00:57:58:00
INIGO FILMS
“STAR MEN”
PICTURE LOCK OUTPUT
2015
TRT 86:40
NDF 23:98
01:00:15:00
Roger:
I’m 76 and
I’m aware that I will not live forever and um… there are many things that I
should still like to do. I’d like to follow my stars a lot longer than I have
done already. Maybe I shall last ah, a little time yet. The telescope that I
now use – it was bought from a re-equipment grant, it was just after the end of
the Second World War. Nobody shows any interest in the telescope at all, so I
could use it whenever I liked or whenever the weather permitted. I set the
telescope myself and crank the dome around to the right place single-handed.
I’ve kept
the Cambridge Observatory on the map as an active astronomical observatory for
ages largely by my own efforts.
It’s for
practical purposes my own telescope.
01:01:39:04
Donald:
Some people
think we invent mathematics. I think mathematics is… is there and we discover
mathematics. It’s there to be discovered. I think about the things that
astronomers see and I’m very interested in giving explanations to what is going
on. You have this feeling for how things work, you then have to show that indeed they would work that way by
making sure that the numbers actually work out correctly. Creativity is a lot
of this.
01:02:32:04
Donald:
People have
reunions to see what’s happened to those young, sprightly people and see how
they’ve decayed. And uh… they’ve often become more interesting. Roger I see
every day, but I don’t see Wal all that much and I see Nick very little so I
look forward to seeing them. We shared this… this period of at least a year
together and it was quite a formative year for all of us. Once you’ve done things like this you know
people like that for life. I just thought it would be fun on the 50th
anniversary to see my friends.
STAR MEN
LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
01:03:41:03
Alison (Narration):
When I was a young girl, I began to lie awake
under the night sky and think about what was out there. I felt I had friends
among the stars. When the astronomer Donald Lynden-Bell told me about his
reunion with Roger Griffin and the others they spent a year with in California,
I asked if I could go with them.
01:04:05:21
Alison:
Finally!
Are you exhausted?
Donald:
Pretty
exhausted, but okay. Okay.
Alison:
Oh! Hi,
Roger.
Roger:
Hello.
Alison:
Do you want
a hug? You’re okay?
Roger:
We just
about made it.
Donald:
Good. Okay.
Excellent.
Alison:
I’m glad to
see you.
Donald:
I am, too.
01:04:23:17
Alison (Narration):
Fifty years ago, they began research careers
here and took roadtrips together. And now they’re taking an anniversary trip.
They became superstars in astronomy - leaders in their fields: Roger, the
instrument-maker; Donald, the theoretician; Nick, the visionary and Wal, the observer.
Together, they represent the most productive period astronomy has ever had,
making discoveries with the power to change the way humanity sees itself.
We’re heading to Pasadena, northeast of L.A. In
1960, these astronomers had just graduated with PhDs and were recruited to work
here. Roger and Donald worked at the California Institute of Technology – Caltech.
This is where they used to live.
Roger:
A high-class
gentleman’s club.
Donald:
Professor
Lynden-Bell and Professor Griffin.
Clerk:
Welcome.
Donald:
Thank you
very much.
01:06:04:20
Donald:
Who is this
distinguished man sitting at the table?
Hello,
Nick. Great to see you.
Roger:
Hi, there.
Alison (Narration):
Nick Woolf flew in from Tucson this morning.
He’s retired from the University of Arizona.
01:06:20:14
Nick:
50 years.
Wow, what does this 50 years mean? If you ask what is most important of the
reunion, it is that it makes… It pulls together the past and asks you to make
sense of it.
Alison:
Did you
bring that flag?
Roger:
I’ve got
the flag with me now.
Nick:
Oh, yes!
Donald:
Great!
Roger:
You can be
reunited with it.
01:06:48:00
Donald:
Get it the
right way up, Roger.
Roger:
After I got
to America and I discovered how um… keen Americans are on their flag, I thought
I should have our flag and I bought it by post from England.
Donald:
Roger’s
very proud of being British. He felt strongly that you should proclaim that
you’re English. Roger would say, “We must put the flag up. Yes.” And then we’d
hold it up for him and somebody would take the photograph. That… That certainly
occurred in many places.
01:07:31:10
Alison (Narration):
The last to arrive is Wal Sargeant. Wal works
here at Caltech and lives in Pasadena.
Nick:
Up United!
Wal:
Is it the
same flag?
Donald:
Yes.
Wal:
Oh,
amazing. Good to see you. Jolly good.
01:07:57:01
Alison (Narration):
The four men got their degrees in Britain at a
time when there weren’t many jobs for astronomers, but rocket scientists in the
Soviet Union changed everything. In 1957, those scientists beat the U.S. into
space with Sputnik. The evidence of superior technology shocked American
experts, who accelerated the U.S. space program and started hiring astronomers.
California offered great research institutions,
large salaries and the two best telescopes in the world.
01:08:47:20
Nick:
Britain
produced scientists, but there was nowhere for them to go. Anywhere where the
climate was good and there were big telescopes was fine with me.
Donald:
There were
post-doctoral fellowships available to have young researchers work in the
United States. That was clearly the centre of astronomy. It was a quite unique
place – Caltech. There were lots of people from other places: Canadians and there
were Swiss and there were Dutchmen… It made it easier for people who were
non-American to feel part of it.
01:09:27:08
Alison (Narration):
At Caltech, the British scientists gravitated
toward one another.
Roger:
We were
already a ready-made group. It wasn’t that we were so deliberately cliquey, but
we… we… we… we did immediately find that we had something in common.
Alison (Narration):
There was one more person in the old group –
John Hazelhurst. He was at university with Nick and Wal and they referred to
him by a nickname.
Donald: Bottle. He used to wear a bottle-green suit
and so he was called Bottle.
Nick: Bottle was very quiet. Always quiet and uh… cheerful,
but he didn’t… he just didn’t talk very much.
Wal: Let’s go. I’ll get my stuff.
01:10:15:00
Alison (Narration):
Bottle slipped a disc 6 months before the
reunion and couldn’t join us.
Our first destination is the Mt. Wilson
Observatory, a 26 mile drive above Pasadena.
