Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
I want to take you on a journey,
and this journey will start in one isolated and sunny place in South America.
It's a very quiet place, nobody is living there,
not even a single spider or a snake,
there is no sound around you.
The landscape reminds you a bit of a surface of a different planet,
and when you are there, you don't wonder why NASA is testing their vehicles there
that later go and do their job on Mars.
There are two valleys.
One is called the Mars Valley, and the other is called the Moon Valley.
Not so far away from there, there is the Chajnantor Plateau
where there is an amazing observatory at an altitude of 5,000 metres.
The place is called the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on this planet.
And this is ALMA.
If you translate it from Spanish, you would say it's "soul",
Greeks would say it's "jump",
but scientists say it's the Atacama Large Millimeter Array,
a big radio telescope, 64 antennas that work together
as one big radio telescope, a 16-kilometer-wide radio telescope.
When I was there,
I was wondering why people want to build this expensive device there,
in such a remote area,
because it's very hard to live there, to walk there, to work there,
because if you walk as you do usually, it's already way too fast.
Because of the altitude and the lack of oxygen,
you can have headaches, and you feel dizzy,
but, of course, the official answer is because of the night sky.
The night sky sky in Atacama is very dark,
it's very good for astronomical observation, no big cities around,
and, of course, the dry site is very good for astronomical observation on its own.
But when I was there, equipped with an oxygen mask,
these answers were not enough for me,
I was still asking why people want to do science [there]
where it's so hard to do it.
And I think the real answer is the desire to answer
the classical questions that people already asked for thousands of years,
"Where do we come from?"
"Are we alone?"
"Is there anybody else?"
But have you asked yourself why people want to ask these questions?
And why, for such a long time, we couldn't come up with an answer?
And isn't it interesting
that scientists and also people who say they don't believe in science,
are both searching this answer in the sky?
I think here we come to the most amazing and saddest story at the same time,
to the point of asking, "What science is about?"
We think that we can know a lot, and we can know a lot,
but we know that there is some limit, we can't know everything.
I don't know how to talk about this
because in science, the answer "I don't know" is a really good answer.
When I started broadcasting almost ten years ago,
The name I choose for my program was "The Known within the Unknown",
and then I understood that if I wanted people to listen to my program,
they needed to understand what I'm talking about;
and if everybody needed to understand it,
of course, it should have been related for everyone, right?
So I started to search for connections between the complicated science
performed in science centers somewhere far away,
and the simple tasks performed in our everyday life,
let's say, those using the same Wi-Fi technology
and present in our lives thanks to radio astronomy.
I started to search for connections between the animals
that lived on this planet millions and millions of years ago,
whose footprints are still here,
and scientists, as sophisticated detectors in search for these footprints
and what these animals looked like, what they were eating,
and even able to find out how and when they disappeared,
way before humans appeared on this planet.
I search for connections
between our plastic shopping bag and fish dying in the ocean
because this bag becomes trash and kills the animals underwater,
and this trash already forms islands in the Pacific.
I started to search for connections between everyone and everything.
When was the last time you had a blood test?
Do you know how much iron you have in your blood, or how old it is?
Well, scientists say it's 8 billion years old,
because at that time a big, old star exploded,
and since then, elements like carbon, calcium, iron
are present in the Universe and also in our blood,
and this stardust still connects us to each other, to the Universe,
and to each life form on this planet.
One more question.
Do you know what it's like when you want to cry, but you can't?
Not just because tears don't come out of your eyes,
but because they stay there in a bubble,
they don't roll down your cheeks, and they just grow bigger and bigger.
Well, if you haven't been to space, or at least cried on a zero-gravity plane,
you don't know what it's like, and you haven't experienced this.
But there are people who have,
and from their experience - astronauts who told me about this -
I drew this example to explain complicated things,
for example, in this case, how gravity works.
And here I come to the point where talking about science
is searching for a common language.
A common language between people who think about the same things,
but just call them differently, they label them differently;
between people who know a lot, and people who hear something for the first time,
but I needed to create a feeling for them, that they were informed well enough
to understand the complicated things I was going to talk about,
so they wouldn't want to switch off my program after my second sentence.
