Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

think forward think research Channel the following program is brought to you by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute a philanthropy serving society through biomedical research and science education it's just a great pleasure for me to introduce Neil deGrasse Tyson you can read in your materials that many many honors he has he has a BA in physics and a PhD in astrophysics we won't hold that against him here and he has many activities many titles he's director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and of course I'm sure everyone when they introduce you makes note of the last thing here that you were voted the sexiest astrophysicist by some magazine or other selves now you know why we really invite worried are you gonna come now that we consider the category say that's you know that's and he will be grilled by our president time check whom as you are whom you've already met who has a BA and a PhD in chemistry we won't hold that against them either and that has a distinguished career as a scientist but also as a leader here of HHMI so with no further ado I will get out of your way Neil it's just terrific to have you back here at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute thank you thank you so one thing that's been that I've been wondering about is you have a distinguished and very exciting research career but then you also are such a master at explaining scientific concepts to students and to the general public through your books and through the the Nova ScienceNOW series how do you do you feel torn between these two halves of your life yeah I I might have felt torn if it weren't for some of the sort of the popularizing legacy that already existed in my field when you consider the likes of Carl Sagan and billions and billions billions it's our favorite favorite word of the astrophysicist billions it sounds cool when you all say together say with me on three ready one two three see that's not just a beautiful that's just a beautiful number and so he came up and decided that here we are doing astrophysics through tax based sources funding through NASA the NSF and the like and yet the public was not a participant even vicarious participant on that frontier and he felt that it was his duty as a research scientist to bring that frontier to the public which he did and did better than anybody and he caught a lot of flack for that at the time his colleagues are saying what are you doing he appeared on the on The Tonight Show then it had Johnny Carson and that was considered an abomination of behavior for a scientist at the time and so he took a lot of flack for it but stayed strong in that effort and throughout that trajectory what the astrophysics community noted was that the public started started feeling good about the research we were doing and funding levels were rising and Congress was talking about it and cosmic discoveries were making headlines when they hadn't before and so there was a phase shift in how scientists who became popularizers were treated by their colleagues and I am in the zone of benefit of that phase shift there's blood on the tracks but it was left way before me what I have noticed however and that in other scientific disciplines even when very close to mind which is physics that relationship does not yet exist it is it's considered a a step away from your professional obligations if you decide to write a book or appear on television and it does not contribute to tenure you know I don't even expect it to contribute to tenure decisions because tenure is a research in a research institution it's a research designation typically I don't have I don't have a problem with that what I all I really ask for is that when I do it don't hold it against me at worst just let it be neutral and I'll be fine with that so I'm saying at worst in my field it is neutral and at best people like it and they recognize its value I don't yet see that in other fields I just don't now now given the draw of this sort of Rockstar status as mr. Alto physicist for the for the nation on television do youth though being drawn more and more into the public expression and explanation of science and away from the research and maybe that's not a bad thing well yes it's it's a that's attention but we the first ask about the tension was I thought you meant between no this was a new colleagues a new question okay is there is there tension within alright and yes there's tension within because my first love is actually in the lab or the astrophysicists equivalent of a lab which is at a telescope or modeling the cosmos on in the middle of some hundred thousand line computer code and that's our lab and I want to do that I want if I want to do that all the time but it's unrealistic to do it all the time so I have to ask myself where do I put the split and right now it's about 8020 eighty public twenty research I want to pull that back in about a year I want to get that back to about sixty forty fifty fifty now before we go on we better all be reminded of what an astrophysicist is because I I think some of us it could even include me might be a little tremendously does include not right about the difference between an astronomer and an astrophysicist okay there's no difference oh okay yeah next question I knew that no they up until eight the 1860s or so early 1850s but really ridin high 1860s and 1870s the application of spectroscopy to the universe became a big business big cottage industry and what that meant was when you're sitting behind a telescope you could deduce more about the universe then where the star was in the sky and how bright it was you could analyze the a with the spectroscope and determine the chemical composition of the star you could look at the spectral features and check for Doppler shifts in those special features to judge is the star moving towards you or away from you if the if the if the spectral feature is broadened that tells you that the star is spinning fast because it's one star unresolved some part of star is moving towards you that gives you a little bit of a blue shift in the line some part is moving away from you and there's a continuum of emissions in between so the line actually fattens in the spectral signature and so you can deduce the rotation rates the speeds that and all of a sudden laws of physics that would previously enjoyed in the laboratory were now cast into the universe laws of physics beyond simple gravity chemistry for example at quantum mechanics not yet invented but of course spectral lines is all about quantum mechanics so it's late 1800s departments of astronomy that were freshly conceived were then called departments of astrophysics and the Journal of astrophysics was born predated by a journal of astronomy but today we all do the same thing we all have extensive training in physics and mathematics and we all talk to each other completely fluently so you're both doing a key role mostly doing a combination of observational work data collection and analysis yeah that's right and computer and very few of us do it all they're people who would primarily go to telescopes others who primarily are pencil and paper and others who primarily are on a computer and it's the synthesis of those that advances the frontier now now you mentioned gravity a minute ago and I will obey gravity I guess it's a little choice on that yeah I know I always do okay I'm I was struck by the title of your most recent book oh this death by black hole and and that's certainly an intense gravitational experience yeah you want to avoid black holes yeah so what would this feel like that'd be a bad day if you in my recent book now in paper guide just came out in paperback thanks thanks for applause by the way I didn't plan to plug the book but it just came in so naturally you even you might have known yes it's called death by black hole and and other cosmic quandary 'z but it's from a section of the book called when the universe turns bad all the ways the cosmos wants to kill us and see there's so much so many people talk about how beautiful the universe is oh how beautiful earth it's like they're ignoring a whole part of what the universe is trying to do that would just as soon have us dead and so there's a whole section in the book that kind of celebrates that fact the rest and the rest is really what it is to be a scientist yes I'm an astrophysicist so there's a lean towards the universe but it's really how to be a scientist at all and not so much how to be a scientist but how to celebrate the enterprise of discovery of scientific discovery and it's gotten very good reviews it actually made the New York Times bestseller my first book to do so however it's it was like minimum bestseller case okay it got to the lowest rung and was there for one week and then left okay so now that was this fiction or not so it turns