Roger:
Do you want
to start at the beginning of the trip? That’s not very long, actually, you see.
You won’t have to suffer very much.
Dear Mum and Alan if he’s there. Allan being my brother. Yesterday morning, we
– brackets (Donald Bell, “Bottle” - Hazelhurst, Wal Sargent, Nick Woolf and I) –
packed vast belongings into boot of car, piled in and set off about 1pm. It was
good to leave the smog behind. Car goes very well. I keep the speed in the low
70s most of the time, but to pass lorries doing 60 it is necessary to
accelerate and we have twice touched 90 on such occasions. The old bus sure can
move. The tires are good, so you needn’t worry. To be continued. With love from
Roger.
Alison (Narration):
The roadtrips were Roger’s idea.
01:11:27:10
Roger:
I bought a
car second hand. A 200 dollar car and it had well over 100,000 miles on the… on
the clock when I bought it.
Donald:
We went
like the wind. It had a sort of corner-to-corner roll at about 85, but we went
through that and out beyond that and uh… it did very well.
Roger:
The route
wasn’t planned. We went where we felt like from day to day.
01:11:55:10
Donald:
It was
dreamed up to start with certainly as a way of visiting all the observatories
in the southwest, but they were in marvellous country and it was a way of
seeing these wonderful sights on the way.
Wal:
I was very
interested to come to a different country and particlarly one with such a
varied landscape: the sense of freedom;
the escaping from ordinary life, which somebody from the working classes was
desperate to do. . .
Donald:
We had all
these people crammed in the back like this and somebody had to ride on the
middle one, if you remember, and we used to exchange places.
Wal:
Well I… I
always put this down to the fact that you’d been to a public school.
Donald:
That’s
right.
Wal:
Where the
upper classes is taught to tolerate discomfort.
Donald:
That’s correct.
Wal:
So that they
can then use this as an excuse to make the lower classes uncomfortable.
Roger:
Oh, Wal. I amazed
you’ve still got a chip on your shoulder about school.
01:13:14:19
Alison (Narration):
Isaac Newton never saw a mountain, but he knew it
would be the best place to put a telescope. The first mountaintop observatories
were built in California. Mt Wilson Observatory was built by the astronomer
George Ellery Hale. Hale founded Caltech, The Astrophysical Journal and with
financing from philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, built the four largest
telescopes in the world.
01:13:46:01
Donald:
He was both
an excellent astronomer and a great entrepreneur and he knew how to get money
out of millionaires. Hale had a great saying: Make no small plans. He believed
in making big plans.
Alison (Narration):
The telescope was retired in 1985. It was too
close to L.A. and light pollution and smog ruined the observing.
Donald:
There’s the
grand old beast.
01:14:36:10
Alison (Narration):
The visit is a homecoming for Roger, who began
observing here 50 years ago and returned often until the telescope was retired.
Roger:
It’s
nostalgic, of course. I last observed with it in 1985. The uh… demand for observing
time on it declined dramatically and um… my wife and I took advantage of that.
We had an enormous amount of the time on the telescope during the last year.
While we’re
here we could look in this… this room. Can, can…? Can lights be put on around
here?
Man:
Uh… We…
These lights have been… have burned out. I’m sorry, Roger.
01:15:20:04
Roger:
I’m sorry
to see the… the way the telescope is not properly used anymore. Although it
looks splendidly old-fashioned, the fact is it’s a very effective telescope and
it’s a pity to see it being, as it were, demeaned.
Alison (Narration):
Roger spent most of his time in the room that
houses the telescope’s spectrograph.
Roger:
What I
actually did here was I… I sat on a chair here and I looked in an eyepiece that
was here and guided the telescope. And um… I took photographs of spectra of
stars.
01:16:05:18
Alison (Narration):
When astronomers pass light through a prism and
photograph it, they can analyze its spectrum and see what a star is made of.
Every element has its own signature.
Roger:
It was
supposed at one time long ago that we’d never know anything about what the
stars were really like because we had no sample of them that we could actually
touch, but with the discovery of uh… spectroscopy, it suddenly became possible
to discover in unbelievable detail what remote objects were actually like.
01:16:42:00
Alison (Narration):
Astronomers ever since have been learning to
glean more information from light.
Roger used spectra to measure the velocities of
stars moving toward and away from us. The highlight of his career was his
development of a spectrometer, that automated the process, making it hundreds
of times faster and more accurate. Planet hunters adopted his method to find
planets orbiting other stars.
Roger:
The method
was strongly resisted by the astronomical establishment at the time. … People who’d spent their lives measuring stellar radio
velocities by the old method – they couldn’t bear to hear that there was a
young man in Cambridge who could measure them so much better and quicker and
more accurately. It took about 10 years to overcome the resistance, but
eventually the method was adopted around the world.
Alison (Narration):
Roger is scrupulous about stars. He made an
entire atlas mapping the light of just one star.
01:17:45:05
Roger:
This is the
Arcturus Photometric Atlas, showing the intensity of light in the spectrum of
Arcturus. It has a few pages of introductions and even a picture or two. And
then the rest of it is all graphs like this. Hundreds of pages of tracings and uh…
they all represent the spectrum of this one star. Big job. The graph paper was
made by a little man in the uh… printer’s office…who had a ruler and a pen and
uh… every fifth line is uh… stronger than the other lines, you know. And every
tenth line is stronger still. Must be a terrible job to draw graph paper like
that.
01:18:56:00
Alison (Narration):
George Ellery Hale’s telescope is old now, but
it made possible the 20th century’s two most profound discoveries
about the nature of the universe. People used to think our Milky Way galaxy was
the universe, but Edwin Hubble used the new telescope on Mt Wilson to resolve
stars in what looked like clouds and calculate how far away they were. He
showed they were outside this galaxy and what was thought could be dense clouds
of gas were themselves galaxies made up of billions of stars. Hubble drew the
curtains back and revealed the immensity of space humanity was a part of.
01:19:48:09
Nick:
People had
been amazed already at the understanding of how big the Milky Way was and then
Hubble came along and suddenly showed that the universe was way, way bigger
than that. The consequences were to steadily diminish what humans were.
Everybody wanted to believe that they were much, much more important than that.
