Letters from an Astrophysicist
Page 10
Note that you did not compare the cost of curing cancer with money Americans spend on the Defense Department, or on farm subsidies. Why not? The Department of Defense spends in ten days what NASA spends in a year, not including the cost of veterans’ benefits. America spends upwards of $100 billion per year in cash payments to farmers so that they do not grow crops. This, itself, is more than six times NASA’s annual budget.
But what’s more important than any of the above comparisons is the fact that truly innovative solutions to problems come primarily from the cross-pollination of disciplines. And this cross-pollination is entirely unpredictable in its nature and its direction. I give several examples drawn from health, but thousands exist in all fields: A new computer algorithm for image analysis was invented back when the original Hubble Telescope mirror was launched and found to be defective. Until the optics were repaired, applying this algorithm was the best we could do with the fuzzy images. Turns out, the algorithm was shown to be ideal for the early detection of breast cancer, enabling diagnosis long before the trained human eye could determine that cancer was present. Few doctors have the background to even think about computer algorithms for this purpose. And the same is true for X-ray machines (invented by physicists exploring the electromagnetic spectrum), the MRI machines (concept discovered by physicists), and ultrasound devices, developed by the military for undersea surveillance.
I will add that my visibility as a Black scientist serves to break stereotypes that, themselves, take an incalculable toll on society, as opportunities and resources are closed off because people in power do not see people of color as having the intellectual mettle to compete in the workplace, in academia, or elsewhere.
So I could not disagree more with your contention. The facts of how society works argue strongly against it. To the extent that you represent an otherwise non-vocal minority, I am intrigued by the strength of your conviction.
We live in a wealthy nation. The wealthiest the world has ever known. In some ways, we define our culture (passively or actively) by what we do as a nation as expressed through congressional funding priorities. The National Endowment for the Arts is funded because it contributes a dimension to the quality of life we enjoy as Americans. Transportation is funded (even subsidized) because we value the economic vitality that it brings. The National Science Foundation is funded because it drives basic research that, history has shown, is a foundation of technological progress, especially where corporate R&D does not go. The Smithsonian is funded because we value the preservation of who and what we have been, to ourselves and to the world. The military is funded because we (as a nation) value above all else the real or perceived security it brings. The National Institutes of Health is funded because we care greatly about curing disease—and on and on. It is this mixture that defines America as a nation.
I suppose another way to set priorities would be to rank the problems of America (and of the world) and solve them in order, applying all resources at once. I believe this scenario is more resonant with your sense of what I should be doing with my life. But the history of the search for solutions does not support this contention. As I said, the most innovative solutions to problems commonly come from outside of the field—from people inspired by different priorities. The government knows this (primarily through fighting wars, and not through some deep insight into human nature) and values it through high investments in pure science, compared with the arts, for example.
No one has ever suggested that obtaining Hubble images is more important than feeding people. But this premise seems to stoke your objections. The best of worlds is to do it all. And, even with the flaws in the system, we do it all better than anybody.
Again, thank you for your interest in my interview, and I do appreciate your comments in spite of (or perhaps because of) our points of disagreement.
Sincerely,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Semper Fi
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Hi Neil,
A lot has happened since I last wrote you.§ Not sure where to start. Some for the good but most for the bad.
I guess with all things I’ll start with the good. My career has been going amazing. I took a job flying “Flight For Life” and saved a few lives! I’m now back in Las Vegas flying as chief pilot for Maverick Helicopters doing tours and showing people how Earth was formed through some of the layers in the Grand Canyon. In that regards things have been great!
For the bad, I’m not sure where to start here. I’ve been through quite a lot. I know you don’t know much about me from our few emails (other than I’m a big fan). I served six years in the Marine Corps and in that time I lost a few friends, one was my best friend. I felt like I paid a good price having been through that crazy time in my life. That’s when I met my wife and we had our daughter. I was on Cloud 9! My wife worked for the Nevada test site as an engineer and we were perfect for each other.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer about four years ago. She battled it for three years like a champ but last year she lost her fight. I thought I would be prepared for it but broke me. If it weren’t for our daughter Ella I’m not sure I would have recovered.
I just wanted to check in with ya and see how you were doing? Sorry if that email was a little drab. But I hope you’re doing good! I’m still following you and I’ll always have your back!
Your friend
Jay Scoble
Friday, March 15, 2019
Dear Jay,
When you assess all the parts and functions of the body, we should be amazed that human physiology works at all. So when parts fail, as they will for all of us at some point, or even when tragedy strikes, as in your lost friends in the Corps, not enough of us reflect on how amazing it was to have been alive in the first place.
Consider further that the Homo sapiens genome is capable of generating trillions of unique humans, which means most people who could ever exist will never even be born. So death is a kind of privilege of those few of us who have known life.
