Dr. John Mulchaey on Carnegie Science and the Future of Astronomy (EP 41)

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It's very important that we try things that we don't expect to work.
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Right.
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For just this reason, because this is how big discoveries happen.
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James Webb is smaller than one of the mirrors of this, one of the seven mirrors of this telescope.
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And we hit limits with James Webb.
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I mean, you know, they're doing exoplanet work.
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It's super exciting.
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We have many Carnegie scientists trying to do atmospheres with James Webb.
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It's just not a very big telescope.
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And so this telescope will allow you to really get the high quality spectra we need.
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I tell people, and I'm sure you feel this way now, like if you haven't lived through one, you have to see one.
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Hello, Internet.
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This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare.
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And this week we are very excited to share our first guest interview as a part of our collaboration series with Carnegie Observatories, one of the most historically important astronomy institutions.
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in the world that just so happens to be based right here in our backyard in Pasadena, California.
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Founded by Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago, Carnegie has helped to shape modern science through a culture of independent curiosity-driven research across astronomy, earth and planetary sciences, biology, and more.
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For this first conversation in the series, our resident PhD, Krishna Chowdhury, sat down with John Mulcahy, president of Carnegie Science and the former director of the Carnegie Observatories for a wide-ranging conversation covering cosmology, dark matter, exoplanets, giant telescopes, science funding, and the future of astronomy.
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Also, on a personal note here from us at FFP, Krishna recently became a father.
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And we'll be taking a couple of weeks of family leave and well-deserved time off.
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And while he's out, we have some great episodes lined up for you, including more interviews and conversations we think you'll be very excited about.
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As always, we are going to learn about the science from the ground up today because this is From First Principles.
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So today I'm joined by John Mulcahy, the president of Carnegie Sciences.
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John, thank you so much for taking your time.
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Happy to be here.
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So I wanted to start by focusing on the science because that's what we do on the podcast.
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And you have a stellar career in cosmology.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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One of the things that I was reading about is how you focused on galaxy groups, not just like large galaxy clusters, but sort of smaller galaxy groups like the kind that the Milky Way is a part of.
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And trying to characterize the dark matter that's in these galaxy groups, because it tends to be a bit harder than if you have a giant cluster and you can just like chart the velocities and then do varial theorem.
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What's the mass?
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That's right.
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Right.
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So could you briefly talk about.
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you know, some of the challenges there and what your approach was when you were dealing with this problem.
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Sure.
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Absolutely.
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So I think the clusters get all the attention, right?
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Because of these big, grand things.
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Yeah, with the gravitational lens.
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It's hard without the lenses and the big X-ray halos and all this stuff.
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They're just really, really amazing systems, right?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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But they're pretty rare, right?
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I think this is the thing people don't really appreciate, that most galaxies actually are in small groups.
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Okay.
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Like the Milky Way in our very small collection.
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Milky Way is in the local group, which is a very, very small group.
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But that's a much more typical environment than the clusters that get all the attention.
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Okay.
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And the nice thing about the clusters, as you mentioned, is that there's lots of galaxies.
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So you can measure the velocities of 100 galaxies and get a good measurement of the mass of the system, for instance.
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It's very hard with a group because you have two or three velocities.
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And remember, we only measure the velocity away from us.
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We can't really measure it in the plane of the sky.
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Because you're doing it.
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That's right.
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We can only measure the redshift.
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And so that's only a velocity in one dimension.
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And then if you say you have three galaxies,
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Those velocities, it's not a very reliable measurement of the mass of a system.
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And just to briefly pause, it's true that even with the large galactic clusters, you can only measure this.
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That's right.
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But maybe because there's so many, you kind of do an ideal gas type thing.
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That's right.
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And you're like, oh, you know, equal partition.
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That's right.
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It should be a somewhat random process.
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So if you do enough of them, eventually you kind of, you aren't losing out, you know.
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Imagine you have a group and everything's moving in this direction.
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We wouldn't see a measurement at all, right?
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Understood.
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For instance, with three objects, you really cannot measure that.
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Right.
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The historic challenge has been because of that, people really had a hard time estimating the mass of these systems.
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And then in 1993, we made a remarkable discovery when I was in grad school that these systems also contain hot gas, just like the clusters do, that glows in the X-ray.
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And that was a really interesting measurement because you can use the temperature of that gas to get an estimate of the amount of mass in the system.
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And so it was the first really kind of reliable measurement of a mass of a group.
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And by the way, the masses actually were aligned with kind of what you might expect based on the pretty poor statistics we had from the galaxies.
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But it did demonstrate really for the first time that there was a lot of, like everything in the universe, there's a lot of dark matter.
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And so these groups, just like clusters, are really dominated by the dark matter.
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Ah, and just to follow that thread of logic a little bit more closely, with the x-rays, you get something like how much gas there is, because the gas is glowing in x-ray.
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Right.
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And then from that, you get velocity.
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Right.
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Well, what you really measure is the temperature.
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Ah, okay.
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So yes, the temperature of it.
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And the temperature is a reflection.
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So why is the gas hot, right?
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Why is it emitting in the x-rays and not in the radio or in the optical?
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It's because the gas is being heated by basically the gravitational force of the system.
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And so I know you guys talk about hydrostatic equilibrium loss.
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It's the same exact thing for here, right?
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It's the gas falls into the system.
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It heats to a certain temperature.
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To maintain the gas cloud is basically a hydrostatic equilibrium.
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And so the temperature of the gas is enough to balance the gravity.
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It's the same thing that happens in the sun with the nuclear fusion pushing outward.
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And the reason the sun isn't doing this in huge ways is because of the hydrostatic equilibrium.
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Right.
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Same exact argument.
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Same exact argument.
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So you get like, you know, the size of the gravitational potential.
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Heats the NASA.
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Yeah.
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That's right.
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Yeah.
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So the clusters, being more massive, have much higher X-ray temperatures.
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Oh, okay.
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Than the groups.
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Yeah.
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And so by measuring the temperature of the group, which you can do with a, like, Chandra, a space telescope or something, that temperature then can be directly, can give you a direct measure of the mass of the system.
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Right.
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Right.
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Okay.
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We just recently covered a paper in the Astrophysical Journal letters about the new relics.
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Yes.
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Like the, you know, they found cloud nine.
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Yes.
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And they did a very similar argument where they looked at the temperature of this gas and then, oh, there's no galaxy there.
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There's no stars, but it's still there.
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Okay.
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That's all clicking.
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And so that was in the 90s.
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smaller groups.
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And, you know, what was that moment like?
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Like, was it sort of a single moment where you, like, unblind all the parameters of your model?
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And you know how they do it now where it's like everything's blind and then somebody presses a button and all of a sudden H0 pops out?
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Yeah.
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It was a very similar moment for us.
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It was, I should say that we wrote a, so interesting story is we wrote a proposal to use the ROSAT X-ray telescope, which was the big telescope in the 90s, the X-ray telescope prior to Chandra.
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And this was in space?
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It was a space telescope.
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Yeah, all the X-rays have to be done in space because the atmosphere absorbs X-rays.
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Mm-hmm.
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Fortunately for us as humans, but not so fortunately if you're an X-ray astronomer.
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Yeah.
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And so we wrote a proposal saying we want to look at some groups and see if we see anything there.
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And the proposal was very poorly ranked.
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They said, oh, you're not going to see anything.
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This is just – nobody really expected to see this gas at the level we see it.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And so, but we got lucky because Rosetta had this weird system where they would rank proposals A, B, and C, and a very small fraction of the C proposals got through.
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We ended up getting a C target.
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And so we ended up getting data that we probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
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Wow.
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And that was the discovery image.
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And so it always reminds me, and I always, every time I sit on a scientific panel, we're reviewing proposals, I always remind people,
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It's very important that we try things that we don't expect to work for just this reason, because this is how big discoveries happened.
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Right.
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I mean, Hubble discovered the distance to Andromeda.
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He wasn't looking to measure the distance to Andromeda.
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He got lucky, right?
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He found a Cepheid variable star up at Mount Wilson there up on the hill.
