Science Friday - Fall Foliage Research, Voyager Scientist Retires, Flaws in Human Judgement, Milky Way Tell-All. Nov 4, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Using Family Photos Of Fall Foliage To Track Climate Change Leaf-peeping, or tourism based on observing the colors of fall foliage, is a big industry in parts of the Northeast. So as leaves continue to change across the northern United States with the turning of the seasons, researchers are working to better understand how climate change may be affecting fall colors—changes that may affect the bottom line for those tourism-rich areas. But to tease out the factors involved with the timing of peak leaf color, the researchers need data on when leaves started to change color, when they arrive at their peak color, and when the leaf-peeping season ends. Unfortunately, satellite imagery showing leaf color is only available dating back to the year 2000—and so Stephanie Spera of the University of Richmond is trying to get data in some unconventional ways. Spera and colleagues are engaging in a massive citizen-science project, asking for tourist snapshots of Acadia National Park that show the colors of fall. While they’ll accept your cellphone selfies, they’re especially interested in older, pre-digital images—the sort of vacation pictures that might be in your family albums, or in shoe boxes in an elderly relative’s attic. Adding those images to their data set, she says, will both help them to validate the satellite data and to extend the boundaries of their data set outwards. Heather Goldstone, host and executive producer of Living Lab Radio on WCAI, joins Ira to talk about the project and how listeners can participate.   The ‘Grandfather’ Of The Voyager Mission Retires 45 years ago, the Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched into the cosmos from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Since then, they’ve traveled over 14 billion miles from Earth, on a grand tour of our solar system, and beyond. The mission is still running, making Voyager 1 the farthest human-built artifact from Earth. Even before launch, scientists and engineers were hard at work planning and designing the mission. Last week, NASA announced the retirement of Dr. Ed Stone, who some called the ‘grandfather’ of the mission. Dr. Stone shepherded the Voyager program as its project scientist for 50 full years. In this conversation from 2013, just after Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space, Ira spoke with Dr. Stone for a status update on the mission.   A Flaw in Human Judgment: How Making Decisions Isn’t As Objective As You Think If two people are presented with the same set of facts, they will often draw different conclusions. For example, judges often dole out different sentences for the same case, which can lead to an unjust system. This unwanted variability in judgments in which we expect uniformity is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “noise.” The importance of thoughtful decision-making has come in stark relief during the pandemic and in the events leading up to the January 6th insurrection. Ira talks with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman about the role of ‘noise’ in human judgment, his long career studying cognitive biases, and how systematic decision-making can result in fewer errors. Kahneman is the co-author of “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” along with Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, now available in paperback.   Frenemies, Lovers, And The Fate Of The Cosmos: Our Galaxy Tells All Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 13.6 billion years old, all-knowing, and a little sassy. It has a rich social life of friends, frenemies, and even love interests—all other galaxies in the local group, including the stunning Andromeda. And the Milky Way is a little disappointed that we’ve stopped telling as many stories about it. Or at least, that’s how folklorist and astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier imagines the galaxy’s personality when writing her new book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. The book stretches from the beginning of the universe to the birth of our planet, and then on to the eventual theoretical end of the cosmos. Along the way, we learn both the science of how stars form and galaxies collide, and the many stories and myths humans have told about these bodies throughout our relatively brief lives. McTier joins Ira to tell all (on behalf of the Milky Way), and explain the importance of story in scientific knowledge and discovery.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Later in the hour, looking back at the Voyager Space Program with its project scientist of 50 years. Plus, it's sassy, it's complicated. It's a total smoke show, talking about our Milky Way. But first, it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. We're nearing the end of fall foliage season, soak in those final glimmers of reds and oranges and yellows while you can. You may even enjoy taking a drive to look at the colors. But you know for others, leaf peeping is a big industry, especially in the Northeast.

