YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Filippenko

lines on the record: 185
first: 2020-11-08
most recent: 2020-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Earth isn't special for any particular reason. There are lots of planets in our solar system and especially around other stars. And occasionally there are going to be ones that are conducive to the development of complexity culminating in life as we know it. And that's a beautiful story.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's magnificent needn't have been that way. And this is one of the multiverse sort of things. You can alter the laws of physics or even the constants of nature seemingly inconsequential things like the mass ratio of the proton and the neutron wake me up when it's over, right? What could be more boring? But it turns out you play with things a little bit like the ratio of the mass of the neutron to the proton and you generally get boring universes only hydrogen or only helium or only iron. You don't even get the rich periodic table let alone bacteria, paramecia slugs and humans. I'm not even anthropomorphizing this to the degree that I could. Even a rich periodic table wouldn't be possible if certain constants weren't this way. Lucky, but I actually think there are lots and lots just like there are lots of planets.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying we're the epitome of all life forever, but at least for life on earth so far, the evidence suggests that we are the epitome in terms of the richness of our thoughts, the degree to which we can explore the universe, do experiments, build machines, understand our origins. And I just hope that we use science for good, not evil, and that we don't end up destroying ourselves. I mean, the whales and dolphins are plenty intelligent. They don't ask abstract questions. They don't read books. But on the other hand, they're not in any danger of destroying themselves and everything else as well. And so maybe that's a better form of intelligence, but at least in terms of our ability to explore and make use of our minds, I mean, to me, it's this. It's this that. Gives me the potential for meaning.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it does. It does. And this is sort of what I was referring to, that it's a beautiful universe that allows us to come into creation, right? It's a way that the universe found of knowing, of understanding itself, because I don't think that inanimate rocks and stars and black holes and things have any real capability of abstract thoughts and of learning about the rest of the universe or even their origins. I mean, they're just a pile of atoms has no conscience, has no ability to think, has no ability to explore. And we do.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read a lot of books, if that's what you wanted to do, had a lot of perspectives on life. You traveled the world if that's what you wanted to do. But if some of these things are not within reach, you're in a socioeconomic position where you can't travel the world or whatever, you find other forms of meaning. It doesn't have to be some profound I'm going to change the world. I'm going to be the one who everyone remembers type thing, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just has to be something that gives you meaning, that gives you satisfaction, that gives you a good feeling about what you did. And often based on human nature, which can be very good and also very bad, but often it's the things that help others that give us meaning and a feeling of satisfaction, you taught someone to read. You cared for someone who was terminally ill. You brought up a nice family. You brought up your kids. You did a good job. You put your heart and soul into it.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From my personal life is what you make of it, really, right? Each of us has to have our own meaning. And it doesn't have to be Well, I think that in many cases meaning is to some degree associated with goals. You set some goals or expectations for yourself, things you want to accomplish, things you want to do, things you want to experience, and to the degree that you experience those and do those things, it can give you meaning. You don't have to change the world the way Newton or Michelangelo or Da Vinci did. I mean, people often say, change the world, but look, come on, there are seven and a half, close to eight billion of us now. Most of us are not going to change the world. And does that mean that most of us are leading meaningful lives? No.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invert courage questions, you know, and uh. Yeah, you know, definitely. I mean, you know. I encourage questions. I like it when students ask questions. I tell them that they shouldn't feel shy about asking a question. Probably half the students in the class would have that same question if they even understood the material enough to ask that question. Yeah.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, in many cases, they were quite good questions, and Feynman said, well, the rest of you should be having questions like this. And I remember one time in particular when He said to the rest of the class, Why is it always these two? Aren't the rest of you curious about what I'm saying? Do you really understand it all that well? If so, why aren't you asking the next most logical question? No, you guys are too scared to ask these questions that these two are asking. So he actually invited us to lunch a couple of times where just the three of us sat and had lunch with one of the greatest thinkers of 20th century physics. And so, yeah, he rubbed off on me.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very, very rewarding when you have students who are really into it. And, you know, going back to Feynman, At Caltech, I was taking these graduate courses, and there were two of us, myself and Jeff Richmond, who's now a professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara, who asked lots of questions. And a lot of the Caltech students are nervous about asking questions. They want to save face. They seem to think that if they ask a question, their peers might think it's a stupid question. Well, I didn't really care what people thought, and Jeff Richmond didn't either. And we ask all these questions.