Telescopes that Rocked Our World

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the first telescope. On this week’s show, we reflect on how telescopes have shifted our perspective on how small we are in size, space, and time. We also discuss how they help astronomers discover new and interesting aspects of the universe, from Earth-like planets to supernova, from black holes to the Big Bang.

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

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Our universe is filled with secrets and mysteries, leaving us with many questions to be answered.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we find ourselves searching for those answers as the very fabric of space, science, and society are converging.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Here, for the first time, these worlds collide. As we give you the knowledge that breaks the barrier between what is science and what is merely pop culture. This is StarTalk.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Now, here's your hosts: Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Lynn Copeland. StarTalk.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And with me, in studio, is professional comedian Lynn Copeland. Lynn, how are you?

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Hi, Neil. I'm great now that I'm here with you. How are you?

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's sweet. Thanks for saying that. Do you know what this show is about?

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Um, yes, I do. It's about telescopes, isn't it?

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's about telescopes, and how they have changed our understanding of our place in the universe. Where are you in your universe?

• 1:37Speaker 03

  I'm at the center, of course. That was a setup.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it turns out, of course, that we, everyone else, thought they were in the center of the known universe too, before, before Galileo first turned a telescope to the night sky. And that was 400 years ago, this year.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  So this is the 400th anniversary of the telescope?

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the 400th anniversary. And telescopes rocked the world.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  They've changed our perception of where we are in the planet, correct?

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not only on the planet, but in the cosmos itself. People thought that just looking up would give you all the information you needed to know to understand our relationship to the cosmos, and that was just not the case. Because if all you do is look up, you will think you're in the center of the known universe. Because everything revolves around you.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  So wait, now tell me, today on the show, because I'm very excited about the show, we're gonna talk about Galileo, but we're gonna talk about the Hubble Space Telescope.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble was just fixed. We've got a call lined up with one of the shuttle astronauts who's responsible for building the tools that fixed the Hubble. We got a lot of stuff lined up for the show, but it's all a survey of what telescopes have done for us and to us.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  And how we realize that we are no longer the center of the universe.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we're not only not the center of the universe, we're not the biggest part of it, or the small...

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Or the only universe!

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there might not even be, we might not even be the only universe out there. Telescopes will help us look for life elsewhere in the cosmos. And so what they, what telescopes have done is however big your ego was at the beginning of the day, it has made your ego a little less by the end of the day. That's what telescopes have done.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  This is terrific. So we're gonna, and we're gonna find out how they were invented, and...

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed. And by the way, did you know that the international community of astrophysicists have gotten together and declared this year the International Year of Astronomy? And the goal is to get everybody in the world to look through a telescope at least once.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I love that. And I love when you ask me, "Did I know?", because you know I didn't.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe you did!

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Did you know?

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lynn, you know stuff that surprises me every show, so...

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Neil, you said a word the other day that I broke down, and I still couldn't understand what the word was.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was the word?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  I don't remember it.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then why even...

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Mata yala yara, "cataology", something.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I have no idea what that word was. Keep me honest, and make sure all the words that I use are understandable to the cosmos.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  We have a lot of interesting people on the show today, too, don't we?

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we do. In fact, I think we're gonna soon get Bill Nye on the line. Bill Nye's an old friend of mine.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  He's a manic man. He is an exciting manic man.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think he just has his coffee every day. That's all it takes.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  He's this bright science man with that is just so, I love him.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, he's got energy to, energy to just share with the rest of the world. And so he's thought a little bit about telescopes and he's, he gets ranty every now and then. And I always want to make sure I get him to share some of his rant with us on Star Talk.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, as a New Yorker, what I like about Bill Nye is he's nice and quick. He's got, he gets to the point fast.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He doesn't just drag on.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  No, he's, he does it when, what are we calling it? A manic minute? It's a nice manic minute.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see what Bill Nye's got to tell us in his manic minutes.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Hey, Bill Nye, the Science Guy here. Last week NASA sent some people up to the Hubble Space Telescope to fix it. And they did. The space telescope is better than ever. It will make discoveries that we can't even imagine. This is what telescopes do. Galileo Galilei was the first guy to take his military telescope, designed for looking at bad guys on the other side of the battlefield. And he turned it up into the sky and he looked at the moon. And instead of it being this perfect carved dinner plate, it's this mess. This jumble of chopped up Swiss cheesy rock. And that discovery changed the world. The universe is not perfect in the way that people first imagined it. Instead, it's, it's much more complex.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Now, there are many more telescopes being built right now, the Spitzer, the Webb. And these things are going to make discoveries that our ancestors couldn't even imagine. I gotta fly, Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There he goes.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  I love him.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if he took a breath that entire minute.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know, Lynn, about the telescope? It was first used as a military device.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Well, you know what you were telling me before the show I found so interesting is that the, the guy who actually invented it, correct me if I'm wrong, was Hans Lippershey?

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hans Lippershey was a Dutch spectacle maker. And a few years before Galileo used it to look at the night sky, he was up there fiddling with lenses that people had used just to read better.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  But he was using them, but he was using, Hans created it for battle. So you could see people.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no one.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Across the field or whatever.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one thought fully about that yet. In fact, the telescope was a toy. It was kind of a curiosity that you could see far away things nearby.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  But what I find so exciting is that Galileo. Looked up.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Like he had the idea to take the toy and look up.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, he looked up and he made a better version of this toy than had ever existed anywhere in the world. Galileo was really smart and figured out how to do it.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  But my point is, it's like if I make a toilet plunger.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  And I make it just to suck it onto things and do nothing with, right?

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  And then you come along and you go, hey, I can use it to unclog the toilet. All of a sudden, that it's your invention now because you're the one who came up with the real good use for it.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, okay, I guess we can think of toilet plungers and telescopes.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, Galileo sounds like a bright guy to me.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he was brilliant, one of the most brilliant people there ever was. Plus, he understood the value of the telescope to human curiosity and to understanding the cosmos. So he looked up and he saw that the universe was not the perfect place that had previously been described. And the prevailing notion that the moon was a perfectly smooth orb, that the sun was a perfectly smooth orb, that the, the, the planets were just these dots of light moving around the night sky, all in orbit around the earth. This concept slowly was dismantled, dismantled, observation by observation by Galileo.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  And he was doing this with not, we should tell everybody who's listening, he was doing this with a not very strong telescope, am I correct?