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He found this star completely randomly and sent him in a different direction.
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The biggest discoveries in astronomy, certainly in probably all of science, happened from this.
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And so as scientists, we always have, it's very easy to kind of fall into the paradigms of what we know, but we really have to try to break out of it.
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And so that was an example.
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And it was hugely exciting, of course.
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It was a side project for me.
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It was not my thesis.
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My thesis was on black holes.
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It was the sprite.
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I ended up doing that.
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But it's what got me my job at Carnegie and probably most of my career was based on this amazing result for these groups.
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Wow.
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That's actually such a cool story to think that you almost didn't have that.
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Yes, who knows where I would be?
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Probably not here, for certain reason.
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Yeah.
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Wow, that's fascinating.
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Because again, it's like, you know, with science, there's established theories, and then the theories give you expectations, and then there's a tendency to just run after those expectations.
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That's right.
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Right.
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I mean, but if we did, you know, I mean, look at the James Webb stuff.
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This is, you guys talked a lot about, you talked about this a lot.
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James Webb is completely rewriting our understanding of the early universe.
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That's right.
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When people were designing, thinking about James Webb for the first time in like 1993 was when it really kind of started.
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Yeah.
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Is that right?
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Yeah.
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You know, people were not, nobody was imagining we were going to find supermassive black holes in formation at the early universe.
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I mean, everything that's coming out of James Webb, it's all new and surprising, right, at some level.
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And that's really what's exciting about science.
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Yeah.
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I mean, just speaking of James Webb, before we set up for filming in this room, you guys were having a journal club.
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And I think they were talking about the bullet cluster.
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Yes, another one.
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Yeah.
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James Webb had just done some spectroscopic analysis.
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And the key takeaway that whoever was presenting the paper was like, so the bullet cluster is way weirder than we thought.
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And it's like, nice.
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James Webb at it again.
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At it again.
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So that got you this job at Carnegie, and you've been here for quite a while.
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Yeah.
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What has that been like?
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What did you like about Carnegie that you stayed for so long?
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Yeah, I came here as a postdoc with really no intention.
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I mean, I thought I would, most astronomers end up in universities or working for NASA.
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Right.
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Those are really the two paths for almost all astronomers.
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And when I came into Carnegie, I was first of all very,
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like surprised that I could get a job here.
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Partly I had this big result that didn't hurt, of course.
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Of course.
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But I came here, and what I really love about Carnegie and what I still love about Carnegie is it is a pretty unique environment, especially I'll speak as an astronomer, but it's also true in our biology and our earth science groups at Carnegie, is the freedom.
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Andrew Carnegie set an organization up with the idea that people, we would hire scientists and let them work on whatever they want.
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And that's really unheard of.
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I mean, you know, at a university, you spend a lot of your time teaching and doing all these other things.
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And of course, at NASA, you're very involved in the missions.
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So to have the scientific freedom you have at a place like Carnegie is really unheard of.
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And it allowed me to move my career.
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So even though my thesis was on black holes, as soon as I arrived at Carnegie six to eight months after this result, I took my career in a very, very different direction working on these groups.
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So everybody will tell you I'm known for these groups of galaxies.
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Yeah.
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That wasn't even my thesis.
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Right.
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But Carnegie allowed me to really expand in that direction when I came here.
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That's very cool.
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And, you know, you've been here.
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You've.
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You've done your job as the director of the observatories.
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Now you've moved up to president quite recently.
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Yeah, within the last year.
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Within the last year.
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You know, Carnegie Science is not just an observatory now, though.
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Right.
233
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It's doing biological research.
234
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That's right.
235
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Chemistry, all sorts of stuff.
236
00:12:30.575 --> 00:12:38.400
So how do you, like, context switch between, you know, your job as an astronomer and your passion as a lifelong astronomer to now...
237
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all of these other different sciences.
238
00:12:40.821 --> 00:12:41.461
What's that like?
239
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Well, I think that that's actually probably the best aspect of the job for me is that in the last year I've got to learn.
240
00:12:46.764 --> 00:12:48.085
I'm learning biology as I go.
241
00:12:48.205 --> 00:12:56.991
I always tell our biologists I took one biology class of my entire life, which was sophomore year of high school, which was a long time ago.
242
00:12:57.071 --> 00:12:59.232
And biology is a completely different field now.
243
00:12:59.452 --> 00:13:01.253
So I really don't know biology at all.
244
00:13:01.273 --> 00:13:03.454
So I'm learning it, which is super exciting.
245
00:13:03.855 --> 00:13:07.657
One of the fun things is getting to have conversations with the biologists and understanding what they're doing.
246
00:13:07.997 --> 00:13:09.478
I keep giving this story over and over again.
247
00:13:09.518 --> 00:13:10.139
I'm going to tell it again.
248
00:13:10.159 --> 00:13:13.081
But I recently learned about photosynthesis.
249
00:13:13.121 --> 00:13:14.242
OK. We all know about photosynthesis.
250
00:13:14.262 --> 00:13:14.803
That's right.
251
00:13:14.823 --> 00:13:16.224
You know, plants take energy in.
252
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But photosynthesis is an exceptionally inefficient process that I had not appreciated.
253
00:13:21.328 --> 00:13:21.889
Yeah.
254
00:13:21.909 --> 00:13:24.291
And I was talking to, we have- Are you going to talk about Rubisco?
255
00:13:24.311 --> 00:13:24.491
Rubisco?
256
00:13:24.731 --> 00:13:25.332
No, I'm not.
257
00:13:25.372 --> 00:13:26.714
But now you're out of my lead.
258
00:13:26.954 --> 00:13:28.356
You're going to get out of my lead very quickly.
259
00:13:28.676 --> 00:13:35.185
But a lot of our scientists are working on these things and they're trying to figure out why is photosynthesis so inefficient and how can you improve it?
260
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And so to me, to learn that, I learned that in the last year, that's super cool to me.
261
00:13:39.851 --> 00:13:41.152
You guys talk about a lot of science.
262
00:13:41.172 --> 00:13:42.693
You probably know more broad science.
263
00:13:42.713 --> 00:13:46.436
No, I don't know much about it, but that is really fascinating.
264
00:13:46.456 --> 00:13:46.937
And why?
265
00:13:47.097 --> 00:13:50.620
You know, because it's been around for, what, like a billion years now?
266
00:13:50.640 --> 00:13:51.000
Right.
267
00:13:51.040 --> 00:13:52.601
Like synthetic bacteria have been doing.
268
00:13:52.622 --> 00:13:53.822
Yes, at least several billion.
269
00:13:53.843 --> 00:13:54.903
Yeah, and they still can't.
270
00:13:54.963 --> 00:13:55.444
And I think...
271
00:13:55.824 --> 00:13:58.305
I was reading just a random tidbit.
272
00:13:58.385 --> 00:14:05.789
I was reading this paper about why it is that way, and there were some physicists who were trying to answer that question from just a quantum mechanics point of view.
273
00:14:06.389 --> 00:14:14.152
And it's literally what they were arguing is that the CO2 molecule and the oxygen molecule look literally the same.
274
00:14:14.312 --> 00:14:14.893
That makes sense.
275
00:14:15.033 --> 00:14:18.294
Okay, because the C is in the center, and then there's O's and O's.
276
00:14:18.314 --> 00:14:19.134
So you just separate.
277
00:14:19.175 --> 00:14:20.895
Yeah, and then there's an oxygen, right?
278
00:14:20.915 --> 00:14:24.037
So whatever enzyme is trying to pull apart CO2,
279
00:14:25.585 --> 00:14:31.227
gets confused with oxygen because if an oxygen goes into that active site, you know, it's just oxygen on both ends.
280
00:14:31.467 --> 00:14:42.490
And then the, so, and, and the, the size is very, the size difference is really small and all it has is like that size difference to tell whether it's interacting with a CO2 molecule or an oxygen molecule.
281
00:14:42.750 --> 00:14:47.952
So if you just think about it, the, yeah, it's like, it's the best I can do because my Lego block looks exactly the same to me.
282
00:14:47.972 --> 00:14:48.432
Yeah, sure.
