[Music]
thank you like many of you out there I
have been planning for a long time to
come to Jackson Hole and to be here on
August 21st 2017 at 11:35 in the morning
that’s because we have a precise
mathematical predictive model for the
way in which the solar system works and
we could predict to the second when that
Sun would appear and sure enough exactly
as if on cue the moon came right in
front of the Sun I hope you all had a
beautiful experience with it I know that
I did our ancestors were not so
fortunate they didn’t know when it was
going to happen and if you had the same
experience that I did you know that it
can be very scary especially those last
few seconds when it just goes dark very
scary so how to understand such a thing
what did it mean
well they had stories and most of them
did involved murder or to be more
specific devouring and since the Sun
always came back it also involved
regurgitation at some level but we don’t
have to be afraid and while we can still
enjoy stories like that they don’t need
to be our model of the solar system we
now have a model so precise you can go
on NASA’s website and see when the and
where the eclipses will be for the next
three thousand years we can see all of
the eclipses that james t kirk will see
in the 23rd century and seven hundred
years beyond that so that is into the
future and yet we can tell you where and
when that’s how good our model is I was
very fortunate enough to be spend many
summers of my youth in Kelley Wyoming I
was a
writer at Teton Valley Ranch every
morning looking out at that mountain was
a pretty inspiring thing and a lot of my
life and mind and spirit were formed
here in this valley I was this was long
ago enough that I came out to Jackson my
first time on a Union Pacific train and
the Challenger streamliner the ultimate
in modern transportation left Union
Station in Chicago at about six o’clock
at night I got on that train and within
minutes I met my friend Annie and she
was my best camp friend for all the
years I was here and she’s still one of
my dearest friends today I’m sure there
were adults on that train but I didn’t
see them and Annie and I spent all
evening all night all day running up and
down the train we played cards in the
bar car and ordered up another round of
three musketeers we spent endless hours
in the observation car and when we
finally landed in Rock Springs Wyoming
we took what seemed the longest bus ride
imaginable up from Rock Springs to Kelly
when I got on that train I thought I was
headed to the wild wild west I believed
it I believed all of it my mother
believed and said that she wanted to
keep us as innocent as long for as long
as possible as innocent as possible for
as long as possible and she did it was
to foster our imagination and I really
thought I was headed to it could have
been 1885 for all I knew I had my lariat
and I had my slicker and I was ready to
ride the range so when I got to Rock
Springs and headed up to Jackson the Sun
set I was sitting on the left side of
the bus with Annie next to me and we saw
our first star and she taught me how to
wish on a star I’d never heard that
before we picked out two stars that she
picked out Vega and I picked out
Arcturus that anytime we looked at those
stars we could think of the other and no
the other was seeing that star as well
so the stars of Jackson
poll stars of that experience were a
huge part of my early friendship forming
as well when I got to Kelly and stepped
off the bus and saw the exquisite night
sky of Jackson Hall
I couldn’t believe my eyes it was
nothing like Chicago I can tell you that
and summer after summer I got to
experience these beautiful stars in this
beautiful valley I was kind of famous
for falling asleep not under the tarp
but out under the stars and I had my
glasses on and I kept them on until I
fell asleep and in the morning with
glasses would all be asked you and
probably rolled over on top of them but
at least I got to see the very last
seconds of the stars before I drifted
off to sleep so summer after summer I
grew here and it wasn’t just my lariat
skills it was also the way I understood
people the way I understood the world
the way I understood the universe my
spiritual life was here my mother didn’t
really like church he didn’t believe in
organized religion so my one and only
religion was forged here under the
Cathedral of these stars so many years
ago a friend gave me a tile that said
for I have loved the Stars so dearly I
cannot be afraid of the night and that
is how I feel I loved these stars and my
form of love was to learn about them so
I chose the path of science and went on
to graduate school and studied astronomy
I had an extraordinary experience when I
was just in the middle of my graduate
school that really solidified my love
for science in a galaxy far far away in
February of 1987 a supernova went off a
supernova is a star that explodes at the
