"Seeing" Stars

I got fascinated when I was 5 or less. My father was a physicist. He read to me out of The Golden Book of Astronomy. His descriptions were so vivid that I could imagine touching these cold planets. I was literally out there.

What is your job?

I am director of research and development for SETI [in Mountain View, California], which is the search for extraterrestrial life. So I work with radio signals. At the moment, I am working on the hardware and software for the next generation of SETI. We will be able to go from searching something like 1,000 stars in a decade to something between 100,000 and a million in a decade. That is why things are so jazzy.

Do you really think there is life out there?

I think the idea that we are a cosmic miracle is silly. Maybe silly is too strong a word, but it would be remarkable.

Do you have dreams about astronomy?

I don't dream about aliens. I don't contemplate aliens. To try to decide in detail what these creatures are would fill my mind with preconceptions. I would not like to get so clever that I decide that there would only be one kind of signal [they would send]. We know so little that to limit the search more than you have to is a bad idea. I do have dreams about astronomy, but they are only occasional. I dream math.

You "dream math"?

To a large extent, the mathematics that I do before I test it numerically is a vision. Imagine a ball moving, and I visualize the curve it moves in, in space -- it is a tactile curve. It is typically those kinds of visions that I have.

As a blind person, what was the hardest thing about learning astronomy?

Diagrams. Every day in class, the teacher would say, "It looks like this," and there was this "shick-shick-shick" on the board. And I said, "You know what, maybe I should be an English major." But I stayed with physics and conquered the diagram drama.

What advice do you have for other blind people who want to go into the sciences?

Persistence counts for a lot. But if you want to be good at any job and you are blind, you should choose something that you really love, because you are going to have to put in a lot of extra work.

What about amateur radio? Is your interest in that one of the reasons you went into astronomy?

Absolutely. I got a ham radio license when I was 11 in 1961. We call distant contacts DX. I started with talking to people across the United States, then across the world. Now I am looking for that really distant contact.