Alison (Narration):
Hubble went further. He used his data to prove
that the universe was expanding. An expanding universe suggested a dynamic
universe – a universe that was different in the past than it is now.
Nick:
It really
created modern astrophysics, but it went back to Darwin. Darwin gave the
impetus to see things in a context of how they developed over time and that has
been the crucial thing that has allowed astronomy to move ahead. Astronomy
would make sense when all the pieces were put together into a pattern. The
expansion of the universe, the birth and growth of galaxies, of stars being formed
and producing heavy elements… that material going into space forming new stars,
new planets. It became an evolving universe and it suddenly all came together.
We’d taken Darwin’s idea of evolution and applied it to everything.
01:21:45:02
Roger:
I wanted to
be an astronomer from about the age of 6. I was born in Banstead in England.
It’s a
village about 15 miles south of London. The War started when I was… when I was
just 4. Bombs would fall during the night, you know and uh… and houses nearby
would be demolished. Of course I had the impression that that sort of thing went
on all the time. Nobody was allowed to show a light after night, so that the
German bombers couldn’t see. The policemen or ARP wardens – that would be Air
Raid Precaution wardens –would um… patrol and there’d be a knock on the front door
if there was so much as a chink in the curtains. So there was no light
pollution at all. From that time I knew I wanted to be an astronomer.
Wal:
Okay, we’re
now in the Pauma Valley which has um… citrus – mainly orange orchards. Here are
orange trees.
Donald:
Yes, over
there.
Alison:
Oh, yeah.
01:23:03:10
Alison (Narration):
In America, they found a lifestyle and a
landscape that inspired them.
Wal:
We all
liked the countryside, the open air, the views. One of the attractions of
astronomy is the excuse to go up mountains.
Alison:
Yeah.
01:23:25:00
Wal:
I was always
drawn to things involving mountains. The fact that telescopes are on top of
mountains with often beautiful views, spectacular scenery is one of the
attractions, at least for me. And I came from an area of England in which the
highest promontory was around 300 feet. I was born in a small village called
Elsham in North Lincolnshire. My father was the gardener in a house which had
servants. I was born in the gardener’s cottage, which came with the job. It
didn’t have electricity or running water. There was a woman who was handicapped
and my mother used to go and clean house for her and she would come… sometimes
come back with books. Volumes of a thing called The Children’s Encyclopedia. And
my brother thinks that instead of being paid the 10 shillings a week or
whatever it was for doing the house cleaning, that my mother actually took the
books as payment. My mother had an ambition to send my brother and me to
Oxford, although she didn’t really know what Oxford was and so that was in the
back of at least her mind. The books contained astronomical pictures. I started
reading them and I learned quite a bit that I’d not learned at school. But I
think the real expansion started in February 1951 when I was 16 years old. I
heard some lectures on the BBC radio by Fred Hoyle, the prominent astronomer.
He gave a series of 6 lectures which talked about the planets, the stars… that
kind of thing.
01:25:17:19
Voice:
The Sun is
enormously greater than the earth and all the other planets. It contains about
1000 times as much material as Jupiter, the largest planet and over 300,000
times as much as the Earth.
Wal:
This
excited me considerably and particularly because Hoyle had a Yorkshire accent
and England is a very class-ridden country. And for the first time, I realized
that people with an accent like mine could do that kind of work.
Alison (Narration):
We’re at Mt Palomar, George Ellery Hale’s
greatest telescope.
Wal: Professor Lynden-Bell from Cambridge and…
Woman: Nice to meet you.
Donald: Hello.
Wal: Professor Griffin from Cambridge.
Woman: Nice to meet you.
Roger: Pleased to meet you. How kind of you.
Wal: And um… we were all together at… at Caltech
in Pasadena in 19…
Roger: 50 years ago.
Wal: In 1960. And that… And we’ve come back to
experience what it was like to be young, sort of.
Man: Not bad for a 1935 elevator, is it?
Donald: That’s as old as we are.
Wal: Hello. Good to see you.
Man: Good to see you, sir.
01:26:27:05
Alison (Narration):
Wal worked here from the time he came to
California. In 1997, he became director of Mt Palomar.
Roger: That’s
a big telescope.
01:26:48:08
Alison
(Narration):
Hale
ordered a mirror 5 meters wide and it was the best telescope in the world for
45 years.
Wal:
The first time I saw it, it was an amazing experience. I came in and looked at all this and
I thought, “God, how am I going to survive?” For several years, I was scared of
it. I would come up here and there would be a slight pit in my stomach because
I… I was worried that I… the science I was doing wouldn’t be good enough for
such a grand machine. Okay! They’re going to move the telescope. You get in
there by using the elevator over there, going up the side of the dome slit all
the way to the top and then you clamber in to that uh… cage, the shiny thing,
when the telescope’s pointing vertically. My longest time up there was 10
hours. You have gloves and we would sometimes… sometimes wear um… flying suits,
war surplus flying suits that would plug into an electrical connection up
there. Those of us who like astronomy would cheerfully do this for hours at a
time and be as happy as pigs in shit.
01:28:24:10
Alison (Narration):
Wal made a discovery confirming the Big Bang
Theory, by observing the relative abundance of helium in these irregular, blue
galaxies. With his observations of hydrogen in the intergalactic medium, he
laid the foundation for an entire new field studying the evolution of
large-scale structure in the universe.
Donald:
Wal is among
the best of his generation in observational astronomy. He needs a big telescope
because he couldn’t do it without the best, big telescopes around, but he’s
extremely good at thinking of what is important and what will be important.
01:29:07:10
Wal:
Okay, guys.
Come along. Yes. I was up here one afternoon looking at the weather – the
prospects for the next night – and some tourists down below shouted up to me,
“How did you get up there?” Meaning…
Roger:
How do we
get up?
Wal:
Yes. By
what means of ladders or… or elevators or whatever. And I replied, “I studied
bloody hard for 15 years.”
Isn’t it
amazing that we get paid to do this? It was wonderful.
Wal:
When I came
here, I was supposed to be a theorist. And after a few weeks, some of the
post-docs who were observers took me up to the mountain to see what it was like
and I found this absolutely entrancing. I loved it. Sitting there in the dark,
gently guiding the telescope and umm…. listening to music. The whole thing was
very glamorous.
