This episode of astronomy cast is brought to you bye swing burn astronomy online the world longest running online astronomy degree program this it astronomy dot s w i n died at u dot eighty for more information. One yeah episode one hundred on december fourteenth two thousand nine in rico fair watching strongly cancer restricting because most really understand. Not only what we know what how we know what we know my name is strange paint on the publisher university him with me his doctor time with you western and southern illinois university. Okay. Hey fraser how's it going going very well the old one interesting announcement for for the new year would you said we never have in other organization that we fall underneath right. Right so it for the past year and a half this right before the internationally or just run we started. We kind of realize that there's a lot of us doing the media projects that. Well it would be good if we all had one home one on bravo that we could fit under so you lie along with phil plate and uh d. u s single point of contact for the international here i was trying to me that gets spell and one of our local faculty members tom foster. And with help from crippling type who this guy like cecil we established and a new nonprofit called asterisk your new media which anyone to learn about at after this year dot org. And this is the new way to get your donations to making the media happened tax deductible. And your donations will help the show and there's also links to three hundred sixty five days of astronomy to d. I wait a second life island and to a number of other projects that were involved with yeah i mean i think they're still recovering from v do eugene amount of bureaucracy paperwork there was required to actually make this. Happen and now we can move on to the actual one part where we come up with projects and get involved i mean i think. We're both really committed shoe helping people learn about astronomy giving people who've never had a chance to look through a telescope. Helping them learn more and just kind of taking boom to do the word out and and join people why we figure from you just grazing so we've got. Astronomy cast we've got astronomy through sixty five we've gone other projects we're gonna be working on a miserable when you try to keep at all altogether and in a way that people can donate and get involved so. Stay tuned. And this this is just one more way they were gonna keep the international here of astronomy legacy maintain into the future and i cannot explain how good it is to have that experience behind me yeah. They don't contact don't screen what a what are your kept yeah. So today's episode astronomy cow excuse about another famous astronomer and we go for we weren't you can look at one of families most famous ideas the family paradox war where are all the unions. What's me demand behind the ideas the names say to the new family mission. And we're gonna do is a little differently or kind of i think you might like this pamela big idea we do but we're going to do the person the man and then uh for the next absorb actually do the mission the new family missions wouldn't do that. And then we've got some others kept floor herschel and the old submissions named after him as well so only be possible that problem but ah that's right now ok so for me was this guy. Well he was the mentality he was born in nineteen a one in italy which is where most italians tend to come from. He was one of these amazing genius people he to. Did things at a young age that kind of boggles the mind so it has essay when he apply for college he sat down to solve the wave equations before waves on a string. And he did it using partial differential equations and for you and i was just which i have to admit is one of the things i was asked to do the graduate school homework assignments that left me thoroughly intimidated i got through it. But i was a graduate student and the person who mark his college entrance i as they which was this horribly hard problem i said that it was a fine piece of work that would have been considered a fine piece of work for a doctor world student. This is what did you just getting into college just getting into college yeah. And he managed to complete all of his college degree bachelors doctoral degree all of it in just four years oh. Yes. I mean new i guess we must really normally had a pretty special guy here and. And help them get access to the cost of the teachers and. Well. This this system was a little bit different back then and and so i think it was much more a matter of of for make came up with ideas and he just did them and. He was able yes he did have the people that devising him but i think when you have i'm mine to that amazing in front if you you just kind of get out of the way and give them the things they need to run as fast as they can. I his first major paper cannot his third year of college. And when he left the university nineteen twenty two he went on to spend semesters at some of the most added pristine just universities all across. All across europe uhhuh one of the things he did shortly after finishing university was he worked with dr- ac- on. At the ever so simple project i'm figuring out what are the energies of all of the particles in a gas of offer me on uh all particles it has to obey d poly exclusion principle. This was one of the things that have been baffling scientists they they couldn't figure out how well like trying to metals behaved why they would flow like current but when he got than expected ways and. It just shortly after finishing his p. h. d. for me sat down with iraq and the two of them solved this project. Soon. Where did you start i mean you know when i see concern each you know it's worth it for me paradox comes from but but we're did he really kind of me because because hidden silence. He he wandered back and forth between quantum mechanics nuclear physics. I his work with direct was purely quantum physics but he also did a lot of work. In particle physics where in fact yep noble prize at the age of thirty