Exploring the Final Frontier: Astrophysicist Discusses Work
By Lisa Pemberton, The Olympian, Olympia, Wash.
Apr. 25–Renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will speak at The Evergreen State College on Tuesday evening as part of the annual Willi Unsoeld Seminar Series.
Tyson, 49, is director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He’s even better known as the host of PBS’s “NOVA scienceNOW” and is the author of several books, including his latest, “Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries.” The book was a New York Times best-seller.
To learn more about his seminar, The Olympian caught up with Tyson at his home in New York. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Question: What message do you hope people will get from your presentation?
Answer: I’m still tuning and sharpening the message, but it will be definitely to light a fire under people to recognize, understand and val ue the role of science and technology in the 21st century. Innovations in science and technology will birth entire new economies.
Other countries are investing in science and technology. America is coasting on investments from previous generations.
QUESTION: Past investments, such as the walk on the moon?
ANSWER: Exactly. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were in their early teens when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. And what are teens looking at today?
Q: How did you catch the science and space bug?
A: I caught it at a time when people were dreaming big dreams. My first visit to the planetarium in New York was in the 1960s, before we landed on the moon. The nation had an investment going. I had an encounter with the cosmos. Just the sheer thrill of exploration and discovery — to me that was a hot ticket. But my interest to be a scientist did not flow out of NASA’s program. I knew the country was doing bold things. That sets a point of view that stimulates the urge to discover and explore in everyone.
Q: What can be done to get that urge back?
A: I might be biased when I say NASA needs another big vision. People always overestimate NASA’s budget by a power of 10 . It tells you that what NASA does with every dollar is hugely visible. … But if the nation is not exploring, then its citizens do not explore.
Q: What’s left to explore?
A: There are a lot of things. There’s the search for life in the universe — life on Mars, life on Jupiter. On the moons of Jupiter, there’s been water for billions of years. And life is everywhere we find water. Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect and Mars used to have water, but something bad happened. …
Another one is, we really don’t understand asteroids and what they’re made of. Why should you want to know that? Well, maybe we might have one coming our way.
People ask, why are you spending money up there? Solutions to problems on Earth might actually be found elsewhere.
Q: Tell us about your book, “Death by Black Hole.”
A: I’m in between books right now. “Death by Black Hole” just came out in paperback. It’s an encounter with how science works. I’d like to believe when you’re done with that, you’ll be hugely scientifically literate. And you’ll learn about black holes. … They’re dangerous things.
My other book, “The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet” will come out in January. It’s a retelling of the public’s reaction when my museum decided to reclassify Pluto another way. We got raked over the coals for it. I have this huge file that has hate mail from third-graders.
Six years later, the International Astronomical Union agreed (with the reclassification).
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I look forward to this trip. I’m honored to be part of the Unsoeld series. He’s got a legacy that the institution is upholding with this lecture series. It’s my goal that, in my talk, I will live up to what’s expected of me for the memory of the life and death of this mountaineer. He was an explorer, a discoverer.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Olympian, Olympia, Wash.
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