Show Notes

• WasEinsteinWrong.com
• Michelson Morely experiment -- U. of Virginia
• Launching Atomic Clocks in Space — Universe Today
• Time dialation — University New South Wales
• E = mc² — PBS
• Cyclotron — GSU
• Einstein and light — U. of New South Wales
• General relativity
• Perihelion Precession of Mercury — U. of Texas
• Deflection and Delay of Light – UCLA
• Eddington and light bending — Nature
• Einstein Ring – Universe Today
• Gravitational Redshift — Wiki
• Frame Dragging — Universe Today
• Gravity Probe B
• Gravitational Waves — Berkeley
• Online course from CalTech about gravitational waves
• Episode 71: Gravitational Waves
• LISA mission

Transcript: “Einstein Was Right”

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Fraser: Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville. Hi Pamela. How are you doing?

Pamela: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Fraser: Doing really well. Once again, we’re having a Google Plus hang-out with our eight close friends on AstronomyCast. Everybody wave.

Pamela: [laughing] Studio audience is unheard by the broadcast audience.

Fraser: Exactly because we’ve muted them all! Um, but it’s really fun and it’s been really helpful for all of our episodes. People have been giving us ideas and fixing our mistakes during the show, so it’s super. So if you want to join us all you have to do is circle me or Pamela in Google Plus and then we send an invite when we’re going to be doing the recording, and if you happen to see it, then come join us and hang out with us. So…it’s really fun. OK, you’re back from China

Pamela: China, France, DC, all points in between.

Fraser: Austria…yeah, you’re here for a little while.

Pamela: It’s going to be one of those episodes where my body is just like jet-lagged, “Why are you awake? Why are you awake?” There’s this voice in the back of my brain saying, “the Sun should not be up, nor should you.” So please pardon any exhaustion-induced word slippages.

Fraser: Alright. OK, So at least once a week we get an email from a theorist claiming that Einstein was wrong. Well, you know what? He wasn’t wrong. In fact, Einstein made many specific predictions to help validate his theories, and each time, experiments have shown that Einstein was right. In fact, some of his more controversial theories were only tested experimentally in the last few years. And before we get into this, there’s a great website that you might want to check out by Steve from our tree lobsters, and it says waseinsteinwrong.com, and if you go there, you’ll find out whether or not Einstein was wrong. It’s…so let’s talk about Einstein. So last show we talked about Einstein; we talked about his history and his life and his theories — less about special relativity and general relativity because we’ve talked about that in the past, but we talked about a lot of his love life and how he moved around from university to university, but the really great thing about Einstein is his theories. So Einstein is one of these great examples where you can see science at work, where a scientist makes these predictions about how his or her theories predict the way that nature seems to work, and Einstein is one of these wonderful examples where you’ve got just prediction-experiment-prediction-experiment, and so what we wanted to do was talk about the different kinds of experiments that he did. We’ve got the ones for special relativity and general relativity, and each one of these experiments just, you know, he said if you go and check out this, you should probably see that, and the experimenters went out and did and found what he predicted and everything worked out great. So, let’s talk about…let’s start with special relativity, because that was sort of the first…

Pamela: It’s where he started.

Fraser: It’s where he started, and right away he upset all of physics with a bunch of crazy ideas, but made some concrete predictions, and this is the big difference. When the woo-woo crackpots send in their theories, you know, they’re like, “Einstein was wrong!” but they don’t actually include the predictions they make about why he was wrong and what we should see instead. You have to explain everything that’s already been seen, plus you have to make some new predictions about…to show what’s different or explain something that is unknown. I’m talking too much — Pamela!

Pamela: [laughing] OK, so the best place to start is with the speed of light because everything that Einstein did sort of hung off of the basic idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers in all directions, and the easiest way to prove that is to take some sort of a light source that you’ll be able to tell if something changed. So good coherent light source, something like a laser beam, something that’s been made coherent by passing through the right set of lenses — all of those things count. So take a coherent light source and split it. You can do this with a semi-silvered mirror so that half the light gets reflected and half the light passes through (this is how those one-way mirrors work). Now, if you split the light just right you can have some of the light go off in the direction of, say, the Earth’s motion, some of the light go off perpendicular to that, and then you can recombine the light, and if the distances that the light should have traveled if we weren’t moving are the same in both directions, and you measure that the light took the same type of travel in both directions even though the earth is moving, well, that starts to show that, well, the speed of light is constant irregardless of the motion of the person who’s doing the measuring and doing the light sending off into space as well.

Fraser: Right, so can you give me then an example? So he made the prediction that light should move at the same speed no matter where it’s coming from?

Pamela: Right, so the first experiment of its kind was the Michelson-Morley experiment, which predates Einstein, but then Einstein went on to basically say, ‘Look, here’s why it’s going on: really there’s no ether,’ and every experiment that’s been done since then shows over and over and over speed of light is the same for all observers.

Fraser: Right, so they did this experiment they shone this light through a mirror, it split up and the speed of light was the same for both people, even though one group was moving one way around the Earth (I guess with the motion of the Earth), and the other group was moving against the motion of the Earth.

Pamela: Right, so what you usually do is you shoot two beams: one in the direction of motion, one perpendicular to the direction of motion, recombine them; if the light combines you get pretty little interference fringes in the right way, you know everything’s good. Now, the next thing that came out of special relativity is that since the speed of light is the same for everyone, time is not. So this is where we’ve had to do experiments of launching atomic clocks, of flying clocks around the planet — all sorts of crazy things to show that, well, time does change.

Fraser: Right. So he made the prediction, then, that if light has to stay the same speed, then the thing that has to give is going to be time. So if you’re moving faster, then you’re going to experience time differently than a person who is moving slower compared to each other. And so the experiment that they ran was they had to fly these atomic clocks in airplanes and later on spacecraft, right?

Pamela: Right, and sure enough, the differences between the two clocks was exactly what was predicted. So yeah, we have the speed of time changes even though the speed of light does not.

Fraser: OK, that’s prediction #2. Were there any more?

Pamela: Well, so then we also have the whole relativistic mass and energy problem. So this is the idea that E=mc² – now, that wasn’t part of the original special relativity paper, but the idea that mass and energy come together started with special relativity and evolved as he detailed out the theory. And so here we have things like cyclotrons that accelerate particles to extremely high velocities and then collide them together. Now, when these collisions happen you end up with a burst of energy concentrated in a small place, and that energy very quickly condenses into particles. Now, the neat thing about the way this happens is the particles all have a given amount of mass. When you add up all the mass of the particles, that mass is greater than the rest mass of the particles that went in, so you might fling a couple of electrons, or a couple of protons at close to the speed of light and circles and circles and circles around the cyclotron, collide them together and the array of particles that come out weigh more than a proton at rest, an electron at rest, and when you try and figure, “well, where did all of that mass come from?” and you take into account the kinetic energy that was built up during the motion at close to the speed of light…the kinetic energy isn’t a function of 1/2 mv2 like it would be if relativity didn’t exist, but rather there’s relativistic effects that increase the mass as the particle starts going closer and closer to the speed of light. So we see the relativistic increase in mass due to the speed; we see the E=mc² all in these particles that come out of the collision.

Fraser: That’s really cool. It’s in the cyclotron that you’re injecting energy from outside, and that energy is turning into mass in the collision.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: That’s amazing. Yeah, and so he had made this prediction…I don’t know did he predict? Did he say, “when you build particle accelerators, if you crash them together…?”

Pamela: For him it was a matter of if you take a mass, any mass, and you accelerate it to closer and closer to the speed of light, what you’re going to see is the apparent mass of the object increases, the relativistic mass of the object increases.

Fraser: Yeah.

Pamela: So then, we saw that when we started actually well using cyclotrons to accelerate things to close to the speed of light.

Fraser: That’s really cool. OK, so just to clarify then, we’ve got three, so were there any more? Sorry, before I…were there any more?

Pamela: So we had time contraction, we had mass energy equivalence…

Fraser: Speed of light being the same…

Pamela: And the speed of light – those are really the key things for special relativity; those are the big factors that we have to deal with.

Fraser: OK, so that wraps up the predictions that he made for special relativity, but then really his greatest theory, the one that blew everyone’s minds was general relativity, and this is what I said at the beginning of the show — that he made some predictions with general relativity that astronomers haven’t had the capability to test until just within the last five years. It’s crazy!

Pamela: And we’re still working at getting things totally at the level where everyone’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK…you proved it.”

Fraser: “…Einstein was still right.” OK, So let’s run through some of the predictions that he made and try to put them in order of when they were able to do experiments to prove that they were true with general relativity.

Pamela: Well, the easiest one, in some ways, was the perihelion precession of Mercury.

Fraser: What? So what was going on?

Pamela: Lots of fancy words there, so….

Fraser: Fancy astronomy words…so what was going on with Mercury?

Pamela: So, with any orbiting object, according to Kepler and later Newton, orbits are ellipses (flattened circles to perfect circle — somewhere in there) that have at the foci of the ellipse (Google ellipse, you’ll see what I mean)… you have the star, the planet, whatever’s being orbited. The perihelion is the closest approach to the Sun. So as Mercury goes around on its elliptical orbit around the Sun, it has a closest approach, it has a furthest approach. Now, if you were to erase everything else from the Solar System – so you have no other planets, if you were to make the Sun a perfect circle, then Mercury’s orbit would just happily be exactly the same orientation for all of time. Now, the truth is Sun’s not a perfect circle; it’s a bit squished around the middle – it’s “oblate” is the fancy word. And so that oblateness causes some effects on the orbit, makes the orbit slowly change over time. Fact is, we do have seven other planets, and a bunch of other rocks and icy bodies, and over time those rocks and icy bodies and other planets for the most part have effects on Mercury, but when you add up all these other effects, and you look at Mercury’s orbit, Mercury’s point of closest approach to the Sun is slowly moving over time in a way that all those other effects can’t take account of. It’s precessing like the top of a spinning top at a rate that’s faster than would be expected, and when Einstein integrated gravity into his theory of relativity, he found that precession was predicted, and the thing was is that he could actually predict how much the precession would be at a level that was greater accuracy than they’ve really done in their measurements at that point. And sure enough, as we’ve gotten more and more accurate measurements, we’re able to find, “Wow! He nailed it! He was exactly right in being able to tell us where we can find Mercury at any given moment as it precesses around the Sun.”

Fraser: And that is really just the perfect theory – that you take something that astronomers have been puzzling about for decades and come up with the math and the theory and go, “Oh, if you run my math, this will explain what you’re looking for,” and that’s just getting out of the gate. That’s just, you know, “just to warm up the engines, I’m going to explain some of the unsolved mysteries that you’ve got in front of you. And now, here’s a bunch of crazy predictions that didn’t even occur to you that I’m about to make about the Universe, so, you know, feel free to go out and prove that those are true too.” So, that’s fantastic. Right, so that precession of Mercury — perfect. So, what was next?

Pamela: Well, and the thing that went in with the precession of Mercury is the exact same physics applies to Mercury going around the Sun, applies to binary stars, applies to binary pulsar systems, and we’re seeing this in dramatic ways as we look at higher-massed compact objects over time. So there’s a pulsar that we see…actually, it’s precession is 4.2 degrees per year, so this is like high-speed precession with high-mass objects. Now the next big thing of evidence that he came up with was the deflection of light by gravitationally massive objects, so starlight getting bent around the Sun…and I have to admit, I and many other people are guilty of saying, “…and Eddington went out and showed this when he looked at the 1919 solar eclipse,” and yeah, Eddington did see light bending, but the thing is people have argued over whether or not that’s sufficient evidence ever since because, well, even Newton predicted that light would bend. It’s the amount that it would bend, and when you look at the errors in Eddington’s measurements, it’s just not quite entirely conclusive, and so people are still…this is the one piece of evidence that people are still going, “OK, is it fully conclusive?” And we look at things like Einstein rings, where we don’t know the mass as precisely, but we’re starting to get as precise as you could hope for, not by looking at the optical light of starlight, but rather by looking at background quasars, using radio astronomy to get highly precise measurements, and with our most sophisticated radio telescopes, we’re just starting to be able to say the error bars are small enough that, yes, the amount of deflection of light by massive objects does conclusively say Einstein was right.

Fraser: Right, and so this was this theory, right? That he said that we should look at gravity not as some kind of attractive force between objects with mass, that we should see it as a bending of the very fabric of the Universe, that in fact, it’s this depression in the space-time. And so both massive objects and energy will follow the bended curves in the space-time caused by these massive objects, and this bending of the light that we see matches this prediction exactly, and as you said, they’re still testing it out to higher and higher degrees of accuracy: “Why use a star going around the sun? Let’s use a distant quasar that’s been traveling for 12 billion years.”

Pamela: Well, you can also just get more precise measurements that way because of the radio light; it’s just easier to use radar — radio rather — and quasars aren’t moving. The problem with stars is they’re orbiting the same galaxy we’re orbiting, and so it’s the quasars in the background that are the most non-moving things in the sky.

Fraser: OK. Cool, cool. So next…

Pamela: Gravitational red-shift.

Fraser: Gravitational red-shift…so what is that?

Pamela: This is the idea that light, as it climbs out of a gravity well, light, as it shines perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, of a black hole, of a white dwarf, of anything with gravity will lose energy as it climbs. So it climbs at the speed of light, light travels at the speed of light for all observers, but no one ever said it wasn’t going to change colors in the process. So sunlight as it falls to Earth gets blue-shifted, and sunlight as it climbs out of the Sun’s gravity well gets red-shifted, and that’s all well and good, but it’s kind of hard to measure. So the key experiment was actually done at Harvard, and the place where it was done still exists, and if you go wandering the Harvard physics department with the right person in hand, they’ll point it out to you. There’s a tower there where they shined (or more or less emitted) gamma ray energy up the tower, and they measured the slight change in color of that light that was a result of climbing up the Earth’s gravity well, and this is something that…what’s neat about it is one of the problems with light getting off of a black hole is it not only can’t go fast enough, but it actually gets red-shifted into oblivion.

Fraser: Right, so you can imagine astronomers now have demonstrated this in all kinds of different ways. I mean, they demonstrate it from light coming from different quasars, light coming from planets, from stars, from neutron stars, and all the different kinds of radiation, and they are able to make these predictions again and again and again — so that’s a good one.

Pamela: Yeah, so the more high-mass objects we look at, the more we’re able to see that this is really going on out there.

Fraser: Really cool. OK, so that’s three so far? Any more?

Pamela: Um…yeah. So…

Fraser: Hit me!

Pamela: So then we have frame dragging, which is one of my favorite ones. So this is the idea that a rotating body actually rotates the space-time continuum around it, and that the way time passes, the way your energy changes (depending on which direction you’re going around an object) is measurable in terms of there’s differences depending on the direction you go in. So the Gravity Probe B is actually the way we finally said, “Yes, there is frame dragging!” There’d been earlier experiments. We’d launched the Lego satellite, looking to try and measure it using that, wasn’t entirely conclusive; we’d seen some evidence from the Mars Global Surveyor as it orbited Mars, but it was finally when we launched Gravity Probe B with its extremely precisely made balls in its gyroscope that we were able to by looking at how over time those spinning gyroscopic balls changed, we were able to see, “Yes, the changes are what was predicted by frame dragging.” This is just one of those awesome things that we have to take into account when we measure things. They actually did it relative to the star IM Pegasus. They measured the alignment of the gyroscopes relative to a star, and it builds up over time, so what they were able to see was a change that added up to 37 milliarcseconds over the period of the experiment.

Fraser: So, just to understand this correctly, you’ve got the satellite, you launch it in space, you spin up these gyroscopes so that they are perfectly aligned with this star, and then you have the spacecraft going around the Earth in such a way that if there was no such thing as frame dragging, then you could go a million years and these gyros would still be perfectly lined up with this star, but instead because the Gravity Probe B spacecraft is moving through the Earth’s gravity field, and the Earth is turning, you get this change in the orientation that comes purely from the way the Earth’s gravity is warping space-time. Did I get that right?

Pamela: Yeah, now it’s not that you have the pull of the rotation lined up with the star. You’re looking at how the motion of objects change relative to the star, but yeah, it’s…we actually see these differences over time, and it’s really kind of cool.

Fraser: That is really kind of cool. What was that? Four? I think there’s more.

Pamela: Well, we also have gravitational waves.

Fraser: Gravitational waves, right, and we’ve done whole shows on this. Gravitational waves – this is the idea that massive objects, as they move through space, should actually send out waves that stretch and contract space-time itself as they emanate out from the object, and the more mass of the object the more violent the events, the bigger the gravitational waves that we should detect. So, he made this prediction, and we still aren’t entirely sure that they’re there, right?

Pamela: So this is one of those things where we’ve actually given a Nobel Prize out for this one.

Fraser: That’s got to count for something.

Pamela: What we’ve seen is, again, you go back to the idea that given Newtonian physics, you have two objects orbiting each other, they will continue to orbit each other forever at the same distance assuming there’s no frictional effects, no external forces, no mass transfer, so you have two non-interacting objects with no external forces orbiting one another and they’ll happily just keep doing that. Now, the reality is that when we look at high-mass objects orbiting each other, when we look at pairs of pulsars, when we look at white dwarf/black hole systems, any combination of white dwarf, neutron star, black hole, we start to see their orbits are changing, their orbits are getting closer, they’re decaying over time. It’s not due to an external force, it’s not due to friction, it’s not due to mass transfer. It’s due to energy being radiated away from gravitational waves. Now, what we haven’t detected yet is those waves propagating through space. We’ve seen the energy they give off, but the much-sought reality is as those gravitational waves propagate through space, they should actually, in the direction they’re propagating, cause objects to temporarily get closer and further apart, and this is where devices have been built. There’s several laser interferometers on the planet Earth that have been set up in giant triangles, where we’d expect that you’d see at one set of these interferometers, the distance getting closer and then further, and then at a speed-of-light-traveling-that-distance time later, we’d see the same thing at one of the other detectors, and we just haven’t seen it yet. And partially this is because, well, things like the UPS truck can get detected as well, so there’s a lot of background noise.

Fraser: Right. Right, but I think that the…I mean, I think people have known that a ground-based method of detecting this is not great. The way to do it is to launch spacecraft and have them keep track of their distance to each other, and then we’ll know with a higher degree of accuracy. And you’re kind of waiting for great, big violent events to happen nearby, and so you might not get enough of them. So, again, you don’t get enough chances of detection, so this comes down to really the quality of experiment, and we’re still waiting for the funding and for the approval for people to launch the spacecraft that will actually make this detection. And will that be it? Will that be the final prediction made by Einstein to be experimentally tested?

Pamela: That’s really the last one that people are really waiting for is gravitational waves, and LISA is the mission that is currently somewhat undead with NASA — neither completely canceled nor actually funded to be built. It’s a set of three spacecraft that shoot lasers between one another to measure their separation and look for that change in distance that comes from a gravitational wave passing over them. So hopefully, we’ll get there.

Fraser: So, one questions though: you said that the energy gets lost. Where does it get lost to?

Pamela: It gets lost from the system. So the way to think of it is as a candle burns, it gives up its chemical potential energy to the room around it in the form of transfer of infrared radiation to the air molecules around it. So the candle is losing energy to the room. In the case of binary star systems, they’re giving up their gravitational energy and radiating it through space, and that energy’s radiating away and nominally changing the distance between things as it goes.