01:31:27:10
Wal:
Well I
don’t know whether it’s a question of science and religion, but I found the notion
that an all powerful god would interefere with the progress of the world if I
said a prayer… I found that pretty silly. So I… I would certainly back off to
the point where I might believe in a god who set things going but then left
things to work themselves out.
Donald:
I pray
sometimes. Not very often, but I pray. Um… I think the evidence is not very
strong, but uh.. there we are. That’s uh... And I was brought up in this
tradition and I love some of the tradition. I think it’s lovely. The idea that
people should at least once in the week be taken out of themselves and made to
think in a broader way and away from their local lives is actually rather
important and to me I do that in church.
01:32:47:11
Nick:
Time only
began at the instant that the universe was created, so you could say that God
only came into existence at that point. But that then doesn’t deal with the
fact that there has to be a before in a, in some sense. A – A prior.
Alison:
Do you
think there’s a prior?
Nick:
Yes, I
think in terms of… of all processes being caused. That’s being pretty Buddhist,
where you don’t have to answer these questions. All you have to do is to believe
in causality, but I don’t fit uh… the ordinary standards of Buddhism just like
I don’t fit the ordinary standards of being either Christian or Jewish or
Atheist.
01:33:45:00
Alison (Narration):
We’re in New Mexico on our way to an array of
radio telescopes. It’s on a dry plateau 6,000 feet above sea level. The Very
Large Array is a set of 27 antennas, each 25 metres in diameter mounted on 60
kilometres of railway track. Each dish weighs 200 tonnes. Astronomers spread
them along the tracks to act as one dish 36 kilometres in diameter.
Donald excelled at explaining images radio
observers produced.
Donald:
It was the
first new window on the universe. I mean, we’d been looking really in the uh…
in the optical for hundreds of years and then the radio astronomy opened a
totally new way of looking at the universe.
Alison (Narration): The VLA was my stop on the roadtrip. I asked Donald and the
others if we could come here. Photographs of it had captivated me in childhood.
Astronomers began installing the dishes here when I was a kid, looking at the
night sky with binoculars.
Astronomers mapped the radio sources in the sky
and called them quasi stellar objects or quasars. The first one they measured
was 10 million million times brighter than the sun.
Nick:
A quasar is
a large black hole surrounded by infalling matter, some of which has been so
heated in the process that it glows very, very bright and it outshines the rest
of the galaxy in which it is in and it can be seen for incredible distances.
Donald:
Nothing
actually comes out of a black hole. It has a very deep gravitational pull and
therefore as things swirl around as they do in your bath when you pull the bath
plug out, you get a swirling out and sometimes you get a great gurgling. That
gurgling is stuff getting so hot that it gives out light.
01:36:27:10
Alison (Narration):
Donald had a unique insight that they were
seeing discs of gas spinning around super massive black holes. He developed a
theory that linked black holes and quasars to galaxy formation and concluded
there was a black hole at the centre of every big galaxy, including our own.
Man:
I ask
Maarten Schmidt and Donald Lynden-Bell to come forward to receive the first
Kavli Prize in Astrophysics from His Royal highness...
01:36:57:15
Alison (Narration):
In 2008, Maarten Schmidt and Donald shared the
first Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, recognizing the importance of their work 40
years earlier. The Kavli was created to honour achievements in fields that have
emerged since the Nobel Prize.
Radio astronomers allowed us to see as far back
in time as possible. Theorists had predicted the universe began with The Big
Bang and that observers should be able to detect its faint radiation all around
us.
Donald:
One of the
discoveries was the microwave background radiation, originally just as a… a
source of noise that could not be got rid of in radio telescopes. None of us
really knew that that was going to lead to measuring the early part of the
universe.
01:38:02:00
Alison (Narration):
Astronomers observed the cosmic background
radiation and gave us a picture of the universe in its infancy. Its subtle
variations in temperature and density will lead to vast concentrations of
matter that will one day produce galaxies, stars and life.
01:38:38:10
Donald:
You know, I
was always reasonably good at mathematics, but I wasn’t good at anything else because
I couldn’t read or found reading very hard - most things involve reading. And I think I was probably “dyslectic”. I always
said to my parents that I would be a carpenter and that they didn’t need to read,
but they didn’t agree with me. And so they plotted the number of words I read
each night on a graph - and I understood graphs perfectly well - So they plotted the number of words I read
each night on a graph and I wasn’t allowed to go to sleep until I had read more
this day than I had yesterday. I am rather impatient, but I can have a lot of
patience in a mathematical problem. I mean, I can work through mathematics
that’ll take me weeks or months to get all the things exactly right.
01:39:45:15
Alison (Narration):
They were adventurous on the roadtrips, parking
the car and heading out on foot, sometimes overnight. One hike stands out to
this day, the hike to Rainbow
Bridge, the world’s largest natual land bridge.
It’s in a remote part of Southern Utah, around Navajo Mountain in the Colorado
Plateau.
01:40:16:05
Roger:
I’d never
been camping before I went to America. It… It was only when I saw that the… the
West was a great place and if you wanted to see it you had to go camping that I
thought I must go camping.
Donald:
That was
totally Roger. I mean, Roger looked up all the possible uh… sites and he said,
“Look, there’s this place that very few people visit and nevertheless it’s a
national monument. We ought to get there one way or another and it’s a tough
hike.”
Nick:
Route 16 to
the Navajo Mountain Trading Post.
Four. So we go up here…
01:40:53:00
Alison (Narration):
For the 50th anniversary, Roger and
Donald want to hike to Rainbow Bridge again.
(Alison: And
here’s the trail.) (said very softly)
Donald:
Rainbow
Bridge is a great hike. In fact, I think it’s the best hike we ever went on. We
were young and energetic and uh… we enjoyed the challenge.
Roger:
It’s said
to be 14 miles and it goes um… up and down into and out of a number of canyons.
Alison:
So here’s
Cliff Canyon.
Alison (Narration):
When they were younger, it took them a day to
go in and over a day to walk out. This time, they’re only going one way and
taking a boat out.
Nick and Wal don’t want to do the hike again.