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it had been better than anything built before, but you're right. If you, today, you'd say, oh, you'd walk by it on the shelf because you can buy binoculars, simple binoculars like at Kmart, that are better, better optics and, and better magnification than what Galileo had supplied. But consider what he was using compared to what was around before. Nothing was around before. So whatever you have is better than what was, whatever anyone was using.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Now, here's what I want to understand as well. The doctrine that prevailed at that time was the Catholic Church.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Was in charge of telling everybody what was going on, right?

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Italy and Rome, that's right. The seat of, of, of the state, basically, was the Catholic Church.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  And am I correct in that Aristotle, his theories were what the Catholic Church was going by, right?

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed, it was. Aristotle, you know, from ancient Greece, of course, had ideas about how the universe must be. The problem, well, now, he was successful in some areas and really not successful in other areas, like astronomy and physics. He said stuff that was just flat out wrong.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Like, like the earth isn't moving.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but you can't blame him for that because it doesn't feel like the earth is

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it feels right, if it was moving, then we'd be moving.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something would jiggle, right?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The chandelier would shake. So, so you can't blame him for that. But what I do blame him for, he made a statement that heavy things fall faster than light things in direct proportion to their weight. So if you had like a cannonball that weighed 10 pounds and a cannonball that weighed 1 pound and you drop them, the 10 pound cannonball would fall 10 times as fast. And he just wrote this because it made sense to him and everyone believed it and no one thought to do the experiment until Galileo.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  So Galileo went ahead and dropped, and now I have to tell you, in preparing for this show today, I dropped everything in my house from like a book and a pencil, like everything. And everyone at home should do this because they do, they do fall at the same rate.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. So if you take a pencil and a book and drop them, obviously the book weighs more than the pencil, they will fall to earth at exactly the same rate and hit the floor at the same time.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Now, what's interesting about this and what's interesting about what was happening at the time, and stop me if I'm wrong, is that Galileo, you know, so he's got this Aristotle's doctrine, he does, he does the law of motion and he realizes, oh, Aristotle's wrong.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  He must have not tried this.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Been drunk or whatever.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden, he thinks, well, if he was wrong there, he could be wrong for a lot of other things.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the Catholic Church had, had based much of its religious philosophy on the teachings of Aristotle. There was a good resonance between the two.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  And we should remind people the Inquisition was taking place at this time. So to challenge the Catholic Church, I mean, on things smaller than this, to challenge the Catholic Church was not a good idea.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be audacious, that's right. And so Galileo had, you know, huevos to do this, you know.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  So, so Galileo, so this is what happens. Galileo sees that Aristotle's a bit of a schmuck. He decides he's gonna, you know, go ahead and test some of his other stuff. He looks through the telescope, he notices Jupiter, he notices planets moving, he sees craters on the moon, he starts journaling this, am I correct?

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he journals it. And what he noticed about Jupiter was that Jupiter had what he called stars that clustered near Jupiter, stayed with Jupiter wherever Jupiter was in the night sky, and that these objects moved around Jupiter.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And later we would learn, of course, they were Jupiter's moons, the four brightest of Jupiter's moons. Today, they're named in Galileo's honor. They're called the Galilean Moons of Jupiter.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Oh, how exciting.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These moons went around Jupiter and were not going around Earth. This was astonishing fact because it flew in the face of all prevailing philosophers.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Now, but what I love about Galileo was he kept this to himself and just started journaling it because, what's his name, Bruno?

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, you knew about Bruno, yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Giordano Bruno was a monk, who, who, a brilliant philosopher in his day. But he suggested that the stars in the night sky, maybe they're like the sun. And if they are, maybe they have planets in orbit around them. Because he liked Copernicus's idea that maybe the sun is in the middle of things, not the Earth.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  So he started flapping his big fat gums.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so he suggests that maybe if there's life on one of the planets around the sun, Earth, maybe there's life around the planets around these other stars. And if that's the case, then the glory of God is manifest everywhere in the universe and not just here on Earth. Earth is not the object of God's creation.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  And then the church burned them at the stake.

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was bad for the church. Yeah, that was considered, not only heretical, it was considered, it was, it was, it was, he was impertinently heretical. An impertinent heretic. You know what happens if you're an impertinent heretic?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  My guess is they make you get naked in some way. Am I right?

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  The Catholics love to strip you down.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he was burned at the stake, naked and upside down.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Real, so, okay, so now Galileo keeps his information to himself, knowing that, oh, you know, Bruno and the whole naked, upside down, burning thing.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, initially, I mean, he doesn't quite, I mean, he writes a book. He writes a book.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  But I mean, he starts gathering the information.

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. And that's, I think, the right way to think about it. His first book on this, which reports his telescopic observations. He's, yeah, some of them are heretical, but it depends on what you do with it philosophically. Are you going to say Aristotle's wrong, the church is wrong, you gotta rethink the Bible? Is this, is this what's behind this book or not? So the book comes out and it's, it's a curiosity. It would be later that Galileo publishes a book called A Dialogue of the Two Chief World Systems. And there is the battle.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  But he waited till he gathered all that information.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he got it until he knew that his arguments were irrefutable. And in the day, you're right, there's the risk of, of, of. Persecution because if you are a heretic, the Inquisition would inquire and you could end up tortured or dead. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the year 1600 and Galileo was making his observations of the night sky in the year 1609. So this is fresh in everybody's memory.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Especially someone that you spoke with who has a lot of information.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in fact, yes, we have interviews for this show. The bestselling author, Davos Sobel, she's written several bestselling books. One of them is

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Galileo's Daughter.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Galileo's Daughter, a whole story about Galileo's illegitimate daughter. He's got, she's got all the scoop on what was going on in Galileo's private life as well as the culture of the day. She's also the bestselling author of Longitude, which is the story of John Harrison and how he invented the first clock that you could take on a ship. So let's find out what Davos has to say about Galileo.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Great.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you're some of an expert now on, on Galileo. And we only know him as a guy who got into a fight with the Catholic Church, but your research has made him a much more sort of fleshed out character in the history of science. And I was wondering, what could you tell us about the time in which he lived and what his telescope meant to the people of the day and to the church and in history?