That's why researchers are working to better understand how climate change may be affecting fall colors, changes that may impact the bottom line for those tourism-rich areas. So how do you tease out the factors that determine the timing of peak leaf color? collect the data, of course. One research group is using an innovative method to record the foliage, and they're doing it by using your leaf photos. In a 2019 conversation on the show, I spoke with Heather Goldstone, host of Living Lab Radio, based at WCAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and I started off by asking her about the importance of fall foliage on tourism. Leaf peeping, as you noted, is a billion-dollar industry in New England. So when we talk to,

about the impacts of climate change on this tourism, on changes in fall foliage. It does have pretty huge potential ramifications in an economic sense. Researchers understand the mechanism for the color change, but the cues that they're using to start the process are a little murkier. You spoke to a researcher named Stephanie Spira. The two cues that trees get to stop really making that green chlorophyll is day length and temperature. And once those cues become unsinked, which one can.

could imagine with temperature increasing, we don't actually know what's going to happen on the broader level with fall foliage. So there's a lot of different variables that we're going to try and disentangle at a very broad scale because we're looking at Acadia National Park of a whole. Yeah, so Stephanie Spara is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond, but she's a New England native really interested in how climate change is playing out in New England. And as she said there, they're trying to untangle all of these things. They're looking at temperature, at precipitation records over time. They've actually had researchers out in Acadia National Park where they're really focusing up in Maine this fall, asking people if the quality of fall

foliage is something they even consider in making their decisions because fall visitation to Acadia National Park has actually doubled since the 1990s. So they want to know if that's part of their decision. And then in the middle of that is the actual fall foliage piece connecting changes in climate to changes in tourism. They're trying to figure out if fall foliage has changed and that's where people's photos come in. So tell us about that. and she's asking people to send in old photos? Yeah, well, because one thing they've been looking at is satellite data, right? That gives them a really consistent record since about 2000 of being able to look at fall foliage from space.

But that only gets them back to 2000, and they want to be able to go back a lot farther than that and start to really piece together a longer trend because, of course, fall foliage can vary from year to year, hugely. So for that, that's where they're turning to their leaf peep for science, crowd sourcing, just asking anybody who's been to Acadia National Park to send in their photos of fall foliage. So everybody's got shoeboxes full of old photos. We used to have them printed out back in the day, right? How do people participate in this? Well, so most people are participating, I think, at this point, through social media.

You can find LeafPeep for Science or ANP for Acadia National Park Fall foliage on Instagram, and people are just sending photos digitally. you know, that's easy for the pictures from the cell phone era. But as you mentioned, it would be great. They would love to go further back. And in fact, you know, one of the things she and I talked about is some of the challenges, at least when you've got satellite data, that's consistent. You know how that photo was taken, what the settings were, that, you know, that color looks

the same across all those photos. But they're going to have some work cut out for them, trying to figure out everybody's photos from decades past. Yeah, we'll help them out. We have a link on our website if you want to help send in those photos. Thank you, Heather. That was Heather Goldstone from an interview in 2019 when she was the host of Living Lab Radio at WCAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. By the way, it's not too late to submit your fall foliage photos. Go to ScienceFriday.com slash leaf picks to find out more. ScienceFriety.com slash leaf picks.

45 years ago, the Voyagers' one and two spacecraft were launched into the cosmos, setting off on their grand tour of our solar system and beyond. And even before they launched, scientists and engineers were hard at work, planning and designing the mission, a mission that is still running, making Voyager 1 the farthest spacecraft from Earth. Last week, NASA announced the retirement of Dr. Ed Stone, who shepherded the Voyager program as its project manager for 50 full years. Yeah, some called him the grandfather of the Voyager mission. Back in 2013, I spoke with Ed for a status update on the mission just after the intrepid spacecraft had officially entered interstellar space. Should I ask that question that I've asked every time, where is it, Ed?

Between the stars, the interstellar space. It's really on a new journey. Has it left the solar system? Well, not really, you see, because the Orch Cloud of Comets is also in the same interstellar space as Voyager is now. So that part of the solar system is actually an interstellar space. But the textbook definition, you know, that we all grew up with, the nine planets, now eight, that was always talked about the solar system. So it's past the planets, then. Oh, it's well past the planets. That's right. The outermost planet is Neptune, which is 30 times as far from the sun of the earth. And the Voyager is now, when it entered intercellar space was 122 times as far from the sun as the earth. So you can see it,

We are well outside of all the planets. Did you ever think it would get this far? Well, we hoped. We didn't know, of course, when Voyager was launched in 1977, the space age was 20 years old. So we had no way of knowing whether spacecraft could last this long or not. But they really have done it. These are the longest lasting spacecraft ever launched,

and of course they are by far the farthest traveling ever launched. And what was its mission when it was first launched? The mission we had was very carefully defined to be a four-year mission to Saturn. And everything else after that was a bonus. We launched in 1977 because that was the magic year when a single spacecraft could actually fly by all four giant outer planets. But we did it stepwise, first to Saturn, and then we added Uranus, and then we added Neptune, and then we added the interstellar mission, which has been going now since 1990. And how have you been able to get it past Saturn, which was your original destination, to get way out there?