01:41:36:00
Nick:
I’m not
going on the hike uh partly because my legs are wobbly, I’ve had blood vessels
break, but the real reason is I don’t need to go on that hike. I’ve done it.
I’ve nothing left to prove. It was Wal’s decision that determined what I would
do. If Wal was not going to go, then I didn’t particularly want to.
01:42:04:20
Donald:
Nick may be
right not to have come actually on the hike himself. I mean, we’re all older
now. I think he’s had health problems and I think he’s a bit worried that uh,
it’s a bit too much. After all, it was nearly too much for us when we were 20.
Nick:
You want to
be at a place where you are in… in cell phone communication the first night to
guarantee that we know that you’re alright and don’t have to send something out
immediately and hopefully get through.
Alison: Okay.
Roger: What is the purpose of this calling?
Nick:
Just to
know that you’re…
Donald:
To make
sure that I’m not dead.
Nick:
Yes..
Roger:
Well I
don’t think that you’ll be likely to be dead.
Nick:
Or that nobody
else has broken a leg or something that uh… that calls for something urgent
rather than… than waiting for two days.
Roger:
Well…
Donald:
It’s Nick…
Nick needs this.
01:43:00:10
Nick:
I grew up
in London. Probably less supervision than people would have thought wise, and
actually probably all the better for it. I wanted to be an explorer. The
wonderful thing I remember as a child was being allowed to read anything. I
would take a topic that I was interested in and I would read everything that I
could about it as fast as I could, not worrying about whether I’d really
understood it because I was just going to read more and more until finally it
sort of gelled as to what it was all about. And then after about 2 weeks I said
“Enough of this. Let’s go onto something else.”
01:43:45:17
Alison (Narration):
Nick is taking us to the University of Arizona
where he was a professor for 34 years. The group at Arizona tackled astronomy’s
next big problem: how to make a bigger mirror than Palomar. Under the football
stadium, they built this facility and revolutionalized the casting of large
glass mirrors.
Nick:
This
particular 12-sided stand can hold mirrors up to 8.4 metres diameter. This
stand is also the only place in the mirror lab where we can turn a mirror
upside down. You can get a crane and grab it at the top, pull to the centre and
the whole thing will turn down. Over there is the furnace.
Alison (Narration):
Nick and his collaborators made a rotating
furnace that makes up to 8 revolutions a minute and pushes the glass into a
natural dish. The mirror casting takes just over 4 days.
Donald:
How long
does it take to cool?
Nick:
3 or 4
months. It’s a… It’s a long time in the oven.
Donald:
You ought
to see this side. This side’s interesting.
Nick:
Unfortunately
I can’t turn it around for you because if you drop it, it’s a lot of years of
bad luck.
Nick:
Now we’re
coming to the polishing lab.
01:45:28:14
Alison (Narration):
They need two years to polish a mirror.
Nick:
The one
here with the really shiny surface is the first mirror for the giant Magellan Telescope
and then the one behind is the mirror… will be the mirror for the Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope. The quality of surface you can get out of a milling
machine is good to about a 10,000th part of an inch and we are
making these mirrors with a surface quality of two thirds of one millionth of
an inch.
01:46:08:11
Alison (Narration):
Nick has made many contributions to astronomy.
He built the first multiple mirror telescope, pioneered adaptive optics to make
telescope images sharper and devised an instrument for NASA to find Earth-like
planets orbitting other stars.
Nick:
I never
realized what I was doing. I just did it. I don’t even feel that… that I’m in
control of the rudder. It… It steers itself. What I have to do is… is pull on
the oars.
It’s because I’m connecting things all the
time and asking questions of “How does this fit with that?” And so when I go
off in some weird direction, it is because that’s where it led and I ought to
understand it a bit better and so I can pursue it until I get bored and then
something else turns up that’s equally interesting and moves me in another
direction.
01:47:09:10
Alison (Narration):
Another thing Nick did was scout mountains from
Nevada to Mexico, looking for sites to build telescopes. He thought the best
location in the continental U.S. was northeast of Tucson.
Nick:
Beautiful
view of Mt. Graham there.
Donald:
Yeah.
Roger:
It is a
pretty amazing view of a mountain. We… We don’t have views like that in
England. It’s quite snowy.
Alison:
It is.
Roger:
We’ll never
get up there.
Alison:
What are
you worried about, Donald?
Donald:
Us not having
a spade to dig the car out of the snow.
Nick:
No, we
haven’t got a spade for digging. Maybe it would have been a good idea, I don’t
know. But there are a lot of strong men here who are capable of pushing.
01:48:10:10
Wal:
The front
wheels are not driving.
Donald:
Are we sure
it is a 4-wheel drive vehicle?
Wal:
It’s
curious because on the um… the trip to Rainbow Bridge we got the car stuck. 50
years ago.
Roger:
There’s a certain
sense of déjà vu.
Nick:
Hello Mt.
Graham. Can I hear you?
Hello?
Donald:
Well,
congratulations.
Wal:
It’s only
just starting.
Nick:
But we’re
out of it. Now we’ll go…
Donald:
It all
makes for a good …
01:49:28:09
Alison (Narration):
We have driven to the top of the mountain to
visit the Large Binocular Telescope.
Nick:
What is
open are two doors, one in front of each mirror and they will move out and
leave a central strip here.
01:50:05:00
Donald:
It’s very
like building battleships actually, isn’t it?
Nick:
Oh, yes.
01:50:16:15
Alison (Narration):
Hubble said the history of astronomy was the
history of receding horizons. There would always be a horizon beyond which we
could not see.
Nick:
The whole
thing with astronauts has been a huge mistake. What should have been learned
from the lunar landing is that you should not send people into space, you should
send automatic equipment, and instead the idiots kept sending humans up and the
main thing you got was a huge expense in getting the humans back alive usually.
If they put the money into remotely controlled equipment that was capable of
taking care of itself, they would actually get the results and not have to
worry about the humans.
Donald:
But it did
advance technology.
Nick:
At the
time, yes. And then…
Donald:
And it did
send children towards working in science.
01:51:38:08
Nick:
Putting
people on the moon is interesting the first time you do it, much less
interesting the second time and by the time you’ve reached the third one, even
if you’ve got new devices up there, it’s a yawner. Ah, well.
