Beyond infinity: astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith is reaching for the stars
Astrophysicist, author and aspiring astronaut Lisa Harvey-Smith believes even the sky is not the limit for women in STEM.
Sadly, astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith admits her first experience of astronomy was pretty much a non-event. Expecting to see Halley’s Comet streak brilliantly across the Milky Way, trailing a tail of gas and cosmic dust, the reality proved downright disappointing.
“That was the first time my dad tried to show me the night sky, when I was about six, and it was rubbish,” laughs the straight-talking scientist, gender equity campaigner, best-selling author and LGBTQI advocate. “It was very cloudy, so my first experience of astronomy was not seeing anything at all!”
Fortunately, or a stratospheric career could have been over before it started, the second attempt was more successful. Six years later, Mars approached very close to the Earth and was clearly visible to the naked eye, brighter than all the stars. “We didn’t know what we were looking for, just something red,” recalls the Australian government’s first Women in STEM Ambassador. “But it was great when we found it! I was gobsmacked because it was real science, seeing it for myself. That’s what you have to do, investigate for yourself.”
It’s something British-born Lisa has been doing ever since she opted to learn at home instead of high school, aged just 11. Girls, she couldn’t help noticing, had to wear skirts and got typecast into “shit things” like embroidery or netball, while boys got to have fun with woodwork, football and cricket. Small wonder she now champions equal opportunity in the traditionally masculine fields of science, technology, engineering and maths, or STEM for short.
“It’s important for so many reasons. As traditional industry goes high tech, STEM skills are more and more vital for young women, as well as men,” she explains passionately. “It’s not about wearing a lab coat and holding up test tubes, it’s about everyday jobs. Even paying in a shop nowadays, you need to navigate high-tech equipment.”
With guidance from her “rebel” father – a pioneering house husband who raised all three kids while his wife headed the local primary school in Finchingfield, Essex – Lisa explored everything from javelin to geometry, mandolin to quantum mechanics.
At 12, she joined a bunch of stargazers (all of them senior citizens) at the local astronomical society in nearby Braintree, attending Space School at London’s Brunel University in summer holidays. Her geeky fate was sealed.
“As a kid I was pretty oblivious to what other people thought of me,” says the funny, articulate University of NSW professor, who came out in her teens to nobody’s surprise, least of all her “cool” parents Liz and Dave.
“It wasn’t always easy growing up a little bit different, but I think they gave me resilience. We were weird in many ways …” She pauses to consider them. “My dad was a house husband in the ’70s and ’80s – that was weird. We were vegetarians – that was weird. We were home educated and that was weird too. Altogether we were the oddballs of the village, and as a kid, that was sometimes hard because you do want to fit in. But I was lucky to find a path that was exciting to me and that I could see myself having great enjoyment
from in future, learning new things. Astronomy was an adventure, the chance to be part of something really big, the human search for discovery. That was enough for me – a real shining light that attracted me as a kid.”
Lisa graduated with a Master of Physics in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Newcastleupon-Tyne, then gained her PhD in radio astronomy at Manchester University, before becoming a postdoctoral research fellow at Sydney University.
Working at the CSIRO, she managed Australia’s SKA Pathfinder telescope – which has already discovered tens of millions of new galaxies – before heading the team of scientists that helped win this country’s bid to co-host the Square Kilometre Array, a project to build the world’s largest radio telescope.
In 2016, Lisa won the Eureka Prize for promoting a better understanding of local science research. She has also featured as guest physicist on an episode of Todd Sampson’s Life on the Line and co-hosted the ABC’s Stargazing Live television spectacular with Julia Zemiro and British physicist Professor Brian Cox.
Her bestsellers When Galaxies Collide and Under the
Stars: Astrophysics for Bedtime will be joined on the shelves later this year by Aliens and Other Worlds.
“Being an author is a big part of what I do but it’s not really a job title,” she says, modestly. “It does take a fair bit of time, but that’s what I do in the evenings.”
Perhaps her biggest high to date – apart from any win by her favourite soccer team, Arsenal – came touring Australia with former US astronauts Charlie Duke, Eugene Cernan and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon.
“It was amazing because I got to know them really well, and work with them,” she enthuses. “I got to delve into their feelings and the transformation they experienced travelling to another world. It was incredible, such a privilege.”
At 41, Lisa is super-fit, runs ultra-marathons for fun and plans to apply for the European Space Agency’s new astronaut program, which selects a fresh intake every 10 years. “I was short-listed and interviewed last time, but I might have another crack,” she says, undeterred by the degree of difficulty involved. “It’s a massive long shot, like buying a lottery ticket, but if I succeed it would be incredible.”
Has she always wanted to be an astronaut?