Well, we used the swing shot effect to propel the spacecraft. There was no problem in the sense of knowing how to get there. It was whether or not the spacecraft would actually survive and continue to function for that. Nobody knew that these spacecraft, there was no experience that say these spacecraft could work so well for so long and such great distances from the sun. The communication, of course, is 10,000 types. more difficult out there than it is if you're near at one AU, only one AU away from Earth. What's the size of the transmitter power?

It's a 22-watt transmitter, so it's focused in generally toward the inner, toward the planets, and the signal strength itself when it gets to Earth is the deep space network is something like a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a watt. And it has one of these old tape systems on it. It has an eight-track digital tape recorder. So it recorded the images during our planetary encounters, and now we record the wide-band data from the plasma wave system, which is a system which, in fact, gave us the final information we needed that we were in the dense plasma of interstellar space rather than in the more rarefied plasma, solar plasma that's inside this bubble. And take off for us some of the major accomplishments from the Voyager. Well, in a biggest sense that made the most important planetary result was it really completely changed our view of the solar system.

It revealed how diverse the bodies are in the solar system. Each one is unique, and that's because of geologic history affected each of them separately. But it's even more than that. There's so many things that we thought we knew that we didn't. Before Voyager, the only known active volcanoes in the solar system were on Earth. and then we flew by Iowa, a moon of Jupiter, a small moon, and it had eight active volcanoes, and it turns out 10 times the volcanic activity of the Earth, greatly expanding our view of bodies and their evolution and their properties, which prior to that was really based just on our

more limited experience with Earth. Yeah, and you discovered all kinds of new properties about Jupiter and the other planets. That's right. Saturn, of course, we found its moon Titan had another nitrogen atmosphere, just like Earth, but even denser. than the Earth's atmosphere, but no oxygen instead of that, it has methane, natural gas, which rains on the surface. So that, again, really sort of broadened, in a great way, broaden our view of bodies in a solar system. And I always like to talk about the last body we visited, which is Neptune's moon, Triton, so cold as body we visited, only 40 degrees above absolute

zero, so cold, the nitrogen is an ice form in its polar region, yet we found geysers erupting, at 40 degrees above absolute zero. And before Voyager, the only known galaxies were here on Earth. So time after time, our view had to be so greatly expanded. I think that's the Voyager mission. Now we're on a totally different mission, which is the first to leave the solar bubble and begin to sail on the cosmic sea that's between the stars.

Because that's what most of the Milky Way is, is the sea between the stars. It's not the stars, but the sea between. Is there, in your experience, and as I called you the grandfather of this project, are there any other spacecraft like the Voyager ever been built? No, no, no, these are you, and I think they will remain so, because really you do this sort of thing where you survey so much, so many new things just once.

The future spacecraft, as you know, have gone into orbit because the next phase of exploration is the detailed look you can get only when you're in orbit. So what are your thoughts, Ed, today, now that this is all happening? Well, I think it's just remarkable, really. It's remarkable. But I think to put it in the larger context of exploration, this mission really has a commonality

with the first circumnavigation of the Earth. Now we have the first spacecraft actually measuring and observing in this realm, which is filled with matter from other stars than our own sun. That conversation with Voyager Project scientist, Dr. Ed Stone, was recorded back in 2013. Best wishes, Ed, on a well-earned retirement. We have to take a break, and when we come back,

as we ponder our election season, we'll revisit a conversation about the flaws in human judgment with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. People make lots of decisions every day, mostly little things like which shoes to wear, what to eat for breakfast.

People can also make bad decisions that are not so little. Decisions based on emotion are short-sighted or ignore key facts. This is especially noticeable when bad decisions are made by powerful people. I bring this up because you may be making an important decision next week. Election season is here, which gives we the people a chance to make our own decisions about how well we think our political leaders have made their decisions. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has made a career studying decision-makers. Dr. Kahneman joined me in this interview last July at the publication of his latest book called

Noise, A Flaw in Human Judgment. Daniel Kahneman, welcome to Science Friday. My pleasure. Nice to have you. All right, let's begin talking about this. The title of your book is called Noise. What is noise, and how is it different from bias? Well, the starting point really is that judgment is a form of measurement.

