A Telescope’s Precision: a Journey Beyond the Visible

Having already spent a month in Armenia, I uttered the usual “Barev Dzez ” [“hello” in Armenian] with confidence as I entered the Yandex taxi car. This magic word acts as a dispeller against what can often become a tricky and intrusive conversation for a solo female traveller in a cab in Yerevan. Suppose the female passenger turns out to be a foreigner. In such a case, the emergency measure is to mention a husband in Yerevan, and that is where we are driving to now! Add a few Herculean attributes to the presumed husband, and one can get away without offers of private excursions from the driver. Nonetheless, during this ride, I was discovered as a foreigner, but this time without any boundary crossing.

It was the imprecision of the location of the most precise institution in the country that broke the silence between us in the car. The “National Body for Standards and Metrology” of the “Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Armenia” was not located on the map accurately. I blame it on the heat – on the 10th of August 2021, in the early afternoon, no one would have liked to have been adventuring on a precision journey in the streets of Yerevan. On the Yandex app, I had to type the address manually as the institute was not listed among the registered locations on the map. However, despite the precise geospatial coordinates entered in the app, the driver struggled to find the right place, and we ended up in an inexact location where we asked person after person [the driver in Armenian, me in Russian] until we finally made our inexact way to the Institute of Standards. It is difficult to estimate how long this cooperative mission lasted, but most probably, the outdoor temperatures made the journey feel longer than it actually was.

I call my contact and tell him that I am in front of the Institute of Standards [I repeat the exact name written on the building]. He asks me if I am in front of the Institute of … [stating a slightly different name that sounds similar]. I am confused as he seems to misunderstand and thinks that I am in front of another building, and I say, no, I am in front of the Institute of Standards—which it turns out is what he means. He tells me I should go inside, ask for him, and someone will show me the way. The turnstile stops me. After the magical words of my contact’s name, I pass it and tell the guard I am meeting A.V., the deputy director. The guard confidently sends me to the third floor and shows me the elevator. I ask the first person I see on the third floor about my contact, and he tells me it is on the fourth floor; this is the third! Perhaps this points to an unknown law in the Universe that guarantees the balance between precision and imprecision, for even as it strives to impose systems and order, the Institute of Standards cannot keep all imprecision at bay. The very success of this national body must depend on this law: there has to be a critical mass of imprecision in the world as a rationale for the Institute to maintain its existence. I am just one floor away from the right one, so I find the stairs that are located very close to the elevator. I journey on them since I feel they are much quicker. On the fourth floor, I ask again the first person I stumble upon – a woman at the elevator holding a plate with cakes – about A.V.’s office. I am led to my final destination in this building.

Having arrived at the second most prestigious office in the Institute, I noticed a secretary busily running around none other than A.V., with whom I had talked on the phone during the morning of the same day to schedule our meeting. During the phone call, he had drawn attention that my request was serious business. I wanted to learn more about my planet’s first – and only – radio-optical telescope. Physicist and engineer Paris Herouni proposed ROT-45 in the 1960s; construction finally began in the mid-70s, lasting almost a decade. Herouni passed away in 2008, and since then, his niece, Arevik Sargsyan, a professor at the National Polytechnic University of Armenia, has been trying to restore the telescope and the equally majestic building which houses its control panel. I had been in touch with Sargsyan through Facebook, and it turned out that my Airbnb host was an old schoolmate of hers. I can imagine the two women sharing a similar energy. My Airbnb host was an impressive female force. Attesting to this was how she transformed the apartment where I rented a room from a high entropy state into the most possibly negentropic one during every one of her visits. I can imagine Sargsyan similarly moving mountains to get her uncle’s legacy cherished.

Sargsyan had told me to call the nation’s Standards Body to obtain approval to access the telescope. This led to our meeting. Over the phone, A.V. asked me if it was for touristic purposes that I would like to visit the site, and I said, no, I am a historian and anthropologist. I do research on the history of science and diplomacy of Soviet Armenia and the Soviet Union, and it would be interesting to see the place. The voice on the other side seemed very energetic, talking quickly and forcefully, asking who I would talk to there and who would show me around. Did I speak to someone? I said I knew about it from Arevik Sargsyan. A.V. exploded angrily and said, “Sargsyan thinks she knows everything about the telescope and presents her vision to everyone.” He started asking me about my background; I said again I was an anthropologist and doing history research. He asked me to come to the Institute, and we would decide there. He said he would happily meet me but insisted that I must talk to the right people. When did I want to come? I said today, maybe? Yes, we agreed on 15:00 – I should call and have everything ready: how much time I wanted to spend there, what I wanted to do, my passport number, where I worked, etc. I said yes, I will.