Fraser: Right. Across the whole Universe…

Pamela: So the Universe is conserving energy, but the star system isn’t.

Fraser: That’s really cool. So the next time someone tells you that they think Einstein was wrong, hold up eight fingers and have them run through the three special relativity and the five general relativity predictions that Einstein made, and have them explain how their alternative theory gives…also explains all those predictions that Einstein made, and then makes further predictions…

Pamela: And take away their GPS unit because if they don’t believe in relativity, they don’t believe in GPS.

Fraser: Right. But that is the level of proof that they have to demonstrate. So that was great, Pamela, thank you very much, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Pamela: Sounds great, Fraser. Talk to you later.

Fraser: Bye.

Show Notes

• Google+: Fraser, Pamela
• Einstein biography – Biography.com
• Timeline of Einstein’s life — PBS
• Wave particle duality — How Stuff Works
• Zero-point gravity — CalPhysics
• Light Bent by Gravity — Suite 101
• Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
• “The World As I See It,” essay by Einstein
• Other non-scientific essays by Einstein
• Theory of Everything
• List of scientific writing by Einstein — Wiki

Transcript: Einstein

Download the transcript

Fraser: Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville. Hi, Pamela. How are you doing?

Pamela: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Fraser: Good, you’re in a sort of momentary break from in between France and China.

Pamela: Yes. This would be called travel insanity. Thursday evening I flew from Nonce to Paris, left Paris Friday morning, flew Paris-London-Chicago-St. Louis…I’m now spending about 15 hours in St. Louis before flying St. Louis-Chicago, Chicago-Beijing, and I’m going there for a meeting there about communicating Astronomy to the public to find out how people all around the world do the types of things you and I do.

Fraser: People sometimes don’t believe us that you have this insane travel schedule, but this is the…you always tell me, as I’ve said, “Oh no, I’m going to be around for the next three months, we’ll have lots of time to record,” and then it all gets filled up with all kinds of speaking engagements, and trips and meetings and whatever, so…and again, we are recording this episode as a Google plus hang-out, so we’ve got eight of our best friends listening to this while we record. Everybody wave (that won’t make it into the podcast)…but if you want to join us on future episodes, you just have to join Google plus, and then circle me or Pamela, and then you’ll see we usually try to give people a bit of a warning when we’re going to record, and then we will announce the hang-out, and then it’s kind of first come first served, but it’s pretty cool, and hopefully when they do hang-outs on air we’ll be able to be a part of that.

Pamela: We really want to hang out on air – we’re just going to keep saying this.

Fraser: I saw one…I saw one for the first time and it was really cool. It was kind of like Youtube, but it was live and people were chatting it was really neat, so…and it let everybody watch it, so that would be really cool. That was like the Dalai Lama or something.

Pamela: We’re not that [laughing].

Fraser: We’re not there yet. Alright, well let’s get on with the show, then. So what can we say about Einstein? Albert f—ing Einstein…lots actually. In this show we’re going to talk about the most revolutionary physicist ever. He completely changed our understanding of time and space and energy and gravity. He made predictions about the nature of the universe that we’re still testing out. Alright, Pamela…and I know you have fiendish plans to talk about his love life, too.

Pamela: [laughing] Well, it was one of these things that as I was reading through the biographies for him, I realized the dates with which it listed him as with various women and married and divorced to various women overlapped in the most fascinating of ways, and I actually had to resort to a spreadsheet to keep track of Einstein’s love life.

Fraser: Is this a first? Is this the first episode of AstronomyCast where you’ve had to prepare a spreadsheet to perform some kind of pivot data analysis on a scientist’s love life? That is amazing!

Pamela: Well, it just made no sense — the listing of cities and everything else, and then I realized, no, he actually left this chick here, went there, was with this other chick…it was just sort of like, “Wow! This is like All My Children: Scientists’ Edition.”

Fraser: So how do you want to do this? Do you want to the first do the part of the episode where we just talk about, you know, the stuff you might see on the Discovery Channel? You know, the “explained this, taught that,” and then feed in the love life parts? Or have a whole separate addendum where we just cover the timeline of his affairs and marriages?

Pamela: Well, if you just take him in order – so beginning to end is probably the easiest way. His love life will play its way in.

Fraser: I think when most people think of Einstein, they think of that picture with him sticking his tongue out, and he was kind of wild and crazy, white hair, but that was really him sort of at the end of his life, but he did a lot of his work when he was quite a young man, so how did it all get started? Where did he come from?

Pamela: Well, he’s a man of Europe, for lack of a better way to put it. He was born in Wittenberg Kingdom in Germany before it was the German nation that we’re used to. This was back in 1879 when we’re still looking at monarchies, but very quickly his family moved to Munich. He stayed in Munich until he was 17 when he moved first, briefly, to Italy and then to Zurich, rather to Areuse, Switzerland and then to Zurich the next year, and this movement was, in large part, to try to keep him in good schools. When he was five… he was from a non-practicing Jewish family, and they sent him to a Catholic elementary school from age 5 to 8 to start him off on a good educational foundation, and at 8 he was able to get into the Leuthold Gymnasium, which was a much more advanced school, and he stayed there for most of his life, but when he was a teenager his parents moved to Italy. They left him in Munich to try and finish out his education in the Gymnasium, but when he was 16 he basically said, “No, I’m going to go spend time with my parents.” And his parents said “We’ve not got a good school for you here,” because he didn’t get into the one that was local, and then he moved to Switzerland where he met his first girlfriend.

Fraser: So how like old was he at this point?

Pamela: So at age 16 he leaves, he drops out of Leuthold Gymnasium, he moves to Pavia, Italy, didn’t get into the school there, he gets sent to Areuse, Switzerland where he’s living with one of the professor’s families, meets Marie Winteler (I believe is how you pronounce her last name), and actually his sister married her brother, but he didn’t actually end up staying with Marie. He spent a little over a year there, finished off his schooling, then got accepted into a four-year program at the Polytechnic University of Zurich at age 17 and moved to Zurich.

Fraser: So this all so far kind of sounds like your life, right? You know, finishing high school, doing well, getting accepted to a University, going straight on to university…right? This is all fairly normal.

Pamela: Yeah, except he had a bit more of a private school education where you have to test into getting into the Gymnasium. I went to Westford Academy, which sounds fancy, but is just a public school in New England that happened to be really old.

Fraser: No, but so far this is all fairly standard, you know: went to high school, went to university…but things went a little weird from that point on, right?

Pamela: Right. So he was doing perfectly well studying math and physics in Zurich, while he was there he met the Serbian, Mileva Maric. The two of them spend a number of years together. He graduated in 1900 had a teaching diploma from Zurich Polytechnic. Unfortunately, Mileva failed her exams and wasn’t able to get one. They stayed together; everything was doing OK. He published his first paper with his equivalent basically of a bachelor’s degree, his four-year degree. His first paper was on capillary forces and straws. I love how he starts with something just so mundane as, “Well, how do straws work?” That was his very first paper, and then he spend two years trying to get a job, and this is the part that gets left out of all the stories because here he is, he’s graduated, he actually had a kid out of wedlock during this period…

Fraser: OK. Right.

Pamela: [laughing] …and so after struggling to find a job, failing to get a job, having a kid out of wedlock at the turn of the 1900s, he moves to Bern, Switzerland and ends up getting a job in the patent office, and once he has the job in the patent office, he and Mileva end up getting married. And while all of this was going on he was also working on a PhD remotely at the University of Zurich and so he had…it was just a crazy life. You can imagine he’s that guy who’s trying to hold together the kid out of wedlock, trying to finish school, needing a to have job to pay all of the bills, and trying to do everything all at once, and it sort of makes sense that he wasn’t fully on his game for anything — and he struggled to get a job.

Fraser: Yeah, I can just imagine we have all of these modern conveniences like telephones, and computers and internet, you know, and they had none of that back at the turn of the …

Pamela: They had the postal service.

Fraser: [laughing] Postal service, yeah, so you can imagine when he’s doing a PhD by mail, right? And you know, everything was just so much harder. I would have loved to have the internet back then…So right, but I mean, the thing is everyone talks about the fact that it was “when he was an ordinary patent clerk” and yet, he was…crazy ideas coming into his mind at that point.

Pamela: And so he’d always shown that this might be happening. As a kid he growing up he got a compass, and he was extremely disturbed by “how does this compass thing work?” He spent a lot of his childhood trying to figure out how to build things. His dad and his uncle actually had an electronics business, which is what was able to keep him in Munich for a number of years, and it was when that business failed that his family moved to Italy, and he tried to transfer schools, and it was just kind of a mess. He didn’t actually graduate Gymnasium. He took standardized exams where he didn’t do so well. That’s…long story short, he didn’t go to the Universities he wanted because he did the equivalent of a GED, and he just managed to keep pulling himself out of these strange life situations. So in 1905, he finished (basically, via mail) a PhD at the University of Zurich, and at the same time, published his group of papers on the Photoelectric Effect, on Brownian Motion, on Special Relativity, and on the Equivalency of Energy in Mass (the famous E=mc2 equation), so he managed to somehow pull everything out, and in one fell sweep proved, “Yeah, I can do it. I can do all of it, all at once,” which was kind of overwhelming.

Fraser: So was he releasing these papers as he was doing his PhD, or after he finished his PhD?

Pamela: It was all in one year: he finished the PhD, published all of the papers, and presumably he’d been working on all of those ideas simultaneously. The thing is when he was in the patent office, the patents that he was working on were all ones that had to do with time, so he was constantly thinking about all these ideas. So the ideas that he was thinking about while reading patents during the day played into the stuff that he was doing as a PhD candidate, and it culminated in all these different papers that all came out at the same time while he was still in his mid-20s.

Fraser: I wonder what effect being in a patent office would have for your creativity. I mean, you would be looking at all of these patents, all of these ideas coming through, and for me, I can just imagine if I was looking at all these patents, I would have lots and lots of ideas, not necessarily stealing the ideas, but just…it would just make me think of other ideas, so I’m sure it was a place for a lot of creativity.

Pamela: And it also gets you thinking about “Wow, this person is so wrong, but here’s this little seed of possibility in what they said.” It’s like anytime you’re listening to someone give a talk and you just finish reading a related paper and your brain starts building these connections between things that the author of the paper and the person you’re hearing speak right now never imagined. It’s just the confluence of everything being in the right place at the right time.

Fraser: Yeah, and I think that’s really important. I know in my own life, being able to (as I’m comparing myself to Einstein)…that I love to read, you know, sort of cross-disciplinary stuff, you know, I’m reading about technology and reading about advances in science and I’m always thinking about how that stuff all applies back to my business, and it’s been really useful to me making just advances in my own… in publishing Universe Today, you know? It just keeps the…so I think it’s really important for many people that you can, you know, expand outside what you’re doing and look at other stuff. That’s where you really get the great ideas and that’s…and then you can feed that back into what you’re working on. So he releases all of these amazing papers over the course of a year, and what was the reception?

Pamela: [laughing] Well, he kept working as a patent officer for a few more years, but overall, he started very slowly and thoroughly revolutionizing everything. He started being invited to travel and give talks. Finally, in 1908, he was still working at the patent office, but he was able to get a position as a lecturer at the University of Bern, this was the same year that he published his paper on wave particle duality of light, so he’s traveling and giving the lectures. His day job to pay for himself and his wife and their kids is at the patent office, but now he’s started teaching, so you can almost imagine this is the adjunct professor position. He’s still continuing to publish groundbreaking papers, and finally in 1909, he was able to work for the first time as a full-time academic. He got a position that means something different than it does in English; he was appointed as a docent at the University of Zurich, which is really a mid-level academic position. We don’t really have the equivalent, maybe research scientist is somewhat close, but he had that position for two years, and he was able to just focus purely on his research and collaboration. And he is someone that really points out over and over and over again the importance of writing letters, the importance of traveling and giving talks, the importance of being part of a community of science because, like you just said, you can’t have ideas in a vacuum.

Fraser: Right and so but this was, I mean, for essentially one of the most prestigious, most influential physicists of all time, it’s interesting that he got a job as kind of a mid-level person, you know, I mean, we’ve heard….

Pamela: Well, he was still only 30 at this point.

Fraser: Well, I guess, I guess, but you can see that the ramifications of his ideas still hadn’t quite percolated in the brains of all the people he was supposed to influence because I know there’s some stories…I’m trying to remember, I listened to Radiolab, and there was this great story about a statistician, I think, and he came up with this formula for…and brought it to his professor and said, “Is this new?” and the professor looked at it, and immediately he was given a tenured position on the faculty because – yes, it was new, and very important so, you know, still Einstein — people didn’t take him super seriously. I mean, they’d give him a job…

Pamela: But, the thing to remember though is the example you just gave is really the exception to the rule. Academia is one of those places where you are expected to go through certain sets of things: you’re expected to spend six years on the tenure track, you’re expected to do two post-docs…there are all of these things, where at a certain age you do certain things, and exceptions are made, but they’re very rare, and he’s at very prestigious universities where, as you pointed out, when he came to America, he deeply appreciated the meritocracy system we have because it was very different from the system he was coming from, and because he was still a young academic, he was given the positions a young academic gets…which kind of sucks, but…

Fraser: Right, but he still got them. Right, so he was working as an adjunct…wait, no, you said docent?

Pamela: Docent. He was a docent at the University of Zurich for two years, and then got offered…he finally got offered a full professorship at the Karl Ferdinand University , I believe, of Prague, moved to Prague, left Mileva behind…so here he is leaving behind wife #1.

Fraser: Yeah…

Pamela: Moving to Prague…

Fraser: And out-of-child-wedlock #1, right? [sic]

Pamela: And so he had a child with Mileva before he married her. They did get married. No one knows what happened to the kid who was born out of wedlock, but they went on to have more kids in wedlock, he then left Mileva behind moved to Prague, took a professorship and very quickly started having a relationship with a new woman. And so this would be Elsa Lowenthal, who went on to become his second wife who he stayed with most of the rest of his life until she passed away, but it was right after he moved that he wrote his paper on how light can be bent from gravity that would then end up being proved at 1919 during a solar eclipse. So he continued doing amazing science and everything else.

Fraser: Right, now which one, then, is the big relativity? Which is the one…is it the E=mc2 one? Which is the one?

Pamela: Well, so it was a combination. He did special relativity in E=mc2 in 1905, and then he went on to do general relativity in 1915, so it was over a course of 10 years that he fully developed the theories of relativity, including wave particle duality, light being bent by gravity, he took a sideline into quantum mechanics, and in 1913, wrote on the zero point of energy, and then he pulled in cosmology in 1917, and he used relativity to talk about, basically, the evolution of our Universe and how the cosmological constant can play in. When he employed the cosmological constant, it’s because he was trying to create a steady-state universe.

Fraser: So, he’s in Prague and becoming a pretty big deal at this point. I mean, I know at this point people are taking his ideas quite seriously and attempting to test them out, and so on. So how long did he stay in Prague?

Pamela: He was in Prague until 1914 where he was offered the directorship of the Kaiser Institute of Physics, as well as being offered a position at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and he managed to get the professorship worded such that he had hardly any teaching at all. So for the beginning of this period he was still married to Mileva, but Elsa moved with him to Berlin and he’s continuing to do all of these amazing relativity, cosmological constant, like getting that gravity work, and then finally in 1919 he divorces Mileva, marries Elsa, and in 1921 finally seems to start to settle his whole life, gets the Nobel prize, is with the woman he’s going to spend the rest of his life with, has this amazing directorship, has this amazing professorship, everything is going right except for the country he’s in is going entirely wrong.

Fraser: Germany.

Pamela: Germany.

Fraser: And he knew it, and he didn’t like it.

Pamela: No, not at all, and in fact, he started looking in the early 1930s, realizing he was about to be in a very bad place to be, he started looking for positions in the U. S. He was a visiting professor at Cal Tech for a while; he ended up having to go back to Europe, spent some time in England… Finally in 1934, landed a position at Princeton as a full professor. That’s where he would spend the rest of his life. But it was while he was a visiting professor at Cal Tech that Hitler came into power and he basically said, “I’m not going back to my position in Berlin anymore.” So he stepped aside, and we talked about this in a previous episode, it was actually his replacement who tried to rescue a lot of German Jews by helping them find positions in America simply by encouraging the people who were there who weren’t Jews to stay put and weather the storm, so he escaped. It was a complicated time.

Fraser: Right, and you can see though, I mean, you can, again, you can just imagine what it must have like to have been in Germany at that time, and he must have just felt — you can just see the way the direction things are going, and wouldn’t have wanted to stick around and he was really fortunate that he had an alternate back-up, I mean, he had this professorship that he was working on over at Princeton at the same time, so he could just sort of stop going home and just stay in the United States, which, unfortunately, I mean so many people didn’t have that kind of mobility and those kinds of options and they would have taken it, so that’s quite amazing to think about that. So he’s in Princeton, which…who’s with him? Has he got any women with him?

Pamela: He did take Elsa with him, so love of his life, ended up taking her with him. They moved the United States. A few years after they moved to the United States, she actually passed away and he stayed single as far as not married for the rest of his life, but then he got tangled into trying to deal with the war. The guy had a bounty on his head – there was actually a price on his head from the Germans, and he was considered one of the enemies of state. In 1939, Einstein did one of the things that he morally struggled with the most. He received letters from other scientists who were trying to alert President Roosevelt about the possibility of the Germans developing the Nuclear bomb, and most scientists didn’t have the President’s ear, but Einstein was famous enough that he was able to listen to their concerns, realize this was an honest concern, go to Roosevelt and say, “We need to address this,” and it was the power of Einstein’s scientific fame that made Roosevelt realize this was an honest threat and eventually led the Manhattan Project, which Einstein wasn’t part of but he might be considered the reason behind.

Fraser: He regretted that, too.

Pamela: Right, it’s something he struggled with. It was something that he’s like “well, I had these reasons that I needed to do it,” but he really regretted that the Manhattan project ended up coming of it, and he really rode out against the use of the nuclear bomb.

Fraser: Right, and so he was both a proponent and helping people understand what was possible and what probably the Germans were working on, but at the same time, really deeply regretted that technology had even been…especially that the technology had been used and that the genie was kind of out of the bottle at this point.

Pamela: And so here he was in a position of, “OK, so we’ve got to prevent them from doing it, and, oh…we did it. Oh, dear.”

Fraser: He was used, yeah.

Pamela: And what’s interesting is throughout his entire life he was recognized as such a genius, and he was also a great reader, so he was asked to talk not just on physics but on philosophy, which he read constantly. He was always an advocate for peace, and in a lot of his philosophical papers –I’d encourage people to go and read them — he talked a lot about humanism and his struggle trying to deal with basically what he’d unleashed through his science, and it’s one of those things that’s hard to sum up in something as short as a podcast, so go out and read Einstein’s non-scientific writings, they’re actually quite beautiful.

Fraser: One of the things I really like about Einstein, or maybe it’s just the culture of the 40s and the 50s and stuff is he was seen as a rock star.

Pamela: Yeah.

