about five years ago when I was the
director at NASA Ames and this is a one
of NASA’s 10 Research Center’s down the
road here and we were here to kick off a
program to provide training and
opportunities in aerospace engineering
and I understand that there’s been a
number of successes in the machine shop
so really keep it up and we encourage
people here in California and around the
country to make use of the talent that’s
here so this I was really proud of this
but I’m not here today to talk about
NASA specifically I’m here to talk about
aliens actually so yeah it’s probably a
lot here in the audience and the Sun I
know I had some of my staff at Ames but
I’m the chairman of the breakthrough
prize Foundation and I’ll tell you a
little bit about it and what we do but
about five years ago a Russian
billionaire and it’s kind of interesting
for a Air Force general to work for a
Russian the yuri milner got to looking
online and he saw that that if you look
at the most famous people on earth like
who gets cited most on Facebook there
weren’t any scientists the 50 most
famous living people’s only one
scientist – Stephen Hawking I’ll show
you a picture of him here a little later
– he said we ought to make scientists
his famous his movie stars and sports
heroes and so forth so he and his some
of his colleagues that included Mark
Zuckerberg you might have heard of him
the Sergey Brin one of the founders of
Google and was wiki who’s the founder of
23andme Jack Ma a billionaire in China
made it set up a prize and I’ll tell you
a little bit about that prize but it’s a
three million dollar prize for each
scientist we gave out twenty four
million dollars worth of prizes this
last November and I’ll tell you little
bit about how we do that but we’re
really proud of making scientists famous
I think it’s important because a lot of
our greatest successes are based on
science 100 years ago this year Albert
Einstein
a scientist somebody might have heard of
wrote this paper it may be the one of
the most famous papers in all time it’s
about general relativity now when I was
a graduate student I took a course on
general relativity and I usually did
pretty good in courses but after about
two months I flunked so so if this video
works I want to show you we gave out
another prize this year to a young
person a we had a high school
competition where we gave up four
hundred thousand dollars with the prizes
to make a video to explain something
that’s really hard so we got this one
guy here Ryan Chester from high school
in Ohio and if this works we were able
to hear him explain it a lot better than
I could about what relativity is almost
everyone has heard of Einstein’s special
theory of relativity it was truly
groundbreaking but it doesn’t have to be
complicated or hard to understand in
fact I bet we could formulate it
ourselves
the theory had two postulates our parts
the first one said simply that the laws
of physics are the same in any inertial
reference frame a reference frame is
just what a person considers to be at
rest
I say considers because you could also
consider it to be in motion relative to
something else in the universe wow it
sounds like we’re developing a theory of
relativity so Einstein said that the
laws of physics are identical in any
inertial reference frame meaning one
that isn’t speeding up or slowing down
but why does the speed have to be
constant well that’s easy to prove just
sit in a chair grab a bowl of popcorn
place it in front of you sit back and
hmm nothing’s happening now let’s do the
same thing in a car with the windows
blacked out what if the driver decides
to change the speed of the car
drastically by stopping all of a sudden
all of a sudden the laws of physics seem
to act a bit differently but if the car
travels and a nice constant speed then
the exact same thing happens is when I
was just sitting on the earth nothing in
both the reference frame of the earth
and the car the popcorn doesn’t move
both the earth and car were moving at
different speeds but as far as I could
tell the laws of physics acted exactly
the same thus we can conclude the same
thing would have happened in any frame
of reference that was also moving at a
constant speed and none of them would
have been any less valid than any of the
others so there you have it
we just proved the first postulate this
is Albert Einstein and the guy next to
him as an astronomer now I’m an
astronomer and astronomers are
physicists that weren’t very good at
math if somebody makes the theory like
Einstein did about relativity and it
makes predictions but until you actually
see those in fact they’re not real so
the guy on the right here is a Sir
Arthur Eddington who was the most famous
astronomer in England in the early part
of the 20th century and so he listened
to Einstein and said you know Einstein’s
theory predicted that if starlight went
by something with a big gravity like the
Sun it would be bent well the trouble
with observing a star near the Sun is
its sounds pretty bright in the Stars
pretty faint but fortunately we have
eclipses so Eddington and 1919 took this
equipment to to Africa and to South
America where there was an eclipse and
he observed during the Eclipse when the
sun’s blotted out a star right next to
