Keys to a fundamentally new understanding of science and clues to revolutionary new technologies are washing over us, unseen, every moment of the day. Capturing and deciphering this information are among goals of the multi-billion-dollar Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international quest to construct the world's largest radio telescope. But its lofty goals could come to nothing, writes Bruce Munro, without mathematical processes still being developed by a handful of scientists, including a small team at the University of Otago.
The helicopter hovers centimetres above the mountain top, tries to settle, does not find a level footing, lifts off and glides sideways a couple of metres to try again.
Beyond the chopper's bubble glass is a rock-strewn, wind-buffeted plateau about 200m wide and 400m long.
Its two southernmost corners are marked by large natural cairns. Next to one promontory huddles a derelict wooden hut held in place during 200kmh-plus winds by steel-rope tethers. Flora and fauna survive here - mosses, miniature ferns, high country grasses that flower briefly each summer, insects, crickets and the ubiquitous feral rabbit.
Surrounding the plateau in every direction is an ocean of magnificent mountains including, to the north, snow-capped Aoraki-Mt Cook. All this is enclosed beneath a cloud-tufted, deep blue dome.
Clambering out of the helicopter, it is hard to imagine this isolated, ancient tableland in the Benmore Range, on the southern edge of the Mackenzie Basin, is potentially poised to contribute to major breakthroughs in science and technology.
But here are three scientists, led by University of Otago physics lecturer Dr Tim Molteno (45), eagerly fanning out across the plateau, taking measurements and observations.
They plan to construct a 200m-square radio telescope here, an array of eight centrally linked antennae spread out across the rocky terrain. The telescope will gaze primarily at the upper atmosphere, seeking to capture data on short-duration astronomical events. It will also be used to develop and test new ways of processing information collected by radio telescopes.
If successful, these new mathematical processes, algorithms, could be used in the much-vaunted but as yet unbuilt and unproven Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project.
Twenty years in the development, with another decade to go before it is projected to be fully operational, SKA is a 1.5 billion (NZ$2.29 billion) dream to build the world's largest radio telescope comprised of about 5000 linked antennae.
Fifty times more sensitive than other radio instruments and able to survey the sky more than 10,000 times faster than ever before, it is hoped SKA will be able to create images of tens of millions of distant galaxies. And because the images will be built up from signals which have taken up to billions of years travelling at the speed of light to reach Earth, it is hoped they will provide answers to age-old questions concerning the beginnings of the universe.
In 2006, South Africa and Australia were named the leading contenders to host the giant telescope, which needed plenty of space a long way from man-made radio signals.
The competition then began in earnest, each country building operational prototypes to prove to the European-led governing body that would fund the project that they had the expertise to deliver.
In mid-2009, New Zealand became a partner-state with Australia to bolster its bid against the South African-led nine nation African consortium.
In May 2012, it was announced hosting rights would be split between both SKA bids - a high-frequency radio telescope to be built primarily in Northern Cape province, South Africa, and a low-frequency telescope in the Western Australian outback.
Dr Molteno was deputy director of the New Zealand SKA research and development grouping that operated until the hosting decision announcement.
The potential of SKA is enormous, he says.
''It has the capacity to make revolutionary discoveries, a bit like the Large Hadron Collider.''
It might even change how we understand the relationship between gravity and quantum mechanics - two big concepts describing the laws of the physical universe that people think should be related but have not yet managed to link. It is part of the effort to develop the so-called unified theory of everything, University of Otago mathematics department lecturer Dr Matthew Parry (41) says.
One way scientists hope SKA will help achieve that is by enabling them to observe how radio signals from pulsars - rapidly rotating neutron stars - are affected by black holes, Dr Parry says.
The general theory of relativity, on which the understanding of gravity is based, predicts how the signal would be affected.
''What SKA is hoping is that the intense gravity of black holes will cause Einstein's general theory of relativity to break down,'' Dr Parry says.
''That could give clues to other theories of gravity which might lead to a unified theory of everything.''
That in turn could result in radical new technologies, although we should not expect to see them for several decades, Dr Molteno says.
Take for example the laser, research technician Phil Brown (52) says.
