Hubble. Webb. Chandra. Spitzer. Rubin. Roman. And now, Simonyi.
With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.
But here’s the thing: Technically speaking, the Simonyi Survey Telescope isn’t named after Charles Simonyi alone.
“The idea was to create something that carries the family name, and I was more thinking about my dad, Simonyi Károly,” Charles Simonyi told GeekWire, using the Hungarian manner of speech for personal names. “He was a professor at Budapest University. He wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Cultural History of Physics,’ which is available now in English at Amazon.”
Simonyi said his father was best-known for his work in popularizing science, “to make science understandable to the great public.” The physicist’s son arguably had an even greater impact on our computer-centric society by taking a leading role in creating Word, Excel and other tools for Microsoft’s Office suite of applications back in the 1980s. Four decades later, Word is still the world’s most widely used word processing software, and Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet.
Now the Simonyi Survey Telescope promises to have a similarly transformative and long-lasting impact on astronomy. Built at the Rubin Observatory on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, the telescope will survey the full sky every three nights, generating about 20 terabytes of raw data daily.
