The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - A Conversation with Irwin Shapiro: Scientist Extraordinaire from the Earth to the Stars, and at 94, still going strong.

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

Irwin Shapiro is a remarkable human being by almost any standard. Following his education in physics at Cornell and Harvard, he had a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory working on various problems in planetary dynamics, and radar ranging, when he went to a lecture and realized that a completely new phenomenon could occur in General Relativity that no one had proposed in the half-century since Einstein first proposed it. For objects traveling near a massive object like the Sun, the travel time to go from one point to another would be slightly longer than it would be if one simply divided the distance traveled by the speed of light. One might think this is simply due to the fact that light takes a curved trajectory near a massive object, rather than traveling in a straight line. But as Shapiro showed, there is an additional time delay, due to the fact that clocks tick somewhat slower in a gravitational field than they would otherwise. This effect, now known as the Shapiro Effect has become known as the 4th test of General Relativity, a test the theory passed when Shapiro and collaborators used the Haystack Observatory to carefully measure reception times for radar signal that passed near the sun. Irwin went from that triumph to Chair the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and from there to Harvard to lead the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory. He remains at Harvard, where at 94 years old, as Timkin University Professor, he still teachers classes, is doing research in biology, and plays tennis several times a week!Besides all of this, Irwin is one of the most lovely and gentle scientists I have known in my career, which continued after my stint at Harvard largely because of encouragement he gave to me at a very difficult time for me. As a result, it was a pure delight to reconnect with him after many years, and have a conversation about his long career, the evolution of science in the 60 odd years that he has been doing it, and about life in general. I hope you enjoy it, and find it as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krauss. In this episode, I have the distinct honor, privilege, and pleasure of speaking to an old colleague reconnecting with Professor Irwin Shapiro, a distinguished and iconic astrophysicist. I've known Irwin for many years. I first knew him when I was a young scientist at Harvard, and he was the director of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But in spite of that exalted position, his door was always open to people to talk to and seek advice.

And I often did talk to him and do just that. And in addition, he was really compassionate at a time when I almost left physics because of some problems with a senior faculty member. He convinced me that the problems in the first case weren't mine. And secondly, it was worth continuing. And I'll be forever grateful to him for that. But the world should be grateful to Irwin for many reasons, not just because of his long, a distinguished career. He's 94 years old, and he's still a functioning professor at Harvard University, teaching

classes, and, in fact, embarking on new areas of research. But he's most well known for the Shapiro effect, which was one of the four tests, classical tests of general relativity. And what's amazing about that, the Shapiro effect, as we described in the episode, how light can take longer to go from one place to another than you would imagine if it's traveling in a gravitational field. And he first realized it after listening to a lecture in 1964. He wasn't a general altruist. He was trained in a variety of areas of physics in celestial mechanics and also quantum optics.

And he was then at the Lincoln Laboratories at MIT working on radar and various kinds of celestial mechanics. When he heard that lecture, realized this could be in effect. then more importantly, realized it can be measured in our solar system with radar and then convinced the observatory there to upgrade their telescope and three years later make a measurement of the effect which agreed with general relativity. And the fact that Irwin, who studied in one area, made that significant contribution in another area, as well as many contributions in a wide variety of areas of Earth and planetary science

and astrophysics, demonstrates what I think is so wonderful about him. He's a lifelong learner, as well as being a charming gentleman and scholar. And as I indicated, at 94, he's now trying to learn and work on biology, which demonstrates, I think, one of the wonderful lessons of his life and maybe this episode, which is that if you're excited about the universe, you should never stop asking questions, and your excitement will keep you young, because as you'll see, Erwin is still certainly young at heart. And I think young in body, I understand he plays tennis still.

every week. It was a real pleasure to talk to Irwin about his perspective over his long career about astrophysics's personal experiences and science more generally, and I think you'll find it entertaining enlightening and enlivening. He's a wonderful man, and I hope you enjoy this episode.

You can listen to it ad-free on our Substack channel, Critical Mass. You can watch it ad-free, the video there as well. Or you can listen to it on any podcast site, and Of course, you can watch it on our YouTube channel. No matter how you listen to it or watch it, I hope you'll consider supporting the Origins Project Foundation

that produces this podcast and other popular science events. But again, however you watch it, I think you'll really be entertained and educated by listening to this wonderful scientist and human being. So with no further ado, Irwin Shapiro. Now, Irwin Shapiro, thanks for joining me virtually. It's a pleasure to be with you again. And it's been a long time since we've been together physically, and it's wonderful to see you.

Well, thank you. It's good to see you, too. I'm particularly happy to have you on the podcast because as a scientist, I've admired you for a long time. And as a human being, I've admired you ever since I've known you. So it's a real pleasure to spend some time with you. I blush. Twice. There you go. That was my goal. Now I've achieved my goal to make you blush.

And what is also amazing is, you know, you also provide a wonderful role model because you are, you are, how old are you know, 94 and a third? 94 and a third. And a quarter. Still a professor teaching at Harvard and working on new areas, which I think is really, you know, it really gives you kind of faith in the future. It gives me, anyway, hope that maybe I'll actually continue to do something useful and when I think of people like you. So it's really a privilege.

Now, I'm going to get to learn more about you. I've known you, but there's a lot I don't know about you. Well, she's hope. Yeah, exactly. And we'll learn a little bit of it. I hope there'll still be some secrets left after the end of it. But this is an origin podcast. And before we talk about some of the interesting science that you've been involved in and your career in academia,

I wanted to find out more about how you got to where you got to and where you're getting to still. Because, as I say, it's an originist podcast, and I'm fascinated by this. Now, you grew up in Brooklyn? No. Where? Bar Rockaway, New York. Bar Rockaway. Okay.

That's in Queens. Yeah, Far Walkaway has had another famous. physicist who grew up there, right? He lived two houses from me. Really? Richard Feynman lived two houses from you? Wow. Did you know him? But I didn't know him. He was much older.

He was much older. Yes. Because, yeah, well, he wasn't that. Was that much older? Huh? He was that much older, eh? Because he died early young. He's 80 years old.

How many? Twelve. Twelve years older. Okay. But do people... Go ahead. Go on. I mean, did you, so did people like, when you decide to become a scientist, people say, oh, Richard Feynman, or did your teachers, or was he well known at the time or only later? Well, it is true. This is sort of embarrassing. But my history teacher in elementary school told me that I was the brightest student she'd had since Richard Feynman. Wow.

I didn't know the name at all then. Yeah. I know him. But it stuck with me because it was such a strange that they... Oh, well, absolutely. Absolutely. Wouldn't it mean? Yeah, that's a great thing to hear.

Wow. But I did meet him a number of times. And, yeah, we knew each other. And I took his sister out for dinner as sort of a condolence thing. A year after he died. died when I happened to be in California in Southern California. Yeah, his sister was a scientist, too, actually. Yes, and she knew me.

She remembered that she was jealous of my little red, wooden, rocking horse. She was something like six or seven years older than I. And I didn't remember having any... rocking horse let alone a little wooden red one but i had an older cousin who never forgot anything in her life and i asked her about it and she verified that i indeed had a little redwood and rocky horse wow wow that's yeah that so that's my findman story it's it's it's a nice to have a findman story it's it's great I, wow. I actually have a picture behind me

and find him in someone. It's right. It's right there. I can't see it. I met him when I was a student in some photography for physics. It doesn't matter. I'll show it to you some other time when we're together.

But I was lucky. Some photographer took a picture for a magazine. And we were actually talking about physics, which was a wonderful thing. Well, I did not know that. That's great. There already I've discovered something wonderful. Two doors down from Feynman.

And I first met him at Cornell, where I went as an undergraduate. He was then a professor. Okay, oh, okay. That's what I was wondering where that. Okay, so yeah, I mean, it's it. Go on. How I met him is sort of interesting. Oh, good.

I was in the hall talking to my advisor and asked him, and who was also my teacher, I was taking his at elementary physics. Who was that? Ken Grison. Okay. Kenneth Grison. And I asked him my question, and he pondered and he saw Feynman coming down the wall, and he said, let me ask Dick. And so Dick stopped, and he asked him my question, and Feynman rattled off the answer and walked away.

And I don't remember the question anymore. Yeah, that's... Yeah, no, he was... That's when I first met him. You know, it's interesting to me that, yeah, because I knew you went to Cornell. You know, you have a lot of overlap with obviously other scientists that I know. That was a hard period for Feynman at Cornell, actually. He was, you know, he was not bad.

He was a little depressed. What year was that? 1947. Yeah, that was a tough year for him. He was really depressed after. Yeah, you know, I don't know whether you know, but I wrote a scientific biography of Richard Feynman. No, I didn't. It's called Quantum Man.

I'm very happy with it. And I'll have to, maybe I'll send it to you. Oh. Yeah. And anyway, I learned a lot about them in the process, but it's, but it was a labor of love because when I got asked to do it, I, I never wrote a proposal. I just got asked to do it. And I thought, well, this is an opportunity to read every one of his papers, which I

wouldn't do otherwise. I mean, I wouldn't have the self-discipline to do it. And it was fun. So I tried to weave the science. It was not sure why. I mean, he was an interesting character, but that's not the only reason to care about Richard Feynman, it was the science that mattered, and I wanted to try and weave that in. Anyway, enough of people about that. So, Far Rockaway, but you went to Brooklyn Tech, is that right?

