The European Extremely Large Telescope will dwarf all other telescopes. In 1609 Galileo’s “Old Discoverer” had a lens an inch in diameter. Now the Keck Observatory on top of a mountain in Hawaii has two mirrors, each of them 10m across, that are so smooth and so perfect that even if they were stretched out to the width of the world their irregularities would still be only inches high. The Extremely Large Telescope — its name so deliberately prosaic that it becomes almost poetic— will, provided that it is completed by 2018, be the diameter of five double-deck buses placed end to end and will be able to see (rather than infer) Earth-like planets revolving around distant stars.

We could, in effect, be looking at ourselves through the looking glass. The Extremely Large Telescope will probably be located in the Canary Islands, but you really can try something like this at home. Look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? Look very carefully. Obviously your left eye is where your right eye ought to be, but there is more than that, something practically impossible to notice and yet fundamental to making sense of the Universe. Your reflection is no longer you. The difference between you as you are now, and you as the mirror represents you, is measurable. This is what you used to look like, a short time (a few nano seconds) ago. But if the speed of light is finite — something that Galileo realised — then everything you see is history.

To see the more distant past it is only necessary to hold the mirror farther away from the object. If we want to finally work out who really killed Kennedy, all we need to do is nip over (assuming instantaneous matter transportation) to a planet some 46 light years from here and we should be able to inspect the grassy knoll (with an Extremely Large Telescope) at our leisure. Similarly, the Battle of Waterloo, the birth of Christ or the building of the pyramids — we just need to go the extra few million miles.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to look through the Keck, the highest observatory in the world, and saw a red dot some 13 billion light years away from the kindergarten phase of the Universe. This is getting close to seeing the absolute origin of time and space. If we can see that far — and that far back — it ought to be possible, you would think, to go all the way and bear witness to the birth of the Universe. Genesis Now. As it was in the beginning.

Unfortunately, there is a small hitch. Beyond a certain point, we run out of photons to look at, it’s just plasma, pre-light, a very interesting cocktail but, sadly, inaccessible to YouTube. So the Extremely Large Telescope will get us, if not all the way back to the Genesis moment, at least to a very short time after the beginning, the “Let there be light” period of stellar formation.

Clearly we need to transcend light. If we cannot quite see everything, perhaps it is possible to hear it using gravitational waves. They pass right through matter, refreshing the parts that photons cannot reach. Every event generates vibrations, pulses, like ripples in a pond. The whole Universe is forever sending out signals about itself, it is simply a question of picking them up — which is why I had to go to Ligo (the Laser Inteferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) in Washington State. Galileo and his successors have enabled us to see and conceive of other worlds. They created stairways to heaven. Shakespeare may well have been registering the impact of the first telescopes when he wrote: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The holy grail of science and religion alike is to see (or at least detect) the point at which there are no more things: to infinity and beyond, all the way back to before the beginning. An heroic but impossible quest? Given infinite time and space, this seems to me like a perfectly reasonable goal and not only attainable but inevitable.

Andy Martin’s Beware Invisible Cows: My Search for the Soul of the Universe is published by Simon and Schuster, £12.99

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