A.V. tells me where to sit. There is a big table with many chairs in his spacious office; some more men are coming in – there are four, and we sit, respecting COVID-19 distancing. The secretary cordially asks me if I want coffee, tea, or anything. I ask for a glass of water. Someone will come later, A.V. tells me, and he saves an essential place for him – directly opposite me. We sit at the sizable black table in the fittingly large office. Three of the five men are very old and quiet. The oldest presents me with two images of the telescope. One is a plan – a plain drawing – and the other is a real picture of the actual telescope. Due to its highly simplified nature, the drawing bypassing the proportions of the telescope strikes me as a contrast to the premises we were in. How could such an imprecisely tuned-to-reality image be part of an international meeting such as this one hosted by the nation’s Standards Body? Again, I think about the possible unknown law according to which the balance between precision and imprecision is a constant in the Universe. It is my anchor at this moment to explain how the highly imprecise drawing serves as proof in this room of the most precise institutional body of the country. Once again, where too much precision is sought after, imprecision tenses the situation. Like the law of entropy. Everyone seems tense, bodies contorted. Is this the price of precision, too? All these honorable men are here to tell me the story of the telescope. It is my duty as a historian with solid foundations in anthropological methodology of such close encounters to listen, one voice in my head says.

A.V. prompts me that he wants to tell me the truth because if I am a scientist and I am going to write history, I have to write the truth, and he brought people to talk to me and tell me what was going on because it is the responsibility of the Institute to tell me the truth. The telescope does not work; it has some defects due to the construction. A long story will unfold in which I understand that Herouni was great, but the telescope he built – only at the end did he realize it doesn’t work. The reason for the errors is, they say, that in the Soviet Union, they were hoping to build big objects, but there were no radio astronomer specialists involved in the project to advise, and by the time they realized it was too late. One of the apparent mistakes is the angle of the feet of the optical mirror – the difference is visible when comparing the drawing and the picture of the actual telescope. The feet were supposed to be straight but are arched in reality! The discussion lasts two hours, and the theme remains the same: why the telescope doesn’t work and why Herouni was a great man. Repetition is the key to precision, I think. After Herouni realized that the telescope would not be functional, he dedicated himself to ancient Armenia and astronomy, I was told. Indeed, I knew Herouni was famous for historical studies about these topics – and his accuracy is highly disputed. It was, however, the first time someone pointed out the crucial connection between Herouni’s failure with the momentous construction project, which was supposed to look into the extraterrestrial past (astronomy always looks into a distant past, light years away from Earth), and the terrestrial turn of the physicist towards a different discipline.

How precision did not prevail in building the first – and only – radio-optical telescope on Earth, thus leading to a disciplinary turn for Herouni, was far from an isolated case. Countless other scientific-technical projects followed a similar fate in the USSR at the time, failing to meet a grandiose plan or to generate an efficient technological marvel. At the same time, many natural scientists in Armenia and the Soviet Union were more generally interested in the humanities and a broader range of fields. This was part of the identity of a Soviet intelligentsia, as anthropologist of science Yulia Antonyan (2012) has noted. This process fits the description of Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols: “scientific patriotism” in which an indigenous elite “enchanted by science” turns to history to produce narratives of Armenians “as a people with scientific traditions of their own” (Anderson & Pols, 2012). The historical studies that Herouni wrote argued that Armenians had an astronomical tradition going back millennia. The most weighty proof in this sense were stone formations on the territory of Armenia that Herouni and, equally notably, astrophysicist and astronomer Elma Parsamyan identified as ancient observatories; since then, Armenians have compared them with Stonehenge. In parallel, astronomy has been waning in Armenia ever since.

