Eugene weekly., June 02, 2016, Page 18, Image 18

telescope, or get them the medical equipment to get them to
think about becoming doctors. My parents had no such force
on me, my brother or my sister. They would take us around
to various cultural institutions: the zoo, the natural history
museum, the science museum or even other places where
adults express highly-honed talents, like on Broadway, or
the opera, or the symphony, or even hockey or a baseball
game. So we were exposed to what talented adults could
do. And then later on, we would reveal in ourselves where
our interests would fall. And for me, it was the universe,
traceable precisely to a visit to the Hayden Planetarium,
my local planetarium here in New York. So, once they saw
that, then it was supported. So maybe that’s the same term as
“nurtured,” but they did not try to get me to do anything. It
happened completely from natural causes.
As a kid growing up in the Bronx, how did you spend
your summers?
In the summers growing up, we went away to camp. In
the city, you know, you don’t have rolling hills or any thing
that country folks might take for granted. So we went away
to a sleepaway camp. There was a lake, and we lived in a
cabin, so it exposed us to things that are not particularly
urban, just to broaden our life experience.
Do you have a hobby?
I have many hobbies, I would say, and not in the
traditional sense. But there are things I like to do when
I’m not doing other things: I like going to see Broadway
plays and musicals; I like going to see the symphonies
and the opera. I like reading very old books, to see how
people used to think about things many centuries ago. I
like playing with — I have a small collection of fountain
pens, I don’t know, I just like playing with my fountain
pens [laughs].
My husband has a collection of fountain pens. I get
it.
It’s a little fascination, my own private thing [laughs].
And I don’t force it on anybody else [laughs again]. Most
of the time, I pull out writing paper, it’s usually from an art
book, that’s the kind of paper that works well for this, and
then I write. And if I’m invited to give any speech, I always
write it with a fountain pen first.
What is the most unexpected thing you have found
in your years of research?
Well, there’s not only stuff that I researched but also
what others have researched. And I didn’t expect anybody
to find dark energy. I thought that was going to be a ghost.
mission to point the telescope, and the data was obtained,
and we’re still analyzing the data. This was many years
ago. It was a very fertile observation, a huge collaboration.
What might be a step to a brighter future for the
human race?
If we elect scientifically enlightened leaders. Without
it, we’re doomed. I want them to know what we do when
the asteroid comes. I want them to know what we do when
we run out of energy. In fact, I want them to know what to
do so that we don’t run out of energy, so that the asteroid
doesn’t come. If we elect people just because we think we
like their personality, then the civilization is doomed —
doomed to return to the cave. That’s not where I want to
go.
Earlier peoples looked to the stars for signs and
signals, but now we can just ask Siri where’s a
good place to get tacos. So, tell me about the
relationship between celestial phenomena and
values and beliefs.
We’ve gained the knowledge that thinking the universe
affects our daily lives is false. We’ve gained the wisdom,
from applying the methods and tools of science, to know
what the correct answer is to something, rather than having
'IF WE ELECT PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE
WE THINK WE LIKE THEIR PERSONALITY,
THEN THE CIVILIZATION IS DOOMED —
DOOMED TO RETURN TO THE CAVE.
THAT’S NOT WHERE I WANT TO GO.'
Do you have a hero?
So, I have people whose talents I admire, and maybe
that would count as “hero” by many definitions. However,
there is no one person that has all the talents that I seek. I
get a leettle bit of one person and a leettle bit of another,
and I cobble them together, and then I make one hybrid
role model, if you will. And that way, I’m not beholden to
weirdnesses that might exist in one person and not another.
“Oh, this athlete is my role model! Oh, they got busted for
drugs!” [laughs]. I don’t care about the rest of their lives.
I don’t care about anything else — just their athletics —
or their ability to solve equations, or just their capacity
to explore. And these aspects of a person’s profile and
personality are what I’ve put together. So my role models
are … à la carte.
But we found it in the late 1990s. I didn’t find it, but
colleagues of mine found it. And dark energy is something
that was imagined could be there, but we figured it
probably wasn’t. It was predicted by Einstein, and then …
there it was. And now we still don’t understand what it is,
but we’ve found it. It’s a frontier.
Tell me about the Hubble Space Telescope — 26
years is a long time for any machine, although my
stove is from 1953 and still fires up great.
Except of course machines get repaired, and Hubble
was repaired five times. And had it not been repaired five
times, it would have been dead in the water after three
years — literally, dead in the water. It would have been
de-orbited and fallen into the Pacific.
Looking back over your career, has your motivation
changed?
How do you feel about this scientific instrument?
Do you ever get to decide where to point it?
Motivation. If you don’t have it, it might seem hard
to figure out how to get it. But if there’s something that
compels you to want to learn, then the motivation comes for
free. For example, let’s say you’re demotivated regarding
mathematics in school. You can’t get up the interest. But
then someone says, “Here’s something that’s going on in
the universe. The universe began with a big bang, and it
was 10 to the 30th degrees temperature and it expanded
rapidly, and out of this came space, time, matter and
energy,” and you say, “Wow, I wanna know about that.”
Learn the math. Now you’re compelled to learn the math,
so that you can achieve this other end.
There are people who have come of age with the images
from the Hubble telescope. They’ve only ever known the
Hubble. And we can understand, then, why people in their
20s and 30s feel so emotionally strong for it: They’ve been
seeing pictures from it since they were children. When they
learned that we were not going to repair it for the last time,
the largest cry to have it preserved was by the public, not
even by the scientists.
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June 2, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
Did it work?
Yeah, finally there was a last repair mission, and
Hubble’s still going strong. I have been part of a Hubble
a belief system tell us how to run our lives. So to think that
the cosmos influenced your life, and somehow controlled
it, is a psychologically immature state. It’s the same state
as a child has, when the child thinks that the person in the
television knows them personally. When the child thinks
that the whole world is sort of created just for them. I
remember thinking this, at my fifth birthday party: There
was a candle that was in the shape of the number five, and
I asked my mother where she got it. And she got it at the
local store. And I remember thinking, “How did they know
it was my birthday?” You’re not thinking about anybody
else, you’re thinking that it’s all for you. And you outgrow
this. As a civilization, we outgrew that.
Are there any natural places, or slices of the sky,
that you have a particular affinity for?
I feel strongly when I’m on the top of a mountain, and
I’m above the cloud layer, and I’m looking up at the night
sky, and then I have access to a telescope that’s snatching
photons of light from their appointed waves, and they land
on my detector, and from there I decode the nature of the
universe. This is a deep feeling.
Why should we “keep looking up”?
I will never tell people what to do. Keep looking down,
go ahead. It’s a free country [laughs]. If it comes and strikes
you in the ass, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Catch “Neil deGrasse Tyson: An Astrophysicist Goes To The Movies”
7:30 pm Thursday, June 16, at the Hult Center $65-$93.50, with VIP
packages available; hultcenter.org.