JWST: The Telescope That Changed How We See the Universe with Richard Panek [Ep. 477]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been making headlines since its announcement. But what makes the telescope so special? How do astronomers create the captivating images we see online? And is the $10 billion gamble actually paying off? Here today to invite us into the intricacies of the controversial telescope is none other than Richard Panek, an award-winning science writer who specializes in astronomy and telescopes. Panek is known for making complex scientific concepts accessible to general audiences by blending them with his excellent storytelling. In his latest book, Pillars of Creation, he tackled the JWST and detailed its story from the very beginning. Join us as we dive into the telescope’s groundbreaking design, the controversies surrounding it, the remarkable discoveries it has already made, the science behind the stunning images we see, and what the future of astronomy looks like. — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 00:29 Panic! at the Discs 02:13 Hubble vs. Webb 05:05 Judging a book by its cover 09:26 The discovery of dimethyl sulfide on Kepler K2-18b 11:27 Exoplanet detection and scientific goals 13:33 Historical rhymes in astronomy 16:56 The process and costs of running JWST 21:21 Controversy around naming JWST 28:25 How JWST images are made 37:43 Margin beyond the margin of error 40:11 Assigning colors to infrared images 43:26 The future of NASA’s giant observatories 45:08 The 4-Percent Universe and what’s next for Richard 48:33 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Richard Panek: 📱 Website: https://www.richardpanek.net/ 📚 Pillars of Creation: https://a.co/d/d86haI5 📚 The 4-Percent Universe: https://a.co/d/hBlWtol ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've gone back and I've looked at some of the headlines from that period and there were things like JWST has broken cosmology. It's broken the universe. Broken was used a lot. After everything died down, I thought that wasn't breakage. That was science.

• 0:13Brian Keating?

  Richard Panic. So great to see you again. Three years after our last conversation. And three years exactly since the James Webb Space Telescope was launched, recording on Christmas Eve 2024. How are you?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Very well. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again.

• 0:29Brian Keating?

  I want to take us back to two years ago when a paper came out called Panic, P A N I C, not P A N E K. Panic at the Disks. It was a suggestion that galaxies of a disk variety formed extremely early in the universe, much earlier than thought, and it was all thanks to the so-called James Webb Deep Field Image. This set off a controversy which led to many things, including many papers that claimed that the Big Bang never happened. What was that story like? How did it resolve itself? Is it resolved to this day? Did the Big Bang happen, Richard?

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I was there. There was something. One of the things about the James Webb Telescope, JWST, is that they wanted to test their theories about the early universe, and by they, I mean people like you. I wanted to figure out whether they were getting the early universe right. And so the fact that there were these anomalies like right out of the gate wasn't particularly surprising. But what it means is that you have to go back and you have to check the data and you have to challenge your assumptions and retake the observations and so on. And what they found is that in almost all of those cases where there were galaxies that were supposedly too big

• 1:50Speaker 00

  for that early in the universe and too many supernovae and too many black holes and so on. Once they took follow-up observations and they did more corrections to their spectroscopy, they were able to make things fit. And to the extent that they weren't able to make things fit, they wound up fitting theories that had been proposed, but nobody had been able to actually test them before James Webb.

• 2:13Brian Keating?

  Was that part of the original mission concept for JWST, the way that the Hubble Key Project was for the Hubble Space Telescope?

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Well, sure. The big difference between Hubble, I mean, there are many differences between Hubble and JWST. But the primary one is that JWST can see in the infrared and the Hubble can see mostly in optical light, visual light, and a little bit in the ultraviolet. But if you see in the infrared, you can see deeper into the universe, earlier in the universe, because the universe has been expanding and so the wavelengths of the light from phenomena in the first 10, I'm sorry, the first billion years or so after the Big Bang has stretched so much in the interim that it's now in the infrared.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  So Hubble's cutoff was around a billion years after the Big Bang and that's what we saw in the original Hubble Deep Field. So they were going to go deeper and also they're taking advantage. I mean, if you look at the initial Webb Deep Field, you'll see a lot of arcs in there, arcs of light, and those are indicators of gravitational lensing. So that galaxy clusters in the foreground were bending the light gravitationally from earlier in the universe and some of that light, as I said, would be in the infrared and therefore visible to JWST.

• 3:37Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, the thought that I had along that episode a couple of years ago now was that it kind of highlights the scientific process, you know, to have a controversial claim that is made based on the obtaining of new data. And that's the way science is supposed to progress. It's not necessarily, you know, the case that science is all built upon radically overthrowing what we knew before. And in fact, some of the, you know, characters, shall we say, that were involved in the claim that the Big Bang never happened based on JWST data, I'm thinking of Eric Lerner and Rajesh Gupta, who I've had here at UCSD, actually.

• 4:18Brian Keating?

