Transcription
Hey everybody, PDA Trainer, Executive Producer, and host of your Break It Down show. I've got an interesting one today. Sometimes we talk about military issues, sometimes we talk about the arts. Today, we're all the way in science, and I've got my cousin Alex joining me because he's studying physics in college, and in particular, you know, on the space side of things, the astro side of things, the cosmology side of things.
And so I'm like, "Hey, I've got this guy from the University of Hawaii, Peter Gorham, coming on the show, and he does stuff with neutrinos." Neutrinos are these tiny, tiny, tiny subatomic particles that are, there's trillions of them. They, they can fly through yourself, like they fly through us all the time. And he's trying to study them and when they run into something because they're so small, they pass through the, I guess, the subatomic structure, so they don't hit anything a lot of times.
And so he went down to the South Pole to, to look at ice, which apparently is fantastically clear and allows you to see for miles and miles and miles if you have the right kind of, of vision, like radio vision. And he looks for points where these neutrinos run into the ice, I guess, and then he says, "Wow, okay, there's a little crack of lightning," and that translates into on a radio wave. And so he's studying, it's just a fascinating, super small world that is basically invisible to all of us.
And there's all kinds of people that have done this in the past. Michael Faraday comes to mind, and, you know, his work with electricity and fields and magnetism. It's just a really, really neat conversation. I know that you're going to dig into and just have your mind blown by him.
Now, in this episode, a couple of times, I reference our dear friend Andrew Friedman from UCSD's Cosmology Department, who, of course, passed away earlier in July 2020. And, hey, it's just, it's, it's sudden these sudden deaths that are of young people because he's not even, he's maybe young 40s or late 30s, you know, such a young guy. Anyhow, it's just, it's, it's still sad to, to miss out on Andrew and, and the great chats that he's had with us. So he's, uh, in the show notes, you can find his episodes there. And of course, you'll find the episode that I did with Alex, my cousin, who lives in Missoula, Montana. You'll find that in the show notes as well.
Hey, uh, listen, we are raffling off an AR-15 built by Eric Hicks of Blackstone, and it's going to be raising money for Save the Brave. Now, look, you can go to the link. I'll put it in the show notes. You can buy a raffle ticket for a hundred dollars. We're only going to sell a hundred of these. So one of the people who buys a ticket, one of the hundred, will win this five thousand dollar rifle for a hundred dollars, or however many tickets you buy. So if you want to get one, use that link and all the money, all the proceeds go to charity. It goes to Save the Brave. And so that's a good way to support us. Even if you don't, um, want a rifle, but maybe someone in your family does, hey, pass that link on and let them know. I said we're only selling 100 tickets. So if you can help us with that, if you're interested in bidding, by all means, do. Keep in mind that rifle has certain features, like a, like a collapsing stock, that may make it illegal in your state. So we may have to figure out what to do with you. But that's the main thing. So Save the Brave, savethebrave.org. You can always go there and donate or just grab that link that's in the show notes and bid on that rifle.
All right, here comes my man, Peter Gorham. Lions Rock Productions. This is Jay Moore. This is Jordan Harvey. This is Dexter from The Offspring. Nathan Sebastian Young. This is Rick Moran. Stuart Copeland. This is Mick Gillette. This is Andy Summers. Hey, this is Skunk Baxter. This is Gabby Reese. This is Rob Bell. Hey, this is John Leon Guerrero. Hey, and this is Pete A. Turner. Hello, this is Dr. Peter Gorham, and you're watching the Break It Down Show.
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This is fun, man. I love doing these things. You're in Hawaii. My, my cousin who's joining us is in Missoula, Montana area. I'm here in Orange County, and we're going to talk about neutrinos and stuff that's going to blow my mind. We've had a lot of people come on to talk about, just, we tended to talk to cosmologists a lot and folks who study the, the big unknown. And one of them is Dr. Andrew Friedman, who works at UCSD, and he blew my mind because I was talking, I, I reasoned my way into, "Hey, wait, there must be quantum gravity." And he's like, "Yes, we have no idea what it is." So we get to these edges of my comprehension of science, and I love doing that for the audience and everybody else. So, so one, thanks for coming on the show. And then also, it's my cousin Alex. He is studying physics, and he's very particular about how I say it. So he's about to graduate with a degree in physics, and, uh, he understands a lot of what you guys are doing. So he's going to help me ask some good scientific-based questions. But thanks for coming on the show. Alex, tell us about Peter and what you found out.
Peter is head of the, sorry, I, I have trouble with abbreviations, but it's the Antarctic, oh my goodness, Impulsive, Impulsive Trans-Antarctic, that's right. Sorry about that. So, yeah, you guys are trying to find neutrinos that are shooting through the ice, and you're, you have this whole compounded, uh, group of antennas, like a large number of them, that are basically floating above Antarctica like a balloon.
That's right. Yeah, in fact, a balloon is what does the floating part for us. So NASA has a program that has been running for decades where they will loft scientific instruments up into the stratosphere. And we took advantage of that opportunity, which takes place in Antarctica during the summer. In Antarctica, you can go up in a balloon and circle the pole in what's called the polar vortex. So we're kind of familiar with that idea of a polar vortex here in the U.S. because it makes, uh, very stormy weather in the Midwest up through the East Coast. But in Antarctica, that creates actually very beautiful, stable weather during the austral summer. And in the stratosphere, it creates literally a circular flow of wind. We can fly a balloon up to the stratosphere, uh, 20-odd miles up, and just circle the pole for up to two months. So it gives us opportunity to put something up into near space at a very tiny fraction of the cost, uh, it would be to give a, to do a spacecraft.
So how long, how much time do you guys spend out there when you're performing this?
