Your editorial rightly criticises the decision to cease funding the Lovell telescope from March 2028 (The Guardian view on the Lovell telescope: budget cuts to physics are bad science and worse politics, 31 July). There are additional reasons why this decision is so shortsighted. Modern astronomy is no longer simply physics. It brings together physics, chemistry, biology and computing to understand how the universe evolved and where we came from. The universe is an inexpensive laboratory in which we can study the interaction of physical, chemical and biological processes under conditions that can never be reproduced on Earth. Understanding how galaxies formed and evolved requires complementary observations across the radio, optical and infrared spectrum. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
As a PhD researcher at Jodrell Bank in the 1960s, I saw first-hand how its innovations transformed radio astronomy. Jodrell played a pioneering role in the development of long-baseline radio interferometry, which links separate telescopes together to create virtual telescopes thousands of miles across. Removing the Lovell telescope from this network would weaken its ability to produce pictures of the radio universe with a sharpness comparable to that achieved by billion-pound space observatories such as Hubble.
