James Webb Takes Us Back in Time

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope have taken the internet by storm, and Declan ...

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Images from the James Webb Space Telescope have taken the internet by storm, and Declan is here with two guests who worked on it for a fascinating conversation about its long journey into reality. Dr. John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the senior project scientist for the JWST, and Dr. Scott Acton, a physicist at Ball Aerospace and JWST’s Wavefront Sensing and Controls scientist, relay their exploits in achieving the most incredible and ambitious space images ever taken of thousands of galaxies, black holes, and dust clouds. And we have to ask: Are we alone in the universe, really?

Show Notes:

–First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope

–Dr. John Mather

–TMD: This Is Something That’s Going to ‘Change Our Understanding of the Universe’

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  1. Avatar photo
    WKDawson

    Declan, really nice to hear your enthusiasm for the Webb observatory.

    Just a minor note. I understand the point about small government that many here promote, and I think in a significant fraction of cases, I can basically agree or accept that this is a matter of perspective where I can see it either way.

    However, with projects like the Webb Observatory, this was almost 30 years of work. As the scientists pointed out, they didn't know exactly how to proceed in the beginning and they had to learn a lot of stuff. They also mentioned that they had to work together with other countries to accomplish this task because it is very difficult to do these things by oneself.

    Would we really have accomplished anything like this by way of a private company? Seriously. Whether it is a king, or it's some politician or whatever, the way that really big things get done is somebody just wants the darn thing enough and gets enough people not to get in the way of making it happen. A private company is accountable to shareholders, most of whom are not interested in a remotely plausible return in 30 years. Moreover, what is the profitable return (monetarily speaking)? Basically nothing. So billions of dollars for nothing? You see, it just wouldn't happen if such things were "privatized". The immediate "return" for defense is far more tangible, so it is maybe easier to bankroll that, but even there, it is the government that asks for the weapon.

    Pharmaceutical companies are perhaps one of the few places where private investment does actually extend over a decade in some cases. That said, the technology that brought us the mRNA vaccines is something people have been working on for the last 20 or 30 years. If you look into the life of Özlem Türeci, who developed the version for Pfizer, she spent many of those years trying to navigate living with extreme job insecurity as a foreigner. This was largely the fault of all the small money disappearing for those projects that didn't have an obvious clearly tangible return that was just waiting to be had. Dolly Parton actually donated some of the important seed money for the development of the Moderna version of the vaccine. Again, I would guess a lot of that was that money was tight so it always goes to where already known results are. Eventually, of course, money did get to these projects, but I would say that we got lucky. It certainly wasn't the largesse of our funding agencies that got us the main hits, it was grit and dedication from scientists against a machine that doesn't have much interest in supporting anything that doesn't promise and deliver an immediate return.

    My point is that whereas I understand that a bloated government, or expecting the government to solve all the problems in society is an absurdity that probably should be resisted. However, in making a first step in a process of development, someone really has to foot an imponderable bill or the idea just doesn't happen. Companies can think on the short term, maybe big pharma has the levity to think on the midterm, but the goal and the returns need to be very clear for anyone to invest in such a project. That is "government investment".

    So what would we get from this, besides staying ahead of China, being the first in the world to develop these technologies? Well, being first, it means a head start. I think the main thing is that we will have to work on some important technologies to achieve this goal, and because it was public, the entrepreneurial sorts of people will now have the opportunity to come up with new ideas on how to apply it. In some ways, the microchip was some of the "low lying fruit" that came out of the Apollo project. That eventually became an enormous industry. It is exactly because immediate tangible goals cannot be easily predicted at the inception of a project and only a small part of that project actually becomes the "return" that you cannot claim that private companies will just magically generate this. Yet even in small scale investing, you bet on what you think will go somewhere, and sometimes it does, and often it just doesn't. Yet generally, if you use your mind, you wouldn't be wrong 100% of the time, and sometimes, you strike gold. With investments like alternative energy, sure, nobody knows that this will yield big things, but pushing a direction helps make it more likely that something will come through the cracks, even if it isn't where you thought it would be.

    Anyway, from my side, I guess I sometimes weary of always hearing that government is bad, privatization is good, and government cannot do anything to help investment and economics. Yet at the same time, where did that Webb Observatory come from? From private investment or deep pockets government? There is a case for both, but there is also a middle ground where government can do some things right.

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  2. Zach

    Loved the podcast. Just wanted to suggest a song to listen to when the next images are released.

    Public Service Broadcasting - Go!

    https://youtu.be/BHIo6qwJarI

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  3. Shel F.

    This was an excellent interview. With all due respect to David and Sarah, The Dispatch Podcast is the flagship podcast this week.

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  4. Payette

    Fantastic discussion, Declan!!