end of its life and after it explodes it
becomes so bright it outshines the
entire galaxy so there’s a very
characteristic brightness that that star
shows a supernova it gets brighter and
then it falls off and gets dimmer in a
very characteristic curve like this so I
was studying stellar interiors and I had
learned that the cooling of the
supernova and the dimming of its
brightness was exactly related to the
decay times of some of the nuclear
products that were forged in the
supernova when a supernova goes off it’s
so hot and so dense inside that all
sorts of nuclear reactions go on and all
sorts of different isotopes are formed
in particular there is an isotope of
nickel nickel 56 that is supposed to I
had learned
dominate and dictate the decay of the
supernova and sure enough as the weeks
months and as you can see years go by it
was spot-on
it was exactly right how was this
possible that I could know ahead of time
that some crazy isotope of nickel was
gonna tell me how quickly this star
would dim in a galaxy far far away but
science could do that we know enough to
know what those nuclear reactions are
and how it would affect how bright the
star looked so this was my Helen Keller
moment when Helen Keller touches the
water and realizes that water is the
same as those patterns she had been
learning science was a path to really
understanding and being able to predict
what the universe was like so I want to
tell you two quick stories of more
recent examples of mind-blowing times
that science has predicted and observed
crazy things and I hope they will have
some of the same feeling for you the
first is the collision of two black
holes and you know that they’re very
dense and very energetic and black holes
like you and I and the earth and
everything else in space sit in
space-time and space-time is just this
fabric of space and time in which
everything
exists and space-time is kind of like
jello that if something energetic
happens ripples come off of it
Einstein understood that he understood
that space-time was curved that gravity
causes this curvature and that big
ripples or big explosions in space-time
would cause ripples but he thought
nowhere but we possibly measured this
because the amount of of wiggle of
space-time is so minut couldn’t possibly
measure it here’s an example of showing
how the ripples of space-time might come
past the earth
I love scale of effect is vastly
exaggerated that’s a relief because that
would be very bad for us but in fact the
scale of the ripples is one one
thousandth of a proton in its size
that’s how small they are how could we
ever measure something one one
thousandth of a proton in extent well
sure enough we’ve measured it with a
laser interferometer gravitational-wave
Observatory just in this last few years
we’ve seen now four of them they’re
probably more they haven’t announced but
two different observatories one in
Washington one in Louisiana got the same
signal that wiggling signal that is the
oscillation of space-time from the
collision of two black holes billions of
light-years away the other example I
want to give you is about this beautiful
wonderful spacecraft called Cassini that
is at Saturn right now it has been at
Saturn since 2004 and it’s been sending
back these amazing pictures you’ve
probably seen some of the rings of the
moons of the planet itself
now Cassini was launched in 1997 and it
took this crazy path it got gravity
slingshots from a number of the planets
and as we talked about a minute ago
gravity is really just an effect of the
curvature of space-time so if you think
about how the spacecraft maneuvers it
it has little maneuvering Jets and then
it falls and makes use of the curvature
of space-time so I’m imagining that
there might be some skiers in this room
you know what that’s like you see the
curve you want to cut it this way you
want to cut it that way that’s just what
Cassini did for nearly seven years as
you can see it started in the launch
here it went around encountered Venus
once that slingshot out to about the
distance of Mars had a little maneuver
got another encounter with Venus had an
encounter with earth and on to Jupiter
which gave it another slingshot to
Saturn so seven years of whoa whoa oh
and finally to Jupiter and finally into
Saturn and after nearly seven years of
this 210 million seconds it came and
fell right into Saturn’s orbit within
four seconds of the predicted time from
10 years ago from mission planners four
seconds so how that is well thank you
Christina and Christina scientists and
engineers well there’s a little bit of a
sad story here of this amazing mission
because it has been exploring Saturn
almost 300 orbits using that same
gravity rolling around bouncing off of
the moon Titan changing its trajectory
all around to get all these different
views of Saturn but this fall something
kind of traumatic is going to happen for
Cassini you know how you marked your