Correct. Okay. Every day on the Long Island Railroad. Oh, really? Okay. $6.33 a month for my ticket to go on the railroad to high school every day. And I never once and four years missed the train due to only one thing. Your mother. No. Absolutely right. She would get me out of bed. She'd have to come in three times usually to get me out of bed because it was a 7.30 train,

which was about a 10 to 15 minute walk from my house. and she made sure I ate breakfast every morning too. Wow, now there's a good mother. A good Jewish mother. It's really great. Now, really, so that, but why did you go, I was, the reason I thought you were in Brooklyn is you went to Brooklyn Tech. Why did you go so far away to Brooklyn Tech?

Why didn't I go to Far Rockaway High School like Feynman did? Yeah, yeah. By the way, he was a classmate of my older cousin. Oh, okay. One of my older cousins. At Far Rockway, but you didn't. Yeah. Why?

No. Because my parents told me, I don't know, I don't know really how they found out about it, that Brooklyn Tech was a much better school, and I should go to Brooklyn Tech. And I didn't want to, because all my friends were going to Far Rockaway High School or so I thought. Yeah. But then I discovered several of them were also thinking of Brooklyn Tech. So I applied. So some of your friends went as well. You had to apply. Now, this already takes me past where I'd wanted to start. So clearly, your parents had plans for you. They wanted you to do well. They decided that school was a good school. So was it like me? Did they want you to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that? No. So what do your parents do?

What did your parents do? My father was in a leather business. And that's a story I could tell you in itself. And my mother was an elementary school teacher. She taught eighth grade math. Did she teach you? No. Not the same school? My uncle taught me early on when I preschool. Oh, really? Taught me fractions and things like that.

So your mother was an elementary school teacher. Your father was in the leather business. Yes. Okay. That was his last profession. He started off as a civil engineer, worked on the Holland Tunnel in New York. Okay, so he was educated. Both your parents went to had gone to university then. My father went to the City College of New York, class of 1903.

Wow. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. And your mother, did she go to a teachers college, or did she go to a... Yeah. She went to some kind of teachers college, and she sought boys because it paid something like $60 a year more when she first. started at the turn of the century. That is the 20th century. Yeah, the 20th, turn of the 20th century. Wow. Wow. Okay, so, yeah, your father was an engineer, and your mother taught math, you say. Yes. So they both had a sort of a scientific or at least, you know, interest in science or math. Did that, did that, I mean, did your interest in science grow out of talking to them or, or reading books or what? mostly I was self from a self-motivated

I guess they didn't try to push me into anything my father had started and was successful in the start of the business and was successful until he had a heart attack in June 1939 and then he started up again after a few years carried on his business out of our home in Far Rockaway. And having built this successful business, he was sort of, I think, he never voiced it,

but I felt that he would have wanted me to take over the business, but he realized that a business wasn't for me. Oh, that's good. Well, that's great. I mean, at least he realized that. A lot of parents never do that. So that's great. Okay.

So you were self-motivated, but where did the, I mean, you must have had some exposure to science. Brooklyn Tech, I assume, is a technical school, so you'd already decided you, that was your bent. Did that arise naturally? Did you play with radios or did you play with chemistry sets or did you read books or what got you? What, something must have helped, not just motivate. In my area, none of my friends was interested. science. It was only me. So it was almost all books. Okay, all books by scientists, but do you any, I mean, any that you read that you remember or anything? Yeah, I remember quite a few that I read.

I read all in a bar back of a public library. Yeah, great. Public libraries are wonderful. So you read books, that's what motivated. Do you have good teachers or that would help? In elementary school, not so much. In high school, there used to be very good teachers at Brooklyn Tech, but I went to high school during the Second World War. And all the really good teachers were offered various war places. Yeah, oh, I see it to work. Ah. Okay, so you were high school student during the war? Okay. But the point is, at Brooklyn Tech, I met a lot of lot of students who were interested in science. Yeah, that, and that here's a stimulation from fellow students that. Was that a revelation? Was that scary? Was that fun? Did you, I mean, I assume you were one of the

one of the better students, if not the best student in your elementary school in science or whatever, and math, maybe. When you went to Brooklyn Tech, did you suddenly discover people who were as good as you, or was that a good thing, or was that a challenge or fun? Well, I guess it was a challenge. I finished first in my class of 800 students at Brooklyn Tech. Wow. Okay. That was a challenge. Okay.

And I managed in just the last term to catch up. It was the first term at Brooklyn Tech. I was sick at the end of the term and missed my finals. Oh, wow. I took makeups, but they weren't counted. Oh, really? Yeah. So I was 26th in my class at the end of the first term.

And I worked myself up, and the last term, I went ahead by 0.07 points. Okay. And at first, okay. Well, it's nice to know you remember that. My father felt I peaked too quickly. You thought that my peaking too quickly was not a good thing. Interesting. Wow.

And so instead of being so excited, he said this is, yeah, it's too early. Wow, that's interesting. Well, that's, okay. Now, why, why Cornell? The word begins with a G. Is it, was it, is it a mutual friend of ours or no? No, gee. Oh, a girl, a girl, of course.

Girls, girl. Oh, were there were girls in Brooklyn Tech? All boys. Didn't have girls. I graduated in 47. The first graduating class of girls at Brooklyn Tech was 1976. Holy mackerel. Wow.

So all boys. So there was nothing to do but work when you were at Brooklyn Tech. I see. Okay. Well, I traveled a lot. I got home at a quarter to five in the afternoon. And I had to go to bed at nine o'clock. Yeah.

So, yeah. So between the train and all boys. it was all working no play for you at high school no I played outside actually I got home 430 and I played outside till 6 yeah till it got to till dinner time yeah I know that story for myself then you get home you go outside you don't come back till dinner's called that was a good life then yep yeah I had no complaints you know yeah it's wonderful you said you always seem to me a very happy man

and that's a wonderful thing. Now, but, okay, Cornell had girls, but it wasn't the only place that had girls. So why Cornell? Was it, I mean, it's true. I guess it was one of the few, at that time, maybe it was one of the few schools. Is it an Ivy?

I don't know. I can't remember. It's Cornell one of the Ivy League. Is Cornell the Ivy? So was the only Ivy that had girls? Well, I didn't know about Radcliffe. I was very ignorant. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. I knew nothing about. colleges. And the college advisor at Brooklyn Tech, they had one such person for 800 students. And I never even saw the guy. Yeah, I don't think they had any in my high school. Yeah, no, I know what you mean. I mean, I didn't know what, when I went to, I had no idea. I just chose the city I wanted to live in. But my father sent away for the application to MIT. but I knew that there were once I thought there were no girls at MIT I wasn't interested I never filled out the application

I thought the same about Harvard I didn't know about Radcliffe Yeah okay yeah but okay Well it's nice to know you had your priorities straight And so the irony of it was When I got to Cornell there were six boys to every girl. Yeah, and half the boys were old enough to be my father.

Because of the work. Because they were returning from the Second World War. Oh, okay. Oh, this is fascinating. Oh, this is great. Okay, but the other irony was, Cornell, in terms of science at that time, you know, Cornell was a very exciting place. and it was good to and oh you also had

yeah Feynman and Beto as professors but also and Philip Morrison and also didn't at the time you were there around the time you were there there were two very good other very good students but I don't know if they were let's see they would have been after you I guess I mean Shelley Glashow and Steve Weinberg went to Cornell yes they did but they were three years behind me so I didn't know them because I I graduated in three years.

Oh, you graduated in three years? We didn't overlap at all. Oh, I thought. I was wondering when you first met them, when you first met Shelley. Okay, it was much later. I met Shelley when he came to Harvard in 1954. Wow. I've known him ever since. Wow.

Okay. Yeah. No, I figured you probably knew each other in school. Okay. No. So, in your class, any other people who became scientists that I would know in Cornel? No one that you would know. No, I don't know when you became scientists that were notable among my contemporaries.

Okay. You did that. You didn't meet your wife at Cornell or anything, did you? I didn't go out with a single undergraduate girl except the first week when the returning students hadn't come yet. And then you were of no interest. I had one day. One day. Next time I saw her, she was with someone who had been a returning veteran who looked old enough to be my father.

Okay. So Cornell was a total bust for me. Well, it's okay. The preparation was good and you had some good. I made up for it. I became a really good ping pong player, although I was already pretty good. Oh, okay. Do you still play ping pong?

Yeah. Not much anymore. Another thing I've never done with you. All these things, I'm learning. Do you play ping pong? I like ping pong. Yeah, yeah, I like ping pong. We used to have a ping pong table when I was a kid,

and when I go to friends' houses that had one, I like pink. It's a guy. I really like it. It's a good game. I was really pretty good. I played the best players in the United States. But you never played any of the Chinese players. I bet the guys who stand, like, 20 feet behind the table.

Yeah. The modern game, it's much different. game now. Yeah. Yeah, much different. I mean, it's amazing to watch. It's really quite a, quite a game. My main achievement as a ping pong player was beating the U.S. women's champion two games

out of three, starting with the 15-point spot. Oh, 15, really? Wow, this is like Bobby Riggs or whatever. Do you remember that thing with, what was his name? That famous grudge match with him and, you know. what the female tennis player's name, I forgot. Billy Jean King. Billy Jean King, yeah, it was a movie made about it.

Yeah, that's right. No movie made about your grudge match in ping pong. No, no. I played the top men's play, the top two men's players. I got a total, I played them each one game. I got a total of one point. Okay, okay. Okay. Well, anyway.

The difference, let me just tell you the difference. The men hit incredibly hard. Yeah. I couldn't play with them. But the women didn't hit so hard, but they were very steady. Oh, okay. That was the big difference. Okay.

Well, I'm glad your career didn't go in that direction. Anyway. But you went from Cornell to Harvard. And by then you knew about, you know, you wanted to go to Harvard. Why did you choose Harvard? I didn't tell you why I graduated in three years. Yeah, okay, good. Tell me that.

