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PBS: The Four-Winged Dinosaur
PBS: The Four-Winged Dinosaur
NARRATOR: One day, long ago, life in a forest came to a sudden halt, snuffed out and buried by volcanic ash. One hundred thirty million years later, fossils are all that remain, and some are like nothing ever seen before. Strangest of all is a creature called Microraptor. It had wings like a bird, but it had them on its arms and its legs. It was a four-winged, feathered dinosaur, and no one has any idea how it worked.
JACQUES GAUTHIER (Paleontologist, Yale University): What's this dinosaur doing with these aerodynamic feathers coming off their hind limbs?
NARRATOR: Rival teams have been trying to figure it out, piecing together clues about what it looked like and how it functioned from crushed and distorted fossils. Each team has built a model with very different results.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: When the animal is squashed flat, as these are, well, it leaves a little room for interpretation.
NARRATOR: Scientists have argued for decades over whether and how dinosaurs evolved into flying birds. Now, they think Microraptor could solve the puzzle, but they still don't agree on the solution.
LARRY MARTIN (Paleontologist, The University of Kansas): You have just shown me the death of the dinosaur-origin of birds.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: Birds are dinosaurs. That's why they look like dinosaurs.
FARISH JENKINS (Anatomist, Harvard University): I'm getting whiplashed by two lines of evidence, and I'm going to be disturbed this evening, thinking about this.
NARRATOR: One team is about to fly their model in a wind tunnel. But who's got the real Microraptor? It's the battle of the four-winged dinosaurs, up next on NOVA.
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NARRATOR: One day, in 2002, a courier made a delivery to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing.
The dinosaur specialist, Xu Xing, was unprepared for what he saw when he opened the box.
XU XING (Paleontologist, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleanthropology): My first feeling is, "Amazing, a beautiful fossil."
NARRATOR: It was a nearly complete skeleton of a small dinosaur, with a feature he'd never seen before, long feathers attached to the arms.
XU XING: This animal has feathers like feathers in flying birds. I thought, "Oh, we have evidence suggesting some dinosaurs could fly."
NARRATOR: For over a century, scientists have searched for the origin of birds and flight, and the evidence keeps pointing to the same improbable conclusion. Somehow, flying birds evolved from Earthbound dinosaurs more than a hundred million years ago. Exactly how it happened is still one of the great mysteries in the history of life. And the solution may be in this box.
Mark Norell and Mick Ellison are from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but they spend much of their time in China, hunting dinosaurs.
They're on their way to Liaoning Province in the northeastern corner of China, a region that's produced some of the most spectacular fossils ever seen. It's an overnight train ride to the kind of place paleontologists dream about.
Today, it's a harsh and often barren landscape. One hundred thirty million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs, it was a forest teeming with life, some familiar, and some not. It was also a place where volcanic eruptions created a virtual Pompeii. Now the trees are gone, but remnants of ancient life remain in the petrified layers of volcanic ash.
Norell has spent much of the past 10 years immersed in the history recorded in these slabs of rock. They open like the pages of a book, sometimes with exquisitely preserved fossils inside. These are more than snapshots of the distant past, they're high resolution records of life in a temperate forest during the Cretaceous period. They're especially valuable for the number and variety of small animals they add to the fossil record: the fish, frogs, turtles and reptiles that lived in and around the freshwater lakes.
MARK NORELL (Paleontologist, American Museum of Natural History): It's the first look at a forest like this and the creatures that would live in a forest like this, where we have tremendous diversity, but it's 130 million years ago. And it's the first time we've ever had that.
NARRATOR: Victims were buried quickly in fine ash, preserving detail rarely seen in fossils: skin impressions on a reptile, fur on a small mammal.
MARK NORELL: ...wish I could find something. Like, you'll go through hundreds if not thousands of layers, and you won't find anything. But occasionally, on some layers, you'll find lots of stuff, either tons of fish or lots of insects or, if you're really lucky, you know, once in a while–I mean it's never happened in my life–but once in a while, people find feathered dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: The first turned up more than a decade ago with what looked like a feathery fringe along its back. Then came others with feather impressions that were unmistakable. These weren't giants like T. rex. Some were no bigger than crows. But their skeletons showed they belonged to well-known dinosaur clans.
They were runners, not fliers. Their arms were too short to function as wings. They were just what most scientists predicted the ancestors of birds would look like before they evolved flight: small, carnivorous dinosaurs with feathers.
The dinosaur-bird connection first came to light in the1860s, when quarrymen in Germany discovered a fossil called Archaeopteryx. It had the feathered wings of a bird, but the teeth and long bony tail of a reptilian ancestor. Some thought the ancestor might be a dinosaur.
But the idea didn't catch on until a century later, when paleontologist John Ostrom led an expedition to Montana and discovered a new kind of dinosaur. It was a lightly-built meat-eater with a killing claw on each foot. They called it Deinonychus, "Terrible Claw."
A few years later, Ostrom was studying Archaeopteryx, when it dawned on him that the skeleton looked like a miniature version of Deinonychus. He found dozens of similarities, enough to convince almost everyone that dinosaurs like Deinonychus were not only the ancestors of birds, they were very much like birds themselves.
The new-look dinosaurs made their widescreen debut as the raptor villains of Jurassic Park. Playing the role of cunning predators, they forever dispelled the old image of dinosaurs as dim-witted, cold-blooded reptiles.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: That's a radical change in the way we looked at these creatures: big, slow, lumbering, now seen as active, dynamic animals.
NARRATOR: Twenty years ago, Jacques Gauthier worked out the details of the family tree, based on changes in anatomy that appeared as dinosaurs evolved from their earliest ancestors.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: Just by using the sequence in which those characteristics appear, we reconstruct the history of life.
NARRATOR: Gauthier found that dinosaurs and crocodiles parted ways 240 million years ago when the ancestors of dinosaurs evolved the ability to stand up and run with their legs straight under their bodies.
As the family branched out, the meat-eaters, called theropods, became more and more bird-like, acquiring traits like a three-toed foot, a three-fingered hand, a wishbone and many others. Each new feature was passed along to the descendants.
Finally, a branch led in one direction to Deinonychus and in the other to Archaeopteryx and birds.
With birds nested at the top of the dinosaur tree, linked to their ancestors by hundreds of inherited traits, Gauthier says there can be no doubt about the family ties.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: Birds are dinosaurs. That's why they look like dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: And some dinosaurs looked like birds. We now know there's one detail the makers of Jurassic Park got wrong. The raptors should have had feathers. The fossils from China proved it.
Since the first discoveries, Liaoning fossil collectors have turned up feathered dinosaurs from many different dinosaur clans. All are from branches of the tree close to birds and Archaeopteryx. Some are from the same clan as Deinonychus; others are from more primitive groups like Oviraptors and Tyrannosaurs. And that means all the dinosaurs in this part of the tree had feathers, wherever they lived in the world.
MARK NORELL: We would assume that an Oviraptor that we find in Mongolia or a Tyrannosaur that we find in Montana would have also had feathers. So everywhere you go in the world, all these advanced theropods were covered with feathery body coverings.
NARRATOR: Feathers would have been useful to the ancestors of birds long before they took to the air. There's nothing better for insulation, which may have been their original function. They can be used to bluff an enemy, attract a mate or simply to show off.
But long feathers attached to the arm and finger bones are the signature of flying birds. And they were missing from the feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning. There were no clues to how Earth-bound dinosaurs achieved flight, until the strange fossil arrived on Xu Xing's doorstep.
As he examined it that first day, it looked like it could be a missing link, with a bird's wing and a dinosaur's long tail and legs. But it had something else that he'd never seen in any dinosaur or bird.
XU XING: I noticed something strange: long feathers attached to the foot. This is so bizarre. You don't know anything, any animal has this long feather attached to the foot.
NARRATOR: A two-winged dinosaur would be a spectacular find, but four wings border on science fiction. Nothing in the world today has feathers on its feet. And this was the first clue that such a thing ever existed.
Xu named it Microraptor.
XU XING: And we started thinking of, "What's this means?" And then it brings the big story about the origin of flight.
NARRATOR: The origin of flight in birds is a puzzle that seems to defy solution. The aerial skills of modern fliers evolved in small steps over millions of years, and the fossil record provides few clues to how it happened. It's one of the oldest debates in paleontology, and for decades it's been a standoff between two opposing theories.
One has argued that flight must have evolved from the ground, up. The ancestors were running dinosaurs, already feathered, probably to conserve body heat. Over time the feathers could have been adapted for flight, as bodies became smaller and the running leaps of dinosaurs evolved into the powered, flapping flight of birds.
But not everyone bought it.
LARRY MARTIN: It's always been a hard sell because with a terrestrial origin of flight, flight that originated from running fast on the ground, you're always working against gravity. But an arboreal origin of flight, where you fall out of the tree, you accumulate air speed whether you want to or not.
NARRATOR: In the arboreal scenario, the bird ancestor was a small climbing animal that evolved flight by gliding from the treetops. And that seemed to rule out dinosaurs, which, presumably, couldn't climb trees.
LARRY MARTIN: The ground-up origin of flight didn't make good physical sense, but it seemed to be essential to the dinosaur-origin of birds. And that made us suspect that the dinosaur-origin of birds was wrong, too.
NARRATOR: Fossil bird expert Larry Martin has been a thorn in the side of dinosaur paleontologists for decades.
LARRY MARTIN: People are going to simply have to explain how you can originate birds from dinosaurs, which apparently can't get up in trees.
NARRATOR: Years later, he's still at it.
LARRY MARTIN: So, if you really love dinosaurs, then my arguing that birds aren't dinosaurs is sort of like taking away Christmas.
MARK NORELL: I get really frustrated by this just because we shouldn't be having to deal with something which has been settled for 20 years. I don't know, when Magellan got back from sailing around the world, if he was frustrated, too, by people who still said the Earth was flat.
NARRATOR: It was hard to imagine what kind of evidence could break this deadlock, until Microraptor turned up. A four-winged dinosaur is a clue that no one expected. For Martin, it's evidence that he was right, at least about the origin of flight.
LARRY MARTIN: I think that Microraptor completely destroyed all hope for a terrestrial origin of flight. This is an animal that probably couldn't even walk on land comfortably, let alone run. And so you're looking at something that's probably completely arboreal.
NARRATOR: Xu thought the same thing: with feathers on its feet, Microraptor must have lived in the trees. But he's also quite sure that it was a dinosaur. Numerous details of the skeleton say so, from the long bony tail to the sickle claws on its feet.
Xu also believes it must have been able to fly.
XU XING: I noticed the feather shape. This animal has feathers like feathers in flying birds.
NARRATOR: The wing feathers are asymmetrical, with veins wider on one side of the shaft than the other, which forms airfoil contour, like an airplane wing. Only flying birds have asymmetrical flight feathers.
But unlike modern birds, Microraptor had not yet evolved the specialized shoulder anatomy for powered, flapping flight. It was more likely a glider, like a flying squirrel, so Xu concluded that gliding came before flapping in the evolution of birds. He presented Microraptor to the world as a synthesis: flight began with gliding from the treetops, and the glider was a dinosaur.
XU XING: Those feathers will change the whole idea how dinosaur evolved into flying birds.
NARRATOR: It looked like Xu had finally cracked the origin of flight. But, within days, another scientist announced that he'd solved it and come to the opposite conclusion.
KEN DIAL (Biologist, The University of Montana): We think we have the answer, and we didn't make it up. Birds told us.
NARRATOR: Ken Dial is a well-known experimental biologist and a strong believer in the dinosaur-origin of birds. He's convinced that the powered, flapping flight of modern birds really did begin on the ground with a running start.
Dial studies living birds called chukars. They can run within hours of birth, although they can't fly until they're a few weeks old. He found that long before they can fly, young chukars use their developing wings to scramble up inclined surfaces to a safe refuge. Over time, the wing beat that helps them scramble becomes the power stroke that helps them fly. There's no gliding involved. Powered flight comes first, even on the way down.
Dial believes this is a primitive behavior common to all birds, reflecting their evolutionary history.
KEN DIAL: I think you're looking at the evolutionary process through this developmental process. And what these animals do, we think, is paralleling the evolution of what transpired between the theropod dinosaurs to modern-day birds.
NARRATOR: It makes sense, unless the ancestor couldn't run because of feathers on its feet. But Dial says speculation about fossils is not enough to prove him wrong.
KEN DIAL: If we're going to live in a world of interpreting fossils because it's just fun to think of all the different things they might have done, well, that's great. It's just...I think you're stepping out of the bounds of reality, 90-some-odd percent of the time. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. You can't do it; I just don't think it's great science.
NARRATOR: Science is built on testable ideas, and it's hard to run experiments on a fossil.
But what if Microraptor could be resurrected from this slab of stone? What would it reveal? Xu wants to find out and so does Norell.
MARK NORELL: This is a really spectacular animal, and I want to figure out as much as we can about functions that it might have had and how this will relate to the origin of flight in modern birds.
NARRATOR: Together they decide to dig deeper, to see what they can learn. And the process begins at Xu's lab in Beijing.
There are now at least 30 specimens of Microraptor in China. Xu has one of the best collections, and they're going to need all of them. They plan to build a model to see how four wings might have worked. To do that, they need to understand its skeleton and the range of motion in its arms and legs. Unfortunately, the fossils were crushed under tons of volcanic ash, making it difficult sometimes to interpret the true shape of the bones.
MARK NORELL: In the best of all possible worlds, we'd make our reconstruction from a wonderful three-dimensionally preserved specimen. But this isn't the best of all possible worlds. We don't have that.
NARRATOR: Many bones are damaged, deformed and sometimes missing altogether. They'll need to work with multiple specimens, look for the best preserved examples of each bone, and combine them all into a composite that fills in the blanks in the original fossil.
The specimens have to remain intact and stay in China, so they'll use high-resolution photographs for reference.
At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Norell is Curator of Paleontology, a scientific sculptor starts work on a bone-by-bone reconstruction of the entire skeleton.
Jason Brougham is an artist and a trained anatomist.
JASON BROUGHAM (Reconstruction Artist, American Museum of Natural History): We had more than 16 specimens to look at, so, many of these bones, I could see from not only both sides, but from end-on, and from all different positions.
NARRATOR: Some specimens have already been analyzed in detail by other scientists.
JASON BROUGHAM: So I would just sit there with my micrometer and check and make sure that what I was sculpting not only looked like the picture but that it met those measurements.
NARRATOR: Since the specimens are all slightly different sizes, each bone is scaled to match the dimensions of the original fossil, a process that takes months.
JASON BROUGHAM: It's hard work to sit down and look at every bone from every angle. It's grueling in fact. My wife says I have a high tolerance for tedium. I guess that might be true.
NARRATOR: By chance, Microraptor is also under investigation at the University of Kansas. Larry Martin and David Burnham have built their own model based on a single specimen and a unique method of preparation.
DAVID BURNHAM (Paleontologist, The University of Kansas): The specimen was found with this side exposed. I embed it in optically clear plastic; I flip it over; I clean down through the matrix on this side, exposing the skeleton from the other side, ending up with a specimen that can be examined from both sides.
NARRATOR: Burnham made molds of each side of the slab, cast the exposed bones and cut out the pieces. Some had good preservation, and some were crushed. When he assembled the bones, the result looked more like a crocodile than a dinosaur.
DAVID BURNHAM: What really surprised me, when I was mounting this skeleton is when I put the back leg into the hip socket, it just popped right into joint. And as you can see, when that happened the leg was mounted in a sprawled posture. The only time it felt like it was in socket was in this position, splayed out.
NARRATOR: A sprawling Microraptor is the smoking gun Martin has been looking for all these years, to prove that dinosaurs were not the ancestors of birds.
All dinosaurs have hip joints that support the legs more or less straight under the body. It's one of their defining characteristics. Sprawling posture is the signature of more primitive reptiles, including the earliest common ancestors of crocodiles and dinosaurs.
Martin has long believed that birds arose directly from these pre-dinosaur reptiles, making them distant cousins, not direct descendants of dinosaurs. And he says Microraptor's primitive sprawl proves him right.
LARRY MARTIN: You have just shown me the death of the dinosaur-origin of birds.
NARRATOR: News of Martin's latest salvo in the bird-origin debate does not surprise Mark Norell.
MARK NORELL: People who are on the other side of it creatively reinterpret all new evidence that's put into it, to fit their own thing. You know, I knew that they would still be at it for years to come. And they are.
NARRATOR: And, as for the sprawling Microraptor skeleton?
MARK NORELL: I haven't seen it. I don't know. Beyond that, though, I would question whether, if that's true, that it actually is Microraptor, because I have seen definitive Microraptor specimens.
NARRATOR: Those are the ones the American Museum team has used for its reconstruction.
JULIA CLARKE (Paleontologist, American Museum of Natural History): The primary specimen is not particularly well preserved, but did you look at other ones?
