Hi I'm Dan George, welcome to my Lockdown Lecture.
So, I want to just talk a little bit about some of the
projects that I work on at the moment.
So there are 14 world engineering Grand Challenges.
And they are things like reverse engineering the brain,
engineering better medicines,
and the one that I work on, which is
engineering the tools for scientific discovery.
I do that largely for radio astronomy,
for radio telescopes,
so that the scientists make the scientific discovery
and I help develop the
tools that allow them to do that.
Specifically, I design what are called
low noise amplifiers.
So for radio astronomy you want to try and capture as
much of that beautiful cosmic signal as possible.
Obviously it's very very far away, very faint,
so you need to amplify that signal.
But you don't want to
amplify anything else.
You don't want to amplify any noise,
so the atmosphere or any other interference.
You just want to amplify the beautiful signal from the
distant galaxy, or star, or whatever it is.
So I develop, using different
semiconductor technology, these amplifiers.
I've printed out what an amplifier will look like.
So this is an amplifier.
The radio frequency signal comes in here from the radio telescope.
It's then amplified along here, and then 
comes out here into the rest of the receiver.
This is just providing power to it, basically.
This little black dot up here, if you can see that,
that's how big it is in reality.
This is a big blown-up version
and that's how big it is in reality.
So these are the tiny things
that me and my team design.
Then they're cryogenically cooled. So we cool
them to 20 Kelvin or to minus 253 degrees Celsius.
And, like I say, we use different 
semiconductor technology to do that.
We use what's called indium phosphide, 
we use gallium arsenide.
So, gallium arsenide chips are the type 
that might be in your mobile phone.
We design with the same technology
but different frequencies as well.
And then we're looking at graphene as well,
to see if we can use graphene for future amplifiers.
So I just want to tell you a little bit about 
two projects that I'm working on,
where I'm developing low-noise amplifiers
for the radio telescopes.
The first one is called ALMA, which is the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.
This is at 5,000 meters above sea level on a plateau in Chile.
This has 66 antennas - you know, the old sort of Sky dishes, that sort of thing but just a bit bigger.
They all work together, 66 of them,
to open an entirely new window on
radio astronomy and fundamental physics.
It works from 35 gigahertz to 950
gigahertz, so just under a terahertz.
So a quite high frequency.
Or in wavelengths that would be
8.6 millimeters to 0.3 millimeters.
So what my team want to do is really push that semiconductor technology
into the terahertz regions, where we've never used it before for radio astronomy,
so that's the
big challenge for us.
But ALMA itself as a radio telescope
is an incredible project to work on.
The supercomputer, that's used in ALMA,
operates at the highest altitude
that a supercomputer
has ever worked in the world.
The images it produces are ten times more detailed
than the Hubble Space Telescope images.
17 PETA operations, so 17 trillion operations,
are needed every single second on that computer.
So that makes it the fastest computer 
ever used on an astronomical site.
It's equivalent to billions of pounds worth 
of personal computers,
that would be needed to make
those necessary calculations.
Even just things like on the correlator,
so the thing that brings all of the signals
together from the 66 antennas,
the correlator itself has
20 million welding points on it.
You know, they're fabulous
engineering challenges.
And all of this across the 66 antennas 
must work in exactly the same way,
no matter what the temperature is.
And that's pretty tricky on a plateau in Chile,
5,000 metres above sea level,
when the difference in temperature between
day and night can be as much as 30 or 40 degrees.
So they're fabulous
engineering challenges to work on.
A fairly recent image that the astronomers
have taken, using ALMA, is of quite a young star
And it's about 1,500 light years away from Earth.
So they've observed this star. And then right at the centre of this star they've detected salt.
Just ordinary table salt, sodium chloride,
glowing from this star.
And it's only with telescopes like ALMA, which are
in the right place in terms of atmosphere,
they are such high-precision antennas,
that they can detect salt glowing from a star
1,500 light years away.
What I love about it is when when we found out about it, the people who worked on ALMA,
we were like "wow that sounds amazing, 
you know, what what does it mean?"
"I don't know, I'm not quite sure yet."
Well that's what's really nice about it.
It then goes "OK now we've done
that one, why is it doing it?"