Fraser: To the same level as any of the singers, or like Marilyn Monroe, I mean, there was this real appreciation back then of scientists and science and people really understood the changes that science were making and that, you know, you can imagine, I mean, right now, very few people can actually name a scientist, you know? I think the closest thing that we have is, as we’re recording this, we’re just a couple of days after Steve Jobs died, and that’s like the closest thing that we kind of have, but I mean, he was more of an engineer and created devices that people really use and love, but the fact that they appreciated his intellect, and really appreciated the fact that Steve Jobs, for example, was really injecting new and important ideas into the way we use computers, whether or not you like Apple products or not, but there was the same appreciation for scientists, for Einstein, that people, they may not have understood Relativity, but they knew it was important. They didn’t necessarily understand Brownian Motion, and Wave Particle Duality, and all that kind of stuff, but they knew that it was important and could recognize his name and the media did a really good job of bringing these people into the forefront and showing that they were important and making people really appreciate science, so it’s really too bad that we’re not at that point now, you know, you talk to most people and they can’t name a scientist by name. Steven Hawking, maybe…

Pamela: Yeah, Neil Tyson …

Fraser: Neil Tyson, yeah…

Pamela: But he’s not actively publishing that much research. I think the big difference here is Einstein, like Feynman to a degree, like Carl Sagan to a different degree – he was out there constantly giving public talks, constantly traveling the entire world, and he talked about things that triggered people to think. He didn’t only talk about physics, he talked about culture, he talked about politics, he talked about philosophy and in this way, he was out there engaging people in a pre-television, pre-internet…I mean, they had television but it’s not like every single home had a television at this point. He was interacting with people in their communities all around the world on a variety of different things and that really got his name out there. If he just sat at Princeton quietly working in his office doing the exact same science, I don’t think we’d have so many pictures of him on posters and every dormitory in the world.

Fraser: Maybe, but I think that there was a hunger for it, like I think there was a desire to bring those people forward and to understand who they were and to showcase them in a way that isn’t there now, you know, you get people like, as you said Tyson, Phil Plait, and even yourself. You put a lot of energy into getting science information out there, and I think back then there was a lot more of a demand and a hunger for it and people really appreciated…I don’t want to sound like some grumpy old man, “In my day…” but just the fact that I think there was a disconnection of the science to the reality to the way that we live every day, and it would be nice if we could bring that back into the conversation — so that’s what we’re doing. So he was struggling with his the theory of everything. I mean he had, in many cases, helped unite the forces and figure out that light and mass were the same thing, but you know, in the end, he was struggling with this sort of final great challenge, right?

Pamela: Right. So toward the end of his life, science was revolutionizing itself in all sorts of new directions. We had quantum mechanics, which he did not like, we had general relativity, special relativity, we had electromagnetic theories, we had technology and computers and everything else taking off and he just wanted to find the single theory that would pull it all together — that underlying theory that explains how is it that you can unite gravity and electromagnetism, and a strong and weak force, into a single understanding.

Fraser: The theory of everything…

Pamela: And it drove him crazy that he couldn’t do it, and all the while he was greatly disturbed that quantum mechanics was showing a statistical understanding of the universe. And what really gets me, is Einstein is someone who was able to accept the fact that this whole quantum theory really fundamentally bothered him — he didn’t want a statistical universe, but in 1924, he worked on the Bose-Einstein statistics that went on to understand, allowed people to understand in the 50s how Bose-Einstein condensates work. So here he is not liking the statistical understanding of the Universe, but helping to define how it actually works.

Fraser: Yeah, and we, of course, depend on it for out very lives now, so…

Pamela: Right.

Fraser: And so…when did he die? How long did he live and when did he die?

Pamela: Well, he died in his mid-70s in 1955. One of the most amazing things that he didn’t do toward the end of his life was in 1952, when the first president of Israel (and the presidency was a largely honorary position)…when the first president of Israel passed away, he was actually offered the presidency of Israel, and he turned it down. He left that for other people to do, and he continued on as a professor at Princeton doing research up until the very end, and he passed away in 1955.

Fraser: Wow. Well, and we have been, sort of, going past some of his research. So we’ve done whole episodes…we’ve done episodes on general relativity, and on special relativity, we’ve done a whole episode on the theory of everything, so if you want sort of more details on those topics, we’ve got whole shows on them and that’s sort of why we’ve sort of skipped past the actual specifics and focused more on his life. Well, that was great, Pamela. Thank you so much.

Pamela: Well, it was my pleasure and we’ll be recording when I’m back from Beijing.

Fraser: Alright, have a great trip to China.

Pamela: OK, thanks and I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.

Fraser: Bye-bye.

Transcript:Max Planck

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Fraser: Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain; I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville.

Fraser: Hi, Pamela how you doing?

Pamela: I’m doing well, Fraser, how are you doing?

Fraser: Good. I hope I got that right. You’re the one who knows a little bit of German, right?

Pamela: I know a little bit of German, and your pronunciation is way better than how we normally say it in the American physics classroom, where it becomes Max “Pl-ayn-ck.”

Fraser: So, either way: Max “Pl-ahn-ck” or Max “Pl-ayn-ck,” we’ll go with that. Time for another action-packed double episode, where we meet a man and his mission. This time around it’s German physicist, Max Planck, considered to be the father of Planckton theory. He was later granted a Nobel Prize for just that discovery. So let’s take a trip back just over 100 years to learn about the man who changed our understanding of the very small: Max Planck. So where do you want to start with this one, I mean, Einstein got all the press, but Max Planck made one of the most important discoveries in all of physics, right? I mean, he’s… what an amazing series of discoveries and ideas!

Pamela: And one of the things that really brings it home is, in reading up for this episode, I found the statement, that when people are referring to classical physics, they’re referring to everything discovered before Max Planck, so his career defines the turning point from classical physics to our modern era of quantum mechanics and relativity.

Fraser: So, can you go back for a second? What was the classic understanding of physics?

Pamela: Up until then people casually argued left and right about whether light was a particle or wave. We dealt with motions in a nice, linear fashion, where you had a force that accelerated something, and you figured out distances, and time worked everywhere the same way for everybody, and it was just a nice, uniform, didn’t-hurt-your-head-too- much, your-stomach-was-comfortable-with-physics, kind of reality to live in.

Fraser: Right, a Newtonian reality…

Pamela: Exactly.

Fraser: Right. Motion… all of the physics made a lot of sense.

Pamela: The worst it got was when you’re dealing with a circular or spherical object, you had to use non-Euclidian geometry. Boo-hoo, you could still model it!

Fraser: [laughing] But the evidence was mounting up that there was something wrong.

Pamela: Exactly. We had this problem that people were trying to understand: what’s the energy coming off of light sources? What is the energy in a hot system? The realization that when you shine light of different colors on objects, different things happen, that heat and photons are related to one another…people were trying to come to terms with all of these different ideas, they were trying to map out the structure of an atom. All of these things were going on pretty much contemporary to one each other, and in trying to understand the amount of light that came from an object of a given temperature, there was this problem where if you looked at it using one set of rules, all of the theories worked perfectly well for long wavelengths; if you looked at it with another set of equations, it all worked perfectly for short wavelengths, but there was no unified understanding of “if you have a hot object, what is the distribution of light coming off of that hot object?” and without that understanding, things like stellar spectra, things like, well, something as simple as “what color is light coming off an incandescent light bulb?” — we couldn’t answer those questions, and Max Planck figured out how to answer those questions.

Fraser: And so what was his answer to the question? What discovery did he make?

Pamela: It wasn’t so much a discovery as, just like Kepler, he kept trying to fit reality into his equations and make it work, and he didn’t really like his answer, so Kepler discovered that things orbit on ellipses instead of circles, and Planck discovered that the only way you can really get the relationship between energy and light to work out is to say the energy is restricted to quanta, that you can go no smaller than a certain value and you have to jump up in a given increment: Planck’s constant value. Now, he didn’t actually think that light was confined to these given increments — that understanding would come later. He was initially just trying to find an equation that would fit reality.

Fraser: Hmm…alright, well let’s talk about his life then?

Pamela: [laughing] I love the abrupt changes! This man is doing this brilliant science, but he was a human — he did have a life going on in the background.

Fraser: That’s all I’m saying, you know, he’s more than just a simple, you know, a groundbreaking idea. Sounds as if he was a pretty interesting guy, too.

Pamela: He was! And in a lot of ways, he was your “scientist’s scientist.” There are certain stereotypes that you hear about: “Well, many scientists and mathematicians are gifted at music,” well, Max Planck was gifted at music. In fact, for a long time growing up, it was thought, “well, maybe with his gifts at piano, his gifts at other instruments, maybe he’ll be a musician.” And he was supported in that, but when he was seventeen, he met a good mathematician at his gymnasium, and he fell in love with science. Then, just like your quintessential scientist, he fell into the boring classes, and complained about the boring classes, but just sort of put his nose to the grindstone, and sucked it up, and got through, and dealt with boring professors, and dealt with uninteresting professors. What’s interesting reading in his bios, is point after point is made about: “He went here and was bored; he went there and the courses were dry.” [laughing] As someone who’s “been there, done that” — not all my professors were not that way, but there’s always that one. But he kept his nose to the grindstone and found interesting what he was doing, and found questions that intrigued him over and above the charisma that was injected into the content by the people conveying the information.

Fraser: So where did he go to University?

Pamela: He entered University at age 17. He graduated from high school quite young and studied at the University of Munich, but they didn’t have a large physics department. Physics was still a beginning field in some ways at that point, and he was kind of unimpressed, but he got through, finished what he was doing, and he went on to qualify for his dissertation at Munich, finishing his PhD at the age of 21, which kind of makes me feel dumb and stupid because I was finishing my Bachelor’s degree at 22. And when he was working on his thesis, he got to work with some of the big names: Kirchoff and Hemholtz, and after finishing up his degree he went on to be a private lecturer. He went on to become an associate professor at the University of Kyle, which is where he grew up, and he actually married a woman that he was childhood friends with, and then he went on to become a full professor at the University of Berlin. So, he did many different things over his life. He studied at Berlin for a while, working with Kirchoff and Hemholtz. It was your typical (admittedly very accelerated) academic career. One of the things that impressed me about him is that he also did have this family life that is mentioned over and over in all of the discussions of him. He married in 1887 and went on to have many children. He had first a son, and then twin daughters, and then another son – all with his first wife. One of the things that he had to deal with – faced with the wars and faced with medical care as it was at the time — was he lost one of his sons to WWI, then he lost both of his daughters to childbirth. Then during WWII, he lost his second son, who participated in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, which is one of those strange things to read in the biography of a major scientist. He lost all but one of his children. He had a third son via his second wife, but his life wasn’t an easy one — first watching his children, and then his wife, and then another child all die before he did. And it wasn’t easy going through the wars either, and this is where a lot of the idea of the “scientific stoic” was another one of those things that he kind of lived up to.

Fraser: Right. I mean, you just think about the amount of tragedy! He lost his first wife, second wife, all of those children…I can’t even imagine, and yet continued on teaching and helping with science. Unbelievable.

Pamela: And he also wasn’t politically silent. During WWI, he was very a much a “OK, everyone, we’re going to get through this, just put your nose to the grindstone and just work.” And that’s something that’s very admirable — to have Europe basically falling apart around you, and to just say, “we’re scientists, we’re just going to do science and get through this.” Then during WWII, he was admittedly one of the 92 scientists that signed the declaration that it was a good idea to take over the rest of Europe, but he went on to admit that that probably wasn’t the right thing for him to do, and he recognized what was happening to his Jewish colleagues, and throughout WWII, he publicly supported the science being done by Einstein, a Jewish scientist. He looked for ways to, within the institutions that he worked at, essentially hide German scientists and give them places to continue working. World War II wasn’t an easy time for him; he was an old man at this point, and he had to flee the bombing that was going on at this point, he lost his home, and at one point he basically said, “I just want to live to see this over and see us get back to doing science again.”

Fraser: I don’t know…it’s a hard thing to say, right? I mean, we don’t know what it would be like in a totalitarian state like that, and in his mind, it was really all about doing the science, but I mean, to sign your name to such a horrible document…it’s a hard thing to then take a step back and say well, you know, you’ve got to understand the time they were going into. It’s a really interesting story. I normally have opinions about this thing, but I don’t know what I would do in that situation.

Pamela: And it’s one of those things where you have to look at, in some ways, what is the difference between what someone says and what someone does? Yes, he signed a piece of paper that was probably not (it definitely wasn’t) a good document, but beyond signing that document, he was then at the risk of his own life, someone who spoke out to say “OK, those of you who are scientists and not German, stop applying for jobs in foreign countries. We need to let the German scientists who can’t be German Jewish scientists, who can’t work in this nation anymore take those jobs.” That’s one of the philosophies he talked about. I mean, can you imagine, your whole country’s falling down around you, and it’s an easy thing to think, “OK I’m just going to take that job my buddy has in America right now, or that job my buddy has in ______”… well, pretty much everywhere else was getting bombed pretty badly right then….but to say, “OK look, we at least are German nationals, we have options if we stay in this country, but look at our Jewish colleagues — if they stay they have no options.” I have the utmost respect for that single action.

Fraser: Right. So, then I think it’s really important for us now to take a look at the discoveries — his actual academic contributions to science. So, when did he really start to produce some science that was some of the groundbreaking stuff? I mean, he had his thesis…I’m not sure, was it better than your thesis?

Pamela: [laughing] Yes.

Fraser: Well, what is the timeline of some of the really big discoveries?

Pamela: His work from the beginning was extremely fundamental. That’s the thing about him is: even when he wasn’t doing cutting-edge, changing-the-laws-of-everything type science, he was always working to innovate things. Before going into his great discoveries, I think there’s one interesting tidbit that has to be noted to contextualize all of this: he was told when he looked into going into physics that it was a waste of time.

Fraser: Dead end…

Pamela: Philipp von Jolly actually said to him: “In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill in a few holes,” so can you imagine? You’re starting your whole career, you’re young, you’re excited, you’re interested, and you’re told, “Dude, you’re wasting your time – we’ve already done it!”

Fraser: Yeah, you’re in typewriter repair right now…

Pamela: His response was: “That’s OK, I’m interested in just filling in the details.” So Planck wasn’t one of these upstart scientists who want to change the world forever and win the Nobel Prize! That wasn’t his goal. I know people who start out with that goal — that wasn’t him. He just wanted to be the one going in and saying, “Huh, we haven’t figured this little detail out. Let’s do that. Let’s figure out this little detail over here and figure out that,” and he kind of filled in quantum mechanics [laughing].

Fraser: [laughing] Yeah, that little detail…

Pamela: Right, so while he was studying he got introduced to the concepts of thermodynamics, and he ended up doing his dissertation work on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is the law that basically states: “Everything is devolving to chaos.” It’s the law that says that entropy basically takes over in isolated (the fancy words are: entropy of an isolated macroscopic system never decreases)… perpetual motion machines — they just can’t exist because there’s always going to be something breaking down the order within a system. This is the idea that all systems tend to disorder over time.

Fraser: Right. And so the whole universe is moving towards a state of higher entropy, and so then came from a place of lower entropy in the past.

Pamela: And this was one of those ideas that…well, the philosophical implications of this are great. I don’t know a physicist who hasn’t blamed the surface of their desk on entropy at least once in their life.

Fraser: [laughing] Right, right. Come on, I’m just going the same direction as the universe!

Pamela: Exactly! I don’t think entropy defines the accruement of paperwork — but it seems to apply!

Fraser: Second Law of Thermodynamics and Paperwork…

Pamela: Yes, and Planck was someone who just fundamentally saw entropy as just something in his gut that made sense and contextualized the universe. And so that was where he started, but while he continued doing work on thermodynamics, and doing work on entropy, he picked up on these ideas of [missing audio] trying to understand the energy distribution of light, and that’s where he jumped in and he tried all sorts of different models before finally settling on the “energy equals some constant (now called Planck’s constant) times the frequency of light.” And when he came up with this, it was just a theory, just a pretty theory that happened to work. He actually, like Einstein, spent the entirety of his life struggling with the concept that our universe is governed by statistical principles, that idea of quantum isn’t just a property of transitions – how light is admitted and absorbed – but it’s a fundamental property of the waves themselves. The philosophical ideas, the things that still make people’s stomachs upset in our post-classic realm of physics – he struggled with those the same way. He eventually came to terms with, “Yes, you need to do statistical thermodynamics these days,” but he didn’t like it. And I love the idea that he was the one who looked at science and recognized, “Well, this is the way it is, this is how it works, and I don’t like it.”

Fraser: [laughing] Right, but that’s “too bad for me,” not “the universe is wrong.”

Pamela: Exactly, and one of his most famous quotes is: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” And this is so entirely true…

Fraser: Still the case…

Pamela: Still the case…

Fraser: Right, so we’ve got here quantum, and I mean, we’ve got a whole episode just on — not just quantum theory — we’ve got one just on spectrum and quanta. So you know, there’s really specific…exactly how this works…how light is bundled up in these discreet packages of energy and what that tells you about the universe, but then where did his discovery go next?

Pamela: That basically changed everything about how we look at physics, and he spent a lot of the rest of his life trying to figure out all of the consequences of this one simple “quantization” of energy. He was also someone that was a great fan of the work being done by Einstein, and again, this is where I pointed out: he was a German scientist working in less-than-friendly conditions for Jewish scientists, and he was able to publicly say, “Look, Einstein’s stuff is good!” and then he worked to build on it. Fraser: He made significant contributions to special relativity when that theory was developed and published, so you see his work going through and he did physical chemistry with his thermodynamics work. He got into electromechanics, he got into special relativity, and what he ended up doing, actually, is building a center, and this is one of the most important legacies, in some ways, for Max Planck is throughout much of his life, he was the director of his own center. He selected the people who worked for him. He used that position as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society to essentially hide people occasionally. He used it derive science that was scientist-focused vs. university-focused. Any of you listening to this who are at universities know there are times when you are simply told, “We don’t care what you do, but you have to bring in money,” or you’re told “No, sorry. We fully recognize that you need x, y, or z or your research won’t work, but we’re bringing in this new hire and so we’re going to take away your lab space now” — all these sort of things that happen in a large, institutional setting, he kind of got rid of, and he said, “OK, we’re going to put the scientist at the center, build the institution around the scientist, and give them freedom to do what’s best.” And today, that notion has evolved into the Max Planck Society, which creates institutes all over Germany that are some of the most well-regarded science research centers in the world, where you take the leading person in mathematics, the leading person in electrostatics, the leading person in relativity and you give them a center that they can populate with people they know are good, with people they know they want to work with, with people they hand pick, and just let them go free with a good budget. This is an amazing way to let the best scientists in the world be the best scientists they can be.

Fraser: Yeah, at Universe Today, we get a lot of great science news coming out of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

Pamela: Yeah.

Fraser: Yeah, and so a lot of them…and they’re all translated into English, and we’re able to access them and talk to the researchers, and it’s great! A huge amount of the research that you see is coming out of these people.

