WEDU Interview; Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Paula Apsell

The following is a special presentation of W edu. Tampa St. Petersburg Sarasota. Well, he's been named the world's sexiest astrophysicist. She's a pioneer of cutting edge science programming. Join us for a special w edu interview with NOVA Science now. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Paula Apsell. Coming up next. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a conduit to the cosmos for millions of people around the world through his role as an astrophysicist and best-selling author and host of NOVA Science Now. Paula Apsell is the senior executive producer of NOVA programming and Director of the WGBH Science Unit in Boston. Welcome! Good to have both of you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So talk about for us for a moment what's the state of science education in the U.S. and how does your program fit into helping the state of science education in the U.S. I'll answer the first question; she can answer the second. It's

bad. OK. Now. [group laughter] You know in the ?indistinguable? you think, OK, but you're, you're younger than me but I can remember after Sputnik this country went crazy ah trying to catch up with the Soviets at the time. And I think probably did a really good job but how do we compare to the rest of the world in terms of our science education? At the time people were beating down the door to get into science classes and you had people wanting to become science teachers. People wanting to become scientists and I think they viewed their, their livelihood, their definition of self as being threatened. And because here we were in America, post Second World War America. believing that we were the technological leaders of the world, and then another country, about which most people knew very little, but it was presumed, "How could they compete with us. And -- bada, bing. They've got a satellite orbiting overhead, over our heads. Actually orbiting over everybody's head. And so that's lit a flame under everyone's chair and got everyone to take action. And I don't

know that we should have to require that kind of stimulus today. It ought to be that people recognize the value of science as not only something good to know because science is the world around us, science is life, but also is the fundamental driver for tomorrow's economies. Yeah. Innovations in science and technology -- without that we can just watch the rest of the world pass us by. Neil, I've read where you, where you think that there's value in learning for the sake of enlightenment. What else is it to be human if not that? Yes, we could worry about where our next meal is coming from, and shelter, But every animal in the animal kingdom does that. So now what makes us human? What makes us human is: once you've got your shelter, we have the luxury, particularly in nations such as the United States, of thinking about our place in the universe, thinking about the universe itself. That is, there's no grander trajectory of human thought than that and we're not the first to have that assessment. We look through the history of culture across time and around the world, there have been

that subset of the population that have looked up and wondered how we fit in this world. I want to ask you about that in a minute, but Paula, this is a spin off from NOVA and NOVA's a great program, but this takes science programming to the next level. There's humor. There's music. It's fast paced. Yeah, that was exactly the point of Nova ScienceNow: It was supposed to be uh a- a- a- a- slice of science with a flair, and the idea is, instead of making our long documentaries as we have on NOVA, um, we would do shorter stories, somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes, and it would be focused on current research--exactly what's going on in the lab, science kind of caught in the process. These are stories that don't necessarily have endings. These are scientific issues and problems that don't yet have a resolution. And part of the idea is to show what it is like to be a scientist. And I think that's one of the reasons why Nova ScienceNow Now is really useful in the classroom. I, I only know what the teachers tell me and

that's, first of all, they are just hungry for material that they can use. because in many cases the textbooks are just so dry. They just don't have anything to excite the kids, and they don't have anything that really shows what a life of science, in science, is actually like. And that's what I think NOVA Science Now does very well. One of each of the segments in the program is simply a profile. It's a scientist, that scientist's work, but mostly that scientist's life, and it really answers the question, "What is it like to be a scientist?" The answer is, kind of, that it's like many things, depending on the person, depending on the field. We have very diverse images of scientists, all of different kinds of people, hoping that kids will be able to look at some of those profiles and say, "You know I, I can see myself doing that." And so it really gives a sense of science as not kinda a set of dry answers but as an experience

and as an exciting experience. Or as a human enterprise, not just this disembodied sequence of facts that somehow fall out of the sky. And it's the range of, of humanity too. I mean, you guys find humor in science, which I, [laughter] I think, you know, grew up -- those of us that grew up with Mr. Wizard in the 1950's and 60's, there was nothing funny about the show. It was always interesting but it wasn't funny. Well I, personally, I find a lot of humor in the world. It's not that you look up in the universe and "Have you heard the one about...", not that kind of humor but there's some interesting things to know. For example, it's kinda fun to wonder what it would be like if you dug a hole through the earth and jumped in. It's -- from elementary school you're saying "Is China down there or what would happen?" So let's explore that and find out what actually happens. It turns out you would vaporize as you pass through the middle. But, but ignoring that complication, it's kind of fun: you would yo-yo back and forth, and it's, it's kinda fun to talk about it, to explore science as, a- a-, turn science not only into an enterprise that you'd want to become a part of, but turn it into an enterprise that