  These individuals have been suggesting this for years, so it wasn't exactly new. And in fact, some of the mature structure of spiral galaxies was observed in Hubble's Deep Field image, the OG of Deep Field imaging. But it's sort of part of the process of scientific progress that it advances. Not one funeral at a time, but one telescope at a time. So I really thought it was an instructive moment in the history of science, but it did get a lot more attention than originally thought. It was kind of shocking in that way.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've gone back and I've looked at some of the headlines from that period. And there were things like JWST has broken cosmology. It's broken the universe. Broken was used a lot. And I, after everything died down, I thought that wasn't breakage. That was science. Exactly what you're saying.

• 5:05Brian Keating?

  So, Richard, as I said, we don't usually have the advice to judge books by their cover. But let's be honest, we have very little to go on, except for the fact that on the back of this book, we have incredible encomia, such as Masterly from the New York Times and previous books. And of course, the roaring, rip roaring praise for all your, all your past works, especially the 4% Universe, classic and modern popularization of physical. Get into how your views have evolved, thanks to JWST, on claims and the thesis of 4% Universe. But before we do that, let's judge the book by its cover. So, Richard, take us into it. What's the meaning of the title, the subtitle in this majestic cover artwork?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Hubble released an image in 19, in the mid 1990s that was dubbed Pillars of Creation. So they went, and it's a star forming region. That's a lot of gas in it. And, and for what? They wanted to go back and, and take the same photo, except now in infrared. And it's still called Pillars of Creation. And it's a very impressive photo, as you, as you were just saying. That was the title of the book from the beginning. I mean, it was just one of those things that the publisher approached me, a couple of editors approached me about the idea for the book. And, and because they were so enamored of Pillars of Creation, they wanted to call that. And of course, feature that photo on the cover. And it is a gorgeous photo.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  I love, I love the colors in it, the, the really deep blues, the inky blues. And of course, the, the, the star forming regions, which are at the tip of what has always seemed to me to be an arm. Right? An arm reaching out or ET. So it's got this little glowing tip of the finger. And that's where stars are being born. So it's very, it's a very cool image, I think. And also for Pillars of Creation, as I was writing the book, I thought, well, you know, Pillars of Creation refers to this image, but as I was writing the book, I kept writing about, you mentioned a minute ago about how science proceeds, astronomy proceeds, one telescope at a time.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  And so I started providing a history of the telescope leading up to Webb. And as I did, I thought, okay, well, these are actually pillars of creation. And JWST is our latest pillar. And so I hope that the title reads two ways.

• 7:31Brian Keating?

  And the subtitle, How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos. Is that a little premature? I mean, do you really feel at this point that JWST has had the impact that, say, Hubble has had? I made the provocative claim four years ago, right before it launched, that it wouldn't really revolutionize, because Hubble picks so much of the low hanging fruit and because JWST is a real scientific tool rather than an artistry generating tool for $10 billion, that it would have less of a cultural, psychocultural impact. I think I've been partially right, at least with the controversies surrounding the disk mature galaxies and also the discovery of potential life, life signatures or biosignatures.

• 8:16Brian Keating?

  We'll get into that next. Do you think it's really unlocked secrets that were previously cloistered away behind the wall of illusion? Or do we have a true breakthrough on the level of a Hubble itself?

• 8:30Speaker 00

  I don't know that we've had breakthroughs on the level of Hubble, but it's very early in the mission. It's going to be going for another 20 years or so, supposedly. Privately, if you talk to the people behind the scenes, they will say that they're actually looking for a little longer than that. But they're trying to be, they're trying to rein in expectations a little bit. As for the subtitle, I have to say, I didn't come up with the subtitle. The publisher did. And I actually, I asked whether unlocked was quite accurate, but they liked the word. But I can justify it. I can defend that subtitle because I arranged the book in four areas, which are actually the four goals that.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  That the JWST team has articulated in each of those four areas, JWST has made breakthroughs. So I think that the subtitle is somewhat justified, at least somewhat.

• 9:26Brian Keating?

  I think some of the most important reactions is as they kind of portray human interest and not only in scientific interest, but human interest revolves around the discovery of dimethyl sulfide on this Kepler K two dash 18b, which obviously has sparked a wave of speculation, et cetera. And you capture the gripping kind of behind the scenes story. Can you take us into it? What was it like for the research team when they first saw the data and what steps are needed to confirm or refute this potentially groundbreaking new discovery?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Well, I was present when at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is the headquarters for the operations for Hubble and Webb both. And there was a conference and somebody, the lead investigator on the potential discovery that you were just mentioning, the dimethyl sulfide, got up and said, he introduced a lot of things from their research and they were all very impressive. And then he closed by saying, now, if the following is true, you are present at a historic moment because we may have found dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl sulfide on Earth anyway cannot exist without life of some sort, you know,

• 10:42Speaker 00

  very primitive life, but still a life. And he was very cautious. You know, I mean, he kept saying, this is not, this is not an announcement, this is not a discovery. Nonetheless, they had put it into a press release that morning. I guess they were kind of staking a claim, you know, because if it turns out to be true, then it is a, then it was indeed a historic moment, but we won't know for a few years. And that particular data, set of data was at the three sigma level, which is not enough to claim a discovery. And the other, some of the other things that they were announcing were at the five sigma level. So they were comfortable with that, but the three sigma level was, was, is very much,

• 11:25Speaker 00

  as you know, in, in an iffy territory.