Alison
(Narration):
But
going to the moon had a profound effect on the people we sent and gave us a new
perspective on our planet.
Nick:
There’s a
decent chance that there are about 10 billion planets in this galaxy that might
have life develop on them and there are about 100 billion galaxies spread
through the universe and our success or failure is hopefully not important in
the long run. We are just one of the many experiments necessary and somewhere
someone gets through.
01:52:57:00
Donald:
I think the
first life that will be discovered will be of an extremely dull form and will
probably be bacterial. If you mean intelligent life – will we discover
intelligent life? I think probably not within my lifetime; possibly within
yours. But how will we communicate? It will be extremely tiresome to
communicate.
01:53:37:05
Wal:
Hey, guys.
Can you hear me?
Man:
Yes. Yes,
we can.
Wal:
Who’s the
telescope operator tonight?
Cynthia:
It’s
Cynthia. Hi, Wal.
Wal:
Oh, hi,
Cynthia. And the weather looks okay?
Man:
Yeah, it
looks brilliant outside.
Wal:
Oh, good.
01:53:52:18
Alison (Narration):
We have returned to Caltech where Wal is
showing us the remote observe room in the astronomy building.
He’s beginning an observing run on the most powerful
optical and infrared telescopes in the world. Located on a dormant volcano in
Hawaii, the Keck telescopes have the best viewing conditions on the planet. Wal
co-led the development team. The Keck Foundation was so pleased with the first
telescope that it funded a second one 6 years later.
They designed Keck’s 10-metre mirrors like a
fly’s eye out of 36 thin panels with a computerized support system to hold them
in perfect alignment. This breakthrough in mirror-making will enable their
successors to build new generations of telescopes.
Roger:
It should
be in Leo. It should be…
Wal:
Yeah. And
Virgo rising is about right. And…
Alison (Narration):
Wal had planned to go to Hawaii to observe, but
he isn’t making the trip.
01:55:03:22
Nick:
Wal is
seriously ill and there are reasons for suspecting that he doesn’t have a great
deal of time ahead of him. None of us have a huge amount of time, but in Wal’s
case it may well be considerably shorter than for the others. He’s certainly
thinking about it now, but he feels he’s had a good life and he’s not afraid of
death.
Alison:
He’s not?
Nick:
No.
Alison:
How do you
know that?
Nick:
‘Cause I
discussed it with him.
Alison:
On this
trip?
Nick:
On this
trip.
01:55:42:09
Wal:
Okay, so
you lot are leaving tomorrow.
Donald: Mmm, hmm.
Roger: Yeah.
Wal: What time are you setting off?
Nick:
Ever so
early in the morning, crack of dawn.
Wal:
Oh. Ah…
Good to see you, Nick.
Nick:
All the
best with everything.
Wal:
Yeah. Yeah,
thanks. I need it.
01:56:03:15
Alison
(Narration):
Wal is
not continuing on the roadtrip with us. He’s staying in Pasadena to look after
his health.
Roger:
Well,
lovely to see you, Wal.
Wal:
Yeah.
Roger:
Yeah. Very
interesting to see you observing.
Wal:
Okay, so
shall I let you out?
Alison:
Sorry
you’re not coming with us.
Wal:
Yeah, I’m
sorry, too. But…
Alison:
See you.
Wal:
Not a good
idea to.
01:56:49:00
Nick:
He’s in a
difficult position and he understands it, and in some ways, he almost looks
forward to this happening because he was dreading giving up astronomy and
instead he’s going to be able to work until the end. I think it’s rather a good
way to go.
Donald:
Death is
part of life. It’s an inevitable part of life. It… It’s the… the way that new
things get going. And you don’t get cluttered by all this memory of what’s gone
on in the past. I don’t really believe that uh… that uh… old people should
dominate the scene. I think younger people should dominate the scene.
01:57:59:10
Nick:
We learn
things that are untrue and incomplete. Ideas that are formed in our brain and
are going to stay with us until we die and so our dying is a part of the
process of those ideas going… is very important for humanity.
Donald:
Evolution
really occurs through death. There’s not enough death in the species.
Nick:
That’s
right. But we haven’t come to terms with it.
01:58:31:10
Alison
(Narration):
I’d
never thought of this. That our death was important for progress and essential
for humanity’s future – that is was important to weed out old ideas.
Roger’s
not happy. We’ve left early and have a long drive to reach the trail head.
We’re going to be passing the Grand Canyon. Roger wants to hike it, too, but
the rest of the group has said no. It’s 7 miles down and 7 miles up. Roger targets
me:
Roger:
As you
know, I’m very disappointed about Grand Canyon.
Alison:
What were
you thinking about Grand Canyon? What…? What are you disappointed about?
Roger:
Uh… It’s no
great athletic achievement to walk out at Grand Canyon.
Alison:
But Donald
didn’t think he could do the hike.
Roger:
Mmm.
Alison:
And neither
did Nick.
Roger:
Well…
Alison:
Did you
discuss it with them?
01:59:56:20
Roger:
No.
Alison:
Certainly
ask Donald what he thought about walking out of Grand Canyon.
Roger:
Well, it’s…
Alison:
And then
immediately hiking to Rainbow Bridge.
Roger:
Well it’s
too late to do that now.
Alison:
I’m saying
that Donald and Nick didn’t want to both hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
and hike to Rainbow Bridge.
02:00:17:10
Roger:
Well, Nick
isn’t hiking to Rainbow Bridge either.
Alison:
No.
Donald:
Thank you.
Alison
(Narration):
Donald’s
reaction is not what I expect:
02:00:34:08
Donald:
Well, it’s
only because you were learning what everybody else has learned before and I’ve
seen it happen so many times before. Roger can be infuriating. There are these
people who are just outlandish and who are very, very difficult to get along
with. Roger’s one of them. That’s alright. You may not believe this, but Roger
has become milder over the years.
Roger:
I’m fairly
easy-going. I take life more or less as it comes. How you appear to somebody
isn’t necessarily how you feel yourself. You obviously thought I was in a sulk,
whereas from my point of view, I was in a misery.
Alison:
And what’s
the difference between a sulk and a misery?