even if you didn't want to become a part of it, you wanted to learn more about it. And this is one of your segments, in one of the upcoming shows. How long did it take, theoretically, if you didn't vaporize in the center, how long would it take from one end of the earth to the other? Well, ignoring air resistance, so you just jump in? Yeah. You'd get to the other side in about 42 minutes. How about that. Actually exactly 42 minutes. [laughter] Neil, you make-- [laughter] You calculate. You mentioned, you mentioned looking up. Now you were born in the Bronx? "Da Bronx," as we say. All right, so you've got light pollution there. How-- Oh yeah, totally. Scott, at the time, there was, like-- apartment buildings were still burning garbage. So-- It was soot. You'd brush the soot off of your shoulders. How did you become aware of, of the heavens, the stars, the galaxies? Oh, I was nine years old, and my parents, who were big fans of the cultural offerings of the city, took me, the whole family, obviously myself included, to the Hayden Planetarium. And there--you know, I had never seen a round ceiling before. There it was. The lights dimmed, the stars came out. And I was hooked. But in a dif--, in a special kind of way, because I looked

and I said, "Ooh, this is a nice hoax," because I, that, to me that wasn't the real sky. The real sky had maybe half a dozen stars in it, [laughter] and so I thought, "Well this is a nice, playful hoax. I'll go along with them." It was a couple of years later when I realized that was an image of the real sky. And if the real sky had that much, sort of, majesty and depth and interest, imagine what telescopes would do for me, imagine what a career in that would bring. So I was hooked from very early. Did you ever want to become an astronaut? No. No, because I knew that astronauts, if they weren't going in orbit around Earth, which is just a couple of hundred miles up, maybe they were going to the moon, back then, and that was only a quarter million miles away. And I was studying the galaxy, the Big Bang, the entire large-scale structure of the universe. So, to become an astronaut is not actually to get closer to the universe in ways that telescopes could bring. Plus, I was worried that if they cut the budget, you know-- [laughter] "Ah, Tyson, we can't bring ya out. You know, the Congress cut the budget." But on, on slightly more serious note, at the time no one going into space looked like me. They all were, like, military pilots. Their

skin was many shades lighter than mine. They all had, you know, Crewcuts in a era where, like "Hair" was the number one play on Broadway, you know, so there was a disconnect there between me and who they were sending, so that I never viewed myself, I could-- I never pictured myself as part of the NASA journey into space. But I followed it and I was definitely appreciative of it. Is that true today for Astrophysics. Astrophysics or astronauts? Well, astronauts I think. Astronauts, we've, we've got astronauts every, that look like everybody. Yeah. That looks more like America than ever before. And so that's one of the great triumphs of the latter-day NASA. What about astrophysics? Astrophysics -- of the six thousand astrophysicists in the world, ah, there's about two or three dozen, ah, ah, people with my skin color. Paula, is that your, you-- Is that part of your, your, your, your, ah, ah, reason for being is to excite kids, ah, to try to take on the, the business, the, the study, rather, of science? Well, I wouldn't say that we're that

specific. We're of course thrilled when we get letters from people saying "Well I'm going to graduate school in chemistry and I did this because I watched her show on Percy Julian or another program and we get them. We, we hear from a lot of, of, of people who actually have gone into the sciences or into engineering because they watched NOVA. And mainly, it's really kind of sad, because mainly these are people who as kids felt kind of out of it. They didn't really feel like they were part of the mainstream. And then when they would, they sort of wondered what was wrong with them. And then when they would watch NOVA they would see all the scientists having a great time. And it gave them a much more positive view of science and therefore of themselves. So we do hear from them a lot, but we're not training scientists here. I think what we're trying to do is really to reach a larger number of people, people in society. This is a very science-phobic culture. When you see scientists at all in Hollywood movies they're either kind of psychopaths or they're

