Start the Week

29/11/2010

Andrew Marr travels back to Egypt in the 1950s to a time of religious pluralism and openness with the writer Tarek Osman. As Egypt votes in parliamentary elections, Tarek, asks what has happened in the intervening years. Francis Spufford imagines a very different world with his account of the Soviet Union under Kruschchev, and what could have happened if the dream of plenty had come true. Turkey's best-selling female novelist, Elif Shafak, argues against the constraints of identity politics and the pigeon-holing of multi-cultural writers. While Vicky Kaspi believes that we should be looking to outer space to stimulate curiosity and creativity: the astrophysicist and cosmologist researches some of the universe's most mysterious objects.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 29 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

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Later on we're going to hear from one of the new stars of the Turkish novel The Best Selling Ellif Shafak about spiritual dreams, and from the astrophysicist Vicky Caspi about pulsars and neutron stars leaking light messages from deep space. But we're going to start with two of the countries still of enough interest to US diplomats to feature in those WikiLeaks leaks. Egypt's ruler Hosni Mubarak's quoted as "inveying against the liars of Iran." But Egypt itself was once thought to be a rising power in the region. Tariq Osman, author of Egypt on the Brinks with me to discuss what went wrong, and we're going to start with Russia. Francis Spuffer's novel Red Plenty homes in on that moment in the late 1950s, early 1960s, when diplomatic messages were discussing the possibility that the Soviets were about to overtake the West, not merely in missiles, but in consumer goods as well. Francis, it was a sort of now forgotten moment certainly in the West, but it wasn't just in the West that there was this sense of optimism. Russians felt it too. Yes, I think it was real optimism. Partly, it was just Russians comparing a better present with a truly grim recent past. But because of that, I think they were willing just for a little while to believe the regime's promises that the future would go on getting better and better and better until it reached something like the dream of plenty which Marx had described at an end to history in which everyone would have so much of enough, they didn't even have to measure it anymore. Yeah, and you feature Khrushchev himself as a rather sympathetic character in many ways in this book, somebody who has gone through the ghastly years of the sort of the famines and the slaughter and the massacres and who hopes it will be worth it. Important to remember that he's someone who partly caused the ghastly years of the famines and the slaughter. What fascinates me about Khrushchev is that he appears to be that very rare thing and monster with an intact conscience. And I think he dreamed of and yearned for and committed the country to utopia partly as a way of settling his internal moral scores with himself. The future had to be wonderful because it was the only thing which would justify the past. I've broken all those eggs, so it better be one heck of an omelet that we're producing. Exactly, it would save you at omelet making committed to 300% improvement under Khrushchev. Now explain to us, it just draws a little picture of your I suppose main anti-hero or hero who you describe as a genius. He was a genius, this is a man called Leonid Vitalevich Kantarovich who was the only Soviet citizen ever to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. Lots and lots of physicists and mathematicians, but very few economists. He came up independently at a dark moment of Stalinism with a piece of mathematics which is in youth all over the world now, improving the operations of multinational companies for example, but he thought it was the secret to making a planned economy per long like a finely tuned machine. It was about optimal inputs and outputs, how did you get the most out of the least? It was, it was a way of introducing or reintroducing frugality into the planned economy, a way of finding a logic inside it which could be exploited to get more from the same or the same from less. It actually got political backing during the Khrushchev time and it looked for a while as if it was going to become the basis for a new mathematical cybernetic Soviet Union. My book is partly about why that didn't happen and it didn't happen really because of the politics of a cruddy regime. Yes, because I put it simply, but I'm not going to disagree with you. I think the Soviet Union was a horrible country and a horrible country with gleams of idealism in it which have to be to be accounted for. Basically they were they were they were stuffed because they had committed themselves under Stalin to a form of industrialization which was hopelessly intrinsically tyrannical and they could not really change the software. The hardware was such that you could not run clever delicate intellectual little programmers for producing consumer plenty on it. Steel, concrete, yes, musical boxes and unhappy ever after no. And it's a book where you have all sorts of, you have the young lovers and you have private life appears and all the rest of it and you have a singer, songwriter who's morally corrupted and so on. But for a novel, you've got quite a lot of people who do things, I mean manufacturers and local program, locals of Soviet, commissars and so on, working on the the basis. It's quite unusual to have a novel that's so much about stuff and making things, isn't it? One of the things that perpetually puzzles me about novels is why they're so little work in