by: Yuriy Diakunchak
I have to admit that I have some rather stereotypical ideas of what a scientist should look like. There are two types floating in my head: wild-haired madmen plotting the destruction of the world in their subterranean laboratories or skinny nerds on a high sugar diet solving the world's problems and saving a whale or two to boot, all from behind jury-rigged home computers. Shoe-horning Ivan Semeniuk, Staff Astronomer at the Ontario Science Centre, into one of these two moulds would take an imagination vastly superior to my own.
Semeniuk, who gives lectures at the Toronto tourist attraction/science mecca's planetarium, makes complex science interesting. When he's declaiming about the stars, his arms fly around, he inflates balloons to illustrate points about the galaxy and generally infects the audience with his fascination with the night skies. No pasty faced lab rat is he. He's young, 33 years-old, personable, knowledgeable and seems to understand that scientific knowledge is far removed from the lives of many people who visit the centre and needs to be explained to the lay person in an accessible manner.
"You're dealing with true natural beauty and people have an emotional response to it. When you show them pictures they do respond emotionally," he says. Using peoples' natural fascination with the skies, Semeniuk tries to provide his audiences a context within which to understand the universe. "We're all parts of the universe, we're intimately connected with the things that we see out there in space. The long term cycle. We're from space and we return to space. Our existence relies on it, so its much nicer that people get a feeling for the big picture and the richness of the details within that picture."
Working with people who are not well versed in astronomy must require someone with a lot of patience even thought Semeniuk, who got his degree at the University of Toronto, maintains that there are "no dumb questions." I think he's saying it for my benefit, because I've just asked him one or two that even I realize are quite dense. What does seem to irk him a bit are the bad jokes he must hear at least once a day.
"Like there's always the one about Uranus. And (when I say) the brightest star you can see from the Earth is Sirius everyone always asks me if I'm serious." Groan. Semeniuk doesn't think his job at the Science Centre is to help in some scheme to churn out more scientists, he just wants to give people an opportunity to experience the beauty of our universe.
"I'm really more interested in allowing people to consider astronomy and science just the way we appreciate art. You can grow through science, you can get a better idea of the world around you. You can base your philosophy of life on a firmer foundation and better idea of what the world is really all about on a physical level. I think all those things contribute to the quality of life," he says.
Astronomy is a funny science, because so little of the material under study is within reach of the researchers. Aside from the odd meteorite that falls to the Earth or a few handfuls of soil and rock scooped up on trips to the moon, astronomers have nothing solid to work with beyond our own atmosphere. Most of their work is based on long hours of observation of objects so distant that it is virtually guaranteed no human will ever land on them. Advances in technology, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have brought into focus phenomena no one could have imagined ever existed, but the physical distances remain as great.
Working in a field such as this requires a person, who can work without ever knowing for sure if his or her theories are true.
"You don't even know if there is a real universe. There are academic arguments about scientific realism and about how real is the universe," says Semeniuk. Though there is a certain level of uncertainty inherent in other forms of science, such as quantum mechanics, almost any observation or theory made about distant heavenly bodies is difficult to prove beyond a doubt.
"The universe seems to evaporate into fields of probability instead of hard substance. We keep looking and looking, we just don't know how big it is. We have this kind of free floating island of what we know and its tapers off at either end into what really is the unknown and possibly unknowable in principle." Its the job of scientists to flesh out knowledge to these limits, but as far as Semeniuk is concerned there are still centuries of research to be done before we start hitting the ceiling. If you believe in the possibility of other life forms in the galaxy, take comfort in the fact that Semeniuk acknowledges such a possibility. But if you are the type that tends to worry about invasions from Mars, you should probably channel your fears in some more credible direction.
"I like to tell people I'm a UFO Ukrainian from Ontario," says Semeniuk who was born in Windsor, Ontario to parents who emigrated from Ukraine. He has three older siblings. "We know the universe is filled with planets, so it isn't hard to imagine that some planets might have life, but I categorically believe that other life will never reach us." The reason being the enormous distances between our planet and any other solar system capable of supporting life.
Most UFO sightings can be attributed to the movements of Venus and other heavenly bodies he says. But the biggest proof that UFO's do not exist according to Semeniuk is that there is a network of tens of thousands of amateur astronomers gazing at the sky every night who track anything that moves. "They're not the ones reporting the UFO's."
And if the UFO's can't reach us, then it follows that life on earth arose independently of any other life in the universe.
"We have Earth stamped on our foreheads. Everything about our bodies and our chemistry, the trace elements in our bodies has to do with evolution in an Earth environment. Everything about us is perfectly meshed in with other life on this planet on a molecular level." (For a different theory see the Space Chicken article)
While many of us would sit down and wonder why, if we can't travel around the universe, is it so big, Semeniuk is more taken by the very fact that we even exist.
"What's really astounding about the size of the universe is that we actually evolved and an intelligence can emerge and get so many answers. Even though physically we can't get there, in our minds we can move all over the universe and this is very profound. I donŐt know if anyone has as of yet come to grips with how meaningful our existence is."
Semeniuk advises people who are interested in going into astronomy to focus on "math, math, math, math, really do a lot of math." The job of a scientist is to know the how's and why's of things. "The scientist has to figure out how to know something, how to actually get some new information. You have to ask questions about everything around you."
If you don't live near enough to Toronto to visit Semeniuk at the Science Centre, you can always catch him on TV on one of the two shows he does. Every Friday night at 10:30 he can be seen on the Discovery Channel doing a program called Heaven and Earth This Week. During the show he points out some of the highlights amateur astronomers might like to look for across Canada. The second show, @discovery.ca, has been nominated for a Gemini award. Semeniuk has been a regular astronomy columnist with the show since it first aired in January 1995. It can also be seen on the Discovery Channel and runs weekdays and Sundays at 7 and 11 pm.