Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussedExoplanets. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.
Exoplanets
Hello
I was going to write at some length about Russia, or more specifically Moscow, to which I went for a few days last week. However, I might find space for a last paragraph.
What I'd like to pass on are some of the comments made after the programme when the conversation was just as clear, rapid and coherent. It seems that if Professor Higgs does not win the next Nobel Prize, then it will be won by someone dealing with exoplanets. The study has come on apace, as they used to say. Don Pollacco pointed out that it is now cool to study exoplanets. 25 years ago it was eccentric. Four or five hundred years ago, if you had suggested planets outside our solar system, you'd have been burnt at the stake. This is called the advance of knowledge. Technology is furiously surging on. It's developed so that soon it may be possible to get direct images of these planets. They were worried that they had not talked about the launch of the Gaia telescope, which would bring us even more exoplanets. And a new satellite mission will study the galaxy in such detail that it will give us a very accurate 3-D map which will revolutionise our knowledge of the galaxy.
Someone said that every single planet in the solar system has clouds and all predictions about how the clouds will work fail. That might be some consolation to those who do the weather in this country. The influence of clouds is the biggest uncertainty in this study. So far they are impossible to predict. There are also some things called rogue planets, i.e. planets not orbiting any star. Where do they come from? So far nobody knows. The thing about the universe outside our solar system is that, compared with us, it is a mighty fury of contradictions, indirections, insubordination, outlaws, own laws and no laws at all, as far as we can make out. What it is, above all, is a new body of knowledge which, if the history of bodies of knowledge is to be considered, will bring this world riches which we cannot at the moment even begin to imagine.
And so to Moscow. The centre of Moscow is much smarter and more handsome than I remember it from about 20 years ago. Much. Almost every building is six storeys, which gives it a pleasing and old-fashioned uniformity. Many of them are being painted up and they look very attractive in seaside colours. The shops do not advertise themselves as shops and so streets can seem rather dull, but there are word signs outside and if you look through the windows you see shops full of produce. The great department store GUM in Red Square is massive. It's like Venice enclosed in stone. Wonderfully worked stone. Inside there are canals of the latest European shops, with bridges stretching from one side to another two and three storeys up. You feel that you are in the centre of the world's luxury trade.
Red Square has one of the most eccentric and wonderful churches I've ever seen. St Basil's. It is in fact about a dozen chapels with onion domes and murals and marvellously worked icons. It looks like something out of a scene in the Arabian Nights. There are over 800 churches in Moscow and those I went to are extraordinarily well-preserved. And then there is the inner circular park walkway; there's the Conservatoire which is dedicated to Tchaikovsky ... And I saw a magnificent production of Educating Rita by a young, English-speaking company at a small theatre in the middle of the town. Too much really to absorb in too little time. But changed it has since I was there last. How deep, I don't know. How long-lasting, I don't know. But how striking!
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
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