them. I know this is probably- That's exactly what I was trying to say rather badly, yes. Maybe it's a defect partly of the English novel and some kind of gentlemanly residue left in it, but it seems to me that work occupies about a third of people's lives and novels should should be enthusiastic about it. So while I wanted this book to do justice to a complicated piece of history, I also wanted it to get into the fabric of the middle bit of people's days in the Soviet image. So yes, it's got a lot of people going to the office and working in factories and hospitals and things. I wanted it to have the texture of life because political ideas only really become interesting once you see them dragging their way through people's lives. The oil and the dust and the things that don't work and the industrial sabotage and all the rest of it. The other thing that's surprising in a novel is the footnotes. I mean you've got pages and pages and pages of detailed footnotes presumably because you're trying to say to people this actually happened. This bit really happened. This bit I made up. You're very punctilious about telling the reader which bits are entirely made up, which bits actually took place. This is partly me keeping a promise to my mother who is a proper historian that if I made things up I would actually tell people where the making up began. But it's also because we can call this book a novel but it's actually some kind of weird compromise between a novel and non-fiction because I did want to convey something that really happened but using storytelling to do it. I wanted it to be full of dialogue and people you'd like to spend time in company with and good jokes and all the other pleasures of novels but it's still it's idea shaped. It's absolutely and it quotes a lot from official Soviet documents and newspapers and so on. You don't speak Russian but it did strike me that this is a book that needed to be published in Russia. Is it going to be a Russian's going to read it? To my astonishment it's being translated into Russian and will be coming out sometime towards the end of next year. I'm still mystified about why Russians need it because a lot of what I've done here has been to find ways to spell out for Western readers and people like me the things which went without saying in the statement. The obvious is always one of the hardest things to get into but maybe Russians are nostalgic for this previous version of the obvious. Absolutely. We're going to come on to talk to about Egypt in a moment but Terry Gossman it did strike me. There were lots and lots of parallels between Egypt and Russia. There are so many economies around the world which looked at this moment of red plenty bought the story and thought we're going to do the same. Absolutely actually at one point in time during the height of the dream in the 50s and 60s of NASA's time in Egypt. Egypt looked to the Soviet Union not only to supply arms and munitions and what the likes but for the building of the high dam, the fourth pyramid in Egypt as they say which was effectively a piece of master Soviet engineering and lots of funds and economics going into it and during the height of that natural experience loads of English engineers and managers looked to the Soviet economy as the role model and I find quite interesting because unlike in the US and Europe actually loads of segments in the Egyptian middle class looked at Moscow and Lenin rather that time as a Paris. There's a scene in France this is a book where they're looking outside the taxi with lots of sort of Africans and Egyptians and people from all around the world are congregating and one forgets that Moscow used to be a sort of international metropolitan hub. Certainly not now. Yes it was it was it was the cosmopolis of half the world for a little while and we have to remember that the Soviet model was a was a model of being modern it was a it was a rival version of the 20th century which crashed but but for a while seemed to offer particularly I think in countries like Egypt a kind of shortcut to getting there and also it let you thumb your nose at the west which must have been terribly terribly satisfied. Ellie if I was wondering as a novelist whether you agreed that work doesn't feature in novels very much and that is a surprising thing I suppose it's quite hard to dramatize it sometimes. It is it is a surprising thing I mean given the fact that it occupies such an important you know part of our lives daily lives yes I agree I mean work is not being reflected enough in in you know novels but again this is a big generalization at the same time then there are novels particularly some non-western novels in which work does occupy an important place especially you know if you're talking about peasants you know factory workers so there is that but when you look at the general picture I think you're very right. And Vicki we're going to be talking about the cosmos in a different way but I suppose another interesting about the Soviet Union in this era it was one of the first places where scientists became the sort of central stars of the narrative I mean Soviet science for all its batty bits its lysenco biology madnesses and so on was nonetheless pretty advanced and scientists were national heroes in a way that took a long time for scientists to become national heroes in the west so that's the case now I suppose. Yeah so I think science is still tremendously respected world wide certainly in the west and this scientist in the Soviet Union led the way we still there still wrote textbooks that we all read and admire tremendously. I do think that one of the very interesting things particularly in the Soviet Union is how they try to take science and apply