• 15:05Speaker 05

  He was Tuscan. He came from, he came from Tuscany and he was living in Venice.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To me, Tuscan is a loaf of bread I get in the grocery store.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  Well, that, that's a venerable association. He certainly loved the food and always wanted to go back there. But he, he taught in Venice for almost 20 years. He always needed funding.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like all scientists.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  Exactly. There's always the funding problem. So

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's always the deep pockets of the military who can help that out.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  Definitely. So there it was, a military instrument.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Galileo was now selling his telescope to the military.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. And he got a, he got tenure at the university and a big raise. So it was great. But then he had the idea of perfecting the instrument and looking at the moon. And that's when everything changed because the astronomy of his day was not what you would call astronomy. It was all mathematical. It was figuring out orbits and predicting planetary positions for the astrologers. That's what it was. Nobody was talking about what are the planets made of? Because the idea was that everything beyond the sphere of the moon, from the sphere of the moon on out, was all made of the same stuff.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  This ether, this perfect substance. And everything beyond the earth was different from the earth. Because on the earth, there was change and decay and death. But the heavens were eternal and perfect.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So no one even imagined that what you discovered here on earth, either materially or physically, could have any relationship to the rest of the universe?

• 16:47Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so how active were the astrologers then, trying to predict the future of things? I guess they needed orbits. And so you get a handy mathematician at arm's reach, you got him.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  Right. And there had been people like Copernicus, who in trying to improve on the orbits, had come up with a really different idea of how things worked. But he was, even his idea wasn't accepted as reality for a long time.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Copernicus put the sun back in the center of the known universe.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Exactly. He put the sun at the center with the earth in motion around it, which seemed like a really crazy idea.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because of course the earth doesn't move.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  Of course it doesn't move.

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, otherwise you'd feel it under your feet.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  That's right. And that was one of the things Galileo had to fight. It was that idea that got him into all that trouble. He took all the heat for Copernicus.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I remember correctly, Copernicus was on his deathbed when he published his great work, so that no one could kill him for it.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Well, nobody made a sound. I mean, it was very quietly accepted. And his book was dedicated to the pope. So nobody considered these things irreligious.

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean Copernicus's book was dedicated to the pope?

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Was dedicated to the pope of his time. So he didn't have a sense that he was doing something really irreligious. Or he did and he knew it would be very cagey to dedicate it to the pope.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he should die as quickly as he can.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Well, he was old by the time he published it because he hesitated for so long.

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so we've got, so now, but I read stories that Galileo was a pompous, obnoxious,

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  irreverent ass, basically, and that that's really what got him into trouble. Had he been a little more politic with the powers of the day, not the military heads where he sold his telescope, but the religious powers who had tremendous influence over life and culture. So are you saying that it's purely his discoveries that got him into trouble and not that he was just a pain in everyone's rear?

• 18:49Speaker 05

  It was a mix because he loved to debate publicly and he was quite full of himself and could really embarrass people. So in a debate, if you were arguing with him, he would bolster your opinion for a long time to make you feel that he really was not against you. And then he would come in and cut you off at the knees and make you feel ridiculous.

• 19:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's the kind of guy where after such an event, they drag him into the alley and beat him up?

• 19:17Speaker 05

  I don't know that that happened, but probably people were tempted. He was definitely in dispute with other scholars, but he didn't have patience for people who thought that Aristotle had figured everything out. He believed in experiment and observation and he trusted his senses. And the other thing he brought to this was skill as an artist. So when he looked at the moon, from what he knew about perspective, he realized he was looking at mountains.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he surely was a believing Catholic, but the, he didn't care whether his views conflicted with the priests?

• 19:57Speaker 05

  Right. He felt that the priests, although their theology was the highest science of the day, they hadn't studied physics and they shouldn't try to tell people how to interpret the Bible. He really believed that the Bible was the true word of God, but that it was abstruse. And...

• 20:19Speaker 05

  It wasn't meant to teach the people astronomy. It doesn't even mention the names of the planets. So why would you go to the Bible to study nature? That's what his argument was. If you want to study nature, you read the book of nature.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in the end, why did they put him under house arrest?

• 20:36Speaker 05

  Well, it's... One of the big mistakes he made was to tell the holy fathers of the church that they could not interpret the Bible.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, he's writing in Italian, so regular folk who are literate can read it, not just the academic folk.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Yes. He had a philosophy that there were very intelligent people who, for one reason or another, had not gone to university and therefore could not read Latin, but that they would be interested.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so wasn't he friends with the pope that ultimately arrested him?

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they became enemies, I guess.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  You know how those things go.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, so that's interesting that back then you would put a scientist under house arrest for... with an idea different from prevailing dogma.

• 21:19Speaker 05

  Right. Well, he was tried because of his book, but still, when it came out, got everybody very upset, and he was called to trial in Rome.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's one of the famous banned books of our...

• 21:30Speaker 05

  Indeed. It was banned for 200 years.

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  200 years? So you're talking...

• 21:34Speaker 05

  Even after people accepted the fact that the Earth really was in motion around the Sun, that book stayed on the index.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what books would you ban today? What scientist would you arrest?

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Me? No one.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think we are at risk of returning to a time where that freedom of speech would be squashed?

• 21:56Speaker 05

  Well, I think the science and religion issue is always an issue. I mean, we're 400 years past Galileo's trial, and we're still talking about it.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know back then, there were a lot of body parts that people kept after people died, just as keepsakes, perhaps. Is that why they cut off Galileo's finger?

