw me in the hospital room with all the other babies born that day, I was looking all around the room with open eyes as if I was wondering about the world that I was just born into. In her words, I looked very different from the other babies who focused their attention on their immediate vicinity. I am not sure if we want to take my mother’s word for it; after all, she was not an unbiased observer. But whether she was predisposed does not matter. As a scientist, I now behave in just the way she described.
Science is a learning process. And the best way to learn is by keeping our eyes open and searching for new phenomena that violate our preconceptions. Anomalies are nature’s way of teaching us something new.
These days, machine learning algorithms could be efficient at sorting through large data sets in search for anomalies.
Scientists can do the same, but the fear from damaging a good reputation often blocks them from admitting that they see a new phenomenon that cannot be explained by prior notions.
The truth is that our knowledge is a small island in a vast ocean of ignorance. But our ego often blocks us from recognizing the incompleteness in our understanding of reality.
A cave dweller finding a cellphone would argue that it is a rock of a new type, in the same way that earthlings who studied the anomalies of the first interstellar object `Oumuamua suggested that it is a comet of a type “never seen before”, such as an iceberg made of pure hydrogen or pure nitrogen, even though these possibilities face “serious difficulties” in the words of some of their proponents.
When a colleague of mine, specializing in solar system rocks, heard about `Oumuamua, he said: “this interstellar object is so weird … I wish it never existed.”
His statement explains why innovation is often suppressed in the face of anomalies. Mainstream scientists would prefer these anomalies to go away in order to maintain the prestige that they can forecast all data with their existing knowledge. They find anomalies to pose a threat to their status as “experts” in the field.
When at leadership positions, these “experts” could establish roadblocks that suppress discoveries in the community around them. In 1909, Edward Charles Pickering, who served as director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1877 until 1919, argued that telescopes had reached their optimal size of 50–70 inches and there was no advantage to be gained from seeking larger apertures. In a 1908 article titled ‘The Future of Astronomy’, he wrote: “It is more than doubtful, however, whether a further increase in size is a great advantage… It seems as if we had nearly reached the limit of size of telescopes, and as if we must hope for the next improvement in some other direction.” Pickering’s blunder led to a major blow for observational astronomy on the east coast of the USA.
On the west coast, just before Pickering’s article was published, George Ellery Hale obtained first light on the 60 inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, which became one of the most productive telescopes in astronomical history. Around the same time, Hale received funding from John Hooker and Andrew Carnegie to create a larger telescope. The 100 inch telescope was completed in 1917; Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason later used it to discover the expansion of the Universe. It was surpassed in 1948 by the 200 inch telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California, which played a key role in the discovery of radio galaxies and quasars and in studies of the intergalactic medium. Clearly, bigger telescopes continued to benefit astronomy as technology improved.
The lack of support for discovery initiatives suppresses the rate of progress. For example, David Jewitt at the University of California, Los Angeles, could not get telescope time or funding for attempts to detect the conjectured population of Kuiper Belt objects. He used observing time and funding he received for other projects until he finally discovered the first of these objects in the outer Solar System with Jane Luu in 1992, using the 88 inch telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
But there is a brighter future ahead with private-sector funding that is not contingent on committees dominated by conservative scientists. This is how I funded the recent Galileo Project in search for the nature of unusual objects like `Oumuamua.
Another reason for optimism is that science will be pursued by our technological kids who could perform better than us. The efficiency of making new discoveries can be improved by removing the human ego from the process. This can be implemented through artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that would accelerate discoveries by avoiding prejudice.
And if we can hope this reality for ourselves, extraterrestrial civilizations that predated us may have established it a billion years ago. To find out if they did, we should search the sky for AI systems that they may have launched into space. Of course, scientists who wish that `Oumuamua never existed, would never find these extraterrestrial systems. But their substitutes, in the form of ego-free AI systems, might. Given this perspective, the Galileo Project will surely employ machine learning to search for anomalies in the sky.
Avi Loeb is the founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos.”
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