it to something that seems slightly non-scientific really a misapplication of science and in some ways the downfall of the Soviet Union particularly as we you know you describe in in your book was an example of taking something that is very very complex and really applying so many interesting new technologies here at the computer for example and look there was a tremendous computer revolution in the end look look our lives are totally changed by it but not in the way that they intended. Yeah I guess I guess in a way it it had to stand for religion and so much else scientific historical approach with scientific everything was scientific science would answer everything. Yeah I think I think you have kind of a religious narrative in which the scientific march towards the cause the kingdom of the kingdom of plenty and yes a lot of this is is a kind of over confidence in what science can do a deep respect for science but then which mistakes the kind of thing an economy is which is a it's a big complicated chaotic system and it doesn't really optimize terribly well treating it to treating it as the opportunity for one big computer program appears not to be very well intellectually founded but there's a kind of there's a kind of generosity in thinking that might have worked. Yeah well let's move now from the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s a little further back and paint a picture of Egypt as it appears at the beginning of Terry Cosman's book sort of around about a hundred years ago. Where it is one of the most cosmopolitan culturally liberal exciting unusual places on the planet really with those fantastic sort of boulevards through Cairo and Alexandria and a sense that this is going to be one of the great rising powers of the world. Absolutely actually one of the one of the themes I start the book with is if you if you're an observer or a visitor to Cairo or Alexandria in the 30s or the 40s or even in early 50s of the last century and if you were to envisage what would be the future of that country or society most likely most observers would have guessed a different future than the next 50 or 60 years for Egypt and certainly different from today's Egypt in almost every respect. The character who is central really to your book and it's hard sometimes really through the book to know whether you really regard him as a complete hero or a bit of a hero, a bit of a villain, whatever is NASA known obviously in this country in the west as you know for the the the sewage crisis and so on and portrayed at the time in the British press as a kind of Arab Hitler we should remember but yet seen as the you know the great hope for modern Egyptian nationalism and indeed Arab nationalism around the world. Nasser has he himself was a historical phenomena for one simple reason since the fall of the last theronic dynasty he's the first Egyptian to rule Egypt which I found fascinating really so if you just very quickly to Alexander the Great's guys had had rolled into town exactly exactly since Alexander the Great up to King Faruk who was who abdicated or forced up the K to 1952 not a single Egyptian has rolled Egypt since then so you can imagine at that time 20 or 22 million Egyptians most of them farmers and peasants very poor really subjugated under centuries and turns centuries of foreign rule and then you have this tall dark man coming saying we will rejuvenate the Egyptian nation stand up to the foreign powers British at that time and the rising America at that time he grabbed the admiration not only of the Egyptians of loads and millions all over the Arab world and then obviously came the sewage crisis that you refer to and then not really because of his genius but to national circumstances result in what appear to be a strategic victory against the all the masters of Britain and France so he is catapulted really to a new status and although it wasn't Soviet Union sized his vision of a united Arab world was pretty gigantic too I mean he really wanted to draw in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and and further south as well into this massive Arab bloc or Arab supination between and absolutely and surprisingly I mean today that might sound a bit funny or or certainly a dream picture but at that time especially after Suez and people sometimes forget Nasser visited Syria in 58 roughly one third of the Syrian population not the the massine population not people of Damascus literally came out to to greet him his car was literally carried off the roads it it was a moment of of rejuvenation if you'd like or seen sir and rather the world and then he turns to the Soviet Union and its allies to help modernize Egypt these massive massive industrial project which the Aswan is the most well known but but many more huge factories and so on across many economic sectors loads of factories were built by funds from the Soviet Union engineers from the Soviet Union at one point in time in the late 60s there were more than 7 000 Soviet engineers yeah yeah and so so I suppose the simple question is what went wrong because Egypt now is you know it's it's it's as you say it's on the brink it's on that we don't quite know it's on the brink of but it certainly it's got a rising militant militancy from from some of the Muslim parties and this kind of decaying bureaucratic semi-military autocracy I think many things went wrong every single experiment unfortunately in Egypt over the past 60 or 70 years has gone wrong uh very quickly the liberal experiment of the first half of the 20th century failed Nasser's experiment failed I argue in the book not only because it was very much a dream but also because the man and his regime failed to build institutions uh that can