Technology & Society

    The things that make children ask questions are infrastructure too

    LMLee McIntosh
    •31 July 2026•7 min read
    The things that make children ask questions are infrastructure too

    I do not remember every detail of the school trips I took as a child, but I remember Jodrell Bank.

    I remember the scale of it. I remember looking up at the Lovell Telescope and trying to understand how something so enormous could move, what it was listening for and what might be out there for it to find.

    Even driving past could start a conversation. The telescope would appear above the Cheshire landscape and, for a few minutes, ordinary questions would give way to much bigger ones. How far can it see? What does space sound like? How do we know what is beyond the things we can see? Could there be someone else looking back?

    Those conversations mattered. The excitement mattered. The permission to be inquisitive mattered.

    I returned fairly recently with my own children, and part of the pleasure was watching the same process begin again. They did not need a carefully designed lesson in the economic value of scientific research. They saw an extraordinary machine in a field and wanted to know what it did.

    Sometimes that is where a lifetime of curiosity starts.

    More than a landmark

    The news that funding for e-MERLIN is due to end in March 2028 is therefore sad for reasons that extend beyond astronomy. Jodrell Bank remains open, and this is not an announcement that the visitor attraction is closing tomorrow. However, unless alternative funding is found, its future as a working scientific observatory is under serious threat.

    That distinction matters because Jodrell Bank is not simply an impressive object from Britain's scientific past. The Lovell Telescope and the wider e-MERLIN network continue to support active research. Only days before the funding announcement, the University of Manchester described the telescope's role in a live demonstration using radar to observe satellites and space debris.

    It would be a peculiar kind of preservation to protect the structure while allowing its purpose to disappear.

    A telescope can remain visible long after the scientific capability around it has been lost. Visitors could still admire the engineering, read about previous discoveries and learn what people once achieved there. But there is an enormous difference between visiting a monument to scientific ambition and standing beside a place where that ambition is still alive.

    Curiosity does not come with attribution data

    My working life has been spent around technology, products, budgets and outcomes. I believe strongly in measuring whether something is useful and whether an investment is producing results. Public funding is finite, and UKRI has set out the financial pressures and prioritisation process behind the decision. No institution should be exempt from difficult questions simply because it is famous or loved.

    The problem is that our measurements tend to favour effects that are direct, immediate and easy to attribute.

    A research facility can count observations, papers, discoveries, collaborations, jobs and students trained. Those things are important. It is much harder to count the child who visits on a school trip, becomes fascinated by engineering and chooses a technical career many years later. It is harder still to count the conversations started by seeing the telescope from a car, the teacher given a way to make science feel real, or the parent who rediscovers their own curiosity while explaining it to their children.

    I cannot draw a straight line from visiting Jodrell Bank as a child to becoming a programmer, technology leader and product builder. No single visit determines a life in that way. A career grows from hundreds of influences, encounters and opportunities.

    That is precisely the point.

    Curiosity rarely arrives with attribution data. Its return may appear twenty years later, in a different city, organisation or industry. By then, the institution that helped create it receives none of the credit.

    If we only value what can be connected neatly to a short-term result, we will systematically undervalue the places that shape people slowly.

    Infrastructure is also human

    We usually describe infrastructure in physical terms. Roads, railways, power networks, cables, laboratories and data centres are easy to recognise because they make other activity possible.

    Scientific institutions do the same thing, but part of the infrastructure they create is human.

    They gather expertise. They train researchers and engineers. They give teachers a working observatory in which to bring science to life. They provide visible evidence that difficult, ambitious work happens here, in this country, within reach of an ordinary child.

    Jodrell Bank has always done this particularly well because it is so physically unavoidable. The Lovell Telescope does not hide inside a laboratory or behind the walls of a university department. It rises above fields and roads. It makes advanced science part of the landscape.

    A child does not need to understand radio astronomy to understand that the object in front of them is attempting something remarkable.

    That matters in a country that regularly talks about improving technical skills, increasing productivity, creating new industries and encouraging innovation. Those ambitions do not begin when somebody applies for a job in science or technology. They begin much earlier, when the world gives a young person a reason to ask how something works.

    That habit of asking the right questions remains valuable long after the school trip ends.

    Not everything valuable should behave like a start-up

    There is a growing expectation that every organisation should explain itself using the language of immediate return, rapid growth and measurable economic output. That pressure can be healthy. It can expose complacency, focus investment and force institutions to demonstrate relevance.

    It can also distort our understanding of long-term national capability.

    A scientific observatory is not a software subscription that can be cancelled and restarted when budgets improve. Expertise disperses. Researchers leave. Training routes narrow. Equipment deteriorates. Relationships built across institutions and countries weaken. Once that capability has gone, recreating it is likely to be far more difficult and expensive than maintaining it.

    This is not an argument that everything should be funded forever. It is an argument that the cost of losing something must be calculated as seriously as the cost of keeping it.

    The balance sheet should include more than the next funding period. It should include the discoveries that will not be made, the researchers who will not be trained and the children who will never experience a working scientific institution at close range.

    Those losses are difficult to measure, but difficulty is not the same as insignificance.

    The places that tell children ambition is real

    Children encounter inspiration in different ways. It might come from a book, a brilliant teacher, a museum, a computer, a football coach or somebody they meet at exactly the right moment.

    Sometimes it comes from seeing something enormous and improbable rising above a field.

    Places such as Jodrell Bank tell children that science is not an abstract activity performed somewhere else by a different kind of person. It is real. It requires machines, imagination, patience, collaboration and people willing to spend years answering questions that may not have an immediate commercial use.

    They also show that Britain has built ambitious things before and can choose to keep building them.

    The Lovell Telescope is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its history deserves to be protected. But heritage status should not become a comfortable way of describing something whose working life we allowed to end. The saddest outcome would be for future children to stand beneath it and learn only what it used to do.

    When I took my own children there, I was not attempting to steer them towards a particular career. I wanted them to experience the same sense of scale, excitement and possibility that I remembered. I wanted them to ask questions I could not necessarily answer.

    I would like future parents to be able to do the same, beside a telescope that is still looking, listening and contributing, rather than one preserved only as evidence of former ambition.

    Places like Jodrell Bank do not just study the universe. They help create the people who want to understand it.

    That is infrastructure too.

    Related reading

    Sources and further reading

    Science
    Technology
    Education
    Infrastructure
    Long-term Thinking