283
00:14:48.472 --> 00:14:52.753
You know, um, I, but that's a really cool problem that you guys are working on.
284
00:14:53.053 --> 00:14:54.674
I think it's really interesting, right?
285
00:14:54.694 --> 00:14:54.894
Yeah.
286
00:14:54.974 --> 00:14:58.435
It has potentially lots of applications for crops and things of that sort.
287
00:14:58.735 --> 00:14:58.915
Right.
288
00:14:58.955 --> 00:15:04.497
But for me, as an astronomer, I mean, it's been super cool to learn about that, learn about Earth science as well.
289
00:15:04.557 --> 00:15:05.517
We have a lot of people working.
290
00:15:05.838 --> 00:15:07.658
You know, Earth is an amazing planet, of course.
291
00:15:07.678 --> 00:15:07.918
Yes.
292
00:15:08.218 --> 00:15:13.080
You know, everything we know about life on Earth is life here on Earth, right?
293
00:15:13.420 --> 00:15:17.242
But there's a lot of things that have happened here on Earth that have got us to this point in time.
294
00:15:17.602 --> 00:15:19.002
Earth is very special in some ways.
295
00:15:19.502 --> 00:15:20.803
There's probably many Earths out there.
296
00:15:20.823 --> 00:15:20.983
Right.
297
00:15:21.363 --> 00:15:26.025
But learning about those processes, you know, understanding why magnetic fields, how do planets get water?
298
00:15:26.045 --> 00:15:30.728
We have people working on all these things that are adjacent to astronomy, but not really.
299
00:15:30.768 --> 00:15:33.449
And so for me, I now get to learn about all this stuff.
300
00:15:33.769 --> 00:15:41.032
But I have to say, the scientists have to teach me this because I'm not, you know, I was, I'm very, very focused on the astronomy piece for the last 30 years prior to this.
301
00:15:41.192 --> 00:15:41.713
Yeah, yeah.
302
00:15:42.113 --> 00:15:48.016
And I mean, speaking of other Earths, one of the big things that Carnegie was involved with over the past...
303
00:15:48.796 --> 00:15:58.858
10 years or so is the giant Magellan telescope that should be coming online soon, hopefully, at the Las Campanhas Observatory in Chile.
304
00:15:59.619 --> 00:16:02.179
So you've been kind of instrumental in that.
305
00:16:02.239 --> 00:16:12.061
And one of the big, you know, mandates of that observatory are to, you know, look for exoplanets and look for atmospheric signatures, biosignatures.
306
00:16:12.522 --> 00:16:18.003
Could you take me through a little bit about how that telescope started?
307
00:16:18.963 --> 00:16:21.443
and how it's been going and what your role was?
308
00:16:21.764 --> 00:16:22.024
Sure.
309
00:16:22.244 --> 00:16:25.684
So we've been working on the telescope for quite a long time, over 20 years now.
310
00:16:25.764 --> 00:16:26.324
Oh, 20 years.
311
00:16:26.344 --> 00:16:27.485
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
312
00:16:27.825 --> 00:16:28.965
I guess these things take a long time.
313
00:16:28.985 --> 00:16:29.685
They take a long time.
314
00:16:29.745 --> 00:16:32.845
I mean, James Wood took 30 years from the beginning to when it launched.
315
00:16:32.865 --> 00:16:35.386
And these will be similar for these giant telescopes.
316
00:16:36.006 --> 00:16:40.427
I mean, I think the thing, as an astronomer, all we do is study light, right?
317
00:16:40.527 --> 00:16:42.947
And light is always the limiting factor for us.
318
00:16:43.027 --> 00:16:46.888
And so the reason bigger telescopes are more interesting in general is because they collect more light.
319
00:16:47.288 --> 00:16:50.291
They also give you higher resolution, so the three combinations are important.
320
00:16:50.792 --> 00:17:01.402
But as soon as our current Magellan telescopes at Las Caponas, which are kind of our main workhorses now, came online around 2000, people in our building here started asking the question, well, what's next, right?
321
00:17:01.982 --> 00:17:03.864
And the challenge is that, you know,
322
00:17:04.825 --> 00:17:12.209
you hit kind of a limit with a single mirror as to how big a mirror you can make to keep it, to really move it and have it keep its shape and things you need to do.
323
00:17:12.609 --> 00:17:21.293
And so that's where the idea of the Giant Magellan Telescope came up, which is really using seven very large mirrors, each of them about 25 feet across in a single telescope.
324
00:17:21.573 --> 00:17:21.833
Wow.
325
00:17:21.893 --> 00:17:23.414
But it's huge.
326
00:17:23.614 --> 00:17:28.997
So it really, the way I always tell people is that right now, our best telescopes are about the size of one of those.
327
00:17:29.437 --> 00:17:30.117
One of those mirrors.
328
00:17:30.137 --> 00:17:30.317
Yeah.
329
00:17:30.717 --> 00:17:31.678
So you're really increasing.
330
00:17:31.698 --> 00:17:33.459
You're doing seven in like a hexagon?
331
00:17:34.099 --> 00:17:34.860
With one in the center?
332
00:17:34.880 --> 00:17:36.861
It's one in the center and then six around.
333
00:17:36.881 --> 00:17:37.622
Yeah.
334
00:17:37.642 --> 00:17:42.165
And the jump in light collecting is just tremendous.
335
00:17:42.185 --> 00:17:43.666
Right, because it's going to go like the square.
336
00:17:44.047 --> 00:17:44.387
That's right.
337
00:17:44.407 --> 00:17:44.927
It goes to the square.
338
00:17:44.947 --> 00:17:45.968
So it's the area that matters.
339
00:17:45.988 --> 00:17:46.248
Right.
340
00:17:46.549 --> 00:17:50.212
And then also the resolution matters because the resolution is the total baseline.
341
00:17:50.232 --> 00:17:51.292
So that's much larger.
342
00:17:51.513 --> 00:17:51.673
Right.
343
00:17:51.693 --> 00:17:52.854
That's like 80 feet or something.
344
00:17:53.034 --> 00:17:53.174
Okay.
345
00:17:53.254 --> 00:17:57.877
And so the combination of that means you're going to get much, you're going to be able to see much, much fainter things.
346
00:17:58.478 --> 00:18:00.499
And you're going to be able to get much, much higher resolution.
347
00:18:00.520 --> 00:18:01.981
And the combination is tremendous.
348
00:18:02.521 --> 00:18:14.346
And as we've seen, like with James Webb, anytime you have kind of a new technology, in the case of James Webb, it's the fact that it's a bigger telescope in space, but also, as you've talked about before, it's an infrared telescope, right?
349
00:18:14.666 --> 00:18:17.047
And it's the infrared component that really, I think,
350
00:18:17.947 --> 00:18:19.749
Well, combined with the size that's made it important.
351
00:18:20.269 --> 00:18:24.832
But, you know, James Webb is smaller than one of the mirrors, one of the seven mirrors of this telescope.
352
00:18:25.253 --> 00:18:26.614
And we hit limits with James Webb.
353
00:18:26.634 --> 00:18:28.355
I mean, you know, they're doing exoplanet work.
354
00:18:28.395 --> 00:18:29.215
It's super exciting.
355
00:18:29.235 --> 00:18:33.599
We have many Carnegie scientists trying to do atmospheres with James Webb.
356
00:18:33.879 --> 00:18:35.620
It's just not a very big telescope.
357
00:18:35.900 --> 00:18:36.120
Wow.
358
00:18:36.181 --> 00:18:43.546
And so this telescope will allow you to really get the high-quality spectra we need to study those exoplanet atmospheres.
359
00:18:43.566 --> 00:18:44.146
That's right, yeah.
360
00:18:44.226 --> 00:18:44.847
I mean, yeah.
361
00:18:45.207 --> 00:18:49.330
We were here about two or three weeks ago when we were filming for the Henrietta episode.
362
00:18:49.791 --> 00:18:56.757
And one of the things that was striking to me is just how small that signal is of an atmosphere in front of a star.
363
00:18:56.777 --> 00:18:58.498
Because the star is just blinding you.