support that experiment or that dream what came after him failed sadat came with a completely opposite view in terms of economics in terms of how the society should function in terms of Egypt's region region role and that also failed and the man himself was assassinated live on tv and in the last 30 years under president Mubarak has been also a very different story many people would say quite disappointing story he's your bratian if I thought in a way Mubarak I'll not go into the Soviet comparison but it's it's you know he's the aged leader under which everything sort of just ticks along um without without reform without changing very much he keeps the lid on everything he and his son are keeping the lid down I think fair point but I would say there are two stories during the last 30 years and very briefly one of them is the story of the military continuing to dominate the country obviously uh and we have to remember that president Mubarak unlike sadat unlike uh Nasser is the only president for Egypt who has spent 30 or 35 years of his career as a professional soldier from a graduate until field marshal but there's another story under Mubarak which is very different to the to the military side which is the rise of capitalism in Egypt today if you look at the regime it's very difficult to say it is the military that rules Egypt full stop certainly Mubarak's son is very involved in the sort of capitalist side as it were the business and money-making side absolutely but I think there's a fascination or a focus by international media on gaman Mubarak as a person while the reality is that he is part of a web of financial and economic interests that um now have a leading role in the regime there's a blur of the lines between wealth and power in Egypt which is very unprecedented quite unprecedented in the last 60-70 years. Ellif I was thinking that in terms of parts of the the Mediterranean that end of the Mediterranean trying to modernize and find different routes for modernization the parallels and contrasts between Egypt and Turkey are very interesting because in both cases you know there are elements of democracy and there are you know democratic parties and and and at the same time this is quite aggressive nationalism. I should say I mean you fell foul of some of the laws about insulting Turkey didn't you in the past. That's a tough question I think there are parallels but nevertheless I would say that Turkey is a very unique case you know in many ways when I look at the Muslim world in general not only the Middle East but the Muslim world in broader terms I think many of the things we see in Turkey are very very sui-generous you know they're very very unique this also is related to the countries past the country's history of course six six hundred years of Ottoman rule Turkey was never a colony you know. Well Turkey ruled Egypt let's remember the Ottomans ruled. I think it's very important because in many in many countries in which you know western powers have ruled we see more fears nationalism or more fears anti-western you know sentiments over time so such things did not did not take place in Turkey and in many ways I think the Turkish civic society is amazingly colorful so of course they could be powerless they could be similarities but nevertheless I would say the differences in my eye in my eyes are heavier. One of one of the sort of themes of of what we're talking about seems to me that determinism should be avoided that a lot of these things are about the individual characters thrown up whether it's Khrushchev or Cosegan or the fact of having Kemal Ataturk who radically westernized and changed the alphabet in Turkey as against NASA you know a few decades later makes all the difference. Let me put it this way if I may intrude. I think in Turkey of course with Ataturk there was a huge transformation but the process of westernization started much earlier and this is something we sometimes fail to remember I mean started with the Cilim III who was called the Reform Sultan you know 1789 when he came to throne when he ascended the throne so that's very interesting I mean you have such a long period of westernization modernization it is an elite project and yet at the same time the civic society has evolved more in Turkey. I think in Egypt also one of the key problems which mixed a unique case is that there wasn't a continuing story in Egypt over the past 150 years so you had Muhammad Ali who started Pumbadi Pasha as he's known in the west who started the new Egypt who was an Ottoman soldier or was an Ottoman soldier his story took 40-50 years and then ended abruptly and then the new monarchs of Faruk and his his time very liberal experiment ended abruptly and then NASA new dream very different from what came before it 17-18 years ended abruptly with a military failure in 67 and then really a bankruptcy of the whole experiment unfortunately then ten years after said that completely the opposite of you abruptly as Turkey has had one narrative that one narrative runs it one of the things I got from Tarik's book was was a sense of of what a loss it's being to Egypt for the the liberal order of things which was around in the early 20th century to have gone with NASA that understandable and admirable though NASA was in in many ways there were a set of kind of constitutional tools that that early 20th century Egypt had which have been gone since and it's kind of hard to see from your book how they how they how they get to come back given that for the last 30 or 40 years kind of political and economic and religious developments have been have been moving along together so that one reason for the rise of of Islamism as I as I read your book is that as as as the state