The instruments of science can evoke the thrill of their discoveries. The sight of the dish of the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank, looming whitely out of the Cheshire Plain, prickles the back of the neck long before the observer finds out that it is used to listen to radio waves from outer space.

These sounds of space reach us millions of years after they were produced from places we can never hope to go. Patric Dickinson was inspired by Jodrell Bank to write a poem in which he called radio waves “blind codes / Of spaces beyond the span/ Of our myths”. From these codes, pulsing radio waves, astronomers have deduced pulsar stars - whose sound is a distinctive pulse as they rotate at astronomical speed - and quasars, the halo of star-like activity round a black hole. Last year, at The Times' First Move festival in giant shadow of the telescope, the dish was used to bounce a poem off the Moon.

Now Unesco says it is planning to broaden the criteria of its World Heritage Sites to include places that mark advances in science. Bravo! Ulug Bek's observatory in Samarkand doubtless will make the list, and so should Los Alamos and Sir Alexander Fleming's office at St Mary's, Paddington. But Jodrell Bank deserves to be included, not least because it is a monument to the flexibility of mind and sheer coincidence that so often prove essential preconditions for scientific progress.

Sir Bernard Lovell, now 94, built radio telescopes in 1945 on fields in Cheshire to study echoes which he hoped might be cosmic rays. When they turned out to be radio waves from distant objects, he built the telescope to track them instead, using gun-turret racks from battleships to tilt the dish from the horizon to the heavens. The project ran vastly over budget but funding was found after Lovell used the telescope to track the ballistic missile launch vehicles of successive Sputniks. It has since, among other things, used pulsars to prove the Theory of Relativity to be correct to within 0.05 per cent. It is still listening. And so, it seems, is Unesco.