364
00:18:58.658 --> 00:18:59.078
Absolutely.
365
00:18:59.098 --> 00:19:07.485
And then the atmosphere just comes in and it's really the circle around a tiny dot with a giant flashlight in your face.
366
00:19:08.706 --> 00:19:10.007
And so I guess the...
367
00:19:10.968 --> 00:19:18.552
The feature of the giant Magellan telescope being so big is that because the signal is just so much higher, you can actually do that signal to noise.
368
00:19:18.772 --> 00:19:19.112
That's right.
369
00:19:19.132 --> 00:19:19.813
You can manage it.
370
00:19:20.073 --> 00:19:21.754
Yeah, and you'll get really high-quality spectra.
371
00:19:21.774 --> 00:19:25.476
So most of the James Webb stuff that's happening now, a lot of them are pretty big planets.
372
00:19:25.816 --> 00:19:29.638
For the most part, they're bigger than Jupiter in many cases, right?
373
00:19:30.258 --> 00:19:32.459
And that's simply because it's a small telescope.
374
00:19:32.699 --> 00:19:34.360
It's not small compared to 100 years ago.
375
00:19:34.380 --> 00:19:35.541
Hubble would have thought that was amazing.
376
00:19:35.561 --> 00:19:36.762
It's still an amazing telescope.
377
00:19:36.822 --> 00:19:37.242
In space?
378
00:19:37.462 --> 00:19:37.602
Yeah.
379
00:19:37.662 --> 00:19:38.042
In space.
380
00:19:38.122 --> 00:19:38.343
I know.
381
00:19:38.383 --> 00:19:39.323
That is remarkable.
382
00:19:39.343 --> 00:19:40.044
Yeah, he would have been.
383
00:19:40.244 --> 00:19:43.167
I mean, it's a crazy, it's still an amazing telescope.
384
00:19:43.227 --> 00:19:43.407
Right.
385
00:19:43.787 --> 00:19:45.008
But it's hitting its limit.
386
00:19:45.028 --> 00:19:49.772
They're really, you can't really do the deep sort of spectroscopy that one needs to do.
387
00:19:49.813 --> 00:19:51.754
And for that, you just need a lot of photons.
388
00:19:52.175 --> 00:19:53.476
And that's all about collecting area.
389
00:19:53.536 --> 00:19:57.539
And so that's where something like the GMT will really be very super.
390
00:19:57.879 --> 00:20:01.863
And the interesting other thing about the GMT is the GMT's first light instruments are
391
00:20:02.123 --> 00:20:04.685
are very, very centered on this exoplanet question.
392
00:20:04.765 --> 00:20:05.525
Oh, OK.
393
00:20:05.866 --> 00:20:12.350
So we have two instruments that are being built, one in the infrared and one in the optical, to do those atmospheres in extreme detail.
394
00:20:12.370 --> 00:20:14.071
So it's going to be super exciting.
395
00:20:14.111 --> 00:20:16.373
And you're going to just be able to do many, many more exoplanets.
396
00:20:16.393 --> 00:20:21.636
Right now, we're kind of limited to a small number that you can actually effectively do from James Webb.
397
00:20:21.676 --> 00:20:24.418
And this is one of the things Henrietta is trying to do, of course, on a different scale.
398
00:20:24.438 --> 00:20:24.718
Yeah.
399
00:20:24.938 --> 00:20:26.359
Can we do it from the ground in general?
400
00:20:26.880 --> 00:20:29.882
With the GMT, it should be possible, no question, I think.
401
00:20:30.302 --> 00:20:30.542
Yeah.
402
00:20:30.882 --> 00:20:33.144
And I mean, this thing is massive.
403
00:20:33.184 --> 00:20:34.905
So you're saying like 80 feet across.
404
00:20:34.925 --> 00:20:36.266
80 feet across.
405
00:20:36.286 --> 00:20:37.446
22 stories high is the dome.
406
00:20:37.466 --> 00:20:39.387
That's what I always like to give people.
407
00:20:39.447 --> 00:20:39.968
I have a picture.
408
00:20:39.988 --> 00:20:40.568
I don't know if you've seen.
409
00:20:40.888 --> 00:20:44.651
We can share with you the picture of it in the Rose Bowl, which is great for us.
410
00:20:44.691 --> 00:20:44.971
Oh, yeah.
411
00:20:45.011 --> 00:20:45.771
It must be in Los Angeles.
412
00:20:45.791 --> 00:20:46.071
Please do.
413
00:20:46.131 --> 00:20:47.232
We'll show it right now.
414
00:20:47.292 --> 00:20:47.592
Absolutely.
415
00:20:47.612 --> 00:20:51.435
We'll show that because that's a really amazing picture, which I get every time I give a talk about GMT.
416
00:20:51.455 --> 00:20:51.755
Wow.
417
00:20:52.735 --> 00:20:55.257
It dwarfs the Rose Bowl pretty substantial.
418
00:20:55.277 --> 00:20:55.377
Yeah.
419
00:20:55.517 --> 00:20:59.440
Yeah, I mean, this is going to be one of the biggest telescopes ever.
420
00:20:59.920 --> 00:21:01.942
You're pushing not just boundaries of...
421
00:21:02.918 --> 00:21:08.120
astronomy, but in order to do that, you're going to be pushing the boundaries of engineering, right?
422
00:21:08.260 --> 00:21:08.700
Absolutely.
423
00:21:08.720 --> 00:21:13.381
Straight up mechanical engineering and like, oh yeah, no.
424
00:21:13.421 --> 00:21:15.182
This is the thing I think people don't know.
425
00:21:15.382 --> 00:21:16.442
So this telescope is expensive.
426
00:21:16.482 --> 00:21:17.362
I'm just going to be honest.
427
00:21:17.382 --> 00:21:19.243
These are billion dollars telescopes.
428
00:21:19.383 --> 00:21:19.963
There's a reason.
429
00:21:20.063 --> 00:21:21.263
It's because of that engineering, right?
430
00:21:21.324 --> 00:21:22.624
I mean, it is a one of a kind.
431
00:21:22.984 --> 00:21:24.905
You can't just go on Amazon and order one of these telescopes.
432
00:21:24.925 --> 00:21:25.085
Right.
433
00:21:25.265 --> 00:21:25.945
Or even the parts.
434
00:21:26.705 --> 00:21:26.845
No.
435
00:21:27.045 --> 00:21:28.225
Everything has to be designed, right?
436
00:21:28.245 --> 00:21:28.385
Yeah.
437
00:21:28.625 --> 00:21:29.666
And it also has to be in Chile.
438
00:21:29.686 --> 00:21:31.886
Well, we have earthquakes, you know, pretty significant earthquakes.
439
00:21:31.906 --> 00:21:34.847
So the telescope's designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake.
440
00:21:34.987 --> 00:21:35.447
Okay.
441
00:21:36.407 --> 00:21:37.507
There's all sorts of things.
442
00:21:37.527 --> 00:21:38.287
It has to have weather.
443
00:21:38.367 --> 00:21:42.088
And, you know, it's a 22-story building that has to rotate and point.
444
00:21:42.168 --> 00:21:45.449
And, I mean, it's remarkable that you can do it at all, right?
445
00:21:45.769 --> 00:21:47.549
But it takes a huge amount of engineering.
446
00:21:47.749 --> 00:21:47.969
Yeah.
447
00:21:48.469 --> 00:21:50.730
Yeah, that's pretty crazy to think about.
448
00:21:50.750 --> 00:21:51.250
So...
449
00:21:54.052 --> 00:22:04.595
The reality, I wanted to sort of transition into the reality of science funding today and how institutions like Carnegie Science get funding in the first place.
450
00:22:04.615 --> 00:22:04.755
Sure.
451
00:22:05.035 --> 00:22:09.056
Because I imagine as the president of Carnegie Sciences, that's one of your big jobs.
452
00:22:09.076 --> 00:22:09.276
Yep.
453
00:22:09.717 --> 00:22:11.977
Is where does the money come from?
454
00:22:12.217 --> 00:22:12.397
Yes.
