-So because
this is the last one,
I also want to tell you
a short story.
And then, after that, then,
I'm going to invite
Claire Parkinson
to introduce John.
So once upon a time,
long after the Big Bang...
[ Laughter ]
...in the great plains
of savanna,
African savanna,
where John's father grew up
until he was at the age of 9,
there were animals
which were competing.
And those animals,
I'm going to use two of them.
The first one is the giraffe.
The giraffe is famous.
It's one of the tallest animal
we have
in the animal kingdom --
about 18 feet.
And then, there is also
a Thomson's gazelle.
So one day, they were competing
and wondering
who can actually beat the other
in a game of hide-and-seek.
I know you all know, of course,
who the winner is, you know?
You have a tall guy
and a very small guy,
about 2 feet.
So guess who is the winner?
The gazelle won the race.
Then you say, "Well,
so don't worry about this,
but I'm actually going
to be useful to you later on."
So I'm going to fast forward
to the following day,
and both animals are
heading towards a water hole.
They're looking for water.
So the giraffe
is moving forward
and followed by the gazelle.
So in the process,
the giraffe actually sees,
in the distance,
a danger coming,
a danger looming.
And he warns his friend.
And he tells him,
"You know, guess what?
There is something happening
that way, in front.
So can we, you know,
change the route
towards the water hole?"
And then, the gazelle says,
"No, let's keep going.
Don't worry about it."
You know?
And then because the giraffe
could see, actually --
it looked like a cheetah
that was coming --
he decided,
"I shall take a different road
and go a different way."
But the gazelle continued
on his way.
Before long,
a cheetah ambushes this guy.
And then, oh, boy!
The thing was hungry,
went for the gazelle.
The gazelle was trying
to do its own things and run.
You know, he can run
at 80 kilometers an hour.
But that was not fast enough
for the cheetah.
And then, it was caught.
The giraffe, from where it was,
was not amused
and was thinking,
"I wish he listened to me."
Okay?
And then, when he went
back to the other animals,
he was wondering
what is he going to tell
the other gazelle
where his friend went?
And he told them that,
"Obviously, I saw him
being chased by a cheetah.
And because of that,
maybe he may not come back."
So I'm not going
to go all the way
to the end of the story.
But the message
from this is that,
when you have a tall guy,
you have to listen to that guy.
[ Laughter ]
So today,
we are laughing
because in our own castle,
we'd say
[Speaks foreign language]
So let's give him
a round of applause.
[ Applause ]
So let's welcome
Claire Parkinson.
[ Applause ]
-Thanks, Gatebe.
Okay.
Charles Gatebe
has just done a great job
in thanking all sorts of people.
However, the most
important person to thank
for this Maniac series
is Charles himself.
This series has been
absolutely phenomenal.
And it's been his vision
that has created it
and his hard work
that has continued it.
So let's have
a round of applause for you.
[ Applause ]
Okay.
Now to John Mather.
I would assume
everybody in this room knows
that John is Goddard's
one and only Nobel Prize winner.
He won the Nobel Prize
back in 2006.
It was based on his excellence
as a scientist
and his excellence as a leader
of the Cosmic Background
Explorer mission
that many people
at Goddard were involved in.
John has done
lots more than COBE.
But COBE was certainly
a huge highlight,
both for himself
and also for Goddard.
But he's also
senior project scientist
of the James Webb
Space Telescope,
which is another major task.
But I want to mention
one other role
before turning it over to John.
And that is
an extremely different role
than being a scientist
or being a leader.
And that is being
a Nobel laureate.
Once a person gets
a Nobel Prize,
as soon as the announcement
is made,
demands on his time
just skyrocket --
all sorts
of speaking engagements
and conversations and media.
John has accepted
this additional role
with such incredible grace
and dedication
and willingness to give up
his time to others,
that I don't think
that Goddard or NASA
or the Nobel organization
could have had a better
Nobel laureate representative
than John Mather.
So with that, John,
we are anxious to hear
you talk about your life.
[ Applause ]
-I'm feeling it's a little hard
to live up to the introductions.
[ Laughter ]
But let me start
before I forget to.
We have pictures
of the new telescope
that I can hand around.
We forgot to do that before.
So I'll send that around.
There are plenty more
if anybody ever needs them,
of course,
over at the --
If you come over to building 29
and look at the big glass,
you can see how
we're putting it together.
-There's also a book here, also.
He has free copies.
So if you want one
for his first books --
-Well, they're not free.
I have to sell 'em.
[ Laughter ]
-They're not free.
-Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, I would like to tell
some stories.
And as I was thinking
about what to say,
I thought, "There's actually
a day of Thanksgiving,"
which is only next week.
But everything that I have
to tell you is a kind of thanks.
So I'm just --
I'm just so astonished
at where humanity has gotten,
where I have arrived.
Anyway, I was saying that this
is a day of Thanksgiving for me,
to tell stories about
who did what
and made all of these things
possible.
And there's no end
to how many stories
you could tell
if you were really to do this.
So I sort of have always felt
as part of a huge tradition
of scientific discovery.
And so I made a chart
of some of my heroes.
These are people
that I knew about
from high school
and grade school, even.
And by the way,
some of us, uh...
Archimedes worked for the DoD.
There wasn't
a lot of distinction
between DoD and civilian
in those days.
But it's sort of a reminder
that we're part
of a huge context.
And NASA is the civilian arm
of some pretty amazing things.
We get to do telescopes
and a lot of other things
partly as a consequence
of the Cold War,
which, for us, anyway,
did not turn very hot.
We were very lucky about that.
Anyway, the previous Internet,
the printing press,
was invented a long time ago.
It took a while to propagate.
From quite early age,
I knew about Copernicus
and Tycho Brahe and Galileo.
When I was about 8,
my parents read aloud
to my sister and me
from biographies
of Galileo and Darwin.
So they were interested
in both of us.
My sister didn't turn out
to be a scientist.
She's something quite different.
But anyway, we were exposed
to give an opportunity
to think about
and learn about science
from very early times.
So Newton said,
"We stand
on the shoulders of giants,"
and he couldn't possibly
have known
all of them that we stand on.
I think back to the days
when people discovered
that if you cooked rocks
in the fire,
you would get metal.
Oh, nobody knows who that was.
But everything we do
depends on that discovery.
So anyway,
another hero of mine,
Albert Michelson
because I've been using
his kind of interferometers
all my life, practically.
One of the --
I guess he is the first
American Nobelist,
isn't he, in physics?
He didn't get
his training here,
but he did his work here,
and so I love what he did.
He managed to find ways
to use fairly ordinary things
that you can build in 1895
to test
whether light goes
the same speed
depending on whether
you're moving or not.
So he provided us with
the evidence
that relativity theory
was required.
Nevertheless, he had something
odd to say about discovery.
"The more important
fundamental laws
and facts of physical reality
have all been discovered,
and they are now
so firmly established
that the possibility
of their ever being supplanted
in consequence
of new discoveries
is exceedingly remote.
Our future discoveries
must be looked for
in the sixth place of decimals."