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense the baseball sniffs out all possible paths. It goes out to the Andromeda Galaxy and then goes to the batter. But the probability of doing that is very, very small because tiny little paths next door to any given path cancel out that path. And the ones that all add together, they are the ones that are more likely to be followed. And this actually ties in with Fairmont's principle of least action and their ideas and optics that go into this as well. And just sort of beautifully brings everything together. But the particle sniffs out all possible paths. What a crazy idea. But if you do the mathematics associated with that, it ends up being actually useful. Useful way of looking at”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When there were particles splitting off from one another and all that. And it looked a little bit like a bunch of a hodgepodge at first, but to those who learned the rules and understood them, they saw that you could do these complex calculations in a much simpler way. And indeed, in some ways, Freeman Dyson had an even better knack for explaining really what quantum electrodynamics actually was. But I didn't know Freeman Dyson, I knew Feynman. Maybe he did have a more intuitive view of the world than Feynman did, but of the people I knew Feynman was the most intuitive, most sort of, is there a picture? Is there a simple way you can understand this? In the path that a particle follows, even, you know, you can figure out, you can get the classical path, at least, you know, for a baseball or something like that, by using quantum physics if you want. But, you know, in”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philosophical level, no sort of physical. How do you draw a mental picture or a picture on paper of what's going on? And he's perhaps most famous in this regard for his Feynman diagrams, which in what's called quantum electrodynamics, a quantum field theory of electricity and magnetism, what you have are actually, you know, an exchange of photons between charged particles, and they might even be virtual photons if the particles are at rest relative to one another. And there are ways of doing calculations that are brute force, that take pages on pages and pages of calculations. And Julian Schwinger developed some of the mathematics for that and won the Nobel Prize for it. But Feynman had these diagrams that he made, and he had a set of rules of what to do at the vertex. He'd have two particles coming together and then a particle going out and then two particles coming out again. And he'd have these rules associated when there were vertices.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He tried to bring to his students and he felt that if you can't explain something in a reasonably simple way to a non-scientist or at least someone who is versed a little bit with science but is not a professional scientist, then you probably don't understand it very well yourself, very thoroughly. So that in me, Made a desire to be able to explain science to the general public. And I've often found that in explaining things, yeah, there's a certain part that I didn't really understand myself. That's one reason I like to teach the introductory courses to the lay public is that I sometimes find that my explanations are lacking in my own mind. So he did that for me”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. He was quite a character. And one of the deepest thinkers of all time probably, and at least in my life, the physicist who had the single most intuitive understanding of how nature works of anyone I've met, I learned a number of things from him. He was not my thesis advisor. I worked with Wallace Sargent at Caltech on what are called active galaxies, big black holes in the centers of galaxies that are accreting or swallowing material, a little bit like the stuff of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics 2020. But Feynman, I had for two courses. One was general theory of relativity at the graduate level, and one was applications of quantum physics to all kinds of interesting things. And he had this very intuitive way of looking at things that he tried to”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the supernova is the one. I mean, I touch upon the subject earlier in my course, in fact, right about now in my lectures, because I talk about how our sun right now is fusing hydrogen to form helium nuclei. And later, it'll form carbon and oxygen nuclei. But that's where the process will stop for our sun. It's not massive enough. Some stars that are more massive can go somewhat beyond that. So that's the beginning of this idea of the birth of the heavy elements since they couldn't have been born at the time of the Big Bang conditions of temperature and pressure weren't sufficient to make any significant quantities of the heavier elements. And so that's the beginning. But then you need some of these stars to explode, right? Because if those heavy elements remained forever trapped in the cores of stars, then they would not be available for the production of new stars planets.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What a beautiful story. I mean, if that does not put you at least in awe, if not in love with science and its power of deduction, I don't know what will, right? It's one of the greatest stories, if not the greatest story. Obviously, that's personality dependent and all that. It's a subjective opinion, but it's perhaps the greatest story ever ever told. I mean, you could link it to the Big Bang and go even farther, right? To make an even more complete story. But as a subset, that's even in some ways a greater story than even the existence of the universe in some ways, because you could end up, you could just imagine some really boring universe that never leads to sentient creatures such as ourselves.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those elements, the phosphorus in our DNA, they all came from stars, from nuclear reactions and stars, and they were ejected into the cosmos and in some cases like iron made during the explosions. And those gases drifted out, mixed with other clouds, made a new star or a star cluster, some of whose members then evolved and exploded, thus enriching the gases in the galaxy progressively more. Our solar system formed with a rocky earth like planet, and somewhere somehow these self replicating, evolving molecules, bacteria formed, and evolved through paramecia and amoebas and slugs and apes and us. And here we are sentient beings that can ask these questions about our very origins. And with our intellect and with the machines we make. Come to a reasonable understanding of our origins.