I assume you got a good preparation from Brooklyn Tech, but maybe that's not a Very good, very good. And I took more courses than were allowed. I had to argue with the people in the administration at Cornell. My argument was if I have a 10 o'clock class and a 12 o'clock, class. I'm not going to do anything culturally at 11, so I want to take 11 o'clock class, too. This was the sort of arguments I had with the administration at Cornell. But the real reason, to be honest about it, was when most kids of my generation were elementary school, they were skipped.

Yeah. Yeah, and I had never skipped. Oh, okay, I skipped. I found out 40 years later how that happened. Oh, why? Well, okay. Your mother. 40 years later, someone organized a reunion for kids of my class and a few years around it. And I went, and this person put out a little booklet ahead of time with all vital information of all these people who were going to come to this reunion. And I noticed something that those who were skipped. to my new all had birthdays before

July 1 and no one who had a birthday after July 1 was skipped oh interesting oh well I can understand I mean my daughter I had the same thing you know there's developmental

ages intellectual age but there's developmental ages in terms of social skills and so there are arguments both ways I mean I skipped a grade and I probably wasn't socially sure enough to do that, but I did it anyway. But I was in May, so maybe that's what was allowed, and my brother did. He was April, so maybe, maybe there was that rule generally, I guess, that they felt

they even were. I don't know any more than I just told you. Okay, so you made up for it. Yeah, you made up for a year by taking, by skipping the, by graduating three years from Cornell. Okay. I did the opposite. Why did I go to Harvard?

Yeah. Well, I applied to four schools. I applied to Columbia because my parents really wanted me to be closer to home because I was an only child and they were getting older. And I applied to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Okay. Nice set. Princeton rejected me. Okay.

They were not exactly accepted. of Jews in that year. They nearly didn't take Feynman. They didn't even allow him to grapard school. Specifically, they had to find out he wasn't too Jewish. They wrote his professor, I think Philip Morris or whatever it was at MIT had to write a letter saying he wasn't very Jewish. Anyway, it's really amazing.

Anyway. And so the reason I didn't go to Columbia is I visited the schools. And in Columbia, every graduate student, barring none, told me not to come to Colombia. Wow. Why? And why was that? Yeah. Was in those days, those graduate students were kept for nine, ten years as slaves of their professors.

Oh, interesting. And they all were very resentful of that. Huh. That's fascinating. Wow, because Columbia had some great rabbi and it had some great physics, scientists. Yeah. So they told you not to go. Yep, so I didn't.

Okay. And then Yale? I told my parents, no, this. I'm not going to. Did they accept you? Yes. Good. You didn't go there.

Harvard is better than Yale. That's what I thought. Yeah. Then better. I went from Yale to Harvard, as you may remember. I was in Harvard with you, but then I moved to become professor of Yale. It was the difference with the two for me was obvious. And I moved to Yale.

Anyway. So that's the story. Huh. Well, okay. Well, you're better than, you know, I did this. By the way, I shouldn't, I know I'm not supposed to talk about me, but I can't help with you. Why not? When I was graduate student, I was a graduate and undergraduate in Canada, I didn't know any.

I applied to the major American universities. And, you know, MIT, Harvard, for me, was Caltech, maybe Stanford and Princeton. And my safe school was Cornell. That's the reason I wanted to mention you, because I had two professors when I was undergraduate work from Cornell. And I figured, oh, well, that was a shoe-in because I was the best student as an undergraduate. And amazingly, I didn't get into Cornell.

So many professors had to actually, and I ended up going to MIT. And the reason was it really easy for me because I didn't get accepted anywhere but MIT. Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think I know why I was, I didn't know anything about the American system and these tests you had to take and all that other stuff because I grew up in Canada. Anyway, I was lucky.

I was happy to get in MIT and it turned out well and then moved down the river to Harvard later. Okay, enough about me and people will complain about that. Who's going to complain about that? You know, this is to talk about you and not me. Anyway, so you, when did you start at Harvard? What year do you remember? 1950, September. And you grad, you must have graduated by 54, so that was a fairly fast Ph.D.

Not quite. Oh, okay. I started working at Lincoln Laboratory in June, 1954, to avoid being drafted into the Korean War. Oh. Ah. But you were still working your PhD. I'm still finishing writing up my

PhD. Being a student wouldn't have kept you out of the war? It did up till then. But my draft board was a little bit miffed. They said I was the only one who hadn't been

drafted other than for 4F or going to medical school. And so I went to Lincoln Laboratory, and I wasn't there two weeks when the assistant director went down with me to my draft board and leaving how essential I was to the defense of the United States. Oh, wow. Okay, yeah, because Lincoln, people not realize at Lincoln Lab. I was wondering why I ended up at Lincoln Lab. But when I came back to Lincoln Lab, they called me indispensable Irwin.

Yes, because people may not realize Lincoln Labs is a long history of defense-related work. But that's why it was established in the first place. Yeah, sure, exactly. Was established during the war? No. Before the war? No, after the war.

After the war, but it was established after the government finally started spending money on physics research and, you know, big science began. Okay, yeah. Oh, okay. Now, before we get to Ligelab, did you choose it specifically because that would keep you out of the war? Or wasn't the science associated with it? It was purely to keep out of becoming canon fodder, which didn't interest me at all. Okay, that's a good choice.

But now, let's see, let's go back to Harvard. You were interested in Harvard, And you met Shelley then. I guess he was a graduate student around that time or he'd come. No, I didn't meet him until after I left, but I still had friends in the physics department and I hung out with them. Okay, because I forget when he was, well, his thesis was, yeah, he was late 50s, I guess, graduate student. Right. He started in 54. Okay. Okay. This one I left. Okay. You keep missing him by, you know, graduating just before.

meeting. We became friendly. Yeah, no, I know. I mean, when he was in law. You managed to get out in time, and as a graduate student, you managed to get out in time just before you could meet him. Yes, but I remained in Cambridge as opposed to Romanian. Yeah.

As one does. As one does. I know what that's like, having done that. So, but you, there were a lot of, there were Schwinger, there were a lot of interesting people at at Harvard, and you were doing nuclear physics? What did you go do? Because your thesis is on high energy, is it nuclear, high energy,

nuclear scattering? Scattering theory. Yeah. So theoretical physics, what was your interest at the time? What did you think you wanted to do? I didn't really know. I didn't have any driving ambition then. Okay, but, but I had a social, I had a social relation that didn't work out. Oh, okay. Well, that happens. Okay. It sounds like that's affecting a lot of your career early on. But, you know, a nuclear physics was kind of forefront, the more sort of sexiest area at the time of, I suppose, before particle, I mean, before it became particle physics. Is that the reason you, I mean, what led you to what you were working on? I mean, you could have worked on anything. Why that? because I chose Roy to be my thesis advisor. Okay.

So this was... Shwea was a little forbidding. Yeah, very forbidding. And he was going on sabbatical the year I was going to start a thesis. Okay. So I did not choose him as an advisor. I chose Roy. He was sort of one of the boys at that time.

Okay, this was which Roy? Glober. It was Roy Glover. Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. I was his first student. You were his first student. Yeah, he was a child wonderkin as Roy.

And then, of course, hosted for a while. And anyway, many, many years later, won the Nobel Prize. But he did a lot of work early on. 2005. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, I was, when I was at Harvard, he still had an office, but most of us didn't appreciate what he'd done at the time. I see. Anyway, as sometimes happens. But he was Wonderkinn in early, in, I guess, nonlinear optics and scattering and things like that, right? And you were his first student. I didn't know that. Okay. Interesting. So scattering theory is what, so theoretical physics. I had a, I had a strange role in his winning the Nobel Prize. Oh, okay. I'm happy to do for that. I taught a course in the

1957 at BU, a graduate course in statistical mechanics. I knew nothing about statistical mechanics at that time. And in fact, Shelley Glashow's cousin was in my class. Okay. Whose name was Sheldon Lee, I've forgotten his last name, which is just like Sheldon. Yeah, exactly, yeah. But anyway, Roy. I didn't know any statistical mechanics, and the fact that I then knew some statistical mechanics, and he didn't, was something he couldn't live with.

So he learned statistical mechanics, and that's how he got into quantum optics. Oh, really? Wow. Okay, that's okay. So these are great stories. Okay, great. So you primarily just picked Glover. He was the young Wonderkin. He was interesting. scattering theory was kind of in vogue at the time, of course. And you had no ambitions in particular in that area. It wasn't as if you wanted to go into particle physics or anything. I didn't have any particular. My father died at that time as well, which really had a big effect on me in many ways. Because I was an only child.

So I had to take care of my mother. I went back to New York every week for over a year. Every weekend I drive to New York. Wow. So I really wasn't doing much in the way of physics at a critical period, what should have been a critical period in my physics learning. Wow. Okay.

Well, you managed to do enough to get a job at Lincoln Labs. But then I must admit, you're, not your CV because I haven't read it, but when I read about you, there's a gap between 1954 and 1967. And I don't know what you did then. I don't remember much either. Well, I know I don't work in 1965, but I mean the 54, you had like a staff position at Lincoln Labs. Yes. Doing what? other than getting out of the war.

I was working on radar stuff. Is that what got you interested in radar? Is that where you learned about radar? Because that radar became important. I mean, part of big part of your career. Yes, radar astronomy. Yeah. I was one of the original people thinking in those terms.

Okay, this is what I want to get to now, the science. So you learned about radar in the sense of it was a defense thing in Lincoln Labs. It's a staff position, not a faculty possession, but a research position, right? Yeah, but there were no faculty at Lincoln Live. Yeah, no faculty in a little bit. And then how did you go from there? So your interest, how did you go from there to being interested in radar astronomy?