455
00:22:12.657 --> 00:22:13.958
So, you know...
456
00:22:15.368 --> 00:22:18.811
In the modern day, there's been substantial cuts to the NSF.
457
00:22:19.992 --> 00:22:22.894
NASA is cutting its astrophysics budget by a lot.
458
00:22:23.454 --> 00:22:32.261
A lot of other institutions are saying that this is kind of an existential crisis for fundamental science, for fundamental astrophysics.
459
00:22:32.661 --> 00:22:34.783
I wanted to ask you about your opinion.
460
00:22:34.863 --> 00:22:37.245
How would you characterize the situation right now?
461
00:22:37.847 --> 00:22:40.248
Yeah, so it's, of course, an ever-changing situation.
462
00:22:40.268 --> 00:22:40.649
Of course.
463
00:22:40.849 --> 00:22:41.549
We're looking at this.
464
00:22:42.390 --> 00:22:45.411
Literally every day it seems like something new is happening on the federal landscape.
465
00:22:46.212 --> 00:22:50.354
I mean, I think at Carnegie, we're a little bit unique.
466
00:22:50.875 --> 00:22:54.797
We can weather kind of changes on the federal landscape better than a lot of universities.
467
00:22:55.217 --> 00:22:59.080
Universities have really come to really rely on federal funds, right?
468
00:22:59.240 --> 00:22:59.560
Yeah.
469
00:23:00.020 --> 00:23:05.602
The research programs at universities, almost all of them are funded almost entirely out of that.
470
00:23:05.762 --> 00:23:10.664
What Andrew Carnegie did was he set up an endowment that funds a significant fraction of what we do.
471
00:23:11.104 --> 00:23:17.047
So we keep our lights on and things like that based on this original money that Andrew Carnegie paid that we have invested and we spend a small amount every year.
472
00:23:17.627 --> 00:23:20.568
So we have kind of a baseline that a lot of universities don't have.
473
00:23:20.588 --> 00:23:24.829
Some of the bigger ones have endowments as well, but a typical research university might not.
474
00:23:25.729 --> 00:23:30.390
And so for us, federal funding has allowed us to do different additional stuff on top of that.
475
00:23:30.410 --> 00:23:30.690
Okay.
476
00:23:31.191 --> 00:23:40.733
So the challenge I think we're seeing is that even though the White House has obviously tried to make pretty substantial changes on the science front and the funding,
477
00:23:41.073 --> 00:23:44.215
So Congress has been much more generous and come back and brought that back.
478
00:23:44.235 --> 00:23:48.838
I think one thing I always tell people about science is science is very bipartisan in general.
479
00:23:49.258 --> 00:23:51.000
Some areas like climate science, clearly, are not.
480
00:23:51.040 --> 00:23:57.524
But in general, things like astronomy and earth science, for the most part, everybody understands the value of them.
481
00:23:57.584 --> 00:24:01.887
Because there's a huge economic impact that comes out of science.
482
00:24:02.547 --> 00:24:05.950
The basic stuff we do here at Carnegie 20 or 30 years from now may be...
483
00:24:06.710 --> 00:24:08.271
lead to some technology we don't know about, right?
484
00:24:08.291 --> 00:24:08.652
Right.
485
00:24:08.752 --> 00:24:13.936
GMT will lead to new technologies we probably don't know about yet that could make money in the future for the country.
486
00:24:14.416 --> 00:24:16.137
So for that reason, it's very bipartisan.
487
00:24:16.177 --> 00:24:19.440
So Congress has come back and put most of the money back.
488
00:24:19.460 --> 00:24:21.662
Like NSF took something like a 6% hit.
489
00:24:22.042 --> 00:24:23.503
Look, we wouldn't want to take a hit at all.
490
00:24:23.703 --> 00:24:24.023
Right.
491
00:24:24.104 --> 00:24:27.906
6% is a lot better than 60%, which is the numbers that were thrown around at one point.
492
00:24:27.926 --> 00:24:28.247
Yeah, yeah.
493
00:24:28.307 --> 00:24:28.867
I remember that.
494
00:24:28.887 --> 00:24:29.308
That was insane.
495
00:24:29.328 --> 00:24:29.788
That's right.
496
00:24:30.088 --> 00:24:31.448
And so that's the good news.
497
00:24:31.548 --> 00:24:37.730
I think the thing we don't yet understand is how that money will be appropriated within, for instance, NSF.
498
00:24:37.750 --> 00:24:42.151
So we don't yet know, you know, is all that money going to go into AI research at NSF?
499
00:24:42.251 --> 00:24:44.232
It's probably quite likely, or quantum computing.
500
00:24:44.572 --> 00:24:48.513
It's not that those things aren't interesting, but, you know, traditionally a place like National Science Foundation,
501
00:24:49.073 --> 00:24:50.694
has funded really basic research.
502
00:24:50.734 --> 00:24:51.875
So it funds astronomy.
503
00:24:51.915 --> 00:24:53.397
It funds earth science and all these things.
504
00:24:53.777 --> 00:24:55.718
And so the question is, will that money flow?
505
00:24:56.639 --> 00:24:57.600
That we just don't know.
506
00:24:57.820 --> 00:25:02.264
And so from my perspective at Carnegie, my perspective has been we cannot rely on that.
507
00:25:02.924 --> 00:25:06.868
We have our endowment, but we need additional money to really do our science.
508
00:25:07.088 --> 00:25:15.214
And so we've put a big emphasis here, which is a lot of my job, on philanthropy and going to the private sector to try to bring in money because we need that money to do these big projects.
509
00:25:15.435 --> 00:25:18.357
But it's not clear it will come from the federal government.
510
00:25:18.557 --> 00:25:20.138
Yeah, that makes sense.
511
00:25:20.218 --> 00:25:28.244
To follow up on that, you know, you say we're going to need to find money from private donors and philanthropy, things like that.
512
00:25:28.665 --> 00:25:30.466
Like, what is what is that process like?
513
00:25:30.526 --> 00:25:37.511
Is it like that scene in Wolf of Wall Street where Leo DiCaprio is like, I have an amazing opportunity.
514
00:25:38.932 --> 00:25:39.513
What are you doing?
515
00:25:39.533 --> 00:25:42.595
So that's what I stood most of my time doing.
516
00:25:42.615 --> 00:25:42.835
Yeah.
517
00:25:43.236 --> 00:25:52.530
Most of my time is spent talking to individuals, meeting people, letting them know what we do at a place like Carnegie, letting them know why it's important, letting them know how they can contribute to it.
518
00:25:52.590 --> 00:25:57.117
So I think the first thing is you, it turns out a lot of people are very interested in science.
519
00:25:57.137 --> 00:25:57.478
Of course.
520
00:25:57.498 --> 00:25:58.019
For all of us.
521
00:25:58.039 --> 00:25:58.319
That's right.
522
00:25:58.499 --> 00:25:58.999
Yeah.
523
00:25:59.039 --> 00:25:59.679
This is a good thing.
524
00:25:59.759 --> 00:26:00.620
Yeah, this is a very good thing.
525
00:26:00.920 --> 00:26:02.200
Yeah, this is a very, very good thing.
526
00:26:02.580 --> 00:26:10.523
And so for us, part of it is connecting to the people who are interested in science, but also the people that have some capacity to really help fund science.
527
00:26:10.903 --> 00:26:13.984
So it's convincing people, look, there's a lot of great things you can give your money to.
528
00:26:14.724 --> 00:26:20.546
But, you know, we think that there's some things we're doing here at Carnegie that are very special and that we hope people will be interested in.
529
00:26:20.987 --> 00:26:23.347
And for the most part, we've had pretty good luck on that front.
530
00:26:23.427 --> 00:26:24.648
But, you know, it is...
531
00:26:25.408 --> 00:26:29.351
It's a challenging time because there's a lot of really other great things people could be funding.
532
00:26:29.571 --> 00:26:30.492
Yeah, yeah.
533
00:26:30.572 --> 00:26:31.292
That's totally fair.
534
00:26:31.553 --> 00:26:32.633
And they've got to make choices.