• 22:16Speaker 05

  Apparently so, that he, by that point, there was some kind of hero veneration going on, and they took the finger, they took several vertebrae. I think you can still see one of those at the medical school in Padua.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is creepy, you know?

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's creepy, but it was the taste of the time.

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess today, people get autographs of famous people, and back then, they would just take your body parts?

• 22:38Speaker 05

  I guess, yeah. I kind of like the autograph, yes.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Davi, how many telescopes did Galileo build?

• 22:45Speaker 05

  Many. He kept improving it. I don't know how many he built, but probably two that survive are actually the ones he built. And they are, they live at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, but one of them is here in the United States now, the first time it's ever left Italy. So it's really exciting. It's at the Franklin Institute.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Philadelphia.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Right. And it will be there until September. I say Galileo was right all along, that in the distant future, when you really understand the deep meaning of the Bible, and you really understand your physics and astronomy, it will all make sense. It will all hang together. But until that day, they have to be separate. And religion cannot have any control over scientific study. And I think he was dead on.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dead on? Live on?

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, live on, dead on.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Davi Solbel, thank you for this interview. And what's your next project?

• 23:54Speaker 05

  I'm trying to write a play about Copernicus.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't stop?

• 23:57Speaker 05

  No, I really, I really like those guys.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a love affair with Copernicus as you had with Galileo?

• 24:04Speaker 05

  No. No. And maybe that's why I'm having so much trouble with it. I like him a lot, but it's not the same.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get you back on when the play's done.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  I love that interview. I love Davi. I'll tell you why she's having a hard time writing the play about Copernicus, Davi. If you're still listening, I'll tell you why. Because he's kind of a kiss butt. He's not, I mean, I'm sorry, Galileo is sexy. I'm now listening to her talk about him, and I'm thinking, oh, my gosh. I'm picturing him looking like Patrick Swayze. I love him, because I love the way he like challenges people.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  I think he's the kind of guy that would make Sarah Palin cry. Do you know what I mean? Because like, I loved when she said that he will lure you into a debate and have you think that he was like agreeing with you and then he would just drop the bomb that he knew more than you did.

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus Copernicus didn't publish until he was ready to die. So whatever.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  And he was a kiss butt. He, at the last minute, he wrote a thing, he dedicated it to the Pope.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dedicated to the Pope. Yeah, he was trying to, you know, not get in trouble.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  He was trying not to get burned, but I don't, I don't like that. He was just kind of a, he kissed butt.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not only that, there's a preface in, in, in the front of the book, of his famous book, that.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Copernicus's.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Copernicus's book. And, no, he didn't write the preface, but it's there in front of his book, which says, it says that this idea where the sun is in the center of the known universe and not the earth, is probably not right, but it's useful for calculating orbits.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Oh, see, wishy washy. Oh, come on, Copernicus, Copernicus, get off the pot. Give me a break. And, and so meanwhile, my man Galileo.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  He, now, this is the other thing that I found so interesting about what David was saying. That Galileo, you know, Copernicus dies, he, he writes this, Galileo has all his compilations, everything he's written, he knows he's going to challenge the church. What he does, genius, my man is genius. He writes it in Italian.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Italian, you got it.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Because that's what the people could read.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those who are literate would only know Italian. They certainly would not know Latin. That's, and most other scholars would be writing in Latin to speak to each other, not to speak to the common man.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  So now, am I right by saying that basically what happened, this is how I'm hearing it, is that Galileo shook things up because now he can't be burned. They can't really kill him because he's got the masses have been reading his book.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  They can ban the book, but they can't kill him yet.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they can't kill him.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  He's popular.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he is so popular that it would be a political, it would be a bad political decision for the church to do anything really mean to him. They put him under house arrest, they didn't torture him. It's still kind of tough to be a famous, important guy and be, be, you know, jailed in your own home. But that, that's what they did. And, but he was not martyred the way.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Giordano Bruno.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Now, I've been to Rome, I've got to tell you, and you know, the Romans, and I'm, I'm Italian, my people are Italian, and, and they like to collect saints' ears and all that stuff. I love that they have his finger.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And when I, when I visited Italy, I learned that at the time that it was supposed to be his index finger, but I, but Davida Later told me after the interview that it's not his index finger, it's his middle finger. And it's propped up, sticking straight up in the

• 27:18Speaker 03

  I like that. So he basically told the Vatican he feels the same way that they felt about him.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's had the last word even in death. By the way, we have a limited number of autographed copies of one of David Sobel's latest books, The Planets. And if you can convince us why you might deserve one of these autographed copies, tell us on our website, StarTalkRadio.net. Sign up, tell us why you think you deserve one of these books and we will send you a free autographed copy. StarTalkRadio.net.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  I want one.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you better write in.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  I'm a good co-host, I believe I deserve one.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me why you want one and need one.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Tell me, are there, um, you know, like, because I still can't get this whole church thing out of my head. Tell me, are there other, are there other priests or anything that, that had, that...

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it turns out that being religious didn't mean you couldn't be scientific. In fact, there are other folks, there are many famous scientists who had been priests or even monks. And in fact, the, there's a, there's a, there's a priest who, who, who is responsible for the idea of the Big Bang.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  You're kidding me.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His name is George Lemaître. He's a, he's a Belgian priest. And he was a contemporary of Einstein. He saw Einstein's theories and said,

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Hey, I can have a solution to your equations that says that the universe is expanding and was smaller in the past and maybe had a beginning." And so it doesn't preclude it, but you just have to know how to keep your...

• 28:51Speaker 03

  And as David said, she said that, that Galileo himself was a good Catholic.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  He just didn't believe that, that religion was where you went to for science.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, that's right, that's right. And so, in fact, I wonder what our audience thinks about science and religion and how this, all this work. And we have, our, our phones are now open.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Ooh, exciting.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. Give us a call at 1-877-5-Star-Talk. Let me hear what you have to say about the relationship between church and science and Galileo and all that goes with it. By the way, the church, the Catholic Church in fact, does have scientists. There's a friend of mine who is a astronomer for the Vatican.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Really?