Such a cosmic perspective empowers me to celebrate every day I am alive. And I share it with you, as a kind of scientific solace on the life and death of your loved ones.
Peace to you,
Neil
* An open letter sent to twelve favorite professors from the Great Courses video series that this gentleman watched and enjoyed. Mine among them. Note: We corresponded six months earlier, in the Parenting chapter of this collection.
† Now The Great Courses, Chantilly, VA.
‡ Adapted for Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 205–208.
§ Jay’s first of five emails to me was in 2013.
Chapter 8
Tragedy
This chapter contains letters describing my firsthand account of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center Twin Towers, written primarily to assuage the concerns of those who knew of my proximity to the danger. This chapter also includes a bit about conspiracy theories and a candid exchange with a mystic.
The Horror, the Horror*
Wednesday, September 12, 2001, 10:00am
Dear Family, Friends, & Colleagues,
My entire family is safe. We evacuated our lower-Manhattan residence at about noon yesterday and migrated north on foot to Grand Central Terminal (about three miles) where we took Metro North to the home of my parents in Westchester, from where I write this message.
We live four blocks from the World Trade Center, in view of both Towers, City Hall, and City Hall Park. I happened to be working at home yesterday. My wife went to work at 8:20am. I left at the same time to vote in NYC’s Mayoral Primary. My 9-month old son was at home with our nanny. My 5-year old daughter was attending her second day of Kindergarten at PS-234, three blocks from World Trade Center. Lineup time in the yard was 8:40am in full view of WTC-1.
When the first plane hit at 8:50, they evacuated the school without incident. I noticed WTC-1 on fire in a high floor upon returning from voting,
about 8:55am. Large crowds of onlookers were gathering along the base of City Hall Park as countless fire engines, police cars, and ambulances screamed past.
I went home, grabbed my camcorder, went out to the street and started filming. I consider myself to be emotionally strong. What I bore witness to, however, was especially upsetting, with indelible images of horror that will not soon leave my mind.
1.I first see WTC-1 on fire at a high floor. Not just flames coming out of some windows, but four or five entire floors on fire with smoke penetrating floors still higher.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
2.Among the papers and melted steel fragments fluttering to the ground, I notice that some debris was falling distinctly differently. These weren’t parts of the building that were falling. These were people, jumping from the windows, their bodies tumbling in rapid descent from the eightieth floor. I noticed about ten such falls, morbidly capturing three of them on tape.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
3.A fiery explosion burst forth from a corner of WTC-2 about two thirds of the way up, perhaps the 60th floor. The fireball created an intense radiative impulse of heat from which we all had to turn our heads. From my vantage point, I could not see the plane that caused it, which hit 180 degrees on the other side of the building. Nor did I know at the time that a plane caused it. I first thought it was a bomb, but the explosion was not accompanied by the tell-tale acoustic shockwave that rattles windows. This was simply a low frequency rumble.
As it burst from the building’s corner, the fireball was so large that it extended all the way across to WTC-1. The fact the building’s corner exploded tells me that the ignited jet fuel got focused by the sides of the floor into which the second plane flew, meeting at the corner with increased explosive pressure. The flames were accompanied by countless thousands of sheets of paper that burst forth, fluttering to the ground as though every filing cabinet on multiple floors was emptied.
The fact that the second tower was now on fire made it clear to us all on the street that the first fire was no accident and that the WTC complex was under terrorist attack. Morbidly, I have the explosion on tape and the sounds from the horrified crowd surrounding me. At this point I stopped filming, and went back inside my apartment.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
4.As more and more and more and more and more emergency vehicles descended on the World Trade Center, I hear a second explosion in WTC-2, then a loud, low-frequency rumble that precipitates the unthinkable—a collapse of all the floors above the point of explosion. First the top surface, containing the helipad, tips sideways in full view. Then the upper floors fall straight down in a demolition-style implosion, taking all lower floors with it, even those below the point of the explosion. A dense, thick dust cloud rises up in its place, which rapidly pours through the warren of streets that cross lower Manhattan.
I close all our windows and blinds. As the dust cloud engulfs my building, an eerie darkness surrounded us—the kind of darkness you experience before a severe thunderstorm. I look out the window and can see no more than about 12 inches away.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
5.Outside my window, after about 15 minutes, visibility grows to about 100 yards, and I notice about an inch of white dust everywhere. That’s when I realize that every single rescue vehicle that had parked itself at the base of the World Trade Center must now be buried under 110 collapsed floors of tangled debris, and multiple feet of dust. This collapse took out the entire first round of rescue efforts including what were surely hundreds of police officers, firefighters, and medics.
As visibility increased and I could now see the blue sky, there was blue sky where WTC 2 used to be.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
6.I decide it’s time to get my daughter, who was taken by the parents of a friend of hers to a small office building, six blocks farther from the WTC than my apartment. As I dress for survival: boots, flashlight, wet towels, swimming goggles, bicycle helmet, gloves, I hear another explosion followed by a now all-too-familiar rumble that signaled the collapse of WTC-1, the first of the two towers to have been hit. I saw the iconic antenna on this building descend straight down in an implosion twinning the first.