One interesting thing with this process has been to see the artist take those fossils and render these often flattened elements into three dimensions. But you have to have a great relationship of trust and collaboration between scientists and artists to really have those three-dimensional representations, kind of, be trustworthy and accurate.
So we're articulating the whole hind limb from these elements, is that correct?
JASON BROUGHAM: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Norell doubts that Microraptor was anything other than a typical dinosaur with legs straight under the body. But for a second opinion, they send the bones to Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Anatomists Farish Jenkins and Steve Gatesy are specialists in the function of limbs and joints in fossil animals.
In his first paper, Xu himself assumed that Microraptor would have to splay its legs out to the side to form the rear wings. But Jenkins says that doesn't fly.
FARISH JENKINS: It's just...it anatomically is not possible given this limb. You can see the articular relationships, there's no question about it. This is a normal hip socket, and here's a good, well-developed femoral head. And in a normal standing position, it would be about like that. You can abduct the femur away from the body–that would be normal–but if you reach about 45 degrees, you begin to hit bone on bone, the femur on the pelvis. So, beyond 45 degrees, this trochanter here acts as a lever, and out she comes.
STEVE GATESY (Anatomist, Brown University): It just has to come out.
FARISH JENKINS: It has to come out. This animal doesn't work like the cover showed it to work.
NARRATOR: Xu didn't have the benefit of the three-dimensional model when he wrote the paper, and he concedes that he was probably wrong about the posture. He never questioned the dinosaur-origin of birds, and upright posture makes sense for the ancestor, given that all birds are built the same way.
But back in Kansas, Martin and Burnham are standing by their conclusion that Microraptor was a flat out sprawler, and that this puts the ancestry of birds outside of dinosaurs.
LARRY MARTIN: Microraptor is absolutely deadly to the dinosaur-origin of birds. Wasn't even a biped; it was quadrupedal. It was on all fours. And it was arboreal, and that probably couldn't be a dinosaur.
NARRATOR: They think the evidence is clear.
DAVID BURNHAM: When I put this leg into the hip, you know, I can visually look at it and determine where it fits. But there's a certain tactile sensation, and I can feel when this bone plugs into the socket.
NARRATOR: So which model is more reliable? The cast made directly from a fossil? Or the sculpture based on 16 specimens?
DAVID BURNHAM: My criticism of the sculpting method is that somebody is carving that. You know, they're, they may miss a little process or a little bump, or a little shape that the computer doesn't think's important or the artist doesn't think's important. And it's probably not even a scientist themselves that is sculpting these things. It's usually done by artists.
JASON BROUGHAM: Granted, it's a sculpture. It's a hand-made, you know, piece of art. But it was held to pretty high standards, you know, and very exacting measurement. And it was crosschecked against multiple specimens. As far as it being a subjective process, well, if you think that measuring, you know, bones, down to the hundredth of a millimeter is subjective, you should have been where I was, you know, for all those months working on it.
NARRATOR: In a final showdown, Martin and Burnham examine the sculpted bones from the American Museum team.
LARRY MARTIN: The only difference from our pelvis is this area right here. You see what they've done. This is pushed in. I would argue that this is fudged for vertical posture as much as you could possibly do it, and you still don't have it. Now, let's see if they can get.... Guess what? They can't sprawl. If they try to sprawl it, it pulls all the way out. I'll be doggone!
NARRATOR: At Harvard, Farish Jenkins looks at Martin and Burnham's cast.
FARISH JENKINS: What we've got is a very well preserved femur in three-dimensional preservation. So this is preserved quite well. That's not the case here. This pelvis has been crushed. It's been squashed, actually flat, and made much more shallow by this crushing. And so, if I fit the femoral head in there it doesn't even fit all the way into the socket. There's not enough socket left. Now even if you tried to splay the leg on this animal, the femoral head is now out of the socket. So even in this deformed specimen, there is no evidence that the animal could put the hind limb in a horizontal plane. It simply doesn't work.
NARRATOR: Neither side trusts the other's evidence, so the standoff continues. And with crushed fossils as the starting point, people are more likely to believe what they already believe.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: When the animal is squashed flat, as these are, well, it leaves a little room for interpretation. And then, so I said before, science is objective, but people are scientists, and they aren't.
NARRATOR: Still, the question remains, if Microraptor couldn't splay its hind limbs, how did it use its leg feathers in flight?
A wing deflects the air flowing over the upper surface, creating lower pressure above than below, which generates the lift necessary for flight. Microraptor could spread its forelimbs out to the side to make an aerodynamic wing, just as birds do. But if the hind limbs couldn't do the same thing, what did they do?
JACQUES GAUTHIER: They certainly can't flap with their hind limbs. It has the same hook-up as you do. It goes up vertically and goes 90 degrees and goes into your, into your hip bone. Can you flap your hind leg in that direction? Try sticking your leg out in that direction and see what you do to it, you know. So yeah, there are these feathers hanging off of it and they're aerodynamic. What are they doing?
NARRATOR: Jenkins and Gatesy can't figure it out.
FARISH JENKINS: Well let's just try to put this together. And you've got a wing that's shooting down. How's that work?
STEVE GATESY: And we can lengthen it, shorten it. I don't even know whether we can turn it this way or this way.
FARISH JENKINS: This is very problematic. Coming off the back? You've got to be mad!
STEVE GATESY: That's what I see, right?
NARRATOR: Martin and Burnham think they have the answer.
LARRY MARTIN: Microraptor has a fully developed wing on its hind legs. And what that means is the hind legs have to be able to sprawl.
FARISH JENKINS: There is anatomically, simply put, no way that it could elevate the hind limb into a horizontal position.
NARRATOR: The question is, "Could it fly any other way?"
One way to find out is to create a model that can be flown in a wind tunnel to see how it performs. And for that they'll need more than a skeleton.
Jason Brougham builds up the body form one muscle at a time, guided by published science on dinosaur anatomy. To estimate the animal's mass and center of gravity, the sculpture is CAT-scanned and computer-modeled with internal organs.
Mick Ellison reconstructs the feathering of the wings and tail. He traces the feather impressions from eight different specimens, scales them to the same size, then makes a composite that combines all the information from all the fossils and reveals the shape of the wings.
Then model-builders John Allen and Hall Train take the knowledge accumulated by the science team–the arrangement of feathers on the wings, the range of motion in the limbs, the body shape, its mass and center of gravity–and build a jointed, feathered model that can be posed in the various postures it might have used in flight.
It all comes together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Wright Brothers wind tunnel. It's been the scene of some unusual experiments, but never anything quite like this.
Some of the world's leading figures in paleontology, biomechanics, aerodynamics and scientific reconstruction have come together for a rare collaboration. The aerodynamics crew from Brown University, led by Kenny Breuer, specializes in natural flight and gliding.
This is their first experience with a dinosaur. And it's the first experience anyone's had with four wings.
STEVE GATESY: I have colleagues that work only on living animals that say, "I can't even understand the living animal sitting in front of me. What makes you think you could make sense of this fossil?" And yet, you know, how could not want to try.
NARRATOR: Xu Xing has the most at stake. He's claimed that Microraptor was a link between dinosaurs and flying birds. But he needs to show how four wings could work without splaying the legs.
XU XING: Those feathers must be related to flight in some ways. But some people disagree.
NARRATOR: Norell, for one, is reserving judgment until he sees some hard evidence.
MARK NORELL: I'm fairly conservative in the way that I interpret behaviors of extinct animals. I wouldn't say that we know that Microraptor even was a glider, let alone a flyer. I mean, I don't think we know that.
NARRATOR: Birds fly with a complex wing beat that propels them through the air and also produces lift. But gliders, like flying squirrels, get the energy to generate lift from falling. The more lift they produce, the longer the glide path, and the farther they can travel before they have to land.
Assuming that Microraptor was a glider, they'll test the hind limbs in different postures to see what, if anything, works best. They decide to start with something simple: legs down and spread as wide as they go.
FARISH JENKINS: This is what we're here for, right?
MICK ELLISON: This is the one. This is the one. This is one my money's on.
FARISH JENKINS: You're money's on this one?
MICK ELLISON: Yeah, like a betting game, yeah.
FARISH JENKINS: And I bet you're a big bettor too.
KENNY BREUER: Is that ready?
ARNOLD SONG: Yeah, we're ready.
KENNY BREUER: Yep, okay. This was one kilogram, so the lifting force is about 10 newtons, right?
HALL TRAIN (Model Maker): The legs are really stable.
FARISH JENKINS: Yeah, they're very stable.
DICK PERDICHIZZI: That's 10 meters a second.
FARISH JENKINS: That looks good. That looks like a natural glider.
NARRATOR: In the wind tunnel, the model is mounted on a sensor that measures the forces produced by air flowing over the wings, including the lift that keeps the flier aloft and the drag that slows it down.
During each test, they'll gradually raise the angle of the wing into the airflow, which produces more lift but also more drag.
KENNY BREUER: So the blue dots on the left curve is the lift.
NARRATOR: The data shows up in the control room on a graphic display. The blue dots indicate the amount of lift being generated, and the red triangles are the drag. The higher the lift climbs, relative to drag, the farther Microraptor could glide in that position.
FARISH JENKINS: I like the way these data come in. They're fun. It's kind of like watching the horses.
KENNY BREUER: I was going to say it's like slow-motion horseracing.
FARISH JENKINS: Kiss three, baby, kiss three. Get up. Get up.
KENNY BREUER: Now, I think this is significantly plummeting to the ground.
FARISH JENKINS: Oooh!
JOE BAHLMAN (Biologist, Brown University): That's a lot of drag. That's going to give it a nice...it's still going to slow its fall.
FARISH JENKINS: Smarty pants!
NARRATOR: With too much drag and not enough lift, the best it could do in this position is not much better than parachuting. A variation with the legs tucked up under the body isn't any better.
It could produce more lift if it flew faster, forcing more air over the wing. But gliders can't generate their own power.
KENNY BREUER: Okay, so we're ready to try a new posture, right?
NARRATOR: The front wing doesn't provide enough lift on its own, so the hind limbs will have to contribute somehow.
One possibility is to form a second set of wings with the leg feathers straight back and the foot feathers spread horizontally, something like an old fashioned biplane.
JOE BAHLMAN: If you look at it like this, I mean, it's clearly a second lifting surface.
NARRATOR: It could be the only way to get more wing area without splaying the legs. If it doesn't work, Xu's dinosaur might not be much of a flier after all.
KENNY BREUER: Right, but the wing is pushed forward.
FARISH JENKINS: That next one, at 2.90, will be almost at 3.
NARRATOR: But the early returns are good.
FARISH JENKINS: Look at that, huh? Almost at 3 already. We're coming out of the gate fast.
NARRATOR: It looks like four wings are better than two.
JOE BAHLMAN: We may have a winner then.
FARISH JENKINS: That's it.
KENNY BREUER: So this is actually a fairly stable configuration. I mean this would be a pretty good way to travel.
NARRATOR: The biplane generates enough additional lift to produce a longer, slower, more gradual descent, but still not enough to travel very far. Moving the legs forward is worse, and causes the body to pitch, nose up.
If Microraptor were a full-time glider, it would need a way to extend its range through the air.
XU XING: I'm not sure, but this is just a kind of a possibility.
NARRATOR: Xu Xing has been holding back so far, but now he pitches an idea of his own. It's a bit unorthodox, and takes a while to sink in.
XU XING: It goes towards the tail.
NARRATOR: But eventually they come around.
FARISH JENKINS: Well, why didn't you say this earlier? This is a very bright idea.
NARRATOR: Xu's idea is to extend the legs almost straight back, allowing the leg and foot feathers to form a canopy over the tail.
FARISH JENKINS: That's your hypothesis?
XU XING: It's a possibility.
KENNY BREUER: It's possible. But that would not be a lifting surface.
FARISH JENKINS: Boy that's an interesting one. This is it. Let's see. This is it.
NARRATOR: Once again, all eyes are on the lift numbers.
FARISH JENKINS: Starting low, 1.12.
KENNY BREUER: That canopy's not necessarily a lifting surface. I mean you really have to have an airfoil to make a lifting surface.
FARISH JENKINS: Get up!
I like the drag staying low.
KENNY BREUER: Yeah. If it did leap out of a tree, that would be its initial posture, right? It would push off with its hind feet, and they'd be behind. So it would sort of dive and that would be a diving maneuver.
FARISH JENKINS: 3.42.
NARRATOR: Now the lift starts to climb.
FARISH JENKINS: 3.51.
XU XING: Wow.
FARISH JENKINS: Almost close to 4.
KENNY BREUER: That's amazing. So I take back everything I said about it not acting like an airfoil. It's acting like an airfoil in the back.
JOE BAHLMAN: This is the highest lift and the lowest drag.
FARISH JENKINS: I realized this. I kept telling you this.
KENNY BREUER: I know you did.
FARISH JENKINS: You win. Congratulations! You're all right! Nice going! Beautiful, beautiful glide, huh? It worked! It works in that position. That's the off-the-branch position. That's fantastic! You called it.
NARRATOR: Xu's posture makes for a long, fast glide. But when it's time to stop, it needs help. And that could be where the biplane comes in.
JOE BAHLMAN: So, if this animal jumps off of a tree, as it jumps, its legs are already behind it. It's able to dive; it's got a nice glide ratio going. And then when it gets ready to land, it can start bringing its legs gradually forward, through those biplane configurations. And then, as it brings its legs all the way forward, it's able to pitch up and land on a tree. So, the ultimate glide story is going to be this transition from the legs all the way back, to the legs all the way forward, which gets you very nicely from the top of the tree to the bottom of the next tree.
NARRATOR: The experiment says that Microraptor could glide very well without splaying its legs. But does that mean bird-flight evolved through gliding from the trees down?
Microraptor belongs to the clan of dinosaurs that includes Deinonychus, and it's close to the branching point that leads to birds, which means it might represent the body plan of the common ancestor from which both lines evolved. If so, then bird flight probably did arise from four-winged dinosaurs gliding from the treetops. And Deinonychus could be the dinosaur version of an ostrich, the flightless descendant of a flying ancestor.
But if another dinosaur is found to be even closer to the branching point, and it was not a four-winged glider, then flight could have evolved twice, one line leading to birds and another to Microraptor, making four wings a side branch on the tree of life.
KEN DIAL: This is not a ladder; this is a bush with twigs that branch out in different directions. And some of them are, in fact, terminal buds.
NARRATOR: Over millions of years of evolution, feathered dinosaurs could have experimented with flight in different ways, with some becoming flightless again and some going extinct.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: And they all might have been perfectly adequate. This Microraptor may have been a better flyer than an Archaeopteryx, but for whatever reason they went extinct, either by chance or because they weren't as good a flyer.
When you look at all these efforts to make the early flying machines, there are some pretty weird-looking contraptions in there. But that same sort of thing went on, you know, in the evolution of the biological flight in dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: If Microraptor proves to be a dead-end, then all bets are off on whether flight evolved from the ground, up or the trees, down.
JULIA CLARKE: We don't have a lot of other fossils that can speak to that question right now. Microraptor is a fine candidate. It's also one of our only candidates.
NARRATOR: Ken Dial may be right that young birds show how it all began, scrambling to safety with their proto-wings. Or more fossils like Microraptor could prove Martin and Burnham right about flight evolving from arboreal gliders, though they'll need more evidence than that to persuade other scientists that those gliders were not dinosaurs.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: This is a question about the origin of flight, not the origin of birds. Those are separate issues. We should have the dinosaurs getting in trees first or running off the ground first, but they're still dinosaurs that are doing this, feathered dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: We still don't know exactly how it happened, but Microraptor is changing the way people think about the origin of flight.
JULIA CLARKE: Microraptor has thrown our understanding into a new and productive chaos. It doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't give us an answer. But it gives us another way of thinking about the data. And, I think, eventually, we are going to get to some answers.
NARRATOR: Microraptor is a creature no one expected, but we know of only a tiny fraction of the dinosaurs that once lived. More than 400,000 species may have come and gone in their 175-million-year history. To date, we've found only 1,100, not counting the ones that are still with us today, long after the extinction of their ancestors.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: After the asteroid hit, 65 million years ago, the only dinosaurs that came out of it are today's birds. They seem to have survived it well enough. There are 10,000 living species, only about 4,000 mammals, so still the age of dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: On NOVA's Four-Winged Dinosaur Web site, compare the skeletons of ancient feathered animals and learn more about the evolution of flight. Find it at PBS.org.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson, host of NOVA scienceNOW. What if you dug a hole through the center of the Earth, out the other side and then jumped in? What if you did that? You'll find out in a moment.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H. Koch. And...
Discover new knowledge: HHMI.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Hi, it's Neil again. You ever wonder what would happen if you dug a hole from one side of the Earth, through the center, out the other side and then jumped in?
Before we show you, a few disclaimers: if there was any air in the hole, air resistance would slow me down, so let's ignore that. Earth's molten core is 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. On the way past, you'd simply be vaporized. So let's ignore that, too. We would also have to ignore Earth's spin, which would make me ricochet from side to side down the hole. And please don't try this experiment on the actual Earth.