Lasers were first built in the late 1950s, essentially as an experiment to follow up on predictions made by Albert Einstein in 1917.
''At the time they were considered esoteric scientific experiments,'' Mr Brown, who works with Dr Molteno, says.
But 50 years on, lasers are everywhere, a critical component to many aspects of daily life from telephones and DVD players to barcode scanners and laser surgery.
SKA is ''very much blue-sky research'', Dr Molteno says.
''We don't know what it will produce.''
But the challenges to make SKA work are equally enormous.
Computers capable of managing SKA have not been developed yet, Dr Molteno says.
''The telescope will operate using the world's fastest computer in 2020,'' he says.
''In other words, they have extrapolated from the history of computing ... and have said by 2020 the world's fastest computer will be fast enough to operate it.''
Whether computer development will continue at its historic rate is a moot point.
Large-scale energy and IT infrastructure also needs to be built. And the cost of operating SKA will be at least as much as the cost of building it.
Then there are the mathematical processes needed to feasibly process the data into images. They do not exist either.
The way radio telescopes at present create images is by matching, or correlating, each piece of data received from each antenna against every other piece of data received from all the other antennae in the array.
This process is directed by algorithms - mathematical processes which, in this case, turn streams of binary numbers into pictures of distant galaxies.
So many correlations have to be made, even with existing radio telescopes, that the processing cannot be done in ''real time''. Instead the data is stored and then the numbers are crunched.
But that will not be even remotely possible with SKA. Imagine the biggest computer hard drive available in retail stores. It has a data storage capacity of three or four terabytes. A SKA antenna will fill one of those hard drives in less than a second. And that is just one of 5000 antennae or dishes, each of which will be receiving that quantity of data 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
''So it's a real problem,'' Dr Molteno says.
''The data is like a waterfall going past. With the SKA you will have to pull images out of it as it flows past. They can't be retrieved once they have gone past.''
Associate Prof Colin Fox (53), of the University of Otago's physics department, puts it bluntly.
''If you have to do all the correlations, there is no way the SKA will run,'' Prof Fox says.
But, adds Dr Molteno, ''We believe that is not the only way to figure out what is in the sky from the signals.
''We believe there is a way that is not just a faster way to do the same thing, but a different thing.''
This is one of the prime motivations for the University of Otago scientists, who plan to have their small radio telescope atop the Benmore Range operational by this time next year.
They hope it will add to knowledge of transient astronomical events - little-understood short flashes of radio energy. But they also believe it could provide the key to unlocking the potential of SKA.
''The radio astronomy community know they don't have the answers to make it work,'' Prof Fox says.
''They are looking elsewhere. And we are one of the ones they are looking to.''
The vexing issue of processing vast quantities of data has become a priority funding area for the United States Government, Prof Fox, who was the only foreign speaker at a 2012 United States conference on the issue, says.
The Otago team is using its comparative lack of funds to its advantage, letting that drive it to find unique solutions in unexpected places.
''That's where we sit on SKA,'' Dr Molteno says.
''Let's see what we can do with stuff that's cheap, such as algorithms. For us in Dunedin, we can work as well as anyone in algorithms.''
The team's radio telescope antennae will use common GPS radio receivers, enabling it to be built for not millions of dollars, but less than $1000.
And it is being constructed in such a way that the scientists will be able to use it to develop and test new and different algorithms - inference algorithms, which have been called ''magician-level statistics''.
Prof Fox describes them as a way to get a computer to process information more like the way a human does.
Traditional signal-processing models assume the radio telescope's computer knows nothing about the universe.
''But we humans work differently to that,'' he says.
''If I see something hairy in the savannah, I assume it's a lion and run.
''It's about informing what you see by what you already know about the world.
''It can be quicker and more accurate.''
If it can be used successfully on the Benmore Range radio telescope, it will mean significantly reduced algorithms are required to get the same result.
This would be the breakthrough allowing SKA to circumvent the data storage problem, instead processing data in real time.
Then we would be able to reach into the waterfall of data falling all around us from the beginning of time - reach in and pull out images that could show us an unimaginable future.