huge geeks or nerds. And of course that's not the way it really is. I mean frankly take it from me, I know a lot of scientists. They're very normal people. In fact they're better than normal. They have broad ranges of interests and not the least bit nerdy. Not that there's anything all that wrong with nerds and they're certainly not psychopaths, so I think [laughter] what we're trying to do, if I had an overarching goal, ah,um, and you know it's probably exalting us a little bit to feel that we could have this impact, is to try to create an environment in our culture that's more receptive to science because like Neil I see our economic future, our competitiveness, as dependent on science and technology. And I think we're all kind of sunk if American kids are not interested in going on, in going into science and technology. My great fear is that America will lose its competitive edge, we will stop being the innovation nation as Hillary Clinton said. And

I think that's going to have a, I think that will mean that our kids and our grandchildren are not going to do as well as we did and nobody will like that. So I think NOVA is just one of a number of things, um, that are kind of bonding together to hopefully have a positive impact on these-- science really needs an image change. It really does. Well, speaking of regular guys, Neil, I should say above regular guys because you're a Harvard grad. ?mm, nhm? you're not chained to your radio telescope 24/7, you're, you're a raconteur, you've, you've got a extensive love and knowledge of wine, ballroom dancer, college athlete, I mean you're really the tops in a lot of the things you've taken on. Well, that was just 'cause I, I think I, I saw the total breadth of what life was offering me at the time and I didn't want to forego it but, it was at a cost. The cost was it took me longer to get out of graduate school. There was a lot of sort of resist, cultural resistance

to having these other dimensions of my personality either exist or be manifested in any sort of way. So it was certainly not the path of least resistance but my love for the rest of what it was to just sort of be alive and to sort of take on what, would exist in the world, in the end, overrode that. And so ah so, so here I am today and I don't regret any minute of it. Ah, I can tell you just to put some punctuation on some of what Paula said. No matter how successful the program is, what you don't want is to have everybody in your society become a scientist. That would be a really an uninteresting society. You want the artists, you want the journalists, the poets, the actors, the comedians, the, the-- You want the rest of what society is because that is the culture that you create for yourself. What you do want as a minimum is among those who become scientists. For those who do not, you want to raise the science literacy of your culture a few notches, and that's the climate. By doing

that you can then create a climate that is not science-phobic, that celebrates science, that when they see a science discovery, they can want to find out more about it, see how it integrates back into their life, into the economy, into our security. And so, but when you have people who fear science, you might as well just crawl back into the cave. Let me ask you about scientific literacy. Ther- there's a big debate in this country right now that that you've got this theory of evolution, scientific theory of evolution, and it ought to be presented. some people say it ought to be presented in public schools along with the theory of creationism or the theory of intelligent design. Scientifically speaking, are the two theories or the three theories equal? Scientists, biologists, astrophysicists - we study the universe, we study life. And in there we discover about it that there's this process of evolution that continues. It's pervasive, it's been going on since the beginning. That is the organizing

principle of how the science gets conducted. If you have another idea, if you have another idea, I don't have a problem with that. But if it's not science, it doesn't belong in the science classroom. And if you look at intelligent design, for example, which has been in all the news it, for those who may not know, if you've been perhaps living under a rock, I don't, I don't know. Intelligent design asserts that there are some things in nature that are so intricate, so beautiful, so, so much beyond our capacity to account for it invoking the methods and tools of science, that it must be made by some intelligent force, some intelligent entity. And typically that means God, but God is not often expressed in that sentence with it, but that's typically what it means. And by the way, there's a long history of famous scientists invoking God at the limits of their knowledge. Even Isaac Newton, for example, he couldn't figure out what kept the solar system stable. He knew his equation for gravity worked. Earth, moon,

earth, the sun, and then he put it all together and the solar system kept flying apart. He said God must step in every now and then and fix things. That's a version of intelligent design. But what you find is intelligent design doesn't lead you to the next discovery. It kind of closes off - When invoked in that way, it closes off your path of further investigation. So in a way, it's kind of a philosophy of ignorance. It's I don't know what it is--God did it rather than I don't know what it is, let's figure out! Let's bring more armament to bear on t-, on how to understand it. And so these are completely different ways of approaching the world around you. One of them leads to discovery, the other does not. And the one that does not is not science. Teach it in history class because it's been invoked historically. Teach it in the religion class. Teach it in philosophy class. Put it in-- I don't have a problem with that. It's not science, it doesn't belong in the science classroom. And if it ends up in the science classroom, you will compromise the student's understanding of what science is and how it works. And you'll be cutting out, at the kneecaps, our scientific enterprise. And we just - like I said - we'll just watch ourselves