calendars for the 21st of August well I
would like you to mark your calendars
for the 15th of September because that
is the end of the Cassini mission
the Cassini planners don’t want Cassini
to fall into and accidentally crash into
a moon that might have life on it we
don’t want to contaminate possible life
on moons of Saturn with bugs that might
be riding along with the Cassini
spacecraft so
sure enough one of those last maneuvers
on the 11th of September will cause it
to bend just enough and fall into
Saturn’s gravity and finally it will
burn up in the atmosphere now we won’t
be able to see anything but we will be
able to see the very sad faces on the
controllers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
as they say goodbye to their mission
that they’ve been working on for over 20
years
I can guarantee you or let me put it
this way I will bet you at Three
Musketeers that that will come off
exactly as planned
exactly when planned because that’s how
well we know the solar system that’s how
well our science and our mathematics
works so why would we ever turn our back
on science it has so many opportunities
and offers so much to us it gives us a
way to to travel around the solar system
it gives us wonder it gives us safety it
takes us out of darkness now some may
think that there’s a conflict between
science and appreciating the beauty and
wonder but I do not I still delight in
seeing the first star I see tonight
every night I still think of Annie
whenever I look at Vega I still can lose
my breath at the beauty of a solar
eclipse so I see no conflict there
knowing that that was the moon coming
out and from the Sun made it almost more
amazing more beautiful I have also heard
it said that science may be
unapproachable to Sun because there’s a
conflict between science and faith and I
don’t think that’s true either I think
of it as sports I really love baseball
and I really love football but I would
never take a baseball bat onto a
football gridiron and you would never
tackle somebody on a baseball diamond
unless you were trying to steal second
base
so there are two different games and
when I need to ask something about the
physical universe something that science
can answer I play by the rules of
science and when I want to ask something
about the meaning of my life or my
soul’s path then I turn to my tools of
faith they don’t have to be in conflict
within another and that has worked for
me thank you
[Applause]
thank you like many of you out there I
have been planning for a long time to
come to Jackson Hole and to be here on
August 21st 2017 at 11:35 in the morning
that’s because we have a precise
mathematical predictive model for the
way in which the solar system works and
we could predict to the second when that
Sun would appear and sure enough exactly
as if on cue the moon came right in
front of the Sun I hope you all had a
beautiful experience with it I know that
I did our ancestors were not so
fortunate they didn’t know when it was
going to happen and if you had the same
experience that I did you know that it
can be very scary especially those last
few seconds when it just goes dark very
scary so how to understand such a thing
what did it mean
well they had stories and most of them
did involved murder or to be more
specific devouring and since the Sun
always came back it also involved
regurgitation at some level but we don’t
have to be afraid and while we can still
enjoy stories like that they don’t need
to be our model of the solar system we
now have a model so precise you can go
on NASA’s website and see when the and
where the eclipses will be for the next
three thousand years we can see all of
the eclipses that james t kirk will see
in the 23rd century and seven hundred
years beyond that so that is into the
future and yet we can tell you where and
when that’s how good our model is I was
very fortunate enough to be spend many
summers of my youth in Kelley Wyoming I
was a
writer at Teton Valley Ranch every
morning looking out at that mountain was
a pretty inspiring thing and a lot of my
life and mind and spirit were formed
here in this valley I was this was long
ago enough that I came out to Jackson my
first time on a Union Pacific train and
the Challenger streamliner the ultimate
in modern transportation left Union
Station in Chicago at about six o’clock
at night I got on that train and within
minutes I met my friend Annie and she
was my best camp friend for all the
years I was here and she’s still one of
my dearest friends today I’m sure there
were adults on that train but I didn’t
see them and Annie and I spent all
evening all night all day running up and
down the train we played cards in the
bar car and ordered up another round of
three musketeers we spent endless hours
in the observation car and when we
finally landed in Rock Springs Wyoming
we took what seemed the longest bus ride
imaginable up from Rock Springs to Kelly
when I got on that train I thought I was
