Oct 2, 2012
Slightly re-organized prob/stat/uncertainty propagation
Separated uncertainty propagation section off from probability and statistics
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Slightly re-organized prob/stat/uncertainty propagation
Separated uncertainty propagation section off from probability and statistics
2012 Oct 02 11h55 EDT Slightly re-organized headers/chapter sections on lookatphysics.com.
Old: Probability and Statistics contained Stat/Prob and Uncertainty propagation, with the gray box about different measures of heterogeneity at the bottom of Uncertainty propagation
New: Probability and Statistics are closed with the gray box about different measures of heterogeneity, Uncertainty propagation is a separate, subsequent section. A blue header (Topic/Slides/Video/Description) was added below the header for Uncertainty propagation, which was given an anchor name of errorprop. A table-of-contents link to errorprop was added at the top of the page. Header, closest video icon links, and directly proximate slide links near edits or sources of copy-paste were clicked to check for obvious coding errors. No obvious coding errors. Page appears to display and point to correct places.
The Uncertainty Propagation materials were already collected in a separate "Uncertainty Propagation" chapter on udemy and did not need re-organizing today.
Sample variance curve fitting
2012 Oct 01 14h17 EDT: PDF print-out for MatLab exercise now posted to udemy and main website lookatphysics.com
Better Born-Oppenheimer
Flipped classroom = conventional learning
Read textbook closely to check for logical consistency--DO NOT look at problem set. Preparation before lecture is essential. It's very difficult to learn (substantial quantities of) new material in one sitting by scribbling notes in a 1-2 h exposition.
Watch lecture to evaluate whether you agree with lecturer's choices of style, content, and presentation.
Writhe in agony figuring out on chalkboard, pencil/paper, and in your head how you would fix aspects of the textbook or lecture that you disliked (i.e. sequence of presentation, method of mathematical analysis, missing logical steps, unjustified approximations, or even "little" things like formatting of visual information).
Practice talking about your ideas from (3) with friends.
(a) Try to do the problem set without fishing for the answer in the textbook. Now that you've done steps (1-4), you probably have only 8-hr. before your homework set is due tomorrow morning. However, the fact that you've done steps (1-4) also means that you are probably able to do the homework in these 8 hrs. You can figure out what you need to do, and most of the time is spent doing algebra, drawing figures, and organizing your work. (b) Take note that some of the homework problems are meant to be solved using subconscious (illogical) cues (crutches) peppered throughout the textbook and lecture. Do not let these slide. Figure out how these cues can be justified. Since you have done step (3), you may have already addressed some of these issues.
I do like having lectures available in a video format online. I make lectures (lookatphysics.com) because many ideas from math and physics are really annoying to read about--having one's eyes jump back and forth between narrative text, figure captions, and complicated diagrams. However, the use of digital video itself does not magically make learning happen. Digital video can make steps (1) and (2) slightly less agonizing and more clear, but it's not a replacement for the evaluation in (1-4).
Style revision on lookatphysics.com
2012 Sep 09 16h22 EDT Revised top of main front page at lookatphysics.com. Now audience, topic list, and social media links are organized in a table. Checked through these links to ensure pointed to correct places, checked that embedded HTML5 video still worked, checked first 2 PPTX and first 2 video links in main body still worked, and checked a "random" video link (bistability) farther down the main body still pointed to the correct page.
Style revision on lookatphysics.com
2012 Sep 09 16h22 EDT Revised top of main front page at lookatphysics.com. Now audience, topic list, and social media links are organized in a table. Checked through these links to ensure pointed to correct places, checked that embedded HTML5 video still worked, checked first 2 PPTX and first 2 video links in main body still worked, and checked a "random" video link (bistability) farther down the main body still pointed to the correct page.
Neil deGrasse Tyson re: physical sciences, with some comments re: biology
An "urban astrophysicist" comments on science, careers in science, science communication, and the relationship between the physical and biological sciences.