I searched for the common language between me and the scientists;
of course, I needed to understand what a scientist was telling to me
- and you've probably heard it's quite hard to understand scientists.
My recipe is to answer two simple questions: what and why.
If I get the answers for these questions from the scientists I interview,
I feel I understand what exactly they want to tell me,
and I'm ready to build my story to share it with my audience.
But why is it so hard to understand scientists?
My version is that's because they know more foreign languages than we do.
Let's say biologists understand the language of the chemical signals
because this is the language the cells use when they communicate with each other.
During every single moment, right now when I'm on this stage,
billions of messages are sent under my skin,
because this is the way cells communicate with each other.
As a journalist
I don't need to know this language to explain you how it works,
I need to find just that one scientist who can tell me this.
And scientists definitely can add to their CVs
probably one more foreign language than I would,
the language of chemical signals.
The same do the astronauts, and most of the astronomers.
They translate the language of light in words.
In the light spectrum
they can read what chemical elements, let's say, a comet has,
and a comet is hundreds of millions kilometers away from us.
They can point for us, for example, at this place,
and this place is where many stars are born.
We would be able to see this place only if we were able to see heat.
This is the famous Saturn with its rings,
and maybe tonight, we would be able to see these rings
if our vision were 1,000 times sharper than it is.
So talking about science is about choosing the correct wavelength,
and doing so, I think,
is talking about complicated things and using simple examples.
I will just make an experiment now:
let's say that this is something I want to tell you about now,
and you are my radio listeners.
It's a very important formula,
it's something that changed our way of thinking a long time ago,
and it's something it's really worth talking about.
Would you be interested to hear about this today?
I doubt it. Maybe a few.
Because it's kind of interesting in a way:
in a few symbols, you can talk about a really big truth in science,
let's put it this way.
But what if I told you
that these few characters can explain why the Moon is not falling on our heads,
would it sound more interesting to you today?
I would prove and I would check the second version.
So talking about science and searching for these simple examples,
sometimes also means searching for them in nature,
at least, this is my version.
We all know there are things in nature
that are too slow or too fast to be caught by our physical eye,
and to explain it to you I want to show you a video.
Let's say how a plant is growing.
When we observe it daily, we see just the result,
how it is changing day by day and maybe just a few millimeters,
but with special cameras, we can film it,
and then we can show you everything that happened in a few months
in 30 seconds.
And you can see that the plant is changing all the time
and is growing constantly.
The same is happening with things
that are too fast to be caught by our eyes,
let's say, a mosquito flight, or a dragon fly's flight technique;
Usually, we just hear them close by,
but with cameras like the one you've just seen we used with this plant
we can film this process, we can run it,
and we can see they move their four wings in different dimensions at the same time,
they even know how to fly backwards,
and now we're just trying to built devices that can do the same.
So what I want to say is that until this camera was built,
we couldn't see this, maybe we couldn't even discover this,
and I think something similar is happening to our consciousness as well.
There are things we can't know, we can't explain, we can't see
- let's say "see" with our consciousness -
and I think we really want to have a device
that would show us everything that is unknown to us.
Many times, we ask science to become this device to show us things,
but science can't explain everything.
Science is something that can inform you about things that you can measure,
that you can make an experiment with, where you can compare the results,
but as we all know, we learn also from our experience,
and sometimes, our experience is something that you can't measure,
you can't make an experiment with, and you can't replicate it.
There is a scientist who is often my guest on my radio show,
and he said that science is like taking a fishing net
and going to the lake to catch some fish.
Of course, this fishing net can have big holes and small holes in it,
and you will never catch the smallest fish in the big-holed one,
so would you say then that there is no small fish at all in this lake?
No, you just can't know this.
But if you've tasted the small fish on your plate,
probably you don't care if someone says
that there is no small fish at all because we didn't see it in the net.
During these 10 years,
while I've been hosting and producing my science radio show,
of course, I met many interesting people with different experiences
because I talk about astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, history,
about very, very different things.
I talked to an astronaut who had experienced walking in space,
he was telling me how it was to take steps there
and how our planet looked from above.
I talked also to an inventor who had a crazy idea
of a plane that can fly without a single gram of fuel,
and now this plane has already landed at many international airports.