So we usually go out in, in the beginning of November. Sometimes guys will come near the end of October. So that's the very early part of, not quite summer, I guess that's late spring in the, uh, in Antarctica, um, in terms of seasons, at least. And then we, it takes us about a month to get our payload ready because we've had to, had to break everything into little pieces and ship it in containers and then fly it on C-130 type transport aircraft down to the ice. They land on the ice with skis. They outfit these military aircraft with skis, and they land on airways, airfields made out on the ice. And we, we get all that stuff and into some payload bays that are set up on also on skis out on the ice shelf itself, the Ross Ice Shelf, which is floating on the Ross Sea, but it's near McMurdo Island, which is a Ross Island, which has McMurdo Station on it. You know, the best comparison I can think of is this is like a big mining camp, uh, except it's in Antarctica. You know, the weather during that time of the year in McMurdo is actually not so bad. It's kind of ski resort temperatures, I would say. So much nicer than working at South Pole. And the difference is, when we launch from there, since we're already offset in latitude from the South Pole, we're going to circle on a much wider circle around the Antarctic continent. But after, after about a month of getting ready, then we get into the launch season, which starts in early December. And if we're lucky, we launch in that first week or two of December. And then we could fly for up to a month and a half, sometimes even two months.
I love the logistics that it takes to get to places like Antarctica. It's, to me, it's just fascinating. Like, as a military guy, I want to ask, like, "Okay, so you've got a grant, and, and let's say they give you a quarter million dollars." I would assume that doesn't cover the budget to get all of you to the South Pole. I mean, it's got to be very expensive. And you have to task out Air Force, Air, maybe they, maybe they do something because it's part of a research grant. But getting, getting C-130s outfitted with skis to the South Pole, okay, one, how long does that take? How rough is that on your equipment? How much does that cost in terms of time and dollars as well?
You know, I honestly don't know how much, uh, those individual flights cost. But, you know, the, the fuel alone is very costly. And, you know, you've got a full entourage of, uh, of the, I think it's the Air National Guard that flies our aircraft. And these guys are absolute professionals. They're the best of the best. Um, you know, without them, we couldn't do the science that we do. So, you know, hats off completely to these, to these, uh, these, uh, personnel that run all this, the pilots, the support crew, the whole operation in Antarctica is a tribute to what we do in America. One of the things we do best is science. And, um, you know, the National Science Foundation organizes this whole thing. It's, uh, run out of what's called the United States Antarctic Program, USAP. They coordinate everything. And I think I heard at one time, this was maybe 10 or 15 years ago, that if you did a full cost accounting on how, what it costs to get somebody to the ice and back, it's about $50,000 ahead. Wow. So, uh, that's, you know, and actually, if you go as a tourist to Antarctica, you can pay that much to get yourself onto the continent as well. So it's probably not too far off the mark. Um, you know, I think as a scientist, we're privileged to have that opportunity. That the American people are willing to support this kind of science is, you know, a really, uh, a really amazing thing. Students, we bring graduate students down, young professionals, early in their careers, and it's just, just an unbelievable experience for everybody. And the science we can do down there is unlike anything on Earth. So, you know, hopefully that that'll, you know, that'll encourage us. You know, we're all paying taxes to make these kind of things happen, but some of our tax money is doing really incredible stuff.
So, I was reading that, uh, you and some other members of your crew had become sick, uh, during some of your experiments there. Could you talk a little bit about that and, uh, how difficult does that make things when you're in such a remote area and you're trying to get a job done?
Yeah, you know, there's, there's a long history of, um, of what we call the, the, uh, the crud, I guess, the McMurdo crud is what they usually call it. I think you're, if you're a military guy, you're probably familiar with this. Any little closed group in a, in a camp situation, you end up with viruses that circulate. Yep. And, uh, that's, that's as bad as any place on Earth in Antarctica where you really have a closed society. We're all eating together, we're all in the same mess. And, um, and, and in addition, because of the environment, I think it accentuates and heightens the, I don't know, the reality of some of the bugs that you get down there. You know, it is a microcosm of society. And there was a, when I went in 2016, I, I'm used to getting sick at least once, either always out for a few days with flu-like symptoms. Um, and that, that kind of runs its course through the whole population down there. But in 2016, uh, three days after I got down there, I felt something coming on. And at first, I thought, "Well, here it comes. I'm, you know, I got the crud early this year." But within a few hours, I was on my back in their little hospital. Um, you know, it's a small operation with, I think, three doctors and several nurses, and with 103, 104 degree fever. And, um, I've never been that sick. And they were trying to pin it down at the time. Uh, they're in the, in the rest of the world, Ebola was the big worry. And so the first question everybody was asking me is, "Have you been to Africa lately?" Or something like that. But, you know, it was, uh, it was really difficult. My, my chief engineer came in, uh, at one point and said, uh, "You know, I was the palest looking, not dead person he had ever seen." So in after just, uh, you know, one, one night, they decided they didn't want me to die on their watch. And so they put me on a, on a, on a C-17 back to, I think, I myself and one or two other people were the only people on that aircraft, and sent us back to New Zealand. And, uh, in the care of the doctors there, I was, I got better in about a week. But they never did isolate what the virus was that put me down.
So that's the other thing about when you go to these places. The environment is so different. Like, every time I would deploy to say, a rock, when I got there, I was gonna basically have like a severe allergy reaction, which sounds worse than it was. Sometimes it was worse than other times. But, you know, you, you get hit with all this stuff you're just never hit with. And, yeah, you know, like the theory that that a virus would just die out if it's left alone. There are not that many people in Antarctica. Turns out. But when you go to these foreign places, you really can get hit with something that your body's just not, not ready for at all. It's, it's, yeah, it's crazy.