During the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Exceptional Research Opportunities Program, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute presented Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was hosted by biochemist Thomas R. Cech. Dr. Tyson holds a B.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, and he is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Dr. Cech holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. in Chemistry.
This interview touched on the practice of science, scientific careers, science education and popularization, and astrophysics. The video recording is posted on YouTube and Dr. Tyson's website at the Hayden Planetarium:
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/watch/2008/05/16/pursuing-a-science-career
Relationships: between non-scientists and scientists and between physical scientists and biologists
Dr. Tyson included remarks concerning science communication and concerning the relationship between the physical and the biological sciences. The following embedded videos are cued to the indicated time points and correspond to the subsequent transcripted excerpts.
03m27s: Respect for science communication in academic science
TYSON: [Dr. Carl Sagan] felt that it was his duty as a research scientist to bring that frontier [of astrophysics] to the public, which he did, and did better than anybody. He caught a lot of flak for that at the time. His colleagues were saying, 'What are you doing?' He appeared on The Tonight Show (then it had Johnny Carson), and that was considered an abominational behavior for a scientist at the time. He took a lot of flak for it but stayed strong in that effort.
TYSON: And throughout that trajectory, what the astrophysics community noted, was that the public started feeling good about the research we were doing, and funding levels were rising, and congress was talking about it, and cosmic discoveries were making headlines when they hadn't before. There was a 'phase shift' in how scientists who became popularizers were treated by their colleagues, and I am in the zone of benefit of that phase shift. There's blood on the tracks, but it was left way before me.
TYSON: What I've noticed, however, is that in other scientific disciplines, even one very close to mine, which is physics, [is that] that relationship does not yet exist. It is considered a step away from your professional obligations if you decide to write a book or appear on television, and it does not contribute to tenure. I don't even expect it to contribute to tenure decisions because tenure in a research institution is a research designation, typically. I don't have a problem with that. All I really ask for is that, when I do it, don't hold it against me. At worst, just let it be neutral. I'll be fine with that. I'm saying, at worst, in my field, it is neutral, and at best people like it and they recognize its value. I don't yet see that in other fields. I just don't.
13m45s K.I.S.S. Use simple words
TYSON: As you fall [into the blackhole], we know from Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is our understanding of gravity, that the fabric of space and time funnels down to a point. So, not only are you stretched head-to-toe, you are extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through a tube. In fact, we have a word for dying in this manner.
CECH: Oh, yes?
TYSON: Yes, it's called 'spaghettification.' OK.
CECH: Sounds very scientific.
TYSON: Yeah, there you go. Well, actually, don't get me started on that because in astrophysics we feel very strongly about this, and I'm gonna get in your face now. I won't blame you personally; I'm going to blame you by association.
TYSON: The universe is hard enough. The last thing the universe needs is a complex lexicon laid down between the communicator and the listener to confuse them about what it is they're trying to listen to. So, in astrophysics, we tell it like it is. We don't research Latin-Greek vocabulary words and invent as big a word as we can to describe something simple. Let me tell you, what do you call spots on the sun? 'Sunspots,' thank you! Big red stars, they're called 'red giants.' Jupiter has a large red spot on its surface, we call that 'Jupiter's red spot.'
CECH: Saturn has rings.
TYSON: Saturn has rings. We call those 'rings.'
TYSON: Whereas, you take a peek at biology or chemistry, excuse me, . . .
CECH: We do have Shh [Sonic-hedgehog] and Wnt signaling, now those are very descriptive.
[Dr. Tyson rolls his eyes]
CECH: OK, you win.
TYSON: I think I win that no matter what. It's my field whose vocabulary is drawn upon to name commercial products. We've got Quasar brand televisions, we've got Pulsar watches. Look at car names. Galaxy 500, we've got the Chevy Nova, although Nova is a star that is just blown up, so I don't think Chevy knew that when they named their Chevy Nova, but that's between you and me, but there is no car named the deoxyribonucleic acid.
CECH: No, we'll work on that. There's no black hole yet either.