Pamela: So you see this person over the course of his life: he was that kid interested in music who did well, who got lured into mathematics, who said “Physics is fun! I don’t care if I discover anything, I’m just going to do this,” who got curious and saw entropy as a driving force in the universe, and then caught this neat little problem which was termed the “Ultraviolet Catastrophe” (which was just a good name) and decided to solve it, and got the Nobel Prize for it, and then fought for his friends during the War, and fought for his colleagues, and who signed this stupid document he shouldn’t have, but then spoke out and lost a son who tried to kill Hitler (or was part of an assassination plot, rather).

Fraser: Yeah, and he didn’t live too much longer after the Second World War.

Pamela: No, he died in 1947 at 89. He lived through what was perhaps the most turbulent time in German history, and he just got stuff done; in the face of personal tragedy, national tragedy, losing his home — he just got stuff done.

Fraser: And so next week, then, we’re going to be talking about the Mission…

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: …and its big goals, and some other really cool things. It’s going to be… it’s already launched hasn’t it?

Pamela: And it just gets stuff done, kind of like the man.

Fraser: That’ll be great. So we’ll talk to you next week about the Planck Mission.

Pamela: That sounds great! Cool!

Fraser: Alright, talk to you later, Pamela.

Pamela: OK, bye-bye.

Shownotes

• Edwin Hubble biography
• Hubble biography (short version)
• Another Hubble bio with pictures
• Edwin Hubble’s basketball goes to space — Universe Today
• NGC 2261, Hubble’s Variable Nebula — APOD
• Cepheid variables and Hubble – WMAP
• Henrietta Leavitt — PBS
• The Hubble Constant
• “A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae. The Expanding Universe”
• Hubble and the Expansion of the Universe – Berkeley
• Gérard Henri de Vaucouleurs
• The Hubble “Tuning Fork” – SDSS
• Hubble Galaxy Classification — U of Washington
• The 200-inch Hale Telescope — Palomar
• The Hubble Space Telescope

Shownotes

Phil’s Bad Astronomy website

All about Phil

Order a copy of “Death From the Skies!”

Death by Asteroid

• Will blowing up an asteroid work? – MSNBC
• Bad Idea:  Blowing Up Asteroids with Nuclear Missiles – Universe Today
• Movies w/bad science that Phil debunks on his Bad Astronomy site
• B612 Foundation
• The B612 Foundation’s solution to potential asteroid strike
• Gravity Tug
• Pan-STARRS
• Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
• Dan Durda
• Apophis – Universe Today
• Mining Asteroids — How Stuff Works

Death from the Sun

• The Sun’s magnetic field – Goddard Space Flight Center
• How to project the sun onto a piece of paper — Standford University
• Solar Maximum of 2003 -- Space. com
• Alpha Particles — Wiki
• Solar Flares, or Coronal Mass Ejections — Marshall Space Flight Center
• The Quebec Blackout of March, 1989 – Windows to the Universe
• History of the Sun – Universe Today
• 2012: No Killer Solar Flare -- Universe Today

Misc.

• Moving the Earth — New Scientist
• Gamma Ray Bursts — Goddard Space Flight Center
• Eta Carinae – APOD
• WR 104 — Universe Today

Don’t forget to vote for Astronomy Cast in the People’s Choice Podcast Awards! The Technology/Science section is near the bottom of the page.

Transcript: Death From the Skies, Interview with Phil Plait

Download the transcript

Dr. Pamela Gay: With me this week is ‘The Bad Astronomer’ Dr. Phil Plait. How are you doing Phil?

Dr. Phil Plait: I’m doing just fine.

Pamela: How does it feel to be an author nowadays?

Dr. Plait: Well, I’ve been an author before but when you do it once it could be a fluke. If you do it a second time then that’s showing that you might have a little bit more credibility. So I’m pretty happy to have another book out. It seems to be doing fairly well so I’m excited.

Pamela: Well and we’re excited to have you here today. As we’ve talked about a lot on this show, the Universe is trying to kill you, me, and everyone in the world. Death can come in many forms but thus far the planet Earth has managed mostly to make it out okay. So far at least we have – as long as you don’t happen to be a dinosaur.

Today you and I are going to talk about a few of the most likely and most interesting ways we may not be able to avoid death in the future. I guess the best place to start is what’s the most likely way that we could all die?

Dr. Plait: [Laughter] Actually calculating statistics on Astronomical events is a little tricky. The Sun IS going to turn into a Red Giant and it IS going to fry the Earth but not for another 6 billion years. So, the odds of you and me dying in this are zero. That’s the most likely kind of thing that’s going to happen – something inevitable as far as us listening to the Podcast or just living our lives today, far and away the most likely event is an Asteroid or a Comet impact simply because there are so many of them out there and it doesn’t take a really big rock coming in to cause a lot of damage.

So, the smaller the rock the more of them there are. There might not be that many dinosaur killers out there, the rocks that are 10 kilometers across (6 miles) but there are lots of little ones you know, a hundred yards across. Those can’t wipe out all life on Earth but if they come over a city, that would be bad.

Pamela: Now, we’ve all seen in movies and we can name these movies (although we shouldn’t because that would give them attention they don’t deserve)…

Dr. Plait: [Cough, cough – Armageddon]

Pamela: [Laughter] We’ve all seen these movies where they try and get rid of the problem by blowing up the rock. This is a really bad idea.

Dr. Plait: Well, yeah it’s bad for a lot of reasons. One of which is like imagine this thing is the size of Mt. Everest, 6 miles across something like that and it’s made of iron. A lot of Asteroids are made of iron. You can drop bombs on something like that all day long and it’s just going to laugh all the way down.

All you’re going to have happen is now you’ve turned an Asteroid impact into a radioactive Asteroid impact. That’s not very good. [Laughter] If we see an Asteroid coming in we may not know what it’s composed of. It might be iron; it might be rock; it might be what they call a rubble pile. Some of these Asteroids are basically shattered in place by low speed impacts. It’s like a bag of rocks or gravel. You can lob bombs at that and it just absorbs the impact and nothing happens.

So this argues that we should really be studying these things so we understand them better. We should be funding this better. We just don’t know enough about these kinds of Asteroids. So really just trying to blow it up isn’t a good idea especially if like at the end of the movie ‘Deep Impact’ which I watched actually last night as we were recording this they blew up a Comet 6 miles across when it was minutes away from impact. All you’re doing is taking one giant impact and turning it into a gazillion somewhat smaller impacts spread out all over the Planet. So you’re not really helping any.

The thing you REALLY want to do with these is to make them not hit [Laughter] the whole problem is they’re hitting us. If you make them not hit then you’re okay. You want to push them out of the way. You can think of a lot of ways of doing this. You can land a rocket on one and stick the back end of it straight up and use that to push it.

The problem with that is these rocks are spinning or tumbling and so you can’t really control which way your rocket is blasting and you want to be able to control this. You can in fact blow a bomb up on the surface of an Asteroid and then you’ll vaporize part of it and that vapor will expand and act like a rocket and push the Asteroid in the other direction.

Pamela: But again if it’s tumbling you’re still going to have problems.

Dr. Plait: That’s right and you can’t really control how much you’re pushing it. You might push it into an orbit that is only marginally dangerous into an orbit that’s VERY dangerous.

There’s a group of people called the B612 Foundation. They’re named after the little Prince who came from an Asteroid called B612. They want to put a Space Probe, a rocket off the side of an Asteroid not physically touching it but near it. This probe might have a mass of a couple of tons something like that so its own mass gives it Gravity. That Gravity can pull on the Asteroid.

So the Probe very gently fires its rockets and can tug the Asteroid out of the way using nothing but its own Gravity. It’s called a Virtual Tether or a Gravity Tug. This is a cool idea – it sounds ridiculous – but in fact these guys at B612 were talking – Astronauts, Astronomers, Engineers, smart folks – and they’re really out there trying to get this done, trying to figure out how to do it. It’s a brilliant idea and honestly I think it will work.

Pamela: And the nice thing about this is Gravity doesn’t care if the Asteroid is tumbling. Gravity doesn’t care in fact about anything other than where the heck is the center of Mass of the Asteroid.

So you launch something roughly the size of a fully-loaded semi-truck which you might have to do in 2 or 3 different trips to get all the pieces into orbit and we can practice ahead of time. We don’t have to wait for something to be on its way to destroy the Planet.

You take something out to the Asteroid Belt and just rearrange the Asteroid Belt a little bit to test out how well this process works. It’s completely straightforward. The math is completely straightforward. The hard part is figuring out how well we can maneuver in that sort of a situation.

Dr. Plait: Yeah, so the other thing it cares about too is the mass of the Asteroid. So if you have a REALLY big Asteroid you need a lot more time to be able to move it where you want as opposed to something smaller which you might just be able to move a lot more quickly.

The thing is these guys are threading the needle. These Asteroids are coming in and the Earth is 8,000 miles across so the earlier you can push this thing out of the way, the wider it’s going to miss the Earth by when it passes. What you really want is a lot of lead time so you don’t have to push it so hard and the lower mass Asteroid the better because then you don’t have to push as hard to get it out of the way in the first place.

The problem is we cannot control those things. Whatever is going to hit us is going to hit us. We have to keep our eyes open, check for these things and get as much lead time as we can.

Pamela: Well one of the problems about Asteroids in general is the Earth-crossing ones are often on highly elliptical orbits and that has some rather severe consequences. It means the one that’s likely to hit us is likely to come out of the Sun or at least the Sun’s direction. Those are kind of hard to see.

Dr. Plait: Right, a lot of the times you’ll read the newspapers and it’ll say we were just missed by an Asteroid last night. That’s really irritating. If you draw yourself a picture, if an Asteroid is coming past the Earth the only time we can really see it well is when it’s already on its way by.

When it’s coming towards us it might be coming from the direction of the Sun or it’s coming from a direction where the geometry makes it look like the Crescent Moon does – it’s not lit very well. So, it’s dark and just coming from a funny direction.

A lot of the times we really don’t discover these things until after they’re passed us. Look that’s a bit of a worry. We need to be searching for these things with even more eyes on the Sky than we have now to make sure we don’t miss them.

Pamela: So coming on-line in December is this wonderful system called Pan-STARRS that is going to be basically observing all of the Sky that it can every night, night after night after night and automatically subtracting one night’s images from the previous night’s to see if there is anything new or if anything moved. This system is going to be able to find Super Nova; it will be able to find Asteroids. It will be able to identify Variable Stars that we never knew about. It’s going to basically look at our inconstant Sky and nail everything that’s not constant very rapidly.

Hopefully this is going to be a way that we can find things that reflect light effectively. Once it is going, a few years later there is another system called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that is even bigger and will be able to find even smaller rocks.

Between these two systems, we should be able to get to the point that we’ve found close to all of the Earth-killing Asteroids and hopefully order of (I think they’re tasked with something like 90 percent of the Continent-destroying size rocks) it’s not everything.

Dr. Plait: A friend of mine, Dan Durda, I’ve actually known him for many years, is an Asteroid Specialist. He’s actually president of the B612 Foundation. He and I were talking the other day and he said the goal is to find 90 percent of all Asteroids that can cross Earth’s orbit that are bigger than 140 meters by the year 2025.

One hundred forty meters is sort of a combination of the smallest ones that can do a lot of damage that are also findable basically. If they’re much smaller than that they don’t do much damage and they’re harder to find. You take all of these factors into account and 140 meters seems to be about the right size to be looking for. Finding 90 percent of them in the next 17 years or so is a pretty good goal.

Pamela: That’s where we’re headed and we’re getting better at finding these things all of the time with new technologies, new ways to automate the search. It’s a fun way to go out and basically protect the planet Earth.

We’re working on finding ways to tug these things out of place when they are on bad trajectories. The nice thing is we’ve found a lot of them already. We’ve found significant double digit percentages we think of them already using statistics. As far as we know there is absolutely nothing headed our way.

Dr. Plait: Not at the moment. There’s nothing with a reasonable chance of hitting in the next few decades. There are some like the one called Apophis which is about 300 yards across, 300 meters across that’s going to pass by the Earth in 2029. We don’t know exactly how far away from the Earth this thing is going to pass. It’s actually very hard to know that this far in advance. As it gets closer we’ll know better but right now we don’t know.

The point is if it passes a little too close to the Earth, the Earth’s gravity will swing it really widely around into a different orbit. If it doesn’t pass close enough to Earth, the Earth’s gravity will only bend its orbit a little bit. If it passes at just the right distance, what Astronomers call the Keyhole; it will come back in seven years and smack us in 2036.

We really don’t want that to happen because something 300 yards across is BIG. That’s bigger than a city-killer by far. You don’t need anything anywhere near that big to wipe out a city. We don’t want something that big hitting us anywhere.

They’re taking this Asteroid seriously even though the odds of it hitting us are like one in 45,000 or something like that, very small. But they want to put a radio beacon on it actually so we can track its orbit perfectly. If it looks like it’s going to come back and hit us, use a Gravity Tug, put one of these things together and move it out of the way.

One of the things I really like about this is besides being able to keep us from getting all killed – which is something [Laughter] I’m all for that –

Pamela: But it would sell your book so well [Laughter]

Dr. Plait: That’s true as a promo I couldn’t ask for anything more. But one of the things that’s good about this is if you can move an Asteroid out of the way, you can move it into an orbit that might help you.

If we see one that’s a couple hundred yards across and made totally of metal (these things are iron, nickel and things that are actually difficult to mine on the Earth) we can actually move it into an orbit which is beneficial.

You move it into an Earth orbit and take your time and 20 years later you go back to it and start mining it when you have the technology to do that. It would probably pay itself off in just a few years.

Pamela: So it could kill us or it could help us build the next generation of autos.

Dr. Plait: Right. There’s a third choice too. There’s a lot of international wrangling over this because what if we see an Asteroid that’s coming in. We know its orbit well enough and it’s going to hit in say Kansas. We use our Gravity Tug and the Gravity Tug gets it pulled out of the way and then fails.

Then we recalculate the orbit and we find out it’s going to hit in Munich. Oops! [Laughter] so, what do we do? There are literally international lawyers who are hashing this out right now to figure out what to do in these cases and how to figure this stuff out. It’s a very complex situation.

Pamela: Wow and it’s a situation we’re going to have to deal with in our lifetime.

Dr. Plait: Yeah.

Pamela: Well, that was a cheery thought [Laughter] and unfortunately there’s actually some rather even shorter term ways that not necessarily Planet death will occur but Planet inconvenience could occur from the Skies. Those problems tend to come from our Sun rather than some Asteroids.

Our Sun is currently at a particularly long period of minimum. We’ve all been eagerly awaiting a new round of Sunspots with baited breath. This new round of Sunspots just could bring some fairly interesting things Earthward. Can you tell us a little bit about what we might expect from our Sun?

Dr. Plait: The Sun is magnetic. It has a magnetic field a little bit like the Earth’s in that you have a magnetic field generated somewhere on the interior and it pierces through the surface. If you were standing on the Sun and you had a compass you could use that to navigate although not very well because unlike the Earth’s magnetic field which basically pops out at the North and South Pole, the Sun has a very complex twisted magnetic field. Like almost like a huge ball of rubber bands. It’s just a complete mess. It’s a very complicated situation.

The Sun’s magnetic field changes in strength. It goes from a minimum like it is now where the magnetic field is very weak and then over time – over the next 5 and a half years – it builds up to a maximum and it’s very tangled. There are loops of magnetic field energy popping out all over the surface. Then 5 and a half years later it dies down and goes to a minimum again. Right now, like you said, we’re at one of those minima.

What this means is that there are very few Sunspots where the magnetic field pierces the Sun’s surface. It actually lets that part of the Sun cool a little bit and it doesn’t glow as brightly and so we see that as a dark spot. The Sunspots are sort of an indicator of what the Sun’s magnetic field is doing. If you went out with a telescope and pointed at the Sun, projected the image of the Sun on a piece of paper (because you DON’T want to be looking at the Sun through a telescope folks) [Laughter] you won’t see that many Sunspots. There have been very few in the past few months.

We are just now starting to see Sunspots from the new cycle. Nobody really knows what this means. It’s been awhile. It’s been an unusually long minimum and nobody knows what that means. Does that mean it’s going to be a weak maximum? Does that mean it’s going to be a really strong maximum? Nobody knows.

In 2003 we had just a rip-roaring maximum from the Sun. The magnetic field was a total mess and there were Sunspots all over the place. The way you want to think about this is to imagine having a net full of bedsprings. You pull these bedsprings until they’re all full of tension and then wrap them all around each other. They are then full of all this Potential Energy just waiting to snap. Then you poke it and when you poke it and one of them snaps and then it hits another one and that one snaps. They all start snapping all over the place. That releases a lot of energy.

Well, the same thing happens with the Sun. The magnetic field was all tangled up – it’s a bunch of springs – and if something happens on the Sun, one of them snaps or there’s some sort of disturbance, it can let loose all these magnetic field lines. They release all of their energy at once. The amount of energy [Laughter] that’s released is ENORMOUS, it’s VAST it’s terrifying!

Pamela: Well and it’s not just energy but these magnetic field lines as they twist and loop out through the surface are filled with plasma and high energy Electrons. The energy is released in the form of both high energy particles as well as in the form of light.

Dr. Plait: That’s right, basically they snap and their energy is blown downward and upward. They shoot particles straight up out of the Sun; they also blast downward and slam into the surface of the Sun. That can generate Gamma Rays which are the very highest form of energy of light. What happens is you get what is called a Solar Flare. It’s just a tremendous flare of energy. It can be several percent of the Sun’s total energy released in just this one little spot.

It’s an explosion that just totally dwarfs the entire nuclear arsenal of the Earth; it’s a tremendous amount of energy. It’s dangerous in two ways one of which is that the Gamma Rays come screaming out of the Sun and those can hit our satellites and they can cause a lot of damage to the satellites.

When they hit the metal of the satellite they basically blast the Electrons off the metal. The Electrons go scattering every which way inside the electronics of the satellite and can fry it.

Pamela: And there’s no warning that this is going to happen because well, light travels at the speed of light so we don’t get a chance to see the burst coming before it lets loose.

Dr. Plait: That’s right so basically the first notice you have of this is when your satellites die and that’s bad. This has happened in the past. We’ve had these Gamma Rays from Flares damaging satellites and shutting them down before.

But then the other problem is that traveling at tremendous speeds is a wave of subatomic particles, Protons, Electrons, Helium Nuclei, what are called Alpha Particles. They come screaming out of the Sun and they can be here in a day or two. Sometimes they’re moving a million miles an hour and sometimes they’re moving three or four million miles an hour. So they come screaming across the Solar System and slam into the Earth.

What this does is they hit our magnetic field and make the magnetic field sort of shake. All the subatomic particles in Space that are trapped in our magnetic field start slithering around like beads on an Abacus I guess you could think of it. The thing is when you do this you generate a huge electric current. That’s the thing to remember.

The details of this are very complicated. The point is a Solar Flare or what is also called a Coronal Mass Ejection which is another type of Solar Event which blasts out huge amounts of subatomic particles, interact with the Earth’s magnetic fields and they generate a HUGE current. They induce a current. Now that induces a current in the Earth’s surface, literally Electrons start to flow in the ground.

Over most of the Earth this isn’t too big of a deal. The problem is in North America – in Canada and the United States – the geography, the geology of the rock is such that you can get these tremendous currents generated there. This can affect our power grid.