• 11:28Brian Keating?

  They say that if you get a three segment result, they'll invite you to give a seminar, but you'll have to pay for it yourself. They invite you to Stockholm and then they they fetch you their their dime or their Swedish kronor. Another, you know, really fascinating discovery that I should say, you know, is is unique in the sense that it was really enabled by Webb's perch in the so-called L2 Lagrange point. And and that's, you know, detection of water vapors, which is very hard to do in direct imaging of exoplanets. So speak about the exoplanets themselves, their their their characteristics. And I always like to ask a provocative question.

• 12:07Brian Keating?

  What if, you know, God or, you know, Zeus or whoever you believe in, you know, sends you a telegram or a text message, a beeper pager, and it's all it says is there's no life anywhere else in the universe? Is it still worth studying these exoplanets?

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Well, they're studying the exoplanets partly to figure out how how our solar system came to be. So when they're looking at star forming regions where there's a single star being born and it's shooting off all this gas and right in the middle there and the very, you know, the the image is huge and right in the middle is is is is the star being born. And around it, in that little, little region, would be possibly an analog to our solar system early in its in its history as it was being as it was being born. So they're looking, they're looking for signs of life, definitely.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  But but if they if we were told that there are that there's no other life in the universe, I suspect that they would keep looking because you never know what you're going to find. I mean, that's that's really the thrill of astronomy. I'm going back to Galileo. As I say in the book, you know, when Galileo used one of the first, what we would call telescopes, to look up at the night sky, there was no reason to think that there was anything else out there than that we could see. Right? I mean, you know.

• 13:33Brian Keating?

  Cue to bring out my my finger puppet of Galileo and his original telescope, which I swiped from his museum in in Archetree, Italy. No, I didn't swipe, but it's. Replica. But yeah, you're right. He did in 1609 make these images here of the moon, the moon's surface, like a magnet there. Yeah, so it's sort of a legacy, although it's a reflecting telescope legacy. But yeah, the immediate thing is sort of understand, you know, research is me-search, right? We want to find out how we came to be. And that that story resonates throughout this book. What other like, human stories or, you know, kind of connections between the past? You mentioned Galileo, what about Newton? You mentioned him in this book. What other kind of historical rhymes are there, as Mark

• 14:17Brian Keating?

  Twain said about history, are there between the greats of the past and this next generation that excite you personally?

• 14:23Speaker 00

  I mentioned a few minutes ago that JWST has four official goals. And they struck me as I was researching the book, that those four goals correspond to really four breakthroughs. Edwin Hubble, the astronomer, said that the history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. And so I took that approach. I thought, okay, they've they've established these four goals, which correspond actually to four horizons that astronomers have crossed in the last 400 years. The first being Galileo, as we were just saying. And but and so we find out that there are, you know, other moons out there. Eventually, we find there

• 15:04Speaker 00

  are other planets in the solar system. The whole idea of the solar system comes about because now we have ourselves as as a planet and solar, the sun, and a system around them. And that and it hadn't been seen, of course, as a as a system, as an interlocking system, until Newton came along and introduced gravitation. But then you have the stars. And the question then is, are the stars moving? Do they have depth? And and so the the second rhyme, as you were suggesting, would be William Herschel in the late 18th century. And he's famous for having discovered Uranus. But he but his primary mission was to map

• 15:49Speaker 00

  The stars in three dimensions to see whether or not this galaxy has a structure. And he and he made a lot of progress. And so he gave he gave the stars the the third dimension. Then comes Edwin Hubble, more a little more than a century later, who finds out that there are other galaxies out there. So now we've crossed another threshold, another horizon. And then back to the beginning of this discussion, we were talking about the difference between Hubble and JWST and the fact that Hubble can only see two, which was to about a billion

• 16:29Speaker 00

  years after the Big Bang. And and so that became another horizon that that the JWS team had deliberately chosen to to go past that horizon. So they really divided it into these areas, the solar system, the galaxy, other galaxies and structure and the evolution of those galaxies, and the first billion years of the universe. So there is a lot of rhyme in there. I like that you put it that way.

• 16:56Brian Keating?