All right, here we go!
I fall, gaining speed as Earth's mass pulls me towards the center. Fourteen minutes into my fall, halfway to the center, I've accelerated to more than 15,000 miles an hour. Here, there's only half the force of gravity than on the surface, so I'm still gaining speed, but at a slower rate than when I first jumped in. Twenty-one minutes into my fall, and I'm at the center of the Earth, going my fastest, about 18,000 miles an hour.
As I pass the center, gravity now works against me, slowing me down. And by the time I make it halfway between the core and the other side of the Earth, I'm back down to about 15,000 miles an hour. It'll take only 42 minutes to make the entire trip to the other side. At which point, I'll slow to a full stop.
Just like when I started, all of Earth's mass will pull me back towards the core. Unless somebody catches me, I'll fall down the hole again and yo-yo back and forth forever.
Thank you!
MAN: No problem.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson. NOVA scienceNOW returns soon.
NOVA is a product of WGBH Boston.
JACQUES GAUTHIER (Paleontologist, Yale University): What's this dinosaur doing with these aerodynamic feathers coming off their hind limbs?
NARRATOR: Rival teams have been trying to figure it out, piecing together clues about what it looked like and how it functioned from crushed and distorted fossils. Each team has built a model with very different results.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: When the animal is squashed flat, as these are, well, it leaves a little room for interpretation.
NARRATOR: Scientists have argued for decades over whether and how dinosaurs evolved into flying birds. Now, they think Microraptor could solve the puzzle, but they still don't agree on the solution.
LARRY MARTIN (Paleontologist, The University of Kansas): You have just shown me the death of the dinosaur-origin of birds.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: Birds are dinosaurs. That's why they look like dinosaurs.
FARISH JENKINS (Anatomist, Harvard University): I'm getting whiplashed by two lines of evidence, and I'm going to be disturbed this evening, thinking about this.
NARRATOR: One team is about to fly their model in a wind tunnel. But who's got the real Microraptor? It's the battle of the four-winged dinosaurs, up next on NOVA.
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NARRATOR: One day, in 2002, a courier made a delivery to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing.
The dinosaur specialist, Xu Xing, was unprepared for what he saw when he opened the box.
XU XING (Paleontologist, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleanthropology): My first feeling is, "Amazing, a beautiful fossil."
NARRATOR: It was a nearly complete skeleton of a small dinosaur, with a feature he'd never seen before, long feathers attached to the arms.
XU XING: This animal has feathers like feathers in flying birds. I thought, "Oh, we have evidence suggesting some dinosaurs could fly."
NARRATOR: For over a century, scientists have searched for the origin of birds and flight, and the evidence keeps pointing to the same improbable conclusion. Somehow, flying birds evolved from Earthbound dinosaurs more than a hundred million years ago. Exactly how it happened is still one of the great mysteries in the history of life. And the solution may be in this box.
Mark Norell and Mick Ellison are from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but they spend much of their time in China, hunting dinosaurs.
They're on their way to Liaoning Province in the northeastern corner of China, a region that's produced some of the most spectacular fossils ever seen. It's an overnight train ride to the kind of place paleontologists dream about.
Today, it's a harsh and often barren landscape. One hundred thirty million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs, it was a forest teeming with life, some familiar, and some not. It was also a place where volcanic eruptions created a virtual Pompeii. Now the trees are gone, but remnants of ancient life remain in the petrified layers of volcanic ash.
Norell has spent much of the past 10 years immersed in the history recorded in these slabs of rock. They open like the pages of a book, sometimes with exquisitely preserved fossils inside. These are more than snapshots of the distant past, they're high resolution records of life in a temperate forest during the Cretaceous period. They're especially valuable for the number and variety of small animals they add to the fossil record: the fish, frogs, turtles and reptiles that lived in and around the freshwater lakes.
MARK NORELL (Paleontologist, American Museum of Natural History): It's the first look at a forest like this and the creatures that would live in a forest like this, where we have tremendous diversity, but it's 130 million years ago. And it's the first time we've ever had that.
NARRATOR: Victims were buried quickly in fine ash, preserving detail rarely seen in fossils: skin impressions on a reptile, fur on a small mammal.
MARK NORELL: ...wish I could find something. Like, you'll go through hundreds if not thousands of layers, and you won't find anything. But occasionally, on some layers, you'll find lots of stuff, either tons of fish or lots of insects or, if you're really lucky, you know, once in a while–I mean it's never happened in my life–but once in a while, people find feathered dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: The first turned up more than a decade ago with what looked like a feathery fringe along its back. Then came others with feather impressions that were unmistakable. These weren't giants like T. rex. Some were no bigger than crows. But their skeletons showed they belonged to well-known dinosaur clans.
They were runners, not fliers. Their arms were too short to function as wings. They were just what most scientists predicted the ancestors of birds would look like before they evolved flight: small, carnivorous dinosaurs with feathers.
The dinosaur-bird connection first came to light in the1860s, when quarrymen in Germany discovered a fossil called Archaeopteryx. It had the feathered wings of a bird, but the teeth and long bony tail of a reptilian ancestor. Some thought the ancestor might be a dinosaur.
But the idea didn't catch on until a century later, when paleontologist John Ostrom led an expedition to Montana and discovered a new kind of dinosaur. It was a lightly-built meat-eater with a killing claw on each foot. They called it Deinonychus, "Terrible Claw."
A few years later, Ostrom was studying Archaeopteryx, when it dawned on him that the skeleton looked like a miniature version of Deinonychus. He found dozens of similarities, enough to convince almost everyone that dinosaurs like Deinonychus were not only the ancestors of birds, they were very much like birds themselves.
The new-look dinosaurs made their widescreen debut as the raptor villains of Jurassic Park. Playing the role of cunning predators, they forever dispelled the old image of dinosaurs as dim-witted, cold-blooded reptiles.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: That's a radical change in the way we looked at these creatures: big, slow, lumbering, now seen as active, dynamic animals.
NARRATOR: Twenty years ago, Jacques Gauthier worked out the details of the family tree, based on changes in anatomy that appeared as dinosaurs evolved from their earliest ancestors.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: Just by using the sequence in which those characteristics appear, we reconstruct the history of life.
NARRATOR: Gauthier found that dinosaurs and crocodiles parted ways 240 million years ago when the ancestors of dinosaurs evolved the ability to stand up and run with their legs straight under their bodies.
As the family branched out, the meat-eaters, called theropods, became more and more bird-like, acquiring traits like a three-toed foot, a three-fingered hand, a wishbone and many others. Each new feature was passed along to the descendants.
Finally, a branch led in one direction to Deinonychus and in the other to Archaeopteryx and birds.
With birds nested at the top of the dinosaur tree, linked to their ancestors by hundreds of inherited traits, Gauthier says there can be no doubt about the family ties.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: Birds are dinosaurs. That's why they look like dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: And some dinosaurs looked like birds. We now know there's one detail the makers of Jurassic Park got wrong. The raptors should have had feathers. The fossils from China proved it.
Since the first discoveries, Liaoning fossil collectors have turned up feathered dinosaurs from many different dinosaur clans. All are from branches of the tree close to birds and Archaeopteryx. Some are from the same clan as Deinonychus; others are from more primitive groups like Oviraptors and Tyrannosaurs. And that means all the dinosaurs in this part of the tree had feathers, wherever they lived in the world.
MARK NORELL: We would assume that an Oviraptor that we find in Mongolia or a Tyrannosaur that we find in Montana would have also had feathers. So everywhere you go in the world, all these advanced theropods were covered with feathery body coverings.
NARRATOR: Feathers would have been useful to the ancestors of birds long before they took to the air. There's nothing better for insulation, which may have been their original function. They can be used to bluff an enemy, attract a mate or simply to show off.
But long feathers attached to the arm and finger bones are the signature of flying birds. And they were missing from the feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning. There were no clues to how Earth-bound dinosaurs achieved flight, until the strange fossil arrived on Xu Xing's doorstep.
As he examined it that first day, it looked like it could be a missing link, with a bird's wing and a dinosaur's long tail and legs. But it had something else that he'd never seen in any dinosaur or bird.
XU XING: I noticed something strange: long feathers attached to the foot. This is so bizarre. You don't know anything, any animal has this long feather attached to the foot.
NARRATOR: A two-winged dinosaur would be a spectacular find, but four wings border on science fiction. Nothing in the world today has feathers on its feet. And this was the first clue that such a thing ever existed.
Xu named it Microraptor.
XU XING: And we started thinking of, "What's this means?" And then it brings the big story about the origin of flight.
NARRATOR: The origin of flight in birds is a puzzle that seems to defy solution. The aerial skills of modern fliers evolved in small steps over millions of years, and the fossil record provides few clues to how it happened. It's one of the oldest debates in paleontology, and for decades it's been a standoff between two opposing theories.
One has argued that flight must have evolved from the ground, up. The ancestors were running dinosaurs, already feathered, probably to conserve body heat. Over time the feathers could have been adapted for flight, as bodies became smaller and the running leaps of dinosaurs evolved into the powered, flapping flight of birds.
But not everyone bought it.
LARRY MARTIN: It's always been a hard sell because with a terrestrial origin of flight, flight that originated from running fast on the ground, you're always working against gravity. But an arboreal origin of flight, where you fall out of the tree, you accumulate air speed whether you want to or not.
NARRATOR: In the arboreal scenario, the bird ancestor was a small climbing animal that evolved flight by gliding from the treetops. And that seemed to rule out dinosaurs, which, presumably, couldn't climb trees.
LARRY MARTIN: The ground-up origin of flight didn't make good physical sense, but it seemed to be essential to the dinosaur-origin of birds. And that made us suspect that the dinosaur-origin of birds was wrong, too.
NARRATOR: Fossil bird expert Larry Martin has been a thorn in the side of dinosaur paleontologists for decades.
LARRY MARTIN: People are going to simply have to explain how you can originate birds from dinosaurs, which apparently can't get up in trees.
NARRATOR: Years later, he's still at it.
LARRY MARTIN: So, if you really love dinosaurs, then my arguing that birds aren't dinosaurs is sort of like taking away Christmas.
MARK NORELL: I get really frustrated by this just because we shouldn't be having to deal with something which has been settled for 20 years. I don't know, when Magellan got back from sailing around the world, if he was frustrated, too, by people who still said the Earth was flat.
NARRATOR: It was hard to imagine what kind of evidence could break this deadlock, until Microraptor turned up. A four-winged dinosaur is a clue that no one expected. For Martin, it's evidence that he was right, at least about the origin of flight.
LARRY MARTIN: I think that Microraptor completely destroyed all hope for a terrestrial origin of flight. This is an animal that probably couldn't even walk on land comfortably, let alone run. And so you're looking at something that's probably completely arboreal.
NARRATOR: Xu thought the same thing: with feathers on its feet, Microraptor must have lived in the trees. But he's also quite sure that it was a dinosaur. Numerous details of the skeleton say so, from the long bony tail to the sickle claws on its feet.
Xu also believes it must have been able to fly.
XU XING: I noticed the feather shape. This animal has feathers like feathers in flying birds.
NARRATOR: The wing feathers are asymmetrical, with veins wider on one side of the shaft than the other, which forms airfoil contour, like an airplane wing. Only flying birds have asymmetrical flight feathers.
But unlike modern birds, Microraptor had not yet evolved the specialized shoulder anatomy for powered, flapping flight. It was more likely a glider, like a flying squirrel, so Xu concluded that gliding came before flapping in the evolution of birds. He presented Microraptor to the world as a synthesis: flight began with gliding from the treetops, and the glider was a dinosaur.
XU XING: Those feathers will change the whole idea how dinosaur evolved into flying birds.
NARRATOR: It looked like Xu had finally cracked the origin of flight. But, within days, another scientist announced that he'd solved it and come to the opposite conclusion.
KEN DIAL (Biologist, The University of Montana): We think we have the answer, and we didn't make it up. Birds told us.
NARRATOR: Ken Dial is a well-known experimental biologist and a strong believer in the dinosaur-origin of birds. He's convinced that the powered, flapping flight of modern birds really did begin on the ground with a running start.
Dial studies living birds called chukars. They can run within hours of birth, although they can't fly until they're a few weeks old. He found that long before they can fly, young chukars use their developing wings to scramble up inclined surfaces to a safe refuge. Over time, the wing beat that helps them scramble becomes the power stroke that helps them fly. There's no gliding involved. Powered flight comes first, even on the way down.
Dial believes this is a primitive behavior common to all birds, reflecting their evolutionary history.
KEN DIAL: I think you're looking at the evolutionary process through this developmental process. And what these animals do, we think, is paralleling the evolution of what transpired between the theropod dinosaurs to modern-day birds.
NARRATOR: It makes sense, unless the ancestor couldn't run because of feathers on its feet. But Dial says speculation about fossils is not enough to prove him wrong.
KEN DIAL: If we're going to live in a world of interpreting fossils because it's just fun to think of all the different things they might have done, well, that's great. It's just...I think you're stepping out of the bounds of reality, 90-some-odd percent of the time. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. You can't do it; I just don't think it's great science.
NARRATOR: Science is built on testable ideas, and it's hard to run experiments on a fossil.
But what if Microraptor could be resurrected from this slab of stone? What would it reveal? Xu wants to find out and so does Norell.
MARK NORELL: This is a really spectacular animal, and I want to figure out as much as we can about functions that it might have had and how this will relate to the origin of flight in modern birds.
NARRATOR: Together they decide to dig deeper, to see what they can learn. And the process begins at Xu's lab in Beijing.
There are now at least 30 specimens of Microraptor in China. Xu has one of the best collections, and they're going to need all of them. They plan to build a model to see how four wings might have worked. To do that, they need to understand its skeleton and the range of motion in its arms and legs. Unfortunately, the fossils were crushed under tons of volcanic ash, making it difficult sometimes to interpret the true shape of the bones.
MARK NORELL: In the best of all possible worlds, we'd make our reconstruction from a wonderful three-dimensionally preserved specimen. But this isn't the best of all possible worlds. We don't have that.
NARRATOR: Many bones are damaged, deformed and sometimes missing altogether. They'll need to work with multiple specimens, look for the best preserved examples of each bone, and combine them all into a composite that fills in the blanks in the original fossil.
The specimens have to remain intact and stay in China, so they'll use high-resolution photographs for reference.
At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Norell is Curator of Paleontology, a scientific sculptor starts work on a bone-by-bone reconstruction of the entire skeleton.
Jason Brougham is an artist and a trained anatomist.
JASON BROUGHAM (Reconstruction Artist, American Museum of Natural History): We had more than 16 specimens to look at, so, many of these bones, I could see from not only both sides, but from end-on, and from all different positions.
NARRATOR: Some specimens have already been analyzed in detail by other scientists.
JASON BROUGHAM: So I would just sit there with my micrometer and check and make sure that what I was sculpting not only looked like the picture but that it met those measurements.
NARRATOR: Since the specimens are all slightly different sizes, each bone is scaled to match the dimensions of the original fossil, a process that takes months.
JASON BROUGHAM: It's hard work to sit down and look at every bone from every angle. It's grueling in fact. My wife says I have a high tolerance for tedium. I guess that might be true.
NARRATOR: By chance, Microraptor is also under investigation at the University of Kansas. Larry Martin and David Burnham have built their own model based on a single specimen and a unique method of preparation.
DAVID BURNHAM (Paleontologist, The University of Kansas): The specimen was found with this side exposed. I embed it in optically clear plastic; I flip it over; I clean down through the matrix on this side, exposing the skeleton from the other side, ending up with a specimen that can be examined from both sides.
NARRATOR: Burnham made molds of each side of the slab, cast the exposed bones and cut out the pieces. Some had good preservation, and some were crushed. When he assembled the bones, the result looked more like a crocodile than a dinosaur.
DAVID BURNHAM: What really surprised me, when I was mounting this skeleton is when I put the back leg into the hip socket, it just popped right into joint. And as you can see, when that happened the leg was mounted in a sprawled posture. The only time it felt like it was in socket was in this position, splayed out.
NARRATOR: A sprawling Microraptor is the smoking gun Martin has been looking for all these years, to prove that dinosaurs were not the ancestors of birds.
All dinosaurs have hip joints that support the legs more or less straight under the body. It's one of their defining characteristics. Sprawling posture is the signature of more primitive reptiles, including the earliest common ancestors of crocodiles and dinosaurs.
Martin has long believed that birds arose directly from these pre-dinosaur reptiles, making them distant cousins, not direct descendants of dinosaurs. And he says Microraptor's primitive sprawl proves him right.
LARRY MARTIN: You have just shown me the death of the dinosaur-origin of birds.
NARRATOR: News of Martin's latest salvo in the bird-origin debate does not surprise Mark Norell.