“Absolutely, definitely, since I was a kid. Other kids had posters of pop stars in their bedrooms; I had athletes and a photograph of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon! I’ve always felt a fascination for space exploration and nowadays, it’s all about science. So the idea of doing experiments, being a scientist in space, in orbit, just really appeals. The impact of stuff you can do up there in microgravity is extraordinary, but also … the view would be amazing! It’s just an incredible endeavour.”
Lisa takes her job seriously, not herself. There’s a fair bet she’s the only astronomer in the world to have controlled a telescope (via internet connection) from the Three Weeds pub in Rozelle, Sydney.
“Actually, telescopes mostly run themselves now, but you still have to look at the displays,” she chuckles. “And I like the Three Weeds, it’s a good pub. Sometimes you’re on duty for 12 to 16 hours, and you’ve got to eat. So I’d just go out to dinner with friends and take the telescope with me, remotely. We’ll call it dinner, anyway! Good times.”
Happiness, it seems, can be as simple as a laptop, columns of data and a beer with her partner of 16 years. Lisa reckons astronomy matters because every single culture in human history has tried to understand life, the universe and everything by looking at the skies. Searching deep space, telescopes can tell us how things were millions of light years ago – “like a time machine” – and can predict what’s going to happen unimaginably far into the future.
In 3.7 billion years the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy and create a mega-galaxy. That’s a scientific given, but the ultimate result is still up for exploration. Will the universe keep expanding until light can no longer travel and it becomes a completely cold, dark place? Or will gravity take over and crunch everything down?
“At the moment it looks like darkness will win,” Lisa grins cheerfully. “But of course we’ll be long gone by then, because we’re not looking after our mother earth the way we should be, although many people are trying. We need to build some wisdom around that as a species.
“Astronomy gives us a bigger perspective on life and the universe and how small we are. I wish some politicians would get into astronomy to gain that viewpoint. Any politician, any party, they’re welcome to look through my
“Astronomy gives us a bigger perspective on life and the universe and how small we are.”
– Lisa Harvey-Smith
telescope and hopefully go out with renewed vigour to save our planet.”
Climate change, she says, is incontestably the biggest challenge facing us. “As a scientist, the data is clear. The CO₂ level is rising very quickly – you can’t argue that, if you’ve seen the evidence – we need to stop and reverse that. We really need to take this seriously.
“It’s incredibly frustrating because people are misled, sometimes cynically for various political and financial reasons, and then they don’t know who to trust. But science isn’t about trusting things or believing things. It’s about trying for yourself and measuring and testing and measuring again. You always question everything as a scientist, which is very healthy. And you don’t meet any rich scientists, so it’s not about money for us – it really isn’t. We’re not sitting on yachts, sipping cocktails. It’s a very ordinary, hard-working profession.”
For Lisa, the truth of science is stranger and more fascinating than any fiction, although she did watch Star Trek – “the original version, with the really bad special effects and slimy things falling from the ceiling onto people’s heads” – as a child.
“Real science is pretty wacky stuff. Gravity folds space up and makes time go faster or slower depending how close you are to a heavy object, like a star. Quantum mechanics is a path of physics that tells us particles of light can be in two places at once. And it’s based on reality. It informs our creation of every technology we take for granted now.
“Science is cool. This is why I write books for kids, to make it exciting and interesting and relevant, to make them see science is not just fun, it’s useful.
All the devices they love and use today depend on a huge amount of science.”
Unfortunately, however, much of our technology is currently designed by and for men. Women are more likely to get killed in road accidents because crash test dummies are male. Artificial voice recognition is more successful for men, because it’s formulated that way.
Women are seldom used as medical research subjects, in case they’re pregnant … The list goes on – all good reasons why more women should be involved in STEM.
“It’s interesting to reflect on how recent it was that women were explicitly excluded from those fields,” says Lisa. “It’s more subtle now, but it’s still there. It works through active discouragement, putting doubts in people’s minds, through stereotypes, the lack of role models, unconscious bias in decision making. The power of unconscious bias in our society is incredible, and very well documented in studies going back decades.”
The answer, according to Lisa, lies in awareness, education and encouragement, getting more women into leadership roles where they have the power to shape our culture. But that means she has her work cut out for many years to come.
“I want to continue doing my current job, as STEM Ambassador, continue it and see it through,” she says. “We have a 10-year plan for women in STEM, to remove the barriers to participation, so we can see hundreds and thousands more women going into studies and careers that use STEM subjects. The aim is for Australian kids of any gender to feel they can contribute equally and have equal access to education. We want all our kids to be able to choose their passions, whether that’s in the arts or science and technology.”
Asked if she has an ultimate ambition, Lisa guffaws loudly. “I guess you could say my ultimate goal is to make my job as STEM Ambassador obsolete.”