In 1989 a tremendous Solar Event actually blew out power grids in the Northeast and in March in Quebec the power went out. Basically our power system was designed way back when to only have a certain amount of electricity flowing on it. In the intervening years we built more cities, more towns, we spread everything out and even though we have not upgraded our system, we’ve let more current flow on it.

If a current is induced by a Solar Event, there’s not as much leeway as there used to be and so in March of 1989 a Solar Event did this to our already maximally loaded grid, dumped a bunch more current into it – like trying to force more water into a pipe that already has as much water as it can bear, the pipe will burst if you do that – so that’s what happened to our grid.

Our grid overloaded, transformers blew out and people in Quebec in March in Canada were without power for 3 days which is BAD.

Pamela: And it’s cold there.

Dr. Plait: Yeah, that’s really bad. That was twenty years ago now and we still haven’t done anything about this. So our grid is even more overloaded and we’re approaching a Solar Maximum. In 2003 we had HUGE Flares coming from the Sun, bigger than anybody had ever measured before since they started measuring them.

If something like that happens again – and we were lucky, none of them was aimed at us, we caught the edges of them – but if one of them is aimed right at us that could blow out the power grid over vast regions of the United States and Canada. If that were to happen again in November or December, or even in the summer when we’re trying to cool our houses and our office buildings that would be a disaster.

Pamela: And it’s a multi-level disaster because you can imagine we get one of these Coronal Mass Ejections that’s pointed straight at the Earth and it’s accompanied by a Flare of Gamma Rays headed toward the Earth, you knock out a few satellites, say cell phone connections. Then you knock out the power grid.

You now have people that have no electricity and no communications. It’s the multi-layered lack of all the things that our modern society has gotten used to having that could just not mass panic not mass death but some death, a lot of inconvenience and severe economic repercussions. That’s the place that we really need to worry.

Dr. Plait: And it’s even worse than that. If you’re an Astronaut in Space, those Gamma Rays can be very serious. They could be strong enough to give you radiation poisoning which would be bad.

Not only that but it affects the Earth’s magnetic field and it means that any airplanes that are flying at the time (for example) if they are using GPS satellites and the GPS satellites go down they could go to compasses but then their compasses and some of their navigational equipment won’t work very well because the Earth’s magnetic field is bouncing around like a super ball.

So, this could be really bad. It’s hard to really know exactly what will happen until it happens. We don’t want to have to go through that to find out. The thing is, like Asteroids, we can minimize this problem by upgrading our grid. We can put in more cables, we can try to insulate them better, there are a lot of things we can do.

The problem is it costs a lot of money. We’re talking billions of dollars to do this. The thing is, at what cost is this? Is it better to insulate things now (and I mean insulate against the disaster) by spending money now or waiting until after it happens losing people and losing billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars of economic growth in business?

Pamela: We never know and so I think this is where upgrading the power grid is definitely something that if anyone ever bothers to ask an Astronomer we probably need to be doing.

Dr. Plait: Right.

Pamela: Let’s see how long it takes the Sun to come out of minimum and maybe we’ll get lucky and have a really boring maximum. Now these aren’t the only ways that the Earth can be destroyed, they’re just the most likely.

Dr. Plait: That’s just chapters one and two.

Pamela: [Laughter] that’s just chapters one and two. So we don’t have time to go into this much depth on all the chapters of your book but what are your favorite ways to contemplate the destruction of the Planet Earth?

Dr. Plait: When I was researching the book, well it was fun. The book is not supposed to scare the pants off of you. I don’t want people lying awake at night panicking. This is more like a rollercoaster ride or a scary movie where after it’s over you, ‘phew’ you feel better, you don’t have to worry about these things so much.

I’ll throw this out there even the most statistically likely event like getting killed by an Asteroid, your chance of being killed by an Asteroid is one in 700,000. Really all of these things as scary as they are, are very low likelihood events. And some of them like the death of the Sun or when we collide with the Andromeda Galaxy and all kinds of disasters can happen then, they will happen but not for billions of years.

The death of the Sun was one of my favorites to write about and to research because even though I knew a little bit about it, I didn’t know the precise timing. I was able to find a timeline of what’s going to happen to the Sun when it swells up into a red giant.

The current thinking right now is that – you know everybody always says the Earth is going to get consumed by the Sun. The Sun will expand out and go past the Earth and we’ll die that way. But in fact, as the Sun starts to expand, the Solar Wind this constant stream of particles coming from the Sun, is going to increase as well. That means that the mass of the Sun is going to get lower, it’s losing mass. If it’s losing mass, it’s losing Gravity. If it’s losing Gravity, its hold on the Earth isn’t as strong.

So, over the next billion years as the Sun is getting warmer, the Earth will very slowly spiral away from the Sun. It’s hard to say right now and there are people arguing back and forth but right now it looks like we’ll just barely escape the Sun. Mercury and Venus, sorry it’s lights out for them. [Laughter] Um but we may make it.

Of course though having what’s essentially a charcoal briquette at several thousand degrees occupy half of your Sky is bad. The Earth will still be toasted it just won’t be totally vaporized. [Laughter] You can be happy about that or not. But one of the reasons I really like this is because I read a paper that said we can actually save the Earth by moving Asteroids around. If you swing an Asteroid past the Earth, the Asteroid gets moved by the Earth. The Earth’s gravity will move the Asteroid. But the Asteroid’s gravity will move the Earth as well.

It’s a variation of the Asteroid Gravity Tug. You can drop Asteroids past the Earth and actually move it out from the Sun. It takes a long time. It might take you know hundreds of thousands or even millions of years but the Sun doesn’t get hot that quickly so you have that much time.

Every few thousand years you can swing an Asteroid past the Earth and it would pull the Earth out. We could actually prolong the life of the Earth a long time by doing this. I thought that is AWESOME. That is such a cool idea. I was really thrilled with that.

Pamela: And that helps prolong the life of the Earth in a lot of different ways. One of the things that we’re looking at is as the Sun gets older it’s going to get hotter and it’s going to do bad things to the planet Earth. This is because as the world gets hotter the oceans begin to evaporate which causes the Planet to get hotter which causes the oceans to evaporate more which causes the Planet to get hotter – it’s this horrible cycle.

If you can find a way to move the Earth further and further from the Sun, it’s a way of compensating for the fact that the Sun is getting hotter. It’s always neat to consider turning your Planet into a spaceship and that’s basically what we’re talking about.

Now there are still other ways that you can destroy the planet. Were there any others that just stuck in your mind as just ooh cool?

Dr. Plait: Well my very favorite far and away is Gamma Ray Bursts. I’ve been studying Gamma Ray Bursts for a few years so that was probably one of the most difficult to research. We still don’t know that much about these events, their total energies and how it all works.

Basically in a nutshell you have a Super Massive Star a hundred times the mass of the Sun. The core of that Star runs out of fuel and collapses. It will probably form a Black Hole and this creates a huge Blast Wave which blows the outer layers of the Star off. So you’ve got like octillion tons of gas expanding outward at some fraction of the speed of light. It generates a HUGE amount of energy and that’s a Super Nova, an exploding Star.

But in the core of this thing, the Black Hole is formed from the very innermost part of the Star. There are just all kinds of things going on there. There’s friction and gravitational energy and magnetic energy and there’s just what I like to call a ‘witches brew’ of Forces.

All kinds of things happen but the end result is that you can focus two beams of energy that come out of the top and the bottom of this thing basically, in two different directions like a lighthouse.

But instead of swinging around, they just go straight out from the Black Hole. They might last a few seconds up to a minute or two. That’s how long this event lasts. But the amount of energy in these beams is beyond human comprehension.

Pamela: [Laughter] It’s a wonderful… there’s more light in that few ten to maybe a couple hundred seconds than the Sun gives off in many lifetimes.

Dr. Plait: Yeah, it’s basically all the lifetime energy of the Sun compressed into a few seconds and I like to tell people this, if it’s a sunny day go hold your hand up to the Sun and feel the energy hitting your hand. Now think about the surface of the Earth compared to your hand and how much energy is hitting the Earth. Now remember that the Earth is only one two-billionth of the sphere surrounding the Earth at the Earth’s distance.

In other words, the sunlight hitting the Earth is only one two-billionth of the amount of light the Sun is putting out. The Sun has been doing this for 5 billion years; it will continue to do this for another 5 billion years. Now compress all of that into 10 seconds, alright. That’s a Gamma Ray Burst. The energy is out of control.

We see these things happening billions of light years away and yet some of them are putting out so much energy that if you were looking at the right spot at the right time you would SEE them! You could stand out in your front yard and ask yourself look at that Star, what was that? That was a Gamma Ray Burst 8 billion light years away. It’s just unbelievable.

Pamela: There’s a chance that we’ll have front row seats to one of these – although it’s not going to be pointed directly at us.

Dr. Plait: That’s right, if you actually calculate how close a Gamma Ray has to be to do physical damage to the Earth – and that sort of damage is usually destroying our Ozone layer, creating a radiation shower or a particle shower in our Atmosphere that can kill you through the radiation. It turns out that they have to be roughly seven or eight thousand light years away. Anything farther away than that doesn’t really hurt us.

It turns out there are two Stars that close. One of them is Eta Carinae or Eta Car as some people call it. You’ve seen this picture; it’s a famous Hubble picture. It looks kinda like a dumbbell. This is a Star that nobody is really sure, has something like a hundred times the mass of the Sun. The thing is when it blows up it may be a Gamma Ray Burst. It may not be but it might be.

But we know it’s aimed the wrong way. We can see the geometry of the system and that beam is going to miss us by quite a bit, by thousands of light years. So even if Eta Car blows up, we’re safe from it. It’s going to be a very bright light in the Sky and probably it’s not going to be a big deal.

But there’s another one called WR104 – it’s got this catalog name – that’s at about the same distance. From what we can tell it’s kinda sorta aimed at us. We don’t know exactly. We don’t know if it’s going to be a Gamma Ray Burst. We don’t know when it’s going to blow up. We don’t know if it’s aimed at us.

All of these things together make me think ah, I’m not too concerned about it. But you know it’s interesting. If it blew up it’s just close enough to do minimal damage to our Ozone layer. If this happened at a time when the Ozone hole was already kinda hurting, this could exacerbate the problem.

It’s not going to kill anybody but you could get a slightly worse suntan. That’s kinda funny to think that an object that’s trillions and trillions of miles away, quadrillions of miles away really, could actually physically hurt you. That’s amazing to me.

Pamela: So we definitely live in a Universe that’s trying to kill us and we’re out of time. So, if people want to learn more, what should they do?

Dr. Plait: Well, they can go to my website, www.badastronomy.com . I’ve written quite a bit about this. Of course, they can buy the book “Death from the Skies” …..

I do want to leave you with one thought. While researching this book I came up with everything I could think of to wipe out life on Earth and I have a pretty vivid imagination. I was coming up with some crazy stuff. [Laughter]

And then I would research and find out yeah, you know this could work. But, I’m not running around in panic. I’m not screaming in circles yelling “the Sky is falling”. The thing is the odds of these things happening are really, really low.

The point of this book is to look at the really cool things that are going on in the Universe. Black Holes and Galaxies are colliding and all of that kind of stuff happening. Have a little fun with it; yeah, you might get a LITTLE scared from this stuff, but you don’t have to worry.

There are a lot more important things in life to be concerned about. We should be at least looking at Asteroid impacts. We should be looking at the active Sun, but everything else you won’t have to worry about too much. It’s just kind of fun to read about them and think about what might happen.

Pamela: Your book is a fun read and it’s been a great pleasure talking to you Phil.

Shownotes

Who’s Who:

Real people:

• Phil Plait
• Phil’s Bad Astronomy Blog
• Kevin Grazier
• More on Kevin from the Cassini mission site

Real people discussed

• Larry Niven
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Richard Hatch
• Michael Bay
• Katee Sackhoff
• BAUT Forum

Show Roll:

• Zula Patrol
• About Zula Patrol
• Battlestar Galactica (official site)
• Battlestar Galactica (SciFi Channel)
• Star Trek (official site)
• Virtuality
• Eureka (SciFi Channel)
• Eureka (Wikipedia)
• Firefly
• Dr. Who (BBC site)
• Dr. Who (SciFi Channel)
• Space 1999 – and the Eagle spacecraft
  
• Babylon 5 (SciFi Channel)
• Babylon 5 (Wikipedia)
• Armageddon (movie)
• Phil Plait’s review of Armageddon
• War of the Worlds (original radio broadcast)
• War of the Worlds (original 1953 )movie
• War of the Worlds (2005 movie)
• 2001 (Wikipedia)
  
• 2010 (Wikipedia)

Characters discussed

• Dr. Pulaksi
• Dr. Who
• new Dr. Who
• Donna Noble
• Victor Bergman
• Sheriff Jack Carter
• Spock
• Mr. Data
• Captain Janeway
• Boltar

Real Science Discussed:

• Pulsars
• Star Clusters
• Expansion of the sun
• mass loss rates of the sun
• Mt. Vesuvius
• Dyson Sphere
• Coronal Mass Ejections
• nucleic acids
• Iapetus
• Jupiter turning into a sun? (not going to happen)

Transcript: Science Fiction at Dragon*Con with Plait and Grazier

Download the transcript

Shownotes

Types of meteorites:
• Iron
• Stony
• Stony-Iron
• Chondrites — these rocky meteorites do actually hit the ground frequently, as about 80-90% of meteorites found on Earth are chondrites.  The chances of reaching the ground intact are lower for a chondritic asteroid than an iron-nickel of a small size, but a sufficiently large enough chondrite will easily reach the surface of Earth intact.  And as for bodies without atmospheres, there’s no difference.
• Arizona State University site on meteorites

Parts of a crater:

• Rim
• Floor
• Wall
• Ejecta
• Rays
• Central Uplifts

All About Craters

• All about craters – Hawaii Space Grant Consortium
• Pamela’s Star Stryder post about the crater sessions at the Lunar and Planetary Conference
• Lunar Impact Craters Geology and Structure — Lunar and Planetary Institute
• Craters are not always round –if the angle of impact is ~<5°, then an ellipsoidal crater will form. See examples at the Planetary Blog (Mars), and Enchanted Learning (moon)
• Earth Impact Database website (Search for craters by continent, age, diameter and name)
• Earth Impact Database FAQ’s
• Earth’s 10 Most Impressive Impact Craters — Universe Today
• Recent impact crater in Peru — Peruvian Meteorite May Rewrite Impact Theories — Universe Today
• Lake Titicaca
• Meteorites from Mars – NASA
• Abstract:  Shock Magnetism and Demagnetism
• Impact Theory for the origin of the Moon — Planetary Science Institute
• Chicxulub Crater
• Asteroid Impact Simulator – Universe Today
• Determining the age of a planetary surface using craters — Malin Space Science Systems
• PowerPoint from Lunar and Planetary Institute about Surface Dating using Craters
• Fluvial Processes on Mars — HiRISE
• Dichotomy of Mars’ Hemispheres Possibly Explained by Giant Impact – Universe Today
• Water Ice on the Moon? – NASA
• Water Ice on the Moon? – Universe Today
• Possible Telescopes at Lunar Poles – Universe Today
• Movie of Landing Near a Crater Rim on the Moon — Universe Today

Books:

• Impact Cratering: A Geologic Process by H.J. Melosh
• See a list of more books on impact craters from Amazon

Transcript

Download the Transcript

Astronomy Cast Episode 80:

Craters

Fraser Cain: Welcome to Astronomy Cast our weekly fact-based journey through the

cosmos. Pamela is in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Fraser, it’s been a sad conference without you here with us.

Fraser: There you go but someone’s got to hold the fort down back in Vancouver.

Pamela: Keeping Canada safe.

Fraser: Right, from space. But how’s the conference been going?

Pamela: My brain is full. It’s been an amazing week of all sorts of content. My

background is astrophysics, it’s not geophysics and I have learned more in the

past week than I think I’ve read reading journal articles in the past several

months. It’s just been an amazing experience of well science concentrate.

Fraser: Can you talk the planetary lingo now?

Pamela: No. But I at least know what the people who can speak the lingo are saying

most of the time.

Fraser: So you’re able to translate a little better. That’s good. Now the results of all your

work is being posted to astronomycast.com/live

We have pictures and audio and text and video, interviews, and all kinds of stuff

so if you haven’t already, go to astronomycast.com/live which is where all of

the coverage for this event is.

Pamela: And it’s not just me. We had help from Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary

Society; Rebecca Bemrose-Fetter our producer has been doing a lot of blogging

and photography. We also got a special guest correspondent.

One of my students, Scott Miller, went to see STS-123. He went to see the last

night launch of the shuttle program and we have his Geeks Pilgrimage

documented over on astronomycast.com/live.

Fraser: Awesome. I saw some video of the launch and I really want to see that. Have

to see that launch before it stops launching. Let’s get on with the show.

As you know, Pamela is attending the 39th Lunar and Planetary Sciences

Conference in Houston, Texas. That means the moon and planets. When you

think of the moon, you think of craters.

In fact a big theme this week at the planet is craters. Pamela has taken it as an

inspiration so this week is the week we drive the show into the crater. Pamela,

why don’t you give us the basic explanation of how we get a crater. Although I

think we can kinda guess.

Pamela: Well you start with a rock, although rocks have more words than I ever knew

existed. You can have a rock that is from the moon or Mars or you can an

asteroid and these can have all sorts of different names.

Most typically the ones that end up hitting planets they were calling chondrites.

You get iron meteors that hit planets. When they impact they can come in at all

sorts of different angles. The angle of impacts affects what direction the ejecta

travels. This is the cloud of material that gets thrown out of the ground and

spewed in different directions.

But you always get a round crater. That’s one of the cool things that you can

knock a planet and you can do it from all sorts of crazy angles and the crater is

always going to be a nice happy little perfect circle.

Fraser: Why?

Pamela: It’s just the way the physics works.

Fraser: Right, like the rock just gets consumed when it strikes the ground and it’s

always in a circle?

Pamela: There are a lot of really complicated processes that go into this. There’s

conservation of energy; conservation of momentum. You hit downward and

material gets flung upwards as the energy is being released. It just ends up

leading to this nice happy little perfectly round crater.

You can get craters that end up with multiple rings of material around them. You

end up with craters that have neat layers layered through them with all sorts of

different morphologies depending on where you hit.

In some cases you can actually create an instant lake if you hit someplace on the

planet Earth and the crater happens to break through to the water table. This

actually happened last September. In Peru there is a crater formed about 15

meters across when a fairly good-sized rocky asteroid in this case, which we

didn’t think those could actually reach the ground, which is a bit troubling.

But, a rocky asteroid came crashing through our atmosphere. People saw it

while they were hanging out on the roof of a hotel looking up when the asteroid

turned meteor turned meteorite hit the side of a riverbank. It poked through to

the water table and within minutes this crater turned into a little tiny watering

hole.

3

Fraser: Wasn’t it making people sick?

Pamela: That was actually one of the stories that were in the news. Several different

teams of scientists a few weeks and a few months later went down to study it.

They interviewed the people involved, took pictures, documented everything.

It appears that it was a psychosomatic reaction. There was a lot of fear when

this happened that it was actually a missile from a neighboring country or just

some other country that for whatever reason decided to throw a missile at the

middle of Peru.