TYSON: Because it'd be hard to sell.
TYSON: But, uh, big bang! We're into one-syllable words, big bang. The beginning of all time, space, everything, big bang, most important event in the universe--most important molecule in the human body has nine syllables.
TYSON: de-ox-y-ri-bo-nu-cle-ic a-cid
CECH: That's why I work on "ribo."
19m41 Mere enumeration is not science
TYSON: We don't count the planets. That's the big pedagogical gaffe--to believe that the enumeration of planets somehow constitutes science, but it's not. People say, 'well there's nine--now I have to remember a different number'--that's not science. I don't care how many planets there are; that's not interesting. Tell me what planets have in common with each other, how they differ.
TYSON: In our exhibits, we don't have the Saturn panel and then the Jupiter panel [where] we [would] have all the data on each. That implies that this enumeration is something important. That's not what we do. We have a panel that says, "rings," and we talk about ring phenomena among objects in the solar system. Another one we talk about ice, we talk about where ice is in the solar system--comets, some moons have a lot of ice. Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, is covered in ice. You get to talk about them in the same breath because they have things in common. Talk about storms--there, now you get to talk about Jupiter, Earth, and Mars in the same breath. We've got atmospheres, we've got uneven heating of the surfaces, you got storms.
TYSON: That's how science progresses--not memorizing. You have teachers giving exams, 'What's the name of the fifth planet from the sun?' That's not science. I think we took the scientific and pedagogical high road, and, in fact, the greater scientific community ultimately agreed with that six years later and voted for demotion.
TYSON: By the way, after we did that to Pluto, it took a year before the public noticed, and it was a New York Times reporter, a year later, who overheard a kid say to his mother, '[Affecting the child's voice] Mommy, where's Pluto? [Affecting the mother's voice] It's got to be there somewhere. Keep looking. I'm busy. [Affecting the child's voice] Mommy, where's Pluto? [Affecting the mother's voice] Keep looking.' And it wasn't there, and he [the reporter] thought he had the story of the century, and so, on page one of the New York Times, on January 21st, 2001--now what should have really filled that day's headline? Think about it, January 21st, 2001.
TYSON: Actually, sorry, it was January 22nd. What should be like big headlines that day? Inauguration of the President! They're still counting dimple chads in Florida, a President gets inaugurated; there's news about Washington then. That was the newspaper, on page one of the New York Times, that had the title, this wide, 'Pluto not a planet? Only in New York.'
TYSON: Then came the hate mail from third graders. I was public enemy. I have just written a book; it's now in copy edited. I have it with me in fact, want to take a look at some of the pages. It'll come out in January '09. It's called The Pluto Files. I've reproduced scans of letters from children pissed off that I've--there's one girl in fifth grade, she says, 'Dear Dr. Tyson, why did you demote Pluto? Why is it not a planet anymore? If someone lived on Pluto, that means they wouldn't exist.' It goes on, and it says, 'I think that's discrimination, discriminating a planet because of it's small,'
CECH: far away
TYSON: and then it said at the end, 'please write back soon, but don't write in cursive, I can't read it yet.'
27m17 Astrophysics: Origins of interest and role of physics for understanding
TYSON: My parents took me to the Hayden planetarium in New York City, and I looked up . . .
CECH: Because you couldn't see the stars in New York City because of all the light pollution.
TYSON: That's a true statement, but let me say it a slightly different way. I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. Right? If you don't know that they're there, you don't know you're missing them. So it's not, 'Gee, I wish I could see the stars, let's go to the planetarium, it's, 'Ok. That's just--you know--it's just dark, or kind of lightish dark.' I'm in there, they dim the lights, and I was just struck by it, imprinted, I guess, is the biological word--behavioral biology--did I get that right? Imprinting? I think that's the right term, and I was star struck.
CECH: Somebody rang a bell, and you salivated, but not literally.
