Abstract
Michael Rowan-Robinson has set himself a formidable task – to encompass the evolution of the whole of infrared astronomy from its beginnings to 2012 in 186 modest–sized pages (not counting notes, indices, etc.). The task is made somewhat easier in that there is a strong autobiographical element to his telling of the story. This is very much his perception of the way in which the scientific content of the discipline of infrared astronomy has evolved out of all recognition, particularly from the time his interests in the subject were first aroused in the early 1970s. Since then Rowan-Robinson has been involved in many of the most important projects in infrared astronomy and seen from the inside the subject’s spectacular development. Having been involved myself in this area, I can vouch for the accuracy of the story.
This book is aimed at the astronomical enthusiast who does not necessarily have the background to appreciate how revolutionary many of the parts of the narrative are. Because of the expansive nature of the discipline, ranging from dust, the smallest bodies in the solar system, through planet and star formation, star and galaxy evolution to the earliest phases of the Big Bang, it is not surprising that huge areas of research and historical background can make no more than a fleeting appearance in the book. On essentially every page, I could identify topics which would fill whole books in themselves; but if this book encourages the interested reader to take these topics further, that can only be a very good thing.
There are a number of striking features of the story, some of which the author states explicitly and others which underlie the dramatic success of the discipline. Rowan-Robinson offers a completely new set of heroes who created the subject, quite different from the traditional optically-based story of astronomy and cosmology. Neugebauer, Low, Becklin, Rieke, Genzel and many others, including Rowan-Robinson himself, opened up the field, very much against the conservative instincts of the majority of optical astronomers. It is inconceivable to think about star and galaxy formation nowadays without recognising that these topics are the birthright of infrared astronomy; but this was certainly not the case in the beginning, when the efforts of the infrared pioneers were regarded as somewhat irrelevant. Early radio astronomers experienced a similar dynamic.
And like radio astronomers, the infrared pioneers came largely from a background in physics rather than astronomy. The reason is that the technology was much closer to that of the physics laboratory than to the optical workshop. The detector and telescope technologies were quite different from those of optical astronomy, very often involving cryogenics, detectors at the very cutting edge of high technology, chopping and nodding techniques to attain high sensitivity, and so on. At the same time, these technologies became available largely through the need of the military to advance the title of this book, namely, Night Vision. This is a fascinating story in its own right. Glimpses of it appear in the book, but it is surely a subject ripe for a major study. John Hearnshaw’s splendid The Measurement of Starlight: Two Centuries of Astronomical Photometry (2d ed., 2014) provides many key insights into the development of infrared detectors and Ian McLean’s Electronic Imaging in Astronomy (1997) describes many of the key technical issues. But the story in its full technical, methodological and political contexts would make a fascinating study.
To give but one example, I was personally involved in the efforts to make available the first common-user infrared arrays produced by the Santa Barbara Research Center for the users of UKIRT in the mid-1980s. These arrays were already being developed by the Riekes for their own projects in the USA, but in the UK our objective was to make these amazing arrays, which were to revolutionise infrared astronomy in the 1 to 5 µm waveband, available to all UK astronomers. The technical and political barriers which had to be overcome by my colleagues, Ian McLean and Terry Lee, to achieve success are the stuff of the professional historian of science. It has to be said that the Santa Barbara technologists were very supportive all the way through, but we were certainly aware of the knife-edge we were often treading. The underlying problem was that there was no way in which the enormous investments needed to create these arrays could be afforded by the UK, but they could be bought as spin-offs from the military research and development programmes.
In summary, this book is a gentle introduction to the universe of infrared astronomy by one of its pioneers and can be safely put into the hands of the enthusiast. It is far from the whole story, but that would be for a very different and more technically oriented audience. Following up the many references in this book is the next step for the real enthusiast and the professional historian of astronomy.