I think astronomers all over the world in the last decade were realizing that the next important project in astronomy was going to be a very large, millimeter, sub-millimeter interferometer. So the Japanese started one project, the Europeans got together and studied another and the Americans were in fact the most advanced in their studies. Eventually we realized that it was much better to all get together and make a very, very big one. So we got together, we called it ALMA: Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which also means soul in Spanish so it’s a really beautiful name. The Americans and the Europeans first agreed to do it; we signed the agreement, actually I signed with the head of the NSF on the 24th of February 2003 and the Japanese joined later and they brought with them also Taiwan, so now we have these three parties for the project of the price tag of about $1 billion.

I don’t think anything will complete the Copernican revolution because a wonderful thing in astronomy, every time there’s something new and every time we have lots of surprises. But this will bring its own big lot of surprises.

The biggest surprises are the ones I cannot guess. I’m sure there will be some of those. The ones I can guess, I think I just mentioned. Maybe really understanding star formation, that would be fantastic, some details that we never understood. How the matter really gets together to form a star. Seeing planets in formation. Some aspects of the chemistry. Maybe a path to life. And as I said, how are the very far away galaxies forming stars.

I was studying physics in the University of Buenos Aires and I was very lucky that at the crucial year a new professor came and he was in astronomy. I decided to work with him and became an astronomer and I have been thankful ever since. I always loved to look at the sky and I was always interested in knowing, but no, I didn’t think from early on that I would be an astronomer. It happened.

The aim of interferometry is to obtain resolutions on the sky comparable to what you would get with a telescope the size like the separation between your telescopes. That’s true in the optical, in the radio, anywhere.

The way you achieve this is, if you are looking at an object in the sky with two different telescopes, in fact the light is not doing exactly the same path in the two directions. There is a little difference. And since the light is a wave, it means that your light waves are arriving with a somewhat different phase to the two different telescopes. So what you want is to measure this distance in phase. The difference in phase will allow you then to really understand what the resolution is in the sky. In the optical, it’s very difficult. You cannot measure the phase. You just measure the light so you have to make the light interfere so it’s very difficult to have interferometry, but we still do it at ESO; for instance, we do VLTI.

In the radio it’s much easier because when you collect the light, you measure not only the intensity, but also the phase. You keep the phase and in fact, what you do is you change from these very high frequencies at which we’re observing, our receivers are changing to lower frequencies where it’s much easier to amplify and measure, but the phase is always kept.

And then we mix all these phases in a correlator which will be in a building which is also at the top at 5,000 meters and from mixing the results — two antennas by two antennas — in the end, it may seem like a miracle, but we can make an image.

I think astronomy in general, and the big discoveries we are doing now in particular can do a lot to change the lives of a lot of people because we are studying the universe and it’s not just our universe, it’s everybody’s universe. My own experience is that once you start talking to people, everybody wants to know where do we come from, where are we going, what are our dreams, what is our destiny as a race, everything.

And we are really trying to understand some of this. This is why, for instance, in 2009, we will declare that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, four hundred years after the first observations with the Galileo telescope. And the aim of this, our motto is, “The universe – yours to discover.” What we are doing is not to please a handful of astronomers, I think that what we discovered interests everybody and we want everybody to know.