Astronomy expert wins Lifetime Achievement Award

TALI FEINBERG

At the beginning of October, Fanaroff was awarded the 2018 lifetime achievement award by the National Research Foundation. This award is given to individuals who have made “extraordinary contributions of international standard and impact to the development of science and in South Africa over an extended period of time”. The manner in which their work has touched and shaped the lives and views of many South Africans is also considered, according to Committee Chairperson Lindiwe Maseko.

Fanaroff was also awarded the National Order of Mapungubwe in 2014, which is South Africa’s highest honour and granted by the president himself. This award is for achievements in the international arena which have served South Africa’s interests. On the award it is written, “He served in all these positions with the single focus of making South Africa stand out in the global community.”

While Fanaroff believes these awards are a great honour, “It is not something I have done on my own. I’ve just led the teams who have done the actual work,” he told the SA Jewish Report in a rare media interview. “You’ve got to make sure that you convey to people that you appreciate what they’ve done… One of the nice things about leading teams is that you learn a lot from them.”

His story begins, like many South Africans, with his grandparents coming to South Africa from Latvia and Tzarist Russia. His parents wanted to work in the sciences, but could get bursaries only to study teaching, which they did most of their lives. But they passed an interest in science on to their son, as well as a strong connection to his roots. “I’m extremely proud of my Jewish heritage, especially the values of humanism, social justice, and equality. We have a great reverence for learning and knowledge, and very close families,” Fanaroff says.

It is these two sometimes opposing forces of science and humanism that have guided the course of his life. “I decided to study radio astronomy at Wits, a relatively young subject at the time,” recalls Fanaroff. “After World War II, equipment from the war was salvaged to study radio waves, which are signals outside of our solar system and Milky Way galaxy.”

He explains in layman’s terms that he studied the energy and events around black holes in space, and he was fortunate to go to Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1970 to do his PhD. There, he worked with other young scientists who were competing to make the next big discovery. He and fellow PhD student Julia Riley were the ones that found it – they wrote a paper that would revolutionise the way astronomers understood these radio waves.

“We noticed there were two kinds of pictures of jets emerging from black holes, shining brighter at different points. We were able to class these as type one and type two,” explains Fanaroff in simple terms. He says finding relationships and patterns in this work is vital but rare, which is why this was such a breakthrough. The two classes of radio sources now bear their names – Fanaroff-Riley class I, and Fanaroff-Riley class II, and they are still used today.

On his return to South Africa, Fanaroff began teaching physics at Wits, but he was increasingly drawn to join the struggle against apartheid. He threw himself into the trade-union movement, seeking out those that were non-racial and not aligned to party politics.

Eventually, he dedicated 19 years to being an organiser and national secretary of the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union, and in 1994, he became deputy director-general in the office of former President Nelson Mandela. During all this he was not able to return to the sciences, but found it extremely rewarding to work on building a better South Africa.

Between 1997 and 2000, he served as deputy director-general in the Ministry of Safety and Security, and as chair of the Integrated Justice System Board and the Steering Committee for Border Control. In 2000, Fanaroff set up his own consulting business outside of government, and he did not expect to play any more major roles in either astronomy or activism.

“But then, I was approached to manage South Africa’s bid to host the world’s biggest telescope,” recalls Fanaroff, referring to the SKA. He led the conceptualisation, development, and construction of its precursor, the MeerKat.

“Thankfully, we were able to ask the right questions, and make the right decisions,” he says humbly. This was a reason, he believes, that South Africa won the bid.

The SKA is an international project to build a radio telescope ten times more sensitive and hundreds times faster at mapping the sky than today’s best radio astronomy facilities. It will be powerful enough to detect very faint radio signals emitted by cosmic sources billions of light years away from Earth, those signals emitted in the first billion years of the Universe (more than 13 billion years ago) when the first galaxies and stars started forming.

The SKA will be used to answer fundamental questions of science and about the laws of nature, such as: how did the Universe, and the stars and galaxies contained in it, form and evolve? Was Einstein’s theory of relativity correct? What is the nature of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’? What is the origin of cosmic magnetism? Is there life somewhere else in the Universe? But, perhaps, the most significant discoveries to be made by the SKA are those we cannot predict.

Says Fanaroff: “We have a cohort of young engineers that are as good as or better than anyone in the world,”, pointing out that he and he believes young South Africans can play a key role in the fourth industrial revolution.

He hopes that the government will invest and commit to projects similar to the SKA, which will offer opportunities for research, jobs, investment, and make South Africa a global player. He envisions a future where the digital revolution will not only boost the coffers of our country, but its people too. “There is scope to do as much as you want to do, as long as you have respect for other people – then they will work with you.”