There is some argument about
whether he really said this.
Needless to say,
you can track these things down
better now than you could.
But this was before
relativity was discovered,
before quantum mechanics
was discovered,
before nuclear power
was rediscovered.
And so but nevertheless,
his sixth place of decimals
was the beginning of evidence
for some of these discoveries.
So it does tell us
we don't always know
how to predict the future.
It was even, I believe,
the Wright brothers
were quoted as saying,
"We would never be able
to fly across the Atlantic."
So the people who do it
are not always the ones
who know what we're going to be
able to do in the future,
so I have a few speculations,
but you can't count
on me knowing.
So a little bit about
how I got into these things.
People are always
curious about my name
because it's a famous name
in American history.
Well, my particular
branch of the family
is not that branch.
[ Laughter ]
My ancestor --
my first Mather ancestor
came from England in 1710,
and his mother was unmarried.
So we do not know
where that Y chromosome
came from before that.
My dad was a statistician.
He worked
for Rutgers University.
And so he studied dairy cows.
And the point was to get
more and better milk.
Milk with more protein
would be a good idea.
A long time ago, we bred cows
for more butter.
And somebody figured out
that wasn't so good
for us after all,
so that was his job.
And he had grown up
in southern Rhodesia
for his first nine years.
And he went into the subject
of statistics
sort of out of a sense
of mission.
He saw that the cows
in southern Rhodesia were thin,
and the ones in the magazines
from America were fat.
And what is this about?
So he wanted to know.
And so this drew him
into animal science.
So I learned
a little bit from him.
Not a whole lot,
but I learned about statistics.
So in ninth grade,
I had a rat experiment
where I had eight baby rats
that lived under the kitchen
table for several weeks
while we were feeding them
different things
to see what they liked
and didn't like.
And so one salient result is
corn flakes is not enough
for food.
You have to have
something else.
[ Laughter ]
So my mother
was a first-grade teacher,
and all of her students
learned to read.
So if you think that some kids
just don't have it,
it's not true.
They can.
They all can.
They maybe not have
the best start,
so there
are ways to do it.
Her father
was a bacteriologist,
and he got his PhD in 1922
from Hopkins,
the same year
my mother was born.
So he wanted to be a doctor,
but he couldn't afford it,
so he got to be
a bacteriologist.
Then he had this amazing luck
on getting to work
on penicillin production
just at the time
that World War II
was coming along.
And so he had a wild time
with that, I'm sure.
I hardly knew him.
My sister is a teacher
and counselor.
And she's my little sister,
but she's retired,
so she gets to have fun.
My wife is Jane,
and she's a ballet teacher.
So, I have her picture coming
up.
So other people to think about.
Just a little bit of history.
Schrodinger, in 1925,
was telling us
about quantum mechanics.
Goddard, in 1926 --
I think it says 1926 --
was inventing
the liquid-fueled rocket.
And there he is.
By the way, some of these slides
were shown
at the Air-and-Space-Museum
event we did a few years back.
And then, here is Einstein
with Georges Lemaître.
Einstein gave us relativity
and the differential equations
we would use for cosmology.
Lemaître, by the way, said,
"You know, Einstein,
this idea that the universe
is static is not true.
And I see how to work
out the equations."
And he said there was
the primeval atom
of the early universe.
Now, people didn't believe him.
Einstein didn't believe him.
I don't think he knew
that it had already been done
before that,
5 years before,
in in the Soviet Union
brand-new Soviet Union,
by Alexander Friedmann,
who died only 3 years
after he did this work.
And he didn't find out
that he was right.
Anyway, here they are.
By the way,
as, maybe, people know,
Lemaître was a Jesuit
priest and scholar
as well as an MIT physicist,
so he was definitely
qualified to work the math.
So Einstein said,
as most of you have heard
in this story,
"Your equations are correct.
Your physics is abominable,"
because Einstein
was really sure
that the universe
had to be static.
Well, we know.
so here's Edwin Hubble
at the telescope.
This picture doesn't
show him with his pipe.
But I guess almost all other
pictures show him with his pipe.
So there he is
trying to take pictures.
In those days, you had to watch
the eye piece to make sure
that the telescope
would track on the star
and to get sharp images.
So he developed
the experimental technology
to be able to make this plot.
This plot is the experimental
demonstration
that the universe is,
in fact, expanding, 1929.
So, just a little bit
of science here.
The dots are galaxies.
And on the horizontal direction
is how far away
did he think they were
on the vertical direction,
how fast they're moving.
And almost all of them
going away,
four of them are not.
One of them
that's particularly close by,
is heading straight toward us,
and that's
the Andromeda nebula.
It's the one you can see
with your eye in a dark sky.
So in a few billion years,
we're having
a fantastic collision coming.
So that'll be quite spectacular
for future astronomers.
So the rest of them, however,
are almost all going away,
the speed proportional
to distance.
This was the first estimate
of the age
of the universe -- 1929.
So if any of you who are dealing
with the general public
need to explain that it's not
"just a theory,"
this is an observation
from 1929 --
It's almost getting
towards a century old --
that we've known the universe
is expanding.
It's not something
we just cooked up
because it would be fun
to talk about over beer.
So other things to show you.
A little closer
to my own history,
here's Lyman Spitzer
climbing in the Alps,
I believe, in 1946.
Lyman Spitzer we think of
as the father of
modern space astronomy
because I think that's the year
in which he wrote
about the possibility
of space telescopes.
And he even wrote about one
where you could polish off
the surface of an asteroid
and make a really big mirror
so you could see planets
around other stars.
Very visionary guy.
I think this was for
the RAND Corporation.
Do you remember?
Was that for the RAND
Corporation, he did that?
So, a very imaginative guy.
Here's another
imaginative guy -- Fred Hoyle.
Fred Hoyle was aware
of the the idea
of the expanding universe.
And that's what he looked like
in about 1946, I think.
Now, about 1950,
he gave the name
"The Big Bang,"
to the Big Bang,
and it stuck.
He didn't like the Big Bang.
He never did like it.
And the only reason that
he's not still talking about it
is that he died.
Some people never give up,
and I guess that's got
some admirable features.
And by the way
people don't usually know
that he developed a version,
which I would interpret
as inflation theory,
that he described in, I think,
the mid-'60s,
so pretty amazing guy.
Then, here I am, born in 1946.
And I don't know
what year the picture is.
But I'm probably 2 or 3
or something.
I look
pretty happy that day.
So, I don't really remember
my childhood.
The only reason I know I exist
is somebody told me I was born.
[ Laughter ]
So a few other things
to show you.
Here are pictures
of a couple of the fathers
of the Big-Bang idea.
There's George Gamow
with his vapors coming out
of the primordial material,
the ylem, it was called
by those guys.
Robert Herman and Ralph Alpher
were two young people
working with him.
And they developed the math
to figure out the temperature
of the early universe.
And they predicted
the temperature
we should measure
is about 5 Kelvin.
We got 2.7 --
pretty good for only having
pencils and slide rules.
And so they actually got to come
to the launch of
the COBE satellite years later.