And when did you move into the faculty? So, okay. That's a big question. I know, so go ahead. You got all the time in the world. But I wouldn't say that. An hour and 12 minutes, maybe. Okay.

I did some work, theoretical work. There was no great importance on distinguishing clutter with radar. If you use radar and people want to confuse you, they send up clutter. So how can you use the radar signal to distinguish clutter? And I worked on that. And then there was a summer meeting in 1955. at Lincoln Lab, where I was invited to be a member of the study, and what was the study about how to defend the country against intercontinental ballistic missiles?

And that's, so in that study, I taught myself celestial mechanics. Oh. Oh. And I worked and essentially wrote a book on, what was it called? It's my first book. I swore I'd never ever write another one. Well, the prediction of ballistic missile trajectories from radar observations. Oh.

Can you imagine a sexier title of a book than that? Yeah, wow. Okay, that's hot off the presses. Sure, it's sold many copies. McGraw-Hill published it, and it sold very well in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union? Oh, interesting. They translated it, redrew the figures, and published it.

Oh, fascinating. And I was told that I have a bank account, or I had a bank account from, royalties in Moscow. But the trouble was I had gone to Moscow before I knew about this, and I never went again. So I have no idea whether I really had anything there or not. But, yeah, that's fascinating. And there were no, at the time, no embargoes on that kind of, or maybe there were, I don't know, on that kind of, on things that had potential security ramifications being published in Russia, I guess. Well, they, the Russians did this without permission.

Oh, without, okay, as they did a lot of things then. Okay, so they translated books without permission. Yeah. Just like we did, I mean, you know, there were some great Russian books. I remember that were translated without permission. Russian, you know, we'd get soft cover copies when I was a student or a postdoc or something of some old Russian, you know, great Russian books and physics. And you'd get pirated versions of them before they became legal and came out.

I see they did that without permission. Okay. Well, as someone... As well as I did the reverse. Did you ever hear of Kinschen? Yeah. Russian physicist? Yeah.

He wrote a book on more or less statistical mechanics, and I wanted to read it because I was interested in those days. Yeah. And I knew no Russian, but do you know Wendell Furry? Yeah, Wendell Furry? Yeah, Wendell Furry, yes, of course.

He knew Russian really well. So I got him to translate the book, and I got it published in this country, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, that's another interesting story. Well, okay. Well, your area of research, of course, later on, as you know, I don't know if you knew, that I was chairman of the board of the Bulte the Atomic Scientists for a decade. No, I don't.

I did. to this moment. It's okay. I helped determine the tombstay clock every year and unveil it. And some of my heroes from MIT and other places and Cornell had been involved in that. And when I was a student, seeing senior physicists who were interested in that issue

and willing to talk about, Phil Morrison and others, made a big impact on me. So it was a great honor when I eventually did that for a while. But anyway, ballistic missiles. Decades a long time. Yeah, it was a long time. Yeah. Anyway, that got me into Project Westford. Okay. After I got that book published on whose proofs I worked on my honeymoon.

Oh, really? Well, you finally met a girl. It was nice. I'm glad you finally met a girl. Well, I'd had an unfortunate relationship for the previous eight years. Oh, okay. That held you back. But then in 1959, October 7th, well, I could go into the details, I met my future wife, proposed to her 10 days later, no, seven days later. Holy mackle. She accepted in three days. We married two months later.

Wow. And we just celebrated our 64th anniversary yesterday. Wow, that's just such a lovely story. Irwin. Well, clearly you waited and you waited for the right one. Absolutely. How wonderful is that? That's really wonderful. I must admit. We're both

just as much in love as we were then. Oh, Irwin. You always make me feel better about being human. That's great. Thank you. It's good to hear it. And we produced two children. They've had five, and our youngest grandchild just got married in September. So the next stop for us is a grandchildren.

Yeah, yeah, great-grandchildren. I'm sorry, great-grandchildren. My mother who died when she was 100 had great-grandchildren. Yeah. Say again? My mother died a few years ago when she was 100. She moved in with us, and she had great-grandchildren, a great joy to her. Very nice.

And I will reveal, I think I haven't revealed in public that I think I'm about to become a grandfather, which was amazing to me. You're going to be grandfather? Finally, I think so. I never thought it would happen, but it looks like it might. No, that's great. I'm looking forward to it. I've wanted to be a grandparent for a long time. Oh, grandchildren are just magnificent. They're the best. You can let them go with them. You play with them, and then they go home. I don't want them to go home. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm looking forward to them.

Well, okay, let's get back to science, though. So much as I like here or the rest. Yeah, let me continue. So after that summer meeting, which I, got into ballistic missile trajectories. Then in 1959, there was a summer study of which I think it was on the Woods Hole, but I'm not positive. There was a person from Lincoln Lab, Walter Morrow,

and a person from TRW who got together and were, they were tasked with it's secure communications, military communications. And they came up with the idea of creating an artificial ionosphere by orbiting microwave dipoles into orbit and using them as an unjammable... What do I want to say? medium that we could use

to communicate radio-wise from one part of the world to the next. Oh, wow. Okay. And that was first known as Project Needles.

These were each about this long and look like needles. And about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. And they were going to launch, or the idea was to launch about 450 million or so of them to form a belt around the earth.

That sounds amusing, but not practical, but... Well, that occupied five years of my life. Oh, really? Wow. I discovered radiation pressure resonances. Oh, okay. Solar radiation pressure. Yeah, sure. And the idea was to bring the dipoles down by solar radiation.

Oh, I see. Wow. You launch them into a solar radiation pressure, where there would be an orbital resonance, and they'd get pushed down continuously. And I became somewhat famous for that. I pointed out, did you ever hear the echo balloon? Fagely, tell me.

This 100-foot diameter balloon that was launched by AT&T, as a passive reflector of radio waves. Oh, okay. It was launched around 1960, just about the time this project Westford was getting underway. And I calculated that its erogy would oscillate with something like an 800-kilometer variation, amplitude. Because I published papers in Science magazine

showing the results of our calculations. What would cause it, the pressure? What would cause it to oscillate in parity? The radiation pressure. Radiation pressure, I was wondering. The radiation pressure would be most important for high area to mass ratio objects. Yes, sure.

Yes. And for a hundred foot balloon very thin, it was important. Yeah, sure. And I try to convince people of the importance. of this, and it was amazing the kind of objections I got from people in positions where they should have known better. But be that as it may, I calculated with one other person from Lincoln Lab, Harrison Milus Jones, if you believe it. Sounds plausible. He wrote the program. I was not a programmer. He wrote the program. I was not a programmer. He wrote the program.

which was called KGL 9. KGL 9. I still remember the name, but I don't remember what the letter stood for, or the nine. But anyway, so we gave presentations in front of Jerry Wiesner and so forth, and Ed Purcell, who was a government advisor at that time, because this became a very hot international controversy, this Dipol project. Okay.

There were a lot of people, especially in England, who were saying that astronomy would be destroyed. Yeah, yeah, no. If we did this experiment where the lifetime, as I calculated, would be about three years. I was wondering how long they would stay in orbit. So I was going to ask how long. So three years?

That was the orbit that we selected. You know, it's interesting. I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but I hear echoes or antecedents of discussions about geoengineering. Very similar thing. One country geoengineering, you know, to fight climate change, where people talk about sending aerosols into space, and the idea is that one country can have a huge effect,

but these things last about a year, the aerosol. So, but your thing would have been, you know, and people are worried about Starlink now, I would imagine those needles would have, wouldn't they have had a huge effect on other communication and anything else that we have nowadays? No? In the event, the people complaining the most couldn't even detect the dipoles when they were in their most dense form. Oh, really? Wow.

It was a long, a long history. I got stopped or I was in the subway in London. It was once. And it was full, so I was standing. And I noticed the young man sitting in front of me was reading a book on matrices. So how often do you see that? He was reading a book on matrices. Oh, okay.

Yeah, you don't see that. You don't see that very often. So I started talking to him. So he asked me what I was doing. you know, and I was rather vague, and he kept pushing and pushing until I told him I was working on this project, you know, was then Project Westford. And he was outraged that anyone would do such a thing. So he got off at my stop, not his, to continue the argument with me. Oh, wow.

This gives you an illustration of how emotionally charged this project that was working on was. Remarkable. I didn't know about it. So this is fascinating to me. Okay. In the end, in the end, the dipoles came down. The measurements of them coming down were less accurate than my predictions. I predicted spot on. Oh, really? Good for you. And the probability of detecting, of finding one after they came down, was very low and none has ever been found. Yes, worse than a needle in the east act. It's a needle in the earth. They would survive coming out of orbit because they would slow down because of the high area to mass ratio. And they wouldn't melt before that.

They had high area to mass? I thought you said they were little needles. I would have thought they'd be able to. Are they still at high area to mass? because they have such a small diameter. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Interesting. Anyway, during the time this was a hot topic,

a guy in England, what the hell was his name? It just slips my mind. But this guy in England, who was a celestial mechanic and fairly well-respected, calculated that the resonance wouldn't work, that these would stay up essentially forever. So I had to arrange a transcontinental call for me to speak to him

because that would have been at the end of the project if he were right. Yeah. So it took me five minutes to figure out what he did wrong. What he assumed was that the inclination of these dipoles, the inclination angle would remain constant. and that's wrong. As part of the resonance, the inclination has to change, and it does. And it took me five minutes to establish that he had made that incorrect assumption.