535
00:26:32.954 --> 00:26:33.934
Yeah, make choices.
536
00:26:34.275 --> 00:26:35.916
Yeah.
537
00:26:36.036 --> 00:26:36.476
Yeah.
538
00:26:36.496 --> 00:26:43.601
So you've had a pretty illustrious career from, you know, 30 years of astronomy.
539
00:26:44.342 --> 00:26:46.884
A lot has changed in astronomy in those 30 years.
540
00:26:47.404 --> 00:26:49.486
What are a few things that, like...
541
00:26:50.026 --> 00:26:57.348
really stand out to you about how the landscape of astronomy and astronomical research is different today than when you started out as a grad student?
542
00:26:57.368 --> 00:26:59.149
Yeah, I think it's a really great question.
543
00:26:59.849 --> 00:27:07.891
The first one, which is, I think, pretty obvious, is that astronomy has gone from being about single individuals, or sometimes maybe even two individuals,
544
00:27:08.311 --> 00:27:09.011
to teams.
545
00:27:09.092 --> 00:27:22.299
I mean, I think this is led by things like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other projects like that that bring together hundreds of scientists to work on a set of problems as opposed to an individual scientist working on their own.
546
00:27:22.599 --> 00:27:27.722
You know, so if you go back 100 years, which is a long time, Edwin Hubble, you know, all the papers are Edwin Hubble.
547
00:27:28.282 --> 00:27:28.843
End of sentence.
548
00:27:28.863 --> 00:27:29.403
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
549
00:27:29.483 --> 00:27:30.725
Single author and astronomy papers.
550
00:27:30.745 --> 00:27:32.186
Single author and astronomy papers.
551
00:27:32.566 --> 00:27:38.512
When I arrived in the early 90s, I mean, most of my papers actually are me and one or two other people.
552
00:27:38.612 --> 00:27:40.294
So not very different than that.
553
00:27:40.314 --> 00:27:40.394
Wow.
554
00:27:40.634 --> 00:27:43.897
But that change started kind of late 90s, early 2000s.
555
00:27:44.198 --> 00:27:48.782
We've now moved into this realm where Mike Blanton, our new director here, right?
556
00:27:48.822 --> 00:27:49.403
I mean, he led...
557
00:27:50.083 --> 00:27:51.445
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 4.
558
00:27:52.066 --> 00:27:52.947
I'm on the paper with him.
559
00:27:52.968 --> 00:27:56.873
I think that paper, I don't know, has, you know, a thousand people or something on the paper, right?
560
00:27:57.073 --> 00:27:58.536
Because we all contributed together.
561
00:27:58.736 --> 00:28:06.207
So I think that's one aspect that has changed, is simply it's gone from being kind of a solo person to this immense thing.
562
00:28:06.467 --> 00:28:10.831
The other way, it's just a similar sort of thing, also led by surveys like Sloan.
563
00:28:10.851 --> 00:28:21.659
But I think even in some very special ways, Hubble, legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope, is the Hubble Space Telescope was really the first project that released its data widely to the public.
564
00:28:22.099 --> 00:28:24.842
So I had many Hubble programs during my career.
565
00:28:24.882 --> 00:28:25.802
I would write a proposal.
566
00:28:26.763 --> 00:28:27.564
I get my data.
567
00:28:27.764 --> 00:28:30.606
But after a year, my data would go on the public archive.
568
00:28:31.067 --> 00:28:33.589
This meant that other people could then, of course, work on the data.
569
00:28:33.949 --> 00:28:35.571
That's a very nontraditional model.
570
00:28:35.811 --> 00:28:38.053
Back in Hubble's day, he kept the data in his office.
571
00:28:38.413 --> 00:28:41.176
We still have his data here stored down in the basement.
572
00:28:41.596 --> 00:28:43.377
It never was put in any public forum.
573
00:28:43.618 --> 00:28:47.161
Now it's a very different world, like the Vera Rubin telescope.
574
00:28:47.181 --> 00:28:48.422
All that data is going to be public.
575
00:28:48.822 --> 00:28:52.264
And so that has opened up astronomy to everybody, including amateurs.
576
00:28:52.284 --> 00:28:54.164
There's a lot of amateurs doing really great things.
577
00:28:54.364 --> 00:28:57.286
You can go look for exoplanets and do all sorts of things.
578
00:28:57.406 --> 00:28:58.866
And that's, I think, very different.
579
00:28:58.886 --> 00:29:03.888
So astronomy is much more of a kind of a worldwide community than it is to be as well.
580
00:29:04.188 --> 00:29:07.330
Yeah, that's a great point, especially with Vera Rubin now.
581
00:29:08.030 --> 00:29:12.835
They're just, they're going to be announcing data almost every day once they get their trigger up.
582
00:29:13.056 --> 00:29:13.396
That's right.
583
00:29:13.416 --> 00:29:14.717
It's going to be huge amounts of data.
584
00:29:14.817 --> 00:29:15.058
Yeah.
585
00:29:15.118 --> 00:29:16.740
And so it's going to give people the opportunity.
586
00:29:16.960 --> 00:29:18.882
But it really means, I mean, you could really be an amateur.
587
00:29:18.962 --> 00:29:21.104
I was an amateur astronomer when I was a little kid.
588
00:29:21.124 --> 00:29:22.286
That's how I got into astronomy.
589
00:29:22.626 --> 00:29:24.248
You know, with my telescope in the backyard.
590
00:29:25.048 --> 00:29:28.212
If I was a kid now, I could actually be doing research.
591
00:29:28.372 --> 00:29:28.653
That's right.
592
00:29:28.673 --> 00:29:30.556
Project is like a teenager quite easily.
593
00:29:30.656 --> 00:29:31.297
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
594
00:29:32.339 --> 00:29:36.446
Especially with, like, AI helping you out with, like, writing code and things like that.
595
00:29:36.486 --> 00:29:36.786
Oh, yes.
596
00:29:36.806 --> 00:29:39.992
I can imagine it's actually such a green space now.
597
00:29:40.272 --> 00:29:40.713
Didn't even...
598
00:29:40.994 --> 00:29:45.057
Well, I think, and that's the other, of course, AI is the other component of it, right?
599
00:29:45.497 --> 00:29:47.958
Is how is AI going to interface with the science?
600
00:29:48.018 --> 00:29:54.983
And, you know, I barely used Fortran, so I'm not a computer guy in any sense because that just wasn't what happened when I was younger.
601
00:29:55.443 --> 00:29:59.766
But AI is going to really revolutionize the field in ways I think we don't fully yet understand.
602
00:30:00.026 --> 00:30:01.147
Yeah.
603
00:30:01.288 --> 00:30:05.253
Speaking of a computer guy, and you just mentioned Michael Blanton.
604
00:30:05.353 --> 00:30:05.553
Yeah.
605
00:30:05.733 --> 00:30:10.560
He is succeeding you as the director of Carnegie Observatories.
606
00:30:11.160 --> 00:30:13.443
You were the director for quite a while before him.
607
00:30:14.965 --> 00:30:16.287
Do you have any advice for him?
608
00:30:16.768 --> 00:30:16.988
Yeah.
609
00:30:18.532 --> 00:30:19.652
Because we're going to interview him too.
610
00:30:19.672 --> 00:30:20.693
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
611
00:30:20.713 --> 00:30:21.133
Yes, yes.
612
00:30:21.473 --> 00:30:23.574
Well, I think I'm very excited to see what he'll do.
613
00:30:23.674 --> 00:30:23.934
Yeah.
614
00:30:24.034 --> 00:30:26.776
Because, you know, the great thing, Michael's coming from the outside.
615
00:30:26.836 --> 00:30:28.836
It's always good to have a good outside perspective.
616
00:30:28.856 --> 00:30:29.597
Yeah.
617
00:30:29.757 --> 00:30:32.758
And I say this as a person who was selected inside as president.
618
00:30:32.798 --> 00:30:33.358
Right.
619
00:30:33.418 --> 00:30:35.759
There's sometimes having an internal candidate is great.
620
00:30:36.160 --> 00:30:36.680
But I think...