And they were so thrilled
to see that their story
had been demonstrated
to be true.
Happened a little later,
in the early '50s,
people thought
there were canals on Mars,
and I remember
hearing about it.
I went down with my family
to the Museum of Natural History
in New York City.
So we saw
the planetarium show, of course,
and we talked
about canals on Mars.
And we saw the big meteorite
that stands still there
in the museum.
And it was all wonderful
and mysterious
and hardly anybody knew
anything about anything.
So everything
was to be discovered.
You might remember,
there was "Ask Mr. Wizard"
on TV,
a wonderful science program.
I think Bell Labs
had a or some --
had a whole series
of TV programs about science,
and it was fascinating.
Who could not want to do that?
That's how I felt about it.
And then, this one happened.
Sputnik went up,
I guess, October 4th of 1957.
So suddenly,
the country said,
"You didn't tell us about this."
Well, of course,
it had been reported
at least 25 times
in The New York Times
that this was gonna happen.
But people had not
taken it seriously.
We did not have
our own response immediate.
There's some stories
behind that, by the way.
Eisenhower knew
that we could fly one,
and he was worried
that if we did fly one,
that the Soviet Union
would accuse us
of spying overhead.
So wait a little while
and they'll launch.
Oh, and then they can't make
that accusation.
So that led
to spy satellites of all sorts,
which also led
to enormous outpouring
of support
for young scientists.
So I was in fifth grade
at the time,
and so, suddenly,
there were science fairs,
opportunities,
just things sprang up
everywhere
anybody wanted
to do anything about --
electronics or ham radio
or science or --
There were
some science summer camps.
All kinds of stuff
turned up for me to do,
and my parents made sure
I got a chance at them.
So, like I say,
we have a lot to thank
the Soviet Union for,
even if we didn't like it
at the time
and we were terrified to death.
I do remember, also,
being told about this same year
that if there was
a nuclear-bomb attack,
we should hide under the desk.
[ Laughter ]
I don't know how many
people here remember that age,
but it was stupid.
I think pretty nearly everyone
knew that wouldn't work.
So where did I go to school?
I went to school
in Sussex, New Jersey.
And I'll show you a little map
in a bit of where that is.
And so that's
when I was in school
my first eight years there.
And I went to another school.
A lot of people that you know of
went to Newton High School
in Massachusetts.
But this is the other Newton,
one of the other --
I guess
there are about 40 of them.
So I went
to the one in New Jersey,
and I'll show you
a picture of that, too.
but particularly
important for me
was that NSF had funded
summer schools
for science-nerdy people,
so one in math
at Assumption College
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
which was just a few miles
from where Robert Goddard
had done his work,
and Cornell University
in physics.
I got to play with relativity
and quantum mechanics
just after my junior year
in high school.
That was just
an enchanting experience.
I thought, "Golly,
I could sort of do this.
Maybe there's a future
for me in this."
And so this was
a really key experience
for me that said,
"Yeah, you could --
you could really enjoy this.
It's so much fun."
This was another key experience.
It says there are some kids
that are astonishingly
good at math
that there's no hope
to compete with them.
[ Laughter ]
This summer school
was full of kids
from Bronx High School
of Science.
And there was one who could play
20 games of chess
with his eyes closed
and beat you in a few moves.
So I thought,
"I know when I'm outclassed."
So, I'm not going to do that.
Anyway,
so pictures of childhood.
This is the view
from my front yard
when I was a child.
This is a barn where 20
very large bulls used to live.
And the backside,
which you can't see,
are science labs
with chemistry
and even radiation detectors.
There was a little truck
parked down there
for civil defense
with Geiger counters.
My dad had a book
about radiation safety,
which I read.
In this field, I stood,
and I flew my model airplane,
and it crashed right into that.
And that was the end
of that one.
So this is where
they were working
on improving the milk production
of the cows
of northern New Jersey.
So my dad had the records of
milk production for 10,000 cows.
He knew statistics.
He was among
the first people
to use computers
for massive data analysis.
So I got to visit
the computing machines
way down in New Brunswick,
where the big
university campus was.
This is the view of my house
when I was a child.
Trees, by the way.
This is a country full of trees.
We were a mile away
from the Appalachian Trail,
an extremely rural area,
a good place for farms,
almost totally protected
from anything.
And so there we are way up
in the corner of New Jersey,
the Delaware River,
Appalachian Trail up there,
very, very quiet spot.
Rode the school bus to school.
It was about an hour
to high school,
about a half an hour
to elementary school.
And that's just about
the same kind that I rode.
This is the high school.
It still looks like that today.
This is a modern picture.
It has not changed.
And this is the town square
of Newton High Sch--
of Newton, the war memorial.
It's almost unchanged
from 100 years ago, I think.
Nowadays, there's
huge population growth
and big-box stores
just outside of town,
and it's really
kind of discouraging.
But that's prosperity for you.
So this was
a pretty good place
for me to go to school
because, somehow,
they had good teachers
and good stuff.
Anyway, so where
did I go from there?
Just a little bit of story.
this is the founding document
of NASA.
1958, we started off.
I was still in elementary school
when this happened,
but we started our space race
in a formal way that year.
There is Mr. Kennedy.
Let me see if I can get...
-But why, some say, the moon?
Why choose this as our goal?
And they may well ask,
"Why climb
the highest mountain?"
Why, 35 years ago,
fly the Atlantic?
Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon --
[ Cheers and applause ]
We choose to go to the moon
in this decade
and do the other things,
not because they are easy,
but because they are hard,
because that goal
will serve to organize
and measure the best
of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one
that we are willing to accept,
one we are unwilling
to postpone,
and one we intend to win
and the others, too.
[ Applause ]
-So that was my childhood,
some of it.
I didn't pay
a whole lot of attention.
I didn't think I would ever
be working for NASA.
Had no idea.
I also didn't know James Webb.
That's James Webb,
the man who went up
to John Kennedy and said,
"This is what it takes to go
to the moon in a decade."
And I like to tell
this one story about him.
He doubled the budget
in the taxicab
on the way to see the president.
This is because
we didn't have spreadsheets
and review boards yet.
So he quite well knew
that he couldn't trust people
that looked like us
to figure this out,
that he knew that the entire
future of the nation
could be hanging on that number,
that he was gonna promise
the president
we would go to the moon.
Well, how you gonna get enough
to make sure you get there?
You run and make sure you don't
run out of gas halfway.
So he knew that there's
a huge amount at stake.
So, I wasn't paying
much attention,
but I did see it
in Life Magazine,
which was one of
those big things we got.
So that was while
I was still in high school.
Anyway, I went to college,
Swarthmore College.
It's a beautiful place
with trees, again.
This is what
it looks like today.
This is where
you graduate.
A couple of famous
Swarthmore astronomers --
Nancy Roman,
one of the very first,
moved into NASA headquarters.
And we worked for her
for a long time.
Another friend of mine --
she was at college
while I was there --
Sandy Faber.
Maybe many of you
will know her.
I see my friend
Anne Thompson is here.
She's not an astronomer,
but she's here.