  I want to turn again to some of the, you know, kind of human stories that make this book so, you know, just impossibly engaging and delightful. And, you know, one of those is you explain a six months of terror. And, you know, this this project, because it was so huge, enormous, unlike any undertaking NASA had ever done, ate up most of NASA's budget, you know, there were daily updates on the delays per day, you know, how many days per day it would be delayed. And it really conflicted with the original director of NASA's vision, when original, meaning when the project first was in its nascent stage, which is Dan Golden. I met him way back when I was a graduate student, 1990s, and had a NASA fellowship that allowed me to meet him. But the the, you know, kind

• 17:41Brian Keating?

  of mantra at that time was better, faster, cheaper. And this was, you know, kind of better, for sure. But no way faster or cheaper. Talk about that and the pressure on the team. You mentioned, you know, specific scientists in the, you know, as responsible for the success of it, but really seeing it through three decades of basically, you know, what they say about airline pilots. It's, you know, it's hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer panic and terror. So tell me, Richard, what was that like on that? What did that do to that kind of the souls and the spirit of the people involved in it?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Well, they had their careers on the line. I mean, this was such a long project, people were working on it for decades. They had spent their entire careers on this. And if, and if something went wrong on the launch pad, or something went wrong during those first six months before it started science operations, everything that they'd worked on would be gone.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  And astronomy in the United States might very well be gone too, because it would be difficult to keep NASA going at any way, in the way that we're used to thinking of it, if their biggest project in decades failed after extracting more and more and more money from Congress.

• 18:58Brian Keating?

  How much does it cost to run? You know, I always talk about these expenses are, you know, the sticker shock is breathtaking, but that's not all, you know, you don't build an aircraft carrier just to build it. You build it to operate it. And our field, experimental cosmology, we have a rule of thumb that it costs about 10% of the construction cost to operate the instrument. So that means in a decade it doubles total. What is that the case for for Webb? I'm not familiar with it.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't know. I'm sorry.

• 19:25Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it must be significant amount of resource. I know for a fact it's incredibly competitive to get time on it. I've had on not only John Mathers, the science project scientist for it, but Adam Reese, who's used it and recently had David Kipping on to discuss his research with it, including exo, looking for exo moons, so moons around other planets that are not in our solar system. But these, you know, it's incredibly competitive. So what does it like to get, you know, to what's the life cycle like of using it to make these secrets get unlocked, to unlock these secrets, if you will? What is the life cycle of a scientist involved in such a project? How does the process work? How do they apply for it? How do they get the time? What are the odds of doing it?

• 20:08Brian Keating?

  And then what happens afterwards, once they do get the time, if they're so lucky?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  The cycle is called a cycle. And so the first cycle were the people who got to use it first for the first year and then the second cycle. So you have to apply, you have to come up with a specific proposal. And because it is so expensive, as you said, you have to really convince the committee that this is the instrument you need, that you can't do it with another instrument, that Webb's, let's say, the infrared capability is essential for your research. And it's a blind submission, but you know, I think it's an open secret in your community that the committee that will be making the decision can pretty much identify who is proposing

• 20:51Speaker 00

  certain things because you just know who's working in what area. So it's not quite anonymous as they would like. But then if you get it, it's an extraordinary opportunity. And if you don't get it, you compete in the next cycle. So I guess by now, I guess we're in the, what, the third or fourth cycle? Wait, twenty, two, three, twenty-four? Yeah, we're in the third cycle. So I think that the proposals for the fourth cycle will be due relatively soon.

• 21:21Brian Keating?

  And the original, you know, kind of choice of the name of the telescope was made a great controversy. I've had Hakeem Oluseyi, who's a solar astronomer, but he mostly does teaching and popularization of science nowadays exceptionally well. But the question that he wanted to investigate was, was James Webb, the NASA administrator that it was named after, was he a homophobe? And that actually caused a great deal of controversy. You know, you don't talk so much about that in the book, but was that something that affected you just from an author's standpoint, you know, wading into these controversial, potentially controversial waters?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  A book of this nature, you know, I said, I said at the first meeting with the editors, I said, you know, this isn't going to be the comprehensive everything that happened with Webb book. I don't know that anybody could read that, you know, and I certainly couldn't research it in the kind of timeframe that we were looking at. So you have to pick and choose. And I acknowledge in the book that the naming of the telescope was controversial for a few reasons, actually. A telescope would usually be named after a scientist. And in this case, it was named after an administrator. Secondly, the head of NASA at the time made the decision unilaterally. He did not consult the community.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  So that was two strikes against him in terms of, or two strikes against the name in terms of its acceptability among astronomers. And then the third, as you said, was the possibility that James Webb was a homophobe. He was certainly an administrator during the period that we now call the lavender scare, when there was a lot of investigations within the government to see whether people were homosexual and therefore security risks, supposedly. And people have done research into it. I certainly haven't seen anything conclusive that he was. But it raises the issue of what you're going to call the telescope.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  And people in the community tend to call it JWST, so they don't have to say Webb's name. The book, I realized, because there's going to be an audio book, which you listened to, having the reader say JWST all the time. They're like, you know, we try to stay away from acronyms as much as possible because it's just kind of a, it's a lot to listen to. So for that reason, I decided to go with Webb. But I say that in the book, and I think I say it in a footnote, so that I did want to be on the record as why I'm choosing to call it Webb, despite the community consensus to call it JWST.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  And I think that it's a great sacrifice for the community because JWST is six syllables, Webb is one, but they have to keep saying this at conferences, JWST. And increasingly, I notice that they slurp it. They just kind of go, "Drist."