TYSON: It was coursing through my veins. Actually, initially, I just thought it was a hoax. 'Cause I knew how many stars there were in the night sky; there [were] like twelve or something, and now there were thousands--so it was a fun hoax. Then my parents, we went on a trip to Pennsylvania and to the Caribbean, we have some lineages through the Caribbean, and I saw for the first time, the night sky as it was, like, intended to be seen.
TYSON: To this day, and I have access to the finest telescopes on the highest mountain tops, I look up and see the night sky, to this day, I say to myself, it reminds me of the Hayden planetarium, which is kind of sick, when you think about it. That the real world would remind of me a projected dome on the sky. But that's what the imprinting does, and I was hooked ever since.
TYSON: I went to the Bronx High School of Science, majored in physics in college, that's where the foundational language is for understanding the universe, and you apply those laws of physics to understanding cosmic phenomena, not only gravitational problems involving planets, moons, satellites, but also the births, lives, and deaths of stars. Some have spectacular deaths. What galaxies do, what the ensemble of galaxies do in our neighborhood. What the entire universe is doing. Anything off Earth's surface is fair game for the astrophysicist.
53m01 Personal appeal of physical vs. biological sciences
TYSON: I valued science literacy in all the sciences.
TYSON: While I was less comfortable with biology--I was always frustrated that there was so much to have to remember, whereas in physics you don't remember anything, there's just a few equations and you derive the understanding of the universe from that. Just compare the thickness of biology books to the thickness off . . . all of Einstein's relativity fits in 20-30 pages.
TYSON: There's a difference in how the brain is wired by the time you're done in the exercise, and so I was more frustrated by biology than by chemistry, chemistry being a little closer--we have quantum mechanics in common between us.
TYSON: So, no, I'm not interested professionally, but I was certainly interested because it's the scientific investigation of the natural world. I got an A+ on my biology term paper. I took biology as a senior, which is rare I think--a senior in high school because I took physics as a sophomore, followed by chemistry, and biology. Usually that's in reverse. So, I was there with a lot of freshman and sophomores--kind of interesting. An A+ on my final paper because I experimented with how to grow a plant completely upside down. I had like soil and water supply up here and light supply down here, and I wanted to see what the contest was between going towards the light but against gravity.
CECH: Geotropism vs. phototropism.
TYSON: Oh, is that what that's called? Thank you for complexifying the . . .
CECH: We biologists are good at that, as I think you've pointed six or seven times during this interview.
58m38s Obstacles are the scientific journey
TYSON: Discovery--that's what gets reported on in this press, but the press doesn't report about all the days in the lab when discoveries aren't happening. They don't report about all the blind alleys that you don't know are blind until you get to the end of the alley. That's the process of science. That's the trajectory that we're all buying into here emotionally, physically, culturally. If you don't like the dead end, then find something else to do because most of what you do will be dead ends, and your ability to intellectually navigate to the side of them, beneath them, over them, around them into another direction is the measure of how good a scientist you are.
TYSON: In fact, if you happen to luck out and have projects that worked out for ten different papers in a row, you're not being trained as a scientist because the day a problem happens, I don't know what you're going to do about it, whereas everybody else who had to gut-slog through it, had to redo a problem because they made a wrong assumption, or the lab specimen got contaminated, or they didn't know it until later and they read the lab book and they find out that the cleaning person came in and pet the mice in the lab--and you find out later--you "lose" year of your life--you actually didn't lose a year, it's just more of the process of science.
TYSON: You're buying into the process, you're buying into the journey, you're not buying into the product, and not enough of the public understands this. The public thinks we just discover stuff.
TYSON: In fact, your dead end, you publish that dead end. If you design the experiment correctly, that's going to be an interesting dead end that he doesn't have to take the next time he looks into that same problem, and he's going to reference your paper. Not 'look he messed up, ha, ha, ha.' No, he's going to say, 'these paths did not work for these reasons, forcing me to make a different assumption.' That's the enterprise of science.