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, gives birth to expanding gases that are chemically enriched, and those expanding gases mix with other chemically enriched expanding gases or primordial clouds of hydrogen and helium. I mean, this is, in a sense, the greatest story ever told, right? I try to, I teach this introductory astronomy course at Berkeley, and I tell them there's only five or six things that I want them to really understand and remember. And I'm going to come to their deathbed and I'm going to ask them about this and if they get it wrong, I will retroactively fail. Their whole career will have been shot. It's student force nightmare. Observe a total solar eclipse, and yet they had the opportunity to do so. I will retroactively fail them. But one of them is, you know, where did we come from? Where did the elements in our DNA come from? The carbon in our cells, the oxygen that we breathe, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our red blood cells.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, yeah. We would be okay In most cases, we'd be okay because our galaxy is 100,000 light years across And you'd need one of these things to be within about 10 light years to be an existential threat.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I certainly don't want one to be very nearby, and it would have to be within something like 10 light years to be an existential threat.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the supernova cosmology project had 40, but the 16 were better measured than the 40. And so our statistical uncertainties were comparable if you look at the two papers that were published.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I showed that if you spread the light out into a spectrum, you can tell spectroscopically that these things are different as well. And in 1991, I happened to study two of the extreme peculiar ones, the low luminosity ones and the high luminosity ones, 1991 BG and 1991 T this showed that not all the 1A's are the same. And indeed, at the time of 1991, I was a little bit skeptical that we could use type 1As because of this diversity that I was observing. But in 1993, Mark Phillips wrote a paper that showed this correlation between the light curve, the brightness versus time, and the peak luminosity. This gives you enough information to...”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decline in brightness, and it turns out rise in brightness as well, more slowly than the less luminous 1As. And so if you calibrate this by measuring a whole bunch of nearby ones, and then you look at a distant one, instead of saying, well, it's a 100 watt type 1A supernova, they're much more powerful than that, by the way, plus or minus 50, you can say, no, it's 112 plus or minus 15, or it's 84 plus or minus 17. It tells you where it is in the power scale and it greatly decreases the uncertainties. And that's what makes these things cosmologically useful.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome term. Okay. Standard candles is what astronomers like to say, but the night sky. I don't like that term because there aren't any standard candles, but there are standardizable candles. And by looking at these calibrate them, that's what you need. Yeah, you calibratable. Standardizable, calibratable. You look at enough of them in nearby galaxies whose distances you know independently. And what you can tell is that, you know, this is something that a colleague of mine, Mark Phillips, did, who was on Schmidt's team and arguably was one of the people who deserved the Nobel Prize. But he showed that the intrinsically more powerful type 1As”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this uncontrolled fusion reaction blows up a star that's pretty much the same in all cases. And you measure it to be almost the same in all cases. But the devil is in the details. And in fact, we observe them to not be all the same. And theoretically, they might not be all the same because the rate of the fusion reactions might depend on the amount of trace heavier elements in the white dwarf, and that could depend on how old it is when it was, you know, whether it was born billions of years ago, when there weren't many heavier elements, or whether it's a relatively young white dwarf and all kinds of other things. And part of my work was to show that indeed not all the type 1As are the same. You have to be careful when you use them. You have to calibrate them. They're not standard candles the way it just, if all headlights or all candles were the same.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emmits doesn't go into being dissipated out of the star or whatever or expanding it the way if you take a blowtorch to the middle of the sun, you heat up its gases, the gases would expand and cool. But this degenerate star can't expand and cool. And so the energy pumped in through these fusion reactions goes into making the nuclei move faster and that gets more of them sufficiently close together that they can undergo nuclear fusion thereby releasing more energy that goes into speeding up more nuclei and thus you have a runaway, a bomb, an uncontrolled nuclear fusion reactor, right, instead of the controlled fusion, which is what our sun does. Okay, our sun is a marvelous controlled fusion reactor. This is what we need here on Earth. Fusion energy to solve our energy crisis, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time, you know, when the great Arthur Eddington ridicules our work. That's another inspirational story for the youngster. Just keep going. But anyway, no matter what your advisor says, right? So, or don't always pay attention to your advisor, right? Don't lose hope if you really think you're on to something. That doesn't mean never listen to your advisor. They may have sage advice as well. But anyway, you know, when a white dwarf grows to a certain mass, it becomes unstable. And one of the ways it can end its life is to go through a thermonuclear runaway. So basically, the carbon nuclei inside the white dwarf starts fusing together to form heavier nuclei. And the energy that those fusion reactions emit.