MARK NORELL: People who are on the other side of it creatively reinterpret all new evidence that's put into it, to fit their own thing. You know, I knew that they would still be at it for years to come. And they are.
NARRATOR: And, as for the sprawling Microraptor skeleton?
MARK NORELL: I haven't seen it. I don't know. Beyond that, though, I would question whether, if that's true, that it actually is Microraptor, because I have seen definitive Microraptor specimens.
NARRATOR: Those are the ones the American Museum team has used for its reconstruction.
JULIA CLARKE (Paleontologist, American Museum of Natural History): The primary specimen is not particularly well preserved, but did you look at other ones?
One interesting thing with this process has been to see the artist take those fossils and render these often flattened elements into three dimensions. But you have to have a great relationship of trust and collaboration between scientists and artists to really have those three-dimensional representations, kind of, be trustworthy and accurate.
So we're articulating the whole hind limb from these elements, is that correct?
JASON BROUGHAM: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Norell doubts that Microraptor was anything other than a typical dinosaur with legs straight under the body. But for a second opinion, they send the bones to Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Anatomists Farish Jenkins and Steve Gatesy are specialists in the function of limbs and joints in fossil animals.
In his first paper, Xu himself assumed that Microraptor would have to splay its legs out to the side to form the rear wings. But Jenkins says that doesn't fly.
FARISH JENKINS: It's just...it anatomically is not possible given this limb. You can see the articular relationships, there's no question about it. This is a normal hip socket, and here's a good, well-developed femoral head. And in a normal standing position, it would be about like that. You can abduct the femur away from the body–that would be normal–but if you reach about 45 degrees, you begin to hit bone on bone, the femur on the pelvis. So, beyond 45 degrees, this trochanter here acts as a lever, and out she comes.
STEVE GATESY (Anatomist, Brown University): It just has to come out.
FARISH JENKINS: It has to come out. This animal doesn't work like the cover showed it to work.
NARRATOR: Xu didn't have the benefit of the three-dimensional model when he wrote the paper, and he concedes that he was probably wrong about the posture. He never questioned the dinosaur-origin of birds, and upright posture makes sense for the ancestor, given that all birds are built the same way.
But back in Kansas, Martin and Burnham are standing by their conclusion that Microraptor was a flat out sprawler, and that this puts the ancestry of birds outside of dinosaurs.
LARRY MARTIN: Microraptor is absolutely deadly to the dinosaur-origin of birds. Wasn't even a biped; it was quadrupedal. It was on all fours. And it was arboreal, and that probably couldn't be a dinosaur.
NARRATOR: They think the evidence is clear.
DAVID BURNHAM: When I put this leg into the hip, you know, I can visually look at it and determine where it fits. But there's a certain tactile sensation, and I can feel when this bone plugs into the socket.
NARRATOR: So which model is more reliable? The cast made directly from a fossil? Or the sculpture based on 16 specimens?
DAVID BURNHAM: My criticism of the sculpting method is that somebody is carving that. You know, they're, they may miss a little process or a little bump, or a little shape that the computer doesn't think's important or the artist doesn't think's important. And it's probably not even a scientist themselves that is sculpting these things. It's usually done by artists.
JASON BROUGHAM: Granted, it's a sculpture. It's a hand-made, you know, piece of art. But it was held to pretty high standards, you know, and very exacting measurement. And it was crosschecked against multiple specimens. As far as it being a subjective process, well, if you think that measuring, you know, bones, down to the hundredth of a millimeter is subjective, you should have been where I was, you know, for all those months working on it.
NARRATOR: In a final showdown, Martin and Burnham examine the sculpted bones from the American Museum team.
LARRY MARTIN: The only difference from our pelvis is this area right here. You see what they've done. This is pushed in. I would argue that this is fudged for vertical posture as much as you could possibly do it, and you still don't have it. Now, let's see if they can get.... Guess what? They can't sprawl. If they try to sprawl it, it pulls all the way out. I'll be doggone!
NARRATOR: At Harvard, Farish Jenkins looks at Martin and Burnham's cast.
FARISH JENKINS: What we've got is a very well preserved femur in three-dimensional preservation. So this is preserved quite well. That's not the case here. This pelvis has been crushed. It's been squashed, actually flat, and made much more shallow by this crushing. And so, if I fit the femoral head in there it doesn't even fit all the way into the socket. There's not enough socket left. Now even if you tried to splay the leg on this animal, the femoral head is now out of the socket. So even in this deformed specimen, there is no evidence that the animal could put the hind limb in a horizontal plane. It simply doesn't work.
NARRATOR: Neither side trusts the other's evidence, so the standoff continues. And with crushed fossils as the starting point, people are more likely to believe what they already believe.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: When the animal is squashed flat, as these are, well, it leaves a little room for interpretation. And then, so I said before, science is objective, but people are scientists, and they aren't.
NARRATOR: Still, the question remains, if Microraptor couldn't splay its hind limbs, how did it use its leg feathers in flight?
A wing deflects the air flowing over the upper surface, creating lower pressure above than below, which generates the lift necessary for flight. Microraptor could spread its forelimbs out to the side to make an aerodynamic wing, just as birds do. But if the hind limbs couldn't do the same thing, what did they do?
JACQUES GAUTHIER: They certainly can't flap with their hind limbs. It has the same hook-up as you do. It goes up vertically and goes 90 degrees and goes into your, into your hip bone. Can you flap your hind leg in that direction? Try sticking your leg out in that direction and see what you do to it, you know. So yeah, there are these feathers hanging off of it and they're aerodynamic. What are they doing?
NARRATOR: Jenkins and Gatesy can't figure it out.
FARISH JENKINS: Well let's just try to put this together. And you've got a wing that's shooting down. How's that work?
STEVE GATESY: And we can lengthen it, shorten it. I don't even know whether we can turn it this way or this way.
FARISH JENKINS: This is very problematic. Coming off the back? You've got to be mad!
STEVE GATESY: That's what I see, right?
NARRATOR: Martin and Burnham think they have the answer.
LARRY MARTIN: Microraptor has a fully developed wing on its hind legs. And what that means is the hind legs have to be able to sprawl.
FARISH JENKINS: There is anatomically, simply put, no way that it could elevate the hind limb into a horizontal position.
NARRATOR: The question is, "Could it fly any other way?"
One way to find out is to create a model that can be flown in a wind tunnel to see how it performs. And for that they'll need more than a skeleton.
Jason Brougham builds up the body form one muscle at a time, guided by published science on dinosaur anatomy. To estimate the animal's mass and center of gravity, the sculpture is CAT-scanned and computer-modeled with internal organs.
Mick Ellison reconstructs the feathering of the wings and tail. He traces the feather impressions from eight different specimens, scales them to the same size, then makes a composite that combines all the information from all the fossils and reveals the shape of the wings.
Then model-builders John Allen and Hall Train take the knowledge accumulated by the science team–the arrangement of feathers on the wings, the range of motion in the limbs, the body shape, its mass and center of gravity–and build a jointed, feathered model that can be posed in the various postures it might have used in flight.
It all comes together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Wright Brothers wind tunnel. It's been the scene of some unusual experiments, but never anything quite like this.
Some of the world's leading figures in paleontology, biomechanics, aerodynamics and scientific reconstruction have come together for a rare collaboration. The aerodynamics crew from Brown University, led by Kenny Breuer, specializes in natural flight and gliding.
This is their first experience with a dinosaur. And it's the first experience anyone's had with four wings.
STEVE GATESY: I have colleagues that work only on living animals that say, "I can't even understand the living animal sitting in front of me. What makes you think you could make sense of this fossil?" And yet, you know, how could not want to try.
NARRATOR: Xu Xing has the most at stake. He's claimed that Microraptor was a link between dinosaurs and flying birds. But he needs to show how four wings could work without splaying the legs.
XU XING: Those feathers must be related to flight in some ways. But some people disagree.
NARRATOR: Norell, for one, is reserving judgment until he sees some hard evidence.
MARK NORELL: I'm fairly conservative in the way that I interpret behaviors of extinct animals. I wouldn't say that we know that Microraptor even was a glider, let alone a flyer. I mean, I don't think we know that.
NARRATOR: Birds fly with a complex wing beat that propels them through the air and also produces lift. But gliders, like flying squirrels, get the energy to generate lift from falling. The more lift they produce, the longer the glide path, and the farther they can travel before they have to land.
Assuming that Microraptor was a glider, they'll test the hind limbs in different postures to see what, if anything, works best. They decide to start with something simple: legs down and spread as wide as they go.
FARISH JENKINS: This is what we're here for, right?
MICK ELLISON: This is the one. This is the one. This is one my money's on.
FARISH JENKINS: You're money's on this one?
MICK ELLISON: Yeah, like a betting game, yeah.
FARISH JENKINS: And I bet you're a big bettor too.
KENNY BREUER: Is that ready?
ARNOLD SONG: Yeah, we're ready.
KENNY BREUER: Yep, okay. This was one kilogram, so the lifting force is about 10 newtons, right?
HALL TRAIN (Model Maker): The legs are really stable.
FARISH JENKINS: Yeah, they're very stable.
DICK PERDICHIZZI: That's 10 meters a second.
FARISH JENKINS: That looks good. That looks like a natural glider.
NARRATOR: In the wind tunnel, the model is mounted on a sensor that measures the forces produced by air flowing over the wings, including the lift that keeps the flier aloft and the drag that slows it down.
During each test, they'll gradually raise the angle of the wing into the airflow, which produces more lift but also more drag.
KENNY BREUER: So the blue dots on the left curve is the lift.
NARRATOR: The data shows up in the control room on a graphic display. The blue dots indicate the amount of lift being generated, and the red triangles are the drag. The higher the lift climbs, relative to drag, the farther Microraptor could glide in that position.
FARISH JENKINS: I like the way these data come in. They're fun. It's kind of like watching the horses.
KENNY BREUER: I was going to say it's like slow-motion horseracing.
FARISH JENKINS: Kiss three, baby, kiss three. Get up. Get up.
KENNY BREUER: Now, I think this is significantly plummeting to the ground.
FARISH JENKINS: Oooh!
JOE BAHLMAN (Biologist, Brown University): That's a lot of drag. That's going to give it a nice...it's still going to slow its fall.
FARISH JENKINS: Smarty pants!
NARRATOR: With too much drag and not enough lift, the best it could do in this position is not much better than parachuting. A variation with the legs tucked up under the body isn't any better.
It could produce more lift if it flew faster, forcing more air over the wing. But gliders can't generate their own power.
KENNY BREUER: Okay, so we're ready to try a new posture, right?
NARRATOR: The front wing doesn't provide enough lift on its own, so the hind limbs will have to contribute somehow.
One possibility is to form a second set of wings with the leg feathers straight back and the foot feathers spread horizontally, something like an old fashioned biplane.
JOE BAHLMAN: If you look at it like this, I mean, it's clearly a second lifting surface.
NARRATOR: It could be the only way to get more wing area without splaying the legs. If it doesn't work, Xu's dinosaur might not be much of a flier after all.
KENNY BREUER: Right, but the wing is pushed forward.
FARISH JENKINS: That next one, at 2.90, will be almost at 3.
NARRATOR: But the early returns are good.
FARISH JENKINS: Look at that, huh? Almost at 3 already. We're coming out of the gate fast.
NARRATOR: It looks like four wings are better than two.
JOE BAHLMAN: We may have a winner then.
FARISH JENKINS: That's it.
KENNY BREUER: So this is actually a fairly stable configuration. I mean this would be a pretty good way to travel.
NARRATOR: The biplane generates enough additional lift to produce a longer, slower, more gradual descent, but still not enough to travel very far. Moving the legs forward is worse, and causes the body to pitch, nose up.
If Microraptor were a full-time glider, it would need a way to extend its range through the air.
XU XING: I'm not sure, but this is just a kind of a possibility.
NARRATOR: Xu Xing has been holding back so far, but now he pitches an idea of his own. It's a bit unorthodox, and takes a while to sink in.
XU XING: It goes towards the tail.
NARRATOR: But eventually they come around.
FARISH JENKINS: Well, why didn't you say this earlier? This is a very bright idea.
NARRATOR: Xu's idea is to extend the legs almost straight back, allowing the leg and foot feathers to form a canopy over the tail.
FARISH JENKINS: That's your hypothesis?
XU XING: It's a possibility.
KENNY BREUER: It's possible. But that would not be a lifting surface.
FARISH JENKINS: Boy that's an interesting one. This is it. Let's see. This is it.
NARRATOR: Once again, all eyes are on the lift numbers.
FARISH JENKINS: Starting low, 1.12.
KENNY BREUER: That canopy's not necessarily a lifting surface. I mean you really have to have an airfoil to make a lifting surface.
FARISH JENKINS: Get up!
I like the drag staying low.
KENNY BREUER: Yeah. If it did leap out of a tree, that would be its initial posture, right? It would push off with its hind feet, and they'd be behind. So it would sort of dive and that would be a diving maneuver.
FARISH JENKINS: 3.42.
NARRATOR: Now the lift starts to climb.
FARISH JENKINS: 3.51.
XU XING: Wow.
FARISH JENKINS: Almost close to 4.
KENNY BREUER: That's amazing. So I take back everything I said about it not acting like an airfoil. It's acting like an airfoil in the back.
JOE BAHLMAN: This is the highest lift and the lowest drag.
FARISH JENKINS: I realized this. I kept telling you this.
KENNY BREUER: I know you did.
FARISH JENKINS: You win. Congratulations! You're all right! Nice going! Beautiful, beautiful glide, huh? It worked! It works in that position. That's the off-the-branch position. That's fantastic! You called it.
NARRATOR: Xu's posture makes for a long, fast glide. But when it's time to stop, it needs help. And that could be where the biplane comes in.
JOE BAHLMAN: So, if this animal jumps off of a tree, as it jumps, its legs are already behind it. It's able to dive; it's got a nice glide ratio going. And then when it gets ready to land, it can start bringing its legs gradually forward, through those biplane configurations. And then, as it brings its legs all the way forward, it's able to pitch up and land on a tree. So, the ultimate glide story is going to be this transition from the legs all the way back, to the legs all the way forward, which gets you very nicely from the top of the tree to the bottom of the next tree.
NARRATOR: The experiment says that Microraptor could glide very well without splaying its legs. But does that mean bird-flight evolved through gliding from the trees down?
Microraptor belongs to the clan of dinosaurs that includes Deinonychus, and it's close to the branching point that leads to birds, which means it might represent the body plan of the common ancestor from which both lines evolved. If so, then bird flight probably did arise from four-winged dinosaurs gliding from the treetops. And Deinonychus could be the dinosaur version of an ostrich, the flightless descendant of a flying ancestor.
But if another dinosaur is found to be even closer to the branching point, and it was not a four-winged glider, then flight could have evolved twice, one line leading to birds and another to Microraptor, making four wings a side branch on the tree of life.
KEN DIAL: This is not a ladder; this is a bush with twigs that branch out in different directions. And some of them are, in fact, terminal buds.
NARRATOR: Over millions of years of evolution, feathered dinosaurs could have experimented with flight in different ways, with some becoming flightless again and some going extinct.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: And they all might have been perfectly adequate. This Microraptor may have been a better flyer than an Archaeopteryx, but for whatever reason they went extinct, either by chance or because they weren't as good a flyer.
When you look at all these efforts to make the early flying machines, there are some pretty weird-looking contraptions in there. But that same sort of thing went on, you know, in the evolution of the biological flight in dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: If Microraptor proves to be a dead-end, then all bets are off on whether flight evolved from the ground, up or the trees, down.
JULIA CLARKE: We don't have a lot of other fossils that can speak to that question right now. Microraptor is a fine candidate. It's also one of our only candidates.
NARRATOR: Ken Dial may be right that young birds show how it all began, scrambling to safety with their proto-wings. Or more fossils like Microraptor could prove Martin and Burnham right about flight evolving from arboreal gliders, though they'll need more evidence than that to persuade other scientists that those gliders were not dinosaurs.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: This is a question about the origin of flight, not the origin of birds. Those are separate issues. We should have the dinosaurs getting in trees first or running off the ground first, but they're still dinosaurs that are doing this, feathered dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: We still don't know exactly how it happened, but Microraptor is changing the way people think about the origin of flight.
JULIA CLARKE: Microraptor has thrown our understanding into a new and productive chaos. It doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't give us an answer. But it gives us another way of thinking about the data. And, I think, eventually, we are going to get to some answers.
NARRATOR: Microraptor is a creature no one expected, but we know of only a tiny fraction of the dinosaurs that once lived. More than 400,000 species may have come and gone in their 175-million-year history. To date, we've found only 1,100, not counting the ones that are still with us today, long after the extinction of their ancestors.
JACQUES GAUTHIER: After the asteroid hit, 65 million years ago, the only dinosaurs that came out of it are today's birds. They seem to have survived it well enough. There are 10,000 living species, only about 4,000 mammals, so still the age of dinosaurs.