And then when he went back and took it into account, he confirmed that I was right, and the project went ahead. But in those days, a transatlantic hole was a big deal. It was a big deal back then. Yeah, yeah, not like now, not the Internet now. It's amazing. Now, did that probably, you say the problem? went ahead. So was it done or no? That was planned? Yes, we did the experiment. It was launched

by the Air Force into this. The full experiment with 450 million of these needles or just a test? 450 million. That was done. The whole thing was done. Yes. Oh. Wow. Now, the way we dispensed them was we had a cylinder, which they were all packed in. And the cylinder, and the cylinder, would spin and the cylinder was suffused with naphthalene. And as the naphthalene evaporated, the dipoles would dispense. Oh, I see. And this was the idea, it was a great idea, but it had one fault. The Air Force didn't dispense this container with the dipoles,

this cylindrical container, until a half hour after. they were supposed to. So the solar angle on this package, instead of being normal to the axis of the dipoles, was at an angle. And so they didn't all come off individually. Many of them came off in clumps. And the clumps had a much lower area to mass ratio, and so did not come down quickly as the individual dipoles were predicted. and did. Oh, I see. So there are still some clumps up there. Great. From 1963 May.

Wow. Okay. Wow. Okay. And so that, did that establish you with, I mean, the success and your work there, is that what kind of made you establish your reputation as a scientist in the field and, well, it made my reputation with Purcell. Uh-huh. Which is important. And he was important in getting me the directorship of the CFA. Later on, really. Because he's, he, the next was the, the relativity experiment. Yeah, we're going to get to relative.

That's how I mean, you have the sheer pair effect and I wanted to get there. I wasn't even aware, I must admit, about this, this work. Although, let's step back before. By the way, we share that. Ed Purcell was essential to my career, too. I mean, Ed Purcell, let's make it clear. He won the Nobel Prize for N.M.R. But he was also one of the most remarkable scientists and human beings.

Every day when I was at Harvard, and he would come and talk to me. We had some ideas together. I would just like, I would want to grow up and be a scientist, just talking to him. He was just so fascinated in ideas and such a charming man. And he was on the Society of Fellows, a Senior Fellow, when I got chosen to be a junior fellow, he was one of the people that chose, so I owe that to him, which is a great privilege. What a wonderful man. As a second-year graduate student, I lived around the corner from him, and he used to walk by,

and we play catch, you know, baseball catch. Oh, really? He was very nice. He was really a sweet man, a very nice man, and highest. Highest integrity of anyone I've ever met. Yeah. Yeah. Very high integrity. Yeah. It was an amazingly unusual thing to find such high integrity, humility, and also such an

amazing accomplishment altogether. Yes. Yeah. We and I know have known many Nobel laureates and other people, and he was certainly, as I say, he was an example of a gentleman and a scholar in a unique way. Yes. I agree. I would feel so lucky to have known him and work with him in a little bit.

Yeah, anyway. But you were, so you, now, you, you did this work for Lincoln Labs, but you didn't go, were you a professor at MIT before you went to Harvard? No, you were always at Lincoln Labs, and you went from Lincoln Labs to directly to becoming the director of the Center for Astrophysics in Harvard. No, you went to. From Lincoln Lab in 1966, I was invited to become a full professor at, at, at MIT.

Oh, okay. And I had to choose a department. Yeah. And I chose two departments. Physics where I was a little distrustful of Weissop, who was then chair. Interesting. And Earth and Planetary Sciences. That's what I thought, Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Which I chose as my primary department because I found Frank Press less, less, How shall I put it? I trusted him more. Wow. See, I would be the opposite. I would have trusted Vicki Weisscott more than Frank Fresno. Well, anyway, it's interesting. I might have changed my mind later, but this was my initial impression.

And what year was that? 1960. What year? The end of 1966. Because for some reason I knew of you from the Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT. and I knew that. Maybe you told me, I don't know how I knew that about you, but that always struck me as weird,

because I knew, of course, of your work in general relativity and other work in radio astronomy, but I didn't know about interest in Earth and planetary sciences, and then I looked up and I noticed, you know, you did a lot of work with your radar work on the interior motion of the Earth and all of that around that time. So you did have a, your research was relevant to the Earth. Well, it was my original idea in 1966 when I first heard of the possibility of VLBI.

I didn't think of that myself, but I heard about it, and I immediately thought of several applications. One was to measure the contemporary plate motions on the earth. But let's step back for a second for the public and say what VLBI is, very long. long baseline. Oh, very long baseline interferometry. Which would allow you basically, long baseline would give you great resolution, I guess, to see. Angular resolution. Yeah, great angular resolution. Yeah. And what we could do without going into the details, what I realize, we could look at quasas, which are essentially fixed point sources on the sky, and use them as references. to determine the distance between antennas on Earth

that we're looking at the same time, at the same sources, one of the time. So you could measure movement of your place. And you could get the distance, three-dimensional distance between the antennas if you looked at enough sources on the sky. You could measure continental drift. You could measure centimeters per year?

Well, what I thought at that time was we could do centimeters per year, when at the time, 100 meters per year was sort of the standard in connecting continents. Yeah, okay. And selling the idea to get support to build test equipment was unbelievably hard because administrators don't want to make a mistake and fund something that's not going to succeed. So they said, show me it'll work. And then we can fund you. And that was the time of the Mansfield Amendment when federal research was supposed to not be basic but only be applied.

Oh, okay. Oh, I see. And so a lot of the money that had been flowing into basic research was halted. So it made it even more difficult, but I fought like a tiger. I thought it would take me three years to measure in the continental drift. It took 18. 18, but you measured it. Now, you know, this is...

I am nothing, if not persistent. Yes, clearly, clearly, which is great. One of the many other features of you that's important. This brings some, this means clarity, because I could never understand, I mean, you were always somewhat of inignity because I thought of you as an observer who used, you know, radio astronomy and to do things. But then the Shapiro effect is a theoretical result. And let's let's go back before we go on and talk because it was 1965. Shapiro effect was 65, right, or 66? No. I had the idea in about 1962. 1962.

1962. I had the idea. Okay, let's go back to what the idea is. And let's point out that this is, you know, there's always new things under the sun. Just when you thought there'd be no new tests of general relativity, that classic tests had been proposed years earlier by different people, sometimes taken back and then, you know,

assume they didn't work and they did work like gravitational waves. But what was discovered was a brand new test of general relativity. which is now known as the Shapiro effect. What got you into it? I just want to get the, I want it for the public to give them the background. Okay. Okay, well,

my memory is not 100%, but as near as I can recall, in about 1961, maybe 1962, I haven't gone back to check. I attended a lecture at MIT on the measurement of the speed of light.

And it was a 10-minute report to the agency, the Air Force, had this report of all the people that funded to do various things. And for some reason, I don't remember, I went. Okay. And I heard this talk, and I remember hearing something about the speed of light. not being constant. And I said, that's strange. I had this one course in 1950, one term course with Bob Carplas. You know Bob Carpius?

Yeah. He was my original advisor at Harvard. Anyway, he had given this course in the spring of 1951 in special and general relativity. and now it was my only contact with the subject until I went to this lecture at 1961 or so. And so I said, that's funny. I always thought the speed of light was constant. So then I looked it up, realized it wasn't,

that this guy in his talk was correct. And I thought then I was thinking in terms of radar astronomy, And I realized, oh, wonder what the effect is on a radar signal to a planet when the planet's on the other side of the sun from the Earth. And I calculated it. It was a couple hundred microseconds. And at that time, radar was at best 10 milliseconds. So you had to go several orders of magnitude more accurate in order to do that. this. So I put the idea in my head and I talked about it a couple of times. I remember once when

Towns was in the audience in Arisebo. I went to Aracibo in the summer of 1964 and Towns was in the audience and I gave the talk. I remember that. And it was still beyond doable. But then in the fall of 1964, Haystack Observatory came into existence, and I realized that with Haystack, there was a problem with Aracibo, in addition to it's not yet being on the air, really. It had two lower frequency and only one frequency so that the solar corona would totally wipe out the so-called Shapiro delay. But Haystack was going to be 18. gigahertz, which was high enough to ignore the solar corona and still measure the Shapiro delay. So I got excited. Now we can do the experiment, except for the fact that we needed a higher

transmitter power than was originally planned for Haystack, which only opened in 1964. And so I went to the director of Lincoln Laboratory. And I'm getting a little ahead of this story, but it doesn't matter. So I'm a little illogical. And asked him if we could get the money to buy a five times higher transmitter than was originally planned for Haystack. And I told him why. and we could do this fourth test of general relativity.

Yeah. And he knew nothing about relativity, but he did know Ed Purcell. Okay. So he consulted Ed Purcell. Ed Purcell said, I don't know anything about general relativity either, but Shapiro has a knack for being correct.

Oh, wow. Wow. That was based on my, Project Westford work with the dike poles. Yeah, that's interesting how one thing leads to another. So the director of Lincoln Laboratory

called up a friend of his in the Air Force in in some place in Ohio. This was just before Christmas and asked him and the guy gave him $500,000 just like that to get this new transmitter. Wow.

And that's What happened? Measureed. Wow. This isn't, I'm so happy we're having this discussion. This history is really neat. Before we go on, I want to, for people, I want to, I forgot one important thing. Okay, good.

I want to go back and fill in. I hadn't published this idea for the fourth test because it wasn't practical. Oh, so you want, okay, so you want to wait until it was practical. But then in the fall, when I, when I found out about, hey, stack and all that was practical already. My son was born, my first child. And those days, they kept the wife in the hospital for days. So I was home alone.