Roger:
Uh… A sulk
is how it appears to you and a misery is how it appears to me.
02:02:04:10
Nick:
The Grand
Canyon. It’s always very dramatic and
then there’s that little tiny trickle that one sees at the bottom that is
apparently a wide river seen from a great distance.
Nick:
I can
explore from up here.
Roger:
I’d like to
go down there all the same.
Nick:
Yes.
02:02:32:00
Roger:
The… The
Rainbow Bridge thing is going to be so um… so dilute that that’s not going to
represent any effort you see,… I mean two and a half days to get to Rainbow
Bridge is uh… not a great achievement.
Donald:
But is life
set to be a set of achievements, Roger?
Roger:
What?
Donald:
Is life set
to be a set of achievements?
Roger:
No, I’m not
suggesting that it is. In fact, I’m suggesting that it isn’t.
02:03:31:05
Donald:
You were
asking people when life begins. One sort of life begins when you make your
first friend. I don’t think you really are very discriminating when you start,
but I think after a time you learn which friends of yours are interesting. The
ones that are interesting to you, you really keep up with and you make an
effort to stay in contact.
02:04:17:00
Donald:
From here
it is 1.4 miles to the ruins of Rainbow Lodge. The track no longer resembles a
road and you’ll need to engage your 4-wheel drive.
Roger:
This would
pass for ‘no longer resembles a road.’
Donald:
Yes, I
think this is absolutely right. Hey!
Not so fast!
02:04:52:15
Nick: Okay.
Donald: Right. Out we get.
Alison
(Narration): Nick’s going boat up in 2
days and meet us at Rainbow Bridge.
Donald: There you are.
Nick: We who are about to die salute you.
Donald: Okay, Nick. There we are. Good. Alright.
Roger’s off already.
Alison: Roger!
02:05:17:00
Donald: Come on. We must go. Alright. March. On we go. It was hot when
we started out and you know, we were all carrying quite heavy packs. Roger’s
natural pace is faster than the rest of us, so he went first.
02:05:45:08
Roger: It wasn’t done in any spirit of competition.
It was purely a matter of convenience. My heart is as light as the pack is
heavy. That’s to say that the longer the hike I’m going on, the more exciting I
think it’s going to be. But it doesn’t weigh on me every day and every minute
that I’m over 70, you know?
Donald:
He always
liked to outdo everybody else and be one up. And I’m for trying to stop him
being one up. It was just part of Roger, he wanted to show that he was the
best.
Alison: There’s Roger way ahead.
Donald: Good.
Roger: We’ve done one Canyon, though uh… I
think it should be said that it’s the easiest one – the first one.
Donald: And here we are. Been through first
canyon, and we’re out of Horse Canyon and we are somewhere right back here,
aren’t we?
02:06:50:10 Alison: No. Please tell us we’ve gone further.
Donald: And we’ve got all this stuff to do.
Alison: Well do you think we’ll get to our
camping site?
Donald: No. Uh… not tonight.
Alison: Okay.
Donald: But we might. Should we go?
Roger:
Yeah.
Donald:
Alright.
02:07:14:05
Alison: This trail is a mess.
Donald: This movie’s going to have a lot of heavy
breathing in it.
Roger:
1961. April
26. Dear Mum. Very hot with blazing sun. There is a sort of rudimentary trail.
Not exactly well-beaten as few people visit Rainbow. Having climbed into and
out of three canyons, each some hundreds of feet deep, we kept stopping to
rest. It was frightfully hot and very uphill and the trail seemed interminable.
It seemed a hugely long way. The description of it rings pretty true, doesn’t
it? I mean, it’s… it’s quite like that now.
Alison: My feet are killing me.
Roger: We walked a lot quicker in those
days. I think it can’t have been as difficult then as it is… as it is now. The
trail must have been in somewhat better shape.
I suppose
we have to admit that we are getting old.
Donald: Well, that’s true. And I enjoy it.
Roger: Oh, I don’t.
Donald: I’ll come in a moment.
02:08:36:08
Alison (Narration): Donald is struggling. This is unexpected and we start to think
about how to get him out of here if he can’t make it out on his own.
Roger: I hope he doesn’t find he’s bitten off
more than he can chew, because I don’t know what we’ll do if he has: I can’t
carry him.
02:09:01:15
Roger:
I run the
London Marathon every year. When you’re 70, if you run it in 5 hours, you can
get an automatic entry for the next year and I still did it in 3:57 last April.
More than an hour in hand. I could stop at a café and have a leisurely lunch
halfway around and still make it. In fact, it would make it easier to do that,
but I don’t think it would be sporting.
Alison: Got it.
Roger: Okay, thanks.
Alison: You’re welcome.
Donald: Is this where we’re staying?
02:09:40:10 Alison: Yes, we can have a fire.
Donald: Uh-huh.
Alison: Oh, man. Thank you.
Alison (Narration): I try to reach Nick to let him know we’re okay.
Alison: I don’t have a signal.
Donald: Okay.
Alison: We’ll have to try him in the
morning. No.
02:10:16:15
Donald: Very glad to see the country again.
I love that part of the world.
It’s
wonderful. You’re away from all of civilization and nevertheless you had
communion with the sky and the stars.
Roger: That’s Betelgeuse. And there’s Sirius. How
about that?
Alison (Narration): Roger gets
out a small telescope and focuses it.
Roger: Jupiter would be to the far right
of Venus.
Alison: What’s that one?
Roger: Uh… That one is uh… Capella. It’s
a binary star which has an orbital period of 104 days.
Alison: You have a very good memory,
Roger.
Roger: Well, I only uh… I only took an
interest in it, that was all.
Alison: Yeah.
02:11:39:07 Donald: Yogi, it’s spring. It’s spring.
Roger: Oh… and bright.
Donald: It is, I’m afraid. Bright and
spring. It’s a good spring morning.
Where’s your alarm
clock?
Roger: Are you being an alarm clock?
Donald: Yes, I am.
Roger: Mm-hmm. Alright.
Alison: Morning, Roger.
Roger: Morning.
02:12:19:10
Alison (Narration): As we start out, I hope this day will go better.
Donald: Oh, dear. I’m going the wrong way. Let’s try
the right way.