TYSON: And if it delays your Ph.D., you have your whole freaking life--you'll delay a year--don't worry about that. What's your hurry? You're going to be doing this your whole life. Celebrate it.
01h01m44s Being forthcoming of ignorance and guarding against giving assent to theories outside their domains of validity
KATHY: I was wondering what you think about the existence of dark matter in terms of explaining the phenomena happening in the universe. There seem to be conflicting views whether or not you actually need to account for dark matter in, sort of, Einstein's modified theory of gravity. I don't know what you think about that, but just out of curiosity.
TYSON: OK. Dark matter is a profound area of ignorance that we live with in astrophysics, one of two largest areas of ignorance.
TYSON: There is such a thing as we call dark energy, which is a mysterious pressure on the cosmos operating opposite that of gravity, having the universe accelerate in its expansion. It should be slowing down because the collective gravity of all the galaxies is an attractive force, but there is this pressure of the vacuum. We call it dark energy. We have no idea what it is. That's just a placeholder term for it. We could have called it Fred. That's just what it is.
TYSON: There's this thing called dark matter, which is actually misnamed. It's really dark gravity. We don't know if it's matter. There is gravity out there that has no known source. You account for all the electrons, protons, neutrons, black holes, gas clouds, dark clouds, planets, stars, you account for all . . . add it all up--it does not account for the total gravity observed in the universe.
CECH: Not even close.
TYSON: It is 1/6th of the total gravity observed.
CECH: That's not close.
TYSON: Not only that, three-quarters of the universe is this dark energy stuff, so one quarter is ordinary matter and dark matter, of that one quarter of the universe, it's the five sixths of it, we don't know what that is, so what does that leave? That leaves, like, 4% of the universe that we actually have a predictive understanding of what it is, OK.
TYSON: And we're candid about that. We don't claim that we're masters of the cosmos with our feet up on the desk. We are candid about . . . and I have to tell you a quick biology story [gesturing admonition and social disappointment, pointing a finger, and inciting laughter].
TYSON: [Looking toward Cech] And you're a chemist, so you're OK.
CECH: Avoid abbreviations that don't make sense.
TYSON: It has been suggested that maybe we don't actually understand Newton's gravity, or Einstein's gravity, correctly. Maybe there's some new equation for gravity that when you apply the new equation, that all the dark matter uncertainties go--they just evaporate--that we're just stupid. There are top people working on that problem. They are having only limited success, but they are sort of wedded to their theory.
TYSON: You don't ever want to be wedded to your theory because what happens is you--remember that at the end of the day even though you are a scientist, you are still a human being, and human beings have intellectual frailties, such as you believe your idea about how something works more than anybody else, and that's good to a point, but it's possible to then start living your idea, and you lose the ability to assess or to recognize evidence that conflicts with it to the point that you should just discard it. There are many examples of this all throughout the history of science.
discussion continues through 01h05m21s
TYSON: I was on Charlie Rose, the PBS talk show, once. This was back in '96 when there was evidence that we might have discovered life on a Martian meteorite. There are meteorites on Earth that started on Mars. The way that happens is that you have asteroid impacts that hit with such ferocity that they cast surrounding rocks into space reaching escape velocity, and then they float in space and then land on earth. It's estimated that there is several tons of Martian rock on Earth; you just have to find it. Now, the evidence was all circumstantial. There was evidence of
CECH: It was morphological, basically, it was . . . slice in these, put them in the microscope. They were round.
TYSON: No, no, no. "Morphological"--he means shape.
CECH: Shape.
TYSON: There were some shapey things that contributed, but that was not the lead evidence. The lead evidence was that in this one rock, oh by the way, we know that Mars was once wet, fertile. We have dried river beds, and flood plains, and lake beds where the lake surface is salty, and you only get that if you had concentrated salt that then evaporated away.
TYSON: In other words, there are rock minerals that could only have come about by the evaporation of water and those having been in solution to it. This rock had, among the things in it, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, clearly a molecule's name not invented by astronomers. That's an organic molecule. It doesn't require organic process to make it, but it's common in organic environments. It also had reduced and, what's the opposite of reduced?