I think that's right. And the other thing is, it's game time. You guys are spending a bazillion dollars to get there. Um, you don't want someone around you who's sick, but you're not going to avoid it. So, so how do you, as the leader, go, "Hey, go to bed and quarantine for 96 hours?" Or, or do, or do you just say, "Hey, we're all here to work. If you can work, I expect you to."
You know, I think in the, with the, the sort of history of people having this kind of relatively mild, uh, illness, you know, we sort of leave it up to everybody to make, make their choice and try to do the best you can. I think, uh, within the last few months, though, the world has changed, and how we think about disease hasn't it? So I don't know, you know, I, I don't know how that's going to affect, uh, anything like this in, in the future. Um, I think, you know, we've sort of turned the corner on something quite different. But as scientists, you know, we're down there to do a job. You know, they, a lot of times to keep morale up, they'll offer, uh, trips to some of the outlying, you know, sites and scenes within the McMurdo area. But very often, as scientists, we are so focused on doing that job that we're the last ones that jump on these little, uh, boondoggles to go out and, you know, see Scott's Hut or places that he, he started his expedition. Those, those places are incredible sites. But when you're there in Antarctica and you have this limited time, you really feel the responsibility of trying to do the best job you can for, for the people that are counting on you. And, um, and it, it really isn't exciting. Um, you know, McMurdo is set up as a station where science is number one. It's probably one of the few places in the world where the most important activity there is, it's not defense, it's not making money, it's, uh, you know, it's purely to get the best possible science that we can do. And so as scientists, you know, we feel that that responsibility and we want to do that job. We, it heightens it for us, and it really is, uh, really is incredible. It's a beautiful place though, if you ever get an opportunity, absolutely, uh, take it. Um, you know, I've never been in any environment like that. It's so pure. You know, even, even, you know, even bacteria, unless you bring a bug with you, there's nothing there that's going to get you. I mean, maybe there's some aliens or something that we haven't discovered, but, um, for the most part, it's just an incredible, pristine, pure environment and really ideal for the kinds of things that we were trying to do.
I had a misconception about neutrinos. Um, and, you know, we were, I was learning more and more about them this last semester under, uh, Dr. Dr. Bulman, Alexander Bulman. He was teaching me quantum physics one and two. I was under the impression that neutrinos didn't really have too much trouble traveling through something like a planet. Could you school me on why I was wrong about that?
Well, so, um, you're not wrong about that, actually. But neutrinos, like every other particle, come in, well, so there are, there are kind of six varieties of neutrinos. Three that we, that we know of. We call this in physics, call it their, um, their flavor. It's a, you know, funny term that we use just to distinguish the, the type of neutrinos. But just like we have charged particles, the electron, we have some cousins of charged particles that are unstable called the muon and the tau on. We also have three neutrinos that correspond to these, these so-called leptons. So those are very, we call them leptons because they're, they're very specifically these, these sort of tiny charged particles. Neutrinos kind of share, uh, these families. And then they also have anti-particles, which we don't know yet whether neutrinos have identical anti-particles or anti-particles that are true opposites of them. That's something that we, we don't know. But, um, with these six different kinds of particles, there's one other degree of freedom, and that is how fast they're going. So if I, uh, take a, you know, a lead bullet and I, I throw it at you, uh, you know, gently, and it hits you in the forehead, you don't die. You know, you might be annoyed at me. But if I take, if I put that in a, in a gun, you know, then, then we have a, we have a major crime going on, right? And the same thing goes with neutrinos. Um, that bullet, um, you know, it had a bullet can be fired with an energy, but really what we're saying is that the bullet itself, which contains, you know, many billions upon billions of atoms, the energy per atom, even when you fire the bullet, is actually very small. But in the case of neutrinos, we can have a range of energies that goes from the tiniest, tiniest possible energy neutrino all the way up to neutrino energies where a single neutrino has the energy of that bullet, uh, even though, you know, it's only one subatomic particle. It can have the energy of a, of a bullet, or a major league fastball, or whatever you want to think of. And the difference now is when that neutrino with this very, very high kinetic energy, when it goes through a material like solid rock, it's much more likely due to its energy to hit something. In effect, what happens is it looks bigger than, uh, than it does when it's got very low energy. So you can think of it as being neutrinos at low energy, which are the vast majority of all neutrinos, the ones that come from the sun, the ones that are left over after the Big Bang. All of those are relatively low kinetic energy neutrinos. Those are going to pass through a planet. The lowest energy ones are going to go through 10 light years of lead and never stop. But, and so what I tell my students is, those neutrinos are as much smaller than a proton as a proton is smaller than the entire Earth. Okay? They're so tiny that they just fit between everything. It's kind of like acupuncture, right? You, you can make a needle so small that it goes right through between the cells of your, of your body without doing any damage. And the same thing is true for neutrinos. They can be so incredibly small that the universe to them is all empty space, including your body, the planet, the 10 light years of lead, whatever. You know, but when you decrease their kinetic energy, they become in some way larger. And it's, it's hard to explain, but that's probably the simplest way to think about it. Even when their kinetic energy is as much as that major league fastball, they're still going to pass through a lot of material, maybe, you know, maybe 100 kilometers of rock before they hit something. Uh, and no other particle even comes, comes close to that. I mean, you can shoot X-rays into, into matter, but they're gonna stop in, you know, maybe a meter or something or less. Uh, you know, you shoot them, they stop in, in a piece of metal in your tooth. Okay? And so it's the case that neutrinos have this unbelievable property of being so penetrating compared to every other particle. But even within their own range, there is a huge variation on what they can actually penetrate through. So in our case, we're looking for neutrinos which are much easier to stop than the ones that come from the sun or that come from the earliest parts of the universe. And the reason we're doing that is we're kind of interested in what's happening in the highest energy particle accelerators in the whole universe. Those are things in the centers of very active galaxies, quasars, black holes, things that are unbelievable environments that our Earth would be vaporized in an instant if we were anywhere near it. Those things exist in the universe, and we see them all the time. These are, uh, environments that, you know, that, that are unlike anything even in our own galaxy. Our galaxy is a relatively benign place compared to the sun. Some galaxies, uh, you couldn't have planets like we have exist in them. They're so full of energy and radiation and, you know, and, and particles moving at these vast kinetic energies. We would never, you know, never survive there.