So anyway,
it was a good time
to study science
at the college.
It was a liberal-arts college,
but I didn't take advantage
of most of the liberal arts
that you could get there.
I did math,
physics, and astronomy
and small touches
of other things.
So I really liked it there,
and then I had to go
to graduate school.
So what happened in 1965?
I was a freshman
in in college,
when these two gentlemen,
Penzias and Wilson,
measured the cosmic
microwave background radiation.
And some people said
they were all surprised.
But I read about that
in in George Gamow's
little paperback,
so I wasn't surprised.
Why is anybody surprised
about that?
It's supposed to be there.
Curiously enough,
a lot of
the scientific community
didn't read the paperbacks.
Yeah.
So at any rate, that happened.
I thought, "No big deal."
I went to graduate school.
That was not what excited me
at that time.
The thing
that was exciting me then
was the discovery of
the elementary particles,
which were still being
discovered one by one.
Very, very difficult program.
And so I wanted to do
more of that.
I went to Berkeley.
I got a summer job
to work with Henry Frisch
at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
I had to make
a one-transistor circuit
to switch a 400-volt device,
which was controlling
a spark chamber.
And we were told that
if you didn't do it right,
you could be killed in this lab,
and some people almost were,
so...
But what I really wanted to do
was I wanted to be
Richard Feynman.
And people said, "I'm sorry.
Are you
independently wealthy?
There are no jobs
for people like that,
and Richard Feynman
already exists."
[ Laughter ]
So I went hunting
for a research program,
and I found Paul Richards,
who was working with
Charles Townes and Mike Werner,
to measure the cosmic
microwave background radiation.
And a lot of you know
that Mike Werner
is now at JPL and Caltech
and is a Spitzer project
scientist
as well as, I think,
the JPL chief scientist
these days.
Anyway, so what are we gonna do?
So this is where I lived,
in a house with a tree.
These trees over here
just to the right of the house,
we planted
when I was a student there.
These were the physics buildings
at Berkeley.
What is it like
to be doing physics in 1970?
It's different.
If you wanted
an lock-in amplifier,
you got one from the shop.
It was huge.
It had vacuum tubes.
You could have a bunch
of resistors and capacitors
that would choose the frequency
that you were gonna use.
And these little nuvistors
were brand-new, tiny,
tiny vacuum tubes,
which worked almost as well
as JFETs now.
So the fast Fourier transform
had just been invented.
there was no Hewlett-Packard
calculator at all.
Our advanced computer
was a PDP-11
that used paper tape.
And we made our detectors
by hand, really, by hand.
People.
These are people
that I work with.
That's me.
[ Laughter ]
Paul Richards, my advisor,
official thesis advisor.
He still looks
a lot like that,
but he's retired.
But he can't stay
away from the lab.
And Mike Werner,
he also was hairier
in those days.
This is our
first project we did.
We built a Fabry-Pérot
interferometer
to measure the spectrum
of the cosmic
microwave background radiation
from the ground.
There's our detector,
lenses.
We had a big pipe.
It was about 8 feet long.
So, we were inside
the building,
then there was the outdoors,
which was cold outside
because we were up
on a mountain.
And we tried to measure.
Well, it wasn't very successful,
well, in the sense
that it worked,
but it didn't tell us
anything very interesting.
So the next question was,
"What do you do better?"
So my thesis advisor
devised this idea --
build a Michelson
interferometer,
fill it up
with liquid helium,
suspend it on 2,000 feet
of rope
from a very high-altitude
balloon,
send it up 25 kilometers,
and see if you can now measure
from above most of the Earth's
atmosphere.
So the answer was yes, we could.
However, I had to write
a thesis about the device
that had failed in flight.
So pretty important lesson
in risk management.
We had done some tests.
It was very clear, however,
that we were tired of testing.
We decided, as a group,
well, maybe the next test
should just be,
"Push the button and see
what happens when you fly,"
because we had never
flown anything.
So we went to Texas,
and we launched
the balloon payload,
and there were three different
reasons why it didn't work.
David Woody, my lab partner,
came back and figured out why.
He made a cold test chamber,
put the whole payload
in dry ice,
and he found out
what didn't work.
So the next time, it did work.
So I got out of Berkeley
with my thesis
about a project
that didn't quite work
and went off to New York City
to become a radio astronomer
at the Goddard Institute
for Space Studies.
There we are.
This is a modern picture.
Tom's Restaurant you might
know from "Seinfeld."
I don't think they filmed
in the real one,
but I had lunch there
every work day.
And most of this building
is a NASA facility.
But you would never know
because
there's just
one little door over here
where the security is.
So this is how I got
back and forth to work.
And this is where I lived,
at a big apartment
building on West End Avenue.
And this is what we did
for computers in those days.
The Goddard Institute had one,
and we had one here, I believe.
I don't think
I ever saw the inside,
so I just found this picture
on the Internet
just to illustrate what
it was like in those days.
So after I'd been there
about 6 months, thinking,
"Oh, well, I'm going to be
a radio astronomer,"
and was trying to do that,
NASA had other ideas.
So in 1974,
NASA called for proposals
of new scientific missions
for explorer satellites.
And they had two rockets
available,
a small one and a big one.
They got 150 proposals,
about,
which is at least,
in order of magnitude,
more than they ever
dreamed they would get.
This is just 5 years
after the Apollo landing,
so scientists are hungry,
we're full of ideas,
and about 12 were chosen
out of these 150 proposals.
Three of them were cosmic
background radiation proposals.
One was the one that I had
organized with our colleagues
from the Goddard Institute
for Space Studies,
MIT and Princeton,
and here at Goddard
in Greenbelt.
And this was our team.
So some of us
are still around.
Most of us are retired.
So anyway, these three teams
all submitted proposals.
And after a couple of years,
NASA Headquarters said, "Okay.
We're gonna form a team
with members of all
of those three,
and we'll start a new project."
So, by the way, this is what
the first concept looked like.
I drew this picture
in 1974 for our proposal.
And we had four
instruments in mind.
But the basic idea
is pretty similar
to what we ended up flying --
a big conical shield,
various antennas for receiving
microwaves from the sky,
a liquid-helium tank
with a couple
of instruments in it,
and that was the basic idea.
So little more of
the history of this.
1976, we started
and chose
our principal investigators.
In about 1979,
the decision was made
to build it here at Goddard,
which is not something
we always would do.
It was recognized that
this was much too difficult
to send out on contract,
that there was no way you could
write a contract
to please measure
this background radiation.
Nobody knew how to design
the apparatus, nothing.
And also considering that
you don't know how to do it,
there's no understanding
of how much work it is.
So in those days, it was before
full-cost accounting
had really kicked in,
so people just worked on it.
However, because it was
an in-house project,
it had low priority,
so we just waited our turn.
And our turn never came
for a lot of things.
Then in '86,
the Challenger blew up.
And we had designed
the apparatus
to go up on a space shuttle.
At that point, it was
going to be impossible to go.