the Sun and on the next chart you’ll see
this the that little red dot or red line
is where the star should have been and
you can see it’s slightly offset so he
published this and said Einstein is
right most astronomers said rubbish but
eventually it was proven correct and
this was the key thing to prove that
Einstein was correct and I’ll talk about
this bending
Starlite or later because this is a
pretty neat effect you know I mentioned
about given these scientists big awards
well the point is we want to have really
an Academy Awards of science and we
hired Vanity Fair that does the Oscar
party and said hey put on a really good
party for these scientists and we gave
them a boatload of money and they
decided to do this event in Silicon
Valley this is that Moffett Field that
building in the back is hangar one which
was built in 1930s
and this this is a pretty glitzy affair
and it’s the only black-tie affair in
Silicon Valley and I’ll tell you it’s
quite a sight to see Mark Zuckerberg in
a black-tie although we have yet to get
Sergey Brin to actually wear one the
first year he showed up with a t-shirt
and a polka dot backpack but anyhow most
of the other people sort of black tie
but this is a pretty cool thing and
since it happened at nasa ames i was the
center director and the landlord so i
got invited to these parties which the
only time I ever got to go to those kind
of parties there was a runway and pretty
cool stuff now just to show you how cool
it is
this is yuri milner I’m sure nobody’s
and Christina Aguilera this is the first
time a geeky sinus like I ever got to
see Christina Aguilera and she’s really
cool by the way but she’s the
Entertainer we had Seth MacFarlane as
the emcee and this is the prize we give
out to these scientists so the
scientists needless to say were pretty
pretty enthralled about this so we’re
starting to get a lot of a lot of
attention on our science prizes well
this is a mission that NASA Ames had
that was launched in 2009 it worked
perfectly until 2013 and then it kind of
half worked which actually pretty good
we were we said we were going to make it
work for four years and it worked for
four years in one day so it was a great
success but any rate it looked at a
hundred thousand stars in our galaxy
like the Sun and it looked very
carefully as the light and at the light
of these stars and in some cases we’d
see the light dim a little bit that was
a planet going in front of the star what
we have found is virtually every star in
our galaxy has a system like our like
our solar system and and about a quarter
of them have a planet size the earth so
you can see a couple ones we found so
there’s maybe 20 billions planets in our
galaxy that are the size of the earth
now we don’t know if they have life but
we think that it’s quite likely so this
last summer yuri milner who gets to be
in all these because he’s a billionaire
and this other guy who you might have
heard of – that’s Stephen Hawking we
announced a hundred million dollar
initiative to look for alien signals
it’s called breakthrough listen and we
rented time on this this is the world’s
biggest steered antenna it’s a hundred
meters the size of a football field and
it’s in West Virginia and we just
started two weeks ago looking for alien
signals and found it yet we do expect to
tune into the Super Bowl so I’ll be
pretty good but
this is the world’s biggest telescope
and I’m sad to say this isn’t in the
u.s. it’s in China you know the the no
this isn’t Arecibo Arecibo is 300 meters
across this is 500 meters so we’ve been
nice to the Chinese so we’re gonna use
it too but this is something about to
come out and I encourage everybody in
this room because this is open to
everybody we’re going to give out a
million dollars of prizes if we find a
signal from aliens people are going to
want to send something back now maybe
it’s a long ways away like 10,000 light
years so the signal will be you know you
have a long time to wait for the
response but at any rate there’s a
million dollar contest we’ll be
announcing probably in mid-april on
breakthrough listen this is the only
signal it’s been sent so far it was done
in the 1960s by Carl Sagan and Frank
Drake the one of the famous scientists
that started this stuff so I think you
guys can do better than this I don’t
know what it means but eventually we’d
like to actually take a picture of these
planets around other stars it’s pretty
hard to do but there’s a way to do it
remember I said that the Sun bends
starlight that kind of acts like a lens
like a lens in your camera so you could
use the Sun to actually image a planet
many light-years away it’s called a
gravitational lens the only problem is
you got to get 550 astronomical units
away from the Sun and we’re only one
astronomical unit so it’ll take a while
but we’re looking at making an
initiative in this thing as well so
hopefully sometime in the next decade or
two we’ll get an image of another planet
like the earth so this is one of our
other objectives ooh I’d like to close
here with what Stephen Hawking said this
last summer that and I think this really
sums up what we’re all about and what we
want the whole world to be about we’re
alive we are intelligent we must know
please join us and thank you
you [Applause]