recede as the rest of the world just passes us by. But it's, it's not science because it's not testable that you can't... [interrupts] It's not science because it doesn't lead to discoveries. Right. That's all. It's very simple. As Ken Miller, the biologist, said in the, ah, Dover court case in 2005 over intelligent design-- Dover, Pennsylvania. Dover, Dover, Pennsylvania. He said I can't take speaking to the proponents of intelligent design. He said I can't take your designer, that you believe is the source of all this, I can't bring that into my lab and test it. I wouldn't know what to do. So therefore it really can't be science because it is not a testable hypothesis. I can't run an experiment on it. So it may be a philosophy, but it is certainly not science. And I'd just like to mention that NOVA has a program on this called "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial," which your viewers can get at PBS.org. And it's based on the transcripts, and you interview everybody on all sides of the issue. It was very thorough 2 hour program. And many people found it very enlightening as

to what the difference is, because it does-- many people feel--well, that's the American way. It's only fair. Just bring them both out, let's teach them both" as they say "let's teach the controversy" until they really understand that they're comparing apples and oranges because science is science. It's based on a certain methodology. And intelligent design, while it may be a philosophy, is not science because it is not based on the scien-- But not even apples and oranges because both of those are fruit. Ok, [laughter]-- they're counting apples and baseballs. Yes. or something. Yes. They're not even the same-- Absolutely. They're not even the same construct. But, ah, you've talked about the Hayden Planetarium-- Hayden in New York City. Hayden in New York City, um and ah-- Hayden Planetarium in Boston actually. Oh I'm sorry, I'm sorry, They're the same sources of money originally. You're now the director. Yes, yes. Well I've been that for a while now but... [talks over] Are you the guy... Are you the guy who's responsible for taking Pluto out of the list of planets. [laughter] Well back in 2000, we opened our new facility, a newly renovated facility with the

organization of the objects of the solar system. And it was not an enumeration of the nine planets. We group them by like properties, and in so doing, Pluto, which is more than half ice by volume, got grouped with other icy objects that were recently discovered and continue to be discovered in the outer solar system. So that all happened under my watch. Yes. And so we got raked over the coals by the press. What happened? Oh the headline, page one headlines of the New York Times: "Pluto not a planet?" Only in New York." And then my inbox just flooded. And hate mail from third graders, and teachers an--, and I was like public enemy-- Meanwhile there was a committee of us who agree to this. It's not like I wrestled Pluto out of the solar system. And then people said, "Oh Pluto was not big enough to make it in New York?" and then jokes started flying and so we basically for years and years were sort of the brunt of anger and, and, and, and in frustration by school teachers and elementary school children until 2006 when the International Astronomical Union basically voted

in--, sided with our original intent of reorganizing Pluto because it's-- Pluto lovers of the world, most don't know that there's six moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto. I tell them that, "Oh I didn't know that." "Nobody told me that." And the point is, it's not that anything changed with Pluto. Pluto didn't change. It's that we learned more about the rest of what's out there, and now Pluto has family. I think it's happier there actually. [laughter] It was, like, one of the biggest of the ice balls of the outer solar system, rather than just being the puniest of the planets. So that's all we did. Is that what we call it, an ice ball, now? Ah, I was being descriptive, but it's called a dwarf planet, now. [laughter] So what are the chances that our planet gets hit by a major asteroid that causes damage to our living space? Ah, in Florida? or the-- somewhere else in the world or the entire world? The entire world. The entire world. You need an asteroid maybe a kilometer across. You know, a little more than half a mile. You can calculate how much damage that will do. That'll hit the crust. It will cast, like, billions of tons of earth's crust into the atmosphere. It'll create widespread fires