621
00:30:37.280 --> 00:30:43.482
Since I kind of grew up at Carnegie all my career and was director, I kind of already knew how things work and everything.
622
00:30:43.923 --> 00:30:45.923
I think sometimes it's good to have an outside perspective.
623
00:30:45.963 --> 00:30:48.104
So I'm very curious to see what he'll do.
624
00:30:48.144 --> 00:30:50.565
I think my advice to him is really follow his instincts.
625
00:30:50.985 --> 00:30:54.246
And I think there's an opportunity for him to shake things up, and that's always a good thing.
626
00:30:54.626 --> 00:30:57.928
So I'm very curious to see what he'll do and what he'll come up with.
627
00:30:57.968 --> 00:31:04.110
I mean, I think his role – I told him this when I made him the offer and tried to convince him to come, and thankfully it worked.
628
00:31:04.851 --> 00:31:10.038
I really think he has like the best job in all of astronomy because it's like he has great resources.
629
00:31:10.058 --> 00:31:11.881
He has this Las Caponis Observatory.
630
00:31:12.842 --> 00:31:19.112
He has access to all these wonderful things we have here, machine shops and all this stuff, and great astronomers to work with.
631
00:31:19.532 --> 00:31:21.794
And the freedom that you won't have anywhere else.
632
00:31:22.194 --> 00:31:28.398
So what I really want to see come from Michael and the whole group of astronomers is what are the things they're going to come up with next?
633
00:31:28.438 --> 00:31:29.899
What are the next ideas?
634
00:31:29.919 --> 00:31:31.440
Henrietta is a great example of this, right?
635
00:31:31.460 --> 00:31:34.922
That's a little tiny project that has huge implications if that works.
636
00:31:35.002 --> 00:31:35.222
Yeah.
637
00:31:35.423 --> 00:31:37.944
And so the thing is, what are the next things like that?
638
00:31:38.405 --> 00:31:39.385
And now that's his job.
639
00:31:39.465 --> 00:31:40.126
He gets to do that.
640
00:31:40.186 --> 00:31:42.667
I have to find the money to make sure he can do it when he...
641
00:31:43.648 --> 00:31:46.171
has the ideas, but I'm really curious to see what he comes up with.
642
00:31:46.231 --> 00:31:47.592
Yeah, yeah, that's going to be great.
643
00:31:49.614 --> 00:31:50.495
I'm looking forward to it.
644
00:31:51.256 --> 00:32:00.125
So I wanted to end by asking you about something that's personally very important to me, which is eclipse chasing.
645
00:32:00.605 --> 00:32:01.005
Ah, yes.
646
00:32:01.405 --> 00:32:02.346
Are you an eclipse chaser?
647
00:32:02.466 --> 00:32:03.566
I am an eclipse chaser.
648
00:32:03.586 --> 00:32:04.406
How many have you gone to?
649
00:32:04.426 --> 00:32:05.246
I've seen three.
650
00:32:05.846 --> 00:32:07.447
OK, so I think we're on the same number.
651
00:32:07.567 --> 00:32:09.588
Oh, yeah, OK. You started in 2017.
652
00:32:09.788 --> 00:32:13.469
No, I started, so my dad took me to my first one in 2008 in India.
653
00:32:13.489 --> 00:32:14.389
Oh, nice.
654
00:32:15.609 --> 00:32:18.350
It was on the banks of the Ganges, the Ganga River.
655
00:32:18.370 --> 00:32:19.130
Yeah.
656
00:32:19.250 --> 00:32:20.510
It was absolutely phenomenal.
657
00:32:20.630 --> 00:32:25.952
And then in 2017, I actually organized like a 100-person campsite in Idaho.
658
00:32:26.412 --> 00:32:26.772
Oh, very nice.
659
00:32:26.812 --> 00:32:28.613
All of my friends, and I somehow convinced them.
660
00:32:28.673 --> 00:32:30.553
I was like, guys, this is going to change your life.
661
00:32:31.133 --> 00:32:34.314
And they all showed up, and it was an amazing... Yeah.
662
00:32:34.514 --> 00:32:38.215
And it was like a textbook eclipse because there were no clouds in the sky.
663
00:32:38.835 --> 00:32:39.535
It was just...
664
00:32:39.655 --> 00:32:40.936
It was honestly amazing.
665
00:32:41.256 --> 00:32:46.037
And then I went to Texas for the most recent one, and I think you were there in Dallas, too.
666
00:32:46.057 --> 00:32:47.277
We were in Dallas, yeah.
667
00:32:47.437 --> 00:32:49.578
And Carnegie did a big outreach event.
668
00:32:49.718 --> 00:32:50.859
We had a huge outreach.
669
00:32:50.879 --> 00:32:51.119
Yeah.
670
00:32:51.160 --> 00:32:53.762
So we partnered with the Perot Museum, which is their new partners for us.
671
00:32:53.842 --> 00:32:55.604
And we're going to continue to work with them.
672
00:32:55.644 --> 00:32:57.646
It's a great science museum in downtown Dallas.
673
00:32:57.706 --> 00:32:57.967
Yeah.
674
00:32:58.167 --> 00:33:00.249
And so what had happened, the story behind it is quite interesting.
675
00:33:00.269 --> 00:33:02.371
We had a total solar eclipse.
676
00:33:02.391 --> 00:33:03.432
So 2017 was my first one.
677
00:33:03.552 --> 00:33:03.772
Okay.
678
00:33:03.893 --> 00:33:06.495
Because there hadn't been one in the U.S. in so long.
679
00:33:06.515 --> 00:33:06.716
Yeah.
680
00:33:06.836 --> 00:33:08.938
And so when I was a kid, there just hadn't been an opportunity.
681
00:33:09.458 --> 00:33:11.840
My parents didn't think of traveling to go see them.
682
00:33:12.180 --> 00:33:13.641
But so 2017 was my first one.
683
00:33:13.661 --> 00:33:16.403
I was in Idaho, too, which was brilliant, beautiful.
684
00:33:16.783 --> 00:33:20.725
And then in 2019, we had one at our site in Chile, Lascapanas.
685
00:33:20.826 --> 00:33:21.066
OK.
686
00:33:21.166 --> 00:33:21.886
So that was great.
687
00:33:22.106 --> 00:33:22.907
Oh, right.
688
00:33:23.107 --> 00:33:24.428
And so that was the second one I saw.
689
00:33:24.448 --> 00:33:24.728
Yes.
690
00:33:24.768 --> 00:33:25.509
That's insane.
691
00:33:25.549 --> 00:33:27.130
So it went over the telescopes?
692
00:33:27.230 --> 00:33:27.470
It was.
693
00:33:27.710 --> 00:33:28.811
It just missed the telescope.
694
00:33:28.831 --> 00:33:30.772
So in fact, we had to do the event at the bottom of our
695
00:33:30.872 --> 00:33:31.192
Mountain.
696
00:33:31.272 --> 00:33:31.592
Okay.
697
00:33:31.752 --> 00:33:33.553
And so we created this giant tent.
698
00:33:33.573 --> 00:33:34.594
We had like 200 people too.
699
00:33:34.774 --> 00:33:35.174
Okay.
700
00:33:35.194 --> 00:33:38.095
We created this giant tent in the middle of the desert to take people down there.
701
00:33:38.155 --> 00:33:40.116
And it was in the middle of Chilean winter.
702
00:33:40.476 --> 00:33:42.517
So I was very nervous about the weather because it can rain.
703
00:33:42.577 --> 00:33:42.797
Right.
704
00:33:42.877 --> 00:33:43.217
It can.
705
00:33:43.318 --> 00:33:45.919
It can be cloudy and chilly, although it's like California, right?
706
00:33:45.939 --> 00:33:46.119
Yeah.
707
00:33:46.619 --> 00:33:47.439
We have winter, right?
708
00:33:47.479 --> 00:33:48.280
Some days it's beautiful.
709
00:33:48.320 --> 00:33:48.920
Some days it's not.
710
00:33:49.520 --> 00:33:50.961
But it was a beautiful day, so that one was great.
711
00:33:50.981 --> 00:33:51.421
Mostly beautiful.
