Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Foremost astronomer, author, and popularizer of science who describes himself as a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules.
On the island
Eight records
Peace by Evangelus Papathanasiu, which uh by accident we've also used in the Cosmos television series, and it's called Heaven and Hell.
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Well, it's the fairly well-known uh cannon by Acclabau.
piece in the jazz idiom by Roy Buchanan called Fly Nightbird.
Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 (The Year 1905)
Houston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
I'd like to play a portion of Dmitri Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony.
Sokaku-Reibo (Cranes in Their Nest)
My next record is in fact one of the pieces that uh was included on the Voyager Interstellar Record, a uh piece for uh a Japanese wind instrument called a shakuhachi. The piece is called Cranes in Their Nest.
This is part of uh another piece by uh Vangelis Papathanasiou on Synthesizer called Alpha.
Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006: III. Gavotte en rondeauFavourite
is an exquisite performance by Arthur Grummio of uh one movement of the Bach Partida number three for unaccompanied violin.
This is a uh I think exquisite piece of folk music from Bulgaria where Eastern and Western traditions have merged. Um it's a shepherdess's song sung by Valja Balkanska.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:55Do you remember when you first began to be interested in astronomy?
I do very uh very vividly. Uh I was a small child, I don't know, five or or so, and uh … even with an early bedtime, in winter you could occasionally see the stars. … And uh they seemed to me interesting, strange, remote, different from uh the neighborhood that I knew reasonably well. … and suddenly the scale of the universe opened up for me, a a very powerful emotional experience which uh I'm uh still engaged in.
Presenter asks
4:53Why [did you choose the University of] Chicago?
Oh yes, very much. I I had applied to a number of institutions and been accepted, but Chicago sent a brochure called If You Want an Education … and it was the only university that um advertised itself as providing an education and uh that was what I wanted
Presenter asks
6:15What was your project [at Berkeley]?
my doctoral thesis was uh mainly on the atmosphere of the planet Venus in an attempt to uh explain the uh apparently high surface temperature of Venus through what's called the greenhouse effect, the trapping of uh infrared radiation by the this massive carbon dioxide in water atmosphere. And uh I was fortunate enough to uh have been successful in the sense that subsequent space vehicle explorations of uh Venus have uh made a reasonably plausible case that it's a greenhouse effect that keeps the surface hot and that the surface is in fact hot.
The keepsakes
The book
Boy Scouts of America
I guess then I would take the Boy Scout Handbook in an effort to be as practical as I could.
Presenter asks
9:59Why were you opposed to the moon landings?
Well, I was opposed to uh attributing them to science. I was perfectly happy if they were uh considered uh political or uh economic or historical or beat the Russians or whatever they were, but they were not fundamentally scientific. … the amount of money spent on Apollo uh may well have been an excellent investment, but it was not primarily a scientific activity. So I was opposed to beginning the Apollo program on grounds that uh would be attributed to science, and I was also opposed, somewhat paradoxically, to ending the Apollo program, because after this enormous initial investment had been made, there was a splendid system for exploring the moon.
Presenter asks
17:01Do you think life on earth is intelligent enough to stop blowing itself up?
That's a difficult and tricky question. There's no doubt that we have the capability to uh destroy our civilization and perhaps our species through the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At the same time, it's also clear that uh we have uh an enormous compassion for others and capability to do good and to act wisely and the tension between these two forces uh which go deep into our evolutionary past is uh the major issue that faces us in this time, I believe.
“I think the music speaks on quite a different level than words do.”
“there's something tremendously hopeful about uh us sending greetings to creatures so far away in time and space that we could never hear anything back from them.”
“science is so exciting and compelling that uh as fun as all this was, uh doing real science is still more fun in in my opinion.”