And I wrote up the paper in the few days that my wife was in the hospital and submitted it to physical reviews. Thanks for your son being born. Wow. Well, I have a friend of mine who used to always write long papers when his son was children were born, the two of them, because he was up all night long anyway. He was a theory, so he did the calculation. Anyway, he's a Caltechner. But this is a great story, but I think for many people who don't know anything about the Schubert effect, I want

to step back and kind of do a little explanation of what it's all about and what the challenge was. So I'll fill in a little bit, and you can add if you want. But the idea is really, you know, I never thought of the Shapiro effect in those terms until I read a recent, In the anticipation of talking to you, I read your review of general relativity, a century of relativity. And I'd never thought of it in those terms, but when you think about it and those terms is kind of obvious, it's not obvious until you do. But as I think I've talked about in a variety of stages, what Einstein general relativity tells you is that clocks not only depend upon their speed, but their position in a gravitational potential. Clocks, and that's the reason clocks slow

down appear to slow down when you fall into a black hole. They appear to slow down and stop and you get the event horizon. And it's what it's used in GPS, as I've talked about often. The GPS devices are up at a higher altitude than we are. Their atomic clocks are ticking at a different rate. So all of this is true. So the point, the Shapirov Act is really the fact that while locally, of course, everything is moving at the speed of light, if you measured it locally, globally. Not everything is moving at the speed of light. Only light. Yeah, I was going to say light. I'm not everything. But light, thank you. Light is always traveling the speed of light locally,

but because the clocks are affected by the gravitational potential, the time it takes for light to get from A to B is different because it's traveling in a region where literally the clock where time is slowing down or whatever, speeding up. And so that's the effect. It's a, additional effect. It's not a distance effect. It's not just that lights bending. It's that it's actually traving in a reputation potential. And that's really a profoundly important and interesting results. And then, well, the effect of the path like the second order. Yeah, exactly. Second order was the Shapiro effect isn't. And it's a, and it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big effect. In fact,

I will, I will mention something I mentioned you before we started, we've started recording. I I've written a number of papers in my life that used it. But one that surprised me was in 1987, there was a supernova, and neutrinos were measured from the supernova first time. And it was a big deal. 1987A. Yeah, 1987A. And it was a big deal.

There were millions of papers written about neutrinos, some of which I wrote, on using the fact that you could measure their mass, because if they had a mass, they wouldn't quite be traveling to speed of light. you might see some kind of time delay on the order of seconds, because these neutrinos are coming from the large magic cloud clouds. And then one day I was in a meeting with Scott Tremaine, who's out the Institute of Advanced Study. And we realized we were talking, realized that, well,

but what about the gravitational time delay from these neutrinos that be going through our galaxy where there's a gravitational potential and did a back of the envelope estimate and discovered that the Shapiro effect was months? It's one of these cases where the general relativistic time delay is huge compared to the special relativistic. And we're able to use that to put a constraint on general relativity into treatise of photons. I was very pleased to be able to use the Shapiro effect. But it's this extra effect.

It's a really important thing. Now, just also, the last time I'll try and introduce myself, what was that? By the way, where did the name Shapiro effect come from? Oh, good. Tell me. Kip Thorne Kip Thorne was the one who called it that Really? Interesting

Well, good for Kip He's a good guy And I don't know this for sure But I think it's because He realized That the guy who was then at JPL Dewey Muleman Had tried to claim credit

For the Fourth Test When he actually stole it from me Oh, okay, there you go That's another story Yeah, okay. Well, I was going to talk about, yeah. Well, I may get to an, there are a few evil people in science. We may get to another one that's relevant to you and me, but not an only obliqually. Also, you know Bob Jastro. Yeah, I know, I know. I mean, I knew of him, yeah. He did something to me that was unbelievable. Okay. Do we want to talk about it? Okay, yes. Okay. I'll tell you that story now if you want or later if you'd prefer it.

Let's talk about it later because we may share stories of evil people we know from science. Okay. One of them relates to you, as you well known. I would have quit. I'll make it quite clear. I made it clear. I almost quit the field because of an awful senior scientist who were, and you were the one who convinced me that wasn't my problem. It wasn't my fault.

And I'll always be forever grateful. I was in a quandary and no one would really help. And I went to see you. I was at Harvard as a postdoc, a junior fellow, and went to see you. because we talk often and at the Center for Astrophysics. And you helped me understand that really what this problem wasn't my, I mean, it was my problem, but it wasn't due to me. And that made a huge impact. Have a senior person help you when you're a junior person give you the kind of emotional support is incredibly important. And I certainly tried to do that in my life. But I've

always appreciated Irwin and I're eternally grateful to you for that. But in the case, let's get back to the Shapiro effect, because the other thing you mentioned that I just, want to reveal for people, explain for people, and then I'll try and stop my monologue. You talked about the corona effect, and this is relevant for me in another paper. I learned about it in another paper I wrote related to you, but the point is that light actually doesn't always travel light speed either. We both lied, because if your light is going through a region with a lot of charged particles, there's an index of refraction, and light actually slows down. So, if you're looking for the Shapiro effect, you've got to make sure you're not fooled by the fact

that there are charged particles there, because that will, that will, could mimic or overwhelm the Shapiro effect. And indeed, as I say, I learned that in one, there was looking at, but the key point is that the Shapiro effect is not wavelength dependence. Exactly. But the charged particle effect depends very sensitively on the wavelength. Exactly. And that's why Haystack, That's I wanted to put in perspective as people would realize that haystack was a different frequency. So, of course, the sun is surrounded by charged particles.

And so in a one frequency domain, there's no way you could ever possibly measure this gravitational time blight. But your point was that at the 8 gigahertz, that the coronal effect, the effect of index or fraction would go way down and you'd now be able to measure the effect.

I wanted to give people that background so they'd understand the words you use. Let's give them this, Aricebo was at 430 megahertz, which is roughly one 400th the effect of plasma. I'm sorry, 400 times the effect of plasma at haystack. Yeah. So the plasma is what causes this index fraction and Erecebo was 400 times more sensitive. So I just want to give people that background so they can understand the sentences you said earlier and understand why you're excited by Haystack. Now let me ask you something, though. So I,

I thought of you as an observer and sort of an experimental observer, but your background is theory, right? But you got involved in an observation, so how did that transition take place? Very naturally. I just thought of good experiments to do. It's not that I was the experimenter. I didn't invent any of the technology for VLBI, for example. I just thought of how to use it. Okay, and then you worked with people who did that.

Okay. It's wonderful. Also on the software. On the software as well. Yeah, I mean, I proposed experiments throughout my life. I should be more clear. I didn't do any programming my life since the mid-50s. Okay.

1950s. But I did do the analytics. Okay, yeah. So that's the way I contributed to the software. was through the analytics, not through actually writing code. And sociologically, it's an interesting little bit of the history of science. This whole talk has been a wonderful bit of history of science, so I think it'll be fascinating to people.

It's fascinating to me, which is all that really matters to me. But you were working in a field, which is also important to realize. I proposed experiments a lot when I was, and through my career, but by the time the field I worked in where experimentalists and theorists had huge amounts of intellectual baggage and experiments were done by experimenters and theory was done by theorists.

But the field that you were in was not, I mean, you could cross boundaries. I mean, the experiments were the level and they weren't 3,000 people working on it. So it was able, you were able in that sociological field of radio astronomy to be able to have that fruitful interaction, between experimenters and theorists that that doesn't so that I mean you know you could be one and

the same you can be part of the same collaboration where now it's in experimenters do one thing and theorists to another and near the twain shall meet at least in particle physics if you notice that I mean was it do you miss that kind of era of people of small-scale experiments having an idea you know over Christmas and then being able to do the experiment and get a result and not wait 10 years although for you know for some of your experiments you had to. That reminds me of my biggest triumph, from idea to a published paper with results from the idea in only six months. Six months. Wow. What was that? There were people who thought that the charge in the upper ionosphere, upper reaches of where satellites would go,

where the dipoles in particular was supposed to go, that they would be affected by the fact that they'd become charged and they'd interact with the ionosphere or whatever is above the ionosphere, and that would ruin the lifetime of the dipoles. And I had calculated as well as I could that they would have, this effect would be nil. nil. But saying it would be nil by calculations and proving it was something else. So I had the idea of launching single dipoles the same thickness or reasonably and much longer

so that individual dipoles could be tracked by radar and we could then see with some handful of dipoles whether charged drag had any effect or not. And I was able to get the space on an Air Force satellite that was going to be launched to launch these six separate dipoles

one at a time and we tracked them and we got the data and we published the result in the journal of geophysical research within six months. all within six months. Now, you know, let me ask you a question.

You were Lincoln Labs and... That, by the way, is totally impossible these days. Yeah, exactly. But in the 1960s, it was not only possible it was done. Well, that's what I was going to get at. And I don't know how to say it, but the virtue of being at Lincoln Labs and being a defense-related laboratory, I assume, is, as you said that, your direct head of Lincoln Labs could phone up an Air Force guy and get $500,000. thousand dollars like that. The ability, I mean, the ability to be able to do that is partly because there was a huge amount of money for defense and you were a defense laboratory. And basically,

if you had a good idea, they throw money at it. And it's a rather unique experience and not normal in science. You agree? Yes. So you benefited tremendously, I guess, from that being at Lincoln labs to be able to test out ideas. And also at a good time in history. And also at a good time in history. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, that's, yeah, good timing. Right place at the right time. That's both, both are important. Okay, you moved, but then I was right, you moved in 67 or so to be to MIT as a professor of Earth and space exploration, which is how I knew of you because, yeah, I knew you, you, when I was doing my PhD at MIT, you were still, I didn't know you then, I don't think. Well, I didn't know you. Yeah, well, I was just a graduate student. But, but, but, but, but, um, but, But yeah, you were in Earth and Space Exploration when I was in the physics department. I finished my PhD in 1982 when I moved to Harvard, which happens to, I realize now, be the same year. Isn't that the same year you moved to Harvard? Yes.