seven for sorting out what happens when you bombarded d courses add ins with you trying to tell you can induce radio activity. He open up an entirely new field of science and anyway by by taking careful look at problems and. One of the most powerful things he did what in sorting out problems. He figured out what is the most simple way to approach that's instead of doing eggs well we have to take and consider that consideration that's we have to take into consideration that and we need to have the exact number for that. From you expert at destination he was an expert and cutting things down to what d minimal required information for parameter. This is where for me problems come from uh how do you asked me the number of blade of grass in the football field. And. He was able to look at problems such as new trying barton and and. Use that to sort out okay so if i take a stack of uranium and makes it with cat man coated rides and building this way i can build a sustained nuclear reaction. Right. And it's so in tune with this the experiment did you go out do do noble proxies what would you don't wanna know it was actually just for figuring out the you can do is radio activity that you got to noble prize it was later on in his career that he went on. To create the first i'd chain reaction of nuclear materials. In the united states that we've after that but he went on to work um with the nine hatten project. Figuring out that you could them bard things with new trying to make them radioactive was just the beginning of everything he did and he got to noble prize for point at which he started which is pretty neat okay so very basketball. I sort of you're changing it sort of the next major path in his career and and life was she's involved in in the manhattan project so out of that come about. Well when he got the noble prize in nineteen thirty eight he pretty much went straight from stock home to the united states he and his wife emigrated. One of the problems with nineteen thirty eight italy was it was under the rule of music levy and well world war two ways gearing up to get pretty awful. And they're starting to be restrictions on juice and italy and his wife was jewish and many of his lab assistants were jewish. And he decided to get out well he could like so many scientists yet and so in nineteen thirty eight him a great it's united states went to columbia where he began work. While he was there with able to collaborate with you for who had a lecture shit at princeton he was able to meet with a number of other people and. They built on work done by others that he discovered that well if if you get together a bunch of uranium that you can end up with today nuclear reactions and. They decided to build the first nuclear reactor here the united states and they didn't do it in new york city instead they did it was collaborators the university of chicago. And i'm right go from bank went to chicago and in an old squash court underneath the then not use football field. They built their first what was that not called a nuclear reactor but nuclear pile. This was all done in nineteen thirty eight nineteen thirty nine and it was in december of nineteen thirty nine that they got the first vision experiments to work this was chicago pile number one. It was uh pile of uranium that had enter laced within it grass site and these town me i'm ron to control the rate at which the reactions were current. Wow i. You should dose of radiation. Well how would it kind of amazing it he must've been exposed to radiation pretty much isn't tired career and this was back when we didn't fully understand all the side effects of radiation. So here he was at columbia university where he was working in the lab too in case radio activity through bombarding things with you trying to. I then he goes to chicago and he build the very first nuclear piles there. That he was eh he was there for the trinity experiment outside of los los alamos yeah. He actually was able to estimate deep power of that explosion by dropping shredded it's a paper into the air just as the blast wave of pro ecstasy. How much the blast wave moved to this little pieces of paper he dropped. His entire life he's constantly in the heart of all of these radioactive experiment and the truth as he ended up dying in his early fifties stomach cancer and. You can't proved definitively that the reason he got this was due to his work with radiation. But he was still a young man in many ways when he passed away and so me he was you know pretty deeply involved in getting the first nuclear weapons built. Right so he was one of the people that figure it out what is required for chain reaction he was one of the people that worked on defining the shapes that are needed. He was never at least not that i i've found documentation up one of the people who pushed to get nuclear weapons don't. But he did moved to los alamos national lab during the later stages manhattan project to work as a general consultant. He was there when all of these things began to happen he was there when the hand for d reactor first one critical in nineteen forty four. And um it interestingly enough also became that system united states the same time that he was working in the los alamos national laboratory. Right oh i'm sure his citizenship was fast tracked probably just a little bit. But it the focus of his work was never developing nuclear weapons the focus of his work was understanding particle physics understanding how to solve problems he is. No this perhaps the best person had doing both experimental and theoretical physics to have lived during his century he was the type of person it was wasn't onto that all that mathematics but. Given the choice is all day long complicated equations or going down to lab and throwing things some things together and building a very complicated meticulous experiment he was comfortable doing either. But he always selected the most straightforward wrapped the solution that's that's interesting that's a very valuable. Shaquille i think a lot of so i just as you said there you know