CECH and GROUP: Oxidized
TYSON: . . . oxidized iron coexisting in the same nook of this rock. If you are reduced and oxidized, you are not in chemical equilibrium. You can't have that. That is not an equilibrium state. One of the most famous non-equiliblrium states is life. Inside your body you have freshly oxygenated hemoglobin coming out of your lungs, reduced hemoglobin going into your lungs, occupying the same volume of organic matter.
TYSON: Not only that, we also have the shape of a little wormy looking thing that is, like, 1/10th the size of the smallest known life forms known on Earth. And if you looked at the electron microscope photograph, it looked like a worm, like little segments; it looked like a cute little worm--unanalyzed, just this image of it. That's what the press led with it because it looked like a worm, but that wasn't the lead evidence.
TYSON: It was the combination of all these organic materials all in the same place. It's circumstantial evidence, granted, but if you add up enough circumstantial evidence, you can build up a pretty compelling case. Maybe the rock lived in an oxidizing environment and then rolled down a cliff and landed in a reducing environment, and it picked it up both, right, OK, I don't have a problem with that, and then had to go somewhere else to pick up the phhs [polycyclic hydrocarbons]. OK, but that seems like you're jumping backwards through a hoop, when you could just simply say that life did it.
TYSON: OK, now, this was page one lead-off news. I'm on this talk show. They pipe in a biologist; he comes in a screen. I didn't mean to say it that way: 'They pipe in a biologist.' Well, of course you need a biologist because they're talking about life. So I'm there, and we're talking about it, and I'm saying, 'I'm intrigued by this evidence. Life will do this for free.'
TYSON: And they showed the little wormy thing, and the biology guy said, 'That can't possibly be life.' And I'm thinking why not? Is there something I'm missing that this learned man on the screen is telling me? 'Cause he was in, like, Minnesota or someplace else, he didn't come in[to the studio]. Is there something I'm missing?
TYSON: I said, 'Well, why can't it be life? Why can't that little wormy thing be life?' 'Because it's 1/10th the size of the smallest life on Earth.' And I'm still ready for, I'm still thinking he's still going to give me an answer, like that's the lead into it, but that was his answer. And I said to him, 'Last I checked, the rock is not from Earth, OK? So why is Earth your measure of what is possible in the whole freaking universe?'
TYSON: And so then I had to think about this and I said why is he--how come he can't . . . open . . .
CECH :Open his mind.
TYSON: . . . he can't do this? And I realized why. Because every week we discover something in the universe that stumps us. We are humbled by our own discoveries, whereas in biology, while you may celebrate the diversity of life on Earth, behind closed doors, at the end of the day, you have to confess to each other, that, in fact, you only have a sample of 1, because all life on Earth has DNA in common with each other, and as long as you have DNA in common, you can pretend it's different, but if you're going to compare it with something in another planet that might not be encoded by DNA at all, don't use your biological bias to judge what the rest of the universe is going to hand you.
CECH: I'll never do that again.
TYSON: OK.
CECH: Plus, now that you've reminded me, Mars is a smaller planet than Earth, so there you go. [Laughter]
1h20m38s Science communication: Speaking your audience's language
JOE: . . . I know a lot of students are really interested in, not just their research, but also education, which is something that you do. And, I'm wondering if you could talk about how you were able to put yourself into a position to be such a big figure in education for the public in terms of science in general, not just astrophysics.
TYSON: Excellent question, and that's an excellent quesiton to end on, I think. So thanks. You came through. Yeah, he's good.
TYSON: There's two things that people like. They like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment. They also like, and they can--either by spoken or by written word. So, if you get better at writing with the intent of empowering a peron's ability to think, then people will come back to you to write some more. If you have a phrase that captures the essence of an idea in language that is not [leaning toward Cech]
CECH: too biological right?
TYSON: If you do not speak or write sesquipedaliously
CECH: That's with seven feet?