NARRATOR: On NOVA's Four-Winged Dinosaur Web site, compare the skeletons of ancient feathered animals and learn more about the evolution of flight. Find it at PBS.org.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson, host of NOVA scienceNOW. What if you dug a hole through the center of the Earth, out the other side and then jumped in? What if you did that? You'll find out in a moment.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H. Koch. And...
Discover new knowledge: HHMI.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Hi, it's Neil again. You ever wonder what would happen if you dug a hole from one side of the Earth, through the center, out the other side and then jumped in?
Before we show you, a few disclaimers: if there was any air in the hole, air resistance would slow me down, so let's ignore that. Earth's molten core is 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. On the way past, you'd simply be vaporized. So let's ignore that, too. We would also have to ignore Earth's spin, which would make me ricochet from side to side down the hole. And please don't try this experiment on the actual Earth.
All right, here we go!
I fall, gaining speed as Earth's mass pulls me towards the center. Fourteen minutes into my fall, halfway to the center, I've accelerated to more than 15,000 miles an hour. Here, there's only half the force of gravity than on the surface, so I'm still gaining speed, but at a slower rate than when I first jumped in. Twenty-one minutes into my fall, and I'm at the center of the Earth, going my fastest, about 18,000 miles an hour.
As I pass the center, gravity now works against me, slowing me down. And by the time I make it halfway between the core and the other side of the Earth, I'm back down to about 15,000 miles an hour. It'll take only 42 minutes to make the entire trip to the other side. At which point, I'll slow to a full stop.
Just like when I started, all of Earth's mass will pull me back towards the core. Unless somebody catches me, I'll fall down the hole again and yo-yo back and forth forever.
Thank you!
MAN: No problem.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson. NOVA scienceNOW returns soon.
NOVA is a product of WGBH Boston.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Chomsky: Big Idea 1996
(Interview beginning: 4:20)
Marr:
Professor Chomsky, could we start by listening to you explain what the "Propaganda Model", as you call it, is. For many people, the idea that propaganda is used by democratic, rather than merely authoritarian governments, will be a strange one.
Chomsky:
Well... the term "propaganda" fell into disfavour around the Second World War, but in the 1920’s and the 1930’s, it was commonly used, and in fact advocated, by leading intellectuals, by the founders of modern political science, by Wilsonian progressives and of course, by the public relations industry, as a necessary technique to overcome the danger of democracy. The institutional structure of the media is quite straightforward - we’re talking about the United States, it’s not very different elsewhere - there are sectors, but the agenda-setting media, the ones that set the framework for everyone else (like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and so on), these are the major corporations, parts of even bigger conglomerates. Like other corporate institutions, they have a product and a market: Their market is advertisers, that is, other businesses; their product is relatively privileged audiences, more or less...
So they’re selling audiences to...
They’re selling privileged audiences - these are big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now the question is, what picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of this structure? Then we draw some conclusions about what you would expect, and then we check, and yes - that’s the picture of the world that comes out.
And is this anything more than the idea that, basically, the press is relatively right wing, with some exceptions, because it’s owned by big business - which is a truism, it’s well known?
Well, I would call the press relatively liberal. Here I agree with the right wing critics. So, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, which are called, without a trace of irony - the New York Times is called the "establishment left" in say, major foreign policy journals - and that’s correct, but what’s not recognised is that the role of the liberal intellectual establishment is to set very sharp bounds on how far you can go - "this far, and no further".
Give me some examples of that...
Well, let’s take say, the Vietnam War - probably the leading critic, and in fact one of the leading dissident intellectuals in the mainstream, is Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who did finally come around to opposing the Vietnam War about 1969 - about a year and a half after Corporate America had more or less ordered Washington to call it off, and his picture from then on is that the war (as he put it) began with blundering efforts to do good, but it ended up by 1969 being a disaster and costing us too much - and that’s the criticism...
So, what would the "non-propaganda model" have told Americans about the Vietnam War at the same time?
Same thing that the mainstream press was telling them about Afghanistan. The United States invaded South [Vietnam]... had first of all in the 1950s set up a standard Latin American-style terror state, which had massacred tens of thousands of people, but was unable to control local uprising (and everyone knows - at least every specialist knows - that’s what it was), and when Kennedy came in, in 1961, they had to make a decision, because the South [Vietnamese] government was collapsing under local attack, so the U.S. just invaded the country. In 1961 the U.S. airforce started bombing South Vietnamese civilians, authorised Napalm crop destruction... then in 1965 - January, February 1965 - the next major escalation took place against South Vietnam, not against North Vietnam - that was a sideshow - that’s what an honest press would be saying, but you can’t find a trace of it.
Now, if the press is a censoring organisation, tell me how that works - you’re not suggesting that proprietors phone one another up, or that many journalists get their copy "spiked", as we say?
It’s actually... Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called "Literary Censorship in England" which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm, except that it never appeared, in which he points out "look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free, democratic England, it’s not all that different", and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force, and then he gives a two sentence response which is not very profound, but captures it: He says, two reasons - first, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear but second, the whole educational system from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don’t say. Well, spelling these things out, that’s perfectly correct - I mean, the first sentence is what we expanded...
This is what I don’t get, because it suggests - I mean, I’m a journalist - people like me are "self-censoring"...
No - not self-censoring. There’s a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through and - it doesn’t work a hundred percent, but it’s pretty effective - it selects for obedience and subordination, and especially...
So, stroppy people won’t make it to positions of influence...
There’ll be "behaviour problems" or... if you read applications to a graduate school, you see that people will tell you "he doesn’t get along too well with his colleagues" - you know how to interpret those things.
I’m just interested in this because I was brought up, like a lot of people, probably post-Watergate film and so on, to believe that journalism was a crusading craft, and that there were a lot of disputatious, stroppy, difficult people in journalism, and I have to say, I think I know some of them.
Well, I know some of the best... best-known investigative reporters in the United States - I won’t mention names - whose attitude toward the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they constantly talk about how they try to... play it like a violin: If they see a little opening they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, "We stand up against power", very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists, and in fact, the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists, have quite a different picture and, I think, a very realistic one.
How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are...
I don’t say you’re self-censoring - I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
We [the UK] have a press which has, it seems to me a relatively wide range of views - there is a pretty schmaltzy Conservative majority but there are left-wing papers, there are liberal papers, and there is a pretty large offering of views running from the far right to the far left, for those who want them. I don’t see how a propaganda model...
That’s not quite true. I mean there have been good studies of the British press and you could look at them - James Curran is the major one - which point out that, up until the 1960s there was indeed a kind of a social democratic press, which sort of represented much of the interests of working people, and ordinary people and so on, and it was very successful - I mean, the Daily Herald for example had not only more... it had far higher circulation than other newspapers, but also a dedicated circulation. Furthermore, the tabloids at that time - the Mirror and the Sun - were kind of labour based. By the ’60s, that was all gone, and it disappeared under the pressure of capital resources. What was left was overwhelmingly the... sort of... centre to right press with some dissidence - it’s true, I mean...
We’ve got I would say, a couple of large circulation newspapers, which are left of centre and which are putting in neo-Keynesian views which - you call them elites - are strongly hostile to.
It’s interesting that you call neo-Keynesian "left of centre" - I’d just call it straight centre. "Left of centre" is a value term...
Sure.
... there are extremely good journalists in England, a number of them, they write very honestly, and very good material; a lot of what they write wouldn’t appear here [the US]. On the other hand, if you look at the question overall, I don’t think you’re going to find a big difference, and the few (there aren’t many studies of the British press), but the few that there are have found pretty much the same results, and I think the better journalists will tell you that. In fact, what you have to do is check it out in cases. So let’s take what I just mentioned - the Vietnam War. The British press did not have the kind of stake in the Vietnam War that the American press did, because they weren’t fighting it. Just check sometime, and find out how many times you can find the American war in Vietnam described as a US attack against South Vietnam, beginning clearly with outright aggression in 1961, and escalating to massive aggression in ’65. If you can find 0.001% of the coverage saying that, you’ll surprise me, and in a free press, 100% of it would have been saying that. Now that’s just a matter of fact - it has nothing to do with left and right.
Let me come up to a more modern war, which was the Gulf War which, again, looking at the press in Britain and watching television, I was very, very well aware of the anti-Gulf War dissidence...
Were you?
The "no blood for oil" campaigns, and I have the...
That’s not the dissidence...
"No blood for oil" isn’t the dissidence?
No. Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait took place on August 2nd. Within a few days, the great fear in Washington was that Saddam Hussein was going to withdraw and leave a puppet government, which would be pretty much what the US had done in Panama. The U.S. and Britain therefore, moved very quickly to try to undercut the danger of withdrawal. By late August, negotiation offers were coming from Iraq, calling for a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal. The press wouldn’t publish them here, they never publish them in England. It did leak however...
There was a great debate about whether there should have been a negotiated settlement...
No, sorry, no there was not a debate - there was a debate about whether you should continue with sanctions, which is a different question... because the fact of the matter is, we have good evidence that by mid- or late-August the sanctions had already worked, because these stories were coming from high American officials in the State Department - former American officials like Richard Helm - they couldn’t get the mainstream press to cover them, but they did manage to get one journal to cover them - Newsday - that’s a suburban journal in Long Island, the purpose obviously being to spook out the NYT, cause that’s the only thing that matters. It came out in Newsday and this continued (I won’t go through the details), but this continued until January 2nd. At that time, the offers that were coming were apparently so meaningful to the State Department, that State Department officials were saying that "Look, this is negotiable, meaningful, maybe we don’t accept everything, but it’s certainly a basis for a negotiated withdrawal". The press would not cover it. Newsday did. A few other people did - I have a couple of op-eds on it, and to my knowledge - you can check this - the first reference to any of this in England is actually in an article I wrote in the Guardian, which was in early January. You can check and see if there’s an earlier reference.
Okay - let’s look at one of the other key examples, which you’ve looked at too, which would appear to go against your idea, which is the Watergate affair...
Watergate is a perfect example - we’ve discussed it at length in our book in fact, and elsewhere - it’s a perfect example of the way the press was subordinated to power. In fact...
But this brought down a President!
Just a minute - let’s take a look. What happened there... here it’s kind of interesting, ’cause you can’t do experiments on history, but here history was kind enough to set one up for us. The Watergate exposures happened to take place at exactly the same time as another set of exposures; they were the exposures of COINTELPRO.
Sorry - you’ll have to explain that to us.
It’s interesting that I have to explain it, because it’s vastly more significant than Watergate - that already makes my point. COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out, not by a couple of petty crooks, but by the national political police - the FBI - under four administrations. It began in the late Eisenhower administration, ran up until...
This is the end of the Socialist Workers Party in America?
The Socialist Workers Party was one tiny fragment of it. It began... by the time it got through (I won’t run through the whole story), it was aimed at the entire New Left, at the Women’s movement, at the whole Black movement; it was extremely broad - it’s actions went as far as political assassination. Now what’s the difference between the two? Very clear. In Watergate, Richard Nixon went after half of US private power, namely the Democratic Party, and power can defend itself. So therefore, that’s a scandal. He didn’t do anything... nothing happened - look, I was on Nixon’s enemies list. I didn’t even know, nothing ever happened. But...
Nonetheless, you wouldn’t say it was an insignificant event, to bring down a President...
No, it was a case where half of US power defended itself against a person who had obviously stepped out of line. And the fact that the press thought that was important shows that they think powerful people ought to be able to defend themselves. Now, whether there was a question of principle involved happens to be easily checked in this case. One tiny part of the COINTELPRO program was itself far more significant in terms of principle than all of Watergate; and if you look at the whole program, I mean, it’s not even a discussion. But you have to ask me what COINTELPRO is. You know what Watergate is. There couldn’t be a more dramatic example of the subordination of educated opinion to Power, here in England, as well as the United States.
I know you’ve concentrated on foreign affairs, and some of these key areas...
I’ve talked a lot about domestic problems.
Well, I’d like to come onto that, because it still seems to me that, on a range of pretty important issues for the Establishment, there is serious dissent...
That’s right.
... Gingrich and his neo-conservative agenda in America has been pretty savagely lampooned. The apparently fixed succession for the Republican candidacy at the Presidential election has come apart. Clinton, who is a powerful figure, is having great difficulty with Whitewater. Everywhere one looks, one sees disjunctions, openings.
Within a spectrum so narrow that you really have to look hard to find it - let me give you...
Can I just stop you there, because you say that the spectrum is narrow, but on the one hand...
Let me illustrate...
... We’ve got flat tax...
Can I illustrate?
... flat tax Republicans, right the way through to relatively big state Democrats.
Find one - find a big state Democrat. The position now is exactly what Clinton said: "The year of big government is over, big government has failed, the war on poverty has failed, we have to get rid of this entitlement business" - that was Clinton’s campaign message in 1992. That’s the Democrats. What you have now is a difference between sort of moderate Republicans, and extreme Republicans. Actually, it’s well known that there’s been a long standing... sort of split in the American business community; it’s not precise, but it’s sort of general, between high-tech, capital-intensive, internationally-oriented business, which tends to be what’s called "liberal", and lower-tech, more nationally-oriented, more labour-intensive industry, which is what’s called "conservative". Now, between those sectors, there have been differences and in fact, if you take a look at American politics, it oscillates pretty much between those limits (there’s good work on this incidentally - the person who’s done the most extensive work is Thomas Ferguson, he’s a political scientist...)
One more example, which will have some resonance in Britain and Europe, is the great argument over the North American Free Trade Association - the NAFTA argument - where...
This is an interesting one.
... if there is something which one could describe as a global opposition movement, that is, trade union-, environmental-, community-based, then it was certainly present in the anti-NAFTA...
Shall I tell you what happened?
Well...
Shall I tell you what happened?
What I was going to say is that...
Never reported...
... those arguments were well... we were well aware of those arguments.
No! That is flatly false. They were not permitted into the press, and I documented this. I’ll give you references if you like.
We read all about it in Britain is all I will say.
No you did not; for example...
I’m sorry, but we did...
Well, let me ask you: Did you read the report of the Office of Technology Association of Congress?
Well...
Sorry - did you read the report of the Labour Advisory Committee?
Well, I don’t get these reports, but I read...
Sorry, that’s...
... I read many articles about the anti-NAFTA argument that’s very...
I’m sorry. Well if you’re interested in the facts, I’ll tell you what they are, and I’ll even give you sources. The NAFTA agreement was signed more or less in secret by the three presidents, in mid-August, right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Now, there’s a law in the United States - the 1974 Trade Act - which requires that any trade-related issue be submitted to the Labour Advisory Committee, which is union-based, for assessment and analysis. It was never submitted to them. A day before they were supposed to give their final report, in mid-September, it was finally submitted to them. The unions are pretty right wing, but they were infuriated. They had never been shown this. Even at the time that they had to write the... they were given 24 hours to write the report... they didn’t even have time to look at the text. Nevertheless, they wrote a very vigorous analysis of it, with alternatives presented, saying "Look, we’re not against NAFTA, we’re against this version of it" - they gave a good analysis, happened to be very similar to one that had been given by the Congressional Research Service, the Office of Technology Assessment - none of this ever entered the press. The only thing that entered the press was the kind of critique that they were willing to deal with: Mexico-bashing, right wing nationalists, you know, and so on. That entered the press. But not the critical analysis of the labour movement. Now...
But somehow, by a process of osmosis or something, I picked up quite a lot of anti-NAFTA arguments, on the basis of worker protection, environmental degradation...
May I continue? This goes on in the press, right until the end... there were big popular movements opposing it - it was extremely hard to suppress all of this, to suppress everything coming out of the labour movement, out of the popular movements, and so on - but they did. At the very end it had reached such a point that there was concern that they might not be able to ram this through. Now, take a look at the New York Times and the Washington Post - say the "liberal" media and the national ones in the last couple of weeks - I’ve written about it and I’ll tell you what you find. What you find is a hundred percent support for NAFTA, refusal to allow any of the popular arguments out, tremendous labour-bashing...
Can I come back, to make sure that I understand the point about the liberal press as against the conservative press because, in Britain over the last 2 years, politicians I come across are deeply irritated, ranging on furious, about attacks on them in the press, day after day, on issues which have come to be known as "sleaze". They feel that they are harassed, that they are misunderstood and that the press has got above itself, is "uppity" and is destructive: That’s the message that they are giving to us. Now, are you saying that that whole process doesn’t matter, because it’s all part of the same...
It’s marginal... Same thing is true here - when the press focuses on the sex lives of politicians, reach for your pocket, and see who’s pulling out your wallet, because those are not the issues that matter to people. I mean, they’re very marginal interest. The issues that matter to people are somewhere else, so as soon as you hear, you know, the press and presidential candidates and so on, talking about "values", as I say, put your hand on your wallet - you know that something else is happening.
But it’s been much more than... certainly with us, it’s been much more than "bed-hopping", it’s also been about taking money, it’s been about the corporations paying for political parties...
Corruption, sure... corrupt judges - fine topic...
