[Music]
you
so Neil Diamond once famously observed
that the reason we tell fairy tales is
not to teach children that dragons exist
but rather to convince them that dragons
can be defeated now I’m a scientist not
a poet but I think about science in
exactly the same way the world is facing
tremendous problems today climate change
social oppression poverty and war
science is a tool that can certainly
help us understand all of those problems
but I often think it’s true purpose is
to teach us that we have the ability to
fight back against them you and I live
in the first scientific age where we’re
surrounded by remarkable technologies
for we have outstanding medical
breakthroughs and we’ve discovered that
we’re part of a much larger world that
stretches from the unimaginably large
down to the impossibly tiny all of that
knowledge mixes around and it points at
a singular truth that says there are
apparently no limits to what we’re
capable of understanding and doing for
all intents and purposes there’s no
problem that you and I can’t solve so
why do I think that and more importantly
why do I think you ought to think that
too so let me tell you a story about
myself I had the great pleasure of
knowing my great grandmother Dora Larsen
and this view I have of the world I
think you can understand by thinking
about how the world changed during her
lifetime
grandma Dora was born in 1895 and she
passed away in 1993 when I was 24 when
she was born the world was illuminated
by oil lamps and people traveled around
in horses and buggies but by the time
she passed away people had walked on the
moon
and the entire knowledge of our species
was available to every one of us on a
computer the world lived through
tumultuous times during her life the
Great Depression two world wars the
first use of
like weapons against humanity but at the
same time in the background we were
making amazing discoveries about the way
the universe was put together and about
the way it works discoveries the change
in a very profound way how we think
about ourselves and our place in the
universe so to understand that let me
tell you two stories one about the very
small and one about the very large when
Grandma Dora was born the periodic table
was 24 years old chemists had figured
out that everything in the world was
made up of the things that appear on
that table familiar things like carbon
and oxygen silicon aluminum but also
unfamiliar things like barium and
selenium and strontium we had names for
all of that stuff but we really didn’t
know what any of it was if I go outside
and I pick up a rock and I cut it in
half and into smaller and smaller and
smaller and smaller pieces what is the
final smallest piece that I end up with
whatever it is it’s too small to see and
you might reasonably ask why should I
care well the truth is there’s a great
mystery hiding in those tiny small
pieces every one of you is a collection
of things like calcium and carbon and
iron and other stuff on the periodic
table but so is a frog and so as a pine
tree if I just take a pile of carbon and
calcium and iron I don’t get a person or
a frog or a pine tree it’s not the stuff
that makes us up it’s how that stuff is
put together and it took physicists
until the 1930s to discover that those
tiniest little bits are what we call
atoms and it’s the linking of them
together that makes all the things in
the world the atoms themselves are made
of even smaller building blocks called
protons neutrons and electrons but
despite knowing that that still doesn’t
tell us how you put it all together to
get me or to get you that discovery was
in
initiated by taking a single photograph
in 1952 this is called photo 51 it was
taken by a scientist named rosalind
Franklin and her graduate student
Raymond Gosselin this is the very first
picture ever taken of DNA the master
molecule that describes all life on
planet Earth
the discovery of DNA showed us a
singular truth that all life on this
planet
is inextricably linked my DNA is exactly
the same as your DNA which is exactly
the same as the DNA of a frog and a pine
tree the story of life on this planet is
written in DNA molecules novels written
using the same words over and over again
but in different order for different
life forms that’s what makes me me and
that’s what makes you you so this is an
example of how we can use something
curiosity and technology to discover
something about the way the world works
this is impossibly small but we still
had the wherewithal to come together and
figure out how it’s all put together let
me tell you a story about something very
big so today I live in the city of
Chicago and this is the view we have of
the city from our vantage point at the
Adler Planetarium on the shores of Lake
Michigan now it may surprise you to know
that this picture was taken
at night we live in an age where we can
banish the darkness from our cities but
if there’s ever a power outage then the
view that will emerge is one that’s not
unfamiliar to those of us who grew up in
places like Montana the milky River of
the Milky Way arching overhead from one
side of the sky to the other this is
what the sky looked like when my grandma
Dora was growing up and in a very real
way it defined the way we thought about
the universe astronomers thought the
Milky Way was the entire universe and
that the Sun lives
we’re near its center that’s a very
limited view of the cosmos and the
reason we have that limited view was
because measuring distances is very
difficult in astronomy there’s nothing
in this picture that’s close enough that