We call it a measurement where the instrument is the human mind. And so the theory and the concepts of measurement are relevant. Bias in the theory of measurement is simply an average error that is not zero. That's bias. Noise in the theory of measurement is simply variability. so that, you know, you could measure a line and measure it repeatedly. You're not going to get, if your ruler is fine enough, you are not going to get the same measurement twice in a row.

There's going to be variability. That variability is noise. And you can see that noise is a problem for accuracy because assume that there is no bias. That is that the average of your measurements is precisely equal to the length of the line. It's still obviously you're making mistakes if your judgments or your measurements are scattered around the value. So that's noise and that's bias. So why do people make those mistakes?

Why do we have people measuring things and then coming up with different results? Well, there are several reasons. One reason in that really people are inherently noisy. So that, you know, when you sign your name, twice in a row, it doesn't look exactly the same. We cannot, in fact, exactly repeat ourselves. We're in a series of states, and those states have an effect on the judgments we make. We call that occasion noise. So, you know, a judge passing sentences is not the same in the morning and in the afternoon. The judge is not the same when in a good mood and in a bad mood.

And then there are two other kinds of noise. To understand the next form of noise, the easiest is, well, let's stay with a judge. So some judges are more severe than others. Some judges are lenient. We call that level noise because the level of their judgment, there is an individual bias. But then the most interesting source of noise is that judges do not see the world in the same way. That is, if they had to rank defendants or crimes, they would not rank them alike. Some judges are really more severe with young defendants than with old defendants. For other judges, it's the opposite. Those differences, which we call pattern noise, they're really interesting and they are in quite a few situations. They are the main source of noise. Is that because that's

where biases may influence the noise? Because people have different biases that makes it noisy? That's exactly it. Noise is really produced by the fact that it's certainly pattern noise, that people have different biases. You know, a lot of us have experienced that when we go to doctors and we get a second or a third opinion, the doctors are looking at us conducting the same tests, and yet they come up with a different diagnosis or a different prognosis. There is a lot of noise in medicine. This is really one of the reasons we wrote. that book, it's that we find a lot of noise in very important systems in society. So, you know, there are easy cases. It's easy to diagnose a common call. But the moment that things get more challenging, different physicians make different judgments. And on very difficult cases, of course, there is a lot of noise. So noise in medicine is a big problem. Speaking about that, when thinking

about judgments that have a wide range of decisions, I can't help but think about the COVID pandemic, how can the concept of noise help us better understand how differently world leaders decide to deal with the virus? Well, you know, it's one of the best examples of noise that we know that as leaders at all levels, you know, from municipalities to leaders of countries, were faced with the problems were quite similar. And they made a wide variety of different choices. That's an example of noise. And each of them did it thinking that they were doing the right thing. But obviously, they couldn't all be doing the right thing if they were doing different things in the same situation. So how might leaders then be able to make better decisions and

reduce noise around the very complicated decisions that need to be made about COVID? Well, you know, we have a piece of advice that is unlikely to be taken up very soon, but our advice is that in the case of COVID, it's a matter of designing how you're going to make the decision and doing it, making the decision, in a disciplined way. When you design the process by which you will reach conclusions, then you are going to have less noise. people are more likely to reach the same conclusions if they all follow a sensible process to get to the decision. There is one source of noise that is not going to be controlled by that. And this is differences in values. So if people want different things, then they will reach different judgments. But if you're faced with an objective problem, you're trying to control the number of hospitalizations. That's a problem where the value is pretty obvious with the systematic process

of decision-making people ought to and we think would be less noisy than they were. When talking about making these decisions, what about using artificial intelligence or machine learning? There was a study that came out last year showing that the AI was better than the dermatologist in detecting melanoma. How does AI reduce noise? in decision-making? AI does better than reducing noise. Any algorithm, any systematic rule that takes inputs and combines them in a specified way will have one crucial property.

It will be noise-free. You present an algorithm with the same problem twice. You're going to get the same answer. But in general, algorithms are noise-free, and it turns out this is one of their major advantages over humans. That is, when you compare the performance of people to the performance of algorithm and rules, in many situations, the algorithm and rules are already superior to people or match people. And the main reason for the lack of accuracy of people compared to algorithm is noise.

People are noisy, algorithms or not. But you'll get pushback from doctors or other people who say, you know, every patient is different. I have to treat every patient differently. and that takes a human interaction. How do you answer that? Well, I answer that by looking at data and by comparing mistakes, the number of mistakes that are made.