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From that normal star until it gets to an unstable limit, roughly one and a half times the mass of our Sun, 1.4 or so. This is known as the Chandasehar limit after Subarmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian astrophysicist who figured this out when he was about 20 years old on a voyage from India to England where he was to be educated. And then he did this and then 50 years later he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1984, largely for this work that he did as a youngster who was on his way to be educated. You know, oh, and his advisor, the great Arthur Eddington in England, who had done a lot of great things and was a great astrophysicist, nevertheless, he too was human and had his faults. Ridiculed, Child.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Motion due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and also due to the Pauli exclusion principle that electrons don't like to be in the same place. They like to avoid each other. So those two things mean that a lot of electrons are moving very rapidly, which gives the star an extra pressure far above the thermal pressure associated with just the random motions of particles inside the star. So it's a weird type of star. But normally it wouldn't explode and our sun won't explode except that if such a white dwarf is in a pair with another more or less normal star, it can steal material.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, first of all, there are several different ways that stars can explode, and it depends on their mass and whether they're in a binary system and things like that. And the ones that we used for these cosmological purposes, studying the expansion of the history of the universe, are the so-called type Roman numeral one lowercase a, type 1a supernovae. They come from a weird type of a star called a white dwarf. Our own sun will turn into a white dwarf in about seven billion years. It'll have about half its present mass compressed into a volume, just the size of Earth. So that's an inordinate density. Okay, it's incredibly dense. And the matter is what's called by quantum physicists degenerate matter. Not because it's morally reprehensible or anything like that, but this is just the name. No judgments here. Yeah, quantum physicists give to electrons that are squeezed into a very tight space. The electrons take home.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. It's like looking at if you'll let me just give this one analogy, you know, you judge the distance of an oncoming car at night by looking at how bright its headlights appear to be. And you've calibrated how bright the headlights are of a car that's two or three meters away of known distance. And you go, whoa, that's a faint headlight. And so that's pretty far away. You also use the apparent angular separation between the two headlights as a consistency check in your brain. But that's what your brain is doing. So we can do that for cars. We can do that for stars.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Raw material for new stars, planets, and ultimately life. And that's just a great story. The best in some ways. So we like to study these things and our origins, but it turns out these are incredibly useful beacons as well, because if you know how powerful An exploding star really is by measuring the apparent brightness at its peak in galaxies whose distances we already know through having made other measurements. And you can thus calibrate how powerful the thing really is. And then you find ones that are much more distant, then you can use their observed brightness compared with their true intrinsic power or luminosity to judge their distance and hence the distance of the galaxy in which they're located.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so a supernova is an exploding star. Most stars die a relatively quiet death. Our own sun will, despite the fact that it'll become a red giant and incinerate Earth, it'll do that reasonably slowly. But there's a small minority of stars that end their lives in a titanic explosion. And that's not only exciting to watch from afar. It's critical to our existence because it is in these explosions that the heavy elements synthesize through nuclear reactions during the normal course of the stars' evolution. Entering the explosion itself gets ejected into the cosmos, making them available.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Elvis, that's right. There you go. But he was the king, right? And he had such a personality. And it was such a performer.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's right. And often the breakthroughs were made based on the body of knowledge that had been assimilated prior to that. But again, people like to worship heroes. You mentioned the Oscars earlier. And you look at the direct, I mean, well, I mean, okay, directors and stuff sometimes get awards and stuff. But you look at even something like, I don't know, songwriters and musicians, Elton John or something, right? Bernie Taupin, right? wrote many of the words or He's not as well known Or the Beatles, or something like that”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just at the moment that they were taking off from the first thing, and that costs them some fraction of a second. And that's it. They didn't win.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People and they emphasize that. And they all played a role. And maybe if some grad student hadn't soldered some circuit, maybe the whole thing wouldn't have worked. But still, Ray Weiss. Kip Thorne was the theoretical impetus for the whole search for gravitational waves. Barry Barrish brought the MIT and Caltech teams together to get them to cooperate at a time when the project was nearly dead from what I understand and contributed greatly to the experimental setup as well. He's a great experimental physicist, but he was really good at bringing these two teams together instead of having them duke it out in blows and leaving both of them bleeding and dying. You know, the National Science Foundation was going to cut the funding from what I understand. So there's human.