they can be very. Mathematically inclined into down really speaks room the equation and. You know and me too extreme dri- where they're making being they're coming with mathematical models to can never be experiments we tested. Well and on the uh on the flip side you've got experiments or some you don't have a limited range of the things were able to do but i think that's very true try so he was very practical you know that each. But he was only interested in the klein's oh ideas that he could demonstrate with speech skills that he house. And probably never no rapid turn it being able to sort of told when i do you it down to the lap- smashed things together she's worked come up with another idea as you said that sort of thing. Um being able to sort of scribble win i do you write down notes bare essentials. That's a a pretty great scope out. And at it allowed him to make a lot of progress and difficult projects that required statistical thinking during the time when we didn't have computers they could readily choose through every possible option. His ability to in place statistics to understand sample theory for instance lead to. Whole new ways of looking at what was likely to happen a particle physics particle physics you're you're dealing with a whole lot of. Okay so we have this many tend to the ah a lot of this at this temperature with these characteristics we know within that they're going to have this distribution of energies and they're going to have this distribution emotions. And it's very easy to quickly in today's world take all of that and say okay i'm going to build a simulation within my computer that contains ten million particles set it loose and see what happened. Well they couldn't do that during the nineteen forties. And for me have the ability to say okay so let so. Looking calculations of d distribution leads look at just his dickel sampling method let look at. Sitting down and just chilling through hard core page after page of doing this sample of this group over here the samples this group over here. And what was amazing in many ways about this was. He had no problems getting down went had when he had to do the meticulous calculations we now do with excel and chewing through them one after another after another doing the same calculation. Hundreds of times it might if they needed for a hundred different cases then who is happy to do the boring tedious work but he deal intellectual flexibility to say i can see statistics i can just you sample. And that fluid at making powerful. And so then after the manhattan project what happened to. Well he kept working on in different ways to nuclear reactions he kept working on study particle physics he was one of the people who. Stepped back and said look that the nuclear bombs that you're looking on building he just can't do that it it requires prohibitive. Announces tricky um it's. Just not a fusion reaction they can be propagate it so he actually stood up against edward teller and said you have to rethink your plan. But he also went on to do works studying d unstable times and you want new clear particles that thing get created during a variety of different reactions and are very hard to study because they very quickly to kate other things. He was also a professor and one of the things he had a habit of doing was coming up with a whole list of projects and he from the not the students and. One of the next it's keep give these amazingly complicated problems to students in the end amazing students. And they'd go off and they'd work very hard and he would've already solved confuse board and wanted to know the solution. But he'd let the students keep full credit for what they did although as a mentor he was a pretty amazing person as well. So he'd actually give them. The kinds of things if someone might write a paper about if they solve the problem. Right right. And the problems that he'd give them where it stream like complicated problems hadn't involved but he just get impatient involved a lot ride and. Then wait for the student to come back with the published solution right but i think how you know half of the challenge of this is is knowing which questions to ask trades. That's where you get that practical. Terrence where someone could say well. This is a good question ask because it's but she mobile until something interesting it's not impossible it's it's doable and then right you know and that's those are some of the best questions you can out the ones you can actually find the answer to which is great. Oh i love this guy lotus gosh. He he was he's the type of person. That you can't help but be inspired by i he engender say car i think are and they were both at the university of chicago it over laughing point in time. There there to scientist that you have to respect and for it not just they're brilliant but. Their style with which they worked for me kept detailed notes if everything he did uh it walking around with no books everywhere and recording his thoughts recording problems recording solutions. And he was famous in later life for people would come to him with complicated projects complicated mathematical problems relating to send six. And he'd flip through his notebooks to find where he'd worked on similar problems in past years earlier in his career and he pulled together the pieces to solve the modern day problems. So he in many ways was it creating his always body of work that he could forever build on to solve new problems in new ways i i don't know how many times i personally have. Had a conversation of my office with myself along the lines okay i know i did something similar to this where did i put it. I don't personally keep the types of volumes of notebooks that for me was able to keep and and that clearing instead of writing as well as of thought as well as of record keeping. Allowed him to always move and a four direction and not have to cycle back like some of these ah so many of us have to do ones. And so then hm at the end of his wife to you gotta stomach cancer. He died of something cancer fifty four he's known