And it is true that humans have that tendency of viewing each case as unique, but it's also true that if you take just a few objective measures in the situation and you combine them appropriately In many situations, an objective combination of scores is going to do better than a human judge, although the human judge has access to a lot of information and has many powerful intuitions. You know, I hear that same kind of argument about how AI is better than people. When I talk to AI people who are designing self-driving cars, they say, you know, we get a lot of pushback that the AI is not small.

martyr, but if you look at the data, you'll see that a computer will drive a car better than a person, meaning that there'll be fewer accidents. Well, all of us are biased against algorithms. And the reason we are is that when a self-driving car causes an accident, we look at that accident and we say, oh, I would have done it. A human driver would just not have made that mistake. But of course, no one asks the self-driving car about the mistakes that humans make. And the same is true in all contexts, where you measure the performance of people against the performance of algorithms. The question is overall accuracy. But the way that people look at it, mistakes that artificial intelligence makes look stupid to us.

They are mistakes we wouldn't make. And the fact that we make more mistakes overall than the AI, that's not something we respond to. One of the ideas that stuck out to me in the book was about overconfident leaders who too heavily trust their own intuition instead of weighing evidence or are too confident in a decision that's more due to chance than their own judgment. What's going on here? Well, what's going on is that most of our. us are overconfident most of the time. And in a way, it's a very good thing. By overconfident, what I mean is that we look at the world and we see the world in a particular way. And we feel a sense of validity. We feel that the reason we see the world as we do is because that's the way

it is. What we cannot imagine is that other people looking at exactly the same situation would see it differently because I see the truth and I respect your judgment. I expect you to see exactly the same thing that I do. Now, that's one aspect of it. Overconfidence is almost built in. But overconfidence in intuition is in a way particularly pernicious when it's not justified. Now, there are cases where intuitive expertise exists, so chess players can look at a a chest situation, and every move that occurs to them is going to be a strong one. But people feel they have intuitions when there is no way that they could have correct, valid intuitions.

For example, anybody who makes predictions about what will happen in the stock market to individual stocks in particular is just deluding herself. It's not possible. And yet, people feel that it is possible. they have intuitions and they trust them. It's a big problem. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman about some of the flaws in human judgment. One of the things I've been batting around a lot lately is what biases lead people to believe something that is patently false,

specifically how so many people bought into the big lie. that Donald Trump really won the election, and then the ensuing insurrection of January 6th. What makes people believe in an easily disputable lie so fully? Well, we have the wrong idea about where beliefs come from, our own and those others. We think we believe in whatever we believe because we have evidence for it, because we have reasons for believing. When you ask people, why do you believe that? They are not going to stay done.

They are going to give you reasons, that they're convinced explain their beliefs. But actually the correct way to think about this is to reverse it. People believe in the reasons because they believe the conclusion. The conclusion comes first. And the belief in the conclusion, in many cases, is largely determined by social factors. You believe what people that you love and trust believe. and then you find reasons for it. And they tell you reasons for believing that,

and you accept the reasons. But it's largely a social phenomenon. It's not an error of reason. And that, by the way, is true for your beliefs and my beliefs. Your beliefs and my beliefs reflect how we've been socialized. It reflects the company we keep. It reflects our belief in certain ways of reaching conclusions. a belief in the scientific method. Other people just had different belief because they've been

socialized differently, and because they have different beliefs, they accept different kinds of evidence, and the evidence that we think is overwhelming just doesn't convince them of anything. Are there cases in which variability in judgment is actually a good thing? Or many cases. That is, we define noise, and that's important. We define noise as unwanted variability, so that when you have underwriters in an insurance company looking at the same risk, you would want them to reach approximately or exactly the same conclusions. But I want variability in the judgments of my film critics.

I want variability in the judgments and opinions of people who are creating or inventing new things. So variability is often very desirable, but in some context, variability is noxious. One last question. I've been following your career for a long time, and I've always wondered what got you and your longtime former psychologist partner, the late Amos Tversky, so interested in human biases and studying. Where did you, your fellows, decide this was something you wanted to study? Well, it was really ironic research.