• 24:22Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think it's quite interesting. I mean, Hakim's analysis came up with, and he was predisposed to thinking Webb was actually guilty of the sort of transgressions that the LGBTQ community certainly has suffered from, and there's no doubt about it. But he was wrong, you know, in his initial assumption. Webb was actually very supportive and one of the... One of his closest advisors, I believe, was what we call queer today. He had another one who was a lesbian, I believe, involved with it. And he was, you know, it wasn't his position to set. The lavender scare was set way above where NASA is in the US government. It was not endemic just to NASA. It was fully through, you know, infiltrated the entire government agencies, all of them,

• 25:06Brian Keating?

  including the security and secrecy agencies. So it wasn't in any way unique to him. And I think the controversies more or less died down. But I think some of the tarnish on the names still, as you say, remains. And that's unfortunate because I do think, although, you know, maybe it, you know, is a lesson to NASA to not name instruments after administrators. Although I think we are, I think the Roman telescope is, I think Nancy Roman was an administrator. She was a scientist too, but she was also much more kind of successful in her advocacy for scientific instrumentation and administration. Thinking about this instrument as a tool, you know, I would say there's no kind of direct way to give money and then get smarter, right? I mean, books can do so much. This book does a lot.

• 25:51Brian Keating?

  Your books do a lot. But the closest I've ever felt is going to a foreign country, a country where I don't speak the language. I remember going to France for the first time. I did take two or three years of high school French, but I was disabused of my great knowledge and mastery of the French language. As soon as I got off the metro, the first minute after leaving the gare de nord, as they would say, and get out and I see this kid and he's playing with his dog and he's talking to the dog.

• 26:17Brian Keating?

  I don't know what he's saying, but I realized the dog knew a lot more French than I would ever know. But this is sort of a collective for humanity. This tool spends money, you know, US taxpayers, you know, dump money in and out comes curiosity, out comes imagination and really allows the human mind to expand and just to appreciate this drama of this incredible, you know, ambitious human endeavor that's uniquely human. There aren't, you know, the nobos aren't doing these kinds of things. So of the four different types of, of, you know, key project, you know, goals, which are the most sort of, you know, important for the implications on, as I say, what makes us human and what we see as inspiring humanity to contribute to make huge investments in science and technology like this?

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Well, you mentioned before Dan Golden, who gave the green light. He was a NASA administrator in 1995, and he gave the green light basically because he was told during a presentation in his office that this next generation space telescope, Webb eventually, would have a theme. The theme would be origins, that it would look for our origins in some way. And you can define that broadly, origins as a species, origins as a planet, origins as a solar system, whatever. But we're going to keep looking, we're going to go deeper and deeper. And we've talked about the Webb Deep Field, and we've talked about the Hubble Deep Field. And the Hubble Deep Field was kind of instrumental at that point.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  It was released about two or three weeks after Dan Golden said yes to the project. And it became a great publicity. I don't know if publicity is quite right, but

• 28:00Brian Keating?

  Rallying point, yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, promotional tool. I mean, it became, for a while there, it became the face of Hubble. And it was a jaw-dropping image. But the idea was, can we see beyond this? And that's what, as I said earlier, that the infrared abilities of JWST does allow to see earlier into the universe.

• 28:25Brian Keating?

  And now I want to go a little bit more technical into some of the details that you alone perhaps are privy to. There are other books written about Webb's first year, one by National Geographic, come from the National Geographic publishers. But this one is less focused on the visuals. There are incredible visuals and beautifully illustrated images that are actually in full color plates, which are amazing. So I want to talk about how these are made. But I want to talk about that in a slightly technical fashion, because my audience is the most brilliant in the known multiverse, and they have questions, I'm sure. And before I do, I want to just highlight the fact that life may have come to other planets from Earth, or perhaps the reverse, a phenomenon that sounds dirty, Richard, but it's not.

• 29:10Brian Keating?

  It's called panspermia. Where meteorites like this one impact another planet with some microbial schmutz, eventually making their way to Earth, or maybe vice versa. This is a lunar meteorite that I collected. So this actually was due to an impact on the moon's surface that blasted off material and eventually it made its way to Earth and Africa. So the reverse process can occur. And I give away these meteorites to lucky winners on my website, briankeating.com/list. And you join my mailing list and one lucky winner per week gets one of these. But if you have a .edu email address and you're an educated individual, you're guaranteed to win one if you live in the US. So go to briankeating.com/edu for your chance to win some possibly material that created life on Earth. And no, I don't think that really

• 29:55Brian Keating?

  happened, but it is genuine solar system schmutz, as I say. And it's what's called dust. And I think dust plays a big role in a lot of the beautiful images of the project. So talk about the choice to use infrared. What was that based upon? Why is that such a fruitful tool that Webb is able to exploit?