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  5. Avatar photo
    J. Eric

    Wow!
    Not only to imagine it, but to make it happen!
    Wow!

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  6. Avatar photo
    TJ

    I really want to know what they are going to learn about dark matter and dark energy from JWST. Combined those two things make up and 96% of the forces in the cosmos…and we don’t know what it is.

    I’m skeptical of the idea that there is life on other planets. Life shouldn’t exist here. We still don’t have any idea how it occurred and many of the efforts at explaining this end up suggesting that it was seeded from elsewhere in the cosmos. Even given all of the innumerable Goldilocks conditions of earth, life shouldn’t exist here.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Will Roberts

    I don't think we can all agree that 10 billion for a telescope in space as your guests state. Those are some expensive pictures. Some might think the money might be better spent providing for people on Earth. So saying it as a statement of fact is inaccurate I do think.

    I for one am a big supporter of the basic research and space exploration NASA does. If only because basic research often results in a lot of good for the wider society though the good can be unpredictable. For companies to make future profits Government often has to invest in areas where there is no profit motive currently. Space is a good example of that.

    I do think the Starship transport could do a lot to revolutionize space flight.

    Musk may not be the best human being personally but at least he is thinking out of the box. In the Federal Government it doesn't pay to think out of the box because people get upset tax money is being wasted. But sometimes it takes a lot of wasted money till you get a breakthrough.

    I think the granddaughter who wants to go to Mars is going to regret going if she gets there. She could go to death valley Nevada. At least there is an atmosphere there and you don't have to live underground so as not to die from radiation poisoning.

    Being a bit of an amateur physicists I have watched some PBS spacetime videos on colonizing and terraforming Mars. Because Mars lacks an electromagnetic field it doesn't seem like you could have a viable colony, at least above ground. Any attempt to bring back liquid water would be thwarted by cosmic rays.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FshtPsOTCP4&t=980s

    Venus might be a better option both for finding life and terraforming

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNdy-LJWNQs&t=581s

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI&t=290s

    That being said I think humanity lacks the patience for such long term endeavors. The only reasonable hope is to invest in what seem to be now unreasonable ideas. Breakthrough propulsion technologies to get us to more habitable planets faster.

    https://www.limitlessspace.org/programs/

    Personally I don't think Elon or NASA are thinking big enough. If people can't travel in a reasonable time frame to a place that won't kill them space exploration will always be a pipe dream. While investing in warp drive and other exotic technologies may seem like throwing money down the drain I think it is a better investment than playing around with chemical rockets. Even if we fail we will probably get more useful technologies out of it than the sort of things we are doing now.

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  8. Rebecca

    Thanks for the great interview! I want to also recommend the Three-Body Problem trilogy by Ciuxin Liu to any Dispatch readers who are interested in sci-fi; and full disclosure, I didn’t think I was interested in sci-fi until my husband recommended the first book in the trilogy to me. Some of the themes of the trilogy go very nicely with this discussion.

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  9. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    I enjoyed hearing this segment. One of my childhood friends is an optical scientist on JWST, and he was posting giddy but necessarily vague updates on Facebook about how good the imagery was as they were working through the alignment process. One of the exciting things about JWST is just how novel the design is- they were truly inventing something that was first of its kind. By contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope is apparently heavily influenced by the architecture of the KH-11 reconnaissance satellite.

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  10. James Angelichio

    The one question I wanted Declan to ask but didn’t hear was “How can anybody work on one project for 30 years before it comes to fruition?” I would go bat shit crazy if I didn’t see results a lot faster than that. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not in space exploration.

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    1. Avatar photocircle-angle-nib
      Declan Garvey vertical-nib Author

      I asked Dr. Acton this when I interviewed him for TMD earlier this year! (https://morning.thedispatch.com/p/the-morning-dispatch-the-school-closure)

      The Dispatch: You’ve devoted about a third of your life to working on this one telescope. What initially drew you to the project, and how have you remained motivated over the past two decades?

      Acton: Well, I think none of us knew it was going to be 20 years when we signed up for it. I got involved in the project when I was working for the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Where my heart was at the time, I really wanted to see humans on Mars, and I looked around for opportunities to make that happen. But I had concluded—as did most of the world at that time—that the window on us becoming a space-faring civilization had closed, politically, economically, and socially. Somehow, Elon Musk has reopened that window. But at the time, that was not an opportunity for me, within the government or outside the government. And I looked at this telescope and realized that, if I could make a significant contribution, it was something that’s going to fundamentally rewrite textbooks and change our understanding of the universe. We only get so many trips around the sun, and then it’s over. At the end of the day, I would say it was worth it. Absolutely worth it.

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      1. James Angelichio

        Thanks for that. I still don’t think I could do it. After five years I’d be saying “This is way better than anything we’ve had before, let’s launch now.”

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