We found that we were prone to mistakes. It was all about statistical thinking when we started. And we noticed that we had wrong intuitions about many statistical problems. We knew the solutions, and yet the wrong intuitions remained attractive. Can you put a finger on why we have so many flaws in our intuitive judgment? So it's not that we could perform surgery and exercise. all the sources of biases from human cognition. If you removed all the sources of biases,

you would remove a great deal of what makes cognition accurate in most situations. So we are built to reach conclusions, not necessarily in a logical way, but in a heuristic way. And heuristic ways of thinking always necessarily lead to, to some mistake, although on average they could lead to correct judgment and faster than reason would do. It's not that we're studying incorrect mechanisms. The mechanisms are very useful. They sometimes, that mechanism, which is usually useful, will lead people to systematic errors.

Well, thank you very much, Dr. Conneman, for taking time to be with us today. It's a pleasure talking with you. That was our conversation from July with Dr. Daniel Kahneman about his book, Noise, A flaw in Human Judgment. We have to take a break, and while we come back, for thousands of years, we've told stories about the stars, now our Milky Way is here to tell his own story, and a book by astronomer and a folklorist, Moia McTeer. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the short break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Picture this. You are a galaxy, a vast collection of stars. stars, planets, dust, and hot gas. You're 13.6 billion years old. You know pretty much everything, and you've decided to tell all. That's the premise of astronomer and folklorist, Moia McTeer's new book, The Milky Way, an autobiography of our galaxy. She tells the story of our galaxy and the universe from the voice of a sassy, sometimes depressed Milky Way. And along the way, we meet our galaxy's love interest and frenemies. We spend time. We spend time with the bullying black hole at its center, and we meditate on the eventual death of stars,

yes, even our star. But why does our galaxy need to tell us all of this? And what can we earthlings take away for our more mundane planetary life? Dr. McTeer joins me now to explain. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much, Iretz. Really good to be here. Oh, you're welcome. You've written this book as if our galaxy were, well, shall I say, a celebrity, a character in a tabloid gossip. Your galaxy has a real attitude. Sure does. So if this is a person, right?

If it's a person, who is the Milky Way? Ooh, I think that the Milky Way is your sassiest friend who might be a little reluctant to join all of the friend group activities. Not a Beyonce, not a Lady Gaga, but someone with that definite queen energy. Oh, I like that. I like that. And you use this personality as a way. to tell the story of the universe from the beginning to the end, really, telling it really, really well. Thank you.

Tell me, after all these people, all these other people have told stories about the universe and have written about them, why does your story still need telling? It's not my story. I read the Milky Ways. When I was proposing this book and trying to figure out how I wanted to write a book about the Milky Way, I was thinking about this very question. Who am I, Moia McTeer, to add my voice to people like Brian Keating or Michi Okaku, these people who have been talking about the universe already.

And I realized, I don't have that much to add, but the Milky Way sure does. So I wanted to use the science to craft a voice and personality for the galaxy. You go through the different names that the Milky Way had over the eons. How did it stick, the word Milky Way? How did that get to be its name? According to the International Astronomical Union, which is in charge of official names for all astronomy objects, the Milky Way doesn't have an official name. It's just called the galaxy. But in the West, we tend to draw a lot of our astronomy names from classic mythology, Greek and Roman mythology, which themselves are inspired a lot by Egyptian and Babylonian myths.

So the name Milky Way probably comes to us from Greek mythology, and it has to do with this story where, Hera, the goddess of marriage and the hearth, she was, unbeknownst to her, forced to nurse baby Hercules. And when she looked down and realized that this was not her baby, that she was breastfeeding, she pushed Hercules away. And that spurt of breast milk that came out of Hercules' mouth was the Milky Way. And that's where we get the word Milky Way from. And even the word galaxy comes from Old Greek for milk, Galaxia. Wow, that is a great story. What were some of the other names that had from other cultures?

There are so many. I think in the book I talk about an old Finnish myth where the Milky Way is called the Straw Thiefs Way. There are people who called the Milky Way the Way of the Birds because it looked like birds were following the path of the Milky Way as they made their annual migrations. I think that if you look at myths about the Milky Way from around the world, you can see that, people had very similar thoughts on it. A lot of it was this drawn-out path, this diffuse, milky-looking path, but there are also fun differences that different cultures put in their myths. And you should know because you're the only person who ever graduated from Harvard majoring in both folklore and astrophysics. A little opposite ends of the spectrum. Just a bit. At least that's what most people think.

when they hear it. But the more you start thinking about that connection, the more overlap you see between them. Initially, it's, oh, you're going to talk about constellations or astrology, but then when you think about it more, it's, well, maybe you can start comparing creation myths from different cultures around the world and see how they compare to our Big Bang, like scientific understanding of cosmology. And then the direction I took it was just fictional world building and seeing how space has influenced our culture and our folklore here on Earth. because it really has. There's a lot of influence there. For example, give me one of the greatest influences.