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, and I've got him right now.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Oh, let's talk to him.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, his name is Chris, let's check him out, Father Chris. Oh, Chris, Neil Tyson here, how you doing?

• 29:42Speaker 06

  Oh, good, good to hear you, Neil.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I've got you on the radio, and I had to call you because our subject today is is the invention of the telescope and the International Year of Astronomy and Galileo, and last I checked, you're a Vatican astronomer. So it sounds like you should be in the middle of some of this. So let me just ask, what, uh, why does the Vatican have astronomers in the first place?

• 30:09Speaker 06

  Well, um...

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're distracible to Galileo or even before?

• 30:12Speaker 06

  Well, before that upstart came along and thought he knew all about astronomy.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Young whippersnapper, yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 06

  Well, at least a little before, you know, a matter of about twenty, thirty years before, um, because it was realized that the calendar, which had been going since Julius Caesar's time, so, you know, amazingly a long time, was now getting a little bit out of step with the seasons.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This would be the Julian calendar, right?

• 30:40Speaker 06

  The Julian calendar, so Pope Gregory XIII, it was, uh, brought in a team to advise him, and that's why we now have the Gregorian calendar.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, of course, astronomers are the keepers of time, so he doesn't bring in biologists for this, he brings in astronomers. So now Galileo comes along, and so he's doing astronomy, he's a mathematician, he's a physicist, and he gets into trouble. And so what is your reflection on that period? Is he, was he out of line, was he obnoxious, was he right? And what happened, and plus, didn't something happen in 1992 between the Vatican and the Pope, which seemed a little late for my measures of time? But what is that story?

• 31:17Speaker 06

  Oh, it's a Vatican, oh, it's a long story, so, yeah. Galileo had a wonderful instinct in physics, you know, how things worked, but he couldn't prove it, and I think that was part of the problem a- as well. It wasn't proved till a couple of hundred years later, uh, really, uh, pinned down the observ- very fine observations needed to show that the sun was really in the center and the earth was moving around it.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with Galileo... Leo's discoveries, but you're suggesting that had he had better data than what his telescope showed, you think the church would have been just fine and would have celebrated him at the time rather than put him under house arrest?

• 31:51Speaker 06

  Ah, there was a big, you know, philosophy change that had to happen. You know, everything was wedded to the philosophy of Aristotle, um, which was sort of great. Uh, but there was a physics there with Aristotle as well, uh, about, you know, how things moved and where the earth was, and that was a problem. Also, in interpretation of the Bible, and the Bible had the sun sort of standing still, and how could that, uh, you know, you know, how could that happen?

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how much of this was inertia of an old idea and how much of it was sort of strict religious, uh, dogma?

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Oh, both, you know, uh...

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we all have some inertia for old ideas.

• 32:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, we all have inertia. Uh, there's always enormous mix-up of emotions and reasons, church under attack, uh, from Protestants in the north, um, you know, retrench, you know, put up the barriers, set up the defenses, you know, it's all that kind of thing as well. So, uh, and the, this new stuff, this new stuff called science is again to collapse the, the ancient philosophy on which the theology was based.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  So where's that going? So, yeah, all kinds of issues.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happens today if you discover something that disagrees with the Pope? I mean, you're in the, are you a Jesuit priest right now?

• 33:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, um, I'm not going to discover anything in science that's going to disagree with the Pope because the Pope isn't a scientist, you know, a wonderful person, uh, President Pope, a wonderful theologian, but he's not a scientist, so, you know, he, he will listen to scientists.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Well, that's an, that's, that's a, that's a start, I think.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Oh, definitely.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an improvement overall that we've read about from centuries ago. So you're a pretty safe scientist working in the employ of the Pope, is what you're telling me?

• 33:30Speaker 06

  Yes, definitely.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Chris, it's been great to have you on the line.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  All right, Neil. No disrespect to the Vatican, but you know I'm now in love with Galileo, so I'm gonna channel my inner Galileo. And I'm gonna tell you right out of, right out of the gate, I'm not gonna believe anyone who sounds like he's from the cast of Spamalot. Um, I don't like how jittery he, every, every answer to every question was like, oh, you little, little.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he's just trying to answer the question. I mean, that's his accent.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Oh, you heard what he was saying. It, what would the, when you asked him about Galileo, the first thing he said was, he said, oh, well, he couldn't prove everything he was, well, of course he could. He was under house arrest. I mean, he did as much as he could possibly do with what he had.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it's a little misrepresented there. I mean, Galileo did really well to make a case that Earth was not the center of all motion. And, and, and what the good father was trying to say is that the real irrefutable evidence would take much longer. That's what he was saying.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  And I would also like to know why the Vatican needs astronomers. Doesn't Italy have astronomers?

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, the country of Italy has astronomers. Yes.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And yet the Vatican still has to have their own stuff. It just, the Catholics tick me off. These are my people, but they tick me off.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm, I'm, I'll take astronomers any way we can get them. There aren't that many of us in the world, you know?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  I agree, but like, I also love when you asked him, like, well, will the Pope challenge him? And he's like, well, no, but some of our popes are like, how old? Like 112? Like, yeah, like, they tell him whatever they want, tell them.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, with my co-host, comedian Lynn Copelitz. Our phone number is 1-87, 1-877-5-StarTalk. Looks like we have a caller on the line. Uh, caller. They said, yes, it's Sarah from Santa Monica. Sarah, what do you got for us?

• 35:24Speaker 07

  Hi, yes. I was just wondering, um, what do you think if we found extraterrestrials? Do you think the church would, uh, try to baptize it?

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Lynn, you have a reply. Thank you for that call, Sarah.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Sarah, I think the Catholic Church will baptize anything if it'll stand still long enough and eat a cracker.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lynn?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Oh, my grandmother, are you kidding?