So our project management
found a way
to take off half the mass
of the observatory
and repackage it to go back
on the Delta rocket,
which was the way it had
originally been proposed.
and so that was,
to me, a miracle --
a management miracle
that we could actually do that.
And it was within
about 100 pounds
of not being possible,
but it was possible.
So we went from being
at the bottom of the queue,
the thing that we would
do in-house for fun almost
to we were gonna be
the very first payload
to fly after the Challenger,
so we were.
So, we launched November 18th,
which is yesterday, right?
Day before yesterday,
yeah, in 1989,
so it's 24 years and 2 days old.
It took us only a few weeks
to get our first
spectrum result,
and then we kept on working
for another 4 years.
Finally,
we're more or less done.
So, pictures of people
to be thankful for.
Here's my postdoctoral advisor
at Goddard Institute
in New York, Pat Thaddeus.
Many of these people,
by the way,
have given
Lindsay Lectures here.
He was one.
He was really an expert
on molecular measurements,
finding the stuff
in interstellar space.
That's me with my wife.
Dave Wilkinson at Princeton
with his spouse.
Mike Hauser, here,
he hired me at Goddard
and also ended up
being my best man
when I got married to Jane.
Rai Weiss at MIT, my colleague.
We worked together to figure out
the design of the spectrometer.
George Smoot from Berkeley
ended up being
the principle investigator
in microwave radiometers.
Sam Gulkis and Mike Janssen
from JPL
also worked radiometers.
More people.
Chuck Bennett became our deputy
principle investigator
for the microwave radiometers.
And Nancy, Nancy Boggess --
Maybe many of you know
that Al Boggess
was the project scientist
for the Hubble Space Telescope
for a long time.
Nancy was at headquarters,
and then, she came out
to become my deputy here
at Goddard
working on the COBE.
Ed Cheng many of you know
'cause he also worked
on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Eli Dwek's a theorist,
and he helped us figure out
what we had seen.
Tom Kelsall worked
on the DIRBE experiment,
Phil Lubin on the microwaves.
Steve Meyer is now
at University of Chicago.
Harvey, here,
is still with Goddard,
inventing things every day.
Tom Murdock
was at the Air Force Lab,
and I don't know
what he's been doing lately.
Rick Shafer was my deputy.
He's retired.
Bob Silverberg was on our team,
and he's now retired.
But when I first was working
on the proposal in 1974,
I would come down on the train,
and I'd stay at his house.
Ned Wright is now at UCLA.
He's also become the P.I.
for the WISE mission,
which has recently completed
its sky surveys
and liberated a huge catalog
of detections.
Engineering team here.
Many of you will
recognize these folks here,
although
some have retired, now.
Most have retired, I think.
The people had to be
a little older than me
to make this work.
[ Laughter ]
So I think all of the people
on this picture have retired.
More people,
engineering team.
Dennis McCarthy
I still see occasionally
because he's got
his own company,
and we are called upon
to give lessons-learned
kinds of talks
and tell stories like this.
Dave Gilman
hasn't retired, either.
I think he's now elsewhere
in Langley.
Anyway, this is the satellite
we finally launched.
It looks a lot
like the picture I drew in 1974.
but it, obviously,
went through a lot of changes
to go through
its configuration
for a space shuttle launch
as well as a reconfiguration
to a Delta.
So it's still up there.
It's about 500-and-something
miles up in a circular orbit,
and I understand
it's still visible
if you know when to look.
It has to be right around sunset
or sunrise,
when it's the brightest for us.
So it had three instruments,
not four,
but basically
the same configuration --
a helium tank in the middle,
and I'll show you
what they did.
This was my thesis project
on steroids.
It had a Michelson
interferometer.
Thank you, Albert Michelson.
The main thing that it had
that we couldn't do
in a balloon payload
was it had
an external calibrator.
So otherwise, the configuration
is very similar
to my thesis project.
But this is special.
It means you can produce
a black-body spectrum,
which is what the universe
is supposed to have given us,
and you put it in
the aperture of the antenna.
And if you get
the same answer, you win.
So eventually, that was done
very, very precisely.
I see Dale Fixsen here
in the audience.
He was the person
who went from...
Well, it's about --
like a black body, too.
It's a black body
within 50 parts per million.
So Dale --
a special thanks to Dale
for his ability to do that.
If you ever need to figure out
anything really complicated
and nobody else
can figure it out, ask Dale.
[ Laughter ]
So these are the people.
I was a P.I.
Rick Shafer was my deputy.
Bob Maichle was
the instrument engineer,
and Mike Roberto,
the instrument systems engineer.
Here is our first result.
It took us just a few weeks
to get this up.
This was before
we'd even figured out
how to calibrate
the instruments.
So we just made up
these little 1-percent
error-bar boxes to put on
because everything seemed
to fit.
And I see Rich Isaacman
is here, also.
He was
the the software-team lead
that helped us
figure this out right away.
So I remember, one day,
they came in with
an autographed interferogram.
And it says
"You know, it's working."
And I was pretty thrilled.
So anyway, when we showed this
to the astronomers,
they were thrilled, too.
And they said, "Okay.
Maybe the Big Bang Theory
is safe after all."
We had some really funny
measurements before this
and some pretty funny theories,
as well.
So if you're a good theorist,
you can explain a lot of things.
If you're a good experimenter,
you know never to believe
what you've measured.
[ Laughter ]
So anyway,
the previous measurements
were all over the map out here.
There's a lot
of excess radiation out here,
and we were all glad
when it went away.
So anyway, the error bar
is now 50 parts per million,
and the temperature
is 2.725 plus or minus
less than 1 millidegree
because of Dale's work.
Pretty astonishing thing, when
we never could've promised that,
but it was there
in the equipment.
It's all because there was
a differential design
that makes it possible
to do that.
So that's one of your lessons
if you're looking for lessons --
make differential measurements.
So Eli Dwek
drew us a cartoon
explaining why
this was important.
"I wish he wouldn't
keep that darn thermostat
at 3 Kelvin."
So anyway,
for good or bad,
the early universe
is very simple for us.
An extraordinarily simple
set of equations
describes everything
we've been able to see
in the early times.
Now, where did these come from?
I don't know.
Anyway,
here's the second experiment.
This is, again,
a differential apparatus.
This was to make a map
of the entire sky.
So what we did was we had
two antennas
pointing in two digressions,
60 degrees apart.
And then we spin the apparatus
in every possible way.
So every possible pair
of sky points
60 degrees apart are compared.
So you have a mountain, like,
hundreds of millions
of measurements of differences
between two parts
of the sky,
and you feed it through
a least-squares-fitting program,
and you get a map of the sky.
So after you've chewed on this
quite hard,
to make sure you, again,
have not made
any serious mistakes,
then you get a map.
And this is the map --
the set of maps that we got
in April of '92.
So this is the one
that Stephen Hawking liked
and said, "It was the most
important scientific discovery
of the century,
if not of all time."
what it is
is a map that shows
that the early universe
is not uniform,
has hot and cold spots
that are only a tiny amount
different from average,
a part in 100,000.
So when Stephen Hawking
said that, I thought,
"Well, that's very generous.