And it takes you on to the next scientific question,
which is brilliant.
So that's ALMA, that's one project I'm working on.
The other one is called the
Square Kilometre Array, or the SKA.
This will be a series of antennas that are in
Western Australia and in a remote area in South Africa.
They'll all be joined together and they will effectively make a square kilometre's worth of collecting area.
So if you imagine the big Lovell dish at
Jodrell Bank Observatory,
if that was a square kilometre's worth
it would be sort of like that.
But instead of having one dish,
you're going to have hundreds of thousands of
different types of dishes or aerials as well.
Now it's currently being built, they're building
the 10% so this is sort of phase one,
but when it's built it will be 50 times more sensitive than any other radial instruments in the world.
It really will open up new windows on fundamental physics, astrophysics and cosmology as well.
I think my favourite fact about it is,
it will be so sensitive it will be able to detect an airport radar-like signal on a planet ten light years away.
So this is a super sensitive thing.
From an engineer's perspective, it's so interesting,
because it's turning on its head
how we design radio telescopes.
Because now you're having to do it where you need to
try and make huge amounts of these,
create and design huge amounts of these telescopes, rather than one or two or a few of them,
you're into thousands of them.
And because of that, the amount of
data it's going to generate is huge, as well.
So it's estimated that the
low frequency part of these antennas
will generate more than five times the
global Internet traffic.
Just this one experiment is going to generate more than five times the global Internet traffic.
When the
whole of the SKA is built,
if we could express the SKA data as a song,
taken in one day, download that song,
that song would take two million years to playback.
So it better be a good song.
But it's huge amounts of data.
Transfers of one terabyte images
are going to be needed every single minute
and transferred
around the world as well.
So this is a really really smart machine
for the future.
But it's that data issue that's the really nice challenge to work on, as well.
So I'm looking at the front end,
the sort of amplification,
but the data in the back end - if it was built now
we literally don't have the computing power in the world to collect and store all of that raw data.
So you'd have to throw away up to 90% of the data,
and that's a tragic thing, I think.
It just feels so wrong that you'd have to
throw it away because we don't have that.
So I'm rooting for quantum computing 
because I think that's going to really help us.
That's an area that needs low noise amplifiers as well
so part of my team are looking at 
quantum computing now as well.
So that's a really nice challenge, as well.
But they are huge challenges for us.
And they're certainly not going to be
all solved in my lifetime.
There are going to be new challenges,
so we need to make sure
that we've got that next generation working on these amazing technological challenges,
and innovating where
they need to innovate, as well.
So I feel really lucky to be able to work
in a profession where I can look ahead
and see the rising demand
for the type of skills that I have.
I find it a really interesting
challenge for engineers
because we do have to
work quite hard to attract people.
Girls, we've talked about girls
and engineering before, as well.
Why do we have to do that?
How great would it be
just to have an industry
where young people are queuing up
to join us in engineering?
Not because they're being cajoled or pestered
into thinking that it's the right thing to do,
but because they've known, they've always known,
how great the opportunities are in
science, technology, engineering, mathematics.
Society as a whole, including children, 
has a real understanding
of what many professions do,
such as medicine,
because we've all had first hand use of it 
at some point in our lives.
So it's ironic that engineering
is everywhere, but it's invisible
because it's woven into the
very fabric of everyday life.
And as a consequence many people
do not know what engineers do.
And why should they? If we aren't out there
helping them to understand
how amazing engineering is,
how ingenious engineers are,
how creative engineers are as well.
And part of that success, as well,
is that you don't succeed.
So part of being ingenious
and being creative, as an engineer,
is that you don't succeed all the time.
We need to celebrate those failures.
And that's what we have all the time.
You need to fail in order to innovate, and as
scientists and engineers, you have to innovate.
So therefore you have to
fail along the way.
And that's the 'fail fast and learn' approach
that I think we need to make sure
that next generation of engineers
and scientists have got.
So my last picture for you is this one.
The way to innovate is to
get out of your comfort zone.
Here's your comfort zone
and here's where the magic happens, over here.
So this is where you need to be. If you're an
engineer or scientist, you need to be over here.
And in order to be over here,
you need to be failing as well.
And I think that's such an important message
for all of us to take to the next generation.