Corrupt parties?
Yeah - corrupt parties. Big Business is not in favour of corruption, you know, and if the press focuses on corruption, Fortune Magazine will be quite happy, they don’t care about that - they don’t want the society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interest - that’s a different thing. Corruption interferes with that. So, for example, when I was, let’s say... I just happened to have come back from India: The Bank of India released an estimate - economists there tell me it’s low - that a third of the economy is "black", meaning mostly rich businessmen not paying their taxes. Well, that makes the press, because in fact, certainly trans-nationals don’t like it. They want the system to be run without corruption, robbery, bribes and so on - just pouring money into their pockets. So yes, that’s a fine topic for the press. On the other hand, the topics I’ve talked about are not fine topics, ’cause they’re much too significant.
What would a press be like, do you think, without the Propaganda Model? What would we be reading in the papers that we don’t read about now?
I’ve just given a dozen examples. On every example - it’s only you’ve picked, I haven’t picked, I mean I could pick my own, but I’m happy to let you pick ’em - on every one of those examples I think you can demonstrate that there’s been a severe distortion of what the facts of the matter are - this has nothing to do with left and right as I’ve been stressing - and it has left the population pretty confused and marginalised. A free press would just tell you the truth. This has nothing to do with left and right...
And given the power of Big Business, the power of the press, what can people do about this?
They can do exactly what people do in the Haitian slums and hills - organise - and Haiti, which is the poorest country in the hemisphere, they created a very vibrant, lively civil society, in the slums, in the hills, in conditions that most of us couldn’t even imagine. We can do the same, much more easily.
You’ve got community activists in America...
Yes we do.
... I’m not talking about the so-called "Communitarian" movements, but I’m talking about the local community activists and writers, all over the place....
All over the place... all over the place... take say, a city like Boston, with all sorts of people: They don’t even know of each other’s existence. There’s a very large number of them. One of the things I’ll do consistently is run around the country giving talks; one of my main purposes, and the purpose of the people who invite me, is to bring the people together, people in that area, who are working on the same things and don’t know of each other’s existence, because the resources are so scattered, and the means of communication are so marginal, there isn’t just much they can do about it. Now, there are plenty of things that are happening. So take say, community-based radio, which is sort of outside the system...
I was going to ask you about that, and about the Internet, which has certainly got pretty open access, at the moment.
Well, the Internet, like most technology, is a very double-edged sword. Like any technology, including printing, it has a liberatory potential, but it also has a repressive potential, and there’s a battle going on about which way it’s going to go, as there was for radio, and television, and so on.
About ownership and advertising...
Right - and about just what’s going to be in it, and who’s going to have access to it. Remember, incidentally, that the Internet is an elite operation. Most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call, you know, so that’s certainly not on the Internet. Nevertheless, it does have democratising potential, and there’s a struggle going on right now as to whether that’s going to be realised, or whether it’ll turn into something like a home marketing service, and a way of marginalising people even further. That discussion went on in the 1920s (it was Radio) - that’s interesting how it turned out - it went on over Television, it’s now going on over the Internet. And, that’s a matter of popular struggle. Look: We don’t live the way we did 200 years ago, or even 30 years ago - there’s been a lot of progress. It hasn’t been gifts from above. It’s been the result of people getting together, and refusing to accept the dictates of authoritarian institutions. And, there’s no reason to think that that’s over.
You’ve been portrayed, and some would say, occasionally portrayed yourself, as a kind of lonely dissident voice - you clearly don’t feel lonely at all.
I say nothing like that. I certainly do not portray myself that way. I can’t begin to accept a fraction of the invitations from around the country: I’m scheduled two years in advance. And at that, I’m only selecting a fraction...
And you’re speaking to big audiences.
Huge audiences. And these are not elite intellectuals either. These are mostly popular audiences. I probably spend 20 or 30 hours a week just answering letters, from people all over the country, and the world. I wish I felt a little more lonely. I don’t. Of course, I’m not in PR, you know, I wouldn’t be in the mainstream media, but I wouldn’t expect that. Why should they offer space to somebody who’s trying to undermine their power, and to expose what they do? But that’s not loneliness.
Professor Chomsky, thank-you very much.
Marr:
Professor Chomsky, could we start by listening to you explain what the "Propaganda Model", as you call it, is. For many people, the idea that propaganda is used by democratic, rather than merely authoritarian governments, will be a strange one.
Chomsky:
Well... the term "propaganda" fell into disfavour around the Second World War, but in the 1920’s and the 1930’s, it was commonly used, and in fact advocated, by leading intellectuals, by the founders of modern political science, by Wilsonian progressives and of course, by the public relations industry, as a necessary technique to overcome the danger of democracy. The institutional structure of the media is quite straightforward - we’re talking about the United States, it’s not very different elsewhere - there are sectors, but the agenda-setting media, the ones that set the framework for everyone else (like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and so on), these are the major corporations, parts of even bigger conglomerates. Like other corporate institutions, they have a product and a market: Their market is advertisers, that is, other businesses; their product is relatively privileged audiences, more or less...
So they’re selling audiences to...
They’re selling privileged audiences - these are big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now the question is, what picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of this structure? Then we draw some conclusions about what you would expect, and then we check, and yes - that’s the picture of the world that comes out.
And is this anything more than the idea that, basically, the press is relatively right wing, with some exceptions, because it’s owned by big business - which is a truism, it’s well known?
Well, I would call the press relatively liberal. Here I agree with the right wing critics. So, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, which are called, without a trace of irony - the New York Times is called the "establishment left" in say, major foreign policy journals - and that’s correct, but what’s not recognised is that the role of the liberal intellectual establishment is to set very sharp bounds on how far you can go - "this far, and no further".
Give me some examples of that...
Well, let’s take say, the Vietnam War - probably the leading critic, and in fact one of the leading dissident intellectuals in the mainstream, is Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who did finally come around to opposing the Vietnam War about 1969 - about a year and a half after Corporate America had more or less ordered Washington to call it off, and his picture from then on is that the war (as he put it) began with blundering efforts to do good, but it ended up by 1969 being a disaster and costing us too much - and that’s the criticism...
So, what would the "non-propaganda model" have told Americans about the Vietnam War at the same time?
Same thing that the mainstream press was telling them about Afghanistan. The United States invaded South [Vietnam]... had first of all in the 1950s set up a standard Latin American-style terror state, which had massacred tens of thousands of people, but was unable to control local uprising (and everyone knows - at least every specialist knows - that’s what it was), and when Kennedy came in, in 1961, they had to make a decision, because the South [Vietnamese] government was collapsing under local attack, so the U.S. just invaded the country. In 1961 the U.S. airforce started bombing South Vietnamese civilians, authorised Napalm crop destruction... then in 1965 - January, February 1965 - the next major escalation took place against South Vietnam, not against North Vietnam - that was a sideshow - that’s what an honest press would be saying, but you can’t find a trace of it.
Now, if the press is a censoring organisation, tell me how that works - you’re not suggesting that proprietors phone one another up, or that many journalists get their copy "spiked", as we say?
It’s actually... Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called "Literary Censorship in England" which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm, except that it never appeared, in which he points out "look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free, democratic England, it’s not all that different", and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force, and then he gives a two sentence response which is not very profound, but captures it: He says, two reasons - first, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear but second, the whole educational system from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don’t say. Well, spelling these things out, that’s perfectly correct - I mean, the first sentence is what we expanded...
This is what I don’t get, because it suggests - I mean, I’m a journalist - people like me are "self-censoring"...
No - not self-censoring. There’s a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through and - it doesn’t work a hundred percent, but it’s pretty effective - it selects for obedience and subordination, and especially...
So, stroppy people won’t make it to positions of influence...
There’ll be "behaviour problems" or... if you read applications to a graduate school, you see that people will tell you "he doesn’t get along too well with his colleagues" - you know how to interpret those things.
I’m just interested in this because I was brought up, like a lot of people, probably post-Watergate film and so on, to believe that journalism was a crusading craft, and that there were a lot of disputatious, stroppy, difficult people in journalism, and I have to say, I think I know some of them.
Well, I know some of the best... best-known investigative reporters in the United States - I won’t mention names - whose attitude toward the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they constantly talk about how they try to... play it like a violin: If they see a little opening they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, "We stand up against power", very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists, and in fact, the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists, have quite a different picture and, I think, a very realistic one.
How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are...
I don’t say you’re self-censoring - I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
We [the UK] have a press which has, it seems to me a relatively wide range of views - there is a pretty schmaltzy Conservative majority but there are left-wing papers, there are liberal papers, and there is a pretty large offering of views running from the far right to the far left, for those who want them. I don’t see how a propaganda model...
That’s not quite true. I mean there have been good studies of the British press and you could look at them - James Curran is the major one - which point out that, up until the 1960s there was indeed a kind of a social democratic press, which sort of represented much of the interests of working people, and ordinary people and so on, and it was very successful - I mean, the Daily Herald for example had not only more... it had far higher circulation than other newspapers, but also a dedicated circulation. Furthermore, the tabloids at that time - the Mirror and the Sun - were kind of labour based. By the ’60s, that was all gone, and it disappeared under the pressure of capital resources. What was left was overwhelmingly the... sort of... centre to right press with some dissidence - it’s true, I mean...
We’ve got I would say, a couple of large circulation newspapers, which are left of centre and which are putting in neo-Keynesian views which - you call them elites - are strongly hostile to.
It’s interesting that you call neo-Keynesian "left of centre" - I’d just call it straight centre. "Left of centre" is a value term...
Sure.
... there are extremely good journalists in England, a number of them, they write very honestly, and very good material; a lot of what they write wouldn’t appear here [the US]. On the other hand, if you look at the question overall, I don’t think you’re going to find a big difference, and the few (there aren’t many studies of the British press), but the few that there are have found pretty much the same results, and I think the better journalists will tell you that. In fact, what you have to do is check it out in cases. So let’s take what I just mentioned - the Vietnam War. The British press did not have the kind of stake in the Vietnam War that the American press did, because they weren’t fighting it. Just check sometime, and find out how many times you can find the American war in Vietnam described as a US attack against South Vietnam, beginning clearly with outright aggression in 1961, and escalating to massive aggression in ’65. If you can find 0.001% of the coverage saying that, you’ll surprise me, and in a free press, 100% of it would have been saying that. Now that’s just a matter of fact - it has nothing to do with left and right.
Let me come up to a more modern war, which was the Gulf War which, again, looking at the press in Britain and watching television, I was very, very well aware of the anti-Gulf War dissidence...
Were you?
The "no blood for oil" campaigns, and I have the...
That’s not the dissidence...
"No blood for oil" isn’t the dissidence?
No. Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait took place on August 2nd. Within a few days, the great fear in Washington was that Saddam Hussein was going to withdraw and leave a puppet government, which would be pretty much what the US had done in Panama. The U.S. and Britain therefore, moved very quickly to try to undercut the danger of withdrawal. By late August, negotiation offers were coming from Iraq, calling for a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal. The press wouldn’t publish them here, they never publish them in England. It did leak however...
There was a great debate about whether there should have been a negotiated settlement...
No, sorry, no there was not a debate - there was a debate about whether you should continue with sanctions, which is a different question... because the fact of the matter is, we have good evidence that by mid- or late-August the sanctions had already worked, because these stories were coming from high American officials in the State Department - former American officials like Richard Helm - they couldn’t get the mainstream press to cover them, but they did manage to get one journal to cover them - Newsday - that’s a suburban journal in Long Island, the purpose obviously being to spook out the NYT, cause that’s the only thing that matters. It came out in Newsday and this continued (I won’t go through the details), but this continued until January 2nd. At that time, the offers that were coming were apparently so meaningful to the State Department, that State Department officials were saying that "Look, this is negotiable, meaningful, maybe we don’t accept everything, but it’s certainly a basis for a negotiated withdrawal". The press would not cover it. Newsday did. A few other people did - I have a couple of op-eds on it, and to my knowledge - you can check this - the first reference to any of this in England is actually in an article I wrote in the Guardian, which was in early January. You can check and see if there’s an earlier reference.
Okay - let’s look at one of the other key examples, which you’ve looked at too, which would appear to go against your idea, which is the Watergate affair...
Watergate is a perfect example - we’ve discussed it at length in our book in fact, and elsewhere - it’s a perfect example of the way the press was subordinated to power. In fact...
But this brought down a President!
Just a minute - let’s take a look. What happened there... here it’s kind of interesting, ’cause you can’t do experiments on history, but here history was kind enough to set one up for us. The Watergate exposures happened to take place at exactly the same time as another set of exposures; they were the exposures of COINTELPRO.
Sorry - you’ll have to explain that to us.
It’s interesting that I have to explain it, because it’s vastly more significant than Watergate - that already makes my point. COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out, not by a couple of petty crooks, but by the national political police - the FBI - under four administrations. It began in the late Eisenhower administration, ran up until...
This is the end of the Socialist Workers Party in America?
The Socialist Workers Party was one tiny fragment of it. It began... by the time it got through (I won’t run through the whole story), it was aimed at the entire New Left, at the Women’s movement, at the whole Black movement; it was extremely broad - it’s actions went as far as political assassination. Now what’s the difference between the two? Very clear. In Watergate, Richard Nixon went after half of US private power, namely the Democratic Party, and power can defend itself. So therefore, that’s a scandal. He didn’t do anything... nothing happened - look, I was on Nixon’s enemies list. I didn’t even know, nothing ever happened. But...
Nonetheless, you wouldn’t say it was an insignificant event, to bring down a President...
No, it was a case where half of US power defended itself against a person who had obviously stepped out of line. And the fact that the press thought that was important shows that they think powerful people ought to be able to defend themselves. Now, whether there was a question of principle involved happens to be easily checked in this case. One tiny part of the COINTELPRO program was itself far more significant in terms of principle than all of Watergate; and if you look at the whole program, I mean, it’s not even a discussion. But you have to ask me what COINTELPRO is. You know what Watergate is. There couldn’t be a more dramatic example of the subordination of educated opinion to Power, here in England, as well as the United States.
I know you’ve concentrated on foreign affairs, and some of these key areas...
I’ve talked a lot about domestic problems.
Well, I’d like to come onto that, because it still seems to me that, on a range of pretty important issues for the Establishment, there is serious dissent...
That’s right.
... Gingrich and his neo-conservative agenda in America has been pretty savagely lampooned. The apparently fixed succession for the Republican candidacy at the Presidential election has come apart. Clinton, who is a powerful figure, is having great difficulty with Whitewater. Everywhere one looks, one sees disjunctions, openings.
Within a spectrum so narrow that you really have to look hard to find it - let me give you...
Can I just stop you there, because you say that the spectrum is narrow, but on the one hand...
Let me illustrate...
... We’ve got flat tax...
Can I illustrate?
... flat tax Republicans, right the way through to relatively big state Democrats.
Find one - find a big state Democrat. The position now is exactly what Clinton said: "The year of big government is over, big government has failed, the war on poverty has failed, we have to get rid of this entitlement business" - that was Clinton’s campaign message in 1992. That’s the Democrats. What you have now is a difference between sort of moderate Republicans, and extreme Republicans. Actually, it’s well known that there’s been a long standing... sort of split in the American business community; it’s not precise, but it’s sort of general, between high-tech, capital-intensive, internationally-oriented business, which tends to be what’s called "liberal", and lower-tech, more nationally-oriented, more labour-intensive industry, which is what’s called "conservative". Now, between those sectors, there have been differences and in fact, if you take a look at American politics, it oscillates pretty much between those limits (there’s good work on this incidentally - the person who’s done the most extensive work is Thomas Ferguson, he’s a political scientist...)
One more example, which will have some resonance in Britain and Europe, is the great argument over the North American Free Trade Association - the NAFTA argument - where...
This is an interesting one.
... if there is something which one could describe as a global opposition movement, that is, trade union-, environmental-, community-based, then it was certainly present in the anti-NAFTA...
Shall I tell you what happened?
Well...
Shall I tell you what happened?
What I was going to say is that...
Never reported...
... those arguments were well... we were well aware of those arguments.
No! That is flatly false. They were not permitted into the press, and I documented this. I’ll give you references if you like.
We read all about it in Britain is all I will say.
No you did not; for example...
I’m sorry, but we did...
Well, let me ask you: Did you read the report of the Office of Technology Association of Congress?
Well...
Sorry - did you read the report of the Labour Advisory Committee?
Well, I don’t get these reports, but I read...
Sorry, that’s...
... I read many articles about the anti-NAFTA argument that’s very...