Why do you think
it's so important?"
So now I understand
that this now supports
our entire story
that the early universe
had hot and cold spots,
density variations,
and just the action of gravity
operating on the material then
is able to produce
the universe that we now have.
So an extraordinarily
simple story
that's a lot simpler
than it could've been
if the previous,
wrong measurements
had been correct.
So we're very happy about this.
It took us many months
to confirm this picture.
Ned Wright, who I showed you
the picture of before,
he was the first one
to see the spots
'cause he could make
a computer program himself
with his own PC
that could do what an army
of other people could do.
So he was the first.
Of course, then we couldn't --
Well, suppose he made a mistake.
Also, it was a team process,
so we had to work it through.
So we missed many, many,
many months
checking that
that was a correct result.
And you might remember,
this was the days
of polywater and cold fusion.
And so we were
definitely certain
that we did not want
to go off half-cocked.
So we worked very hard
to get that.
Now, we still were
a little in doubt.
But then the WMAP mission
was flown.
This was conceived
by Chuck Bennett,
our deputy P.I.
for the DMR on COBE,
with David Wilkinson
at Princeton.
And so it was a joint project
of Goddard
and Princeton University.
And so that's what
it looked like.
Again, it's, by the way,
a differential device,
two identical halves
looking out
in different directions
across the sky.
The angle between them
is not 60, but it's close.
So again, hundreds of millions
of measurements
to compare different parts
of the sky.
And they made this map.
So again, the cosmic
hot and cold spots
are confirmed.
Most of these little dots
are cosmic.
The red band across the middle
is local.
But miraculously enough,
they agree.
The COBE map agrees
with this map where it should.
So what can you do
with a map like that?
You can make a power spectrum.
This is the spherical version
of a power spectrum
or basically an analysis
of the hot and cold spots.
And what we find is
there's a particular size
of about 1 degree in scale,
which --
It turns out to be a measurement
of the effective size
of the universe
at the time
that it became transparent.
So that was
a wonderful surprise.
We didn't even know
that this would be there
when we made our first concept
of flying the COBE.
In fact, when we proposed
the COBE satellite,
there was no serious prediction
or whatever
for what this should be.
Then Chuck Bennett
made a lovely plot
of the exponential decay
of the predictions with time.
Anyway, we finally got there.
And now, it turns out
that every, single bump
on this curve matters.
And they are all
beautifully represented
by a pretty simple theory
that, however, requires you
to believe
two impossible things --
dark matter and dark energy.
So if you believe those things,
we have, now, their values
from this.
And we've quite a nice
set of numbers, then.
So the curious thing
is that this thing,
the dark energy,
which was thought,
for generations, to be zero,
is dominant.
And the result
is that the universe
is geometrically flat.
If you would take
a slice of the universe,
all through 13.7 billion years
after the Bang,
measure the sum
of angles of a triangle,
it'll always be 180 degrees.
So it's geometrically flat.
Despite Einstein's
giving us curved space-time,
that particular piece of it
is flat.
So the other weird part here
is dark matter,
which was also "who asked
for that" sort of stuff.
But it's also dominant.
In fact, if it weren't there,
we wouldn't be here, either.
So even though
you can't see it,
taste it, smell it, feel it,
see it in any way,
we should probably be calling it
transparent matter
rather than dark.
Nevertheless,
it's really important to us.
Third experiment was this one.
This is called the DIRBE,
the Diffuse Infrared
Background Experiment.
Mike Hauser was
the principle investigator.
And this was to make
a map of the sky
in infrared wavelengths.
So what did they find?
By the way, again,
this is a differential device.
There's a tuning-fork
chopper here,
which compares the incoming sky
with the cold interior
of the device.
So this was able to produce
a couple,
quite remarkable results
we had not fully
understood, even now.
The sky is a lot brighter
than people knew.
If you add up the brightnesses
of all the galaxies
you can find,
they do not add up
to everything.
And so there's
an infrared component
to this universe of ours
that was unexpected.
Well, it's not
completely unexpected.
We did know enough about it
to go looking,
but people did not expect it
to be this bright.
Roughly half of the starlight
that's ever been produced
has been reabsorbed by dust
and turned into infrared.
No, that was
a bit of a surprise.
So I guess we're running
out of time, eventually.
But I wanted to tell you a few
things about more modern stuff.
So this is what the universe
looked like for NASA in 1985.
NASA got a whole lot
of good astronomers together
to explain to Congress why we
needed four great observatories.
We needed the Hubble,
the Spitzer,
the Chandra, and the Compton
GRO observatories
because all of these things
were open questions.
And how did the universe begin?
This was before COBE had flown.
So there were things
that might've been different.
Some we can now answer,
Big Bang -- although now,
we just put the question
back a little farther.
What was before that?
Will we find
new laws of physics?
Yes, we did.
We found dark matter
and dark energy for sure
and probably inflation.
The inflation theory
of the early universe
has been tested and confirmed
by the WMAP and results.
How did the galaxies form?
Well, the Hubble gave us
a big surprise on that
which confidently predicted
that they weren't
the way they are
by the very best theorists.
So how were the stars born?
It's still pretty mysterious
to us.
It happens in dark places
where you cannot see.
How did life start?
Well, we know it started
at least once.
But are we alone?
Probably.
Who knows?
Good question.
We're working on that.
How were planets formed?
I think, in 1985,
the general opinion
was they were extremely rare,
and you have to work
extremely hard to find them.
And it wasn't very long
before the first few
were being found.
How do stars die?
We didn't yet know that they
would turn into black holes,
although we had predictions,
and certainly, we did not know
that they existed.
So coming along
to what happens after that.
Well, in 1993, we were up there
repairing the Hubble
and making it better.
And so we went
from this kind of picture
to that kind of picture.
So that said, okay, Hubble
is extremely powerful now.
What are we gonna do?
So only a couple of years later,
a committee was formed
under Alan Dressler
to write a book.
And it's called "HST:
Hubble Space Telescope
And Beyond."
And if you ever want to be
inspired by a committee report,
this is one to try...
[ Laughter ]
because they explain to us
why we needed
to build the James Webb
Space Telescope,
but they didn't
call it that yet,
and also to develop
the technology
for finding
the planets like ours,
so this mattered to me,
though I didn't know it
at the time.
I didn't even know
the committee was working.
So I'm sitting here --
I think it was October 30th
of 1995 --
and I'm thinking, "Well,
I better think
of something else to do
because NASA's
never going to do anything
as exciting as COBE again.
Maybe I should finally look for
a university job, something.
Well, what am I gonna do?"
I'd already
started showing graphs --
viewgraphs around to my friends
about, "Well, we should make
a deployable telescope
because the Spitzer Telescope
is too small."
My friends here gave
a colloquium
to the astrophysics group
over in building 21.
People laughed, and they said,
"We'll never do that.
That's too complicated."
So okay, well, then,
we won't do that.
So however, we are doing that.
And now
it's 6 1/2 meters across
instead of a lot smaller.
And so I'm gonna conclude
with some stories
about this telescope.