We moved together. I didn't know that until just now unless I got. No, no, I didn't know it either. I had never occurred to me because I, because while I moved there in 1982, and I knew of you as I said, for some reason, at the Earth and Space Exploration at MIT when I was a student there. So I'd seen that big, tall building,

and I think I walked in it once or twice. The Green building. The Green building, where people used to jump off it. After the man who paid for it. Of course, always the way. Later on, I gave a lecture, I shouldn't, I'll tell you anyway, I gave a lecture on neutrinos and geophysics

in that building. I remember the Colloquium for the Department of Earth and Space Exploration, I'd never know anything, but when I was at Harvard, I did some work, which I thought showed you could use neutrinos to do geophysics. And I remember when I gave the talk, these people in the geophysics department said, you know, I said, this is an experiment you should do. And they said, when I was in school, people didn't even believe neutrinos existed. And you want me doing an experiment based on? Anyway, but we moved to the same time to Harvard. And I didn't get to know you for a few years, because I was Harvard 82 and 85. And I think it was 83, 84 when I started to do that. You moved anyway.

You moved from Earth and Space Exploration to become the director of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard, right? I moved to Harvard officially in the middle of 1982. Yeah. But the first thing I did was take six months off to clean up all the papers I had accumulated at MIT so I could start with a first slate at Harvard, which I did on January 1, 1983 as director.

Okay, you started 83 as director. And I don't know how come I got to know you so quickly, except you're so lovely. But I had an office of the physics department, but I went all regularly to the Center for Astrophysics and met you. Why did you agree to do that, that administrative job? It's an administrative job, right?

So what caused you to want to shift? That's an interesting question. to which I have an interesting true answer. Oh, good. At just about this time or a little earlier, my daughter was in high school and taking chemistry. And I looked at her chemistry book because I was her father. Yeah, sure.

And I was appalled, absolutely appalled. They had so much detail about things. that my daughter had no knowledge about it all. She didn't even know what a wave was. The only way she and her contemporaries could survive was just to memorize. They couldn't learn anything. It was appalling to me.

So I decided that maybe I should try to contribute something to pre-college science education. Uh-huh. And when I got this offer to be the, director, I said, huh, this may be a good opportunity to do something about science education. Wonderful. What a great reason. That was a large part of my reason for accepting. And I established the science education department at the Center for Astrophysics. Oh, I didn't know you did that. Which is flourished.

Since then. Although I ran into problems at the time when I was, thinking of my daughter's work, I didn't realize how serious they were, how much control publishers have over curricula. Yeah, it's just disgusting. I've been asked to write textbooks and I've given up a few times because it was so clear to me that publishers don't really care. They have a model and that's all they care about and they don't want to. They only care about making money. Yeah, they only care about. Yeah, exactly. They certainly do. That's all they care about. I agree. You know, I wondered, were you involved I used to work for a while with my friend, then friend Leon Letterman,

who preceded me as chair of the board of sponsors, the Boltony Atomic Scientists. But Leon was loving man. Yeah, of course. How could he not know Leon? He was a wonderful man, Rachel Witt. But he spearheaded in Chicago, and I got involved in this in a variety of places. One of the reasons your daughter had problems

and is the fact that they teach science in his most stupid way in high schools. They teach biology first and then chemistry and then physics, when in fact, the logical thing to do is teach physics first because physics is the basis of chemistry, and then teach chemistry because it's the basis of biology. They teach biology first because it's kind of touchy-feely and I think they kind of feel, and it doesn't involve much math and they think it's friendier. But it gives people the impression that it's all memorization because you're right. They learn chemistry. They don't know what energy is or a wave or any of those things, and they have to memorize it. And so people get this awful

distorted view of science as memorization. So Leon spearheaded in Chicago an effort which he was successful in getting them to change the order of the curriculum. I tried in various places. But at CFA, did you guys ever try and get involved in that effort

to switch the order of teaching or no? I don't think so. It's a shame. I'm not sure. I have to ask Phil Sadler. It was my best hire and science education. I remember when he was there. Yeah. Okay, so, so.

I raised the money and then I had to have someone run the program. Yeah. No, it's great to make hires in that way. I remember you tried to convince me to stay in one way or another. It was Project Star, science teaching through its astronomical roots. Okay, there you go. Okay, excellent.

That was my main contribution to the project. with me. Now, I got to ask you another question, which is probably not, no one else cares about but me, but I don't care. When I knew you at the Center for Astrophysics, one of the things I vividly remembered, because it's the Smithsonian, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophic. So that, you had to answer to the Smithsonian as well, which is an important thing to realize. And Smithsonian is in Washington, and you had to go down to Washington all the time. And you never took the plane. You always took the train. My understanding was you didn't, like planes. Do you still not like planes? Let me tell you my plane history. Okay. My wife and I decided to go around

the world before we had children. Oh, nice. So I was invited to give a talk in Paris in May. So we left in March and went the other way. Okay. So we'd end up in Paris and May. Yeah, okay. And we were, our first stop was Hawaii, which was fine. And then our next stop was Tokyo. Oh, okay.

And when we were waiting for the plane in Hawaii, there were a lot of cancellations, a lot of delays. But I didn't think anything of it. And then we got on our plane to go from Hawaii to Japan. And we'd hardly gotten up when the plane started shaking like crazy. And when it was dropping hundreds of feet at a time. And even the officials, you know, the stewardess and such were scared out of their wits. Even the pilots weren't communicating very well with the passengers.

And needless to say, my wife and I weren't feeling very good either. But we got through it and we landed in Guam. In Guam, okay. And I almost didn't get back on the plane. Okay. It was so scary. Yeah, sure. And that made me less than comfortable getting on plane.

Oh, that explains it. Okay. Well, that's nice. Okay, now I know. Now I get on planes, but very rarely. And I'm not so bad anymore. I used to be terrible. Really? Really? Notts. Wow. Even though you knew how they worked, you know. It should. The fact that we made that plane trip safely should have made me feel even safer. Yeah, exactly. It didn't have that psychological effect. Okay. Okay, look, let's try and wind up with talking about the present and future. What amazes, what I love, there's many things I love about you.

But one is that, you know, you can move between these fields. There's Earth, science, and then general relativity and astronomy. And as head of Center for Astrophysics, that must have helped you get a global view of the field because you were leading a very large laboratory, or what do you want to call it, of a lot of different people doing a lot of different things. And so let me just ask you, you know, having had this experience, testing general relativity, and now, of course, gravitational waves have been discovered and actually exist and have been discovered.

What do you see as the big, in the field of astronomy and in all the fields you've worked on, I guess, what do you see as the future? I know I can't predict it reliably. Of course you can't. I tell people I don't predict the future except for two trillion years in the future. When I first, it's easy and secondly, no one will be around to check anyway. But what are the most, let me not say what will happen, but what are the most exciting opportunities you see? Well, I know what you change feels.

So we'll get to that at the very end because you made a major change, which I think is so impressive at the age of 94. which again gives me great hope. But before we get to the new field, and maybe you didn't see any great opportunities, and that's why you changed fields. But what do you think are the most interesting areas? Just out of interest, because you have a long historical perspective. Let me put it that way.

To be very clear, I haven't really sat down and thought about what is the most important thing to do. My guess is it's going to be a surprise. It would be surprised if we learned some new basic physics that changed a lot about how we look at the universe. Or we may discover life elsewhere in the universe. Which I'd love to see happen in my lifetime, but doubt it. Well, you keep going, Nerwin, because I think at least will, I suspect, we might discover the existence

of extinct or extent life in our solar system, not intelligent life, of course, but microbial life, I think. I wouldn't be surprised in Europa or insolades and the oceans of those that we might... We might find evidence of past life on Mars, for example. It's not without possibility.

Yeah, although as... I don't know if you know, I mean, a friend of mine from Harvard, you may know Andy Knoll. Oh, I know him well. Yeah, you know, Andy. I haven't seen him since the pandemic. Yeah. Because I've lived a life of isolation, sure, basically for the last almost four years now.

Well, it's a good thing. You keep doing it because I want you to be healthy. But Andy once convinced me actually when I was writing a book that he, that, you know, and the big thing about life on Mars is if we discover evidence for extinct life on Mars, we won't, it won't be clear. It isn't our cousins. that's the that's the because you know microbial life can make it between the two planets

yes yes that was a revelation for me when I first realized that the 20 years it was about how many years ago any so so life on Mars would be interesting but might not be independent life and insolados or Europa would be independent and that would be a much more interesting discovery okay let's let's not I won't do that that inquisition and I won't I don't think unless you want to talk about the professional one comment

I think the chances of life having originated only on the earth, given that the universe is populated with so many earth-like situations, I find to be incredibly small. I agree with you there. Yeah, absolutely. Although, unfortunately, and you know because you've worked in Ersieobo, while I think it's unbelievably small likelihood that we're the only even intelligent life, much less life,

I also, however, I'm more sanguine. I'm not pretty optimistic that we'll know about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe if it exists. It's just a big universe with a lot of time differences and a lot of space differences. And no matter what some of your colleagues at Harvard may be thinking, they're not visiting us. And so, yeah, I think it's out there,

but I'm not optimistic. I'm not, I guess, a pessimistic. is not the word, but it's a, if we discover life, it tells us to life elsewhere, it'll be luck more than anything else, I think. Good luck, because it could easily exist and we'd never know about it. Just like we could, our brief, what I suspect will be in a cosmic sense, our brief flurry as an technological civilization, you know, we, 100 million years from now, there may be no evidence that we were ever around. Yeah, so anyway, on that optimistic or whatever, on that dreary note, let's go to something more.

Here's another dreary note. Do you really want to talk about that professor who would mean? If you really were eager to give that story, you were talking about someone who was really awful to you. And I interrupted you to mention someone who was awful to me when I, and I didn't want to mention his name now, although he was related to the person. I wouldn't mind telling the story. It still bothers me. Okay, tell it because I think people should realize your sociology. Yeah.

Okay. I had worked out these resonances and solar radiation and had done the calculation on the echo balloon and things like that. And there I am sitting on the toilet looking at Time magazine, and I see an article. in Time magazine by Jastro's disciple talking about the discovery of the importance of radiation pressure on satellite orbits. Oh, I see. And at the same time, within a few days, and I don't remember whether it was before or after,

the paper that I had submitted with Harrison Jones on radiation pressure resonance as screen to Science Magazine, had been rejected. And the review was totally incompetent. There was no basis for rejection at all. Let me guess. The referee wrote a paper, Bill. I was going to guess that the referee who rejected you wrote a paper, their own paper, and submitted it.

Is that what happened? Yes, but how did I find out? Oh, okay. There was a friend of mine from high school, Brooklyn Tech. It was in my first term class in math, whom I kept in touch with Richard Drachman, who became a physicist, worked at Goddard. And he was then at Brandeis for a few months, and I told him this story. And he said, he wouldn't be surprised if Jastrow had stolen this for me as the reviewer. I had no knowledge of Jastrow at all at that time.

Never occurred to me that the reviewer was someone who then went on to publish himself. Then a few weeks later, I was in talking to the librarian at Lincoln Laboratory. I don't remember why I was in there. And I told her this story. because I was friendly with her. And she went to her draw and pulled out the review of our science article. Wow. And who was it by?

Jastro. Jastro. How did she get it? Because Jastro's secretary sent it to Lincoln Laboratory instead of to Science Magazine. Oh, wow. And she had copied it, put it away, and sent the review on to Science Magazine. Oh, wow. Wow.

Isn't that amazing? The nerve of this guy. Yeah. So I called him on it and insisted on an apology and writing in Science Magazine, which he reluctantly gave in a mealy-mouthed way. and the guy who actually worked on the mathematics for Jastro's paper, when he found out from me what happened, he said he would never write another article on solar radiation pressure and never did.

Well, that's honorable. Well, let me say, the resolution was good for you. It doesn't always happen that way. One of the reasons I wanted to let you say the story, besides venting, is, you know, people should realize, as a theorist, you know, the great thing about doing the experiment is no one can take the experiment away from you when it's been done. But if you're a theorist, it's very hard. Ownership of ideas is a very ephemeral thing. And it's very hard to deal with that. Often, it happens to many of us. And at times when, you know, when you talk to someone and then you, so one has to get used to the fact that that it's, that these things are ephemeral.

And you were very lucky in the sense of being able to clearly show that. But it often happens in the field. And it's really hard to give priority to ideas because ideas are, you know, are ephemeral. You can't really often demonstrate ownership of them. As a theorist, it's a very difficult thing. And so as I've grown up and in science, I realize that the virtue of being an experimentalist is that you have something to show, something hard and concrete to show, no one could take away from you. And the person who nearly caused me to leave my career,

who was related to the person, the reason you were at the Earth and Space Department at MIT, Earth and Planetary Sciences. Interesting enough, there were many things that were awful, and I don't want to get into it. But I was amused by one thing. He later on, there was another postdoc who was there, and I had just become an assistant. assistant professor at Yale and was talking to this postdoc and this person is now in the National Academy. And I gave a lecture at Chicago on this idea I was working on with my friend Frank Wilczek. And someone of the audience said, oh, but so-and-so just wrote a paper on that. Who? Well, I wasn't going to mention the names. But someone to the audience said this person

had just written a paper on this. And I was shocked because I just talked to that person about our paper. And later on, when I went back to, I talked to the person after Michael Locum, he was the boyfriend of this person. And he said that this man at the Center for Astrophysics, and I'm not going to mention names, even though he's later on became a very, well, he's a well-known scientist, he told this young postdoc that it was okay for them to steal the idea of someone who was about to be an assistant professor. Postdocs could steal ideas of someone above them, but not below them. That was his rationale for that.

That's the kind of, and it's important to realize that there are, you know, science is a field of scientists. And the science can overcome the biases and the jealousies and all the rest. The science as a field can progress because it's based on testing and skepticism and all the rest. But scientists are human. And the great thing about science is it manages by the scientific method to overcome the vicissitudes and sometimes lack of integrity of individual scientists. Your wife is there. We're almost done. Hello.

I'm leaving, so I'm just going to say goodbye. Hi. Okay. There we go. Their life. And I'm a clearing aid place. Oh, yeah. I want to say, I want to say muscle tough on your recent anniversary.

and we talked about it. I picked a good one. Yeah, you picked a good one. I think so, too. I agree with you. But I think he did too, so you're both lucky. We think so. Good.

It's wonderful. Bye, sweetheart. Oh, I love that. Okay, keep care. Bye-bye. We're almost done, Rowan, but I'm so glad we had that little interaction, too. Which I'm not editing now, by the way. I'm not editing that one out.

That will be here in this podcast. your wife coming in. I'm not editing that out. Oh, oh. Anyway, let me just close. So I thought that was another interesting moral to talk about the fact that scientists sometimes steal things, sometimes. Anyway, just the field, but the field progresses in spite of that. And it's a scientific method that's so important that that's what we should. Anyway, that was my moral.

But what I wanted to go into at the end is you're 94, and now you're working on genetics, Or microbiology? I'm trying to answer a simple question, which can be encapsulated in the following phrase. Why does an onion to DNA have almost seven times as many bases as a human DNA? Okay, it's great. What caused you to know about that? I mean, or to become interested in that problem? That's easy.

The course that I invented at Harvard's request, namely a course for non-scientists, a science course for non-scientists, which I developed at the age of 80, I decided to make it have three parts. I'm dividing three parts. The first part was exploring the universe or looking at the universe, or looking at. up. The second part was the earth and its fossils or looking down. And the third part is the story of life or looking in. Oh, okay. And it's the third part where I had absolutely no basis from prior education since I never took a course in biology, not even in high school, because they didn't offer it in my high school. And mine, it was because it was so boring, I dropped it. It was memorizing the parts of a frog. That's all it was was memorization. That's why my high school didn't carry it. Good, good for that. That was back in the 40s.

So I learned something about biology to fill in the third part of the course. And one of the things I ran into was the number of base pairs in various organisms. And I saw these incredible things, the salamander. as almost 40 times the base pairs as a human, that this is crazy. What is going on? And I decided that nobody knew, and I would take it on.

It's wonderful. I think that's a wonderful. So I'm now building my background in all the related stuff. There's a lot of stuff whose vocabulary is all separate from anything I'm familiar. you with. And that's what I'm doing now. But the trouble is, Larry, I am so absorbed in ordinary things that I have very little time to work on it. And that's troubling me. As I look to the future, realize I can't have many more years like this left. And I see how my time is taken up in stuff that has nothing to do with this question. I'm not depressed.

But distressed. I can see why you're distressed, but let me ease your distress a little bit. Knowing you as the man I do, and I'm fortunate to know you as a man I do, I'm convinced that the other things you're doing are making the lives of the people around you better. So you're doing, as our mutual friend, who's also an atheist, the late Steve Weinberg would say, you're doing God's work. Well, since I don't believe in thought, that's a great compliment. Yeah, neither did he.

So, but, but look, I think the fact, I wanted to have just mentioned, good luck to you in this project, but the fact that at 94, you're not intimidated by taking on that problem is a, is a wonderful, a wonderful example of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, that humans, you know, that it's, it's, it's inspiration for all of us. to realize that, you know, you keep on asking questions and life remains interesting. And I encourage you to keep on asking questions. This has been, for me, just been a joy. Better than I'd hoped and I had great hopes. And so I appreciate you taking two hours of your time.

And just being able to spend that time with you again has reminded me of the joy. I used to walk in your office as essentially a postdoc. And we'd sit down and talk for 40 minutes. and it was just a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I thank you for that and I thank you for this, really. Well, it's my pleasure. I enjoy this a lot and I appreciate you spending the time with me. Right.

I would like to make a contribution to this onion question. That would tickle my fancy because I've made contributions to astronomy, to physics, to Earth science, but I could make a contribution in biology, that would be very nice. Good luck to you. I wish you good luck. I'd like, I know, we could talk to you. I must admit, my thought is I'll probably fall on my face, but I want to give it a try. Unless you're willing to fall in your face, you never do good things. Boy, it's kind of something, you know, because of my books, I've had to learn biology, it's an interesting question. Maybe you and I'll talk about it later and we can work on it together.

What's this? I say, maybe you and I can talk about this after the later, because I've learned biology because of some of the books I've written, and not a lot, but enough to be fascinated and also sad that I never took it. And I said, after this, maybe we can talk, and maybe you and I can work on it together. Okay. Okay.

With that, thank you again, Erwin. It's been wonderful. And I think as far as getting a perspective of science over the last 60, 70 years, for me that I think the audience will benefit tremendously. Thank you so much. You're more than welcome. I've enjoyed it a lot. Take care, Larry. Okay, you take care. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation.

This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org