headed to the wild wild west I believed
it I believed all of it my mother
believed and said that she wanted to
keep us as innocent as long for as long
as possible as innocent as possible for
as long as possible and she did it was
to foster our imagination and I really
thought I was headed to it could have
been 1885 for all I knew I had my lariat
and I had my slicker and I was ready to
ride the range so when I got to Rock
Springs and headed up to Jackson the Sun
set I was sitting on the left side of
the bus with Annie next to me and we saw
our first star and she taught me how to
wish on a star I’d never heard that
before we picked out two stars that she
picked out Vega and I picked out
Arcturus that anytime we looked at those
stars we could think of the other and no
the other was seeing that star as well
so the stars of Jackson
poll stars of that experience were a
huge part of my early friendship forming
as well when I got to Kelly and stepped
off the bus and saw the exquisite night
sky of Jackson Hall
I couldn’t believe my eyes it was
nothing like Chicago I can tell you that
and summer after summer I got to
experience these beautiful stars in this
beautiful valley I was kind of famous
for falling asleep not under the tarp
but out under the stars and I had my
glasses on and I kept them on until I
fell asleep and in the morning with
glasses would all be asked you and
probably rolled over on top of them but
at least I got to see the very last
seconds of the stars before I drifted
off to sleep so summer after summer I
grew here and it wasn’t just my lariat
skills it was also the way I understood
people the way I understood the world
the way I understood the universe my
spiritual life was here my mother didn’t
really like church he didn’t believe in
organized religion so my one and only
religion was forged here under the
Cathedral of these stars so many years
ago a friend gave me a tile that said
for I have loved the Stars so dearly I
cannot be afraid of the night and that
is how I feel I loved these stars and my
form of love was to learn about them so
I chose the path of science and went on
to graduate school and studied astronomy
I had an extraordinary experience when I
was just in the middle of my graduate
school that really solidified my love
for science in a galaxy far far away in
February of 1987 a supernova went off a
supernova is a star that explodes at the
end of its life and after it explodes it
becomes so bright it outshines the
entire galaxy so there’s a very
characteristic brightness that that star
shows a supernova it gets brighter and
then it falls off and gets dimmer in a
very characteristic curve like this so I
was studying stellar interiors and I had
learned that the cooling of the
supernova and the dimming of its
brightness was exactly related to the
decay times of some of the nuclear
products that were forged in the
supernova when a supernova goes off it’s
so hot and so dense inside that all
sorts of nuclear reactions go on and all
sorts of different isotopes are formed
in particular there is an isotope of
nickel nickel 56 that is supposed to I
had learned
dominate and dictate the decay of the
supernova and sure enough as the weeks
months and as you can see years go by it
was spot-on
it was exactly right how was this
possible that I could know ahead of time
that some crazy isotope of nickel was
gonna tell me how quickly this star
would dim in a galaxy far far away but
science could do that we know enough to
know what those nuclear reactions are
and how it would affect how bright the
star looked so this was my Helen Keller
moment when Helen Keller touches the
water and realizes that water is the
same as those patterns she had been
learning science was a path to really
understanding and being able to predict
what the universe was like so I want to
tell you two quick stories of more
recent examples of mind-blowing times
that science has predicted and observed
crazy things and I hope they will have
some of the same feeling for you the
first is the collision of two black
holes and you know that they’re very
dense and very energetic and black holes
like you and I and the earth and
everything else in space sit in
space-time and space-time is just this
fabric of space and time in which
everything
exists and space-time is kind of like
jello that if something energetic
happens ripples come off of it
Einstein understood that he understood
that space-time was curved that gravity
causes this curvature and that big
ripples or big explosions in space-time
would cause ripples but he thought
nowhere but we possibly measured this
because the amount of of wiggle of
space-time is so minut couldn’t possibly
measure it here’s an example of showing
how the ripples of space-time might come
past the earth
I love scale of effect is vastly
exaggerated that’s a relief because that
would be very bad for us but in fact the
