How is the Allen Telescope different from traditional radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array?
JT: The Allen Telescope is the first of what we call Large Number of Small Dishes (LNSD), a new way of building telescopes. It’s a radio interferometer. That isn’t new. We’ve had interferometers since the ’70s. But creating the equivalent of a large telescope by building it out of lots of small pieces, by using consumer technologies wherever possible and by putting the complexity into computing, we’ve changed the paradigm and brought the cost down. I hope that we’ll use it to change the world by detecting evidence of another technology or by discovering some new astrophysical phenomenon that no one yet thought of.