I mean, we have used the Milky Way to navigate to keep time, so there are a lot of practical influences. But even today, with modern astrology, which has roots in very practical, useful things, I think it's something like 70 million Americans read their horoscopes every day. So that is absolutely a connection we have. And yeah, we still name satellites and space missions and all kinds of objects we send into space after folklore. We sure do. Yeah, usually there are like competitions. The IAU will often, or NASA will often ask the public what they think something should be named with a few options. And often those options are based on mythology because now there's kind of a naming trend in place where we want to keep with that same pattern. of having constellations and comets and moons that we find in the solar system named after creatures and figures from folklore.

Right. Let's talk about the Milky Way social life. The Milky Way has friends and, yes, romantic relationships with other galaxies in its neighborhood that we call the local group, which is kind of true in real life. What's going on there? The Milky Way is just one of about 50 or so galaxies in this little neighborhood. that you're right, we call the local group. And most of those are tiny dwarf satellite galaxies that orbit around the Milky Way or Andromeda, which is the other really big galaxy in our neighborhood. When I was trying to think of the Milky Way as a person, it made sense that some of its neighboring galaxies would be really annoying to the Milky Way and some of them would be more endearing. And so the large and small Magellanic clouds or Larry and Sammy as they're called in the books. They make a lot of appearances. Larry is boring and gets on the Milky Way's nerves,

but Sammy, the small Magellanic Cloud, is more of what the galaxy would consider a friend. And then Andromeda is this long-term, epic, long-distance romantic partner that the Milky Way has been courting for billions of years. You call it an absolute smoke show, I believe it says at one point. Yeah, Andromeda's hot. And the language you use, you said it was sassy, it certainly is. Do you, as a communicator, find that that language is appealing to a certain demographic you want to reach? I'm thinking about like younger people than normal astronomy or astrophysics books? No, not really. I don't think that there was much strategy in coming up with the voice of the Milky Way because I have received some feedback that it's a little too sassy for some people. But that's just what made sense for me at the time. If you have this being that has been alone for billions of years and much of its time is spent creating stars that it knows are going to die eventually, that it would be sassy and it would have kind of a chip on its shoulder.

So I wanted to stay true to the science in that way. And the Milky Way is a three-dimensional galaxy. Emotionally, I mean, it's depressed. Right, as it reveals. Yes. When discussing the emotional turmoil that its famous Black Hole, Sajai Star creates for it, right? Mm-hmm. What do you have against black holes?

I was worried I would get this question. I, Wimicked Here, have nothing against Black holes. But I was writing this book during the pandemic. I got the deal to write it just a week before lockdown happened in New York. And I myself was going through a lot of mental health struggles over the past two years. So, of course, that was reflected in the book that I wrote. And I thought that maybe it could help other people. Throughout the book, the Milky Way learns to give its inner turmoil a name.

It calls the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sarge. And once it gives it a name, the Milky Way can control more of what it does around the black hole. So it learns how to not let all of this anxiety and depression get to it in a way that I have had to learn how to do that over the last couple of years. Interesting. That's really interesting. And you do describe the physics of a black hole in terms that general folks like me can understand. You do it very well. And I thank you for that. Thank you. The Milky Way also thinks that it is the be-all of all galaxies. You know, is there really such a special galaxy in the context of all the gazillions of them in our universe? No, not really.

But have you ever been a big fish in a small pond? It's really easy to feel like you are the biggest, baddest thing out there. And in terms of the local group in this neighborhood that the Milky Way spends all of its time interacting with, yeah, it is the biggest and baddest. So that's what informs its personality. But if it went to a nearby galaxy cluster, like the Virgo cluster, for example, it would not be that big of a deal. Right, right. And the Milky Way takes credit for making scientists, I mean, astronomers better at what they do by developing new tools and techniques to study it. Of course. We wouldn't have this technology if the Milky Way weren't so interesting that we had to study it. Some people call astronomy the oldest science, and the Milky Way is very proud that it.