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Maybe, maybe, okay. I think any fanatical, any Baptist, same way.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think everyone would be lined up to convert the alien into whatever is their religion?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It won't even get off the craft. Every Baptist, every Catholic will be there with holy water and snakes and everything else they got.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a frontier of culture.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Except for you and I, we will show up and we will say, extraterrestrial friend, be a free thinker.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Thanks for your call, Sarah. So let me, let me ask you, Lynn, what do you, you're born Catholic, right? So you?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Actually, I was not baptized Catholic. Is that hilarious? My mother refused to baptize me Catholic, but my grandmother would take me to mass all the time.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. All right. Well, we've got Catholic priests out there as scientists, and they're doing good work. Father Corboli is a, he studies stars and how they work and what their chemical compositions are and where they're moving. So he does real astrophysics, and that's how that is. He knows where to-

• 36:50Speaker 03

  I'm just teasing. I know.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He knows where to put the line in the sand, as did Galileo. Galileo said, "The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how that came out.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Speaking of how the heavens go.

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  I want to talk more about telescopes.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Can we?

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sure, sure.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Um, can we talk about the big, what's the big old telescope right now?

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the telescopes, let me tell you what happened. So Galileo reveals that Earth is not the center of all motion. Fine. And then other telescopes come along, along the years, and we learned that the stars in the night sky are not the entire universe. In fact, the stars in the night sky are part of our Milky Way galaxy, and that galaxy is just one of countless other galaxies in the universe. So every time you turn a bigger telescope to the night sky, we end up smaller than we had previously imagined. Every time that has happened, every single time, it is an ego dismantling device. Every time. And so people try to try to, some people don't survive these transitions. They be, they get depressed. They, they try to resist it. They say it can't be so.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, but I have a different view on this. I see telescopes as revealing how majestic the universe is to us. And our three pounds of gray matter actually can figure out how the universe works, based on the information telescopes bring to us. So I think it's quite a celebration.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Now, you said something to me before the show, which I, I still don't understand completely. So I'm gonna ask you again, I'm gonna ask you now what it means. You said that, that they help the telescopes and, and the Hubble Space Telescope in general, I mean specifically, not in general, specifically helps us by, by, by looking, what'd you say? You said by looking forward, we look back?

• 38:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, they look back. As you look farther, as, as you look out in space, you look back in time.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Oh, because of light years?

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, it takes time, light time. So in fact, I see you're seated, seated about a yard from me, three feet. Light travels about one foot every billionth of a second. So I see you not as you are, but as you were, three billionths of a second ago. And you haven't changed much in that time.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  You're not looking closer.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you go farther enough away, the moon takes about a second and a half for its light to reach us. The sun, about eight and a half, eight minutes and 20 seconds. The farther away you go, the older is the light from that object that you see. And so you get more and more powerful telescopes. Take the Hubble Telescope, for example. It can look way out into the universe, so far back, that you're looking near the beginning of time itself.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Now, one of my favorite things ever is that the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most productive telescopes ever built, correct?

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is the most productive scientific instrument of any kind there ever was. And you can measure that a lot of ways. How many scientists participate? How many research papers were published? Every metric has it winning the contest.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  I don't wanna be mean, but when, when did, when did the Hubble Telescope, when was it created?

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was launched in early 1990s, yes.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  And in 1990, it was, and clearly, we've come far in the space program. We have more women now involved, because when we launched it, it had a problem.

• 40:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it did have a, what's it have to do with women? What are you saying?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, only men would send something up into space. And all of a sudden, be like, oh, my gosh, the pictures are fuzzy.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they had, you remembered, yes. The pictures were fuzzy at the beginning of the time. At the, at, when we launched it, all the mirrors had a perfect shape. But one of the mirrors had the wrong perfect shape. And the shapes didn't work together to make the sharp images that we had all expected.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  But we'd spent a lot of money and time in this.

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had, we had to call a do-over.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  It was gonna do what we needed it to do, so then we, we fixed it.

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We went back up and serviced it with the shuttle. Shuttle astronauts went up and serviced it. They had to invent special tools. They had to, um, figure out what needed to be changed, put in corrective, corrective glasses. Corrective, they were mirrors. A corrective system of mirrors to fix the bad mirror and turn it all into good mirrors. And then it became the telescope we had all dreamt it needed to be.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  So it's strong, its eyesight is strong now.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's above the atmosphere because the atmosphere wreaks havoc on your ability to see sharp images. Here's light coming from across the universe, and it's a nice, sharp point of light, and it hits the atmosphere, and it gets jiggled and smudged and, and interfered with, and you end up with a fuzzy image on Earth's surface.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Tell me quickly, what did the, what, what are some of the things that we found from the Hubble telescope? We found that black, black holes.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black holes lurk in the center of galaxies. Hubble confirmed the age of the universe itself.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  How did that happen?

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it looked out in time, and you look at these, think, these exploding stars, we call them standard candles, because they, there's a certain kind of exploding star that all have the same brightness each time they explode. And they're really bright, so you can see them halfway across the universe. So Hubble got good data on these standard candles. And once you know how far away an object is, and you see how fast it's receding from us, you get the expansion rate of the universe, you nail it down, and you turn the clock back. If it's expanding today, the universe was smaller yesterday. And if you know exactly how fast it's expanding, you turn the clock back, and you can say that all the universe was in the same place at the same time, 14 billion years ago.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  You know what is the joy of doing a show with, with an astrophysicist?

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'd like to do is call one of my friends.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  You can call an astronaut.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got a, I've got an astronaut friend, he's a, he's an engineer, who's one of the people who designed the tools that they used to fix the Hubble telescope. And he was a spacewalker. He went on one of the shuttle missions to the space station.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  I called him, he didn't pick up the phone.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's call Paul my astronaut friend and see, see if he's, see if he should be home. He's expecting me.

• 42:35Speaker 08

  Hello?

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, is this Paul?

• 42:37Speaker 08

  Uh, yes, it is.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Paul, this is Neil deGrasse Tyson with Lynn Koplex, my co-host, calling from StarTalk. How the hell are you today?

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Hi, Paul.

• 42:44Speaker 08

  Good. Hi, Neil. Hi, Lynn. How are you?