out the publisher while they'd rather be higher on the list anywhere on the list they get to say New York Times best seller on the next printing needle head say was only there for six days six and a half days they don't have to say that so in a black hole yeah you want to avoid them if as you fall in if you imagine a feet first dive into a black hole what happens as black holes are small and like right now as you stand your about 6 feet tall your feet or closer to this sort of be the size of the Blanco there are black holes that size for sure others are larger if this is not one though I bet it wet check dry it we planted so what we do is you if you're standing on earth your feet are closer to the center of the earth then your head is by six feet nuts so you can calculate the force of gravity on your feet there's just a simple equation provided by Isaac Newton you might remember from your physics class and calculate the force of gravity on your head and you get there not very different they are different but they're not very different not so different that you would notice it biologically all right it turns out that if the object that has gravity is small then your height becomes a more significant fraction of the size of the object then it would be for the earth here you are on earth and here's the diameter the earth but now here you are and now black holes that and your this so now you calculate the difference it's huge it's huge as you fall towards the center of a black hole that difference in gravity grows oh now I think I'm gonna get you long okay so well so initially it kind of feels good you know you kind of stretch stretching feels good right we all want to stretch when you wake up in the morning you don't crunch you stretch yeah so it feels good but then you realize that the growing force is unrelenting and it will reach a point you can calculate this where the difference in gravity exceeds the molecular bonds that attach your flesh as one solid piece of body and so there's a point will you swear you'll snap into two pieces and it'll likely be at the base of your spine now those two pieces then begin to feel this difference in gravity between their top and their bottom and then they snap into two pieces so we go from one to two to four to eight to 16 to 32 and eventually you become this stream of atoms head down towards the abyss now it's actually worse than that because as you fall we know from Einstein's general theory of relativity which is their understanding of gravity that the fabric of space and time funnels down to a point so not only are you stretched head to toe you are extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through a tube in fact we have a word for dying in this manner yes yes it's called spaghettification okay sounds very scientific yeah there you go well actually don't get me started on that because in astrophysics we feel very strongly about this and I'm going to get in your face now okay okay I got uncle blame you personally I blame you by association okay the universe is hard enough the last thing the universe needs is a complex lexicon laid down between the communicator and the listener to confuse them about what it is they're trying to listen to so in astrophysics we tell it like it is we don't research Latin Greek vocabulary words and invent as big a word as we can to describe something simple you know B 10 what what do we call spots on the Sun sunspots thank you okay chip big red stars the quote red giants alright Jupiter has a large red spot on its surface we call that Jupiter's red spot alright so pattern has rings saturn has rings we call those rings alright so where as you take a peek at biology or chemistry excuse me you know do have sonic hedgehog and wynt signaling now those are very descriptive okay you win yeah I think I win that no matter what and it's my field whose vocabulary is drawn upon to name commercial products it's quasar brand television we've got pulsar watches we've got look at car names the galaxy 500 we got the nope the Chevy Nova although Nova is a star that is just blown up so I don't think Chevy knew that when they named their Chevy Nova but that's between you and me but there is no car named the deoxyribonucleic acid No we'll work on them there's no black hole yet either that was yeah that'd be hot just you'll be hard to sell it'd be hard to sell that but a big bang that's weird - one syllable war Big Bang the beginning of all time space and everything Big Bang most important event in the universe well supporting molecule in the human body has nine syllables did I get it right nothing so deoxyribonucleic acid yet nine that's why I work on ribe oh I'll cut it right story okay so I I was many of us were saddened by Pluto's being demoted from planet - I'm sorry it just it just was it just was really a tough day to open the newspaper and see that what what do you professionals think about this we'll get over it actually I had something to do with it Oh i erican Museum of Natural History in New York City we have the Hayden Planetarium the Rose Center for Earth and space that I'm in charge of that the universe part of the museum and for our newly built 230 million dollar facility back in the year 2000 we opened with exhibit displays of the solar system where Pluto was removed from the secret shake-and-bake I was liking you up to now I was like with you up till now so Pluto was removed and put where put with you don't have it in your pocket do you no no no part of the Pluto it was with its brethren newly discovered brethren of the outer solar system Pluto who here is like likes Pluto who here was saddened that it got demoted okay did you know that there are six moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto including Earth's moon did you know that did you know that Pluto is more than half ice by volume such that if you brought Pluto to where earth is right now heat from the Sun would evaporate that ice and it would grow a tail that's no kind of behavior for a planet that would look bad in the planet pantheon you know if you walking around with the tail what we what was discovered in the early 1990s was that there were more objects in the outer solar system they had weird orbits like Pluto there were small like Pluto that were made of mostly ice like Pluto in fact a new swath of real estate had been discovered predicted to be to have been there about 50 years ago now discovered named for an astronomer called Gerard Kuiper and it's called the Kuiper belt of comets Pluto fits right in fits right in and so I think of it as not losing a planet but is gaining a new member of the family of objects in the solar system and we don't count the planets that's the big that's the big pedagogical gaffe to believe that the enumeration of planets somehow constitutes science but it's not because oh well there's nine now I have to remember a different number that's not science I don't care how many planets there are that's not interesting tell me what planets have in common with each other what they differ in our exhibits we don't have the Saturn panel and then the the Jupiter panel we have all the data on each that implies that this enumeration is something important that's not what we do we have a panel that says rings and we talk about ring phenomena among objects in the solar system another one we talk about ice we're talking about where ice is in the so listen your comments are some moons or have a lot of ice Europa what are the moons of Jupiter is covered in ice you get to talk about them in the same breath because they have things in common talk about storms there now you get to talk about Jupiter Earth and Mars in the same breath we've got atmospheres we've got uneven heating our earths of the surfaces you got storms so that's how science progresses not memorizing you have teachers giving exams what is the name of the fifth planet from the Sun that's not science so I am I believe we took the pedagogical and scientific high road and in fact the greater scientific community ultimately agreed with that six years later and voted for two motion oh by the way after we did that to Pluto it took a year before the public noticed and it was a New York Times reporter a year later who overheard a kid say to his mother mommy where's Pluto it's got to be there somewhere you know look keep looking I'm busy mommy where's Pluto it just keep looking and it wasn't wasn't there and he thought he had like a story of the century and so on page one of the New York Times On January 21st 2001 now what should have really filled that day's headlines think about it January 21st 2001 actually sorry scary 22nd what should be like big headlines that day inauguration of the President there's still counting dimpled Chad's in Florida a president gets inaugurated there's news about Washington then that was the newspaper on page one of the New York Times that had the title this wide Pluto not a planet only in New York then came the hate mail from third graders I was a public enemy and so I just so I have just written a book I know it's now in my copy edited I have it with me in fact you want to take a look at some of the pages it'll come out January oh nine it's called the Pluto files and it has and I've reproduced scans of letters from children pissed off that I look you there's one girl in fifth grade she says dear dr. Tyson well why why did you demote Pluto that why is it not a planet anymore if how do if someone lived on Pluto that means they wouldn't exist looks like okay that goes on as it says I think that's discrimination discriminating a planet because it's because of its small far away okay and then it said at the end please write back soon but don't write in cursive I can't read it yet so I have letters from children I have arguments from adults I have colleagues duking it out between people who really don't care and just think about it and others who are invested in missions to Pluto on the premise that if it's a planet it has a planets worth of budget to spend on it as opposed to just a dirty ice ball in the outer solar system so there was politics culture and you can't neglect you can't omit you can't sweep under the rug the greatest force of them all and it's the force of Disney Disney is the true plutocracy there because you have the dog made in America first conceived and drawn the same year that Pluto the cosmic object was discovered so the same tenure in the American consciousness that's why Europeans didn't care one way or another it's at Pluto isn't it the little one out there that doesn't know how to orbit the Sun keep it meanwhile we have people you know so so you just get over it get over although it does sound like this story has a silver lining because it encouraged people to become interested in what is a planet how does one define that it would also had the elements of the press poking fun at the astronomical community for example they said in one case this is when at the time and is still the case the New York Knicks the basketball team is doing abysmally in the NBA and so sports writer had a headline and said astronomers meet in Europe to discuss whether they should demote the New York Knicks to a dwarf basketball team they dribble the ball and they look and dress like a basketball team but they're lacking in certain fundamental aspects like scoring okay supplement so they got so it goes on and on and on and so they and that people had fun with it and so the Pluto files it has is a retelling of that trajectory of information told firsthand because I was in the middle of the hate mail and I was like x-raying packages from elementary school for like six months I guess you just have to increase public interest in science by whatever it takes well I was i lost probably a year of my life fielding questions and and the like so this book better pay off because I'm telling you it was like yeah so let's go since since uh the audience here is particularly interested in career pathways science so I noticed this morning there was a lot of angst in the room I could tell in the area but I think you know a healthy respect for for the fact that this is not the it could be an exciting life but but not the easiest life is it and how did your let's start when you were young when did you first know you were going to be a scientist I was nine years old and and what science were you intrigued by at age nine a universe oh so you were really and did you deviate from this astronomical pathway through your career and then come back to it or was it always just first you were an astronomer and then an astrophysicist and that well I learned how to pronounce astrophysics and that was it thence forth that I was your trajectory once you know that interest runs deep then by the way this is the advantage of knowing what you want to do early because then you can align the forces of your life to enable opportunities that might otherwise have gone by unnoticed you were nine years old I was nine and I visit my parents took me to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and I looked up because you couldn't see the stars that's what York slowed ideas us of all the light poles yeah I mean that's a true statement but let me say a slightly different way I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see right if you don't know that they're there you don't know that you're missing them so it's not the gee I wish I could see the stars let's go to the planetarium it's okay that's just it's just dark or kind of light as dark all right so I'm in there they dim the lights the stars come out and I was just struck by imprinted I guess is the biological word and behavioral biology do I get that right in printing I think that's the right term and I I was starstruck somebody rung a bell and you salivate oh right but but but not literally yeah yeah I was it was coursing through my veins and well actually initially I just thought it was a hoax because I knew how many stars that were in the night sky there's like 12 or something and now there were thousands so it was a fun hoax I didn't you know and then I my parents we went on a trip to Pennsylvania and to the Caribbean we have some lineages through the Caribbean and I saw for the first time the night sky as it was like intended to be seen and to this day to this day and I have access to the finest telescopes on the highest mountaintops I look up and see the night sky to this day I say to myself it reminds me of the Hayden plant which is kind of sick when you think about it that the real world would remind me of a projected gnome on sky but that's what the imprinting does and I was hooked ever since and I went to the Bronx High School of Science majored in physics and college that's where the foundational language is for understanding the universe and you apply those laws of physics to understanding cosmic phenomena not only gravitational problems involving planets moons satellites but also the birth lives and deaths of stars there some have spectacular deaths what galaxies do what the ensemble of galaxies do in our neighborhood what the entire universe is doing and so anything off the Earth's surface is fair game for the astrophysicist now Neil you make it sound like at age 9 you had this vision of yourself as an astrophysicist and you sort of marched very steadily towards that goal but there must have been some time tell me about the time that the toughest time you had on this pathway when you almost did when and did something else and what what kept you on track well IIIi still can't say that I almost did something else you know astrophysics is not the first subject you think of to put food on somebody's plate or to somehow improve the situation of the underprivileged in the world it's just not the first profession that you think of so my parents who were my father was active in the civil rights movement my mother was a housewife at the time a very common profession of the day and later on went back to school became a gerontologist so here are my parents who are helping people and here's their son you know studying black holes right looking up at the sky yeah yeah and so it's a little weird it's a little bit but they were supportive of this and all right but I still had some discomfort about whether I was doing the right thing culturally hmm I knew I was doing the right thing personally but you want to make a difference in the world if if you don't want to make a difference in the world go move to another planet I mean why what are you here for you know why just don't move to Pluto but and so meanwhile all right I go to high school and I take extra science classes in extra math classes and advanced calculus and all this stuff and I go to college and I was athletic in high school in college I wrestled by the way I wrestled in the weight category at the time 190 pounds 109 now that's a keyway category of all of them through ten weight categories why because if you show up 192 pounds you then get classified in a way category called unlimited okay so there's really good incentive to hit that way so there's another guy on the team who was my weight we were the same way he was a senior talented fellow majoring in economics fact he became a Rhodes Scholar during the year and we've got we come and I had a nice good workout we're coming out he said you know how's how's it going I'm a freshman ah his house no I said oh all my problem sets are kicking my butt I barely have time to go to the bathroom and he said what was it you're majoring in again I said physics and he says well and you want to do what with I said I wanted to get a PhD in astrophysics hey you know what he said to me by the way what was he going to do with his Rhodes fellowship at Oxford he was going to explore the role of enterprise zones in inner-city neighborhoods to empower those who were economically disenfranchised okay he's black but Lee so he turns to me and said astrophysics the then he says the following the black community cannot afford the luxury of someone with your intellect to spend it on that subject and I was devastated by that comment devastated now he wasn't just anybody saying it this is somebody who was walking in the walk and talking the talk and so I had no way out of that he dug a hole and put me in the hole and I and do I had no shovel I mean no ladder no wait and there I was in a hole trying to think my way out of it and I knew my interest in the universe was real because I felt it in my heart I felt it coursing through my veins but my responsibility as an educated member of society was eating away at that ambition in the absence of another way to think about the problem I just kept at it but with this albatross around my neck this this guilt that maybe I wasn't doing all I could to help others alright is 1989 I'm in graduate school in New York City Columbia University Upper West Side a phone call comes in to the department from Fox News this is before Fox was a national network whose local Fox News the weather guy had read over the news wire that there was an explosion on the Sun okay a blob of plasma plasma Astrophysical plasma which is just a gas with a lot of ionized particles in it so it actually responds to magnetic fields it's kind of kind of a cool state sometimes called the fourth state of matter and I said you know like if this is explosion on the Sun what could you tell us about I said oh it's just a blob of plasma highly charged particles moving fast about a hundred times the size of the earth yes large it's a big plasma pie headed towards Earth as it gets closer these charged particles will notice the magnetic field of the earth they will split positive and negative they will be attracted to the poles they will spiral down collide with the molecules in Earth's atmosphere excite them and render them aglow creating the Northern Lights oh the aurora borealis so tomorrow and over the weekend once you go north and have a good look at it he says you mean earth is okay I said Earth is fine they said could you say that on the air and I said okay and they said we'll send up a limo and I said limo on the air and I'm like I'm a graduate student all right I'm wearing my one shirt and I got Bo and I'm not you know I said could you send the limo to my house okay to my apartment meet me there not at the office so I like run home shower put on my one tie my one you know shirt my one jacket go to the interview would sit in here like this a little backdrop of books kind of this the erudite set anyway so we do the interview and that's why we record two taped at 3:00 in the afternoon so I go home call everybody mom dad sis brother grandma grandpa so I could be on TV tune in it's my first time on TV so I'm home eating dinner okay and the interview comes on there it is so there it is and at the end I had an epiphany of Revelation you ready yeah is 1989 I had never before in my life and I believe to this day that that was the first such occasion ever but I'd never performed my life seen an interview with a black person on television for expertise that had nothing to do with being black holding a side of course interviews with performers and musicians or athletes right I'm talking about experts and what a lecture intellectual I had never seen a black person here the guy didn't ask me well how do black people feel about this plasma coming from the Sun what does your community feel about this will it harm your skin the way it will harm our that's not the conversation that unfolded I was telling him whether Earth would survive and at that point I realized that one of the last stereotypes that prevailed in the among people who carry stereotypes is that black people are somehow dumb they used to be the stereotype that blacks were like physically unable you're right you know shiftless and lazy and then Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics sets four World Records within 45 minutes in front of Hitler right the Aryan race so that kind of fixed that one right we got that one done you know no one is saying blacks don't have physical ability that one's done okay so when you combine this I wondered maybe if there's more of this that's a way to undermine this sort of the the stereotype that prevailed about who's smart and who's dumb and think about it the word smart is not applied to all professions even if you are smart in that profession no one talks about smart lawyers they might say a brilliant lawyer they'll talk about a creative artist smart is saved for scientists it just is it's not even really applied to medical doctors it applies to scientist in the lab figuring stuff out that hadn't been figured out before so if you have visible examples of this then whatever is your next encounter with the black person trying to squeegee your windshield at the red light and if you're prone to saying all these black people they don't work and they're too dumb you're going to have to remember that I just told you that Earth is safe from the plasma that came from the Sun and so you're going to have to reconcile this you're gonna have to be wonderful maybe this guy could have been one of those but for lack of opportunity but for lack of institution with foresight okay Anil at this point you had the answer to your Rhodes Scholar thank you I said to myself I just have to be visible others like me in that situation that would have a greater force on society than anything else I could imagine anything else and so to this day I'm getting email from white people saying they wish they were smart as I was that was an unthinkable thing thirty years ago that just would not have ever happened white people wishing they were smart like black people and so um so so then I said to myself it's not that the black community can't afford to have me do Astrophysical can't afford to me to not do astrophysics and at that point I found myself standing outside the hole I had climbed out just the act of observing that interview and since then there have been other interviews with Intel intellectuals of minority groups that have nothing to do with their being a minority but I think that might have been the first ever and I'll tell you why I think it was the first not that I've seen every single broadcast up until that minute of every channel but there was another five years before I saw it happen again that's why I think it was a newer length and I had been a good looking just like you'd buy a new car and everybody somehow has your car that you're driving cuz it you how did that happen well you're now looking for it so I was looking for it and it went another five years so so yeah so I'm out of the hole so then I said well let me look up my guy see what he's like ant find him anywhere on the Internet I'm aware he is so I think I made the right decision and that's what that's how that unfolded but that and I yes I still knew I wanted to become a national physicist but there's the comfort level for having made that decision that I had to work myself into very good wonderful story yeah more may be equally apropos to these young budding scientists thoughts about their career what do you do or what did you do what should they do if you start out in a program after having chosen it very carefully and being very excited about it and then things don't work out at what point you just try harder and at what point do you do you cash it in and go somewhere else I started graduate school not at Columbia University where this story unfolded I started at the University of Texas as a graduate student at that institution I had a fellowship to attend graduate students had access to large telescopes in ways that attending other universities you would not to get good telescope access it had some good theorists there and so I had high expectations for that program and rather than rehashing other complexities about my life as a graduate student which was unorthodox I was a really different kind of student my portfolio of activities included a lot of things that was not a graduate student and I did that in high school and college when I wrestled for exam and I did stuff I even danced okay dance ballet and modern and international Latin ballroom competitive Latin ballroom and so I might get was still doing humming I can still do from say huh you're not you're not going to appear there we go I still do that okay and this going to interrupt you long enough to say that I just thought of a new meaning for Dancing with the star star there you go there so I had all these activities that I pursued what I didn't know was that I was expected to drop them all and only give 100% of my life to the lab again the figurative lab and I was uncomfortable doing that I was worried that all of a sudden I would no longer be all that I was I'd have to be something else and it was quite distressing for me the rest of what I was was my identity to say cut all that out never leave the lab I didn't if that's what I needed to be an astrophysicist which was coursing through my veins since age 9 I said all right I guess I'm going to have to just change my personality as uncomfortable a decision as that was and so I changed my personality made it less gregarious less socialized less and I just kind of became this hermit and I found out that the opinions of those in judgment of me because graduate school is all about the judgment the faculty has on your promise and performance as a future scientist it's all about that it's not about anything but that they're all try to make a judgement about what you will be and what kind of scientist you will be and so what I then learned is that they had already assessed my likelihood of success based on the two years that I had to sort of shed myself in other words they were imprinted with who they thought I already was so I when I had problems with my advisory committee I said it's time for me to transfer my program so no by the way this will put there's a point where they dissolve my committee and then I appealed it and they said okay that was only committees basically kicking you out of graduate school I appealed it then okay you can come back but you have to start an entire new PhD thesis with a whole different adviser because the devisor relationship wasn't working as well as all the rest of this and then they said things like now think carefully before you do this this would be another five years of toil and and then I realized I realized this trying to taunt me on the premise that the toil you invest in getting a PhD is somehow something to avoid somehow that that's bad when in fact that is the scientific enterprise your PhD is just your first big research project that we expect many more of you down the line yet they said this to me as though I was going to say Oh more work more research I better not let me find something else to do and some of the advice some of the other advisers thinking they're doing me a favor said you know you have this personality why don't you become a computer salesman I know some people who work for computers you could become into trying to do me a favor by getting me out of their community and I didn't mean push on you like that I'm sorry so I said to myself if I'm going to have to do a whole new PhD it's not going to be at this institution it was got to be fresh it might be fresh in another place and that's when I knocked on doors there are faculty that had seen me deliver papers oral papers and poster papers at our society conferences the American Astronomical Society and I said very something very simple there's a chairman of the Department of Columbia I said circumstances are such that I need to transfer my graduate program will you consider taking me as a student that sentence is sufficiently understood by anyone in a graduate school environment that he didn't say to me well what happened with your invite tell me give me the detail why did it it's like it wasn't working out and the fact that I was still on my feet and still knocking on doors that told him something right away but not only that he had seen me he had scientific conversations with me so it helped that I was visible at conferences it helped that I was speaking to other scientists about their work about my work you had a network yes outside of the one that was tarnished and so he said at least we can should make you do is take the general exam which is just the the textbook learned subject so that they can say he's with everybody else in the school and then I transferred in force directly for the PhD skipping the masters and it was just a completely different environment it's really different and I guess it's basically the fresh start and so you know it was it was lost income because it was the time was delayed before I would get the PhD and get PhD level income but it was not lost professional development because I had an expertise germinated in the previous PhD that I had been writing and I actually had published two papers based on that thesis but now I had a whole other thesis in a whole other subject area so as a result as they say that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger I had a greater breadth in my depth of understanding of astrophysics as a freshly minted PhD student and immediately after graduation I was offered a postdoc at Princeton University and that's which has a leading astrophysics department so I can tell you that in the end what matters more than anything the matters even more than how smart you are is how strong is and how deep is your ambition because no one ever said graduate school is going to be easy no one even said that there is this trajectory you follow and if you just do that everything will be fine because graduate school you have to have relationships with people who stand between you and the success of your career it's got to work it's got to be fertile it's got who they've got to respect your intellect that it's and it's going to be hard work yes that's why you're doing it you not doing because it's easy you're doing it because it's hard you did it because it was easy everybody would have done it and they could have no distinction about what it is you were pursuing for yourself in this enterprise this great enterprise we call research science so while they were telling me to be the computer salesman while I had was being kicked out of graduate school there was a point where I was in my parents basement without an academic affiliation something that I had had and maybe even take him for granted my whole life without a job you know how low can kenick how much lower can you get you kicked out of school you don't know if you gonna get into another school your life's ambition this is not just something that I discovered in college because astrophysics was early in the alphabet in the course catalog you know it was something that was deep within me and I needed those reserves I needed the support from my family that was a subject that came up this morning support from loved ones it's all part of the reserve of energy and these are the challenges by the way some people have it easier than others it might look out with a good advisor but don't assume that just because you have overlapping research interests that the the interpersonal relationship will work so I want to hear what you guys if you have question oh you did you have more questions yeah no I I can say here man look at what we didn't get to half of this but I think you're right I think it would be more interest not that I don't love you here with the questions but to hear what some of the students in the audience might might want to and if not then we go back to your questions that's why yeah hi dr. Tom Tyson my name is pH I'm shitty I'm a cognitive science student at UCSC being a cognitive science students I'm cognitive that means for thoughts right what do they say thoughts scientist I just wondered so I'm interested in fogger trends okay and it looks like early on you've been really interested in big things like universe TV interviews and billions as you mentioned so where was it a small thing that you were interested in I'm not gonna take the Pluto against you you know I know it was small and you didn't like it but what thank you but small suffice you know what I wanted to tell the press I want to say we kick Pluto out of solipsism is too small to make it in New York you know I wanted to be like a really like I want it to be you know really piss him off but I was more professional than that well what when you were thinking about your your future profession what are you thinking about small stuff as RNA for example like were you intrigued by smallest stuff as well or were you thinking big I valued science literacy in all the all the sciences so while I was less comfortable with biology I was always frustrated that there was so much to have to remember whereas in physics you don't remember anything there's just a few equations and you derive the understand the universe from that so I just compared the thickness of biology books to the thickness of you know all of I'm Stein's relativity fits in you know 20 30 pages you know so it's there's a difference in how the brain is wired by the time you're done in the exercise and so I was more frustrated by biology than by chemistry chemistry being a little closer we have quantum mechanics in common that between us so no I'm not interested professionally but I'm certainly interested because it was the scientific investigation of of the natural world I got an A+ on my biology term paper a to biology as a senior which is rare I think a senior in high school because I took physics as a sophomore followed by chemistry and the biology usually that's in Reverse so I was there with a lot of freshmen and sophomores kind of interesting but I'm an A+ on my final paper because I experimented with how to grow a plant completely upside down I had like soil and water supply up here and like supply down here and I wanted to see what the contest was between going towards the light going towards the light but against gravity right geotropism versus photos very low oh is that what that's called you knew that thank you for complexify the that we biologists so many I think you pointed out six or seven times for a nice interview okay up there my name is Imran and I'm currently a Gillian fellow at Yale and my question is um did you ever come to a point where you began taking up some of those hobbies that you started giving up and like it's maybe two questions that that's the first one and the second question is did you ever encounter difficulties of your actual thesis work like when you're when you're at Columbia those difficult times in your thesis I mean my person I find like different hobbies that I am involved in sort of we get to go okay excellent question I'll repeat it in case the recording devices needed him to have been actually live on the microphone the first question was I forgot it what was it for him giving up hobby okay do they help you attain you through where any of my lost hobbies resurrected in my later years I paraphrase what I think that's your question second question was what did I do did my thesis just go swimmingly or worse you got to Columbia yeah what so yeah what or were there occasions where I reached an impasse perhaps not knowing what to do so first question um I picked up some of the hobbies as I got older it's harder to like wrestle you know you just learned that you don't recover as fast like normally I'd bounce back by the next afternoon and now I was out for three days I noticed um I took on other hobbies more befitting my aging body but my growing intellect and so I took on the effort of reading old accounts of scientific discovery so I have a growing collection of antiquarian science books I read the original writings of Galileo and Newton and Copernicus and through books that were in circulation at the time they were alive you can see like wax marks on it because as people read at night with wax candles I mean it was and so that brings a certain element of romance to the study of how we came to understand our place in the universe and it also can be humbling to see the confidence our scientific predecessors may have had in one idea or another and watch it evaporate in the face of new information I got my research today I carry that sensitivity to what might be right or wrong glean from that exercise I also can tap it when I get interviewed on television I have a whole historic history of science reservoir of reference to flesh out and put in context the discovery that might be going on today so what I've accepted about my life is yes I reintroduced things that were not Center aligned to that interest but I have seeded those other activities as being chapters of my life and now I'm writing different chapters figuratively and literally because when I was wrestling rowing and dancing I was not writing books now I'm writing books the Pluto book is my ninth book and so you just say what was it that is kind of their work yeah okay so so that's that's how that plays out I still do them that just take on a different Tambor and I value them greatly about impasses they're not impasses that's just science don't look at it as a problem look at it as science you know there's the delusion the delusion that science is about discovery it was never about this discovery that's what gets reported on in the press but the press doesn't report about all the days in the lab where discoveries aren't happening they don't report about all the blind alleys that you don't know a blind until you get to the end of the alley that's the process of science that's the trajectory that we're all buying into here emotionally physically culturally if you don't like the dead end find something else to do because most of what you do will be dead ends and your ability to intellectually navigate to the side of them beneath them over them around them into another direction is the measure of how good a scientist you are in fact if you happen to luck out and have projects that worked out for ten different papers in a row you're not being trained as a scientist because the day a problem happens I don't know what you're going to do about it where's everybody else we have to gut slog through that had to redo a problem because they made a wrong assumption or the lab specimen got contaminated or they didn't know it until later and they read the lab book and they find out that the cleaning person came in and and and and pet the mice in the lab yeah and you find out later and you lose a year of your life you actually didn't lose a year it's just more of the process of science you're buying into the process you're buying into the journey you're not buying into the product and not enough of the public understands this the public thinks we just discover stuff in fact you're dead end you publish that dead end if you design experiment correctly that's gonna be an interesting dead end that he doesn't have to take the next time he looks into that same problem and he's gonna reference your paper okay not oh look he messed up ha ha ha no he's gonna say these paths did not work for these reasons forcing me to make a different assumption yeah that's the enterprise of science and if it delays your PhD you got your whole friggin life you just you'll delay a year my god I said don't worry about that what do you know what's your hurry you're gonna be doing this your whole life celebrated I don't mean to like get all on your case it looks like I like I'm facing him now you know it's like it's all your fault and you're the one so you'll be measured not by not having dead ends but how well you navigate around them at the time you notice that they're there we have one last question down here in the green sweater last question well I don't know I think we're okay unless someone is like busting at the seams okay right okay maybe not the left but we have an additional decision okay um I'm Kathy and I'm a physical chemistry major so I hope you mentioned dark matter mm-hmm um so I was wondering what you think about the exist of dark matter in terms of explaining the phenomena that sort of happening in the universe because there seems to be conflicting views whether or not you actually need to account for dark matter in Einstein's um sort of Einstein's modified theory of gravity so I don't know what you think about that but just out of curiosity okay a dark matter is a profound area of ignorance that we live with in astrophysics one of two largest areas of ignorance there is such a thing as we call dark energy which is a mysterious pressure on the cosmos operating opposite that of gravity having the universe accelerate in its expansion it should be slowing down because group the collective gravity of all the galaxies is is an attractive force but there is this pressure of the vacuum we call it dark energy we have no idea what it is that's just a placeholder term for it we could have called it Fred all right it's just what it is there's this thing called dark matter which is actually miss named it's really dark gravity we don't know if it's matter there is gravity out there that has no known source you account for all the electrons protons neutrons black holes gas clouds dark clouds planets stars you account for all it up that add it all up it does not account for the total gravity observed in the unites and closes it is 1/6 of the total gravity observed that's not fun not only that not only that 3/4 of the universe is this dark energy stuff so 1/4 is ordinary matter and dark matter of that 1/4 of the universe it's the 5/6 of it we don't know what that is so what does that leave that leaves like 4% of the universe that we actually have a predictive understanding of what it is ok and we're candid about that all right we don't claim Matt that we're masters of the cosmos with our feet up on the desk we are candid but I have to tell you a quick biology story your mind and your chemist to avoid abbreviations ok make sense ok right so it has been suggested that maybe we don't actually understand Newton's gravity or Einstein's gravity correctly maybe there's some new equation for gravity that when you apply the new equation that all the dark matter uncertainties go they just evaporate that's just which is stupid and they're people top people working on that problem they are having only limited success but they're sort of wedded to their theory you don't want to ever be wedded to your theory because what happens is you remember that Indy at the end of the day even though you're a scientist you are still a human being and human beings have intellectual frailties such as you believe your idea about how something works more than anybody else and that's good to a point but it's possible to then start living your idea and you lose the ability to assess or to recognize evidence that conflicts with it to the point where you should just discard it there are many examples of this all throughout the history of science I was on Charlie Rose you know the the PBS talk-show once it was back in 96 when there was evidence that we might have discovered life on a Martian meteorite ok Mars there meteorites on earth that started on Mars okay and the way that happens is you have asteroid impacts that hit with such ferocity that they cast surrounding rocks into space reaching escape velocity and then they float in space and then land on earth it's estimated that several tons of Martian rock on earth we just have to find it now the evidence was all circumstantial all right there was evidence of it was morphological basically it was no no slice in these I'm looking at him in the mic no no no they did what they were round morphological he means shape shape yes there were some shapee things that that contributed but that was not the lead evidence the lead evidence was that in this one rock oh by the way we know that Mars was once wet fertile you know we have dried riverbeds and floodplains and and rivers lake beds where the lake surface is salty and you only get that if you had concentrated salt that then evaporated away so in others their minerals Rock minerals that could only have come about by the evaporation of order and that those having been in solution to it okay so this rock had among the things in it polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons clearly a molecules name not invented by astronomers so that's an organic molecule it doesn't require organic process to make it but it's common in organic environments it also had reduced and what's the opposite of reduced oxidized oxidized iron coexisting in the same nook of this rock if you are reduced and oxidized you are not in chemical equilibrium you can't have that that is not an equilibrium state one of the most famous non equilibrium states there is is called life okay inside your body you have freshly oxygenated hemoglobin coming out of your lungs reduce hemoglobin going into your lungs occupying the same volume of organic matter okay so not only that we then have the shape of a little wormy looking thing that is like one-tenth the size of the smallest life-forms known on earth and if you look at the electron microscope photogate it looked like a little worth little segments it look like a little cute little worm unanalyzed just this this image of it that's what the press led with because it was looked like a worm but that was not the lead evidence presented it was the combination of these organic materials all in the same place all right it's circumstantial evidence granted but if you add up enough circumstantial evidence you can make a pretty compelling case maybe the rock lived in a oxidizing environment and then rolled down a cliff and then landed in a reducing environment and it picked it up both right okay I don't have a problem with that and then they have to go someplace else to get the PAHs okay but that seems like you're jumping backwards through a hoop when you could just simply say that life did it okay now this was page one leadoff news I'm on this on this talk show they pipe in a biologist he comes in the screen I didn't mean to say it that way you know they pipe in a biology of course you need a biologist cuz we're talking about life so I'm there and we're talking about it and I said I'm intrigued by this evidence life will do this for free and they showed the the little wormy thing and then the guy the biology guy said the biology that can't possibly be life and I'm thinking why not is there something I'm missing that this and this learning man on the screen is telling me cuz he was in like Minnesota or someplace else and he didn't come into and it said something I'm missing I said well why can't it be okay why can't that be that little wormy thing be like because it's one-tenth the size of the smallest life on Earth and I'm still ready for it to like I'm still thinking he's still gonna give me an answer like that's the lead into it but that was his answer and I said - last I checked well that is not so much okay so why is Earth your measure of what is possible in the whole universe all right and so then I had to think about this and I said why is he how come he can opaque he can't open it he can't do this and I realized why because every every week we discover something in the universe that stumps us we are humbled by our own discoveries whereas in biology while you may celebrate the diversity of life on earth behind closed doors at the end of the day you have to confess to each other that in fact you only have a sample of one because all life on Earth has DNA in common with each other and as long as you have DNA in common you could pretend it's different but if you're gonna compare to something in another planet that might not be encoded by DNA at all don't use your biological bias to judge what the yet rest of the universe is gonna hand you I'll never do that again okay Krauss now that you've reminded me Mars is a smaller planet than Earth so there you go next question yes in the middle just just speak up and you don't need the microphone about an asteroid she didn't forget that asteroid this year she didn't forget the asteroid so you want you want a quick quick quick update on the asteroid there's an asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl headed towards Earth it's called Apophis named for the Egyptian god of death and darkness it wasn't coincidental that it was named that when this asteroid was discovered in December 2004 its trajectory was calculated based on a short segment of its orbit because you look from one day to the next it's in a new place in the sky these folks are moving once you saw that its trajectory would intersect the orbit of Earth you don't name that asteroid Bambi or it's Lincoln or Tiffany right you're gonna give it a name befitting it some sense of gravity yes yes that pun was surely intended so the reason why you never heard of it perhaps is because it was discovered that that this aspect of its orbit was calculated and reported on the same week of the Indonesian tsunami okay I think there was an end of oh four or five I forgot which of these two years it is same week odd thing is of course a two hundred thousand people died in that tsunami odd thing is if this asteroid hits in a place where it could hit and I'll describe that in a minute it will hit in the Pacific Ocean it would create a tsunami in the Pacific Ocean that would make the unities and tsunami look like a street puddle that's slightly over spilled the Tejas so I think rightly the media attention was given unto the Indonesian tsunami but that was not an excuse to then never have the press talk about this object it's a real object and there's something called the keyhole it'll have a close approach to earth in the year 2029 in April April 13th which by the way is a Friday it will come close enough to earth to dip below our orbiting communication satellites for that passage that will be the closest largest thing we have ever observed in the history of our observing the universe that's a shot across our bow the uncertainty in its orbit at this moment is such that for that passage there is a range of orbits it could have which if it goes through what we're calling the keyhole Earth's gravity on it will be just right or rather just wrong just wrong that the next time it right around it will hit Earth seven years later April 13th if it goes to the center the keyhole it'll hit the Pacific Ocean 500 kilometers due west of Santa Monica it'll plunge into the Pacific Ocean to a depth of three models at that depth it will explode cavitating the ocean with a hole three miles wide three miles deep that impulse will send away a tsunami wave that will basically wipe out the entire west coast to the United States and the east coast of Asia now oceans don't like having big holes in them so this three mile high wall of order does what it's a hole in the water what if it does it falls back in the hole this is not Moses here we're talking it won't just stay there like in the movie it'll fall back into the hole slosh into itself rise high into the air fall back to the ocean cavitate the ocean again and it'll do this with such ferocity it'll repeat itself about 50 times taking about an hour so every time it cavitate s-- the ocean it sends another tsunami so it's not will be just one wave like the Indonesian Schneider does this will be 40 waves 50 waves now each wave has to pull back out to get ready for the next one and it's separated by about a minute so there's a limit to how far these waves will get on shore we think it's about a quarter of a mile so if you're more than quarter mile inland you can just watch this happen if you're not now the million dollar Malibu homes they will feel this first tsunami wave the nut time will basically pick up the homes it'll bring them back out to sea then the next wave will come in return the home to this to the shoreline but now the home is in a slightly different shape and as this continues all man-made objects along the coastline and trees and debris basically becomes this churning ablative mass wiping clean the entire coastline now nobody has to die because we'll know this well in advance but I found there are two pet two people who will die there is the stupid surfer who says I got to do that tsunami way you know they're gonna be out there okay so we'll have dead surfers and dead weathermen you've seen him does the camera guy over there and come closer watch the hurricane slash get this shot can you see us I'm reporting from the Harket now I'm a scientist if this asteroid goes through the keyhole there'll be people evacuating the west coast building shelters stockpiling food there'll be people praying to their gods there'll be people doing all kinds of things I'd rather be doing something about this is where engineers come in and sign physical scientists and physicists and astrophysicist so we've got top people right now working on a way to deflect the asteroid they're in is the power of science you don't have to build a shelter from something that could kill you you can prevent a thing from killing you in the first place it's like how do you solve acid rain well let's have acid rain proof umbrellas you know no you want to put stop the rain all right go how is your brain wired for finding solutions so do you have it so we'll monitor the news at that time by the way there is it is not known who will pay for that deflection mission if it comes to pass probably America but asteroids can hit anywhere in the world and the UN while there's a space unit of the UN that there's no funding stream suppose this we're headed for Indonesia would we pay for the for that to deflect it as suppose you pay to deflect it and we only have deflect it and then hit somewhere else that's an interesting geopolitical problem you know so it's not just fix it home it's more complex than that oh by the way you got these guys who like stockpiled nukes and that community want to blow the sucker out of the sky you know there's that the folks who want to use the nukes that we have and the problem is here in America we're really good at blowing stuff up we're less good at knowing where the pieces go after the explosion whereas when you deflect something you can monitor your progress all along but another question question front row now this is the last question shown last question so it's it's the pressures on well I think it's a good question can from talking to here I know a lot of students are really interested in not just the research but also education and I'm wondering if you could talk about how you were able to push yourself into a position such a big figure in education for the public excellent question and that's a textual question to end on I think so Thanks you came through yeah he's good good good um all right there are two things people like they'd like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand it's a sense of empowerment they also like and they can either by spoken or by written word so if you get better at writing with the intent of empowering a person's ability to think then people will come back to you to write some more if you have a phrase that captures the essence of an idea in language that is not biological if you do not speak or write sesquipedalian Slee that's with seven feet yes s Krupa die I think it's just really big words a lot of syllables look at do you know about this I love that word because it is one of it is a word that it's describing that it is a sesquipedalian sesquipedalian values word check it out don't ever write it though so you do this now the first time I was ever interviewed for national television it was actually with the first real time I'd had a little bit on CNN didn't I don't count that it was like the six second bite I was on NBC Evening News night with NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw 1995 the first planet in orbit around another star was discovered page one story they sent an action cam to the planetarium Iowa's brand-new as director of the planetarium and I'm fundamentally in academic that's how I think it's how I behave they bring in the cameras they interview they ask me all these question how do we discover these planets I gave my best professorial reply I said what they actually used something called the Doppler effect and you look at the spectral changes in the star responding in its gravity to the mass of the planet in orbit around it we think to ourselves that a star is in the middle like the Sun and planets orbit around it no the whole system orbits its common center of gravity which means you got the likes of jupiter and saturn out there the sun actually does this and if you observe the Sun its spectral features you will see the spectral feature oscillating in harmony with this motion either the Sun has some kind of oscillatory problem or you infer the existence of planets it orbit around it we now have rising through 300 known planets in orbit around Earth without ever actually seeing the planet we're inferring their existence through their gravitational call print on the star host star itself I gave my best profesora reply another one was in the news reports from the discoverers they used the word wobble to describe what the host star was doing but I know what a wobble is it tops wobble that you know that's a while this this is not a wobble it's more like a jiggle and and I described this I said it's not really a wobble it's more like a jiggle like that so that night on the evening news all they showed where my hips doing this director the plaintiff says that stars actually jiggling so I said okay you're gonna play that way you didn't like my professorial reply you want to sound bite me I'm gonna hand you sound bites I'm going to be one step ahead of you because I'm living in their universe I can't force their news program to listen to my lecture because that's their world if they're gonna come to my classroom they're gonna hear me lecture but I'm going to go to their newscast I bet it talked the way they want it packaged so I went home that weekend and I had my wife just sort of sort of bark out concepts and phrases and things and the black hole quasars Saturn and every word she spoke I am looking at a mirror and I came up with a two or three sentence sound bite on the object okay so pick something the universe just testin pick anything I don't care supernova supernova the biggest explosions in the cosmos okay they'd be using that soundbite deep they're using it you know it okay that's like once and sumit too sad soundbite if one of these happens nearby earth it destroys our ozone layer and gives everyone in the world skin cancer but you know to using that soundbite the you know it okay so I loaded it up with sound bytes and every next time the camera came back and they asked a question out came a sound bite and uneditable soundbite because they try to piece it together if you'd be all preface Oriole they got to cut it and make their own sentence uneditable sound buddies and when I started doing that they started beating the path to my door other networks saw me on their program and they wanted me to do it for their program and now they're backed up lined up just because I'm giving them soundbite just cuz I spent a little effort to speak their language so I started valuing it and investing my own energy to become better at it whether or not you can ever become great at something you can always become better at it don't ever forget that and don't say I'll never be good you can become better and one day you'll wake up and you'll find out how good you actually became having transcended whatever limits you might have thought you couldn't pass and I've carried that sense of vision statement with me ever since I started writing which was early high school I think that is great advice not just with respect to this question but with respect to these folks whole careers and Neil you're something else we is that a good thing or a bad thing what a biochemist says you're something else you you are you are simultaneously illuminating and entertain and we thank you well thank you thank you you

Channel: ResearchChannel

Views: 1,092,593

Keywords:

Id: 0I5Fl1Qn-Do

Length: 89min 16sec (5356 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 12 2008

Reddit Comments

[u/EmperorG]

It took us a year to find out? When were those scientists planning on telling us?