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, humans like competition and they like heroes. And unfortunately, it gives the impression to youngsters today that science is still done by white men with gray beards wearing white lab coats. And I'm very pleased to see that this year, you know, Andrea Gez, the fourth woman in the history of the physics prize, to have received it. And then two women, one at Berkeley, one elsewhere, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry without any male co-recipient. And so that's sending a message, I think, to girls that they can do science and they have role models. I think the breakthrough prize and other such prizes show that teams get recognized as well. And if you pay attention to the newspapers, most of the good authors like Dennis Overbai of the New York Times and others said that these were teams of people.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll conduct this survey large scale survey with the Rubin telescope. So she's been recognized, but never with the Nobel Prize. And I would say that to her credit, she did not let that consume her life either. And perhaps it was a bit easier because there had been no Nobel given for the discovery of dark matter. Whereas in the case of pulsars and Jocelyn Bell, there was a prize given for the discovery of the freaking pulsars. And she didn't get it. I mean, what a travesty of justice”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arguably one of the discoverers of dark matter, although there, if you look at the history, there were a number of people. And that was the issue, I think. There were a number of people, four or more, who had similar data and similar ideas at about the same time. Ruben won every prize under the sun, the new big large-scale survey telescope being built in Chile is being renamed the Vera Rubin telescope because she passed away in December of 2015, I think.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I got them to be pretty talkative. And then in a polite, diplomatic way, I started asking them pointed questions. And basically they admitted that if there are four or more people equally deserving, they wait for one of them to die. Or they just don't give the prize at all when it's unclear who the three are, at least unclear to them. But unclear to them. They're not even right part of the time. I mean, Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. With a radio antennas, a set of radio antennas that her advisor, Anthony Hewish, Conceived and built, so he deserves some credit. But he didn't discover the pulsar. She did. And his initial reaction to the data that she showed him was a condescending rubbish, my dear. Yeah, I'm not kidding. She did not let this destroy her life. She won every other prize under the sun, okay Vera Rubin.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They grew up as astronomers making contributions on little teams, and we decided to band together. But all of us had our voices heard. So it was sort of a culture, a style that I preferred, really. But let me tell you a story. At the Nobel Banquet, okay, I'm sitting there between two physicists who are members of the committee of the Swedish National Academy of Sciences. And I strategically kept offering them wine and stuff during this long, drawn-out Nobel ceremony, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I helped bounce ideas off of him, but we wouldn't have had the result without him. And I was on both teams for reasons. I mean, you know, the style of the first team, the supernova cosmology project didn't match mine. They came largely from experimental high-energy particle physics, where there's these hierarchical teams and stuff. And it's hard for the little guy to have a say. At least that's what I kind of thought. Whereas the team of astronomers led by Brian Schmidt was, first of all, a bunch of my friends.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was a fellow at Penn State, Alex Wolshan, who in nineteen ninety two, three years preceding nineteen ninety five, found a planet orbiting a pulsar, a very weird kind of star, a neutron star, and that wouldn't have been a normal planet, sure. And so the Nobel Committee, you know, they gave it for the discovery of planets around normal sun-like stars. But hell, you know, Wolshan found a planet, so they could have given it to him as the third person instead of to Jim Peebles for the development of what's called physical cosmology. He's at Princeton. He deserved it, but they could have given Nobel for the development of physical cosmology to peoples. And I would claim some other people were pretty important in that development as well. They could have given it some other year. So there's a lot of controversy. I try not to dwell on it. Was I number three? Probably not. You know, Adam Reese did the work.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? The problem was Hawking radiation had not been detected, but you could argue that Hawking made enough other fundamental contributions to the theoretical study of black holes. And the observed data were already good enough at the time of before Hawking's death. Okay. I mean, the latest results by Reinhard Gensel's group is that they see the time.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the Higgs particle, it was six to eight thousand physicists and engineers. In fact, because of the whole issue of who gets it experimentally, that discovery still has not been recognized, right? The theoretical work by Peter Higgs and Anglaire got recognized, but there was a troika of other people who writ perhaps wrote the most complete paper and they were left out. Another guy died.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they recognize teams. And so, in fact, both teams in the accelerating universe were recognized with the breakthrough prize in 2015. Nevertheless, the same three people, Reese, Pearlmutter, and Schmidt, got the red carpet rolled out for them and were at the big ceremony and shared half of the prize money. And the rest of us, roughly 50. Shared the other half and didn't get to go to the ceremony. But I feel for them. I mean, for the gravitational waves, it was a thousand people. What are they going to do? Invite everyone”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a team effort now. It's a team. It should be redone. And the breakthrough prize in fundamental physics, which was started by Yuri Milner and Zuckerberg is involved and others as well.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he deserved it. And on Solston, Gerson Goldhabber deserved it, but he died, I think, a year earlier in 2010. But that would have been four. And so. And me while I was on both teams, but you know, was I number four, five, six, seven? I don't know.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source