712
00:33:51.681 --> 00:33:52.282
Mostly beautiful.
713
00:33:52.342 --> 00:33:52.722
Oh, yes.
714
00:33:52.782 --> 00:33:56.084
No, there's more beautiful than almost anywhere, I guarantee.
715
00:33:56.464 --> 00:34:03.968
And so one of the people that came on that trip is Lyda Hill, who's a philanthropist and actually a funder of the Perot Museum.
716
00:34:04.548 --> 00:34:08.070
And Lyda, on this trip, I'm like, Lyda, you know there's going to be an eclipse in Dallas.
717
00:34:08.090 --> 00:34:09.491
I already had my eye on it in 2020.
718
00:34:09.531 --> 00:34:09.831
Nice.
719
00:34:10.271 --> 00:34:12.813
And she said, oh, we have to do something with the schools.
720
00:34:12.833 --> 00:34:13.073
Yeah.
721
00:34:13.093 --> 00:34:14.313
She's very, very big on education.
722
00:34:14.334 --> 00:34:14.454
Right.
723
00:34:14.474 --> 00:34:14.814
And I was...
724
00:34:15.354 --> 00:34:20.019
And so she went back and connected us to the Perot Museum, which is the science museum, very well connected.
725
00:34:20.619 --> 00:34:24.083
And she funded us to buy a million of the little glasses.
726
00:34:24.103 --> 00:34:26.786
So we handed a million glasses out to all the schools in the area.
727
00:34:27.386 --> 00:34:29.028
And a lot of our astronomers went.
728
00:34:29.088 --> 00:34:32.592
We visited something like 30,000 students in the end, I think, together.
729
00:34:33.192 --> 00:34:36.113
And the week before and so a lot of our astronomers were there for a whole week.
730
00:34:36.153 --> 00:34:39.415
It was it was just an amazing experience I don't know where you were were you in Austin?
731
00:34:39.435 --> 00:34:40.575
We were we were in Austin.
732
00:34:40.615 --> 00:34:42.436
Austin wasn't so good It wasn't so good.
733
00:34:42.556 --> 00:34:47.558
We were I actually rented a Airbnb and then again a hundred of my friends showed up.
734
00:34:47.738 --> 00:34:59.823
Yeah to the same Airbnb and like totality was happening and for the first like 90 seconds There was a cloud and then we saw the edge of the cloud leave and there was a you know it was on the banks of a river and
735
00:35:00.183 --> 00:35:06.270
So you could hear the cheers along the river as the clouds moved and as it cleared up.
736
00:35:06.370 --> 00:35:10.575
And we were like, we saw it, we heard it coming 20 seconds before we saw it.
737
00:35:10.876 --> 00:35:12.337
And it was an amazing time.
738
00:35:13.679 --> 00:35:19.766
Unfortunately, I had some trouble with Airbnb because apparently I'm not supposed to have 100 people on the lawn of an Airbnb.
739
00:35:19.786 --> 00:35:20.126
So...
740
00:35:21.147 --> 00:35:24.208
Other than that, it was a great time.
741
00:35:24.768 --> 00:35:25.089
Yeah.
742
00:35:25.149 --> 00:35:28.070
No, it was similar in Dallas where it eventually cleared up.
743
00:35:28.110 --> 00:35:29.190
So you did see Totality.
744
00:35:29.210 --> 00:35:31.431
So we did see Totality, and it was a great experience.
745
00:35:31.451 --> 00:35:33.112
So every one of them has been different.
746
00:35:33.132 --> 00:35:34.052
I've seen three of them there.
747
00:35:34.132 --> 00:35:36.053
Every one of them is different.
748
00:35:36.073 --> 00:35:39.114
So I've become a little bit of an eclipse chaser myself.
749
00:35:39.134 --> 00:35:40.254
Yeah, yeah.
750
00:35:40.374 --> 00:35:42.295
I'm trying to go to as many as I can.
751
00:35:42.723 --> 00:35:45.465
Yeah, we're already thinking of 27, which is the next big one.
752
00:35:45.585 --> 00:35:46.105
Right, where is that?
753
00:35:46.125 --> 00:35:47.046
27 is over Egypt.
754
00:35:47.446 --> 00:35:48.127
Oh, right.
755
00:35:48.687 --> 00:35:51.509
It goes over all of North Africa, basically, and goes over Egypt.
756
00:35:51.529 --> 00:35:52.449
It goes right over the pyramids.
757
00:35:52.590 --> 00:35:52.870
Yeah.
758
00:35:52.930 --> 00:35:55.351
And so, and it's six minutes of totality.
759
00:35:55.371 --> 00:35:56.972
So that's- Yeah, that one's super long.
760
00:35:57.153 --> 00:35:57.733
Yeah, it is.
761
00:35:57.853 --> 00:35:59.874
It's unfortunately, well, maybe it's fortunate.
762
00:35:59.934 --> 00:36:02.296
It will be clear because it's August in Egypt.
763
00:36:02.596 --> 00:36:03.437
It's like almost 100%.
764
00:36:03.537 --> 00:36:03.877
Yeah.
765
00:36:04.037 --> 00:36:05.518
But it'll probably be 110 degrees.
766
00:36:05.578 --> 00:36:06.379
But- Right.
767
00:36:06.439 --> 00:36:07.559
It will be worth it to see it.
768
00:36:07.579 --> 00:36:07.780
Yeah.
769
00:36:07.840 --> 00:36:10.001
I mean, six minutes is a long time of totality.
770
00:36:10.021 --> 00:36:10.561
That's right.
771
00:36:10.601 --> 00:36:11.122
That's insane.
772
00:36:11.142 --> 00:36:11.282
It is.
773
00:36:11.522 --> 00:36:15.806
I tell people, and I'm sure you feel this way now, like, if you haven't lived through one, you have to see one.
774
00:36:15.906 --> 00:36:16.127
Yeah.
775
00:36:16.207 --> 00:36:18.229
And everybody always says, oh, I saw the partial.
776
00:36:18.249 --> 00:36:18.689
It was 99%.
777
00:36:18.789 --> 00:36:19.570
Oh, my gosh.
778
00:36:19.650 --> 00:36:20.851
It is not the same.
779
00:36:21.191 --> 00:36:23.153
It's a completely different experience.
780
00:36:23.173 --> 00:36:23.674
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
781
00:36:23.814 --> 00:36:26.496
It's one of these sigmoids that's just, like, super.
782
00:36:26.917 --> 00:36:27.578
Oh, 100%.
783
00:36:27.638 --> 00:36:28.498
Like, super steep.
784
00:36:28.699 --> 00:36:29.139
Oh, it is.
785
00:36:29.199 --> 00:36:29.740
It's crazy.
786
00:36:29.820 --> 00:36:30.300
It's crazy.
787
00:36:30.340 --> 00:36:33.083
So I've become a little bit of an eclipse facer myself.
788
00:36:33.123 --> 00:36:33.223
Yeah.
789
00:36:33.243 --> 00:36:33.523
Yeah.
790
00:36:34.484 --> 00:36:37.608
And I know many people, many of our supporters there are Carnegie as well.
791
00:36:37.948 --> 00:36:40.971
I've had some of them went to all three of those trips and everybody's asking about Egypt.
792
00:36:40.991 --> 00:36:43.534
So I'm like, okay, we're going to work on this.
793
00:36:43.614 --> 00:36:43.774
Yeah.
794
00:36:43.794 --> 00:36:45.596
Long ways to go, but it's going to be pretty spectacular.
795
00:36:45.616 --> 00:36:45.836
Yeah.
796
00:36:45.876 --> 00:36:46.097
Yeah.
797
00:36:46.397 --> 00:36:48.239
Well, best of luck on that trip.
798
00:36:49.661 --> 00:36:50.742
It's been a great conversation.
799
00:36:50.782 --> 00:36:52.083
Thank you for taking the time.
800
00:36:52.103 --> 00:36:52.524
Thank you.
801
00:36:52.764 --> 00:36:52.984
Yeah.
802
00:36:53.004 --> 00:36:53.605
I appreciate it.