So in 1995,
I got the phone call
from Ed Weiler,
who had just been made
the Origins-theme director
at NASA Headquarters.
And the phone message said --
and I wasn't even there
when it came.
He left a message that said,
"I need a proposal tomorrow.
Would you like to work
on this next telescope?
Call up John Campbell.
He knows what this means."
So, of course,
I called up John Campbell.
He knew what it meant.
I was needed to be
a study scientist
for this new telescope.
So at that time --
I was working with the WMAP team
to think about what to do.
And I pretty quickly said,
"I know what my priority's
got to be.
They've got that one handled.
This one's all new.
This will be a lot of fun.
What could
I possibly want more
than to work on that telescope?"
So I said yes,
and we sent our one-page
proposal the following day.
And we got a few hundred K here
at Goddard to start studies.
So it lasted for a long time.
People were very ambitious
and thought it could be done
a lot quicker than it could.
But this is what
we've ended up with.
And for those of you
who are not astronomers
and haven't seen it a lot,
This telescope is 6 1/2 meters,
21 feet across.
So it's much more than
from floor-to-ceiling here.
This umbrella is much bigger
than this room.
It's as big as a tennis court.
Just imagine Roger Federer
running back and forth,
jumping across the fence
in the middle.
And it is now
an international partnership,
which was, by the way,
instruction from Ed Weiler.
It should become
an international partnership.
We knew that it had done
very well for the Hubble
to be
an international partnership,
so now we have.
So European and Canadian
space agencies are chipping in.
We've got instruments
coming from around the world.
By the way, all four of them
have now arrived.
If you come up to building 29,
you can look through
the big glass
and see what we're doing.
you can't actually
see the instruments this week
'cause two of them
are in the big vacuum tank,
and two of them
are hiding in the corner,
but we will be able
to see people working in there.
Operations could be
at the Space Telescope
Science Institute,
as they are for Hubble.
And we're launching in 2018
on a European-supplied rocket,
the ARIANE 5,
which, knock on wood,
has 50-in-a-row good launches.
And we are planning
for operations of 10 years,
at least,
carrying fuel for that.
So in in view
of giving thanks,
some pictures, again,
for people that really made
some important things happen.
James Webb, the man.
We named it after him.
It's the first time
we have named a telescope
after somebody
who wasn't an astronomer.
And so when
this was first proposed
from NASA Headquarters,
astronomers didn't like it.
I think many of us
were too young to know
who James Webb was
and what he had done.
If you want to know about him,
there's a wonderful book
called "Powering Apollo"
by a proper historian.
And so James Webb, the man,
is much more astonishing
than you could possibly imagine.
I think there's probably
no other person in the world
that could have made
the Apollo program happen.
When you read about him, it --
I'm in awe.
So Garth Illingworth,
in 1989, an astronomer,
chaired a committee
and a meeting,
and they wrote a book
this thick
about what should the new
telescope be after Hubble.
This is even before Hubble
had been launched.
Ed Weiler
I told you of already.
Alan Dressler, who's the chair
of the committee
that wrote the inspiring
committee report.
Dan Goldin.
Alan Dressler went
to see Dan Goldin
and explained
the committee report,
and they hit it off.
So anyway, Dan,
very unusual for administrators,
Dan went to
the Astronomical Society meeting
the following January
and announced
that Alan's report was good,
that it was not
nearly ambitious enough.
Alan's report asked
for a 4-meter telescope.
We would build one
6 1/2 meters or more.
And so we were kind of amazed.
But peer review kicked in,
and he got a standing ovation.
So that was the thing
that began our project
to really start rolling.
And so immediately,
people volunteered to work
on this project,
engineers all around Goddard,
engineers in the various
aerospace contractors,
astronomers.
Everybody wanted to participate.
So the following summer,
we had three giant team reports,
and all of them concluded, "Yes,
we could really
build this project,"
and roughly how to do it.
Other people -- Peter Stockman
was my counterpart
at the Space Telescope
Institute.
He's now retired.
Two chairmen of
the Astronomy Society,
Rob Kirshner
and John Huchra,
both helped us gain traction
with this.
John, I think, even chaired
a committee for us
for the telescope
to help choose
the spectrometer.
John Campbell was the person
who I called up to say,
"What is this phone call about?"
And he was our study
manager for a few months
until we recruited
Bernie Seery to take over.
Rick Howard, by the way,
I put on here.
He was a more recent person
at NASA headquarters.
When we got our project
into trouble,
he took took on the job
of explaining to Congress
why we now knew what
the right thing to do was,
and so we owe him
a lot of thanks.
It wasn't an easy thing to do.
I'm afraid I'll lose my time,
so I want to just tell
one thing about that.
Couple of years ago,
maybe 3 years ago,
it was recognized
that the budget
we were requesting
was always bigger every year
than what we had
previously requested,
and Senator Mikulski
was getting
kind of annoyed with us.
You could tell.
So at a certain point,
even though she was thrilled
with astronomy,
thrilled with NASA,
and a very inspiring person
to talk with,
she said, basically, "Enough.
Tell us
what the real answer is."
And so this is
a really remarkable story
because it enabled NASA
to explain directly to Congress
what the answer was.
Ordinarily, when we have
a thing to tell Congress,
we tell the OMB first.
And OMB says, "No.
Can't tell them that."
That's the normal thing
to happen.
"We're not gonna ask Congress
for that much money."
So curiously enough,
this letter that
Senator Mikulski sent us
required us to answer directly,
so we did.
And so we had to now produce
the real answer,
the one that doesn't say,
"Well, we can get by
with this for this year,
but we'll probably have
to ask for more next."
This was the real answer,
including all the possible
margin error request,
all of the allowance
for technical problems,
earthquakes, storms, fires --
anything that might
happen to you.
We didn't allow
for sequestration and layoffs.
But practically everything else,
we had to allow for.
So even a new statistical tool
was asserted at this point,
called the joint
confidence level analysis.
And finally,
people began to accept it.
So eventually, Congress,
which threatened to kill
the project completely,
said, "Okay."
And they put us in the budget
at the number
that we had requested.
So Rick was a pretty important
part of this process,
so many thanks to him.
A few other people
to tell you about.
These are members
of our Science Working Group.
We are a very widespread
international team.
Since time is short,
I won't tell you
very much about them.
but about half of them
are competitively selected,
and the other half are
ex officio people like me.
Many more,
many of us are here at Goddard.
Couple of special people
at headquarters.
Eric Smith was here at Goddard.
He was my deputy
on this project for a while.
He took on the amazing challenge
of going to headquarters
and making it happen from there.
So he is still doing that.
Hashima Hasanis Deputy Program
Scientist at headquarters.
Our Technical Leadership here
is a very large team,
but still not nearly as large
as you might imagine.
These are the people here
who are making this happen.
And some of them
are not all here.
She's in California.
He's in Scotland.
Let's see.
He's in California.
He's with
the Northrop Grumman contract.
So this is a small portion
of our team here at Goddard.
This is the big model.
Does not fly.
It's made of steel.