and the political class move towards kind of free markets there's actually a huge gap for social services which the Muslim Brotherhood have rushed in to fill for example absolutely true and if you look at the last 30 40 years the the leading story in Egypt is the rise of Islamism however if you look today there are some positive developments still very early on but positive developments for example the rise of the private sector this is the first time in the last 60 70 years that the private sector now employs more Egyptians than the government than the public sector and this is new the civic society as as Leafa just mentioned has or is witnessing a revival after many years of being demonized really by by the mosque and the church by the religious establishment both sides education is seeing many interesting developments in Egypt well one of the things that I do think links links Egypt and Turkey obviously is the position of novelists in the sense of historically Egyptian novelist and mafus when winning the Nobel Prize and so on incredibly important in the culture and the same would be true in Turkey where novelists have had a much more important role with respect to Francis and others than than they've played in the West I think in terms of of how the country thinks of itself but that's a kind of burden as well I would suspect do you think do you think that I think it has you know two two sides on the one hand let me make a very broad you know comparison when I look at America for instance so many books are being published every every year but I tend to think they evaporate so fast you know however in Turkey novels do not evaporate that past a novelist is always more than a novelist the novel this is a public figure writers a public figure I think part of the story goes again back to the autumn and era because late Ottoman writers most of them many of them were of course men you know they saw themselves as father novelists they wanted to show the right and the wrong they wanted to direct their readers to the right path so they wrote they were men with with missions they wrote with a mission we have this sense of this idea that novelists can you know can lead the way can can be guides can be you know men with opinions which means what you say about whether it might be Armenians or whatever it might be or the condition of of democracy in Turkey you become instantly a public figure and what you say matters very much and a little bit like in a much gentler way Soviet novelists or poets in the past you can be arraigned and hauled up in front of courts because of what you've said because it matters so much I think that's one you know a very small small part of the of the picture and I would rather look at the bigger picture you know and I think there's an amazingly lively and dynamic literary environment in Turkey is a storytelling culture that is livelier than the west there's a very vivid there's a very rich you know storytelling culture and I'm always amazed by this because especially the oral culture it's very much dominated by women whereas when I look at written culture it's very much dominated by men you know literally critics editors writers poets mostly men now when I look at the people who read these fiction you know the novels it's mostly women so it's like women read but men write and this is something that I would like to see changing but what I'm trying to say is most of these readers in Turkey women readers they take stories very seriously and then when they like if they like a story when they like a book they give it to their grandmother they give it to their aunts I've never seen anything like this in any other places really when I in my you know book signings when they bring me books I realize the same book has been read by maybe six or seven different people they've been underlining different sentences with different colors this is something very emotional so what I'm trying to say is there's also a lot of inspiration you get a lot of inspiration in Turkey as a writer and there's also that side of the picture. Do you think that Mafuis himself who won the won the Nobel Prize as I said said that once he said in all my writings you'll find politics you may find a story which ignores love or any other subject but not politics and in a sense I suppose that's what you're saying that the problem has been in Turkey too too much politics enough of the rest of the life. That is true I mean politics is important and unfortunately sometimes things become very quickly politicized more than that they become very quickly polarized you know and that makes it more difficult you know to to take things slightly you know it it's lessens the the scope of humour in life yes but that said there's also a very rich tradition of black humour you know black political humour which which I take very seriously as well so there's different sides. In your last book The Forty Rules of Love which is another bestseller one of the characters who is himself a novelist says that he believes that we believe in the freedom and power of the individual these days regardless of god-government society in many ways human beings are becoming more self-centred and the world is becoming more materialistic but he says that humanity as a whole is becoming more spiritual and this is a book about the spiritual there's a Sufi character very prominently in the book and I wondered if that fictional novelist in your novel was also speaking in some way for you that's your view. Usually you know my work is not autobiographical I but definitely part of my personality my life seeps into the stories but I'm more interested in creating characters so I like to make a distinction between myself and the