What are those kinds of environments like? What particles do they produce? What kinds of things can we use to probe them?
So neutrinos give us that opportunity. They're almost like a flashlight that can look down into these incredibly hot, uh, environments in the cosmos where everything else seems to be, you know, impenetrable, I guess you would say. That was our, our goal with ANITA: let's try to see if we can see particles that originate in the highest energy accelerators in the whole universe. These are things that are a billion times more higher energy than the best we can do at the, at the particle colliders we have on Earth, like the CERN Large Hadron Collider, any of those kind of colliders. So that got us excited, and we, you know, we proposed this to NASA quite a long time ago, and we were able to convince them that this was an opportunity that would allow us to do that. The reason was the ice. The ice is what makes the difference for us.
So, you know, you can ask me why. Before we ask you about the ice, I don't want to get past some of the size of what you're doing. You're talking about particles that can fly through anything before they even hit anything because they're so small, and they're different levels of energy, charge. But you're also measuring things in, in picoseconds, which are, I don't know, by my account, like a quintillionth of a second or something like that.
Well, uh, that actually, pico is, uh, is a part in a trillion. Okay? But there, there is, there are people who even go down to quintillions, which are at, they call them attoseconds. So that's, we're, we're nowhere near the record on what could be measured in, in that sort of time domain. But yes, you know, part of what we have to do is measure things down at the, you know, I would say maybe the five to ten picosecond level or, or thereabouts, just to make sure that we preserve the, the, uh, accurate phase of everything that we measure. When we measure a radio wave, we want to know exactly where we are in the, in the, in the, you know, the crests and troughs of that radio wave. And since the radio waves themselves are, uh, are coming by and they're, they're up and down in a nanosecond, if we want to measure things accurately, you know, to a percent level, we've got to measure down to kind of 10 picoseconds to accomplish that.
Wow. So, uh, you mentioned the ice. And is it, is it just because Antarctica is just one great white spot that we can somehow use to sort of like a, uh, like an antenna, for example, to locate these?
That's a, that's a pretty good analogy. It's a, it, it, it's a little different. In neutrino physics, we have never found a way to focus neutrinos. Um, you know, theorists have maybe come up with some hair-brained ideas on what might work, but, uh, they won't focus like you could focus in a lens or telescope. So, um, even, even the way an antenna works, which is you can use the radio waves to accelerate electrons and a metal, that doesn't work with neutrinos either. So the only hope we have is they just crash into something, and the, the thing they crash into makes a little squawk of some kind. In our case, an electromagnetic squawk, and we manage to pick that up with our, our antennas, which are listening to the ice for those radio squawks.
If a neutrino happens to crash into something, in more detail, it's when a neutrino, the neutrinos that we're looking at, so we measure energy in particles in a funny way. We measure it according to how many volts it would take to make an electron go as fast or, you know, have as much energy as that particle. And we call that electron volts. So, you know, it's kind of a fairly simple idea. You can think of it as just in terms of volts. So a lightning bolt has, you know, something like, you know, as many millions of volts. The particles that we're looking at, the neutrinos, have about a billion times a billion volts of energy individually. So when they crash into a nucleus, uh, that billion times billion volts can actually, by its energy, can create a whole new secondary zoo of very energetic particles, more like the ones we're familiar with, electrons and other things like that, and gamma rays. And those will make a thing that's like a lightning bolt.
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And those will make a thing that's like a lightning bolt, uh, with a billion billion volts, but it happens inside of the ice. So you think of a solid material. If somehow you could be in that material, you know, maybe in a hollowed-out sphere or glass or something, and you're sitting there, and one of these neutrinos crashes into a nucleus nearby, you're going to see a flash of lightning maybe 20 or 30 feet long through the ice. Uh, that it'll be that bright. And that, that crack of lightning in the ice actually makes a big, it's a big spark, if you will, and makes us a big static sort of radio wave, uh, you know, a crack of static, just like you would hear if you're out in the Midwest driving with your AM radio on your thunderstorm, you're going to hear, you know, every time the lightning goes, you hear a crack on the, on the radio station. That's exactly the kind of thing we're listening for as we fly above the ice. So, you know, the idea is very simple. Uh, of course, all that, the devil is in all the details. But one thing that that ice does for us is it provides a material that's solid. So, you know, it's easier to have the neutrino hit something. But it's also extremely clear to radio waves, much more clear than any of our ideas for clarity. Okay? Um, I, uh, you know, we're used to glass being clear, right? Glass is maybe a quarter of an inch thick, and it's, it's completely clear. Uh, but, um, if you make glass, you know, 10 feet thick, it's not clear anymore, right? It gets very dark. If you've ever seen a bunch of glass, you know, together, it gets dark. And 10 or 20 feet of glass, you won't see anything anymore. Ice is, is very different. In, in the radio regime, if you have a mile of ice, you can see right through it. If your eyes could see radio waves, it's completely clear. And scientists have been using this property for many years to map the subcontinent in Antarctica by using radar. They just bounce radar off the bottom and it comes back, and they can make an image of what's going on underneath the ice. So if you could fly over Antarctica and you had radio eyes, you would see right down beneath it. You would see all the, all the mountains and valleys and lakes and everything else that's, that's underneath. So that's the other wonderful property of ice is it's extremely clear to radio waves. There's nothing like it on Earth. Even, uh, even the clearest water doesn't compare to this. There's no solid material that we, that we have any, uh, anything to compare it to. There's nothing like it. It's ice is, uh, is a miracle to me. You know, we, we've heard a lot of wonderful things about ice and, you know, there's 19 different forms of ice, all those kinds of crazy things. But this other property of ice is not one that we, that's well known outside of the scientific community. It's utterly clear to the radio regime.