• 30:13Speaker 00

  In two ways, I think, two primary ways. The first is that seeing in the infrared allows you to see through dust. It allows you to see through things. I mean, if you take, because it's about heat, it's detecting heat and the heat will come through the dust, right? So it will be imaging something that, to our eyes, is invisible. And the other advantage of infrared is the one that we've discussed, where you can just see deeper into the universe, because the light wavelengths have been stretched by the expansion of space over the past 13 point something billion years.

• 30:53Brian Keating?

  And another very fascinating detail that you talk about in the book is this concept of dithering. So a lot of people have accused me of dithering my life away, but what is the notion of dithering and a telescope? What does that actually allow scientists to do and use Webb more efficiently?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  You should correct me if I'm wrong, because you'll know this much better than I do. But dithering is you look at an object and then you move the telescope a little bit, because this particular image might have a different kind of schmutz on it. It might have a cosmic ray. That part of the image then is unusable. So you dither a little bit and then you Then you go back and you go, ideally, then you you have by combining those images, you come up with an image that or a set of data. I mean, we talk about images, but for the scientists, it's zeros and ones before they become images. And sometimes they want to see an image and they can convert the zeros and ones into the images that we see, like on the cover of the book or that you see in newspapers and magazines and so on

• 31:55Speaker 00

  on web all the time. But the data comes in is zeros and ones, and they can look at that and and extract the information that they need. But again, through dithering, you you are going to get the clean data. You will be able to to take the different images and put them together. Now, am I getting that right?

• 32:15Brian Keating?

  That's exactly right. I mean, no image processing tool, no chip is perfect. There's literally, I forget how many megapixels there are in webs, imaging cameras, but there's many, many megapixels. And the odds of one, you know, not going, you know, to be a failed pixel or missing some wire bond or something like that is basically infinitesimal. It's it's impossible to do that over so many pixels. So it compensates for that by having many, many pixels. But sometimes the actual target is on that, you know, David Kipping is looking for a moon. And actually, they've discovered that that some of the pixels are not performing nearly as well as as designed, actually, and you'll see that in the interview I do with him. And in fact, very, very poorly. And so they have to use, it's sort of like

• 33:00Brian Keating?

  the human eye. The human eye has this fovea. I've got a human eye in the background, a model of it, for those listening, not a real one. But the human eye has this peculiar property that, well, it needs to get the data out of the retinal system and then into the brain. And so it does that via a bundle of nerves which which have a place that indicates where there's no sensitivity alike, because you can't have it simultaneously transport data and also be imaging. So that's why we have the blind spot. And it's pretty close to the fovea, which is the point of maximal intensity of the human eye. So Webb has the same problem. Some of the central chip gets, you know, gets a lot higher noise level than than desired or or planned. And that brings us, you know, the technical challenges of

• 33:41Brian Keating?

  this instrument I have in my office at UCSD in my other recording studio. I have a model of the 3D printed model of JWST equipped with gold plated, you know, subreflectors, the primary mirror. And that was made by an undergrad, you know, took weeks for him to build it. It's painstaking, I've already broken part of it. But talk about the, you know, the challenge of building, you know, assembling this origami structure in space and what risk that represented for NASA to undertake.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  The telescope, the, uh, the light collecting surface was going to be, uh, 20, 21 feet diameter, something, something like that. Whereas, uh, Hubble was much smaller. So, okay, they wanted to have a much larger collecting area, light collecting area. But you can't build a mirror of that size. So they had to build, uh, segmented mirrors, which are little mirrors that add up, uh, into, to a big mirror. And that technology has been around since I think the early 1990s, late 1980s, something like that. They have this huge multi-segmented mirror

• 34:51Speaker 00

  that you can't fit into the tip of a rocket. So they had to figure out a way to transport it. And you say, uh, their, their solution was, uh, was very origami like that. It, they folded it up, stuck it in the rocket. And then when it got into space, it would unfold. And that's, you know, extraordinary achievement in itself. They then had to deploy the sun shield. Now, you mentioned earlier that the telescope is in L2, Lagrange point two, uh, which is, which is part of the solar system, one of, um, several parts of the solar system that are in gravitational balance. So it's opposite the sun from the earth.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  One of the reasons they chose that. That particular location is that it would be in the shadow, it would be in perpetual eclipse, right? It would always be in the shadow of the earth. So that blocks a lot of the heat. Infrared, very sensitive to heat. They had to keep it down. They had to keep the heat as low as they could. That is to say, they needed to get the instrument down to, close to absolute zero, not absolute zero, but as close to it as, as they could. So that means that one side of the instrument, the, the whole instrument is going to be facing the sun, or the earth, actually, and that's going to be getting, soaking up a lot of heat, even though the