This was a fairly remote area near the Bolivia border and somewhat near Lake

Titicaca. There was a lot of fear and paranoia and no it was just a rock.

Fraser: Why don’t you walk me through the steps nice and slow like for as a rock

strikes the ground – space to crater.

Pamela: Okay. The most typical case is you have what starts as an iron asteroid. A

happy little friendly object on an orbit around the sun minding its own business,

but its orbit happens to intersect the orbit the Earth. It can intersect it at all

different angles.

You can end up with an asteroid that hits our atmosphere head on where its path

is going straight from space straight down towards the earth. That’s kind of

rare. Most of the time you’re at some crazy angle.

Just probability says that its’ more likely you’re going to be somewhere

between zero and 90 degrees than at 90 degrees when you hit the atmosphere.

Depending on the angle that it hits the atmosphere it’s going to deal with

differing amounts of slowing down from the atmosphere.

Different frictional effects as it passes through the atmosphere will slow it down,

heat it up, dissipate some of its energy and dissipate some of its mass through

all sorts of different burning up processes. This is what you see when you look

up in the sky and see this really bright streaking object. It is melting,

evaporating, ionizing all these things depending on its composition.

So it’s getting smaller and smaller and so you might start off with something

that is several meters in size that ends up the size of a football by the time it hits

the surface of the earth. Then when it hits all that energy is transferred into the

ground.

You can end up with instantaneous melting. You can end up with shocks, but

the basic result is you end up with this great big splash of materials that shoot

straight up.

4

Fraser: Does the asteroid always hit? Can’t they explode in the air?

Pamela: No. It doesn’t. They can explode in the air, or they can vaporize in the air. The

vast majority of stuff in the air that hits our atmosphere is pebble and dust grain

size. Things like that aren’t going to make it to the surface of the earth. It’s

only the larger objects and how large is required really depends on the angle

that the object impacts on our atmosphere and the difference in velocity

between them.

You can imagine that you have this asteroid that is on an orbit that causes it to

just hit our atmosphere and is going just fast enough that it is mostly gravity

sucking it in. You could also end up with an asteroid that is perhaps going

around the sun in the opposite direction so it could hit the Earth’s atmosphere

with the exact same angle.

Because of the difference in its’ orbital velocity and our orbital velocity where

we have basically a head-on collision, it’s screaming in at tens of kilometers per

second and this huge extra velocity ends up making it a much more dangerous

object.

Fraser: Okay so the rock has transferred its energy to the ground. What happens to the

ground?

Pamela: It depends on how big the object is. There are some really cool models that

have been done at Los Alamos National Lab where they have a super

computing facility. In some of these models, there are simulated scenarios of

large object hits the ocean and the splash of the ocean water is so great that a

column of water goes through our atmosphere.

So we’re actually if we get hit by something large enough and hopefully this

would never happen because the tidal waves would be devastating and as would

many other things. If you hit our oceans just right, you can splash ocean water

into orbit basically. That’s just really cool.

You can do the same thing if you hit land but it would be much more

devastating. This is actually how we end up getting Mars rock hitting the Earth

as meteors and being found as meteorites all over the planet.

At some point in Mars past it was hit by something big and chunks of Mars was

sent into space on orbits that carried them to Earth where they passed through

our atmosphere, survived and landed somewhere on the planet just waiting for

some geophysicist or some farmer to find it.

5

Anyone can find a meteor. They are all over the planet. They are easiest to find

in deserts and in Antarctica. But you could find one in your back yard if you’re

lucky.

Fraser: Now either you’re on a tangent or you’re avoiding my question. I think you’re

on a tangent.

Pamela: It’s also after midnight where I am and also very late where Fraser is.

Okay, so the rock hits the planet and you can get dirt or water thrown into the

air depending on where it hits. The energy as it propagates through the soil can

take a chunk of the soil and actually flip it over.

You can end up with inverted layers stacked up on top the soil, dirt, or glacier

around wherever the impact occurs.

Fraser: You mean like dinosaurs on top, then newer rock, then finally topsoil?

Pamela: That’s exactly what happens, it’s a complete flip. If there is enough energy, it

can liquefy as it hits. Soil is made up of silicates, organic materials, because we

have earthworms here on our planet. Organic materials form just about

everywhere but they don’t always have earthworms and microbes in them.

An organic material is just something that has carbon atoms and molecules. But

you take this stuff and if it has silicate in it that basically melts to glass, which is

cool and you can melt it and get these fascinating structures around it.

There is also all of the material that is in the meteor that has now turned

meteorite and that can shatter on impact and you end up with ejecta fields that

are filled with quartz crystals. You can end up with all these various blobs of

shiny glass strewn all around where the central crater is located.

You also get the pieces of the meteor if it chooses to shatter, which can be

chunks of metals. So you have this ejecta field around a crater rim that includes

inverted materials.

In some cases depending on what you hit, if you’re hitting something that’s rich

in metals, you might actually in the process be able to whack them hard enough

or melt them just right that you end up creating magnetic fields within the

materials that you’ve just knocked really hard

Fraser: All right, I know that if you hit a piece of iron really hard you can give it a

temporary magnetic field, right? Because you are aligning all the little jiggled

up iron atoms so that they’re all pointing in essentially the same way and they

get that magnetic field going. So a large enough rock can do that to dirt and to

iron ore in the ground?

6

Pamela: Exactly. This is actually something that we think has happened in some cases

on the moon. If you look at the lunar craters there are some amazing maps of

the moon’s magnetic fields from the lunar Prospector.

When you look at these maps, there is a little bit more magnetic field in one

place than another and is coincident with the centers of craters where there is

little upwellings of material which sometimes happens for reasons that we’re

still trying to figure out.

It is thought that these magnet fields are either induced through shock, like

hitting it as you would hit a nail with a hammer, which is something anyone can

try. Go get a real metal nail and whack it a few times with a hammer really

hard and you can use it to pick up paper clips.

Either that or perhaps in some really ancient cases there was an intrinsic

magnetic field around and by heating the material, you randomize the atoms in

it if it is material capable of becoming a magnet.

As those heated up atoms cool they align along any magnetic field that happens

to be around. This is why in different parts of the planet Earth we can actually

figure out the history of the Earth’s magnetic field by looking at the way the

magnets are aligned, natural ferromagnetic materials.

With the moon we have these neat little lumps and bumps of magnetic fields

that are coincident with craters. And that’s just cool.

Fraser: Right, you get some lava that pours out of the ground or is created in an asteroid

strike and it is liquid enough that all of its atoms can align while it is cooling in

the magnetic field.

Then the magnetic field is cooled and they are locked in place and maintain a

record of the magnetic field that was there at the time.

Pamela: In some cases if you whack something hard enough with an object that is large

enough you can even do things like create the Earth’s moon.

Our planet once upon a time was hit by another object and we go into this in our

“How the Moon was Created” episode.

Fraser: That’s like a big crater there, mighty big.

Pamela: Actually, it’s more like an ejecta. So the splash of material I told you about can

sometimes make it up through the atmosphere, that would be our moon.

Fraser: A really big collision.

7

Pamela: It’s a really big collision. But in these really big collisions you don’t always get

moons. In fact, it looks like both Mercury and Mars have giant basins. In

Mars’ case one that is about half the planet – the whole hemisphere.

Both Mercury and Mars appear to have been clobbered by something of double

digit percentages of their own size at some point in their past. This had huge

morphological affects on the entire planet.

Fraser: Now what good have craters done for us?

Pamela: Well, they probably got rid of the dinosaurs which some would argue allowed

mammals to evolve on the planet Earth and thus reign supreme and destroy the

planet in new and interesting ways.

At the same time, it’s a way of distributing material around the solar system and

there also a tool that geophysicists can uses to measure the ages of other objects.

For instance on the moon you can look around and there are lava fields on the

moon. The moon actually had a much more liquid core in its past and lava was

able to escape through various different types of dyke features.

There are also all sorts of very neat little underground effects of lava going

underground where we could see it and creating neat geographical formations.

We can date different features on the moon such as the highlands, the mare

based on how many craters there are in different areas. We could also measure

the depth of lava using the craters.

The way this works is you look at an area and count how many craters there are

in different areas and we can also measure the depth of lava using craters. The

way this works is you look at an area and count how many craters of different

sizes there are within that area.

You can make a plot of number of craters versus size of craters and you’ll end

up with a bazillion little tiny craters and very, very few giant craters and you

can fit a pretty much straight line to those relationships.

Now in an area that has a ton of craters, where you end up with the entire line

shifted so that it intersects the Y-axis is really high number. That is a really old

surface, one that has been around for along time getting whacked with rocks

from space.

Fraser: So you just count the number and the size of craters in some region and then you

consult some geophysicists chart somewhere and it tells you how old that region

is. I guess you might have regions that are right at almost the beginning of the

solar system while other places might just be a few million years old.

8

Pamela: They actually define different geological periods based on the crater number.

This gives us the relative age. Trying to get at the actual age of a planet, a

moon, whatever requires you to actually go out, grab a rock and do radioisotope

counting. Look at what different elements have had a chance to decay in that

particular rock.

We can’t do that with Mars yet. But we sent Apollo astronauts to the moon and

they landed in different places. By taking those rocks and looking at the

radioisotopes in them and what has decayed and what is left, we’re able to say

this part of the moon has this age; this part another age; and use that to scale our

understanding, at least with the moon, this crater rate corresponds to this date in

the past. That’s kinda cool.

With Mars, we’re not at a point yet where we can do the radioisotope work and

say we know exactly how old this part of the surface is. Although we have

some fair guesses based on our understanding and on the Rovers we have sent

there so far.

However, with Mars we do the same thing. We age different surfaces and also

age things like stream beds, filuvial systems cut out by liquid we think and they

look like deltas and we’re able to say this section is older or younger than this

other section based on how craters are layered on top of or not layered on top of

based on these filuvial systems.

Fraser: Now we look in the sky and we see the moon just wracked by craters and yet

here on Earth, I think there are meteor crater for well-known crater? Why isn’t

the Earth as hammered as the moon?

Pamela: It rains. We are hammered just as much as the moon. The difference is that as

you look at the surface of the Earth you’re not seeing any rocks that are 3.5

billion years old unless it’s a rock you happen to find and pick up and test and

just happened to survive.

There are a few places on the Earth where we find old rocks but it’s not the

whole surface of the planet. When we look at Mars; when we look at the moon,

we’re looking at surfaces that have rocks on their surfaces that are billions of

years old and they haven’t been eroded by rain or dust and the plate tectonics on

both the moon & Mars are much less.

Mars has the Tharsis Bulge, it has Olympus Mons, it has all these volcanoes that

are problematic. They raised a whole chunk of the surface. To understand

those parts of the surface we have to do all sorts of crazy other stuff. In general

the surface of both of these worlds haven’t been rained on.

Already with the crater that recently formed just last September in Peru, 15-

meter diameter crater is almost gone. It rains, and the rain washes soil in,

9

flattens things back out. Anyone who has ever dug a hole in their back yard

knows the hole is going to fill itself back in rather quickly.

Our planet erodes. It kinda sucks.

Fraser: So you just wonder how many enormous craters are just gone.

Pamela: There is actually thought that things like the Yucatan are crater edges. As we

look more and more at satellite images we’re finding more and more giant

craters from their rims all over the planet.

Fraser: That’s right, there’s like the latest satellite missions are able to measure the

contours of the Earth such precision that they are able to find these enormous

craters just by the tiny little difference in the height of the rim.

It’s been eroding for a hundred million years but there is still just enough of the

rim remaining that they would know there was a crater there, that there was a

huge collision there. Only just now they are able to discover these craters.

Pamela: The other way that we’re finding it is using gravity measurements. This is one

of the coolest things. I learned about this a few years ago. I thought this was

really cool and I don’t geek out too much about gravity.

There is the ability to measure gravity with some instruments so precisely that

you can tell the difference in gravitational acceleration between someone’s foot

and their head using this instrumentation.

It’s possible to go around with gravity detectors and if you know your distance

from the center of the planet, which you can get from GPS systems, and you

measure the acceleration of gravity at that altitude from the center of the planet,

you can roughly figure out the amount of material that has to be between you

and the center to cause that acceleration. Doing this, they go out and find things

like petroleum reserves.

But working in South America, a group of geophysicists actually found a big

impact basin this way because the densities versus shape of the terrain just

didn’t make sense for any other process. Gravity allowed them to find a hidden

crater.

Fraser: They’re using that technique to measure ice loss from glaciers to see how the

ground such as in Canada is bouncing back after the last Ice Age. They can

measure how the ground is moving back up after the Ice Age. It’s pretty

amazing.

Pamela: It was actually using these gravity measurements that we’ve recently been able

to figure out that the reason that you get this weird dichotomy between the

10

northern and southern hemispheres of Mars is because Mars got whacked by a

really big object. We didn’t know about what had happened for a long time

because of the volcanic system that spews volcanic material all over the

boundary between the highlands and the lowlands. We had to figure out how

does that boundary move beneath the lava flows.

A group of geophysicists combined topographical maps that show the altitude

of the terrain with gravity maps that were extremely precise. They were able to

determine that if we assume that the crust of Mars has this density and the lava

flows have this density, what do the boundaries between these have to look like

in order to get the gravity we observe and the altitude of the land that we

observe.

When they did this, they could basically peel off all the volcanoes and see what

the crust looked like beneath them. They were able to find that the boundary

between the highlands and the lowlands is basically a perfect ellipse around

Mars. You pretty much can only get that shape if you whack Mars and you

make an impact basin.

There are ways that you can work really hard with other models and twist

parameters and other things and jump through lots of hoops and ignore

Ockham’s razor and get this to happen other ways. But the easiest way to

explain those results is to say that Mars got whacked with something over 2,000

kilometers in diameter and didn’t end up producing a moon in the process but

instead created this dichotomy between the highlands and lowlands.

Fraser: Wow, so a couple more things. One was just to talk a bit about how the gravity

and structure of what gets hit changes the nature of the crater itself.

Pamela: It’s not just the gravity, it’s also the surface that’s getting hit. So if you impact

on top of a bunch of ices and say you dig up the soil beneath the ices and spread

them out on the top of the ice.

Then you can get these really neat plateau craters where over time the ice

around the crater in this ejecta blanket might vaporize or sublimate away and as

this ice goes straight to gas where the soil has been dug up and plopped down

onto the ice it can’t do that. You end up with that layer of ice basically

protected by the ejecta that’s on top of it and everything else around it gets

lower and lower and vaporizes into the atmosphere.

You also have depending on the gravity the amount of stuff that gets flown up is

going to differ. If you hit a really big heavy object with a rock, the gravity of

that object is going to hold on to the material and make it not fly out quite so

much.

11

But if you hit something much smaller you launch rocks from Mars to Earth.

So the height of the crater walls is going to be a function of the density of the

material you’re hitting and the gravity of whatever it is that you’re hitting. It all

plays together.

Fraser: I know we mentioned when we were doing our tour through the solar system

some of the bizarre crater formations in some of Saturn’s moons.

Pamela: The death star.

Fraser: Yeah, where it almost looks like it’s hitting a real spongy material and the

material is just collapsing. I think there’s one last really good use for craters

that we haven’t talked about which is when the astronauts return back to the

moon one of the things that they will be looking at is the craters at the southern

pole of the moon which are in some cases eternally in sunlight and in other

cases eternally in shadow and may even hold water ice.

Pamela: One of the things that is amazing that I just learned this week is the difference in

altitude between the base and the rim of some of these craters is like four

kilometers. That’s about two miles.

We talk about Denver, the mile high city. Imagine standing on the edge of

something twice the altitude or more of Denver looking down. There is an

amazing movie they showed us of a little tiny sad little lander craft coming in

and just perching on the very edge of one of these craters.

Fraser: Nancy, one of the writers did a story about that on Universe Today. We’ve got

the video on the site. It’s kind of scary.

Pamela: The reason that we’re looking to do this is when you land at the equator of the

moon, in daylight you’re several hundred degrees. When in darkness, you’re at

minus a couple hundred degrees. Pick Fahrenheit or Celsius it really doesn’t

matter it’s really huge swings in temperature either way you go.

Once you get down into one of the craters in constant darkness the temperatures

stay constant. One of the things about electronics is they don’t really like to

have their temperature messed with. We can engineer things that work at a

couple hundred degrees and we can engineer things that work at a negative

couple hundred degrees. It’s hard to engineer things that can survive huge

temperature swings.

If we go to one of the poles of the moon you can stick your habitats down in the

shaded part and just keep people warm and stick your solar panels straight up

and they will be in constant daylight. So you have constant power and thermal

regulation. It’s just a lot easier to function that way.

12

Fraser: You could have the sunlight just a few tens of meters away from your habitat

and still be safe.

Pamela: One of the ways they phrased it was you can be down in a constant darkness

area and just raise your hand and the simple act of raising your hand that is

above your head, your hand will be in perpetual sunlight.

Fraser: I can’t wait until that exploration starts happening.

Pamela: Just a few more years.

Fraser: Just a few more years. The missions are going to be launching just within the

next year and it seems like it will start steamrolling from there.

Pamela: We have LCROSS and LRO are launching on the same rocket in I think

October of this year. LCROSS is this really cool mission that they’re going to

basically plow objects into the surface of the moon making artificial craters,

making our own space craft into meteorites and see what dust gets chewed up

into the air. It’s going to be neat work.

Fraser: All right, well I think we’ll be covering that as we go for a much, much future

show.

Pamela: It was a great experience and next year you need to come with us Fraser.

Fraser: Will do.

---

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity.
Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard

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Transcript:

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Fraser: Just a couple of shows ago we showed you how to get a career in Astronomy. Now you have your career as a research astronomer. Obviously, the next goal is win a Nobel Prize. We’re here at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Austin, which is just one tiny step a person has to take to win that Nobel Prize.

Pamela: And there are a few Nobel Prize winners floating around this meeting.

Fraser: So it’s not impossible.
 
Before you get that phone call in the middle of the night from Sweden you will need to come up with an idea, do some experiments, write a paper, get published, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m probably over-simplifying it Pamela.

Pamela: Oh, way over-simplifying it.

Fraser: Obviously not everyone is going to win a Nobel Prize, but why don’t we start somewhere and talk about how people can go from zero to getting their research done.

Pamela: Well, in general you have to start with an idea. You have to start with a question, a “what if� and work on trying to solve that “what if.� Nobel Prizes have gone to people who said, “what if you look at the Universe in the radio; what if you explore what is coming through galaxies by simply tuning your telescope to look at radio light instead of looking at optical light?�
 
There are all sorts of different people who have simply said “well what if� and then there’s the hard part; it’s easy to come up with the “what if�.
 
You then spend years following that “what if� with careful theoretical work with careful building of instrumentation, with carefully looking at your noise to see what is it in the noise that no one else has ever discovered.
 
The cosmic microwave background came from a group of scientists working to study the microwave emission of our galaxy and instead coming up with the microwave emission of the universe.