So there was another project that was working on finding events in the ice in, in Antarctica as well, was there not?
Yes, IceCube. It's called. It's called IceCube. Uh, the IceCube name comes from the fact that they've instrumented a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole, and they've put optical, very sensitive optical light detectors into the ice, deep down, maybe two kilometers deep in the ice, and they're looking for neutrinos as well. So they're actually, so, you know, what I said about this lightning bolt, if the neutrino hits something, makes, makes this, this blast of secondary particles, IceCube sees that as well in the optical regime. Ice is also very clear optically, as well as, as well as to radio. It's maybe 10 times more clear in radio, but it's still quite good optically. So, you know, maybe a hundred meters of ice is equivalent to a thousand meters of ice. 100 meters optically would compare to a thousand meters radio. But that's still very, very good. There's no other material optically that clear as well. So IceCube has used that property to look for neutrinos at lower energies than ANITA. They're looking at energies which are about a thousand times less than what we're looking at. So the neutrinos they're interested in are, are still, uh, a million billion times, uh, the, the voltage, you know, of a one-volt battery. You know, it is, it is a different regime of neutrino energy. And they've started to actually see some significant events, uh, whereas ANITA is still, uh, still, uh, setting, uh, upper limits on these, on these kind of events. We haven't quite gotten enough sensitivity yet. But IceCube is starting to open that window. ANITA has seen some, some strange things though, that we can't quite explain. So that's gotten us some, you know, some interest among, among the wider community in trying to understand if we're, if we're seeing some, some new type of physics or just something anomalous about the, uh, about the way we're looking at things in Antarctica.
Yeah, how do you, and you're saying that, let me just, how do you sort out the noise? We're a noisy planet because we, we like energy to communicate and to entertain. And is that a problem down there? I mean, is that why you go there? How does that work?
Well, it's, it is why we go there. Apart, you know, we go there for the ice. Uh, we also go there because it is one of the, uh, radio quietest places on Earth. But it's still got a lot of radio noise. I mean, uh, when we first launched above McMurdo, we can't do any science until McMurdo goes over the horizon because even that relatively small mining camp, if you will, is has still got far more radio noise than we can tolerate. But once we get over the horizon, then things get pretty quiet, and we can tolerate the other kinds of noise that we do see. We see satellites, we occasionally see field camps of other scientists. But for the most part, you know, it's, it's tolerable, and we just have to kind of sift our way through the data in order to exclude the stuff that's produced by human activity. And it's the same in astronomy, too. All kinds of air pollution that we have to deal with when we're, you know, just collecting data from the skies. Yes. And in fact, uh, some recently, some, uh, satellites have gone up that are making that even harder for astronomers, I believe. The more satellites you get in, in the sky, the more contamination of dark star fields you get. So, you know, this is a problem we're going to be facing, uh, uh, you know, for the rest of time, I guess. For science, it's, there's always some conflict between human activity and the sort of quiet you need for science to, to do its best.
What are we going to do with all this information? Like, what, uh, do you have any idea how this will be applicable? Is someone else using your science to advance their science? What's, what's the, uh, what are the secondary benefits? And what are the, I think these things might be kind of happening thoughts.
Well, so that's always a good question. One of the things that we've done in American science is early on, uh, I think scientists made this distinction between what we call basic science, basic research, and applied science. So basic research is that kind of investigation, that realm of, of research in which we don't actually know what the immediate benefit is going to be. And then, you know, on the other end of the spectrum is applied physics or applied research, where we're actually, we know exactly what we want to do. We want to produce a better can opener, you know, or something like that. So those are two ends of the spectrum of science. And, you know, there's an enormous range in between. And often what happens is something that starts as basic research, over the course of time, becomes applied physics or applied science. So a good example, for example, is, you know, in the 1890s, Pierre Curie put some radium in his drawer, and he happened to put it on top of a photographic plate and discovered, uh, some time later, that the photographic plate had gotten exposed by the radium because the radium, in fact, was radioactive. It was making X-rays, which actually went through the cover that was on his photographic plate and, uh, exposed the film. Well, that was a novelty early on, right? You know, people played with radium, they didn't realize what they were up against. But it took about a generation for that to become the most important tool in medicine in the 20th century, probably X-rays. You know, we, we still rely on X-rays to this day for almost everything we do in medical and dental science. So, um, it, you know, that took about a generation for that basic research to become applied science. With neutrinos, I have no idea where it's going to go. Um, we're in a universe of neutrinos. You know, they're among the most numerous particles that they're that you see anywhere. We're bathed in a sea of them, uh, every moment we're speaking, a trillion of them go through the tip of our noses. Wow. And, and yet we know so little about these particles. And so I think that that, in the case of neutrinos, I cannot tell you if it's going to be a generation before we see the applications, or or two generations, or what, or if we ever do. But it could be something that changes everything. We don't know. You know, there are these, these, you know, if, uh, physicists were not working on quantum mechanics back in the 1920s and 1930s, we would not have a transistor in the 1960s, right? And if we didn't have a transistor in the '60s, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing right now, right? We wouldn't have a cell phone. You know, among the most absurd things that you could have told someone in the, in the '50s or '60s is that they would have a little tiny box that they could carry with them, talk to people with, um, you know, on the other side of the world, and could also listen to music with. I mean, what if people would have thought you were completely nuts? And not just listen to music, any song, any piece of music ever recorded, in any way it has been recorded, you know, any version. Yeah. And, and that all came out of Bell Labs, people playing with pieces of silicon and saying, "Hey, look at this thing. Look what I can do with this. You know, isn't that cool?" Yeah. Uh, so, you know, I, I, all I can do is, is, uh, you know, plead no contest. I don't know where neutrinos are to get us, but it could be something wonderful. And, and I think we, as Americans, you know, this is something that we have done as good as anybody in the world, if not better than anybody in the world, for, for, for generations now. We've chosen to invest in basic research. And I think we better keep doing it because we just don't know. If we hadn't done it in the past, we would not be where we are today. So, um, it is, uh, I don't know, there's something exciting about this, this universe of particles that we can barely understand and barely feel. Um, you know, you may have heard some things about parallel universes. Well, this is not the kind of parallel universe that people, you know, were, were attributing to ANITA, but neutrinos, in their own right, they almost constitute a parallel universe. But it isn't parallel, it really is part of our universe, and it's one that we barely know anything about.