any human then or now will ever visit
any of those faraway stars the problem
of distance was solved by an astronomer
at Harvard named Henrietta Swan Leavitt
she discovered that there are certain
stars that if you look at them in the
telescope and you can measure their
brightness then you can tell how far
away they are today we call that lis of
its law and it’s one of the most
important discoveries that we ever made
in astronomy it was used almost
immediately to show that the Sun didn’t
live at the center of the Milky Way
it actually lives somewhere in the rowdy
outskirts in a place called the Orion
signa spiral arm we used it to measure
the distance to another galaxy for the
first time showing that it was millions
of light years past the boundaries of
the Milky Way and that the universe was
larger by far than any astronomer had
thought was reasonable up to that time
and in 1929
leave its law played a role in showing
us that the universe was expanding today
we look at that expansion and we know
were looking at the evolving cosmos we
know that we’re seeing the universe
having grown from 14 billion years from
a primeval fireball that we call the Big
Bang all of this just serves to point to
the idea that the universe is really
vast on scales that’s very difficult for
us to imagine and comprehend despite the
fact the universe is older than our
galaxy or the Sun or the earth or me and
you we’ve been able to piece together
the story of its life and where we came
from using a tool called the telescope
and a law discovered by a Harvard
astronomer that’s one example another
example of this profound ability we have
to take impossible problems and work
them out and figure out how things work
together all of this and more happened
over the course of just a hundred years
if you lived as long as my
great-grandmother lived then you saw
tumultuously
not unlike the ones we’re living through
today and you may have wondered is the
world ever going to emerge on the far
side
the poet Delmore Schwartz once said time
is the fire in which we burn and he’s
absolutely right
we’re victims of our own history but
only if we look backwards with limited
eyes we are capable of doing amazing and
impressive things to improve our lives
and we know that because we’ve made
remarkable discoveries that we have no
business knowing the answers to about
how the universe works so in the end
science is a tool that we can use to
improve our lives but it’s also a way to
expand our consciousness it gives us
perspectives in exactly the same ways as
art and literature and poetry these are
the things that define at their core
what it means to be human and these are
the things that we turn to when we need
the courage in our abilities to conquer
all the struggles that we face every day
you
so Neil Diamond once famously observed
that the reason we tell fairy tales is
not to teach children that dragons exist
but rather to convince them that dragons
can be defeated now I’m a scientist not
a poet but I think about science in
exactly the same way the world is facing
tremendous problems today climate change
social oppression poverty and war
science is a tool that can certainly
help us understand all of those problems
but I often think it’s true purpose is
to teach us that we have the ability to
fight back against them you and I live
in the first scientific age where we’re
surrounded by remarkable technologies
for we have outstanding medical
breakthroughs and we’ve discovered that
we’re part of a much larger world that
stretches from the unimaginably large
down to the impossibly tiny all of that
knowledge mixes around and it points at
a singular truth that says there are
apparently no limits to what we’re
capable of understanding and doing for
all intents and purposes there’s no
problem that you and I can’t solve so
why do I think that and more importantly
why do I think you ought to think that
too so let me tell you a story about
myself I had the great pleasure of
knowing my great grandmother Dora Larsen
and this view I have of the world I
think you can understand by thinking
about how the world changed during her
lifetime
grandma Dora was born in 1895 and she
passed away in 1993 when I was 24 when
she was born the world was illuminated
by oil lamps and people traveled around
in horses and buggies but by the time
she passed away people had walked on the
moon
and the entire knowledge of our species
was available to every one of us on a
computer the world lived through
tumultuous times during her life the
Great Depression two world wars the
first use of
like weapons against humanity but at the
same time in the background we were
making amazing discoveries about the way
the universe was put together and about
the way it works discoveries the change
in a very profound way how we think
about ourselves and our place in the
universe so to understand that let me
tell you two stories one about the very
small and one about the very large when
Grandma Dora was born the periodic table
was 24 years old chemists had figured
out that everything in the world was
made up of the things that appear on
that table familiar things like carbon
and oxygen silicon aluminum but also
unfamiliar things like barium and
selenium and strontium we had names for
all of that stuff but we really didn’t
know what any of it was if I go outside
and I pick up a rock and I cut it in
half and into smaller and smaller and
smaller and smaller pieces what is the
final smallest piece that I end up with
whatever it is it’s too small to see and
you might reasonably ask why should I
care well the truth is there’s a great
