Physicist keeps his eyes on starry, starry nights
Howard Trottier’s day job concerns the teeny-tiniest stuff in the universe.
His night gig takes in the whole cosmos.
“From the subatomic to the big,” Trottier, a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, said. “They’re intricately linked, as it turns out.”
He is a theoretical subatomic physicist by training — research interests include lattice quantum chromodynamics and heavy-flavour physics — but his passion is the night sky.
Intrigued as a boy by the experiments carried out by his older brother, Lorne, who built a crystal radio before Trottier was even born, he was always fascinated by science.
Lorne, 11 years Trottier’s senior, still has a huge influence. Co-founder of a Montreal tech company, Lorne donated $2.7 million of the $4.4-million cost — in effect, fronting the capital cost — of the twoyear-old Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard at SFU.
“He was my inspiration, he’s the biggest science nerd I’ve ever met,” Trottier said. “There’s enough of an age gap that when I was younger we didn’t hang around together a whole lot, but I could see what he was doing. He was always in the basement soldering together stuff.”
When Trottier was growing up in Montreal, around 11 years old, and on an overnight camping trip in the Laurentians, a camp counsellor introduced him to the night sky.
“He took 30 of the nerdiest kids to look at the stars and that’s what really pushed me into astronomy. I had never seen the night sky like that or had any understanding of it before that.
“I went home and had to buy a telescope. I used my paper route to save money and bought a telescope. When I saw the rings of Saturn I was screaming in the street, ‘Oh my gosh, look at the rings!’
“This is really what pushed me forward.”
Trottier’s enthusiasm carries over into public outreach, bringing the joys and wonders of the cosmos to children, youth and adults.
Starry Nights is a public-participation event held on clear Friday nights that Trottier initiated a decade ago.
“I went into university thinking I was going to be an astronomer, but that’s not what I ended up doing,” he said.
Astronomy when Trottier was an undergrad was not, shall we say, what it is today.
Particle physics, meanwhile, was in its heyday.
“If you know (the TV show) the Big Bang Theory, think Sheldon, same general area (theoretical physics), only I’m not remotely as smart as he is, but I have better social skills,” he said.
“If I was going into science now, it would be astronomy and astro physics, without a doubt. We’re in this golden age of discovery in all areas of science, but nowhere more so than in astronomy.”
Put it this way: When Trottier was a grad student, Pluto was still a planet and for all we knew, it was the farthest planet from Earth. “Now we have this survey that tells us there are millions of terrestrial planets in our galaxy.”
The Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard is tucked beautifully into what for 50 years was sacred empty space because SFU architect Arthur Erickson didn’t build on it. Today, it’s an award-winning plaza (best Canadian small-scale, public landscape).
Trottier also has his Cabin in the Sky Observatory, a little private place on a hill overlooking Osoyoos.
The 27-inch SFU telescope can peer back about two billion years. His much smaller telescope in Osoyoos can see almost as far in the absence of Vancouver’s light pollution, he said.
“We go to the cabin, I never get over how many stars are in the sky. They crush down on you.”