Herouni’s scientific patriotism was locally driven, in contrast to the culture of Soviet science that had been built since the early 1920s when the Soviet Union incorporated Armenia. In the post-Stalin era, scientific patriotism was expressed in Soviet Republics from the Soviet periphery (South Caucasus, in this case) to the center (Moscow) rather than vice-versa  (Suny, 2005). Previously, during the Stalin reign of the USSR, nation-making was a state-led centralized process, as captured by Francine Hirsch with the term “empire of nations” (2005). Thus, under Stalin, national identities were part of a state-building project directed by Moscow. Afterward, in contrast, especially from the 1960s onwards, the grassroots intelligentsia deployed the tools of the class to cut across national identities and dictate a local identity. At the time, in the late 1980s, Herouni turned fully to his historical studies, and the striving for national identity led Armenia and Azerbaijan into armed conflict. In other words, the gradual increase of national claims against Moscow’s dictated statehood was paralleled by a turn of astronomers towards history – and a decline in astronomy.

These observations, however, do not account for how, after having failed in a field for which he had the support of an entire scientific and engineering team, not to mention the two academies of sciences (the local Armenian one and the central one in Moscow), Heroumi could venture with such epistemic confidence to become an expert in a completely new domain: the physicist and engineer had no training in humanities. How could I then know the standard for historical precision in this particular case? That is, how would I know whether I would be acting from a proper foundation when reconstructing truthfully the past of Armenia and its Soviet astronomy? What should I calibrate my vision against when looking into the past as a historian?

My journey to the telescope started with precise, intent actions as a female cab passenger to avoid what could turn out to be an uncomfortable conversation with a male driver. Presenting an accurate narrative to the driver superseded the value of truth. It did not matter whether I was Armenian or not, whether I had a husband or not, and whether he was in Armenia or not. My cab strategy contrasted with academic values – especially the accuracy and truth that has to prevail in historiographical accounts. In other words, in my quest to find out the truth about ROT-45, I, as a female, in my interaction with a male, had to construct by default a certain truth rather than let it unveil itself through concrete proofs.

Imprecision seemed to hijack the strive for precision from then on. My non-Armenianness was soon exposed due to the imprecision of the coordinates of the Institute of Standards. Approaching the most precise institutional body in Armenia involved revealing a series of imprecisions. From the logistical difficulties to arriving at the right office to meet the right people to the failed precision in the telescope’s construction, there seemed to be a sabotaging tension. Striving to make sense of the experience and the conflicting proofs in front of me, I began to hypothesize on a certain law in the Universe, guaranteeing the balance between precision and imprecision. There was tension between striving for accuracy and failing in the face of unexpected imprecision, which could be explained through an equilibrium – a more appeasing scenario I could work with.

Looking into the past through a telescope for astronomical truths had been replaced by looking into the past historically in the case of Herouni. Many males in the above story dealt with imprecision by deflecting – because the telescope did not work, attention had to go in other directions. We, females, were on the side of finding out the truth (me, as a historian) and speaking out a different truth (Arevik) as we did not take the imprecision for an absolute answer. Imprecision and failure not only did not hinder but propelled Arevik and me to engage more with the telescope’s truth. The decline of science and technology in the USSR was the decline of a grand project – the failure of power was the failure of precision. Nonetheless, failing in grandiosity was the material for new truths: historical. Herouni had looked for a glorious truth elsewhere than astronomy in writing studies of questionable precision supporting a specific national identity. Arevik was running around, showing proof that the telescope works. I was only going to be able to pursue the steps to seek out the truth, it seemed, if I noticed the universal balance that unfolded in front of my eyes. To stand a chance of restoring a historical truth, I had to recognize, accept, and work with imprecision in the manifold ways it manifested in the case of ROT-45.

References

Antonyan, Y. (2012) The Armenian Intelligentsia Today: Discourses of Self-Identification and Self-Perception. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 4(1), 76–100. https://www.soclabo.org/index.php/laboratorium/article/view/279.

Anderson, W., & Pols, H. (2012). Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54(1), 93–113. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41428709.

Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press.

Suny, R. (2005) Soviet Armenia, 1921-1991. In E. Herzig & M. Kurkchiyan (Eds.) The Armenians. Past and present in the making of national identity (pp. 113-125). Routledge Curzon.