• 36:16Speaker 00

  sun is, is in eclipse. And the other half is going to be pointing out towards the rest of the universe. So they need to make that side very cold. The other side is going to be hot, just because it's, because it's facing in the direction of the sun. So there is this difference of hundreds of degrees, you know, hundreds of degrees below zero to hundreds of degrees above zero, either Fahrenheit or Celsius for that matter. And between the two, they're going to have a sun, a sun shield to keep the universe facing part of the instrument cold. So the sun shield needs to unfold. This particular statistic might be my favorite

• 37:00Speaker 00

  from the whole enterprise, which is that the sun shield is actually five layers. And each layer, as I say in the book, it's, is the length of a long tennis lob and the width of a tissue, which is just crazy. I mean, that's like, that's, that's nuts, you know? And they have to unfold it and the five layers and, and eventually it creates an SPF, sun protecting factor of a million, I think it is. So you're not going to get that at Walgreens.

• 37:33Brian Keating?

  Hey friends, just a short request to ask you to use your thumb while my thumb is occupied to leave a like on this video. And don't forget to subscribe. It really helps us with the algorithm.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Now back to the episode.

• 37:43Brian Keating?

  Another kind of technically gripping component of the book involves the concept of margin that you guys discussed with Mike Menzel. So this concept that he insisted upon, which he phrases as margin beyond the margin for error. We're used to NASA, you know, and, you know, failure is not an option, except on my, you know, high school calculus test. But what does that mean? Margin beyond the margin of error? What could that possibly lead to in terms of design choices or operation strategies to get that extra margin to, to allow it to have the success and longevity that hopefully it'll have?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  So margin beyond the margin of error is that you want to not only take into account the things that you, the worst case scenarios, but you also want to take into account the scenarios that you can't imagine yet. So you just keep creating more and more protection. So for instance, there was a moment, you were talking about the six months of terror. There was a moment in May of 2022 when Webb got pinged by a micrometeorite that was bigger than they expected. I mean, they knew that it was going to get pinged. That's a given.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  But this one was, was quite large and they thought if this is going to be a regular occurrence, then we're going to lose a lot of the lifespan of the instrument if it continues to get bombarded like this. And somebody said to Mike Menzel, who you mentioned, who was the chief engineer on the project, you know, are you worried? And he said, for decades, I've been telling you, I need more margin. I got more margin and that's why I can sleep at night.

• 39:29Brian Keating?

  That's right. Well, yes, give it enough money, you can have enough margin, but, but it does look like he was able to achieve that. What, what's the expected lifespan of, of Webb?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  The ballpark figure has always been somewhere around 20 years. But what if the micrometeorites keep hitting it, bigger ones than they imagined, then you're, then you're talking about lifespan of five years, four or five years. So, you know, they, they had to be realistic and temper expectations a little bit, but as I said earlier, now they're looking at more than 20 years, which would take us into the 2040s, which is when the next generation of space telescopes will be launching.

• 40:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's fantastic. Now, in the book, you obviously highlight these beautiful images that are so mesmerizing. You do mention also kind of a little bit of a, maybe it's inside baseball, but the controversy surrounding, you know, how do you assign a color to an infrared image? Can you talk about what you learned about that process of assigning colors? And in a way, our audience can appreciate?

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, that was fascinating. Somebody asked me a few weeks ago. So if I go online now, can I see what Webb is seeing? And I said, no, because Webb is just, Webb is collecting photons and it's, the photons become, as I said earlier, zeros and ones, and then those get shoveled toward Earth. And then through what they call the pipeline at Space Telescope Science Institute. And eventually, those zeros and ones can be converted into images. Now, Webb, as we've been saying, sees into the infrared and it sees like about 27 microns. And to put it in perspective, what we see with our eyes is less than one micron.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  So, okay, it sees 27 microns and, and it's equipped with filters. And the filters can go at specific positions depending on what information the team thinks might be contained at that. So at the five micron point, or the 6.8 micron point, they might say, okay, we expect to see carbon dioxide there. We expect to see hydrogen there. We expect to see an isotope of hydrogen there, whatever. So they can put these filters at specific points. Then they get the filters, you know, if they want, if they want the images. So, but the filters, of course, are collecting, you know, they're converting the photons. So, okay, so, so now we have, let's say that there are six filters. So you get six images and you

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Have to, you know, like, as I said, let's say that you chose one particular filter for hydrogen. So that filter, you want to put the image from that filter, you want to put, you want to assign a color. And the color for you might be hydrogen is going to be orange, or it might be hydrogen is going to be green. So that's up to you. And if you don't have the decoder ring, then you don't know how to interpret the image. If you look at the papers where Hubble data is peer reviewed, you'll see that images will have designations of which particular filter they they used. There are hundreds of options and they will say which option they chose and which color they assigned to

• 42:48Speaker 00

  it. So for instance, if you look at pillars of creation, which we've been talking about, this is the title of the book, and it's the image on the cover of the book. And the image is called pillars of creation because that's what the original Hubble image was called. And indeed, in the Hubble image, hydrogen is one color, and in the Webb image, it's a completely different color. So if you don't know that, then you can't really do science. So it's fun to go online. People do this and they get Hubble, they get Webb images, and they play around with the color. They can make very pretty images, but they, but they're scientifically meaningless.