Fraser: I read that one of the ways that some of the greatest research happens is that it starts out with someone looking and going, “huh, that’s funny.�

Pamela: And most of us go huh that’s funny and we blame our instruments and move on. The truly great people won’t let things go. They just keep delving in and exploring deeper until they’re able to say, “well I’ve ruled out everything. This is something new. This is something exciting.� Then they followed up with figuring out what it is, and it’s a collaborative process with different people shaking ideas out on other people who can then go, “no that’s crazy but what if�…and you follow all the “what ifs� until you find the truth.

Fraser: Okay. Let’s start at the beginning then. Let’s say you have an idea or you look at your data and think, “huh, that’s funny.� What’s the next step?

Pamela: Math.

Fraser: Okay.

Pamela: The first step is you go through and do a statistical analysis. You see if you can repeat it. You have to be able to repeat something. If it happened only once never to be repeated again, it probably wasn’t real.

Fraser: Right, I guess what I’m saying is how will you get access to telescopes? How will you get access to the equipment you need to even follow your crazy ideas?

Pamela: Let’s say you’re not trying to figure out what the noise in your data is but rather you come up with this idea of “I think foo is true about galaxies� and you want to figure out how to prove to the rest of the entire scientific community that is true. Well the first step is you do a literature search and make sure no one else has ever studied foo.

Fraser: So where would you do a literature search?

Pamela: There are two places to go. There is the NASA ADS website which is pretty much a collection of all the published journals. Some of them unfortunately, you have to pay huge subscription fees to get access to the most recent articles. But there is hope.
 
There is another site XXX.lanl.gov It’s ArchiveX, it sounds like a porn site but it’s run out of Lawrence Livermore National Labs and it’s where pretty much everyone goes to dump a copy of their latest research. Often people dump a copy before it has even gone through peer review to get feedback from the community – what questions do people have and what ways can you make your paper better before you take it to publication?

Fraser: Right. These all have search engines you can put in key words, you can put in search of the text. It’s all available, you can read their research and make sure that whatever your idea is, nobody else has, or you find what everyone else thinks on the subject and you can decide whether your thinking is absolutely brand new or just a variation of what somebody else thought about.
 
I guess when you see what other people thought about it helps you search and refine your thinking and you come up with new ideas.

Pamela: Then you need some sort of an infrastructure to put your idea in. “I think Galaxies might have foo becauseâ€?… And then you go through and demonstrate what is the evidence that this could be out there waiting to be found. What are the breadcrumbs that are leading you to discover this new foo about galaxies?
 
Once you’ve put these breadcrumbs together and found the path through the woods, then you write telescope proposals. You write grant proposals. You try to get the time and the money that will allow you to study this effect. This is it’s own peer-review process.
 
You send out a proposal for telescope time and you’ll either get telescope time or you’ll get feedback that says, “well we didn’t give you time because we are concerned about the following things. Follow up on this. Tell us more; convince us better�.

Fraser: You have to sell to the telescope managers that your idea is worth exploring.

Pamela: It’s actually a committee of hopefully your peers or the people you hope to be peers with in the future. It’s a select group of scientists who sit down and it’s not always the same group of people every time. They go through all the proposals and sometimes hundreds of proposals looking for forest nights of telescope time to be available to them.
 
These people go through and use their wisdom and ability to use the scientific method to examine your argument. Think of them as the jury in a court case and you are the lawyer making your opening statement. You have to sell your idea and only once you’ve convinced them that your idea is worth pursuing do you get the ability to pursue it.

Fraser: But as you’ve said, there are other avenues you can go to. There are networks of amateurs and there are other ways. You make the same pitch to multiple missions to multiple telescopes.

Pamela: One of the best ways to do it is first you go to some easily accessed ground-based telescope and get some preliminary observations. With the preliminary observations you say either we have a hint of this being possible or we can’t eliminate this as being possible because the observations aren’t good enough using this telescope so clearly we need a bigger and better telescope.

 
They want you to first use the cheap, easily available resources before you can get the Hubble Space Telescope time – the very large telescope time. It’s a matter of did you do your homework or not. It’s big resources and there are not a lot of resources out there to share.

Fraser: So you have written your proposal, your peers have come back and said this sounds like it’s worth pursuing so they’ll schedule you time on the equipment?

Pamela: You get time on the equipment; they then often just ship the data to you. A lot of the telescopes now are what they call Q-based. You say, “these are the conditions that need to be met for my observations to be taken,� and a night assistant automatically gets your data and ships it to you either over the internet or perhaps on a DVD.

Fraser: So you don’t have to go to the telescope?

Pamela: No, not at all.

Fraser: You don’t have to head out to space to look through the Hubble?

Pamela: No, definitely not that one.

Fraser: But in many cases, the proposal is approved and you’re in. At the time that they promised your data will come to you and you can start crunching it.

Pamela: It’s all beautiful magic. Once you get your telescope data that is just the start. It can take months to get your data reduced to a point where you have numbers you believe are actually true.
 
You get your data, you reduce it, you play with it, try this, try that and a couple of months down the line you have something where you can make graphs and plots.
 
From your graphs and plots you have to try to figure out what does my graph and my plot mean? In some cases you can get completely new science just by graphing two variables no one every thought to graph before.

Fraser: But in many cases you have an idea of what you should be expecting with your galaxy theory and you are now looking through the data and checking to see if your theory matches reality.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: And as you are saying, there could very well be any number of interesting things that poke up in the data that are completely separate from what you’re working on and that probably must just work into brand new proposals to look for more information.

Pamela: Every new question you answer ends up creating ten, fifteen, twenty, a thousand more questions, more ideas, more things you just need another ten nights of telescope time to explore.

Fraser: But even if you get a no result, that’s still useful because that just means that your theory is wrong and that’s okay.

Pamela: Or sometimes you just simply haven’t come up with a better way to do something.
 
One of the more frustrating aspects of my doctoral dissertation is that I successfully proved that that if you look at one radio source you have roughly 23% probability of finding a cluster of galaxies around that. We already knew that. But if you look at a grouping of six radio sources, you have a 27% a whole 4% better chance of finding a galaxy cluster. It wasn’t really easy.

Fraser: Intriguing.

Pamela: It wasn’t really useful though because it takes a lot of time to find the clustering and prove that it is real. It was a very sad result, but is was a true result and it was worth sharing to prevent anyone else from following this bad avenue of exploration.

Fraser: All right, so let’s say that you got your data, you’ve crunched your numbers and you believe you now have a result.

Pamela: Then you publish. Often the first step is coming to a meeting like this one, the American Astronomical Society meeting and putting a poster presentation together.
 
This is where you have a 48-inch x 48-inch sheet of paper to convince everyone of the vague outline of your idea. Show your graphs. Give captions. Give a few hundred, maybe a thousand words of text in big enough letters that someone slinking past with their coffee trying not to attract any attention will be able to read as they slink past.

Fraser: I can’t overstate that it really looks like a kid’s science fair with posters around. It really seems like you would expect it was a lot fancier but it is like a big piece of paper with a bunch of pretty pictures on it and some graphs and a person standing beside it trying to get people to come take a look at it.

Pamela: It’s just amazing the diversity of people. My very first time I presented was at AAS in San Antonio, TX and the person hanging the poster next to me was Erica Bonvetnse (?) who had written the textbook I was using that semester and was another variable star astronomer and many, many other things. She’s just awesome.
 
I totally fan-girled over this woman older than my grandmother – that’s probably not true. But I made her sign her book and then she just stood there dutifully next to her poster just like I, the little meek undergrad did.
 
So you see everyone from high schools students in some rare cases to the most senior faculty standing quietly next to their poster waiting for someone to come by and actually care.

Fraser: So you have to do your time with your poster.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: All right. That’s only one part of the conference. The other parts are the meetings.

Pamela: There are meetings and oral presentations, but posters are the primary way to convey information. There are also 5-minute oral presentations.

Fraser: Posters are the primary. It blows me away that standing beside a poster is the way that you communicate your research and your ideas to other astronomers.

Pamela: Well what’s great about is if your options are give a 5 minute oral presentation or present a poster, with your 5 minute oral presentation you have no time to say anything – that’s 3 overhead slides; 3 powerpoint slides.
 
At your poster, you can stand there and you can have a dialogue with your peers. You can find out who has data on this source that is sitting in a drawer unprocessed because they took it for some project they decided not to do. You can interact, you can get great ideas.
 
That is what’s important about doing these poster and oral presentations is dialoguing with other people. Finding out what don’t you know that is hidden in somebody else’s head or drawer or some journal article that you just missed because it is easy to miss one or two. There are thousands and thousands out there.
 
You go through this process of dialogue. Science is a collaborative effort. Very few people work in any sort of isolation and we generally refer to the people who work in isolation as cranks because science is dialogue. Each person’s idea is growing on everyone else’s ideas.
 
Once you’ve gone through these presentations, then you’re ready to sit down and spew out your five to ten page journal article that you then submit to a journal for final publication.

Fraser: So once you’ve gotten all the feedback from your poster presentation, you’ve sat in a bunch of meetings, you’ve had a chance to collaborate with some of your peers, you then go back to your quiet office space and write up your findings.

Pamela: Yes. You write up your findings.

Fraser: Now that you have a journal article what do you do with it?

Pamela: You hope that somebody reads it. This is where if you write a really good paper and it catches someone’s attention, if you have a really remarkable finding you might actually write a press release for it or go to your University Press Officer and get them to write a press release for it. If you’re lucky, people will read your paper and most papers really get read like ten times.

Fraser: Where will they read your paper?

Pamela: In the journals that come out.

Fraser: So your paper isn’t guaranteed to go in a journal.

Pamela: No, you take your paper and submit it. The step that we all painfully try and forget is when you get your referee’s report back.
 
So, you submit your paper to the journal. The journal then finds someone who’s not one of your direct collaborators and is quite often your direct competitor, sends your paper to them and asks them should we publish this? They will generally say, “yes, but make all of the following corrections.� Often you have to go through three rounds before you actually you get the yes.
 
The first round will be: this is worth publication but needs serious revision. You then revise. It then comes back and says: much better and if you’re really lucky that’s when they say yes fix these four sentences that you wrote stupidly.
 
Occasionally you have to go to a third before they finally say yes, this is worth publishing. Often referees are extremely useful since they are coming at it from outside of the problem they are able to say, I think I know where you’re going with this idea but I shouldn’t have to guess. Flesh this out so that anyone reading this knows what you’re thinking.
 
Sometimes they write just the most amazingly vague things like expand on paragraph six. And I think, what about paragraph six do I need to expand upon? You’re just wondering, how dumb can this person be?

Fraser: Of course, any of the people who would have worked on any of Pamela’s papers in the past they were wonderful.

Pamela: Right and the grant process is the exact same way. So you get back these referee reports, make all the changes, eventually get your paper accepted and then it often comes out several months later.

Fraser: And that’s the peer review process, right? You’re submitting your paper to your peers – in many cases your enemies – and they’re trying everything they can do to find a hole in what you’ve thought of. Trying to make sure the words you’re using are as clear as possible before the journal is willing to publish it.
 
So you run that gauntlet, you do the final edit; no one else can nitpick any other problem with your journal article; it gets published into a journal. What are the journals?

Pamela: The primary ones in astronomy are the Astronomy Journal, the Astrophysical Journal, the publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Nature and Science and Astronomy and Astrophysics. Nature and Science are big only because they have the biggest press engines.
 
A lot of really great science comes out in the Astrophysical Journal that is totally worth being in Nature and Science but the authors just don’t feel like jumping through that hoop. Nature and Science are hard to work with.

Fraser: They want to make it all pretty slick with pictures.

Pamela: With the Astrophysical Journal, you know it’s going through peer review, it’s going out to your peers which doesn’t necessarily happen with Nature and Science. You get your journal article in Astrophysical Journal or one of the other journals and now you hope somebody reads it.
 
If you’re lucky and people read your work, that’s when you start getting invited to give university talks. You are invited to give talks at conferences like this one and at other conferences out there and your idea starts to build and is shared and starts to become a foundation of what we do.

Fraser: So what will happen is future researchers will be referencing your work in their work. Citations, is that right?

Pamela: Citations are sort of the thing that we all want the most. It’s one thing to publish ten journal articles a year, but if no one ever cites them or no one ever reads them, what good are they?
 
Given the choice of inviting a speaker who’s written three papers that each have a thousand references and that happens very, very rarely, but it occasionally happens, or someone who’s written a hundred papers that have never been cited by anyone other than the author, go with the person with a thousand citations. They clearly did something that somebody (and in this case a lot of somebodies), care about and need to know.

Fraser: Right and so it’s almost like the citations are the votes from other researchers that the work that you’ve been doing is of value and is a high contribution to the field.

Pamela: It’s just like how many links does the Podcast website have; how many links does the blog have pointing at it.

Fraser: It’s almost like the same model that Google works on that the more links to a website the more popular Google has decided that website is so the more likely it is to show up in future searches.

Pamela: The way it actually ends up happening in some cases is someone finds a cool effect and that cool effect ends up taking on the names of the authors. So you have the Butcher-Oemler effect in galaxy evolution. You have the Geller Hook diagram. These are all people and those are the names on the journal article that brought forward this new idea that now bears that idea’s name.

Fraser: You get to have your name just run along with it for the rest of the time that it gets used.

Pamela: Forever.

Fraser: That’s the way to go.

Pamela: Yes. So now anyone who is out there doing large-scale structuring Geller Hook…is still there. For a long time galaxy formation was the Agen Linden Bell model. I hope I got those names correct otherwise I’m going to be laughed at later. But Searles Zin model – there’s all these different it’s just the names of the people on the article and that’s what you remember and those names go on to sum up all the ideas in those journal articles, those key papers to our fields.

Fraser: If you want to be a working astronomer, how often should you be publishing?

Pamela: It depends on what you do. There are people out there who are amazingly prolific and put out one paper a month or more in some cases. All because you’re chewing out a whole lot of papers doesn’t mean you’re doing excellent science.

Fraser: No, but in some cases I guess – like Mike Brown at CalTech who is the person who found the tenth planet. I guess he’s got the right technique, the right team…

Pamela: And he’s just chewing out discoveries.

Fraser: Exactly. Oh, new planet, new large Kuiper Belt object and just keeps them coming out. In those cases I think you don’t really no need to slow down or stop. But if you’re going to come up with something really deep in foundation you might as well take your time and get the citation.

Pamela: It depends on what field you’re in. If you’re a theorist, you might spend a year or two carefully delving through the mathematics and get one publication out of it and you worked very hard the entire time.
 
In other cases you might be someone who is studying things that it takes two years worth of observations and then all of the analysis that goes in the observations.

Fraser: Think of the people on the Gravity Probe B mission where it will take two years or three years for that to finally gather all of the data to be able to decide and in the end it will be just one sentence like: Yes, Einstein was right again.

Pamela: The number of publications that makes sense for you is really going to depend on what type of science you’re doing. There are people like Michael Brown who just chew out papers at a phenomenal rate and then there are other people that two papers a year and they are highly respected scientists. You just have to put all the different pieces together.

Fraser: That’s kind of good for the regular folk but now the people who really want to win the Nobel Prize, are there any other further steps you can take or is it you’ve already done your bit?

Pamela: You’ve either got it or you don’t.

Fraser: So you either thought of something foundational that’s going to change everything or keep working.

Pamela: One of the key aspects that I’ve seen in all the Nobel Prize winners that I’ve interacted with is these are the people that when you walk through the University halls at 8 p.m. are at their desk. When you walk through the hallways at 6 a.m., they’re at their desk.
 
They go home for 6 hours maybe and they’re constantly dedicated, they run a tight ship in terms of keeping their grad students on track and keeping their undergrads on track. Everyone works hard, dots all their I’s, crosses all their T’s, pays attention and is thorough.

Fraser: There is a level of almost organization and hard work and focus and dedication that goes above and beyond the regular researching that happens.

Pamela: These are the type of people that in a few cases after they get the Nobel Prize, they decide to go and play in another field and within a matter of months they’ll be at the top of that field too. There’s just a level of both genius and dedication that qualifies someone to be capable of getting a Nobel Prize.

Fraser: In many cases I know the Nobel Prizes aren’t awarded until in some cases ten or twenty years. It’s almost like you have to wait until the research is totally incontrovertible, that everyone assumes it is completely true and they use it repeatedly.

Pamela: It becomes part of the canon.

Fraser: It’s not like you’re going think this year we came up with a wonderful discovery and later this year we’re going to get a call from Sweden. It’s this year we’ll come up with a wonderful discovery and then over the next ten years it’s proven and re-proven and everyone really thinks it is right.
 
Ten years after that if things have really settled down then you’ll get your call. You can almost, from what I’ve heard from people who’ve got it, you can start to feel that you’re in that zone; you’re starting to have a chance to win one of the prizes. I thought this could be easy, but I guess it’s not.

Pamela: No, it’s not.

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity.
Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard

Shownotes

Non-Profit Groups

• American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
• Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP)
• Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

Graduate School

• The 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey
• Annual Reports of Astronomical Observatories and Departments – from the AAS
• Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics & Computing – offers online Master’s program

Careers in Astronomy

• American Astronomical Society Job Register – “The Key to Astronomy Employment”
• FAQ’s on Careers in Astronomy
• Links for women (and everyone else) in science
• Women in Astronomy: An Introductory Resource Guide – from the ASP

 

Transcript: Building a Career in Astronomy

Download the transcript

Fraser Cain: With all the enthusiasm that’s being generated with astronomy, it’s had a bit of a strange side-effect. We’ve been causing some of our listeners to have midlife crises about their careers. We’ve had other people who just want advice – they’re moving into college for the first time and they want to direct the courses they’re going to be taking into astronomy. Some other people already have skills that are very useful and have wondered how they can help up or even change their career to be working in the field. We thought we’d try and answer everyone’s questions all at once and just run through the major career paths you can take that relate to astronomy and space, and what kinds of things you’ll need to do to actually make yourself a good candidate for that field.
 
What I thought we’d do actually, is start with a biography Pamela – we’ll do mine afterward.
 
How did you go from a straight-A high school student to a professor, a researching astronomer with a doctorate in there somewhere… what was the process?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I have to admit – I wasn’t a straight-A high school student. There was this class called German that really almost killed me.

Fraser: Oh, okay. All right.

Pamela: Don’t ever ask me to speak German, it’s just an act of personal humiliation – and there were a lot of B’s thrown in there.

Fraser: Okay, okay, fine. I didn’t actually find out what your grades were, I just guessed.
 
[laughter]
 
You could’ve just gone along with it, but okay – go on.

Pamela: That’s one of the things, a lot of people assume, “I’m not a straight-A student, I couldn’t possibly be an astronomer because don’t you have to be really smart?�
 
Well, yeah, you have to e really smart, but grades aren’t the only diagnostic of are you a smart person or not. Sometimes grades are more of a reflection of, “I was a high school student: there were times I didn’t care about trigonometry.�
 
What you do need is good grades in science and math, and an ability to communicate. You don’t have to know how to analyse Shakespeare and poetry (although a lot of scientists can do that), but you do need to know how to communicate effectively so you can say, “I came up with this great discovery, let me tell you about it!� and other people will understand what you’re saying.
 
But that’s neither here nor there.
 
To get from nerdy high school student (which I will admit to being – if there was a science club, I was there. If there was a band thing, I was there). To get from that to PhD astronomer took 4 years of college and 4 semesters of calculus.
 