characters but that said I am someone who's very interested in spirituality in general and this again has been one of the topics that I found a bit difficult maybe to talk about because the moment we speak about spirituality people immediately think about religion really geocity you know and then immediately fundamentalism these things are not the same they can't be lumped together they're different things is that why you chose a Sufi mistake as a as a main character in this book from the 1200s not somebody much remembered to the rest of the world I think the Sufi I think Sufi philosophy Sufi poetry Sufi art Sufi way of thinking in general is very important and it's worth remembering it's worth you know doing more research about it it has had a tremendous effect not only on the Islamic world but I would say the world in general it is a very introverted inner oriented very peaceful very constructive philosophy that has no room for violence that has no room for aggression your your the basic thing is to deal with your ego you know to transform yourself and in some ways I found I find parallels between the art of storytelling and stuff and Sufism because I think in both the essential quest is to transcend the self that has been given to you and to go beyond those boundaries I mean the one point that or the one example you mentioned in Egypt which is the most famous novels of course in Egypt Mahfuz always infiltrated his political views put them into his his novels the question I have for relief is do you believe in this connection between culture and and the writer I'm asking you the question because I've read some what you said about that the writer can write about things he or she does not necessarily has lived or has not necessarily experienced I don't know in in my view and based on on what Mahfuz has mentioned I thought there's this strong link between culture place and writer absolutely I you know I think it's a very important question for me it's something that I do think about almost on a daily basis there is a there's a metaphor used by Rumi which I like a lot and I think it explains very much what I'm trying to say he talks about living like a drawing compass you know as you know one leg of the drawing compass is very static it's fixed in a territory just like that I like to think of my fiction as having very strong local roots it is based in Istanbul it's learned so much from the Turkish culture gets a lot of energy and inspiration from there however the other leg of the drawing compass draws a huge wide circle around the first one and travels the world and makes connections with different cultures at the end of the day I think the art of storytelling is about connections building connections we're going to move now to even bigger connections and other kinds of stories Vicki Kaspi your talk at the Royal Society you're calling the cosmic gift of neutron stars and neutron stars is that's that's your particular focus of interest neutron stars and pulsars and they are mysterious things neutron stars just tell us a little bit about them to start with well they're a very exotic form of star very much unlike our own son which of course is a star it's the remnants of are the most massive stars typically 10 to 30 times the mass of the sun which have ended their lives and collapsed in upon themselves to form a tiny little star only 10 kilometers across but containing as much mass in fact we think up to 40 or 50 percent more mass than the sun crushed into you know very human dimension only 10 kilometers across and just try and give us some sense of of the massness of that mass I mean what would a small quantity of it mean yes well it's tremendous densities the matter in neutron stars has been crushed so that there's no space between electrons and neutrons anymore if you went to a neutron star and took a teaspoon full of it it would weigh something like a billion tons not not matter like we have here on earth and these and these collapsed stars are we think all around us on throughout the universe well in fact the the light that they produce is quite faint and we can only see them mainly in our own Milky Way galaxies so we only see the ones that are closest to us and they tend to be in the disk of our galaxy mainly and so what is a pulsar then? A pulsar is one type of neutron star that rotates quite rapidly and has a very large magnetic field that is pointed that is misaligned with the spin axis much like the earth's magnetic pole is not at the geographic pole and they produce lights they produce beams of radiation from their magnetic poles that we see as a flash of light each time the star turns which can be incredibly fast I mean that yes that's true the some neutron stars rotate several hundred times every second and we see these as flashes of light hundreds of times per second which we detect using supercomputers so we're dealing with unimaginable speeds unimaginable densities hard to imagine periods of space why should we be interested in all of this I mean beyond wanting to know what's out there in an abstract way what does it tell us well it is a little hard to connect the utility of neutron stars with what we've been discussing so far but that said they are quite useful certainly in for science overall and physics in particular so they're useful astronomically for understanding the evolution of stars how stars live their end products and so forth but these so they're part of universal history in terms of the narrative yes that's a that's a wonderful way to put it but they're also tremendous laboratories for doing for studying extreme physics physics that is inaccessible and terrestrial laboratories so for example these stars are excellent clock because they rotate very regularly you could easily set your watch to in fact you could set your most atomic clocks to them and as such because they have these beams of radiation that are bright enough for us to see on earth they are tremendous beacons of precision timing across the galaxy we can see them in we can detect their motion through their Doppler shifts but we could we can see how they move very very precisely and then we can do very detailed tests of different physical theories such as Einstein's theory of general relativity and so if we know precisely where they are and and are they also potentially one day if we're we have spacecraft out there a way of finding a way around the universe yes they've been suggested that they could be used as navigational beacons the the rotation rate is so steady that you could orient yourself very very well just by seeing which pulsars in which direction you would recognize them by their rotation rate so it is possible I believe there's even a patent out on that this was people of course always looked at the stars and you know what we were talking about the Sufi world and the old Islamic world where there's massive amount of effort put into stargazing because people thought it would tell you about the future and give you a bit of hard evidence how difficult is it to to fund this work these days or do all big governments you know the United States puts a lot of money into astrophysics but is it hard because it's presumably very very expensive to get the kit to do this yes well so astronomy like many areas of physics has become a science where big doll is a required we we do need big telescopes in order to make progress if people see ever further out and funding for very very large projects is certainly a challenge particularly in these economic times on the other hand once one large facility is built many many people can use it the Hubble Space Telescope has been used by you know hundreds or thousands of astronomers over the years and has lasted quite a long time so once these things are built they're quite useful for making progress and there is enough scientific funding at least I can speak of Canada and the United States that that may allow us to progress Francis Buffett um I want to speak up for a minute for Arab astronomers because it's not an accident the sky is full of Arabic star names um Aldebaran Deneb and Rigelor all Arabic names but Vicki do I remember rightly that that pulsars get discovered as a strange by-product the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that there's that there's that moment when when they find a regular signal sometime in the 50s or 60s and think think ah ha somebody is signaling to us but then it turns out to be an early early discovery of pulsar so well so you're quite right the first discovery pulsars in 1967 which was actually done here in Britain at Cambridge University at first it was such a startling signal from the sky you don't expect something to be going regularly beep beep beep in the sky it was thought initially that these were extraterrestrial intelligent signals but that theory was quickly thrown away when it was realized they were confined to the galactic plane for the most part and that there's so many on the sky that it really couldn't be a natural uh phenomenon and and today sort of that you you encounter that kind of um a picture sometimes in pop culture for example in the movie contact starring Jody Foster uh when they're looking for extraterrestrials and they see something going beep beep beep and initially get very excited they say oh no it's just a pulsar which to me is really just a pulsar you think that's a pulsar it's a pulsar it's quite quite upsetting to me have you discovered pulsars yourself certainly yeah yeah so it's it's do you sort of notch up i mean is there a kind of league table that that Vicky Caspie she's she's she's she's got 20 pulsars under her belt we tend to work in teams it's it's a team effort it's not an easy thing to do and uh we don't we don't put little notches on our on lipstick cases or things like we're certainly not the males but in a case um no it's it's a team effort um we we're all interested in advancing the cause and finding new algorithms new uh ways of using supercomputers and clever or faster ways in order to do this particular chance challenging problem and perhaps I'll also apply it in uh in other cases yeah so in a sense my sort of crudely materialistic question what's it for deterministic question what it is is it's that it is one of the last boundaries that people on the planet are really staring at not knowing what they're going to discover it's it's about looking absolutely it's it's a scientific curiosity just pure and simple but at the same time it allows us to push the boundaries of engineering and computing and find new ways to do prop to accomplish problems that uh really we don't encounter on a daily basis well we're never against pure pure thinking on this program thank you to all my guests we've now run out of time elif shaft shaft act is presently writer in residence at kingston university I should say and her latest novel as we mentioned is 40 rules of love you can see vicky casper is solely extolling the cosmic gift of neutron stars this very evening at the royal society in london and frances spuffards red plenty and tarrick osmons egypt on the brink are in good bookshops and probably bad bookshops as well now next week we're going to be doing a little pada de with matthew born and the dance critic jennifer homens talking about the history of ballet and we've also got david aronovich of the times and jane haines talking about froid and prushed what could be better for now goodbye

Producer: Katy Hickman.