Roger: Uh-huh.
Donald: You see the path anywhere?
Roger: That’s not a trail.
Donald: Don’t you think that looks like a trail?
02:12:48:09
Roger: We’re
definitely totally lost now. I suppose this is the trail, but I’m not sure. Do…?
Do you think it goes up here?
Alison: No. No, I think it goes that way.
Roger: There’s nothing that way. That’s
hopeless.
Donald: I think it probably goes over here and
then crosses back here.
I think it looks like a trail here.
Roger: Where did Donald go, anyway?
02:13:34:05
Donald: Yeah, here we are. Here’s the path.
Alison: Okay, we’ll be right there.
Alison (Narration):
No sooner are we back on track then something
else happens. Roger needs to rest.
Roger: Ah… Getting enfeebled in my old
age.
Alison: How old are you, Roger?
Roger: 76. Donald’s 76, but he doesn’t
run marathons.
Alison: Yeah.
Roger: Do you think I should make my mind
to it. Sort of give in?
Alison: No, I think you should just keep
going. Ignore your age.
Roger: There’s some aspects of it I can’t
ignore.
Alison: That’s true for all of us.
02:14:26:03
Roger: Mmm. When I was a student and I
was uh… late going for a train and I had to run for it, I can remember
wondering, ‘whatever will I do when I’m 50? I shall miss the train’, but uh…
somehow I’ve sort of been putting it off.
Alison: But you don’t seem old to me.
Roger: Oh, thank you, Alison.
02:14:56:05
Alison: Well, we better keep going. We
have a long way to go still. Shall we?
Roger: Yeah, I suppose so.
Alison: Onward.
Roger: Yeah. Here we go again, then.
Alison: Donald will be very far ahead of
us now.
Roger: Yes. He will be.
02:15:28:10
Alison (Narration): Roger continues to struggle and it surprises me.
Alison: Can I help you?
Roger: It’s too much for me. I can’t do
it. I’m too old now.
Roger: Maybe I can do it.
Alison: I’ll help you. I’ll go ahead.
Roger: And I’m a bit despondent about myself because
I’m not as strong as I used to be.
02:16:24:15
Alison: re’ you okay?
Roger: Yup. Yup.
02:16:39:03
Alison: Roger?
Roger: Yeah.
Alison: This way. Follow me. There. You
did it.
Roger: Thank you.
Alison: Look back, Roger.
Roger: Yes.
Alison: This is a fantastic view. Isn’t it
beautiful? And look at the sky.
Roger: Yeah.
02:17:13:05
Alison: Aren’t we lucky?
Roger: Yes.
Alison: Well, let’s keep going.
Roger: Alright.
Donald: Onward.
Roger:
It
certainly is an amazing place.
Alison:
Shit.
02:18:04:10
Donald: Fantastic. Don’t you think it’s fantastic?
Just fantastic scenery. You know, it makes one feel great to be alive to be on
this, doesn’t it? Even if it’s hard work.
Roger: We look a bit small compared with the
landscape.
Donald: There it is. There it is. That’s Rainbow
Bridge.
Roger: So it is.
02:18:49:01
Donald: No
problems, Nick. Just late as usual.
Nick: Dr.
Livingstone, I presume!
Donald: Stanley,
I presume.
Alison: Come
on.
Nick: We’re very glad to see you.
We
were a little worried.
Donald: We tried to ring from the top. --
Nick: It didn’t work.
Donald: --
Of Cliff Canyon. It didn’t work. But actually, we had a good trip.
02:19:16:15
Nick: Good.
Donald: Uh… No problems.
Donald: It was a relief. And thank God I can
put down my pack.
Roger: Well I was pleased to have made it
but I didn’t… I didn’t have much doubt when we started that I’d be able to make
it. I mean, I’m not given to sort of dancing about and congratulating myself on
anything ‘cause the… the next thing happens… that happens is a fall, you know.
Pride goeth before a fall.
It’s
difficult to grasp how big it is when you just see it in a picture. It’s about
300 feet high and wide.
Roger:
I would
have liked to stand on it like I did before, but there, there didn’t seem to be
much prospect of doing that.
02:20:11:15
Donald: It’s not allowed.
Roger: Are you sure it’s not allowed?
Donald: Yes, absolutely sure.
Nick: I offer you a toast to Athenaeum
Enterprises.
Donald: It’s a great enjoyment to go hiking
with friends. To the future! Thank you.
02:20:49:08
Alison (Narration): It was a privilege to go with them. Nick quoted T.S. Eliot.
“We shall not cease from exploration and the
end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place
for the first time.”
Donald: The numbers in astronomy as you know
are very big. It is easy to appreciate a tenth of a second and if you’re a
photographer, you might even… or a runner, you might even appreciate a hundredth
of a second. How many hundredths of a second are there in a year? Well that’s quite
a big number actually, and if you think about it there are about 30 million
seconds in a year. So that’s 3 times 10 to the 7, a hundredths of a second,
that’s 3 times 10 to the 9 and if you ask about a hundred years, that’s 3 times
10 to the 11, which is very like the number of stars in the galaxy. And that’s
very like the number of galaxies in the universe, too.
02:22:19:05
Alison: Are you afraid of death? Are you
worried about it?
Roger: Uh… No, I’m not worried about it.
Uh… I can’t see any purpose in being worried about it, but I’m not looking
forward to it. I’m, I’m a Christian and um… uh… I therefore believe in
principle in eternal life, but I wonder what you do with eternal life. It seems
to me that eternity is a very long time and I don’t know what to do all that
time. I can’t believe that they have telescopes in heaven, but I don’t know
what they do have.
Alison:
What did
you learn from a lifetime observing the universe?
02:23:23:02
Nick:
Well… Somebody
once said that the most remarkable feature of the universe is that it is
comprehensible. That somehow with these ideas of cause and effect we can go
through and make sense of all the parts of it that we’ve observed and see how
they all fit together. Curiosity is a necessary part of survival and the thing
that I like most about life is being able to ask questions.
02:24:22:05
Wal: The question is always the same one: what the hell is out there.
Wal died seven months after the reunion, on
October 29, 2012. [font is Gotham
Medium same as credit roll]