So, so that's a great example too, of how people from the outside looking into the world of science often misread something or misinterpret something that's being told. How often in your own work have you had to deal with that, where you've said something and maybe it's not really been construed correctly by whoever you were saying it to?
You know, I, I can't say that any, any journalist has ever gotten it exactly right, and I think that's perfectly fine. You know, that's it. You know, in, in the end, God made this universe somehow or other. I'm trying myself, and many other physicists are trying to figure it out, and we're, we have no doubt interpreted it in some goofy way, and it must give, you know, it must make God laugh continuously the way we, the way we interpret his universe. In the same way, I've tried to explain things to journalists, and because of my inability to do so, they can, you know, they can completely get it wrong. But, you know, it, I think what, what journalism does is it captures the wonder of what we're doing, and that's the most important thing. We, the universe, without making anything up, is incredible and wonderful and amazing. And so, however we communicate it, you know, as long as we do our best to try to stick to what, you know, what we, what we think is true, um, I think it's all good. I really have no, no beef with any, any of this. You know, sometimes it gets me in trouble. The story about parallel universes went back to NASA, and, you know, um, you know, NASA got a little bit, um, uh, huffy about whether I was telling people that we had discovered a parallel universe, which was not, not quite true. But, you know, once we sort that out, uh, every, everything is good. I think it's, uh, you know, we're all trying to make sense out of something which is, uh, is almost incredible. You know, that the universe we live in is incredible. It's, it's, you know, we're barely able to scratch the surface in understanding it. And I'm, I'm very happy that, you know, we get the opportunity to do this as scientists. And, you know, part of our job is to try to communicate to the best we can, uh, for the, to the people that are actually supporting this. And, you know, it's just a privilege that I often, you know, it humbles me to, to think about the privilege that I have to be able to do this kind of thing.
When I think about people that have done this kind of work, you know, generations ago, someone like Faraday comes to mind. You know, where he only barely gets to do what he wants to do, and once he gets there, oh my gosh, he changes the entire world. Are we better at finding the Faradays now? Like, like, let's say that you're on par with his brilliance and everything else, do we find more of you out there that can go out and change how we see and how we use the world? Because his inventions, I mean, the generator largely works the same way as he described 200 years ago.
You know, yeah, it always amazes me. I, I, I consider myself at the very bottom of that, you know, of that fraternity of people. Um, to, you know, I'm honored to be able to, to call myself a physicist, uh, in, you know, in, in the same profession as some of these other guys. These guys are, you know, they're bright lights in the history of science. Um, I don't know, you know, how do we find these guys? What scares me sometimes more is how many future Faradays and Einsteins and Mozarts have died because we, as a, you know, as humanity, haven't been able to, you know, have more, uh, um, more egalitarian, uh, communities and distribution of food and distribution of medicine. And, you know, as a, the human race, we don't know what it takes to make these incredible, incredible geniuses. But I guarantee you, you know, we've probably missed out on more than we have found because of the inequalities in our societies. So that part, I think, is saddening. But at the same time, it's just amazing and wonderful when you, when you see these, these guys who, you know, who, who make these kind of breakthroughs, the Einsteins, the Faradays, the Maxwells, the Giraffes, the, you know, it's just, um, it, it's, it's humbling and wonderful to be a part of that.
You think about someone like Philo Farnsworth, who's choked out by by legal things and and the pursuit of money. And what if someone had just funded him and let him? Or even Tesla, you know, I mean, these guys don't always make sense in the real world. But that's my goodness, you know, incredible what the, what the brain can come up with. I, I think, you know, as a society, we, we're the ones that have enabled a lot of this, uh, because of the generosity to science and the investment. And I just hope that we can stick with it, that we don't forget that, you know, very often the payoff is going to be for our children or our children's children. You know, let's hope that even in, in these tough times, we can continue to, to, uh, to keep that as a priority.
What do you think makes a scientist? Just, uh, is it, um, the ability to look at the world and observe it and, you know?
Follow the scientific process. Is it, you know, how much you research something? Is it what you do in your life? All the above. I think it's, you know, curiosity and, uh, and tenacity and not letting it go. You know, giving your giving your your passion the the chance to really guide you. And, you know, you have to couple that with some, uh, some hard work. I mean, there are certainly people in my profession who have extraordinary abilities and skills in mathematics and understanding, which I don't think I really had. You know, I, uh, I remember getting excited about physics long before I discovered, you know, how hard it was. Uh, and I think that excitement carried me through the hard parts.