This dust cloud was darker, thicker and faster-moving than the first. When this round of dust reached my apartment, fifteen seconds after collapse, the sky turned dark as night, with visibility of no more than about a centimeter. It was getting harder to breathe in the apartment, but we were stable.
At this point I offer no hope of survival for any of the rescue personnel who were on the scene.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
7.The cloud settles once again, now leaving a total of about three inches of dust outside my window. Another dark cloud of smoke now occupies the area where two 110-story buildings once stood. This cloud, however, was not the settling kind. It was smoke from ground-level fires. At this time the air in the apartment is getting harder and harder to breathe and it becomes clear that we should evacuate—especially with the likelihood of underground gas leaks. I load up my largest backpack with survival items, put my son in our most nimble stroller and leave with our nanny, who then walks across the Brooklyn Bridge toward her home.
I go to where my daughter was held, which was upwind from all debris on a quiet street. She is in good spirits, but clearly upset. I have a crayon drawing of hers, sketched while waiting for me to arrive, which shows the Twin Towers with smoke and fire coming from them, as only a 5-year old could draw. “Daddy, why do you think the pilot drove his plane into the World Trade Center?” “Daddy, I wish this was all just a dream.” “Daddy, if we can’t return home tonight because of all the smoke, will my stuffed animals be okay?”
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
8.From the calm of an upholstered couch in the office where my daughter was kept, with my son under one arm and my daughter under the other, I realize that, fully loaded, each tower of the WTC holds 10,000 people. From what I witnessed, I have no reason to believe that any of them survived. In fact, I would not be surprised if the death toll reached 25–30,000. Beneath the Towers is an entire universe of six subterraneous levels containing scores of subway platforms, plus a hundred or so shops and restaurants. The Towers simply collapsed into this hole—a hole large enough to have supplied the landfill for the World Financial Center across the West Side highway from the World Trade Center.
Upsetting enough, but then . . .
9.I realize that if the death toll is as high as I suspect, this incident is much, much worse than Pearl Harbor, where several thousand people died. It’s more spectacularly tragic than the Titanic, the Hindenburg, Oklahoma City, car bombs, and airplane hijackings. The number of deaths in one four-hour period will be nearly half of the American death toll in all of Vietnam.†
I reconnected with my wife by 4 PM, meeting her just north of Union Square Park, before we hiked another mile north to Grand Central Terminal for our ride to Westchester, above New York City.
I will never be the same after yesterday, in ways that I cannot foresee. I suppose that my generation now joins the ranks of those who lived through unspeakable horrors and survived to tell about it. How naive I was to believe that the world is fundamentally different from that of our ancestors, whose lives were changed by bearing witness to the 20th century’s vilest acts of war.
Peace to you all,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
Sunset on the World Trade Center
A love letter, appearing in the “City of Stars” special issue of Natural History magazine.
January 2002
Rising a quarter of a mile into the sky, the World Trade Center’s twin towers were about five blocks tall.
I live four blocks from where they stood. I saw them ablaze. I saw them fall. All from my dining-room window, which, within ten seconds of each tower’s collapse, offered less than one inch of visibility wh
ile the opaque dust cloud of pulverized concrete rolled by. From that same window, blue sky now appears where the twin towers used to be.
The World Trade Center was a veritable vertical universe. I think about it often. I think about the people who worked in the towers, the tourists who visited the observation deck, the diners at Windows on the World. I think of all those who lost their lives.
When I look hard for a peaceful way to remember the towers, I cannot help but think of them as observatories. On the top floor, you could type greetings into a computer that would transmit your message into space via the north tower’s radio antenna, for all eavesdropping extraterrestrials to decode. The towers were so tall that for someone on the observation deck, the horizon was forty-five miles away. This distance was far enough along Earth’s curved surface for the Sun to set two minutes later for the person on the observation deck than it did for someone on the ground floor. If you could have run up the stairs at one flight per second, you would literally have stopped the sunset. Alas, you’d eventually have run out of breath or run out of floors. In either case, at that moment you’d lose the Sun for the night, as it set gently below your horizon.
New York City’s twin towers have lost the Sun forever. But I take comfort in knowing that the Sun will rise again each day, as it has done a trillion times before.
World Trade Center Anniversary
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
New York Times
To the Editor:
When I think of anniversaries, I think of occasions to remember people, places, and events that have been largely forgotten over the previous year. For me, however, not a day has gone by when I did not think of the World Trade Center and the thousands of lives lost in its rubble, just four blocks from my home. So maybe I’ll use the anniversary as an excuse to try and think of something else for a day.