look for. How do you even towards his dad i eugene waiting or uh wrote that ten days before for me died he told me i hope it won't take long. He knew when it was over and he accepted that and so for him is just always. A motion forward. So what would you say i mean this is gonna be challenged so what would you say work for me biggest contributions to fuel astronomy. And we're gonna get you know next week we're gonna get into the mission that's named after right. So it his there is induced radiation which got him the nobel prize and all this is work on nuclear bombardment help us understand help particles both the ok and how they built. And super know that this is something that happens on a regular basis super never goes off and you have a slash of new trying to nutri does that had out from all as nuclear reactions that are going on during the stars collapsed. And this bombardment of new trying on elements that are in the shell of material that's given off by the super nova these new tries because what are called the fast process the are processed. Which very quickly you take some fairly normal out i mean you bombarded with you try bar it was new truck bart was new trunks and is it a try collapse down and become prime time turning that i'm in until heavier and heavier element. So. Because it him we have a better understanding of how you're able to build on answering super now it also gives better and you're standing. Of the product the processes by which it decay can happen and he radioactive material baited a k that process by which new trying are you there formed. Or destroyed converting back and forth from press times with either positive i'm thinking that it or like trying to ping in that it. This this. Bait educate process i with something that for me helps define and which defines the creation of nuclear element and stars and into pronounce explosions. And of course um we weren't done a whole showing this but um you can give them give a little reminder of the others paradox. Right so hm one of the things that bears his name is uh what are called for me problems this is where you look at something and you say okay how can i solve this but my straightforward method. Um as i mentioned earlier the how many played the clock grass are there in the football field. And one for me problem that he had was. Where all the a lan. If you go click back because the envelope calculation of. How long it would take a civilization it to send out space probes to the nearest start it from there they sent off to to the nearest to start each of those enough to tears to stars. You very quickly can populate d entire galaxy with little space probes are going forth and. Basically communicating hey we've got life over here. To life elsewhere in the galaxy. And we haven't seen this this finishes prove there's life out there. And the fact that we haven't seen this defendant creases referred to as for me paradox right even the most conservative estimates for the amount of intelligent life there must be in the u. galaxy. Would still have. The solar system crawling with pros. And and the only way to get around for me paradox is to either say the lights out there doesn't care and isn't out there spreading the word that they exist. Or that we're alone. Worthy distances or just to about. But there is some almost physical wall. That's that that produced preventing cost me able to reach them from won't won't which is job depressing thought to right and and it's the one that technologically is the hardest to understand because. Even at our early stage and development as a civilization we've managed to fling things out beyond the edge of our solar system yeah item you're seventy thousand years voyager will of them both arrived if in your store. Right we did it so like if you so. Yeah yeah so it's a if you haven't already listen to the to the episode the whole show on the drink equation in the front information paradox and. And they're both of you know what what a great question it's it took pose was at all i often have to true think about. And wondering and it shows the clarity is how he looked at the universe is nice straight forward well statistically i he's not someone i'd ever want to get in any sort of an argument with. But he's remembered for so many different things that have his name on it there's for me direct statistics but i think is broken every student she's ever taken quantum mechanics on at least one homework problem. There's for me problems that are done by school children to teach them estimation there's just. Even a computer that he developed one of the very first computers to be able to do monty carla simulations was an analog computers it for me built. Um so there's a for me at computer bearing his name and then of course element one hundred on the periodic table is named after for me will thanks normal and next week we're gonna talk about the mission named after him with now in space helping to look at some of b d i was using ordering subject i'm down fifty but astronomy care we quit backspace stranger because transcripts for every episode are available on our website check it out it's running here any comments questions or p practice photos right okay wherever you know so short nonprofit educational resources quite a boyfriend advance our family day we're supported through the confirmation what's right with you you're enjoying seven cats one i have a sort of thing help favorite band with just what was the only way all the websites although they have forgotten about them over u s taxpayers you can support sure for free right nine zero four recommend it to your friends every little bit helps equipment according to our website instructions subscribe to the show on your body of the software after i do dot com aforethought yeah though x. amount worth it or not even defrauded trevor plural sure was that it is programs astronomy capital murder southern illinois universe where we're at all would never support in universe today uhhuh rules wow oh uhhuh uhhuh oh them
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