I, you know, I'm still learning. Uh, you know, I will teach a class in undergraduate physics and learn something that I thought I knew all over again. And so that kind of excitement about learning, curiosity, never never letting go of that idea, even when it seems impenetrable and inaccessible, you have to be tenacious about about going for for knowledge. Knowledge is, we, you know, it's a it's a precious commodity. The truth is a precious commodity, and we, you have to be committed to the truth. You have to have a burning passion and love for what's true and what's not. I think that's what makes a real scientist.
When I talk to Dr. Friedman, he talks about their work trying to prove or disprove the the Bell test, and they do the cosmic Bell test. And when they talk about the parameters of their experiment, you have to give up certain things like freedom of choice and these things that aren't surrenderable in our in our defined world. You know, and I know, you know, about what I'm talking about with this. But do you have things like that where, like, if these things are true, then this absolute truth can no longer be absolutely true?
Well, you know, one of the things that you go into when you're when you're trying to work on some, uh, hypotheses is you're we're human, okay? We we have our likes and our dislikes. There are hypotheses when we first come upon them, we like them. We like them better than other ones. And what makes the difference, I think, in science is even if you have a bias toward one thing, you have to somehow, you know, step back and say, all right, whatever the outcome is of this experiment, even if I end up in a place that didn't prove my favorite hypothesis, I proved it wrong, for example, and makes me look bad because I invested too much in that. Well, I have to be ready for that. And, you know, that I think is the mark of a, you know, that's a a kind of humility that we all have to have in seeking the truth. Is sometimes it ain't what you thought it was, you know? So, you know, we have to love the truth more than we love our own, uh, you know, sort of self-interest. I think that's really, really important.
Um, yeah, and Hit's experiment, by the way, was was incredible. And, you know, I I feel humbled by that. You know, even even, uh, considering what we've done. You know, we we, um, I I I like sort of, uh, um, taking the machete through the, you know, through the tall grass. Yeah. And what he's talking about is using tweezers, you know, in effect, on on very, very minute effects. And, you know, I I sometimes feel like I'm not I'm not sure I would have the the the patience to go through and and measure things at that level. It really is a remarkable experiment what he did. And that, uh, measuring that cosmic Bell's inequality. So it's so cool. That's off to those guys. And just explaining it breaks your brain. Like you're like, wait, what? What? I don't have freedom of choice. I don't, you know, I have to give up these things. It's just, and then the data they have that they click gathered from this is massive. So they they can go through and they could write papers the rest of their their life on the data that they've gathered from this experiment. It's it's incredible what you all are thinking of and coming up with. And and shoot, if nothing else, I thank you guys for taking the time and effort to go have a blast, but go do all that stuff. You know, sometimes pushing it to the limit, though, where I I don't think I'd want to go through that, uh, that the hospital and McMurdo experience again. I'm going to try to avoid that in the future. But, you know, those are the those are the risks that we take. And we're in a world, I think, that's shrinking in many ways. But at this by the same token, there are ways that we can expand the world by looking more carefully and more deeply and more methodically, uh, into these these, uh, areas of investigation. Whether it's on the on a smaller scale, uh, you know, just trying to understand how this virus has affected us. I, you know, if I had to start over, I I think the idea of going into molecular genetics, uh, absolutely fascinating. So, you know, if you have a chance, get a molecular geneticist on your on your program. I think that is really it's so incredible. The tools, you know, a lot of tools that just didn't exist at the time that we that I started in science now, um, came out of actually physics. I think, you know, physics has contributed many of these things. And but now it's become the hallmarks of biology and molecular biology and genetics. Some really incredible work that's been done.
What do you think is on the horizon for projects that are looking for, uh, neutrinos? Do you think that there's gonna be some other location, uh, fancy location somewhere inside the earth, maybe, where they're gonna be searching for these things?
You know, I at this point, I don't see anything that's, uh, that's better than ice. But there have been some really crazy ideas. So as you may have heard, you know, we have several moons of large planets which are have, you know, ice perhaps hundreds of kilometers thick, um, on their surface. Enceladus, uh, is one that comes to mind. You know, they're Ganymede, right? There are ice planets out there. And, uh, you know, someday I could envision, uh, neutrino observatories consisting of satellites orbiting these ice planets, using that incredible, you know, low-temperature cold ice as their observatory of the cosmos. Uh, you know, maybe seeing as much of the universe in neutrinos as we're now seeing it in in optical. So, uh, you know, thinking outside the box there. The entire solar system is our playground in the future. I think that's probably the the most exciting, uh, part of this for astrophysicists.
Yeah, you think about the other, like you said, there's 18 kinds of ice. I mean, ice is fascinating. What if it was helium ice or methane ice or something like that, where you've got it? Would that have a different, would that in in any way change or improve the way you're able to do that? Plus, you're out in the cosmos, 800, you know, thousand miles away, wherever it is. It's pretty cool to be able to have a lab out there. Yeah.
That's right. You know, I I mean, this is the kind of thing that we can dream about, uh, in the future. If we can solve, you know, many of the problems that we're facing as a as humanity and be able to devote more of our resources to these kinds of things, then I think it, you know, it may be that these are the futures that we can look for for our children, our children's children, to be able to devote themselves to curiosity as a profession. You know, what a wonderful world it would be if if, uh, if, you know, we solved hunger, we solved disease, and we're able to see that, you know, that we could follow these kinds of passions for what's true and what's not true about the universe. It would be wonderful.