• 43:26Brian Keating?

  And that's what's important, right? After all, I mean, ever since Galileo used his telescope to sketch these beautiful moon images here. The conclusion of the book wraps up with a, with a, you know, a little bit spicy take from Mike, I think it is, about the next enormous, you know, potentially budget belt busting mission, habitable worlds observatory, which, by the way, won't do nearly as broad a scientific portfolio as Webb did, but it will do very deep and one of its more narrower, but very important task, which is, you know, looking for habitable worlds. Talk about that. The future, what's the future of NASA's giant observatories? Do you think they're emboldened to continue to try these massive endeavors? Or have they been chastened by how much, you know, kind

• 44:11Brian Keating?

  of therapy they needed to get Webb into orbit?

• 44:14Speaker 00

  As you know, every 10 years, there's a decadal survey, which, which sets priorities for NASA's space missions. Well, other science as well, but for our purposes, the astronomy.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  And the most recent decadal survey ranked the Hubble World's Observatory as the top priority. They're working toward it. I went to a workshop on what they're doing, what they're hoping to do. But that's 20 years away. But it takes a while to build these instruments. And so they're in the very early stages of that. There's a history of these top priority in the decadal surveys, launching much later than they think. So this one, they're talking about the early 2040s. We shall see, or I guess some of us shall see, some of us won't, but.

• 45:08Brian Keating?

  Keep taking your vitamins, right? And then finally, you're renowned for all of your scientific writings. This is our second time talking, but I expect that we'll talk more. I think you're typing your next book with your right hand as we're on the phone on the call here. But the 4% universe really was kind of a landmark in scientific popularization. How did this book, or how does this book kind of reflect on the lessons learned in the 4% universe? And what do you feel like is the prospect? I mean, will it be the 5% universe, the 3% universe? What are some of the cosmic controversies? And also, maybe ways that you've updated your thoughts on the history of our universe and where it's going cosmologically speaking, as it butters the bread around the Keating household?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  So the 4% universe deals a lot with dark matter and dark energy, which comprises 95 to 96% of the mass and energy in the universe. And the rest is the stuff of us. As Webb is looking, we started this conversation talking about controversies about the very early universe. And that Webb is, one of its purposes is to test the thinking about the early universe, the development of the first stars and supernovae and galaxies. There was controversy about. Whether the data, the early data from Webb was negating some of those theories,

• 46:32Speaker 00

  was falsifying them because they were finding, you know, large, you know, galaxies too supposedly too early in the universe. While those controversies have died away, a lot of the thinking has gone into if we adjust our understanding of the development of dark matter, or we adjust, maybe dark energy was different early in the universe, maybe it's changed over time. That's a possibility. You know, we've talked a lot in this discussion about how science works. And science is always this dance between theory and observation. So there are all these theories, now we have all these observations, and now the theorists have to go back and, and adjust their thinking about dark matter and dark energy, for instance. That's science.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  And then they'll match that against the data again.

• 47:18Brian Keating?

  That's the way good science is done. Science proceeds from, you know, controversy to controversy, I say, and that's a good thing because as we find flaws in existing theories, we discover new laws. So as we wrap up this fascinating conversation, curious what you're working on next? What is next in your, in your oeuvre, the panic oeuvre?

• 47:39Speaker 00

  At the moment, I'm working on a proposal for what I hope will be my next book. It would be really walking the reader through the development of the special theory of relativity. You know, I find that paper to be really beautiful. I mean, the first five pages or so are mostly prose, and then after that it's math. But the first five pages of prose are, are really compellingly written and argued. And once you get into Einstein's mindset, I find it to be, well, you know, I mean, really kind of life-changing. And if I can capture that in a book. I ran into Walter Isaacson recently, and you know, he did a biography of Einstein. And I told him a little bit about this book, and I said, you know, one of the ideas is

• 48:21Speaker 00

  that special relativity really, there was like a before and after moment in physics for special relativity. And he thought about it, he said, That's right. It cleaved history.

• 48:34Brian Keating?

  Richard Panek has been phenomenal, as I knew it would be. Thanks for your patience and my crazy schedule, but I'm glad we got this out on the, on the fourth, uh, third anniversary of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. I look forward to many more discoveries from Webb, guided by this wonderful new book. And I will have links to purchase it in all your formats. I enjoyed, as I said, reading it. It's beautifully bound, printed and the photography and the, and the color plates are spectacular. You don't see that in so many books. So it's a testimony to how, you know, proud the book publishers are and how much stake they have in your masterful crafting of the narrative. So, Richard, thank you so much and happy holidays to you. And, and I hope to talk again when the next book comes out.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

• 49:20Brian Keating?

  It's always a pleasure.