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, our show today is on telescopes and we knew that you had something to do with the Hubble as an astronaut, an active astronaut and an engineer. I was wondering, just tell us quickly, what, uh, what did you do for Hubble?

• 42:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, Hubble, I started my career there, uh, designing tools on Hubble to fix it for the first and second servicing mission.

• 43:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's had, it's had like four or five servicing missions, right?

• 43:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, five servicing missions, although the numbering got a little, uh, messed up. Uh, the last one was four A.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, four A, okay.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Uh, Paul, I just heard you say you designed tools on Hubble. You mean on it or for it? You weren't sitting there going, oh, we need a...

• 43:21Speaker 08

  No, for Hubble, to work on Hubble.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, uh, the tools have to be different. Why? I mean, if you need a screwdriver...

• 43:30Speaker 08

  Well, when the sun shines on them, and shines on Hubble, and the sun shines, it's, it's plus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. When it's, um, in the shade, it's minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's got radiation bombarding it all the time.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're hot and cold, you're hot and cold on and off?

• 43:47Speaker 08

  On and off, yep. And there's no air, a lot of radiation, so, uh, you just can't bring up your average power tool.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  So now do, now are there rooms created like that at NASA that that's where you go into these things and, and you test the stuff out before you take it with you?

• 44:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. We have, uh, thermal vacuum chambers where we suck all the air out and make it hot and cold and we, uh, vibrate it for the shuttle launches. Uh, radiation, we don't test here, but we just design it for that.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Now, I have another question. Do you, did, now, did you have to talk to the engineers? I, I, I'm really, I'm not the rocket scientist clearly, because I'm going to ask some really dumb questions, but like, did you talk to the people who, who designed the, the Hubble, Hubble, uh, telescope itself?

• 44:31Speaker 03

  So you had a nice, you guys worked together?

• 44:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, all the replacement instruments, we had to make special tools to interface with all of those instruments. So yeah, we had to work directly with them. And it's a crew aid and tools, it's called. So there's certain tools that are your regular extensions, drills, screwdrivers. And then there's crew aids, which are special handles or fixtures and, you know, things to move the instruments around. Because some of them are pretty big.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying, some of your tools are sort of space age versions of ordinary tools? And other parts of the portfolio are, are special elements that enables?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Draw the life.

• 45:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, like a special handle that folds up and, you know, moves out of the way when you have to close the doors. Or a special place where you put your spare and hang it over the side of the orbiter. So it has to be able to hold it, um, when you're getting a new instrument and putting it in Hubble.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and how hard is this? I mean, is it like working on your car?

• 45:30Speaker 08

  Well, the, the axial instruments are about the size of a refrigerator freezer. And the, um, other instruments that go on the side and the fine guidance sensor, they're about the size of a baby grand piano. So you got.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  So you have to work out.

• 45:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, well, you're in zero G, so.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Now, I have another question that brings me to go, speaking of being weightless. Is there some sort of contraption that, that locks you into the Hubble while you're working on it?

• 46:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, usually on a spacewalk, you got two folks and one is on the end of the robotic arm and they're in a foot restraint. And so it's kind of like ski boots. You're, you're kind of locked in at your feet. Um, and then we have, uh, other foot restraints that we move all around. There's the other person is the free floater and they move around using their hands, um, even though it's called the spacewalk. Um, and, uh, you have to get into foot restraint or you hold on with one hand and, you know, use the tool with the other hand.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So none of you guys are just freely floating?

• 46:34Speaker 08

  Uh, no, whenever you are gonna actually do something, you really gotta brace yourself. Otherwise, you know, Newton's laws, uh, spin you in the opposite direction.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's that physics one I keep telling you about.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  I know, yeah, I've been studying up on that. Uh, this is an interesting question. Uh, how many, just tell me, I'm just curious. How many times do you go over your checklist before you leave? And, and before you get out onto the, uh, the craft?

• 46:58Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, usually you have, um, let's see, hundreds of hours of in the simulators and spacewalks. So, you, you do it, and then you try not to memorize anything. And you have somebody inside called the IVA, the Inner Vehicular Activity Crew Member. And then the EVA is the person outside spacewalk. But you have the person inside talking to the ground and to you, reviewing your checklist and, and, you know, making sure you don't forget something.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, do you guys ever see space junk whiz by? Cause we always read about space junk and, uh, just curious.

• 47:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, it's, uh, the, uh, the distances are so great, uh, that, uh, no, you really don't see it. Uh, usually the ground notifies you if something bigger than a softball is getting close. And close is like, kinda within a mile or two.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so they, they track a softball and you bring your catcher's mitt, I guess.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  So they basically, well, you actually hear they're like, duck in five minutes.

• 47:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's hard to duck when it's seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour, but...

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Really interesting.

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, we gotta run, but thanks for having you on the line. I'd, I'd like to call you back one day, cause we're good, we'll be in space a lot. It'd be nice to have an astronaut at arm's reach here.

• 48:09Speaker 08

  Sure, anytime.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, thanks a lot, we'll see you.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Thank you, Paul.

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 48:12Speaker 08

  You're welcome, take care.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  So exciting, I got to speak to an astronaut.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, Galileo and astronauts, like, you know, they all just...

• 48:19Speaker 03

  I'm in love. I really am. I think he looks like Patrick Swayze too.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me tell you, we've, uh, just to remind you, we're given, we've got some, some freebies for you. If you log on to stargtloradio.net and tell us why you deserve one of Davis Sobel's books, The Planets, autographed, signed copy of one of her books. Tell us why you deserve a copy. And if we, if you convince us, we'll send you one. And not only that, we have signed posters. It's a Hubble Space Telescope poster, signed by one of the astronauts. So, log on to the-

• 48:56Speaker 03

  That's cool, too.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all cool. And it's all free if we decide that you convinced us badly enough that you want one of these. So, go on to stargtloradio.net. So Lynn, so you like astronauts now, as well as Galileo?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  I do. And I didn't say this to Paul, but I've got to tell you, I think the most important thing I would be doing, and you know, before I went to fix the, not that I would ever be fixing the Hubble, but, but I would be checking my boots. Those boots that lock you in.