Do you think it's become harder as time goes on to get funding for scientific projects? And on top of that, do you think that the way most people view science is, uh, you know, more friendly, more agreeable toward it? Whereas like Carl Sagan said in a book, once, you know, there was this, um, there's this, uh, nerdy aspect to being a scientist. Do you think it's different now? Do you think people hold more respect for it?
Oh, I'm sure that the nerdy thing hasn't changed. I mean, just look at me, okay? So what I would say is that I think people greatly underestimate the, um, the ability of of every American to get excited about about some parts of science. And it may be different parts, uh, but I I never underestimate that. I think every time I, you know, I have sort of one-on-ones with people that don't know what I'm working on, um, you know, if I'm able to sort of, uh, to explain it clearly, I can see their excitement is is there as much as anybody. So very often, it's just the problem of, you know, us not explaining ourselves, uh, very clearly.
As far as funding goes, yeah, I mean, that has, I I hate to say it, but in my whole professional career, which started as a professor in about 2000, it's been on a slow decline. And it's very troubling to me to see that. And I think especially for, uh, for young scientists going into, uh, academics and research, the fact that that this funding has been in decline for 20 years now is a real concern. I think we as a society stand there, we have a risk of losing our preeminence in science, um, and in education, if we, if we, if we don't somehow turn the corner on this. Um, you know, I think it's, there are perfectly good reasons why this may be the case. It may just be that that, um, we are, we're not doing as well as a nation. But I, I honestly don't think that's true. I mean, American ingenuity is just as good as it ever was. I think we can be as productive as a society as we ever work. And so I think we have to just find out, you know, how do these priorities shift so that science, which has given us so much good in our society and has elevated us so greatly in the world, how did it somehow get lose its priority with us? I think that's something we we as a society need to recognize and change.
One of the things I talk about a lot, you know, is like dealing, and probably because of my time at combat zones and looking at social problems, that they're they're really like cubed multivariate problems where it gets really impossible. You just put a pie there and go, I don't know what to do. Our scientific problems, easier to solve, even if they're impossible, like, you know, things that are faster than light speed? You know, there might be something out there. But it seems like social problems are just, they're damning the impossible to do. Is is that as true for the hard sciences?
You know, there are there are always problems which no one knows what to do about. An example of neutrinos is, we know that the Big Bang didn't just produce microwaves, which are relatively easy to see now. In fact, we've we've been able to measure them to a nats eyelash. They also made neutrinos, and it made as many neutrinos as it did microwave photons. And that Big Bang soup of neutrinos is around us all the time. But nobody has thought in 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 years, I can't even remember how long we've been working on this problem, how to detect those neutrinos. No one can come up with a way. Their, you know, their ideas have come and gone, and no one has been able to design an experiment yet that will detect those cosmic background neutrinos. So despite the fact that we have a theory and everyone believes it must be right, we still haven't measured them. So who knows? Yeah, maybe some, there's something weird going on there that that we will discover if we can ever figure that out. So from an experimentalist point of view, that is one of the hardest problems in the neutrino world.
Um, in the in the world of theory, I think this unified finding unified theory with quantum gravity, uh, unifying gravity with the other forces, that has just turned into such an incredibly hard problem. No one would have expected it to be so hard. And theorists are still have come and gone. They've, you know, they've, uh, and we still seem no closer to finding the answer to that than in any other part of physics. And there are some physicists now who who claim that you can prove there is no answer to it, that somehow, you know, it, it is, it's one of those things which is, uh, you know, a a paradox wrapped in an enigma, and we'll never will never find our way around it. So, yeah, I think those are those sort of two examples.
Yeah. Any final questions, Alex? You know, coming to, uh, the end of my college career here, at least for the time being, I've been trying to think of a project. And, you know, one thing I'm really interested in is, you know, seeking life somewhere out in the universe. And one of the cool ideas that, you know, I've heard from other people and sort of what I wanted to talk about is, uh, looking for, uh, signatures of life and atmospheres on, you know, something that's very far away, like an exoplanet. To bring it a little closer to home in our search for life, do you think that there's still a chance that we could find it in our own solar system? And, you know, if you were to lay down a bet, where in our solar system do you think we'd find it, either current or past evidence?
That's a that's a great question. You know, I, um, I that is that that's one that I really don't have a good sense of. I, you know, if we find life in this solar system, there's been, you know, billions of years since, you know, the first single-cell organisms have developed on Earth. And it's possible that we may have seeded the solar system and evolution will have created that that life. We just don't know how hard it is to make life, honestly. This is something that the once you start trying to run the numbers, and I've even tried this myself as kind of a hobby, you know, you start to see that the uncertainties in each generation of the math, they begin to grow exponentially. And at the end, you can say, well, you know, the chances of life existing are either zero or infinity. Right? The Drake equation just keeps getting more and more complex. The numbers keep getting smaller and smaller. It is it is a very difficult problem, and I don't think we have a handle on it yet. But, you know, what's exciting is in my in in just the last two decades or so, we now know of so many exoplanets. This was, you know, unheard of when I was in, you know, at your position in in physics, when I was just finishing my undergraduate degree. No one was thinking at all about exoplanets. You know, that was that was an unbelievable, uh, thing that happened. And the fact that we have so many of them, we have some earth-like examples. I think this this question is gonna gonna, you know, the numbers are gonna change dramatically. Either we're gonna be able to tighten that Drake equation down drastically because we'll find nothing on these exoplanets, or we're gonna find something, and that's going to be one of the most exciting moments in history.
I love it. Hey, man, thanks for coming on. Hopefully, we can have you on again the next time you got something to update or talk about, because we need more conversations like this that open up our minds and push us to think about things in a new way. Thanks a lot, guys. Immensely talking.
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