Saturday, May 16, 2015

Astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni: Always Approach it with a Certain Sense of Openness

To stand here with Kulkarni is to bring together the past and the future. For as much as Kulkarni delights in this place, as inspiring as it is to be here, he says actually visiting a telescope is soon to be a thing of the past.

"The best way to do astronomy is to get the astronomers out of the dome," he says. "And the human in the loop becomes monotonous. If a machine can do it, honestly, I think everyone is happy."

Machines are good for studying the sky because they have no preconceived notions about what they'll find. Astronomers, Kulkarni says, just don't have the imagination to know what to look for.

"The sky is so much richer and so much more imaginative than the imagination that you should always approach it with a certain sense of openness," he says.

Kulkarni says you look at the information the machines collect and try to figure out what it's telling you. That's the way you make discoveries.

source

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