I’m sorry. Well if you’re interested in the facts, I’ll tell you what they are, and I’ll even give you sources. The NAFTA agreement was signed more or less in secret by the three presidents, in mid-August, right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Now, there’s a law in the United States - the 1974 Trade Act - which requires that any trade-related issue be submitted to the Labour Advisory Committee, which is union-based, for assessment and analysis. It was never submitted to them. A day before they were supposed to give their final report, in mid-September, it was finally submitted to them. The unions are pretty right wing, but they were infuriated. They had never been shown this. Even at the time that they had to write the... they were given 24 hours to write the report... they didn’t even have time to look at the text. Nevertheless, they wrote a very vigorous analysis of it, with alternatives presented, saying "Look, we’re not against NAFTA, we’re against this version of it" - they gave a good analysis, happened to be very similar to one that had been given by the Congressional Research Service, the Office of Technology Assessment - none of this ever entered the press. The only thing that entered the press was the kind of critique that they were willing to deal with: Mexico-bashing, right wing nationalists, you know, and so on. That entered the press. But not the critical analysis of the labour movement. Now...
But somehow, by a process of osmosis or something, I picked up quite a lot of anti-NAFTA arguments, on the basis of worker protection, environmental degradation...
May I continue? This goes on in the press, right until the end... there were big popular movements opposing it - it was extremely hard to suppress all of this, to suppress everything coming out of the labour movement, out of the popular movements, and so on - but they did. At the very end it had reached such a point that there was concern that they might not be able to ram this through. Now, take a look at the New York Times and the Washington Post - say the "liberal" media and the national ones in the last couple of weeks - I’ve written about it and I’ll tell you what you find. What you find is a hundred percent support for NAFTA, refusal to allow any of the popular arguments out, tremendous labour-bashing...
Can I come back, to make sure that I understand the point about the liberal press as against the conservative press because, in Britain over the last 2 years, politicians I come across are deeply irritated, ranging on furious, about attacks on them in the press, day after day, on issues which have come to be known as "sleaze". They feel that they are harassed, that they are misunderstood and that the press has got above itself, is "uppity" and is destructive: That’s the message that they are giving to us. Now, are you saying that that whole process doesn’t matter, because it’s all part of the same...
It’s marginal... Same thing is true here - when the press focuses on the sex lives of politicians, reach for your pocket, and see who’s pulling out your wallet, because those are not the issues that matter to people. I mean, they’re very marginal interest. The issues that matter to people are somewhere else, so as soon as you hear, you know, the press and presidential candidates and so on, talking about "values", as I say, put your hand on your wallet - you know that something else is happening.
But it’s been much more than... certainly with us, it’s been much more than "bed-hopping", it’s also been about taking money, it’s been about the corporations paying for political parties...
Corruption, sure... corrupt judges - fine topic...
Corrupt parties?
Yeah - corrupt parties. Big Business is not in favour of corruption, you know, and if the press focuses on corruption, Fortune Magazine will be quite happy, they don’t care about that - they don’t want the society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interest - that’s a different thing. Corruption interferes with that. So, for example, when I was, let’s say... I just happened to have come back from India: The Bank of India released an estimate - economists there tell me it’s low - that a third of the economy is "black", meaning mostly rich businessmen not paying their taxes. Well, that makes the press, because in fact, certainly trans-nationals don’t like it. They want the system to be run without corruption, robbery, bribes and so on - just pouring money into their pockets. So yes, that’s a fine topic for the press. On the other hand, the topics I’ve talked about are not fine topics, ’cause they’re much too significant.
What would a press be like, do you think, without the Propaganda Model? What would we be reading in the papers that we don’t read about now?
I’ve just given a dozen examples. On every example - it’s only you’ve picked, I haven’t picked, I mean I could pick my own, but I’m happy to let you pick ’em - on every one of those examples I think you can demonstrate that there’s been a severe distortion of what the facts of the matter are - this has nothing to do with left and right as I’ve been stressing - and it has left the population pretty confused and marginalised. A free press would just tell you the truth. This has nothing to do with left and right...
And given the power of Big Business, the power of the press, what can people do about this?
They can do exactly what people do in the Haitian slums and hills - organise - and Haiti, which is the poorest country in the hemisphere, they created a very vibrant, lively civil society, in the slums, in the hills, in conditions that most of us couldn’t even imagine. We can do the same, much more easily.
You’ve got community activists in America...
Yes we do.
... I’m not talking about the so-called "Communitarian" movements, but I’m talking about the local community activists and writers, all over the place....
All over the place... all over the place... take say, a city like Boston, with all sorts of people: They don’t even know of each other’s existence. There’s a very large number of them. One of the things I’ll do consistently is run around the country giving talks; one of my main purposes, and the purpose of the people who invite me, is to bring the people together, people in that area, who are working on the same things and don’t know of each other’s existence, because the resources are so scattered, and the means of communication are so marginal, there isn’t just much they can do about it. Now, there are plenty of things that are happening. So take say, community-based radio, which is sort of outside the system...
I was going to ask you about that, and about the Internet, which has certainly got pretty open access, at the moment.
Well, the Internet, like most technology, is a very double-edged sword. Like any technology, including printing, it has a liberatory potential, but it also has a repressive potential, and there’s a battle going on about which way it’s going to go, as there was for radio, and television, and so on.
About ownership and advertising...
Right - and about just what’s going to be in it, and who’s going to have access to it. Remember, incidentally, that the Internet is an elite operation. Most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call, you know, so that’s certainly not on the Internet. Nevertheless, it does have democratising potential, and there’s a struggle going on right now as to whether that’s going to be realised, or whether it’ll turn into something like a home marketing service, and a way of marginalising people even further. That discussion went on in the 1920s (it was Radio) - that’s interesting how it turned out - it went on over Television, it’s now going on over the Internet. And, that’s a matter of popular struggle. Look: We don’t live the way we did 200 years ago, or even 30 years ago - there’s been a lot of progress. It hasn’t been gifts from above. It’s been the result of people getting together, and refusing to accept the dictates of authoritarian institutions. And, there’s no reason to think that that’s over.
You’ve been portrayed, and some would say, occasionally portrayed yourself, as a kind of lonely dissident voice - you clearly don’t feel lonely at all.
I say nothing like that. I certainly do not portray myself that way. I can’t begin to accept a fraction of the invitations from around the country: I’m scheduled two years in advance. And at that, I’m only selecting a fraction...
And you’re speaking to big audiences.
Huge audiences. And these are not elite intellectuals either. These are mostly popular audiences. I probably spend 20 or 30 hours a week just answering letters, from people all over the country, and the world. I wish I felt a little more lonely. I don’t. Of course, I’m not in PR, you know, I wouldn’t be in the mainstream media, but I wouldn’t expect that. Why should they offer space to somebody who’s trying to undermine their power, and to expose what they do? But that’s not loneliness.
Professor Chomsky, thank-you very much.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
KCTS9: Neil Degrasse Tyson
(1:20)
EC: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much for being here on Conversations. Welcome to Seattle.
NT: Thank you for having me.
EC: Again, I’m sure you have been here numerous times.
NT: It’s one of my favorite cities actually.
EC: Well how does of a kid born in the Bronx end of becoming an astrophysicist?
NT: First you have to say this: Da Bronx.
EC: Da Bronx, I’m sorry…
NT: Just get that straight, all right?
EC: Forgot the “Da.”
NT: Actually I’ve thought long and hard about this, because I wondered, suppose I grew up in the suburb—or if I grew up in a rural setting on a farm, where the night sky was always visible for me from childhood , from infancy. I wonder if it would have ever struck me as boldly as it did in New York, because in New York there is no sky. You can see the moon, ok, of course the sun in the day time… …the moon and maybe a couple of planets at night—that’s it, that’s our total encounter with the night sky as a New Yorker. Even when you look up your sight line mostly will hit a building – so you have to look straight up before you see the sky and it’s not interesting at that point, the lights are too bright.
So it was not until I was nine years old where my family, my parents, took me and my brother and sister to the local planetarium. In New York City, that’s the Hayden Planetarium and that’s when they dim the lights and the stars came out in this unusual ceiling that was round , this domed ceiling , and I didn’t know where I was. It was a little frightening at first, because the room kind of disappears from under you, I mean psychologically, it disappears and it’s just you and the cosmos, I thought it was hoax. I said there aren’t this many stars in the nights sky, because I know , I’ve seen them from the Bronx, It was like five stars in the Bronx, and it would not be ’til several years later where I would actually go in to the rural parts of, on that time, Pennsylvania and also in the Caribbean.
We took some family trips there, and I saw the night sky, as it was intended to be seen. To this day I’m embarrassed to confess that when I look up to the night sky with some finest observing locations in the world, I still say to myself, that’s beautiful, reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. I know that’s a little sick to think like of an artificially produced sky as the reality, the reference, but that’s what it was, but it hit me when I was nine years old and I was star struck, now, suppose I’d seen it my whole life I don’t think I would have been that star struck, and I wonder what I be today where it would not… for that delay in that cosmic encounter.
EC: And Hayden Planetarium is your life’s work now?
NT: Yeah, so now I came back and now I’m like head of the place. (laughs)
EC: Were you always good at math and science?
NT: I liked it and my grades were always all over the places, so people always put so much emphasis on grades when of course in adulthood no one asks you what your GPA was, most like times someone asked you what grade…
EC: I can’t remember…
NT: I couldn’t even remember, so clearly there is something else that matters in life than what your grades are and I think there is not enough support of what could easily recognized in someone as ambition, the urge to want to learn more no matter what is your situation, so there I was, my first encounter with a night sky, and the years that followed in to middle school and into the high school, I joined the amateur astronomers club and I attended extra classes at the museum that contained the Hayden Planetarium. Because once you go to just the public exhibits it’s a point where you want more. In any good museum any good facility, will have programs that go beyond just the permanent exhibit as did the American Museum of Natural History, of which the Hayden planetarium is a, is a part.
And so I just kept growing and I kept growing—that’s not even in school, I’m out of school doing this, after schools, on the weekends. And so, I felt fortunate to be near a facility, as so many people are who live in cities that have science museums, to live near facility that could keep stoking this curiosity, this cosmic curiosity that was planted at age nine.
EC: Not a lot of African Americans in Astronomy…
NT: That’s right. There is about, when I got my Ph.D. in 1991, there was about fifteen, in the world and…out of about 2 or 3,000 astrophysicists. There is more today. Last time I checked it might be 50 or 60, but the total number of astrophysicists has gone up in that same proportion so the relative numbers haven’t changed much.. I don’t have an easy explanation for that, I could make up one…but it’s not for the benefit of research , I think what a luxury it is to say I want to study astrophysics, suppose, you’re the first of your generation to go…… the first in your family line to go to college, and every one sort of bucking for you. Are you going to major in something as obscure as astrophysics, if you were the first to go to the college, when being financially stable is going to be a high priority for the whole family lineage at that point? So I think it might take a couple of generations before sort of financial stability is established within the community, the demographic… …before someone who is born in to a family that doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, then have a luxury of thinking about what to study just because it’s fun to do, rather than they need to draw a pay check.
EC: Now did I read?
NT: No, [laughs] the way you started so…the way…no—
EC: Was it the week you were born, that NASA was founded?
NT: Yes, the very same week, the same week that it was founded, the actual week, of the actual year that I was born NASA was founded, I should say that in reverse… And there’s been some talk - your name has been debated about as may be a candidate to the head NASA. Well, there are rumors, I mean the rumors are true, that doesn’t make them factual…there are true lies. I mean my name has come up on lists, but I didn’t put my hat in the ring,I mean I’m not , I’m not bucking for the job, there’re people who want that job.
EC: Do you?
NT: You know, if I’m asked, I’d be flattered. I’d be happy to go to Washington and have that conversation but I don’t, I am doing—I have to ask myself—we all love NASA , we all want NASA to succeed and those who don’t love NASA … don’t know enough NASA to understand why they should, I can tell you that right now. NASA is one of the few agencies where one’s support for it is uncorrelated with your political lineage, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, centrist…
People who would rather spend their money other ways, it doesn’t—whatever that urge, it does not correlate with their political platform. All I can say is, I have to ask myself, where I can do best for NASA. Is it as head of NASA, which is this huge ship, with this inertia—decades of inertia—in motion. With the man program, and the science program, and the centers. NASA has all these centers across the country, from the jet propulsion labs and…Houston, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space center, the headquarters and NASA Stennis, all across the country. It’s a huge, huge multi-headed beast that’s there. And you gotta tame it and drive it all into a direction so that it’s all coherent. And that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do. And there are people who want to try to take that on, and I deeply respect that. I don’t know if being head of NASA is the best way to use my portfolio of talents in the service of NASA. As it is now, they publish my op-eds…and they, my books get out there. And I, and I can, I have a TV show, NOVA Science Now, where NASA subjects are major recurring themes within it. On PBS of course! So, I couldn’t do that if I was head of NASA. And if I became head of NASA, who would then do that? Whereas I can continue to do this while someone else heads NASA. So that’s why I’m not, if I’m not called, I’m not going to miss it. But I nonetheless wish NASA well.
EC: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Although a lot of kids are holding you accountable after this book.
NT: Pluto had it coming! Let’s establish that, here and now. I’ve been blamed for like kicking Pluto out of the solar system. But don’t…don’t shoot the messenger.
EC: Are you guilty of killing Pluto?
NT: I’m an accessory to it. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
EC: So let’s go back…
NT: I drove the car. I drove the getaway car.
EC: [Laughs] You were the driver! You were the driver!
NT: That’s all I was!
EC: So let’s go back to 2000, and at the planetarium, this exhibit’s going to come out…
NT: Newly built, newly invested facility. Rose Center for Earth and Space.
EC: And actually things were pretty low-key when this exhibit opened. Then the NYTimes came out with this article…
NT: [low voice] The New York Times did it, that’s right, don’t blame me the New York Times…so in the 1990s we’re designing this new facility, and we’re thinking to ourselves, what’s, is there any new way we should think about delivering the universe to the public? It’s not just the planetarium, there’s a whole surrounding museum of the universe, that’s there. Part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. So we noticed that in the 1990s, new objects were being discovered at a rapid pace in the outer solar system, beyond Neptune. In orbits that kind of resembled Pluto’s orbit. Objects of sizes that resembled Pluto’s size, that were little. Objects that were mostly ice by volume, like Pluto. And we said, Hmm. Things that make you go—raise an eyebrow, wonder what’s going on out there. Maybe Pluto is a member of this new class of objects that are now being discovered. So while Pluto has always been kind of an oddball ninth planet, it’s actually quite natural in its properties when considered among what we have found in the outer solar system. So all we did was take Pluto and group it with all these other newly discovered objects. We took the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—grouped them together.
Took the, the, rocky terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—grouped them together. The asteroid belt, grouped that together. And that presented a new family photo of the solar system. We didn’t count planets, we didn’t say there are only eight planets in the solar system—that’s what we got stereotyped as doing. And I kept, people kept trying to get a quote out of me—so how many planets are there? And I said, I don’t care how many planets there are, that’s not how we’re delivering the science, pedagogically or scientifically. Taking what I felt was the high road, which was no longer counting objects. There’s no science in the numerical count of planets. There is science in the properties they have, that you can compare and contrast among the whole portfolio that is the family of the solar system.
EC: So did you expect this when you came out with the exhibit…to take off and become the center of a controversy?
NT: It didn’t take off! For a whole year. Not initially, like you were saying. It was…people seemed pretty cool about it. Until the
EC: New York Times a year later...
NT: …someone at the New York Times spotted this, and overheard some kid trying to find Pluto in the groupings of the gas giants and the rocky inner planets and couldn’t find Pluto. It’s not going to be there ’cause there’s four of these and four of these and Pluto is not either of those. And so they overheard this and said, Oh we’ve got a story here. So they got on the horn, called headquarters—downtown in New York, in Times Square, Times headquarters—
EC: Pluto’s missing!
NT: Pluto’s missing, send up a reporter and a photographer…and there they came, and right there came the headline: “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York.” And that’s when the hate mail started coming from kinder—from third graders, coming into my office. [mimics kids] Dear Dr. Tyson, why, put my favorite planet back in, why did you take it away? (in crayon, right?) Here’s what Pluto looks like, in case you don’t know—write back soon. One of them said, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet. The cutest things. But I realized this struck a chord.
There’s this, there’s this, correspondence, there’s this, this permanence of knowledge that people believe this count of planets means to them. And they’re getting conflicting information and they’re upset by this. And I could not otherwise account for it other than to say to myself, Why are Americans reacting this way, in ways that Europeans are not? And I looked around and said, Is there anything else named Pluto?
EC: Think it all had to do with the name? Particularly for kids?
NT: I think so. Even though an American discovered Pluto, you could argue maybe Americans would be a little more jingoistic about it, but I polled people who are Pluto lovers, and they said, “No idea.” So…maybe ten percent of them knew that an American discovered it. So that was not the driver of this American sentiment. And I have to conclude that it was just the dog. There it is, the dog. That was the beginning and end of that.
EC: But I would think…
NT: Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Just to flesh that out. First sketched the same year Pluto the cosmic object was discovered. So they have the same tenure in the hearts and minds of Americans.
EC: But in a way, as much as it became a controversy…and kind of humorous to some extent too.