mystery hiding in those tiny small
pieces every one of you is a collection
of things like calcium and carbon and
iron and other stuff on the periodic
table but so is a frog and so as a pine
tree if I just take a pile of carbon and
calcium and iron I don’t get a person or
a frog or a pine tree it’s not the stuff
that makes us up it’s how that stuff is
put together and it took physicists
until the 1930s to discover that those
tiniest little bits are what we call
atoms and it’s the linking of them
together that makes all the things in
the world the atoms themselves are made
of even smaller building blocks called
protons neutrons and electrons but
despite knowing that that still doesn’t
tell us how you put it all together to
get me or to get you that discovery was
in
initiated by taking a single photograph
in 1952 this is called photo 51 it was
taken by a scientist named rosalind
Franklin and her graduate student
Raymond Gosselin this is the very first
picture ever taken of DNA the master
molecule that describes all life on
planet Earth
the discovery of DNA showed us a
singular truth that all life on this
planet
is inextricably linked my DNA is exactly
the same as your DNA which is exactly
the same as the DNA of a frog and a pine
tree the story of life on this planet is
written in DNA molecules novels written
using the same words over and over again
but in different order for different
life forms that’s what makes me me and
that’s what makes you you so this is an
example of how we can use something
curiosity and technology to discover
something about the way the world works
this is impossibly small but we still
had the wherewithal to come together and
figure out how it’s all put together let
me tell you a story about something very
big so today I live in the city of
Chicago and this is the view we have of
the city from our vantage point at the
Adler Planetarium on the shores of Lake
Michigan now it may surprise you to know
that this picture was taken
at night we live in an age where we can
banish the darkness from our cities but
if there’s ever a power outage then the
view that will emerge is one that’s not
unfamiliar to those of us who grew up in
places like Montana the milky River of
the Milky Way arching overhead from one
side of the sky to the other this is
what the sky looked like when my grandma
Dora was growing up and in a very real
way it defined the way we thought about
the universe astronomers thought the
Milky Way was the entire universe and
that the Sun lives
we’re near its center that’s a very
limited view of the cosmos and the
reason we have that limited view was
because measuring distances is very
difficult in astronomy there’s nothing
in this picture that’s close enough that
any human then or now will ever visit
any of those faraway stars the problem
of distance was solved by an astronomer
at Harvard named Henrietta Swan Leavitt
she discovered that there are certain
stars that if you look at them in the
telescope and you can measure their
brightness then you can tell how far
away they are today we call that lis of
its law and it’s one of the most
important discoveries that we ever made
in astronomy it was used almost
immediately to show that the Sun didn’t
live at the center of the Milky Way
it actually lives somewhere in the rowdy
outskirts in a place called the Orion
signa spiral arm we used it to measure
the distance to another galaxy for the
first time showing that it was millions
of light years past the boundaries of
the Milky Way and that the universe was
larger by far than any astronomer had
thought was reasonable up to that time
and in 1929
leave its law played a role in showing
us that the universe was expanding today
we look at that expansion and we know
were looking at the evolving cosmos we
know that we’re seeing the universe
having grown from 14 billion years from
a primeval fireball that we call the Big
Bang all of this just serves to point to
the idea that the universe is really
vast on scales that’s very difficult for
us to imagine and comprehend despite the
fact the universe is older than our
galaxy or the Sun or the earth or me and
you we’ve been able to piece together
the story of its life and where we came
from using a tool called the telescope
and a law discovered by a Harvard
astronomer that’s one example another
example of this profound ability we have
to take impossible problems and work
them out and figure out how things work
together all of this and more happened
over the course of just a hundred years
if you lived as long as my
great-grandmother lived then you saw
tumultuously
not unlike the ones we’re living through
today and you may have wondered is the
world ever going to emerge on the far
side
the poet Delmore Schwartz once said time
is the fire in which we burn and he’s
absolutely right
we’re victims of our own history but
only if we look backwards with limited
eyes we are capable of doing amazing and
impressive things to improve our lives
and we know that because we’ve made
remarkable discoveries that we have no
business knowing the answers to about
how the universe works so in the end
science is a tool that we can use to
improve our lives but it’s also a way to
expand our consciousness it gives us
perspectives in exactly the same ways as
art and literature and poetry these are
the things that define at their core
what it means to be human and these are
the things that we turn to when we need
the courage in our abilities to conquer
all the struggles that we face every day
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