And about 150 people here.
Still only a tenth or so
of the worldwide team
that it takes to build
this observatory.
Most of the rest
are at the prime contractor
and his various subcontractors.
European team is now
pretty much finished
because they've delivered
their stuff,
except for the rocket.
So I'm actually in there,
wearing sunglasses.
How does the observatory work?
It's huge.
It's stuffed into
the top of the rocket.
This is the area in five faring.
There's hardly an inch
to spare anywhere.
So it's good
we didn't actually claim
we could build an 8-meter.
We are putting it far away
where you cannot get there
by human travel at any rate.
If we ever did need
to service this,
we would probably
have to send in
a specially constructed robot.
And we know where
we would attach it,
but we hope we don't
ever have to think about it.
So our job is make sure
we never need it.
So how do we...
Well, this is our
"Seven Minutes of Terror" movie.
this is the unfolding
of the telescope after launch.
First,
the solar panels come out,
then the telemetry dish,
then the big umbrella,
five-layer umbrella.
This, just the movie,
is a huge accomplishment.
[ Laughter ]
Just as a point on that,
when I came here to Goddard,
there was a computer at my desk.
It was round,
and it had two pointers,
and it was slide rule.
And I had one already myself.
And when people started
to design the COBE satellite,
they had big pieces of paper
and 4H pencils,
so that's what it took.
You could never have imagined
doing something like this
with pencils.
So this enables us
to see things
before we build them
and see if they would
possibly fit together
and to detect things
that would go wrong
before they go wrong.
but they're still also
no substitute for tests.
If anyone should
ever tell you,
"We're gonna prove it's true
by analysis,"
tell them, "No."
[ Light laughter ]
So finally, it is deployed
to the right shape.
And this all happens within
a couple of weeks of launch.
It then takes 2 months
to coast out
to the launch area,
I mean, to the orbit area
and also to cool down
to the right temperature.
And then we're enabled
to focus it.
Now, did I think of this myself?
No.
When we started
thinking about this,
we had a meeting at
the Space Telescope Institute.
And about 15 or 20 people,
including a good draftsman,
came,
and engineers
and scientists came.
And we mumbled about
what it would take
and what orbit it should be.
And I like to remind people
that you just cannot tell
how hard it's gonna be
when you draw a sketch
on a whiteboard.
Just no way.
And when you've got
a sketch on the whiteboard,
it's easy to make
the telescope bigger,
make the person smaller.
So we didn't know
what it was gonna take,
and we clearly underestimated.
But we did learn, of course,
from Hubble,
that we'd better learn
how to focus.
So this is one
of the things we did.
We built a scale model.
All of these 18 hexagons
are adjustable in position
and curvature.
And there's an algorithm,
which was derived from
the Hubble algorithms,
that enables us to focus in
and make a star image sharp.
We also learned from Hubble
that a end-to-end focus test
was a good idea.
And here is the test program
we have created.
This is at the Johnson
Space Flight Center.
Apollo astronauts rehearsed
into this chamber.
And nowadays,
we are building a clean room
in front of that giant door.
So we will have the telescope
in there in a few years
verifying that it still focuses
when it's cold.
It is truly enormous.
It's about twice as big
in every dimension
as our big chamber.
And so it makes you dizzy
when you get to the top,
just to look down.
So we'll be there
long enough to test it.
I'm gonna wrap up
with just a couple of things
more about science.
The hot topic of today
is planets and transits.
We designed our observatory
not knowing that this would be
a possible technique.
But Kepler has found us
well over 3,000
candidate objects like this
where a planet goes
in front of the star
and blocks some starlight,
and you can tell
how big the planet is.
And Hubble and Spitzer
have both observed
these kinds of events.
With Spitzer, you can see
a warm planet
going behind the star
and being eclipsed, as well.
So both of these
are really important
because they let you study
the planets
and even not only find out
how big they are
and how warm they ought to be
because of the orbit,
but even to do some spectroscopy
on the planets themselves
and learn whether
they're anything like Earth.
So with the Webb Telescope,
we think, with a proper target,
we might be able to tell
if the Earthlike planet
we find has water,
has enough steam
to make an ocean.
So a very, very ambitious thing,
and I think we're very fortunate
that we designed
something that could do
this work,
even though
it was not in the plan.
Just a couple words
about the Nobel and all that.
I got a phone call
on October 3rd of 2006.
it was just a little
before breakfast.
I was still in bed.
The question, first one was,
"Are you the John Mather
that works at NASA?"
And, "Okay, yes, I am."
So they wanted to inform me
that we're receiving
the prize that year.
So this is the press release,
"For discovery
of the blackbody form."
And blackbody form is the curve
with the little boxes on it.
And the anisotropy,
which is Greek,
and it means
"the universe is lumpy."
[ Laughter ]
So I got to show this chart
a whole heck of a lot.
And I got to go get my diploma
from the King of Sweden.
The physics is mentioned
first in Nobel's will,
so the Physics prize
is the first one given,
so I'm the first one up.
So my big worry is,
am I gonna trip?
Am I gonna remember
which way to bow?
So you're instructed to bow
in three different directions,
first to the king,
then to the committee
and the royalty behind him,
and then to the audience.
So I got to talk to the Queen
at dinner about her children.
And I've been
doing this a lot now.
[ Laughter ]
As Claire mentioned,
I do a lot of public outreach.
Just a couple words
about what's coming next.
Few years ago
this cartoon came out --
"Everything we know
about the universe
is wrongedy-wrong-wrong."
And here's an example.
These lads discovered
that the universe
is accelerating.
And this was the discovery
of the dark energy.
This was a 1998 discovery
using the Hubble
Space Telescope.
And they finally got their Nobel
2 years ago for doing this.
So I'd like to put this
in a cultural context,
which is Jefferson's.
Jefferson wrote
in the Declaration
of Independence
about the Laws of Nature
and of Nature's God.
And then he talked about these
human being things.
"We hold these truths
to be self-evident."
And we scientists have
an interesting challenge
to go from the first
to the second.
So I think we're part
of this process,
but we are only a small part.
So thanks very much for coming.
I have many more stories
to tell you,
but it's been a pleasure
to be here today.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
-Now, because of time,
I think I'll allow one comment.
And then we'll have time
to go one more time,
and that's it.
Comment, question?
Yes, please.
-[ Speaking indistinctly ]
Yeah, I was asking
are we trying to point
the James Webb Telescope
to Earth?
-No. No, we --
-[ Speaking indistinctly ]
-No, actually --
So the question question was,
can we point the telescope
at Earth?
And the answer is, no, we can't
point in that direction.
We're putting the telescope
far away to keep it cold.
And if we ever pointed it
at the Earth, it would be warm.
So there are lots
of other planets to look at.
All of the ones
from Mars outwards, we can see.
-I asked because
I wanted to see,
are you gonna set it
as a reference?
-Ah.
-No.
We don't have to use that.
Okay?
So the book, by the way,
I have copies of these books
in my office.
I don't have any today,
but if you want
to come get them, I have them.
$10.
[ Laughter ]