that will darken the atmosphere, cloaking the earth, preventing sunlight from reaching the plants, knocking out the base of the food chain, and sending a wave of extinction across the tree of life. And what are the chances? ?unintelligible? how-- Actually, um,ah, an asteroid that size won't necessarily end life, but it'll completely disrupt what we call civilization. The food chain, the food distribution channels, the transportation network, and that's what we kind of depend on as modern humans to conduct our daily affairs. So what are the chances that happens. It's a certainty that one of those would hit us in the next-- about a kilometer size-- you get one of those every few hundred thousand years. So that seems like a long time. It's outside of an election cycle. Yes. [laughter] But when it-- But it would do, like, multiple high trillion-- You can't even measure the cost of that damage if civilization is gone. So you have to, like, jump-start civilization to reinvent your laws of physics and this sort of thing because you killed everybody who knows it. So.

So what you want to do is not have to run away from these kinds of problems. So you want like scientists and engineers in your midst to solve the problem in advance. OK. And one of my big points of anger is, why is it that we're running away from tornadoes and running away from the hurricane and what why don't like figure out a way to stop it, rather-- you know we complain about the shelters weren't good enough. I'm saying, no, your research up front wasn't good enough to prevent it in the first place. So. So you've got an asteroid coming. Let's deflect it. I'd rather do that then build shelters to hide from it. And you think maybe that we'll find a way to prevent tornadoes and hurricanes? Oh I see, I'm speaking very broadly about what it is as humans to run away from something that might kill us, when the history of science and the power of science demonstrates that in fact we can not have to die from the forces of nature. We can actually find ways to maneuver them. Paula, you have to have one of the greatest jobs in all of documentary film-making--that is, you sit around the table on Monday and think well, what are we going to cover next? How do, how do you come up with your ideas? Well,

actually that's kind of like what we do. Ah, we ah, there are lots of ways that we come up with ideas, um, and sitting around just kind of brainstorming is actually one of the ways that we do it. But we have a, naturally, a research staff. We have a science editor plus a lot of scientists get in touch with us and make suggestions. Our research staff reads all, they read all of the--or we can't read all of the scientific literature. So there's so much of it. But they read digests it and they read a lot of the scientific journals. Um, we read all of the mainstream press and you'd be surprised how much material we get out of the New York Times, and-- And by the way one of the great frustrations of the scientist who works with the public entity, such as that is, more often than not there isn't the scientific expertise to get it right. And so the effort of the scientist whose efforts are brought in becomes an exercise in frustration because people are, they don't know what they're doing. And I have the luxury of working with just this list of people that she described

so that when, what comes back to New York, because that's where our offices are for NOVA ScienceNow, when it comes back from Boston to New York, it's been vetted. We know what's on the frontier. and now I have the luxury of sort of polishing and buffing in places that I can possibly contribute to it. But all the hard work was done up front by people who were on the scientific staff of NOVA,and they, ah, the content of the Web site. So it's, it's a tremendous resource not only for the public but for the feeder line that goes into what's actually gets produced. Paula, ah, the, we're, we're down to the last two minutes but is, can you, ah, tell us about one or two segments that you've got coming up this summer that you're particularly fond of. Well I'm so fond of so many of the segments on NOVA ScienceNow that -- Like picking your children and-- really is ah, hard to say. I mean I can just in, in the first show, there's, there's a, a story on dark matter that I just think is fantastic. And, ah, Neil goes down into a, ah, is it a cave Neil? It's a mine. --or an underground mine

and I don't know how they ever got down that elevator-- It's an iron mine, yeah. --but they did it. And amidst all of the dead bats, there's an experiment that's so fascinating that, ah, I think our viewers will just, just be intrigued why we don't-- It seems to me as a lay person that we should really understand all the stuff, ah, that makes up our universe but we don't. And there's another story on Alzheimer's disease which of course you know all of us have, ah, elderly parents and brothers and sisters and relatives and we know about the heartbreak, ah, that memory loss causes later in life, but this is a story about some mice that go swimming in their own personal little hot tub. And from these mice and from observing them, scientists have learned a good deal so that they can understand how memories may be recovered. So I just think these are two fascinating, um, stories. And they're actually from the first

program that's on June 25th, so-- Well, we can't wait for, for the series to start. Thank you both for coming here. Paul Apsell and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you for being here today. And for more information on the series, visit WEDU.org. I'm Rob Laurie. For all of us at WEDU, thank you for watching.