• 49:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Wouldn't you be checking them? Like, the last thing you need is just someone angry with you, cutting your Velcro on your strap. It's like checking your parachute before you-

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you don't want to float away.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  I don't want to float away. I don't want like the, was the astronaut lady that wore the diaper. I don't want someone like that angry with me, cutting my Velcro and-

• 49:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's important to not have enemies when you're an astronaut.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You depend on so many thousands of other people.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  And be a good communicator, because the IBA people and the EBA people, and this is something that, that is interesting, when they fix the Hubble, it's not like they went and did this in a, in an hour.

• 50:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It was days and days and days and days. This is hard work.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  There was a lot of, because now he said, Paul said that there's people inside directing them, and there are people outside that are like, so they're telling them, turn to the right, turn to the right, turn to the right. Yeah, great, I can't get the space wrench to go that way.

• 50:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's, it's hard. It's hard stuff. It's hard stuff.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  But now they've got it all fixed.

• 50:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our phone number here at StarTalk is 1-877-5-Star-Talk. And it looks like we've got, who do we have on the line? We have Steve on the line. Steve? Steve, where are you from?

• 50:32Speaker 09

  Hi Neil, uh, I'm from Washington.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Washington DC or the state?

• 50:36Speaker 09

  DC.

• 50:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  DC. Well, welcome to StarTalk. You got a question?

• 50:40Speaker 09

  Hi, hi Neil, hi Lynn. Um, I have a digital camera, and I was wondering, I've heard, is there digital telescopes up there?

• 50:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, I mean, in fact astronomers and the whole astrophysics community has been digital since the early 1980s. We were one of the first to create digital images. We had that demand for it. So now, contrary to what many people think, they think we go to telescopes and look behind, look through the lens and see the universe. No, it's all recorded digitally. Many, many times, we don't even leave our office. Because if it's digital, then who cares how far away your computer is that's analyzing the data? It could be across the room, it could be across the ocean, it could be halfway around the world. So all of our data are digital. And the Hubble data is all coming in digitally. And Hubble, which came of age in the 1990s, that's about when the world, well, at least the developed

• 51:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  world, was coming onto the internet. So images from the Hubble telescope were perfectly timed, in their digital form, to be spread far and wide, as attachments in people's emails, as screensavers on people's computers. And so, the Hubble telescope was not only great scientifically, it was one of the, it's one of the most important ambassadors of scientific discovery there ever was.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  This has been an exciting show. And now, we've learned that we can look back.

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In time.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  In time. Will we ever be able to look forward?

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, not in any way that we know. Because it hasn't happened yet.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  And the Hubble doesn't have much, much more time left.

• 52:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so this new, this new servicing mission, oh, by the way, I didn't get, forgive me, I didn't give the last name of our, my astronaut friend Paul, it's Paul Richards. And he's, he's an active astronaut with NASA, and he, and he's down in Maryland, where he works at the, at the Goddard Space Flight Center there. And so, I just want to thank Paul for agreeing to be on.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Thank you, Paul.

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  But now, tell me, now, wait, we have five, we have five more years, you said?

• 52:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the servicing for Hubble gives it a new lease on life. There were some parts that had broken and had come in disrepair. And so, those were replaced, other instruments were swapped out. And so now, Hubble is more capable than it has ever been in any of the previous servicing missions. And it'll go for at least another five years if everything works as planned. But it could go longer than five years.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  But that we're not gonna stop there. I mean, we're still, we're gonna

• 52:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Create some, we're gonna have some more stuff go up there, aren't we?

• 53:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly. So there's the next generation space telescope, named for James Webb, who was the head of NASA during the famous Apollo era back in the 60s. The James Webb Space Telescope is specifically tuned to observe the universe so early in time that we will see galaxies themselves being born.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Oh, that's exciting.

• 53:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so when you see things being born, you feel it's, it's, you've gotta celebrate that.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Someone just peeled a Spock ear off and did a jump for joy.

• 53:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and not only that, so we've got that telescope, uh, looking to the edge of the universe, and there are others. For example, that, that's the, that's a telescope looking far. We actually have telescopes looking nearby. One of them was launched, and it's the Kepler Telescope, named for a famous astronomer, a German astronomer, a contemporary of Galileo's, actually. And so this telescope is gonna observe the nearest hundred thousand stars. Guess why?

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Cause we're looking for a habitable zone?

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're looking for life in all the right places. Where, what we think are the right places. We're looking for Earths.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  But, well, a scientist, when you're looking for life, you're just looking for proof that something can live here.

• 54:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, of any kind. It'd be great if we found little green men and little green women. That'd be really cool, but if we're searching for life, we're searching for life of any kind, we'd be, we'd be tickled to death if some of that life we found was microbial.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  That's exciting.

• 54:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so once we get that, then, now, here's the thing. Suppose the life is not what we call intelligent. I mean, not that it's dumb, but that it's just microbial. There, what we call biomarkers, there are features in the atmosphere of a planet that would reveal the existence of life that could be thriving on the planet's surface. And so, the next step, once we've logged these planets, is to look for biomarkers, to then make a new catalog of what are the most likely planets that could possibly have life. So that's what that'll be.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  And once we find that, we'll be back.

• 54:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be back. And so, in fact, next week's show is, we're going to feature an interview with a senior SETI, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Schostak. SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So the entire subject of that show is going to be on just that.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  I just got goosebumps.

• 55:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there you have it. And so, we're coming to the end of our time here. It's been great. It's been fun, Lynn.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. It has been fun. We learned, we learned that we are not the center of the universe.

• 55:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can come and try to get some free stuff on starTalkRadio.net and tell us why you deserve one of David Sobel's books, The Planet, and get a signed poster of the Hubble telescope by astronauts.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  And from now on, I'd like to be referred to as Galileo's girlfriend.

• 55:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. And I've got to tell you, we are co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This is StarTalk. I am Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lynn Koplitz, we are signing off.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Goodbye.