was able to inspire that type of creativity and curiosity in humankind. And in that science, I find that you make a really interesting observation about how science by definition is usually conducted by experimentation, but not astronomy. As you say, quote, some science is observational in nature, but not experimental, right? Absolutely. I have never touched a star. I have never touched a planet that wasn't Earth, and yet I got my PhD studying stars and planets and how they move around the galaxy. So it really is observational. We can't create control groups out of stuff that we make. Instead, we have to look out at all of the examples the universe has given us. Say, we're studying stellar evolution, how stars change over time. We have to find stars at different stages of their

evolution to study. We can't just look at one star and trace it over its entire life because they live a lot longer than humans do. And it's pretty hard to make one in our laboratory. Yeah, exactly. Hard and like might be pretty dangerous. And also the Milky Way wants to tell us about the end. I mean, the end of the universe, the death of stars, the death of everything. And from our own myths about the end of the world, we have all different kinds of myths about the apocalypse, right? How does the science of cosmological collapse relate to our own stories of creation and destruction and all these myths. Oh, I love that question.

I think it's really interesting that we only kind of recently in this grand scale of humanity started thinking about the ultimate end of the universe because we only recently had the technology to know what the universe was and how it could end. But even though that's a recent thing,

humankind has thought about the end of the world for as long as we have thought about the beginning of the world. I love that we assumed that things would end because that kind of makes the time we have precious. I love the way that you can project our human lifespan and the fact that we will die onto the biggest things that we could possibly comprehend like the universe, which will also die. So in a way that makes it just like us, but a lot bigger. Yeah, it gives us a sense of our own mortality. Yeah, and that's really important for us to have. Yeah, yeah. And the Milky Way is also sad about us because we're not telling stories about it like we used to. And you leave us with the directive to start telling new stories. Yeah. Where exactly will these new myths come from?

We are creating new myths all the time. There's a chapter in the book called Modern Myths. And I poke a lot of fun at science fiction, especially Star Trek. In an earlier version of the book, there were a lot more digs at Star Trek than you see. see in this final copy. And well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the digs about Star Trek and other creatures that we make up is a worry that humanoid-looking aliens on rocky planets with breathable atmospheres are going to give us the wrong idea about what lies outside of our own solar system. Yeah. And what to look for. Absolutely. Why should anything else in the universe look like us when there is an amazing diversity of planets out there that vary in size, the type of star they orbit. I think it's a lot more interesting to think about aliens that would evolve and adapt to the environments that they're in. And there are just so many fun environments out there.

Like, why limit our imagination to stuff that looks like us? Finally, I want one last question about the Web Telescope. I'm sure you've seen these wonderful images. What do you think was so special about the JWST images that you saw? I was blown away by how far we could see with JWST for the first time. We were looking at galaxies, some of the first galaxies to ever form in the universe. And that gives us a better understanding of where we came from and where we might go eventually. But I think it also gives us a better sense of the scale of time in our universe. One thing that I really wanted to do in this book was get people to shift their perspectives and zoom out from their tiny scale, both in time and space. And the more we can

learn about the vast expanse of the universe, the easier that will be for us. And as an aside, the Milky Way says that we need to rename the telescope. And who are we to argue with our own galaxy, right? Yes. There has absolutely been a push in the astronomy community to rename JWST, The Milky Way is all for that because even though it's this big thing that doesn't really care about us, it also thinks we're pretty silly for judging people based on who they love or what they look like. So the Milky Way is all for changing the name of JWSD. Well, that's a good place to stop. I want to thank you for this book.

It's a great book. Thank you very much for writing the book and for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thank you so much. I'm really glad you enjoyed it. And it has been a blast talking to you about it. Dr. Moya McTeer, astronomer, folklorist, and author of the Milky Way, an autobiography of our galaxy. And now it's your turn to explore the cosmos with us. Members of the SciFri Book Club will be reading Moja's new book this December.

You can learn all about what's in the stars, read an excerpt from the book, sign up for in-person and virtual events, and enter to win a free book. All that on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash Milky Way. That's science friday.com slash Milky Way. And speaking of our Milky Way, you know, there is a big event next Tuesday, November 8th, right? Of course. I'm talking about a total lunar eclipse visible to stargazers in most of North America. It starts on Monday night and last into the wee hours of Tuesday. Enjoy.

And that wraps up another edition of Science Friday. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, yes, subscribe to our podcast. or ask your smart peeker to play Science Friday. And of course you can say hi to us all week on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or you can email us the classic way, SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Send us feedback.

Tell us what you'd like us to cover, too. Last but not least, a big SciFri welcome to listeners joining us this week on WUSF in Tampa, Florida. Great to have you aboard. We'll see you all next week. I'm Ira Flato. Have a great weekend.