I went to Michigan State University as an undergrad. I took physics classes – every single class that was possible to take, I took. To be a good astronomer, you have to understand all the physics as well as the astronomy. I also took a large number of math and computer science classes. Many astronomers actually end up also getting a degree in mathematics as an undergrad, because there’s so much math involved in doing physics and astronomy.
 
Now, if you’re sitting there going, “oh my god, I hate math, I could never do that� that’s okay – I’m sitting right there with you. Instead you can learn how to do computer programming. There is so much stuff out there that requires database programming right now. If, instead of becoming an amazing calculus/linear algebra/abstract algebra super-guru, you go out and become an expert database programmer, an expert large number statistics and mathematical modelling programmer, those are other skills that are extremely useful in becoming an astronomer.

Fraser: Right, but I don’t think that we can really protect people from the math.

Pamela: No – you have to take four semesters of calculus.

Fraser: Yeah, I mean a lot of what you do as an astronomer is crunch numbers – you look at the math, you make calculations, you’re trying to make predictions and that all just comes from math – your gravity, you’re calculating light. It’s just math, math, math. Not to mention the really hard stuff, like what the cosmologists and the theoretical physicists are working on. That’s a whole other level. Even just regular, day-to-day being an astronomer does involve a lot more math than any other career.

Pamela: So you have to survive in math. You have to understand the math, but you can tune what area of astronomy you go into to decide either, “I love/adore mathematics, I’m going to become a cosmologist who does theoretical models of the universe,� or you can decide, “I’m going to go off and do research on quasars and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey looking for statistical trends,� where you need to understand the statistics, but the majority of your day-to-day work is computer programming.

Fraser: So does the undergrad degree really matter?

Pamela: The undergrad degree matters in terms of that’s the first step to getting into graduate school.

Fraser: Would you say a math degree, a chemistry degree, a physics degree, a computer science degree, all those would be appropriate?

Pamela: I’ve met people in graduate school who have degrees in mathematics, physics and astrophysics primarily. There are other people who have other degrees. There was a woman who went to graduate school with me, Marsha Wolfe, she had a degree in electrical engineering, and she could make telescopes do things that most of the technicians couldn’t. she did fabulous work on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope as a graduate student because she had this background in electrical engineering.
 
So there are always exceptions to the rules, but in general the straight paths that are most often taken are to get an undergraduate degree in astronomy, physics or mathematics.

Fraser: Okay, so that’s four years – what’s next?

Pamela: Next is graduate school. While you’re doing that undergrad work, you need to look for research opportunities. There are summer programs – the National Science Foundation funds what are called REUs. This is where you get research experience as an undergrad by going off to some university other than the one you’re attending, or going off to some centre like Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and you spend your entire summer doing research.

Fraser: This is probably where our previous podcast on how amateurs can contribute dovetails into this. If you’ve already been an amateur and have already made some of those connections, you can probably then draw on them and contact some of the researchers and say, “I’m working on my graduate degree now, are there any opportunities to do research work with what you’re doing?� If you’ve done things really well, you’ve probably had a lot of doors open for you.

Pamela: One of the neat doors is occasionally you’ll get amateur astronomers who have an undergraduate degree that they got 10-15 years ago in electrical engineering, computer science – some technical field – and they’ve been working in that field since they graduated, but they’re off doing amateur astronomy. They’re off working with researchers or doing day-to-day observational data reduction – all the normal grunt work that gets given to grad students.
 
They go, and they fill in the things they didn’t get that you need to get into graduate school – a few classes in astronomy, a few classes in calculus… then they apply for graduate school right off the bat as a mid-life career change, going to grad school in their 40’s and 50’s, jumping headlong into their research… but they’re ready because of the stuff they’ve been doing as amateurs.
 
This is a very rare case, but I can think of three different people who’ve made that mid-life change of career.

Fraser: I think some of the people who’ve emailed us have sounded like they’re in that class: people who’ve been engineers or computer scientists for the last ten years, and have always wanted to get involved in astronomy.
 
How many years, then, of graduate school? Is there a master’s degree first?

Pamela: It’s typically a two-year master’s degree. You often do your master’s and your PhD at the same institution and often in the same area of research.

Fraser: So where did you do your master’s degree?

Pamela: I went to the university of Texas. I’m actually kind of an oddball: I did my master’s degree on variable star astronomy and then I did my PhD on observational cosmology – I did the evolution of galaxies in clusters.
 
You can break things apart. The more general ay to do it is to pick a topic and stick with it. You stick with it for sometimes upwards of six, seven, eight different years.
 
Theorists: people who focus on the math and doing the computer modelling of how the universe behaves, they often escape a little bit faster because they’re not waiting to get their data. People who actually build instruments, it’ll take them a little bit longer. You might see a theorist escape from starting graduate school to finishing their PHD in five years (that’s with both the master’s degree and the PhD), whereas someone who builds an instrument will still get the master’s degree at the end of two years, but it might be eight years down the line from starting graduate school to getting the PhD before they finally have that sheepskin they can walk away with.

Fraser: How many total years did you do in grad school?

Pamela: Six and a half years.

Fraser: You did six and a half years of graduate school, and four years of undergraduate school.

Pamela: Ten and a half years of my life.

Fraser: That’s ten and a half years of school.

Pamela: Yep.

Fraser: It’s not like you did it part time – you were pretty solid for most of the at time, right?

Pamela: I never went off to Europe for a summer. The summer between freshman and sophomore year of undergrad I spent working at MIT. The summers after that I spent doing astronomy research. Graduate school was non-stop the entire time. Yeah I went through… I don’t always recommend this. I think everyone needs to go somewhere for a summer and just… be 20.

Fraser: Yeah.

Pamela: But yeah, I went straight through.

Fraser: Okay, and then things didn’t really get started then… so you’re ten and a half years of school in, then what?

Pamela: The normal route after that is to go off and do a post-doc. You spend anywhere from six months to three years at another university learning how to run your own research program.
 
When you’re in graduate school, you’re working on your own research project, but you have your dissertation advisor and often an entire dissertation committee to herd you – to say, “you might want to look at these journal articles,� or, “you might want to register for this conference, let’s work on writing this paper together.� You’re answering questions where you’re the only one working to find the answer, but there’s people guiding how you do that.

Fraser: So where did you do your post-doc work?

Pamela: This is where, again, I was an oddball. I’ve always wanted to do public outreach, so for me the path wasn’t a straight one. I actually jumped from getting my PhD to working as an editor at Astronomy Magazine for one year. Then I went to Harvard and worked as instructional staff for three years.
 
The other route you can do if you don’t do the post-doc route is you can go and take a visiting professor position and work as an instructor for a certain period of time. You spend a few years getting teaching experience. That was more the direction I was leaning in.
 
After spending a year doing something totally different with my brain, I went and worked at Harvard where I was an instructional laboratory associate. While I was there, I got to do some teaching and learn how to develop good labs, work with the telescope there. From there I came to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where I’m on the faculty.

Fraser: All right. You’re really just getting started.

Pamela: I’m a baby astronomer.

Fraser: Yeah, being on the faculty… what will the future hold, theoretically for your position? You’ve only essentially been a professor for a couple of years now.

Pamela: Right now I’m what’s called an adjunct professor.
 
There’s lots of different positions. We usually talk about them as soft-money positions and hard-money positions. people can spend their entire life in either one of these categories.
 
Soft-money positions, which is kind of what I have right now, means some of your salary comes from grant money, from contracts with NASA or other agencies to do specific work. It basically means you’re constantly writing grants and begging for money (Hi! Donate to Astronomy Cast!). You’re doing things you choose to do.
 
I also teach in this adjunct position, which means I look for whatever classes are open – those are the ones I get to teach.
 
Hard-money positions are sort of holy grail. These are positions funded by the university that if you don’t have grant money you may not get promoted, but you’re there to stay. Often you start off in a tenure-track position (this is what I’m hoping to find sometime in the future).
 
A tenure-track position means you’re on a probationary period (often for six years). During that probationary period, you demonstrate you’re capable of supervising graduate students, that you’re capable of bringing in grant money, and that you’re a teacher that knows how to teach to the population of students at your particular university.
 
Every university’s students have their own particular needs and personality that you have to know how to interact with. Someone who’s an excellent professor at Princeton may not be an excellent professor at a liberal arts university. You have to find the right voice for your audience.
 
So you spend anywhere from three to six years in this probationary tenure-track position and then you either lose your job or you go on and you end up becoming the tenured professor. Tenured professors really can’t be fired unless they totally screw up. The reason for this system is to allow you the academic freedom to follow questions that may not have an easily found answer where you might spend three years following the rabbit down the rabbit hole only to discover that the rabbit really didn’t exist.
 
Once you have tenure, you have the freedom to ask the questions that are risky questions.

Fraser: Let me see if I can do the math here: four years of undergrad, five-ish years of graduate school, a few years of post-doc and then if you get in with a university you’re looking at six years of tenure-track and then you might end up as a tenured professor at a university.

Pamela: Yes.

Fraser: Wow.

Pamela: So you’re often in your late-30’s

Fraser: Or early 40’s.

Pamela: Yeah, before you’re finally done. There’s lots of people who will do two, three, four post-docs. It’s quite common right now for people to do two post-docs and then start looking for the tenure-track position.
 
In my particular case, I did one year at Astronomy Magazine (to do something totally different) and then worked at Harvard for three years. Now I’m in the adjunct professor position. I’m not going to move unless I find a tenure-track position to look for.

Fraser: Right.

Pamela: I have my soft-money. I have students I love working with, and I just have to see what the future holds and hope the grant money and (Hi! Donate to Astronomy Cast!) that our audience is friendly to us.

Fraser: Right. Let’s say you took a different course – that’s the traditional, academia, on your way to being a tenured professor track. You come out with your post-doc and let’s say you’re purely into the research – where does that course take you?

Pamela: That’s another perfectly normal path for people to take. You come out, you do your post-doc for say three years, and then you start looking at the national observatories and at research centres to see what positions they have. These are the people that work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the Southwest Research Institute near where Phil lives, and people who work at Kitt Peak National Observatory, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatories… all these different places have staff astronomers who are full-time researchers who aren’t doing the teaching, but instead are able to dedicate all their time to the development of new knowledge. That’s pretty much all they do.

Fraser: But that takes a certain kind of personality – that’s the kind of person who really enjoys just the research and doesn’t necessarily want to spend the time doing the outreach and the teaching, etc.

Pamela: There are those of us (and I fall into this category) that get a certain high off of teaching. There’s something wonderful about having an audience full of students. There are these magical days, occasionally where the students just start firing out questions and getting into an idea. It may not be the idea you meant to teach that day, but you get them talking, you get them thinking, and you realise, “I have just made them think about something they’ve never thought of before�. That really makes it more interesting for me to work on my research, because I can see someday this is something I can get someone fired up with. This is something I can use to get people interested in wanting to learn.
 
But that’s my personality. There are other people who don’t need the same people contact that I need, and they do very well sitting down and chewing through the numbers and working with the equipment, getting amazing results while working with their peers, their collaborators.
 
All of astronomy is a social endeavour. If you look at the journal articles, almost everything is authored by more than one person, but the people you work with vary with what type of job you choose.

Fraser: But from my place here, that sounds like a really hard slog. To go through all of those steps and to get all of that education in place – either for the research route or for the academic route. I wouldn’t mind hearing some other ways you can come in from the side, some other kinds of careers that are tangentially related to it.
 
If you are enthusiastic about astronomy, if you are willing to put in an investment of education but not necessarily a full tenure-track… what are some possibilities?

Pamela: There are all sorts of different career options. All because you choose one path doesn’t mean you have to stay on that one path. It’s harder when you switch paths, but nothing is ever set in stone.
 
Rick Feinberg, who is the editor-in-chief of Sky and Telescope Magazine has a PhD in astronomy from Harvard. He went from doing the whole PhD researcher thing, to now leading one of the most prestigious astronomy magazines you can find in the bookstore. That’s a different route, and he has many people on his staff who have different levels of science degrees. David Tytell has an undergraduate degree from Caltech. Kelly Beatty (I think) also went to Caltech. They have people with master’s degrees on their staff.
 
This an extremely well educated in science staff, working in the field of journalism. They get to live and breathe the science, and talk to the scientists on a daily basis and be involved… but they’re using their astronomy knowledge to communicate rather than produce new knowledge. They do have people on their staff out there searching for asteroids and doing amazing science in their spare time as well, which really says something about the staff they have.
 
You can also get involved as a docent at your local museum. Say you don’t want to switch careers, but you want to get involved in astronomy. You can get involved at your local museum doing sky tours. A lot of museums have telescopes associated with them you could perhaps get to use – and perhaps get high school students involved in doing research. You work as the broker between the researcher and the high school student, to help scientists get better research done and get students doing that research.
 
There are also all sorts of side-tasks that somebody needs to do, that take different skills than necessarily a PhD in astronomy. There’s all the software we use, there’s the planetarium software – Starry Night, for instance. There’s data analysis software like IRAF or MIRA.
 
There’s also all the hardware that we use, from developing better cameras like Apogee and Santa-Barbara Instruments do at the amateur level. At the professional level, there are people who build individual, specific cameras where an institution will spend anywhere from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars on building new instrument systems to take better spectra, to take deeper images, to improve our ability to capture photons from distant objects in the universe. That requires optical engineers, electrical engineers. These are people who often have only bachelor’s degrees… but without them the PhD researchers could do nothing.

Fraser: Right, so you’ve got people who are creating the software that can scan through the big databases or be able to store the data. You’ve got the engineers and the people who help with the optics and the CCD cameras and all that stuff.
 
In many cases, the people working the observatories, helping support the astrophysicist or astronomer coming in to record their data… you’ve got someone who work with the observatory who helps to make sure the recording equipment is ready to go, the equipment is properly prepared so they can start doing their tests.

Pamela: Every observatory has the individuals who basically are the shepherds that allow the astronomers to function. We sort of fly in and we’re there for three or four nights. Maybe we get to come back several times a year, but we don’t live and breathe the observatory atmosphere. There are people who are the night assistants, who are there every night working the telescopes for the astronomers. There are the people who are there to switch out the instruments.
 
A given telescope may have half a dozen or more different instruments that you can take off and put on, depending on what research you’re doing. It takes an extremely skilled set of individuals to swap out the instruments and get everything up and running smoothly and correctly calibrated.
 
The night assistants I think have one of the coolest jobs. They get to see everything; they’re not specialists on planets, galaxies or stars… they’re specialists in making the telescope do whatever needs to be done. They get to see the data on everything as they sit there and basically they’re the puppeteer that makes the telescope go.

Fraser: Are there other fields… I know there’s the SETI institute, and you work with the AAVSO. There must be some positions in those as well – some volunteer organizations?

Pamela: In addition to the national centres and the university-based centres, there are also a whole set of different non-profit research organizations. We have the Planetary Society, there’s the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the American Association of Variable Star Observers, SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. These are all non-profit centres that are run primarily off of individual donations and grants that do specified research. The AAVSO studies variable stars. SETI is doing astrobiology. The ASP is working to better integrate astronomy and education. These groups work with a focus on specific projects, and partner with the national research centres and different universities to better meet their goals.
 
So you can also get in through the non-profit link, if that’s a direction you want to go. There are so many different ways to get involved in astronomy, it’s just a matter of looking around your community and asking, “what can I afford to do?�
 
Many of these jobs… let’s face it, most of us would do what we do for free if it weren’t for the fact we have bills to pay. Astronomy is not exactly a highly-paid field, in general.

Fraser: I was going to ask that. Let’s say we’ve got a tenured professor – they make a bundle, don’t they?

Pamela: Sort of?

Fraser: Okay…

Pamela: A freshly-minted, tenured professor and a freshly-minted computer scientist, where the computer scientist is someone who just finished their bachelor’s degree, will often make the same amount of money depending on the market.

Fraser: Right.

Pamela: So, you don’t go into academe because you want to make a lot of money. It also depends on where you end up.
 
We recently had one of our undergraduates in physics finish her degree here at SIUE and she got hired to work at Fermi lab, which is an accelerator up near Chicago. She was hired at basically the same salary a starting professor would get hired at. When you go to work at national labs, the pay’s a little higher. When you work at little state universities, the pay’s a little lower.
 
Because we’re all state or federal employees, it’s actually possible to look up most of our incomes online, which is a little bit sad because it means really – we have no privacy. But all the numbers are out there, and there’s an excellent link on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s page (which we’ll work on getting in the show notes), that allows you to look up how much professors and instructors are paid at different universities across the United States. These numbers tend to be biased by the fact that business professors make way more than anyone else.

Fraser: Right.
 
Just to give people my bio, I’m completely different. I actually went to UBC here in Vancouver for engineering and sort of stopped part-way to go and found a software company here in Vancouver and run a series of software companies of the course of about ten years. Finally recently I finished getting my computer science diploma (even though I’ve been working in computer science).
 
One of the things I was doing on the side, I had astronomy as a hobby, so I was maintaining Universe Today as a way to sort of learn how to manage a website but also to sort of follow one of my hobbies. Sometimes your hobbies have a way of becoming your life. Over time, over the years as I was managing, I built up a larger and larger following. In the last couple of years, I’ve been able to do this as my full-time job.
 
I think you and I took probably the most different directions that we possibly could have, and yet here we are doing Astronomy Cast. I think that says you can take the traditional route, you can take an alternative route. As long as you clearly know who you are and know what you like, and have a good sense of how you work, then almost anything’s possible.

Pamela: There’s room in this field for people of almost every background. That’s one of the most amazing things. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing graphical artists to help figure out how to communicate visually to people better.

Fraser: Oh yeah – almost every day I’m exposed to three or four paintings or computer renderings of an astronomical object or a piece of space equipment, that’s been done by some computer animator. That’s a huge field as well.

Pamela: When you start looking in the education and public outreach offices of the national labs and the big universities, you start finding people who have marketing degrees, who have art degrees, who have literature degrees… who are working to bridge between the scientists and the public. They’re immersed in astronomy all day, every single day, even though they have backgrounds that are anything but astronomy. They’re necessary to the communication of astronomy.

Fraser: Right, that would probably be which basket I would fit into – I’ve got the physics and chemistry from my engineering education, but I definitely don’t have the astrophysics and I only have a little bit of calculus under my belt, not the amount you have.
 
I think as long as you really immerse yourself in the subject matter and bring yourself up to speed, there’s quite a lot you can do if you’re interested in the communication side. If you really want to do the research side, I don’t think there’s any short circuit around doing school.

Pamela: No, and it really does help if you’re a straight-A student and if your undergraduate GPA is above 3.5. That’s kind of the magic number – and you need to do research as an undergrad.
 
You can go the whole route being a B-student, with not doing the research, but it’s going to be a lot harder and your chances of making it are a lot lower.
 
When I was a freshman at Michigan State, one of my faculty looked at a room of about 70 students and said, “about ten of you are going to go to graduate school, about one of you is going to get a PhD.� I know that three of us in the room did go on and get PhD’s, and two of us are still active in astronomy.
 
But that was a room of 70 people.

Fraser: Out of 70, yeah. Wow.

Pamela: Now, there are people in the room I lost track of, but those are the people I know.

Fraser: Right, right.

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity.