The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - (Audio) John Mather: From the Big Bang to Searching for Life

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

John Mather is an astrophysicist at NASA who has been involved in important space missions to probe our fundamental understanding of the Universe for over four decades. He helped lead the design and deployment of the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE), which launched in 1989 to probe the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang with a precision that could not be obtained from terrestrial experiments because of absorption of radiation by the atmosphere. The experiments on COBE, and its successor missions WMAP and PLANCK, literally have turned cosmology from an art to a science, allowing the precise measurement of cosmological observables that previously were either not measured at all or only measured to within a factor of two. This has led to a golden age of cosmology, where theories of the early universe can now be compared directly to observation. John directed the building of the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE which was able to show that the cosmic microwave background radiation was indeed an almost perfect ‘black body’ spectrum associated with a very well defined temperature of the Universe at a time of about 300,000 years after the big bang. Indeed, no terrestrial experiment has ever produced such an accurate black body spectrum, which was one of the fundamental predictions that helped develop quantum mechanics early in the 20th century. For his work on COBE, John shared the Nobel Prize with George Smoot. But John didn’t rest on his laurels, for several decades after COBE John helped lead the design and development of the James Webb Space Telescope, which recently launched and will probe both the very early universe and also extra solar planets, possibly helping us discover evidence for life elsewhere in the Universe. John and I talked about his origins in science, the science he has accomplished, and what his future plans are in a discussion that will help provide a valuable perspective for anyone on the current status of cosmology and astrophysics, as well as what we might learn in the future. The ad-free video is available for all paid subscribers to Critical Mass in an adjoining post.. Video with ads will be available on the Podcast YouTube Channel, and audio is also available wherever you listen to podcasts. Enjoy! Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

And welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I had the privilege and pleasure of having a conversation with my colleague and friend and also the Nobel laureate, astronomer, John Mather. John has been involved in important experiments in space that test our fundamental understanding of the universe for many decades. And about 40 years ago or so, he first began to design and eventually become more. one of the project scientists and principal investigators of a NASA experimental satellite

called the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, which was designed to measure the cosmic background radiation coming from the Big Bang. And when that experiment, which allowed us to measure it with unprecedented accuracy in a way we couldn't do on Earth, first reported its results in the late 80s to the early 90s, it changed cosmology, turning it from an art to a science. The cosmic quantities that previously had been unmeasurable or only known within a factor of two uncertainty could now be measured to several decimal places. And that changed everything. It changed our ability to constrain fundamental cosmological theory and our understanding of the early universe. It showed that the cosmic background radiation was a black body, which demonstrated that the universe had a finite temperature. And in fact, that black body radiation was the best measured black body in nature.

And John was in charge of the experiment that measured that. that measured that. Kobe also was able, for the first time, to measure the primordial density lumps that would later on coalesce to form galaxies. And that would allow us to constrain our theories of galaxy formation, including dark matter and everything else. And for those very important developments that changed everything about cosmology, John and his fellow scientist George Smoot were awarded the Nobel Prize.

But John didn't rest on his laurels there. After that, he became the project scientist and lead scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope. And he helps spearhead that program to produce the telescope that's now been launched and any day now will present the first images of the universe which allow us to look back to the earliest periods of star formation as well as perhaps measuring new habitable planets in the universe. And John is continuing on with his interesting ideas for developing new devices that can explore and open up new windows on the universe. As he discusses in the podcast, he's looking at new programs and new projects that might allow us to measure the atmospheres of extra

solar planets and look directly for life in a very exciting way. We had a wonderful conversation about his life and science and this current state of science today, and I hope you really enjoy it as much as I did. You can watch it ad-free on our Substact site, Critical Mass, or you can watch it on YouTube, or you can listen to it on any kind of podcast platform, I hope you'll consider watching it on our substack site and subscribing to the substack site, Critical Mass, because that supports this podcast, but also the Origins Project Foundation, which makes the podcast possible. No matter whether you listen to it or watch it or where you listen to it or watch it, I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks.

Well, thank you very, very much, John, for joining me for the podcast. It's always a pleasure to see you. I hope you're doing well. Well, thank you. We're having a good time over here. Well, it sounds like you've got a lot of interesting things going on, and I want to talk about them. But I do want to, this is an origins podcast, and I want to start with your origins, which I've been learning a lot about in the last while that I didn't know. We've known each other for a long time, but through our science mostly. And you've been actually, I should say, you've been a supporter on various times on the board of the origins project.

so I have appreciated your playing a role in various of our events. But I want to hit you. You're a scientist, and one of the ways I want to, things I like to find out from people is why they became scientists. Now, I understand in your case, you had role models as scientists. Your father taught at Virginia, what was going to become Virginia Tech. Am I right? Yes, he was there until I was about one year old.

Oh, well, that didn't have that much of thing. family moved. Yeah, my family moved up to New Jersey to the Rutgers University Experiment Station where they were studying dairy cows. That was my dad's profession. On the other side, my grandfather, who I hardly knew was a bacteriologist working for Abbott Laboratories, making penicillin. Wow. But you hardly knew him, but you hardly knew him, but I understand, is it nevertheless he played an important role. You heard a lot about him in your family. Is that true? I heard what a hero he was. both as a nice guy and as a person who opposed the McCarthy era purges that people were doing in those days

and tried to protect his fellow employees. Wow. That's very important. That's almost harder than anything else. I admire that more than almost anything else because talent and doing science is based on maybe talent, enjoyment and hard work. But doing something like that is kind of brave in a way that really reflects character. That's really impressive. Yeah. So anyway, people loved him, but he died very young. So on my dad's side, well, asked him fairly late in life, how come you're a scientist? And he said, well, he was a kid in Southern Rhodesia. His dad was a missionary over there, educational missionary. And so he looked at the cows. And he looked at the pictures of the cows in the magazines that came from Indiana. And they were different. So it looks like there's something to be learned here.

So he wanted to go and study how to make better cows and better milk. So that's how I ended up on a dairy research station of Rutgers University, living a few hundred yards from a barn full of bulls and laboratories. So that was my beginning of learning about science, but I ended up not learning any of either biology or dairy cattle or anything like that, but looking up at the sky, which was something you could do in the country because the stars would come out. Unlike here in Washington

where you have to have a really good special night to see many of them. That was my beginning. It was a rural environment. I mean, there really were cows and you and you went. Did you ever milk them? Did you ever learn how to do anything like that? No, I didn't do that.

That was actually, it's pretty hard work. My neighbors did it. My neighbor buddies, they got up at 4 o'clock in the morning. they'll milk the cows. So they were strong and healthy and athletic, and they could win the wrestling matches and little league baseball,

but no, I was the opposite. I stayed at the doors. I studied my books and my radios and my lens kits from Edmund Scientific so I could build my own telescopes. So I was just a different kid, but I was given many opportunities even out there in the country.

Yeah, no, I want to go through those opportunities because you were quite fortunate. I have to say I spent a week on a farm when I was a kid and it was enough to teach me that I never wanted to be a farmer. I think seeing the four in the morning and the working all day was enough to convince me there must be other ways to do things, even if my inclinations hadn't been academic, which they were. But you know, the farm, let me just, before I get to the opportunities you had on the farm and in your life, which I was really pleased to see and interested to see all of those things. I know partly because I related to them. I was given a lot of opportunities in enrichment programs and that really had an impact on me.

And I can see it was the same thing for you. But did your father or mother, did they encourage you to be assigned? Your mother was a teacher of French, right? Is that true? Actually, by the time I knew her, she was a teacher of first grade. Oh, okay.

Did she teach you? No. Oh, okay. I was never in one of her classes. Oh, okay. So my folks weren't actively involved in direct me to do anything. They didn't need to encourage me to be a scientist, but they did get me opportunities. Would you like to do this?

Oh, yeah, I'd like to do that. How about would you like to do that? Yeah, I'd like to do that. And at one point, I did want to get some electronic parts for my high school science fair project. So, yeah, they got me some parts. And I had a ninth grade biology project, which required getting some. some baby rats and feeding them different things. So my dad had access to those kinds of things.

So I had eight little baby rats, lived in the kitchen for a few weeks while I studied what they ate. That's great, encouraging you, they could clearly could tell which way your interests were. But by the way, did you read any books about science? Did that encourage you at all? Or was it just?

Yeah, all the time. As soon as I got access to them, I was reading them. So I think in third grade, I had already books about Galileo and Darwin. In fourth grade, I was, yeah, I started really paying attention in fourth grade. And I wanted to know everything there was. Well, that's great. And your teachers obviously encouraged you rather than discourage you, which is, I assume, you had good teachers?

Yeah, they pretty much let me do what I wanted. They didn't help or hurt much. They just let me be a long. It was good enough. Yeah, well, no, I mean, you know, for some kids who are good students, I think that's what you want to do is you don't want to get in the way. But, but, you know, and, and that's nice that they let you do what you want. And they could tell you were kind of, you're clearly self-directed. You did a lot of science fair projects, I guess, because you talked about the one you had, but you also did a science fair project with a robot, right, with vacuum tubes and things.

Yeah, it didn't work at all. But it was an attempt. Well, that's an example of my history. It's an example of my history. I try to do things that are too hard. And they don't work, but I learned something. That, you know, on a totally different level, when I was chair of a physics department, I ran a program in physics entrepreneurship, which we created, which our business school

dean said was an oxymoron. He didn't understand, as you do, that physics, well, both theorists and experimentalists, but particularly experimentalists are really entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs in a way. But when we started the program, we asked former business people, physicists who'd become business people, what we didn't teach them. And they said it was we didn't teach them how to fail effectively. And I think that's what's really important. And if you're not pushing the edge of the envelope and learning how to fail effectively and get

something out of what didn't work, then you have problems. I assume you say that's been your history. Yeah. I have a lot of failed projects that I learned something from. And some of them are still in the back of my mind. Even as a kid, I read about telescopes and turbulent atmosphere of the earth. And gee, wouldn't it be great if you could do something about that? So I'm still interested.

I'm still working on that. Well, we're going to talk about that. I was learning about someone. You were telling me about one of your new projects in an email and I was looking it up and it is quite interesting. We'll get to it. But you've done some other interesting projects on the way. So I want to talk about those. But you did like electronics early, which is interesting to me.

I think it's, it seems to me that people who really liked electronics early become experimentalists. And, you know, I know a lot. of my colleagues, friends, Joe Taylor, for example, another Nobel Prize winner, who's a wonderful old friend of mine at Princeton, you know, he was, he did, built CB radios and all these things and, and antennas and, and, you know, I played with electronics, but, but, but it was for some reason the books that that got me interested. I was clearly a theorist early on. Yeah, yeah. But you, you, you did a lot of projects with, experimentally, but, but also you got to do these enrichment. programs, which I was really impressed with in summer schools and 10th grade and Assumption

College, but Foundation of Mathematics and Cornell University for Summer Physics Program. And how did those opportunities get a rise for you? I have no idea. My parents must have found them. They must have talked to the people in the school to say, well, we got a kid who wants to do stuff. What can he do? So I don't remember any of how it was discovered, but I must have applied and I must have said yes. So somebody said, do this and you might be able to go. So, well, but you know, you, you had a great, you obviously besides your experimental interests

and maybe abilities, you can tell me about whether you think you're a good experimentalist in a moment, but you had great mathematics abilities. You did really well. And there was a math contest in when you were in grade 7. Well, let's see, was it great seven? I don't know when it was, actually, a nationwide math contest. Played seventh in New Jersey. When was that?

Was that in university? That would have been probably when there's a senior in high school, probably. Senior in high school. Yeah, no, I was pretty good at that level of mathematics. And I didn't actually pursue it as a profession because of partly because of one of those summer enrichment programs. I went off to school with kids from Bronx High School of Science at this assignment. College and I could see that they were years ahead of me.

And these were the kinds of kids who could play chess with you with their eyes blindfold, but then they'd still beat you. So, okay, well, I'm not in that league, at least not today. And so why don't I try something easier like physics? And they weren't already good at physics. And I love physics. So it turned out to be able to make a way and do something that hadn't been done, which was, to me, exciting.

Yeah, no. Well, obviously, you've done a lot. that has been done before but that's that's you all but you did know you were nevertheless good enough i think in college was it the putnam mathematics competition that i think you scored 30th in the nation in yeah yeah it was actually 29th when i looked up the the printed newspaper did but uh that was an astonishing thing i didn't expect to do well because it wasn't my specialty yeah i really wanted to do physics but okay well there's a chance so it came out of that thinking well gee i'd like to be like Richard Feynman. Yeah. He's the wizard. He knows everything. And even when I was a college

student, his read books were the thing to try to understand and learn physics from. Yeah. So, okay, and I got to graduate school. Oh, I want to still want to be like Richard Feynman, understand quantum mechanics and gravity. After a little while, I realized that's actually pretty hard. And you've had more of a run at that than I have at all. But, Anyway, I also developed in graduate school as sort of wish to be closer to hardware and to talk to other people. I just was tired of staying up late at night in the library. Yeah, puzzling over stuff. There's nice to have a real thing.

You know, I've come to appreciate it more late in life. You're right, as a theorist, and obviously Feynman was a big influence. I wrote a book on him. But we also all realized we can't be Feynman, but it's nice to be, you know, nice. And he did, by the way, I think he won the Putnam Method. competition by the way maybe that's the reason you wanted to do it i wouldn't be surprised he was that sort of guy yeah he wanted and and people don't think he was a good mathematician but he was an astounding mathematician he'd like to pretend it all came by accident but but he was very good but late in life you know i kind

of knew i didn't want to be in experimental i actually did a degree in math and physics to get out of doing one of the experimental requirements in a physics course and and and but then you know as typical well, later in life, I kind of, I look with experimentos with great envy because you actually, at the end of what you've done, you actually have something. And, you know, I've produced theories and there, but it's really nice to have something, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you, you, you, you, uh, you did in graduate school, you, well, actually, I want to, there's something, there's a number of things that impressed me that I read that I didn't know about you. Um, first that, you know, so you went to Swarthmore, which is, which I know is a nice sort of, and in fact, actually, there's,

there's some CMB people at Swarthmore that I, that I knew from, but they weren't, were they doing CMB when you were there, causing microwave background or, no, and it was just discovered then. Yeah. It was an undergraduate when it was discovered. Yeah. So, no, it was too, too soon for the college faculty to get into that. I don't know what they're up to now with it. But, but, you know, I read that, that, that on your senior thesis committee,

was David Wilkinson, which must have been an experience. You know, and that's, that, well, you know, David was one of the many people I met in my life who is inspiring a wonderful human being as well as a great physicist. I often say, I used to say that one of the many proofs against God was that he, he didn't win the Nobel Prize. And because he, you know, he was involved in the early experiments with Peebles and Dickie that really discovered the causing microwave. Essentially, they knew what they were looking for, and the people who discovered it had no

idea what they were looking for. And Dickie Peebles and Wilkinson were profoundly great scientists who could have won that Nobel Prize. And if I think Bob Dickie wasn't such a gentleman, they might have. But then he went on, you know, and other work and inspired. And of course, one of the great causing microwave back on probes is named after David Wilkinson. What was your experience with him as an undergraduate when he was on your thesis, senior thesis? Well, it was very momentary because he just asked me a few questions and I guess I did well. So I thought, that's interesting. He was a really young faculty member at that point.

He was hardly only older than I was. But he had finished his graduate school already and I was just about to go be in it. But I did get to work with him later as he was a member of the Kobe science team. And he was the first cosmic background radiation guy we called up after we had the idea of writing a proposal. We'll call him David Wilkinson. So we asked him if he would join our team. And he said, yes, of course. So we wrote a proposal back in 1974 for what turned out to be the Kobe satellite.

He was part of the original team. Wow. Well, 70. And that gives an idea we'll talk with too. Yeah, I bet he must have been a pleasure to work with. Yeah. And an excellent scientist, of course. But that also will get something into that. I mean, that's another reason why I never wanted to be experimentalist,

is that you start an experiment in 1974 and in 1990 or so, you know, you probably begin to, you know, have an experiment. And so that long lead time requires a kind of dedication. As a theorist, I mean, there's some theorists who do the same thing in the whole lives, but as theorists, I kind of hit and run, I have an idea and I work with it. It's lovely to move another field, but to work on something that you don't know if it's even going to be built when you make the proposal and all of the obstacles to building it is amazing. But that obviously wasn't discouraging to you. Yeah, well, I just didn't worry about it.

I thought this is clearly the most important thing I've got to work on. This is my best idea. Look at how important it could be if it works. So I have patience and persistence and I'll stick with it. And so we were lucky that, of course, it did get flown and it did work. And then we would more lucky that the universe gave us something to see. Yeah, we'll talk about that. I want to talk about it.

It was a close call. It was a close call. Absolutely. I was convinced, like many of my colleagues, that Kobe would be a failure in the sense that it wouldn't be able to signal from noise based on what had already been there. And it was just amazing that, well, we'll talk about this, how you were just a little bit below the other experiments that have looked and not been able to just do it. And it is amazing that the signal was there and striking.

But that's jumping ahead. And I want to talk about the Cosmicrowy background in a little more orderly fashion for people who don't know much about it. But I still am not finished with you yet. And your life. And Wilkinson was on your committee. But then you thought about going to Princeton for graduate school. Was it because of Wilkinson?

No, I just knew he was there. but just it was a really good school. Sure. And it was close by and I had friends up there. So well, I'll go there. And then you ended up getting going, deciding because of a friend to Berkeley looked like a nicer place to be. And I was really impressive. You told, you wrote to Princeton.

I guess you were going to, you'd already been accepted there, I suppose, that you weren't going to go because they didn't had no women students, which I think, which is, that's right. And I was sort of aware that that was an odd thing. they didn't have women students. I was also self-interested. I don't have a girlfriend. My friends at Princeton said, don't come here if you're not married. It's not a good place for a single guy. Okay, I can understand that. They're very vocal about this. Okay, just for personal reasons. And then, but it was, I think, just the next year or two that they said, okay, we're opening up

for women. So I don't think I had anything to do with it. I think it was the time, it was time for them to change. But when would when did you start graduate school? What year? I started grad school in 68. Yeah, I think it was it was 70 when the Ivy League. I think Princeton was one of the last of the Ivy leagues, but they all admitted women. It's still amazed me when I first learned that. You know, I went to graduate school in 77 and moved to the United States and to do it. And I had no idea. It was only seven years later than, you know, that they hadn't had women. It was still a shock to me to to realize it was that late. And, and how things have changed. Yeah, well, Princeton had this sort of, it was of wonderfully archaic. When I went to visit, you know, they have these colleges and people

have dinner. They put it on these long black robes like you're in Oxford. Yeah. And you don't have to wear anything under them, but you can go there and just have dinner with your friends. And it's all very buddy, buddy and masculine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of these schools are like that. Yeah, I mean, like to be like Britain, which was very masculine. And, you know, I've attended a high table now in a number of British universities. But yeah, I mean, even when I I taught at Yale, there's a lot of this anglophilia they like to mimic, mimic this British. Well, it was sort of fun, but I thought, it doesn't feel like me. Well, that's good.

In fact, yeah, I can, I absolutely can understand that. And yeah, probably a difference for me from from Harvard and MIT, where MIT I had my PhD and then I went to Harvard and it was a very different feel. MIT was sort of no nonsense kind of the kind of place I think, you know, you and I appreciate, just get to work and and and and the robes don't matter and neither to the to the academic frills but but you went to berkeley and that of course it's 68 that was a key time and you and and and you said your you're you're that the vietnam war had an impact and i'd like to ask you i didn't realize that um and were you active in any of the anti-war movement when you were there no it wasn't active um but what was a sort of

more up front was there was a lot of student protests, which tore up the city. And I was trying to go to physics class. And Ronald Reagan was governor. He sent a tank, an armored tank to park at the foot of the University Boulevard and sent helicopters to tear gas the campus, including the hospital. so I thought this is not in good times to be protesting either. So, but as far as I could tell, he was, he was very good at using this event as to help him propel himself into national leadership. You know, we're so tough on those stupid students. Yeah, it works. It worked for him, obviously.

But it did indicate me. I was, you said, you considered studying law to, in order to defend the country from the government of the day, which I thought was a very interesting attitude. And you also said, of course, you've been in government in a way. We're as a gun employee, and so your views have changed a little bit. Well, right. I thought, well, it was clearly very important question. How do we protect ourselves from ourselves?

Yeah. But I went and got the catalog from the law school. Oh, I don't understand a word that it says. This is not a good opportunity for me. I am not well prepared to be a lawyer. it's just not me either so somebody else better do this but that's not going to be me okay well but did you um have your you don't have to answer this question but i was impressed that you know on these social issues you you you thought about them and spoke about them and at least in in uh and have your would you

consider yourself still a classical liberal in that sense or or um you know uh uh you know uh concerned about protecting the people from government or perhaps protecting people elsewhere, like when we have invaded various countries? Yeah, well, I've got lots of political concerns. Clearly, the vision that our country started with, with the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution, is one that we were not living up to at the time and still are having trouble with. But there are wonderfully inspiring words there and every 4th of July I read the Declaration of Independence and I say I'm so proud to be working in this world where this is what we really try to do, even if we can't do it yet. So it's aspirational. It gives us direction to follow and I like that. I'm proud of what we are trying to do.

And that declaration said a lot of things that people consider to be liberal, but actually, actually, I think it's conservative to keep what we have and protect ourselves. You know, this country was started to protect us from the government. Yeah, I know. It certainly happened. And so protecting ourselves from the government is important, but it's, anyway, it's interesting subject. I'm not a deep thinker on government or philosophy, but I'm simultaneously grateful for the wonderful support that our country's been able to give to science and also aware that one of the reasons that they do that is because we're at war with the rest of the world half of the time. And so it's tricky. It's tricky. I mean,

certainly the motivation for supporting science, especially after the Second World War was not necessarily the science, but the science being able to contribute to the defense of the nation in a certain way and, and, or the prestige or whatever. No, I look, I don't want to, I don't want to bring politics especially, and I'm also particularly aware that now as a Nobel laureate, and obviously have any friends, including you were Nobel laureates, that you have to be more careful what you say than you could before because you get asked to, I know, because I've been part of getting groups of people together to write letters on various things at various times for supportive science and other things, that you get asked for a lot of things and you have to be

a little more careful now. Yeah, what you say and when you say it. Right, but some things are kind of obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And but, you know, it occurred to me when you talked about the Declaration of Independence and the aspirations of the country that we haven't lived up to, it's more part and parcel of what you're talking about with experiments. You know, failing in experiment, just you learn something and then you try and improve, right? And so maybe that's each time we fail, we should try and accept that we've at least failed in a way

and try and improve what we're doing and learn what we've gotten from it. Yeah, we have, you know, the future is long. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Exactly. We hope. We hope it is. Yes. Yes.

The time given the events the day, sometimes when wonders. But anyway, let's get to the more of the signs. You look, when you got to graduate school at Berkeley, which was in the 19, late 60s, in 1970s, Berkeley was a, well, actually, right from the early 60s through on to the early 70s, Berkeley was a key center of physics in the country and had been one of the, perhaps the major experimental, but also to some extent theoretical center. And, you know, I've talked to people like my friends, David Gross, who was there earlier as a theorist, and then Barry Beres, who was a experimentalist there as a particle physicist in the 60s. In the 70s, you went, you were working

with Paul Richards, who I know very well, and also Charlie Towns, another great, scientists. What was so Mike, Mike Werner, I should mention Mike Werner also. Yeah, in fact, Mike for, I understand that Mike was, was a mentor of yours or no? Yes, he and I worked together under the supervision of towns and Richards to produce an experiment to measure the cosmic background radiation from a mountain top in California. Now, how did you get that? Before we get to the experiment, I mean, why did you, your interest initially was particle physics probably because of findment, I suspect. Yeah, it was exciting. Yeah, and why did you want? Everything was mysterious and new.

Yeah, it was. In fact, that was a time of great uncertainty. And it was a really new and new particles were being discovered every year and it was morass and clearly open for understanding. It's amazing how within five years the whole thing had been sort of understood in a way. But what caused you to move out of that field? Well, number one, I was tired of studying in the library. And number two, I started asking around to the faculty, well, what have you got to work on?

And so I talked to just a couple of people. And Mike Werner and Charlie Towns and Paul Richards were all working together on this measurement of the cosmic background radiation. Oh, that's pretty cool. Sounds like fun. I couldn't understand that. It's a lot simpler than quantum mechanics. So I was very attracted and I liked them personally. I think they were great people to work with.

And I still think so. There's a great environment to learn experimental physics. Yeah, no, I know. I didn't know, I didn't know towns very well. Paul Richards, I know for a long time, a lovely, lovely. But we did, well, but let's step back now and now begin to talk about the science. 1970 was only five years or so after the cosmic microwave went back and had been discovered. It was really in its infancy.

So let's talk about, well, what were you trying to do then? and what the importance of the cosmic microwave background is. So let's talk about both. Okay, well, back in 1970, it was a pretty good guess that this microwave radiation that had been measured was actually cosmic because it seemed to have no direction. It came equally from all directions that says cosmic. It was more or less in the right domain of temperature

to be the predicted cosmic background radiation that had from Alfred Herman and their work back in the 40s. So it's probably it. But what if it's not? So there had been some early measurements that were incorrect and that said, well, it's not that. So this sounds like a graduate student project, doesn't it? We can at least do that one only better. And so that was a strategy, find something pretty easy and pretty quick to do.

And that was the one that Mike Werner and I did on the master. mountain top in California. And it worked. And it said there's nothing fishy going on that we can see, but it wasn't very easy to do because atmospheric interference is very strong. So what was this specific experiment? Millimeter waves. You look at what was it specifically looking for and what was what was their result?

It was looking to see is the temperature right at shorter wavelengths than people had measured before. And so I have to look in between the interfering frequencies from the Earth's atmosphere, then water and oxygen are emitting light at those wavelengths also. So there are a few places in between their interference where you can see, well, cosmic background, is it really the right temperature? So that was our job. And yes, it's about right, but it's not a very precise measurement. So while we were doing that problem.

Let me step back. I'm just going to think of the audience here. So let's explain something, which actually becomes very important in your career later on, how you measure temperature. Why would measuring a certain frequency tell you about a temperature? So hot objects, well, why don't you explain it? Yeah.

So the prediction of the expanding universe story is that the universe has just one temperature in the early times. Everything's like a giant pressure cooker, there's only one temperature. And then the expanding universe, preserves that unity, and there's still only one temperature for that heat radiation, even though it's cooled off a lot. That's the prediction. Now how are you going to test it? You have to have a thermometer, basically, and tune it up to all the different wavelengths that it could possibly pick up. So if you get

this same temperature at every different wavelength, you've confirmed the big bang picture. So that was our job to basically measure the temperature at as many wavelengths as possible. And measure measuring the temperature again just to step back for people measuring the temperature at different wavelengths is the reason you can do that is that an object of a certain temperature amidst frequencies amidst many different wavelengths but each wavelength with a different power and you can look at and you can look at the intensity so if you have a temperature x you can predict how much energy is in each or power is in each different frequency band and and it has a well-defined spectrum called for an an ideal object called a black body.

So what you're doing is you're measuring the power in a specific frequency, and that tells you the temperature, right? That's exactly right. Yeah, that's what we wanted to do. It's pretty hard on the ground because of the air. And, of course, the atmosphere is a lot warmer than the thing you're trying to measure. And so is the apparatus. Our apparatus is just sitting there on the mountaintop.

It's room temperature, chilly room, but room temperature. And the cosmos is. is a hundred times colder than that in the absolute scale. So that's near impossible. So well, okay, we tried and we got about the right answer, but it was near impossible. How did you get, how were you able to disentangle it from all the local temperature backgrounds and such?

Well, number one, you have a body of that you can build yourself and you know exactly what temperature it is. And then you changed its temperature in front of the apparatus to see, well, you measure the right thing and then you have to extrapolate to what if there's only looking at the universe so that's the basic part and then you have to fiddle and fool around a lot to get rid of the interference of the earth atmosphere and the apparatus itself so it's a lot of argument and not a very direct measurement but you can do it that's what they had to do the first time when the

radiation was discovered yeah in fact the first time they discovered it again they it was because of what we understood later, we called it a three degree background, but they measured, I think, a single frequency, right? Yeah, that's one. They got noise at a single frequency. And from that, you really can't say it's at a temperature if you've only measured a single frequency,

but you can say if it were a temperature, this would be the temperature it would be. They never, either, but they couldn't, they had no spectrum. It was just a single data point, right? Right. So that was the Bell Labs result. And it wasn't very long until the Princeton group

got a measurement at a different frequency and they got the same temperatures. So that's that was a confirmation that it was really cosmic. Yeah. But then after that, the big job for all experimenters was measure and more frequencies and measure better. And of course, whenever you start, you get the wrong answer the first time, the second time, the third time. And you have to keep at it until it starts to make sense.

So you measured it, you got a date, you got some data, which was not very good. That got you a PhD, I assume, right? Yeah. But that was actually only part of the PhD. There was also another apparatus that Paul Richards had designed for us, students, while he was on sabbatical, Britain. And he came back and he's got this sketch and an idea and a drawing. And so, why don't we build this, guys? And so it was a balloon payload that would go up 25 miles of the upper atmosphere to get above that interference we were complaining about just now.

and then you could do a much better measurement. So that was the plan. And so I worked on that for a couple of years with them. And we finally went down to Texas to launch it from the balloon base in Palestine, Texas. And up it went, and you know it didn't work. So why? It just didn't function properly. There were three different reasons.

Two of them related to the equipment being really cold when it's way up there in the upper atmosphere. And one of them was something we never would have ever figured out in the lab, which was the water got into the motor and froze and rusted. And so we got the motor back and it wouldn't turn anyway. Wow. So that happened between the moment of launch and recovery. So anyway, so Paul Richards said, okay, you can write a thesis about this thing that did work on the ground and the thing that didn't work in the air. and we'll let you out. So I got a job to work for NASA after that.

Well, this is fascinating. It's great. The point is that experiments don't work still teach you something and you can get a PhD if you know, because you learn from it and you learn the techniques. Is that the experiment also it worked, but it wouldn't have, was that the one that you did some soldering on to that we've.

Oh, yeah. I solder the antenna on the bottom of the apparatus and it fell off at the lunch site. So somebody who knew how to do this better came and fixed it, fortunately. Otherwise, we would have been even more mystified about why it didn't work. Yeah, well, there we go. I mean, I want to point out to people that, yeah, you know, for kids who want to do stuff, you don't have to be the best solderer, you don't have to be the best mathematician. You don't have to be a lot of things.

A lot of kids are intimidated from doing science because they think they're, you know, there are better people at X, Y, or Z. And the point is it takes all kinds and good ideas and we're willing to work. And it takes a team, usually. We're never there alone. That's what I've really learned from life that you're never alone. If your idea is a good one, then you've probably got people working with you. And so they'll catch you, we hope, if you make a mistake.

And eventually we'll get it figured out. So it takes patience and some kind of faith that it's all worth working on, even though things will go wrong over and over. Yeah, kind of determination, a kind of faith. You're absolutely right. And that's an important thing, your statement about it being a team, because it's even true for theorists. I mean, people, everyone has this vision of Einstein,

that sort of lone guy in a room at night or something. And he wasn't. And he wasn't at all. He wasn't in any way. And, you know, as a theorist, I mean, it's teamwork with your students and other people, arguing at the blackboards, learning from other people.

Science is a collaborative activity. and has always been, well, maybe Newton. Newton was an exception, but that was way back when. But in the modern times, it's essential. It's a social activity. And one of the wonderful things about it as a social activity is it brings people together of vastly different experiences, cultures, religions, languages, and they can all work together fruitfully. It's a perfect example for the rest of the world of how to get along, you know. Yes, I think so too. And in effect, I would say most of my ideas that have turned out to be useful were coming from conversation with other people. Absolutely. And learning when you're wrong, I think is really important. And if you don't,

that's part of I just finished doing a radio program about echo chambers and universities now. And the problem is that if you don't allow, if you don't hear from people who disagree with you, sometimes you don't discover you're wrong. And that's a real, that's a real problem. Yeah. And it actually as a general principle, that's something that's something that's really important for NASA. You know, we don't want to take a chance on being wrong about our space flight hardware. Yeah. I like to tell people, you know, John Mather's opinion has no effect whatever on the hardware. Don't ask me if it's going to work. We have to go through the process to make sure that it works. And to prove yourself wrong. Yeah, testing yourself is we're wrong.

Yeah. We have to test. We have to get other people to argue with us because how do you know you're even testing the right thing you could have a blind spot and just not be aware so there are lots of stories to tell but at any rate the testing and arguing are crucial to success yeah no absolutely in fact i want to go into that in nass in a second i the the balloon experience appeals to me because i i've i've talked to a lot of ballooners and it's a unique club of learning how to i mean but the balloon unlike a laboratory experiment so much can go wrong and so much so much almost almost always does It's a great training ground to learn about how things can go wrong, I think. And every experimentalist I know who's on balloons has told me horror stories,

fondly in retrospect, but horror stories. But you moved to NASA, and that was a bit, was that a very different environment? After all, NASA, you moved to NASA when in what year? In January of 74. So, okay. My doctorate and immediately got on the plane to New York. Wow. NASA has a small laboratory in New York.

And in those days, we did astronomy there. Pat Thaddeus was a brilliant radio astronomer and also an expert on measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation. As it turned out, this was important. Yeah. But anyway, he said, well, would you like to be a postdoc and become a radio astronomer? And so when he called up and offered me this job and I didn't really know him, but I'd met him just once. So I said, yeah, I'll do that. So it sounded like fun.

I really loved who he was and thought he'd be a great person to learn from. So I said, okay, I'll go to New York. I'll become a NASA astronomer. So now now now the New York environment NASA at New York was more of well was at it it. It was at the university was at Columbia. No, was it located? Yeah, they have their own building, a separate building, but it's next to Columbia University. So was it a more of a university environment?

Was it more of a university environment than in the government environment? Yeah, well, how can you tell the difference? Well, we weren't mostly teaching, so more of a government lab. But we were doing research. So Pat Thaddeus was studying molecules in space. And he'd even managed to find a way to build a small radio telescope, four feet in diameter. About that big. On the top of physics building at the university.

and started to mapping, where is the carbon monoxide molecule in space throughout our galaxy? So, oh, that was the coolest thing. You can do radio astronomy from New York City from the top of the building. Yeah, it's amazing. I'll do that. Yeah, it's still amazes me. I don't know how you guys do. That's the kind of thing as a theorist.

Wow, it still amazes me that you can do that kind of stuff. Well, you work at it and work at it. You keep looking for opportunities. And so once in a while they turn up. You know, you try 99. them and one of them works and so yeah yeah no well we couldn't build a telescope there well you know so you were you were working with thaddeus at at columbia but that was 74 and you said that was i was i you said that the nascent the birth of of cobi was at that time as well so talk to me

about about that about how how cobi came about the cosmic background explorer satellite just for the listeners which was the first one to ultimately measure several facets of the cosmic background by a satellite space and for which you and George Schmute shared the Nobel Prize. Yeah, so it was 1974. I arrived at the end of January at New York and summertime, sometime NASA put out an announcement of opportunity, a call for proposals. And basically they said, send us ideas for new science projects. You know, it's just been five years since we landed on the moon. What are we going to do now? And from what I hear, they were expecting a handful of scientists to send in proposals. But, you know,

I told my boss that was Pat Thaddeus, you know, my thesis project didn't work. But you know, it's obvious that we shouldn't be doing this experiment in outer space because it overcomes all of the problems we ever had trying to do it with balloons and the like. So here's my idea. He said, yeah, that's a good idea. We'll call up our friends. We'll write a proposal. So we called up Ray Weiss at MIT. We called up Dave Wilkinson at Princeton. We called up Mike Houser at NASA Goddard in Greenbelt. And we added a few more people from their teams and we wrote a proposal. And we met, had our first meeting face to face in something like September that year. And the proposals went in a few months after that. And so it was our concept. And it went in and came back, well, we sent it into

NASA, I thought, well, that'll never work. I'm just a kid. We're all young. We're all claiming to be able to do this thing, and that we've never done. But somehow NASA knew that this was so important, had such an immense possible payoff that they said after about a year, well, why don't we give you some money? We'll study it some more. And that's while I was still in New York. So we studied it some more. So hold on, let me, because I had some interference there in my ear for a little while, so I wanted to be clear. So you didn't think it would work, but NASA thought it was good enough to continue to, did they fund, they funded a study proposal at the beginning? Is that I funded this small study. The idea that interested them at the time was, could I put the spectrometer

into the same cryostat that we were considering for the IRAS satellite, the infrared astronomical satellite which was already being considered and we were working pretty hard on it at that point so the upshot was no it's actually a bad idea to try that but it was a way to keep momentum going and then you moved down to did you say you moved down to greenbelt then i moved down to greenbelt in summer of 76 so you'd been two years after so um so by then it was beginning to look at like this is a good enough idea somebody really would select it. So I came here on hopes that it would work. Mike Hauser recruited me to come here. And okay, let's try that. We were hoping that it would be chosen to continue. So it was. That meant that NASA said, this is a good enough idea. We'll study

it some more. And here are some brilliant engineers who are just finishing up another observatory and they'll help you. So they were building and completing the international ultraviolet explorer, which was a little telescope in orbit of the Earth that went around once a day like our communication satellites do now. But you could sit in the control room downstairs in Building 21 and send commands to your telescope. So astronomers came from all over the world to observe things with the telescope. And so we knew this was a brilliant engineering team.

and they could make something very difficult happen. So we worked with them for quite a while and send in a bigger revised proposal to NASA headquarters. And I think they chose in those days about 12 of the original big proposals to study further. By the way, there were about 150 proposals sent into NASA headquarters in 1974, which was, from what I hear, a big shock. They didn't expect to get nearly that many. And there were actually three of them about cosmic background radiation. The other two, one was from Berkeley. One was from jet propulsion labs.

So as it did something unusual, they said, this is important enough that we might need expertise from all of those teams to do the right thing. So they said, we're going to create a new science team with members of all of those teams. I was going to ask. We got a new side team. Logical thing to do is put it together. Yeah, so we got one person from Berkeley, two people from JPO, David Wood Wilkinson from Princeton, Ray Weiss from MIT, me and Mike Hauser.

And I think Pat Thaddeus at that point said, well, okay, you guys, I gave you a good start, go run. So he didn't actually want to be a part of the big space mission, as far as I could tell. So then anyway, so we're often running. and so John Mather is now going to meetings every day with engineers to figure out how to do this. Had you become, so there was a group and there was group Berkeley and you say Caltech. At this point you were a junior scientist or were you were you sort of a projects?

What was your role in the in the team at that time? Okay, well I was called the study scientist which meant I worked with the the leading engineers to figure out how to build something. And I also was pushing the idea out of the spectrometer that would measure this spectrum of the cosmic background radiation to compare it with the color or the temperature that it should have if it were really cosmic. Yeah. So I had the two jobs. Okay. So did you have a permanent position at that point? Or was it, I mean, the government is a little bit different.

Yeah. Well, as far as I was concerned, it was permanent. So I wasn't going. anywhere i guess there was a in the standard procedure is you're on uh provisional employee for a while but you but you were you know it turned out to be a bad guy yeah okay so but there were you as you say you worked on the spectrometer the experiment not only had as and it's and so when there were 150 proposals the the cobi what would become cobi wasn't funded fully but it passed some there's some number that they funded at some provisional level. Do you know how many there were or no?

I think there were about 12 that were chosen for further study. So you were surprised? I think, yeah, I was surprised, but not that surprised. And I think eventually NASA flew most of them. All that's well. It took a long time to work off that queue of brilliant ideas. They were amazed at how many brilliant ideas they were. Yeah, no, it's, it's 150. And it was like, it's many things, you know, if you have the, science progresses for many reasons. One, when the new technologies become available to open up new windows,

that's when new discoveries are made. And it was a time of new technologies where, where a lot of new windows were, and so smart young scientists would say, hey, here's a new technology, let's use it. And you were one of those, I think, that was thinking about that. Yeah, no, yeah, we do. Yeah. So, but there were when we started, nobody had ever flown a, helium crash in space and we needed one. But we knew that NASA was already going to build one.

So, okay, this isn't stupid. Oh, you knew it because of the IRAS experience, because of the experiment. And that flew. Did that fly? Yeah, it flew. Yeah, it also was a lot of trouble. Yeah, it had a lot of trouble. But it did work.

Yeah. So right away, when we started our study, we flew out to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, to say, well, how does this thing work? Okay, now, now, there but it's a it's a it's a it's smaller than a particle accelerator experiment but it's a big experiment that has a lot of components and you and your work focused as we'll talk about on on one of the seminal measurements it made which was the spectrum but there were different components

and how was it decided what instruments should go on this uh we're important and what aspects of the cmb should study so how did your group decide that and and and who got involved and how Okay, well, we had the small science team that I mentioned, and we had originally proposed four scientific instruments in our group from New York. So then we got together as a group, and we argued and thought, and we decided, well, one of them is actually too hard to do. We can't really figure out how to make that happen. So we'll just have to give it up. What one was it? So that was another anisotropy measurement at millimeter waves.

Would have used detectors inside the cryostat, but otherwise similar to the DMR measurements that we did later, the microwave radiometers. So that was ejected right away. Later on, there was another crisis when there wasn't enough money to keep on going at the full tilt that we wanted. And our good friends down the hall at the Hubble Space Telescope needed money even more than we did. And so we better wait for a while.

So at that point, somebody said, well, now we have a new technology. We could put one of the frequency channels of the microwave radiometers onto a balloon. And it probably wasn't the best wavelength to use anyway. So maybe that will be a good substitute or good enough substitute. So it kept us going and also enabled us to sit. enough money we could try a more advanced technology for the microwave receivers. You know, we were going to start, we started off with room temperature receivers. And that was not, well, we were afraid that it wasn't quite good enough.

Yeah. And so nobody knew, but we said, okay, we have extra time. We just saved some money. We have time to develop a slightly more advanced technology. We'll cool the receivers down to a lower temperature and they'll be more sensitive. So we did that. We found a way. And we were glad in the end that we had as we'll talk later. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. It was a combination of good luck and good and good foresight, I think, that combined together. But the, so the, so the, but just to clarify for people then, the three components of Kobe were with this experiment called FIRAS, which Did you, when did you become the head of that part of the experiment right away or, or? Well, I think I was always really the leader of that, but I wasn't given a title right away.

And we had two other instruments also. The microwave receivers that were to make a map of the sky and a, and a near infrared telescope, I called the diffuse infrared background experiment that was looking for the light of the first galaxies. And this wasn't the same kind of experiment as the others. It wasn't looking at the cosmic microwave radiation. It was looking for something that had never been seen. And so we all chewed on this for a while and finally decided who was going to lead each of these instruments.

And so Mike Houser ended up as the lead for that one. It's called Derby, the diffuse infrared background experiment. And George Smoot ended up being the PI for the microwave radiometers. So, but they were all, none of us were alone. We had a team and we all looked over each other's shoulders to make sure we're doing the right thing. They're a big team and that's part of the problem of people point out with Nobel Prizes, especially in science nowadays, is there's teams and people get recognized for one reason or another. And I had never thought of it. I don't know, I wasn't, I might not have asked it, but it's kind of interesting.

I guess, you know, there were three experiments and Nobel Prize allows three people, but two of the experiments, because they directed, were related to Cosmic Microw background won the Nobel Prize. So poor Mike in a way missed out, I suppose, by looking for something, which itself would have been a remarkable discovery, I suppose.

Yes, it is a remarkable discovery. At the time that we made our measurements, the result was a surprise. It's also not been fully explained, which means it's still an ongoing surprise. It's an ongoing puzzle. But it was a sort of iffy, and difficult measurement, long, long argument

to get to the answer. And so it's a little less certain even now of what it is and what it means. So but there are also lots of, as you say, there's lots of questions about who should get a prize. So some stories to tell number one, Ned Wright, UCLA, was the person who made the first map that showed bumps on it as with a map of the cosmic microwave spots.

So he did it all on his little laptop. So that was pretty spectacular. It took us a long time to argue with him and agree that that, yes, that's the right answer. And also Chuck Bennett, who was a deputy PI for that instrument, actually was the real shepherd for an awful lot of the hardware and software. And his concept really got implemented. So both of those guys really earned an awful lot of credit in this. And it's too bad.

We didn't get to tell the Nobel committee that before they made their choices. Well, it's arbitrary. It's only three. It comes out this way. Yeah, it comes up this way. But it was recognized. I mean, it was a, it changed everything. And it did.

And I know I was around. I was working on that field. And actually, well, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, I knew George well at the time and was, and actually tried to get my university to hire him earlier on and they didn't. But was thinking about Kobe and when, but it changed. There's no doubt that it changed everything because it made it clear that you could see two aspects of the CMB. One which was maybe more surprising the other. But let me let's let's, let's before we talk about the one that was more surprising, which was the antisotropies.

FIRAS measured this black body spectrum, your experiment. And it's one of the most beautiful images. I mean, I'm sure God in newspapers everywhere because it, as I say, theoretically, from 1905 on, quantum mechanics had predicted this spectrum called a black body, which is a spectrum of radiation emitted by a perfectly black body, of which you generally don't get anything here on Earth. But you could predict the spectrum of radiation, the amount of energy in each frequency band, black body radiation.

It was the kind of thing you learned of in school. And as an undergraduate, you do these tests in undergraduate experiments and you look for this kind of stuff. But your picture was a perfect black body. And I mean perfect. The error bars could not be seen. And let me ask you this. So at the time it was, I believe, and I used to write about this. So I hope I wasn't saying the wrong.

It was the best measured black body. that had ever been measured. Is that true? Yeah, it is. Still is. I want to ask, is it still, have we ever been able to produce a black body and earth that competes to the universe? And the answer is no. Well, I guess you can, but it's hard to prove when you've done it. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. By the way, we should explain one subtle point here, which isn't so subtle.

We didn't actually measure whether Planck's curve is correct. we said here is our best black body that we can build it's a big piece of black plastic yeah and it's as close to black as you can possibly make and we said okay here's the sky it's coming into the apparatus now we put the big piece of black plastic in instead of the sky and they match okay so that's how you avoid having to measure whether plonks curve is correct you say well the sky is a black body maybe here's a piece of black plastic they match exactly so i don't have to have to have to know if plunk's formula is correct to get this comparison okay exactly okay interesting and your black plastic had to be and the black plastic had to be that's how we can get

to some price well we had to match the temperature exactly i was going to say you have to match the temperature so that's how you get the precision of temperature you can change you could you could you could adjust the temperature of the black plastic presumably right yeah yeah it had controls on it and so how well could you just down to the matches to what accuracy about we could control it with about one mili Kelvin steps I think which is a small fraction yeah and the harder problem was to make sure the thermometer that we had on the piece of black plastic was itself correct because how do you prove that how did you prove that well um very ingenious guy named dale fixen found numerous ways to we had several thermometers

So you can use the Planck's formula to say, this is how they should behave. You should change the temperature up and down. And then he said, I can see molecules in space with this spectrometer. So I can calibrate the spectrum exactly. I know the wavelength. So we know Plunk's constant and the Mulsman constant. So now I can actually determine from the shape of this spectrum what the temperature actually is.

So he could get that whole argument to work and the end of the precision is better than 1,000th of a degree Kelvin, better than one millie Kelvin. So it's because of him and his way of thinking about calibration that we were able to get that. And the error bars in the end are less than one milli degree temperature and less than 50 parts per million on the spectrum agreeing with the black body. So it's stunning. It's unbelievably stunning. It was just, it was no, you know, whenever you see something like that, you don't expect the first, you know, the first measurement to be so, so clear and beautiful. And it was really a shock to see it so, so beautiful. Before that, I guess people don't realize.

I mean, as a theorist, I'd seen, I'd seen, you know, evidence of the black body spectrum and the temperature. But, but no one had measured, because you can't get most of these wavelengths on Earth, you know, no one had seen the spectrum to tell you, hey, it's really. a temperature and then suddenly not only is there really a temperature hey it's the best measured you know it's the best measured temperature in a way of almost anything it's ever been measured it's really amazing yeah now i should tell you one next step that people are thinking about we had goddard uh i've been thinking about a way to measure it a thousand times better a thousand times better it's not impossible uh we can make a black body piece of plastic that's a thousand times better

And detectors have improved at least a thousand times since we flew the Kobe satellite. So Al Kogat has a device that he's designed with our team. And if somebody says, go, we can do that a thousand times better. And what will you see? Well, something special and different, because then you have a sensitivity enough to see does the universe behave itself the way you say? Or is something weird and interesting going on? Well, that's what I was going to ask. Well, before I get there, I should say that's important too about space.

I wonder if that's ever frustrated you. And it's one of the interesting things that go, Kobe, the timing. When you build a space experiment, it takes, because it's so hard to do space experiments, you have to pick a technology and then test it and make sure it works in space and all the rest. And that means generally you're picking technologies that are maybe 10 years older than the best technology on Earth at the time. because you have to. You have to pick it and you have to make it work. And that means that there's this interesting competition between, yeah, everything's better in space at some level, but the technology on Earth gets better, and it's often interesting to see that competition.

And I remember vividly how within months of Kobe coming out, seeing some terrestrial experiments that could compete. And it was just fascinating that leapfrogging that happens. in science in this particular way of science. Yeah, and in particular for that experiment, there was Herb Gush at University of British Columbia. And he had a small rocket that went up and spent a few minutes measuring this same thing. And he was able to get a lower temperature detector

that was more sensitive than ours. And so he got a pretty decent measurement in a few minutes. That's the one I remember. I remember that's the one. My friends at University of British Columbia, I remember young postdoc at the time, actually, is now a professor there. And, yeah, yeah.

And so it was, it was again, one of the, so that's what I mean by kind of luck in a way, because. And then interestingly, interestingly, the other area of luck for Kobe, the other part of the Nobel Prize, which came from the fact. And I want to get to this thousand degrees, the thousand times better in a second, but I want, let's go to Kobe back to Kobe for a second. So the other remarkable discovery is not just that the universe is at a fine temperature, but that you could look at the primordial. fluctuations that were the signatures. We all know there are galaxies in the universe. The question is, where do they come from? They had to come from things collapsing. So that means at early times there had to be little excesses of matter and energy in different parts of the universe. But they couldn't very, very big. We knew that because we had already known they

had to be very small. And in fact, most of people thought they were so small that Kobe would never see them. And at least most of us theorists. And then this experiment, discovered remarkably an image which showed with it with a resolution which nowadays of course has been way surpassed by their experiments but enough to see that you can actually discern what were primordia lumps versus all the stuff between that mic that magway background here the galaxy and all the other stuff you had to get rid of and most of us thought first of all you'd never be able to get rid of the galaxy and secondly that the lumps would be far too small because already terrestrial experiments had already limited those antisotropies

to be so small within a factor of two or so of what you actually saw. So it was kind of a very, and in fact, it's probably true that other experiments had seen it, but didn't have the coverage to be able to know that they had been with confidence that they could, that what they were seeing was primordial and not noise. And again, it's an interesting bit of history of sociology, of science within months of Kobe presenting this, hey, this is really prominent. All those other experiments were able to say, hey, we've seen this.

We can see this because they didn't have the comp. It wasn't that they didn't have the confidence. They didn't have the ability to do what Kobe could do, which was get rid of the atmosphere and everything else. It's kind of an amazing thing. How suddenly, that's what I mean, how it changed everything. Because suddenly, most of us thought you'll never see it and you'll never be able to disentangle it. Kobe saw it, disentangle it, and suddenly it proved that everyone.

else could do the same thing and opened up a whole new field. Yes, and there are a lot of stories about that. One of them is, you know, those were times when bad science was being published a lot. And getting a lot of public attention with a cold fusion and polywater and all kinds of stuff that just wasn't true. And so we bent over backwards to make sure that everything we said was as true as we could possibly make it. So we didn't want to just say we saw it in the data. We wanted to be able to say, we tried really hard to find out if we were wrong.

That's fine and said there are so many ways. Yeah. And David Wilkinson was absolutely of that point of view that I'd say not only don't believe everything you think, don't even believe everything you measure. It would be his motto. And so we work and work and work to check everything that Ned Wright had shown us.

And after a while, yeah, those spots are just the way he said they were. We also had our own internal crosscheck because I told you about the balloon experiment that carried the other frequency. Our buddies that flew that were part of our team. And so as we were getting close to publishing, they were able to say, we have done our first analysis of our balloon data and we see those same lumps in the same place. So we're probably both right. Yeah, that's very important to be able to snow. The bottom line is that noise happens, but noise fluctuates.

And so different requirements will see noise in different levels. But if you see the same thing in the same place, it's a good indication that's not noise. Yeah. Probably. So it gave us courage. But I don't know if Dave Wilkinson was ever quite sure that we'd done the right thing because he's a tough guy to convince. Yeah. Well, good.

And that's good. We're glad he's part of our team. Yeah, no, you need that. So, but it was a upshot of all this. Sorry, go on. The major, major upshot of all of this was, not only is there something there, but we have to go measure it better. Yeah, absolutely. It is worth all the immense effort that it's going to take to measure it better.

So when we started off, the idea of the satellite was we have to measure as well as nature allows us to measure. And we had an idea that nature was going to limit us. us because of the interference of the galaxy. You know, the galaxy, the Milky Way that we live in is really pretty bright. There's a lot of electrons zipping around and crashing into things and sending out microwaves. So we knew how it worked, sort of. We said, how are we going to be sure we can remove it from the data? Are there any directions that are clean?

So anyway, we worked on that. We were pretty confident we could do that. But then after you've done it, then you feel a lot more sure. Yeah, yeah. So then after everybody saw the spots, we said, I think basically everybody interested in the microwave background said, now we know how hard we have to work. We have to work really hard, but we have ideas.

Yeah, but you can do it. So there was an eruption of effort all around the world. Every country had ideas, everybody had ways to make better detectors, ways to try to measure from the ground, ways to measure from balloons, everything that we had just a flood of experiments. So eventually, as I'm sure we were going to get to this, we have two separate satellite experiments that were built to follow up our discoveries. And, of course, number one, they got the same answer that we got, which is good,

but they got a whole lot more detail, much sharper, finder maps. Now, what I never guessed and never appreciated when we're conceiving the mission was how important it would turn out to be, that you would be able to measure the statistics of the spots. There would be so many spots, so much information about random stuff that you could compute a model of the universe that would match it within a few percent. Well, that's, I didn't know that. Nobody knew that when we started. And no, I don't think any of us believed it. I remember at a few, I was still at Yale, at the professor at Yale. And I remember a colleague of mine, I was in physics and astronomy, very gustav. Homer, well-known astronomer, I remember going to his office and he's arguing about something,

and he said, the universe will conspire so that you can never measure any fundamental parameters. He was convinced of it, right? And that was in the late 80s, okay? And that was just before, and so I think what's really important to point out is how much, especially for young people who may not appreciate this or even the general public, is how much things have changed. that and there's no doubt that Kobe and the cosmic, the cosmic microwave background itself, this background from the Big Bang of radiation that comes from the Big Bang

when the universe first essentially became transparent to radiation when it was 300,000 years old, and that radiation has been propagating, and that's what you're looking back for. That's why it's so important. You're looking at a baby picture of the universe. We should have probably even stressed that before now. But it turned cosmology from an art to a science,

to a precision science. When I was a young professor then at Yale, we knew the expansion of the universe to a factor of two or so, and even that was not necessarily believable. And other features were very roughly done. And now, you know, 60 years later, 50 years later, 40 years later, actually, I'm younger than I think, 40 years later, we now can measure cosmological parameters

as a result of realizing you could do it. I mean, Kobe didn't measure. Kobe measured the temperature, but the antisotropies, you know, demonstrated they were there. But now we can measure things better into one part and a thousand. And it's just, it changes what you can say about the universe. And that's what I mean by it changed everything. Not that it did itself, but it pointed out that it could be done.

And that's the important thing, I think, that it pointed out to the rest of us that, hey, suddenly this is really a field where you can change the way we understand the universe and it has in tremendous ways. Yeah. So now I have a question for you because I have a question for you, because I had the impression at the time we were proposing our mission that theorists were not taking us seriously. And as we got closer and closer to launch,

more and more people started writing papers about what they thought we would see. So I thought if we were not flying this satellite, this might be an empty field for theorists. So I wanted to know if that was how it felt to you. Well, it felt like it was a field that was deeply in need of a new observation. actually. I'll tell you, I was at Yale and I actually ran a workshop, maybe it was prescient,

in the 1980s on the Cosmwayway background, where I bought, brought experimentalists and theorists together to say, what could you learn if you could actually see something? That's, by the way, when I tried to convince Yale to hire George. But, and at the time, people thought, nah, it's not going to result in anything. And, and, you know, it's not, it's, it's always just going to have noise and, and, and, and it's going to be a long effort. And so it we I have to say that I don't think anyone was optimistic that all of this great theory. I mean, people who worked in it were hopeful. But but it was it was just changed people's attitudes like that. And I remember I'll have to tell you when I'll say it now, a little story because I had a former graduate student of mine who worked with me when I was at Harvard

when I was a junior fellow. And we'd worked on theoretical, uh, uh, cosmology having to with dark matter and and and and gravitational lensing and he went off to Oberlin college and and was a wonderful young man and wonderful teacher we were and you know when people go to Oberlin it generally means they're going to have a teaching career and a few years later he contacted me and i'd moved to Yale and he had asked me for a lot of reference he said you know he'd really decided he really wanted to get involved in in something to do with real research and observation and really do so i wrote a letter and i didn't i remember with some nassa thing and i didn't know what it was i said okay he's a good really good guy you know hire him and then and then cobi came

out and i got a letter from this former student gary hinshaw um who then said boy i'm so glad you recommended me and i realized it was coby i had no idea and it was uh because i didn't to me it just didn't seem like yeah you had another nas experiment that wouldn't work so yeah so what people probably couldn't appreciate in 1985 or so was how dramatic the progress would be in technology. Yeah. So when I say we have a thousand times better experiment we could do today, well, we have that in so many areas. Coblee satellite had, oh, six I guess microwave receivers. Now an apparatus in the mountain top in Chile will have like 10,000. Yeah. And they're much better. So we've had

vast progress in what you can build and how sensitive it is. And so it's not too much wonderful. It's not so surprising that we made me able to interpret it so much better. Yeah. We got a lot more than nobody could have anticipated this tremendous revolution in technology. Absolutely. And actually, that's how I met all riches, by the way. I was interested in measuring dark matter. And as a theorist who was interested in experiments, we got interested in something called ballometry and and I ran a workshop and Paul came we were thinking about new ways to use this to measure dark matter and the technologies are are fascinating and seductive and I that's why as someone who's a mathematical physicist originally I got interested more and more because the technology is so

fascinating let's talk about that technological change and go back to that factor a thousand if you could measure it a fact that just the temperature a thousand times better what could you do you would be able to see all kinds of energy release patterns in the early universe that are undetectable today. So we're talking now about the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, something that follows this black body curve to parts per million accuracy. Well, what stuff goes on, which is not in local thermodynamic equilibrium, something's at the different temperature from something else. So it can change that thing that you're looking at. So you should be able to see at a very long wave link, signs of the plasma of the early universe being a different temperature. So this is getting a little detail.

But, you know, after the universe starts expanding, it's at first extremely hot. And it's just all one temperature. And it's a mix of electrons and protons and other particles. Then at a certain point, when the universe is about 400,000 years old, it suddenly, rather suddenly becomes transparent as all the electrons find holes. on atomic nuclei. So bam, suddenly we get a picture of the early universe as it was then. And then the first approximation is, well, those photons just go in straight lines until they get to, so we can see them. But that's not a completely good approximation. So several things happen along the way. One is the photons run past gravitating objects. So the paths get

bent. It's called gravitational lensing. So it has a huge effect on on the tiny spots that we see with the better experiments today. The other is that the temperature of that stuff after that time is not all the same temperature as the rest of the universe. And so something that can be hotter or colder can affect what we see. So we're beginning to have hints

that something's different there. So it's a way to look at what we call the cosmic dark ages. Yeah, the creative time between the release of the photons to go running about by themselves and the time and now there's a period where something happened and the first stars and galaxies lit up the plasma got hotter or colder we'd like to know all that and there should be signs of this in the spectrum of the background radiation that you should be able to see well yeah in fact but you're looking yeah and it's and it's also important to realize that this

universe becoming transparent didn't do it instantaneously it took some time and that and therefore there Therefore, and there wasn't just, there wasn't, and so there was a little, there was helium also primordial helium. And so things were not necessarily all at the same temperature because the transparency would change over time. So you'd be able to look for that too, which I think is really, really for me of great interest. Yeah. One of the tiny effects that you might imagine, maybe you can't see it, is that, of course, each hydrogen atom, as it's, As each electron latches onto its proton, it emits particular frequencies of light. The what's called the Lyman series or the others that hydrogen can produce.

And depending on whether the hydrogen is hotter or colder than the radiation, either these will be seen as brighter or darker than the rest of the radiation. So should be able to see it. It's like looking at the chemistry of the sun, but looking way back to those earliest times. So, yeah, it'd be fascinating if you can do it. And I have to say, I don't think we'll see it, but it's sort of interesting to think about it. And then, you know, as a theorist, I should point out one of the neatest things is not thinking about what you could see, but discovering the stuff that you didn't think about you could see.

And as a theory, that's why we have to keep looking. Because the imagination nature far exceeds our own. But I have to say, again, as a theorist talking to you as experiment with us, I've experienced that time in and time out. I've written papers after experiments proposing something or explaining something that I thought to myself, I could have written that 10 years ago. But until the experiment is done, you never take things seriously. It's happened in accelerators that I've written papers after the W&Z were discovered. But I do remember vividly with a former student of mine is now at Berkeley, a guy named Martin White,

when I was at Yale, when Kobe came out. And I had known this. I've been thinking about something called gravitational waves from the early universe from a thing called inflation. And I realized that, hey, that these antisotropies looked like they could be what you call a quadrupole, the co-beed stuff. And we wrote a paper saying, actually, the whole thing could be a quadrupole, and it could be a gravitational wave that you saw, not just that, you know, in anisotropies. And that's, again, something I could have done years earlier, but until I saw that, I didn't take it seriously. And it turns out that, you know,

for gravitational waves and has since become in the cosmic background has since become significant but i and so we thought about it right then but i never thought about it earlier because i didn't take it seriously so what may come out of your next experiment i mean i'm very happy we latched down to that early and it's that made it made a big impact but but still from the point of view of your experiment what is most interesting that might come out of the experiment of you of looking for things with a new window a thousand times better than before is not what you and I are talking about now about what you could see, but what you and I have no idea about we might see. And I think that's the neat neatest part about being an observer in general.

Yeah, well, your story has an interesting parallel in exoplanets. I guess you're aware of this. Astronomers looked for exoplanets, little planets orbiting other stars just like Earth in the solar system. Yeah. And they were completely shocked when they found that the other solar systems are not like ours. they would have been so easy to look for if we'd bother to think about that. So two guys got the Nobel Prize for thinking out of the box, as they say. Yeah, yeah, no, and Jeff Marcy at Berkeley, who I know is was involved in that. And yeah, they, and we've done a podcast with them.

And he, they, yeah, it's, it turns out our solar system, we always think you're typical. And our, our social system may be the exception rather than the rule, in fact. It's beginning to look like it. Anyway, I asked people, why, why didn't we predict any of these things? And it's the same as your story. It didn't seem important to work on it. And I've talked to people who said, well, I could have predicted this, but I didn't. Yeah, yeah.

So your story is pretty common. So David Bennett says, well, everything we know about exoplanets has been a surprise. Yeah. But that's why, I mean, that's why we need, I mean, physics is an experimental science. And that's we have to remember that. As a theorist, I'm humbled by that. But the theorists get a lot of air time, you know, and a lot of, oh, yeah, I mean, you know, thinking of the Einstein thing, and we get a lot of people talking to us because we sound, you know, whatever.

But but we shouldn't get carried away. And I've used to say that about string theory in particular. But it's driven by experiment. It's driven by experiment. And not only is an experiment confirmed theory, but experiment drives what we think about and the way we think about things. And it should remain that way for a variety of reasons because, one, we need to be grounded in reality. But two, we need to realize, as I've said, that the surprises come, that nature tells us that what we're thinking about wasn't necessarily the right thing.

And if we lock theorists in a room now and ask them what we're going to see 40 years from now, they'd all be wrong in a sense. I mean, except it's about the stuff we already know, but about the stuff we don't know, it's really important. Now, let's talk about another experiment that's going to, that just, I want to move to, in the last half hour or so of this, of, of, of, of the, you turn from, obviously from cold. to another very important experiment, which is just beginning, an observatory, which has just come online in its own way. And then you've been the lead project scientists on, I believe. And that's, of course, the James Webb Space Telescope.

Why do you talk to us about its nascence and its little story before we talk about what it might see? Sure. Yeah. So two parts of that. One is my part, which is I was thinking, well, I've finished the Kobe satellite. What do I do now? So I started drawing sketches of telescopes that unfold in outer space because I thought, well, we're building the Spitzer Space Telescope, but it didn't have that name yet. But it's not big enough. So can't we get one that unfolds? And I found a few other people were talking about that. And I gave a talk to my guided laboratory, and people laughed at me and said, that's too hard. We'll never do that. And meanwhile, there was a committee under the charge of Allen Dressler that had been. created to study what are we going to do after the Hubble.

So they were working on it and they wrote a beautiful book that said, we need a telescope that's bigger than Hubble and is capable of doing infrared astronomy because we'd seen what the Hubble could do after it got fixed and it was beautiful and wonderful and inspiring. And it still said, you know, we still didn't see the first galaxies. And why didn't we see them? It's because they happened so quickly. They happened very soon after the expansion began,

and that means that when we look for them, they come to us as very red or even infrared galaxies. Let me explain. Let me stop. How we can't possibly see them? Let me stop. Again, explain that for people, why they're red. The point is because the universe is expanding radiation from farther away

gets more and more shifted towards a long wavelength of the spectrum. And so we can measure what's called the red shift, and all we can tell how far objects are away. by the redshift, the objects that are further away, that light has been traveling longer and shifted more as the universe has had more time to expand along with the universe. And so we call it a redshift. And so galaxies that early on, of course, would have admitted visible light, we would see now, if they were early enough, we'd see that light in the infrared. I just wanted to give some background for that. Okay, so go on. Yeah, so that's exactly what our work concerned about.

as if you really want to see how it started, how did the galaxies grow? We've got this picture of the early universe with the hot and cold spots in the Big Bang material. We've got a story that we can now tell about gravity and how it's supposed to work. We haven't found any mistakes in that story yet, but can we really see? It's still very hypothetical. What's the first object that grew and how did it do it? So the book says, let's go find it. Build us a bigger telescope. that is big enough to be sensitive and pick up the infrared light.

So that's the little book. And it's a very inspiring little book. It's called HST, which is Hubble Space Telescope and Beyond. It says two things. Number one, build this telescope. And number two, invest in the technology to see little planets like Earth orbiting sun like stars. And so they knew that was really, really hard.

But they said, we better start. I was very pressing to think of that at the time. Yeah. Yeah. So there were some different ideas, though, those days as to how to do it. But at any rate, they were writing this book. And so NASA headquarters was talking to them. And so I got this phone message one day that says, we're going to start a study of this new telescope. Do you want to work on it? Oh, man, do I want to work on

that? So I dropped everything I was doing. I was working with Chuck Bennett on the WMAP proposal. I said, I think Chuck can do this better than I can anyway. I'm going to work on this web telescope it wasn't called webbed yet so so I dropped everything and I've been doing it ever since so that was what year was that October 30th October 30th of 95 I think 95 so it's 26 years do we've been doing this yeah now that's that's what I'm saying you have to you have to be willing to work 26 years and anyway to me it was never a matter of how long is it's it's going to take is it is absolutely worth doing it is the best thing I could be working on yeah so I don't care long it's going to take as long as it's going to go.

Yeah. And I knew it was because number one, it's unique. There's no other possible way to get at this information. And number two, the director of NASA administrator was Dan Golden, and he said he wanted it. He went and spoke to the Astronomical Society. He said we're going to do it only bigger. You got a standing ovation. Well, my man, isn't that a good point?

Peer review, eh? Pure review. Yeah. Okay. So everybody volunteered, engineers. and scientists volunteered right away to work on this telescope and we didn't have to go recruit everybody wanted to work on it so we found a way and it took a long time but it took a long time but when you say you knew it was going to happen let me let me step back because i remember sending

i remember testifying once before congress but i remember there are many times when it didn't look like it was going to happen because it was expensive and unfortunately in this country even after projects are approved uh they kept the way with the way science funding works big projects can be canceled as new administrations come in and and it's there was 25 years for it to 25 opportunities for congress to kill it and and there were several times when it came close were you worried i remember you and i talked about how how we could do do you remember i wrote you and said how could we help to how can i help to encourage people to yeah i don't remember that very much i just remember thinking well it's as they say it's a way above my pay grade somebody else has

to figure this out. And for my position, I don't get to go out and campaign. Civil servants like me, we're represented to the Congress by our administration. Our budget goes through the budget process and the Office of Management and Budget has to say, here's the budget.

So it's all mysterious to me, but I knew there were good forces that were in our favor. And someday I may know who they all were, But of course, important to mention our Senator Mikulski, a very powerful advocate for science of all sorts, and especially astronomy. She was a senator who wanted to be a scientist. I had known that about her.

I knew that she was very strong advocate for. Yeah, she saw the movie about Marie Curie when she was a girl. She wanted to do that. So she started off, but then she ended up doing other things and becoming a politician, but always spoke warmly and brilliantly about how the scientific enterprise was so important for all humanity.

And so she took a personal interest and she was very disappointed with the price that we needed to have. And she was upset with us. And so she sent us a letter, said, please figure this out. Better get some external review. I can't just go forward to the rest of my world

and say this is great. I have to have somebody who proves that this is great. So NASA organized two review committees from outside to say, is this the right thing? Is there any other way to do this mission? And are we doing the right part of the mission? Are we testing it correctly? So basically, is there any other way to do it better and cheaper?

The upshot was not only is there no other way to do it, but it is really going to cost you more money and more time. So, and that's, I guess, The combination of all these forces made it work. But I don't know how. To me, it's magic. Well, it's good that you were just, you were focusing on what needed to be done to make it happen and letting other people worry about the other problems.

They were worrisome. But I think that's another issue. I think I'm looking for not morals, but impacts of these stories should have for people. And a lot of people think scientists want to spend money just to spend money. You know, oh, gee, this big accelerator cost $10 billion or this telescope cost $10 billion. And the answer is, scientists want to spend as little money as they can to do what is necessary to do. And if there was a way to build that telescope for $50, you'd be given the money yourself to do it. Yeah, we'd do it.

Of course we would. But so the critical question, is there any other way to do this? And as far as we know, there still is no other way. Yeah. And I think that's really an important factor. It was, it's an expense. On the other hand, you know, a billion dollars. used to be a lot of money and $10 billion used to be a lot of money but now it's trillions

of dollars a but but you know when we talk about spending that kind of money it's worthwhile people realizing that what I don't know what the telescope cost in the end close to $10 billion I forget what about $10 billion that's the quantum more or less of big projects and but that's 10 billion spent over 25 years and when you think about that and the amount of money that's spent compared to almost anything else that's really such a small percentage of the of the overall budget and and if we can't if we can't spend that kind of money to ask fundamental questions about ourselves it says something about us that my my favorite story about this in regards is i don't know if you knew uh robert wilson who was the first head of a fermi lab

who uh who uh who was asked testified before congress and was asked if it would help in the of the nation. And he said, no, but it'll help keep the nation worth defending. Because the, you know, the discoveries you make. Yeah. And I think it's a very important quote. And, and these fundamental questions that we ask about ourselves, if at some level, they're what keep us going as a culture. So I think it's very important. If people didn't need to hear that, it's, it's profound. But let's talk about what JWST is going to do. We know it was designed in part to look for the first light. The first light. to tell us whether our pictures of how those lumps in the microwave background eventually became

galaxies and all sorts of chicken and egg questions that we don't have the answers to. Did black holes form before galaxies and cause galaxies to merge around them or did they galaxies merge and form black holes? A lot of questions that we don't know the answer to and the only way we'll have the answer is by seeing them. So first light, which we now know happened with maybe within about 500 million years or less of the Big Bang. So that's why you need a telescope that's both large so it can resolve these things and also infrared so that it can look back at those times so those are two parameters of the telescope but there's but we also know as as these very prescient guys pointed out that we it would be great to have new telescopes that could look for planets

so you want you want to talk me through that as well yeah sure um so well first of all what are we going to do about planets with the web yeah yeah that's what i mean that's all talking about them a few of them that are big enough and bright enough, that they should look like a little dot sitting next to the star. So we have equipment called a coronagraph and three of our four instruments to look for those. Now, when we see those, they're not going to be, there will not be like Earth.

I'm going to, I'm going to interrupt you again because people I know what a coronagraph is and why that's going to help you look. The point is the planets are there, but the star is very bright. So what you want to have is something that will basically, you know, like you do in your car, when you're driving,

your car you want to you want to see that the horizon you put your flap down to get rid of the sun so you can see the horizon and you can see the road in front of you and a coronagraph is a sophisticated version of that that basically blocks out the starlight so that you can see the fainter stuff near it so sorry i just wanted to interrupt so people yeah no that's that's good uh that's we do have that and so we'll be able to see some planets with that but they'll be big ones especially young ones when they're young they're still pretty bright because they have the heat that they were still warm from being born the other way that we have is to go and watch when a planet goes in front of its star it's called a transit so well okay we already have a lot of

catalogs of these objects we know when the little planet goes in front of its star so we know about them but we don't know much about them we know they're there we know roughly how big they are because we know how much light they're blocking from their planet, I mean, from their star. But now what we can do that hasn't been done before is to look for the starlight that goes through the atmosphere of the planet on its way to our telescope. So this is a very tricky thing. It's, well, here's the star and it just sits there and we get a spectrum. We spread the light out into the colors. Then we get a planet that goes in front of it and it gets a little fiender. But now does it change the spectrum? Or does it not?

And so that's the question. If it has an atmosphere, it can change the spectrum. Because molecules in the atmosphere of the planet have absorbed wavelengths, some wavelengths, and not others. So that means the planet looks bigger at some wavelengths than others. So we should be able to tell, but there's a really hard measure with it. So we're going to do this. We've got about 60 planets in the list that we're going to look at in the first year. And a handful of them are small enough that they could be like Earth.

a lot more, bigger ones, so easier to study. But what might we find? We are kind of hoping that some of them will have an atmosphere with water vapor. And that would be really cool, because the ones we're looking at are little planets around little stars. They're called M stars. So these are kind of hostile little stars. They have solar storms all the time. And so maybe those solar storms, stellar storms are blasting away.

and removing the atmosphere of the planets, and maybe they're not. So that's our first big question. Are there atmospheres? And the second, if there is, is there water enough maybe to have an ocean on a planet out there? So this would be our first hint they will ever have that there really is a planet out there that could have life like ours. That's, I mean, don't see the hint. It doesn't mean there's no life.

It just means that we can't tell. Yeah, just mean the absence of evidence is an evidence of absence, as Carl Singh would say. but the key point is that what makes it so exciting is not just seeing the planets, but being able to see the atmospheres. Water is a first step, but the key point that we want to emphasize, and we still don't know all of the ways to do this in Ironclad, in spite of a lot of the hype that's been discussed. But we know life has dramatically changed the atmosphere of Earth.

There's free oxygen because of life. There wasn't before. That doesn't mean there can't be free oxygen if there isn't life. But there are many features. Life has changed the planet. by looking at the atmosphere, you might, if you found, you know, just seeing free oxygen might not be enough, but, but if you found enough things that were key factors, you might say, well, the evidence is such that it's hard to explain all of these things in the atmosphere if there isn't some form of life like life on Earth, which would be fascinating. It's going to be a long, hard slog, but that, that, but let me ask you another question. It's also true, I think, that you're, because you're, you're, the JWST is looking for infrared light, planets, no, no, just. absorb light, but they also emit light. They're warm. And therefore, like the Earth, emits radiation at a temperature about 15 degrees Celsius. And therefore, the Earth is radiating as a warm

body in the infrared. Okay. And that's one of the reasons that climate change happens, in fact, and carbon has such a big effect on it because it absorbs that infrared light that would otherwise make it into space, heating up the Earth. So you're also sensitive to the radiation emitted by planets. as well as absorbed, right? Yes, we are. But it's again the problem about the coronagraph. The star is so much brighter than the planet. Yeah.

That it's pretty hard to tell unless the planet is itself very bright. So it could be. We'll be looking. You don't know. Okay. Yeah. Well, speaking about... We're not expecting to see a little Earth.

Yeah, yeah, no, no. But maybe a Jupiter. We shouldn't. A Jupiter. So we've found some pretty extreme planets already. And so we can tell they must be a thousand degrees. Yeah. Maybe with molten iron, maybe iron rain.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Well, that's, I was just going to say, those are the two big things. One here is about JWC, the cosmic dawn and planets and maybe life. What are the other things that you think it might do? and of course the most important things, not maybe the most important, but the great things are the things that we'll do that we have no idea that it'll do.

But what are the other things that you hope might come up from JWST? Well, I'll tell you what we're looking at. We're going to be looking at, oops, got to get my ear piece back again. We're going to be looking at basically empty places in this guy like we've looked at for with Hubble

to see what the most, most distant galaxies, and we've got a method to do that. We'll be looking at places where stars are being born today inside those beautiful clouds of glowing gas and dust like the Eagle Nebula and the Orion Nebula. So we know where to look because stuff is happening. But the use of infrared light lets us see better inside those clouds. Infrared light has the ability to go around the dust grain

instead of just bouncing off. So when you see that beautiful opaque cloud of dust, you say, gee, I wish I could see through it. Well, you can if you use infrared light. So we'll be studying the insides and hopefully finding out how stars are growing in there with their own little disks of planets around them. So we know where to look. I'm not quite sure what we're going to see. We'll be looking at planets in the solar system.

Obviously, this is the place to look if you want to see a planet. We got nine of them. We can see all of them from Mars on outwards with the web telescope. the others we can't see because they're too close to the sun. We can't look that direction. So we'll be looking at everything all out to Pluto and even beyond. I'm glad to see that you like me are old enough to think, say we have nine planets, by the way. It shows our age.

It shows our age. Well, it's a dwarf planet, but it's a planet. It'll always be a planet to me. Forget what I argued with Neil Dyson about this a lot. But go on. Yeah, so it is different. Anyway, we'll be looking at everything because that's where we can get evidence of what's going on locally.

So two really interesting places to look, well, is Europa, which we know we're going to go visit with NASA probe. And so we know Europa has an ocean covered with ice, and there's water spitting out here and there. So we're going to fly through the water plumes and see if they're full of organic molecules. So we're going to look at that, of course, with a web. Yeah, we're going to say, let's make it clear.

Let's make it clear. That's not web isn't going to fly. through just so people realize that's a that's a NASA mission yeah just so people understand that okay right the other thing we're planning a visit to Titan which is a satellite of Saturn it's such a big satellite that it has its own atmosphere with a lot of nitrogen and weak enough gravity that you can imagine building a helicopter so we are sending a helicopter as well as a chemistry lab to the land on Titan. So we're going to be watching Titan with the web telescope also. Okay, it should be watching Titan. So you can watch within our atmosphere and there you can

the infrared radiation will be quite an important way of looking at things. And of course, let's remember it's also much bigger. It's a better it's a better resolving telescope than Hubble by a factor maybe a hundred or something. And yeah, what it would it's not that much bigger. But anyway, it does. No, no, not not much bigger, but it's resolving, but it's its size is what six times bigger, but that means it's areas, you know, something like that. It's, it's areas about seven times bigger. Seven areas, seven times bigger. Okay. Yeah. So it's much more sensitive, especially at the infrared wavelengths. Yeah, right. It's size. Sorry, it's two times bigger. In fact, we already got pictures that show that the image quality is better than what we could get on

Hubble. Yeah. You know, I saw the first picture, by the way, I wanted to ask you about that, at least the first picture that was released with all those background of galaxies. You know, the big, the big excitement was supposed to be that star and the beautiful, the beautiful lines coming out of But for me, it was all those amazing galaxies behind it, the photo bombed. Yeah, as I say, photo bomb, that's a new term to me. But at any rate, yeah, the galaxies everywhere. And we presume that many of them have never been seen before

because we've never had this kind of equipment before. Yeah, so that'll be, it'll be fascinating. So what it'll see, we know the things it's looking for and the obvious places to look, but what it'll see, we have no idea. And the fact that it's working so beautifully, congratulations to you and your team. It is amazing.

I'm always amazed when these things, I mean, just the incredible technology and all of the things that could go wrong, and you're quite aware of them after your days in ballooning that could go wrong that that haven't. And that's one of the reasons that cost so much money because you don't want to put something up there

and have the antenna fall off. And so that's why you have to make sure it works. And a lot of the money that's spent is to make sure that it'll work. What was the scare? By the way, this is the kind of question journalists would ask, so I don't want to ask many of these kind of questions. But what was the scariest moment for you in all the steps,

the launch, the opening of it, and et cetera. Was there a scary moment? Actually, for me, there was not a scary moment. Okay. I just felt all along that we have done what we should do. We had a risk management plan. We had a 7,000 things in our list of risks. And we chewed on all of them until we were pretty sure we had done the right thing.

We had almost 7,000 requirements to check off. And we analyzed them all and we checked them off. So we're pretty systematic about getting this right. So isn't not, well, I think it's okay. Why don't we launch? This is, we've done everything we should. So it can be nervous if you want, but it's not required. Well, that's amazing.

Well, the launch, though, you can't control the rocket ship. You can't control the rocket ship. And that's always a good. But again, I've always looked at this and say, well, you know, my worrying isn't going to affect anything. I'm just going to enjoy this because here is this great accomplishment of humanity that is going up on this terrifying rocket. But I'm not terrified. I'm just proud. Oh, wow.

That's a wonderful quote. I'll remember that. That's great. I hope people that will quote that in the podcast because I think that, yeah, I will when I write the summary of it. Okay. in the last few minutes i want to talk about as you point out to me hey i'm not just resting on my laurels here i've got some other new projects that i'm quite excited about so why don't we spend a few minutes orca is it orcas and hoey or something like i don't know how to pronounce that so

why do you tell us about i'll tell you briefly so um from childhood i wanted to worry about how come we get blurry pictures through atmospheric distortion when we try to do astronomy so a new idea is now not so new, but why don't we have a laser beacon in space to focus on? And so if you could post a laser beacon in front of your target star and look up from the ground with a telescope, you could focus on the laser beacon and it would compensate for the turbulent atmosphere. Yeah. So, well, this is a little hard to do, but everything's hard to do.

So we don't have anything that works very well yet for visible wave lakes. The things you and I can see, we can't do this technology yet. Well, let me just jump ahead. Before we get to the one in space, you're going to talk about having a laser come down. We do do this, to some extent, it's called adaptive optics. It's changed the field. We send a laser through the atmosphere that we know will excite radiation at a certain point in the atmosphere and use it as a sort of artificial guide star in the atmosphere.

And then we can see, we can determine the turbulence up to that point. So that's been an important proven technology. I remember when it was, again, just being proposed, it was amazing to me. Because then you've got to get that information and get your telescope to respond fast enough to account for those turbulences. Once again, I figured it would never be possible. Once again, I underestimated observers, and it has been. And so this is a next step of that. So go on.

Yeah, it's a next step. So this is a way to make it work better at really short wavelengths, which are in some ways the best because the sky is really dark. at the visible wavelengths. So that's an idea where we know how to do it roughly. We haven't gotten anybody to say, yes, we'll do it. But we're working on it. We did a pretty thorough study of it, so we know what to do. The other thing I've been working on is called a hybrid observatory.

So this is in order to be able to see those little Earth's way out there. Well, we need a coronagraph to block the starlight. Well, how about if I've put something in space to cast a shadow of the star onto a whole telescope. And so what it needs to be is about 100 meters. That's the biggest two football fields across, shaped like a pointy sunflower, and needs to hover in front of the star

for an hour or something like that, so you can see something. So we know roughly what it takes, but it's almost the, well, this is really hard. So I've got a reason to the proposal. I've got an approval from NASA to do a preliminary study on how you would do this. Wow. It's a mechanical engineering job.

Sure. Something that big that you can still lift. Yeah, no, I actually, I remember colleagues of mine when I was chair at Case Western Reserve had proposed putting something in space. I mean, you know, out there that basically blocks a star. If it's far enough, if it's if it's near a telescope but far enough away, it can float in front of the star and just block it and you want to design this. Yeah, I know those guys who are, they proposed to use.

it with the web telescope. Yeah, exactly. They proposed it with the web telescope at the time. It was a great idea, but we didn't do it. Yeah. So anyway, so in the back of my mind, when they told me this, are you sure you can't do this with a telescope in the ground? And so eventually I said, yeah, I found a way. Oh, wow. At least in principle. In principle. So we'll come back to you later on and tell you how we did that. Well, I hope so. I hope so, John. This has been fascinating, of course. And I think lightning in many ways. I hope for many of the people listen, but what I think is really so important

is to see the optimistic attitude of saying, we can do this. Let's just put her nose to the grindstone and just do it and not let anything get in the way and just as you say, not being worried, but be proud. And I'm glad that, and I'm

obviously proud of what you've done. I'm glad you are. And it's been it's always been a pleasure to talk to you. And I think this is illustrated so many of the reasons that science is such a wonderful field to be a part of, and I feel lucky every day to be a part of it and have colleagues like you. So thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Larry. It's been a pleasure to talk with you, and I look forward to seeing this turn up on the Internet.

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