scale of the ripples is one one
thousandth of a proton in its size
that’s how small they are how could we
ever measure something one one
thousandth of a proton in extent well
sure enough we’ve measured it with a
laser interferometer gravitational-wave
Observatory just in this last few years
we’ve seen now four of them they’re
probably more they haven’t announced but
two different observatories one in
Washington one in Louisiana got the same
signal that wiggling signal that is the
oscillation of space-time from the
collision of two black holes billions of
light-years away the other example I
want to give you is about this beautiful
wonderful spacecraft called Cassini that
is at Saturn right now it has been at
Saturn since 2004 and it’s been sending
back these amazing pictures you’ve
probably seen some of the rings of the
moons of the planet itself
now Cassini was launched in 1997 and it
took this crazy path it got gravity
slingshots from a number of the planets
and as we talked about a minute ago
gravity is really just an effect of the
curvature of space-time so if you think
about how the spacecraft maneuvers it
it has little maneuvering Jets and then
it falls and makes use of the curvature
of space-time so I’m imagining that
there might be some skiers in this room
you know what that’s like you see the
curve you want to cut it this way you
want to cut it that way that’s just what
Cassini did for nearly seven years as
you can see it started in the launch
here it went around encountered Venus
once that slingshot out to about the
distance of Mars had a little maneuver
got another encounter with Venus had an
encounter with earth and on to Jupiter
which gave it another slingshot to
Saturn so seven years of whoa whoa oh
and finally to Jupiter and finally into
Saturn and after nearly seven years of
this 210 million seconds it came and
fell right into Saturn’s orbit within
four seconds of the predicted time from
10 years ago from mission planners four
seconds so how that is well thank you
Christina and Christina scientists and
engineers well there’s a little bit of a
sad story here of this amazing mission
because it has been exploring Saturn
almost 300 orbits using that same
gravity rolling around bouncing off of
the moon Titan changing its trajectory
all around to get all these different
views of Saturn but this fall something
kind of traumatic is going to happen for
Cassini you know how you marked your
calendars for the 21st of August well I
would like you to mark your calendars
for the 15th of September because that
is the end of the Cassini mission
the Cassini planners don’t want Cassini
to fall into and accidentally crash into
a moon that might have life on it we
don’t want to contaminate possible life
on moons of Saturn with bugs that might
be riding along with the Cassini
spacecraft so
sure enough one of those last maneuvers
on the 11th of September will cause it
to bend just enough and fall into
Saturn’s gravity and finally it will
burn up in the atmosphere now we won’t
be able to see anything but we will be
able to see the very sad faces on the
controllers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
as they say goodbye to their mission
that they’ve been working on for over 20
years
I can guarantee you or let me put it
this way I will bet you at Three
Musketeers that that will come off
exactly as planned
exactly when planned because that’s how
well we know the solar system that’s how
well our science and our mathematics
works so why would we ever turn our back
on science it has so many opportunities
and offers so much to us it gives us a
way to to travel around the solar system
it gives us wonder it gives us safety it
takes us out of darkness now some may
think that there’s a conflict between
science and appreciating the beauty and
wonder but I do not I still delight in
seeing the first star I see tonight
every night I still think of Annie
whenever I look at Vega I still can lose
my breath at the beauty of a solar
eclipse so I see no conflict there
knowing that that was the moon coming
out and from the Sun made it almost more
amazing more beautiful I have also heard
it said that science may be
unapproachable to Sun because there’s a
conflict between science and faith and I
don’t think that’s true either I think
of it as sports I really love baseball
and I really love football but I would
never take a baseball bat onto a
football gridiron and you would never
tackle somebody on a baseball diamond
unless you were trying to steal second
base
so there are two different games and
when I need to ask something about the
physical universe something that science
can answer I play by the rules of
science and when I want to ask something
about the meaning of my life or my
soul’s path then I turn to my tools of
faith they don’t have to be in conflict
within another and that has worked for
me thank you
[Applause]
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