And I talked to a woman who had had a near-death experience
and that was a case where I didn't know exactly how to talk about it
because it is something that we can't measure,
I can't prove what she was telling me, how it was to be dead.
I can't ask her to do it again for me,
and I can't ask someone if she is lying or not.
So here I come to the point where talking about science
and asking questions about these known and unknown things,
on the edge between the known and the unknown,
and thinking about these known and unknown things in general,
means doing this responsibly
with curiosity, and respect at the same time.
When I found my language for talking about science with scientists,
I thought maybe it's interesting to ask the scientists themselves
if it's interesting and easy to talk to me.
And there is a physicist
who always leaves my program saying, "It's so amazing, it's so easy,
I'm so inspired now and in such a good mood."
So I went to see him, and said, "Look, I have a scientific question for you,
'Why is it easy to talk to me?'"
He said, "Well, I can't tell you, using a scientific method
because I'd need then another you and another me
while talking and having a coffee,
and we'd need to have the same experience in life,
and I can't compare them, but this is what I can tell you from my point of view.
It's easy because you don't know the limits."
And I was, "What? What kind of limits? What exactly do you mean?"
He explained me that there is always [more than one truth],
and that of course, people believe in their truth, and they fight for it,
and that always when two opinions meet, they create a frontline.
But if you fight on one side, and the other answers on the other side,
the frontline gets wider and wider.
Then you are so busy with fighting techniques,
and guns, and protection plans
that you just don't have time to research your truth anymore.
And he said, "When you talk to me,
I have a feeling that you are not aware of these limits
because you don't ask me about fighting techniques or guns,
you directly ask me about ideas that don't belong to anybody."
For me, that was the confirmation
that my strategy of what and why probably works.
At the beginning I told you we were traveling today,
and we started our journey in the Atacama desert.
Now, to see strange structures, you don't need to climb 5,000 meters high,
you need to 1,000 meters deep underground.
You need to take an old, box-type elevator
that fits 15 people: yourself and 14 miners.
For six minutes, you won't see anything, just a complete darkness around you
and hear a big noise that will go through your earplugs.
After these six minutes,
you will reach 1,000 meters underground,
miners will go to the left, you will take the narrow tunnel on the right,
and you will see salt around you.
200,000,000-years-old salt.
Welcome to the Boulby Mine in the UK.
But you didn't come here because of the salt,
you came because here is
one of the few deep-underground laboratories in the world,
and you won't believe, but people explore here, yes, the Universe.
They want to catch the small particles that come from far away
because of the natural radiation
that is reduced in this place to the minimum;
it's a quiet place, they can do research there.
But when I was there, underground, I was still asking this question
why people want to sit under this one-kilometer-thick rock layer
and hope that a fire won't break out some day
in these narrow tunnels that looked like this.
Just to catch particles?
Just to answer the question
and maybe one day to catch these particles to be able to say
what that dark matter that forms more than 95% of our Universe is?
I think this 'why' is very connected to the 'why' I asked in ALMA.
It's again being connected to everyone, to each other, to the Universe,
to the big unknown.
That is not the lack of knowledge, it's part of knowledge,
and I would say that this big unknown is the fuel that drives us further,
to learn more, to ask more, just to be alive.
Just as the people at the Boulby Mine want fresh air, need fresh air,
so does the mankind need fresh air that drives us further
and keeps us searching for creative answers
to these constantly changing 'I-don't-knows'.
And this is the man that inspires me already since childhood:
Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
I always say that he showed us one more planet on this planet.
He showed us what is under the water,
and he showed us that it is nothing empty, dark, silent;
it's full of life - different, but still life of this planet.
For a long time, I was afraid of this underwater world,
and I had an opportunity to interview his son,
and thanks to him, I overcame my fear.
Now, instead of being afraid of diving, I really love diving,
and I discovered this world for myself.
But Jacques-Yves Cousteau asked a question,
"What is a scientist?"
And his answer was that a scientist is a curious man
who is sitting and looking through the keyhole of nature,
trying to know what's going on.
I would say that a science journalist is that lucky person who can sit next to him
and all the time ask what it is that he sees.
Thank you.
(Applause)