TYSON: Sesquipedalia, I think it's just really big words with a lot of syllables. Look it up. You know about this [word]? I love that word because it is a word that it is describing that it is. Sesquipedalia is a sesquipedalious word. Check it out. Don't ever write it though.
TYSON: So, you do this. The first time I was ever interviewed for national television, actually the first real time, I had had a little bit on CNN, I don't count that--it was like this six-second bite. I was on NBC nightly news with Tom Brokaw, 1995. The first planet in orbit of another star was discovered, page one story. They sent an action cam to the planetarium. I was brand new as director of the planetarium, and I'm fundamentally an academic--it's how I think; it's how I behave. They bring in the cameras, they interview, they ask me all these questions, 'How do we discover these planets?'
TYSON: I gave my best professorial reply, I said, 'Well, they actually use sometihng called the Doppler effect, and you look at the spectral changes in the star responding in its gravity to the mass of the planet in orbit around it. We think to ourselves that a star is in the middle, like the Sun, and planets orbit around it. No, the whole system orbits its common center of gravity, which means you've go the likes of Jupiter and Saturn out there, the Sun actually does this [gesturing circular motion about a center]. And if you observe the Sun, its spectral features, you will see the spectral feature oscillating in harmony with this motion. Either the Sun has some sort of oscillatory problem, or you infer the existence of planets in orbit around it. We now have rising through 300 known planets in orbit around . . . without actually ever seeing the planet. We are inferring the planet through their gravitational pawprint on the host star itself.' I gave my best professorial reply.
TYSON: Another one was, in the news reports from the discoverers, they used the word 'wobble' to describe what the host star was doing, but I know what a wobble is. Tops wobble. [Gesturing] That's a wobble. [Gesturing] This is not a wobble, it's more like a jiggle, and I described--I showed this. I said it's not really a [dance move] wobble, it's more like a jiggle [orbital motion of hips] like that. So that night on the evening news, all they showed were my hips doing this. 'Director of the planetarium says the stars are actually jiggling.'
TYSON: I said, OK, you want to play that way? You didn't like my professorial reply? You want to sound bite me? I'm going to hand you sound bites. I'm going to be one step ahead of you 'cause I'm living in their universe. I can't force their news program to listen to my lecture 'cause that's their world. If they're going to come to my classroom, they're going to hear me lecture, but I'm going to their newscast, I better talk the way they want it packaged.
TYSON: I went home that weekend, and I had my wife just sort of bark out concepts and phrases and things in the universe. 'Black hole,' 'quasars,' 'Saturn' . . . . and every word she spoke, I'm looking in the mirror and I came up with a 2-3 sentence sound bite on the object. OK? So pick something in the universe. Just to test this. Pick anything, I don't care.
CECH: Supernova
TYSON: Supernovae: The biggest explosions in the cosmos. OK? They're using that sound bite! They're using it! You know it. OK, that's only a one-sentence sound bite. Two-sentence sound bite: If one of these happens nearby Earth, it destroys our ozone layer and gives everyone in the world skin cancer. Boom! You know they using that sound bite. You know it!
TYSON: I loaded up with sound bites, and every next time the camera came back and they asked a question, out came a sound bite, an uneditable sound bite. 'Cause they try to piece it together. If you be all professorial, they got to cut it and make their own sentence. Uneditable sound bites. And when I started doing that, they started beating a path to my door. Other networks saw me on their program, and they wanted me to do it for their program, and now they're backed up, lined up, just because I'm giving them sound bites, just because I spent a little effort to speak their language. I started valuing it and investing my own energy to become better at it.
TYSON: Whether or not you can become great at something, you can always become better at it. Don't ever forget that. And don't say, 'Oh, I'll never be good.' You can become better. And one day, you'll wake up, and you'll realize how good you actually became, having transcended whatever limits you might have though you couldn't pass. And I've carried that sense of vision statement with me ever since I started writing, which was early high school.