NT: Yeah, I mean, no one, no one you know went to duel over this. But it was nonetheless, emotions were flowing, people chose up sides.
EC: But wasn’t it a good thing…you got to write a book about it…but…
NT: The book was catharsis for me. Not that I got to write it, I HAD to, otherwise I would’ve gone insane.
EC: But it brought this focus for kids, and other people, on science, the universe, all those things that that’s what you want.
NT: It’s true. I like science literary in a population, whether or not it’s astrophysics, chemistry, or biology, it doesn’t matter to me where it derives. But it made cosmic subjects front page story for many years, and particularly when an official vote was taken by the international community of astrophysicists…in 2006—that’s now six year delay—we did it first, we were the first public institution to re-think Pluto’s public identity. It came to an official vote later on, which created another media storm at that time, but now it was not focused on what we did—because this was a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union—not a labor union in that sense, it’s a society of astrophysicists. They took a vote, in Prague, so all the press went to Prague for that. I was home, doing a backstroke, I was fine because I was not the focus of this. And the vote came down to redefine the word “planet” in such a way that Pluto does not apply.
EC: But what you’re really doing here in this book is explaining how all of this came about.
NT: Exactly. The book is not some diatribe. Most of the book is a celebration of the public’s reaction to this, this Pluto controversy.
EC: In a lighthearted way…
NT: I think so, I think so, yes. You get the science and you get the back story.
EC: What is all this stuff you have in here about Pluto water…
NT: Back in the 1920s, just in the decade that preceded the discovery of Pluto—an American discovered Pluto but an American didn’t name it, nor could an American have named it—because it was a widely advertised, heavily used mineral laxative, called Pluto Water, with the logo: “When nature won’t, Pluto will.” No one’s thinking cosmic object at that time. So in fact it got named by an 11-year-old girl in England, who happened to be very well connected by the way… Her father was like head of the Cambridge Library, friends of the Astronomer Royal, so and she’d just learned about Roman mythology and saw that Pluto was far and distant and underworld—so she nailed it I think, in that effort.
EC: With the work you do…the writing, appearances…are you trying to open people’s minds to science, to the universe? For a lot of kids…science is an intimidating thing.
NT: Well I think it’s intimidating because people believe that they won’t be good at it, or they won’t understand it. And no one likes not understanding something—it’s frustrating, it can be embarrassing. And I think there are levels of approaching science. I think of science as this ladder, and it can go very high, to the point where every next rung fewer and fewer people understand what’s going on that rung until you get to some top rung, where you get the three people in the world who know what’s going on there. But the rungs go all the way down. And my concern is people not even approaching the ladder at all. And I think there are plenty of rungs there that are well within reach, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds. And a lot of what I do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on in the minds of people in the public—what their different backgrounds are, what TV shows do they watch, what books do they read. And that’s the profile of the wiring of the brain of an audience. And I go into an audience as best as I can with an understanding of that brain wiring. And I take, find out, which rungs on that ladder best fit that audience. And then they’re grabbing at the rungs, and they feel like they’re connected to the cosmos. Or at least they behave—they behave like they seem like they know what’s going on.
[Laughs] So that’s a good feeling. It says that there is a way that the science that’s around us can become part of the—just part of what you think of as life. Rather than, Now I’m about to do science. No, no—science is just there all the time. All the time. There’s ice melting in my water glass here. There’s hot air rising up from the hot lamps. There’s always something going on around you that’s science. It’s not something separate—it is life.
EC: Carl Sagan.
NT: Carl Sagan. I met him like only four times in my life, but three of them were significant. The fourth was just sort of a brief encounter—[but three] were significant. I, coming out of high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science—I grew up in the Bronx)—
EC: Da Bronx.
NT: Da Bronx, thanks for correcting me. By the way, the most formative years of my life were at the Bronx High School of Science. This is a school that has seven Nobel laureates counted among its graduates. So there’s a legacy there. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with the teachers. It really has to do with just the general environment that you’re in, where everyone cares about learning. This was back when being a nerd was not something that got the respect that it does today – because today the nerds fix your computer. Back then you didn’t have a computer for them to fix, ok?
Today if you’re not in arm’s reach of a nerd you’re missing out on something that’s going on with the technology around you. So I applied to colleges, got accepted at Cornell. A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan. He was already famous at the time, he’d done the Tonight Show. He said, I noticed you’re very interested in the universe. If you’re thinking of coming to Cornell, come by. If you come by I’ll be glad to meet you and show you the lab. I’m thinking, Carl Sagan?
So I went up to visit Cornell, he met me outside the lab, showed me his office. Reached behind, and pulled out one of his books, signed it to me. Cool—just reached there and get one of your books just sitting on the shelf. Took me, spent half the day with me. Took me back to the bus station—it’s a bus ride from New York City, four hour bus ride from New York City—started to snow, and he said if the bus doesn’t get through, here’s my home number, come and spend the night. I’m thinking, Who am I? Here’s a famous guy, brilliant scientist, who am I to him?—other than someone with ambition? And to this day—I remember then, I said to myself, if I am ever in a position of influencing others the way he’s influencing me, I’m going to do that.
And so, here I am now a scientist and I’ve got books on the back shelf, I can now do that. I’ve got the books on the back shelf and when students send me e-mail—which would not have happened back then of course, there was no e-mail—they’re the first e-mails I reply to. I have this commitment to this next generation of people in the educational pipeline that was instilled in—within me—simply because Carl Sagan spent time on me and I was nobody.
EC: Isaac Newton.
NT: Isaac Newton—smartest guy there ever was. I’ll make my replies shorter because you said you wanted this to be faster. Smartest guy there ever was, bar none, I don’t care who—Leonardo, Einstein, I don’t care who you say—Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion. One of them is the seatbelt law, by the way: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by outside force. People who don’t wear seatbelts never learn that law, right? See so physics can prolong your life!
The laws of gravitation. A friend of his says, why are they orbiting in ellipses, in that shape—planets, ’cause they’re not circles, they’re an ellipse, a flattened circle. [He says] I’ll get back to you. Goes home for a couple of months, comes back: Here’s why. Conic sections—you cut a cone and you get the shape. Well, how did you get that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to solve that problem. The guy—and then he turned 26.
EC: Oh my gosh.
NT: Isaac Newton. I can’t read about him without the hair standing up on the back of my—if I had hair there it would be standing up on the back of my neck. It’s spooky how connected to the universe he was.
EC: You’re the father of two children.
NT: Yeah, one aged now eight, and twelve.
EC: Are they interested in science?
NT: I don’t press it on them. I’ll tell you this, by the time I’m done with them they’ll be scientifically literate…whether or not they want to become scientists. In fact if you ask them today…my daughter wants to be a novelist - very much not a scientist - It’s something else completely. But I can tell you this, she’s scientifically literate. And the science literary is coming from the—how I immerse them in their environment at home, when we travel. What surrounds them that forces them to think about how the world works. And I’m actually doing a study on them about the causes and effects of these—of the environment versus how they think.
People think science literacy is being able to recite facts—how long does it take for the moon to go around the earth, how does your microwave oven work. And it’s not that. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part is how do you look at the world. What lens, what does the world look like through your lens. If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening, there’s a lot of things we understand out there! And that understanding empowers you – to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second, it’s a, there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you’re not scientifically literate, you are in a sense disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process. And you don’t even know it. So, whatever my kids become, I want them to become scientifically literate.
EC: Well I think they have a heck of a mentor. Your book again, is called the Pluto Files, one of many books that you’ve written. Plus Nova Science well.
NT: Thank you very much.
EC: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much for being here on Conversations. Welcome to Seattle.
NT: Thank you for having me.
EC: Again, I’m sure you have been here numerous times.
NT: It’s one of my favorite cities actually.
EC: Well how does of a kid born in the Bronx end of becoming an astrophysicist?
NT: First you have to say this: Da Bronx.
EC: Da Bronx, I’m sorry…
NT: Just get that straight, all right?
EC: Forgot the “Da.”
NT: Actually I’ve thought long and hard about this, because I wondered, suppose I grew up in the suburb—or if I grew up in a rural setting on a farm, where the night sky was always visible for me from childhood , from infancy. I wonder if it would have ever struck me as boldly as it did in New York, because in New York there is no sky. You can see the moon, ok, of course the sun in the day time… …the moon and maybe a couple of planets at night—that’s it, that’s our total encounter with the night sky as a New Yorker. Even when you look up your sight line mostly will hit a building – so you have to look straight up before you see the sky and it’s not interesting at that point, the lights are too bright.
So it was not until I was nine years old where my family, my parents, took me and my brother and sister to the local planetarium. In New York City, that’s the Hayden Planetarium and that’s when they dim the lights and the stars came out in this unusual ceiling that was round , this domed ceiling , and I didn’t know where I was. It was a little frightening at first, because the room kind of disappears from under you, I mean psychologically, it disappears and it’s just you and the cosmos, I thought it was hoax. I said there aren’t this many stars in the nights sky, because I know , I’ve seen them from the Bronx, It was like five stars in the Bronx, and it would not be ’til several years later where I would actually go in to the rural parts of, on that time, Pennsylvania and also in the Caribbean.
We took some family trips there, and I saw the night sky, as it was intended to be seen. To this day I’m embarrassed to confess that when I look up to the night sky with some finest observing locations in the world, I still say to myself, that’s beautiful, reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. I know that’s a little sick to think like of an artificially produced sky as the reality, the reference, but that’s what it was, but it hit me when I was nine years old and I was star struck, now, suppose I’d seen it my whole life I don’t think I would have been that star struck, and I wonder what I be today where it would not… for that delay in that cosmic encounter.
EC: And Hayden Planetarium is your life’s work now?
NT: Yeah, so now I came back and now I’m like head of the place. (laughs)
EC: Were you always good at math and science?
NT: I liked it and my grades were always all over the places, so people always put so much emphasis on grades when of course in adulthood no one asks you what your GPA was, most like times someone asked you what grade…
EC: I can’t remember…
NT: I couldn’t even remember, so clearly there is something else that matters in life than what your grades are and I think there is not enough support of what could easily recognized in someone as ambition, the urge to want to learn more no matter what is your situation, so there I was, my first encounter with a night sky, and the years that followed in to middle school and into the high school, I joined the amateur astronomers club and I attended extra classes at the museum that contained the Hayden Planetarium. Because once you go to just the public exhibits it’s a point where you want more. In any good museum any good facility, will have programs that go beyond just the permanent exhibit as did the American Museum of Natural History, of which the Hayden planetarium is a, is a part.
And so I just kept growing and I kept growing—that’s not even in school, I’m out of school doing this, after schools, on the weekends. And so, I felt fortunate to be near a facility, as so many people are who live in cities that have science museums, to live near facility that could keep stoking this curiosity, this cosmic curiosity that was planted at age nine.
EC: Not a lot of African Americans in Astronomy…
NT: That’s right. There is about, when I got my Ph.D. in 1991, there was about fifteen, in the world and…out of about 2 or 3,000 astrophysicists. There is more today. Last time I checked it might be 50 or 60, but the total number of astrophysicists has gone up in that same proportion so the relative numbers haven’t changed much.. I don’t have an easy explanation for that, I could make up one…but it’s not for the benefit of research , I think what a luxury it is to say I want to study astrophysics, suppose, you’re the first of your generation to go…… the first in your family line to go to college, and every one sort of bucking for you. Are you going to major in something as obscure as astrophysics, if you were the first to go to the college, when being financially stable is going to be a high priority for the whole family lineage at that point? So I think it might take a couple of generations before sort of financial stability is established within the community, the demographic… …before someone who is born in to a family that doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, then have a luxury of thinking about what to study just because it’s fun to do, rather than they need to draw a pay check.
EC: Now did I read?
NT: No, [laughs] the way you started so…the way…no—
EC: Was it the week you were born, that NASA was founded?
NT: Yes, the very same week, the same week that it was founded, the actual week, of the actual year that I was born NASA was founded, I should say that in reverse… And there’s been some talk - your name has been debated about as may be a candidate to the head NASA. Well, there are rumors, I mean the rumors are true, that doesn’t make them factual…there are true lies. I mean my name has come up on lists, but I didn’t put my hat in the ring,I mean I’m not , I’m not bucking for the job, there’re people who want that job.
EC: Do you?
NT: You know, if I’m asked, I’d be flattered. I’d be happy to go to Washington and have that conversation but I don’t, I am doing—I have to ask myself—we all love NASA , we all want NASA to succeed and those who don’t love NASA … don’t know enough NASA to understand why they should, I can tell you that right now. NASA is one of the few agencies where one’s support for it is uncorrelated with your political lineage, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, centrist…
People who would rather spend their money other ways, it doesn’t—whatever that urge, it does not correlate with their political platform. All I can say is, I have to ask myself, where I can do best for NASA. Is it as head of NASA, which is this huge ship, with this inertia—decades of inertia—in motion. With the man program, and the science program, and the centers. NASA has all these centers across the country, from the jet propulsion labs and…Houston, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space center, the headquarters and NASA Stennis, all across the country. It’s a huge, huge multi-headed beast that’s there. And you gotta tame it and drive it all into a direction so that it’s all coherent. And that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do. And there are people who want to try to take that on, and I deeply respect that. I don’t know if being head of NASA is the best way to use my portfolio of talents in the service of NASA. As it is now, they publish my op-eds…and they, my books get out there. And I, and I can, I have a TV show, NOVA Science Now, where NASA subjects are major recurring themes within it. On PBS of course! So, I couldn’t do that if I was head of NASA. And if I became head of NASA, who would then do that? Whereas I can continue to do this while someone else heads NASA. So that’s why I’m not, if I’m not called, I’m not going to miss it. But I nonetheless wish NASA well.
EC: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. Although a lot of kids are holding you accountable after this book.
NT: Pluto had it coming! Let’s establish that, here and now. I’ve been blamed for like kicking Pluto out of the solar system. But don’t…don’t shoot the messenger.
EC: Are you guilty of killing Pluto?
NT: I’m an accessory to it. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
EC: So let’s go back…
NT: I drove the car. I drove the getaway car.
EC: [Laughs] You were the driver! You were the driver!
NT: That’s all I was!
EC: So let’s go back to 2000, and at the planetarium, this exhibit’s going to come out…
NT: Newly built, newly invested facility. Rose Center for Earth and Space.
EC: And actually things were pretty low-key when this exhibit opened. Then the NYTimes came out with this article…
NT: [low voice] The New York Times did it, that’s right, don’t blame me the New York Times…so in the 1990s we’re designing this new facility, and we’re thinking to ourselves, what’s, is there any new way we should think about delivering the universe to the public? It’s not just the planetarium, there’s a whole surrounding museum of the universe, that’s there. Part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. So we noticed that in the 1990s, new objects were being discovered at a rapid pace in the outer solar system, beyond Neptune. In orbits that kind of resembled Pluto’s orbit. Objects of sizes that resembled Pluto’s size, that were little. Objects that were mostly ice by volume, like Pluto. And we said, Hmm. Things that make you go—raise an eyebrow, wonder what’s going on out there. Maybe Pluto is a member of this new class of objects that are now being discovered. So while Pluto has always been kind of an oddball ninth planet, it’s actually quite natural in its properties when considered among what we have found in the outer solar system. So all we did was take Pluto and group it with all these other newly discovered objects. We took the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—grouped them together.
Took the, the, rocky terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—grouped them together. The asteroid belt, grouped that together. And that presented a new family photo of the solar system. We didn’t count planets, we didn’t say there are only eight planets in the solar system—that’s what we got stereotyped as doing. And I kept, people kept trying to get a quote out of me—so how many planets are there? And I said, I don’t care how many planets there are, that’s not how we’re delivering the science, pedagogically or scientifically. Taking what I felt was the high road, which was no longer counting objects. There’s no science in the numerical count of planets. There is science in the properties they have, that you can compare and contrast among the whole portfolio that is the family of the solar system.
EC: So did you expect this when you came out with the exhibit…to take off and become the center of a controversy?
NT: It didn’t take off! For a whole year. Not initially, like you were saying. It was…people seemed pretty cool about it. Until the
EC: New York Times a year later...
NT: …someone at the New York Times spotted this, and overheard some kid trying to find Pluto in the groupings of the gas giants and the rocky inner planets and couldn’t find Pluto. It’s not going to be there ’cause there’s four of these and four of these and Pluto is not either of those. And so they overheard this and said, Oh we’ve got a story here. So they got on the horn, called headquarters—downtown in New York, in Times Square, Times headquarters—
EC: Pluto’s missing!
NT: Pluto’s missing, send up a reporter and a photographer…and there they came, and right there came the headline: “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York.” And that’s when the hate mail started coming from kinder—from third graders, coming into my office. [mimics kids] Dear Dr. Tyson, why, put my favorite planet back in, why did you take it away? (in crayon, right?) Here’s what Pluto looks like, in case you don’t know—write back soon. One of them said, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet. The cutest things. But I realized this struck a chord.
There’s this, there’s this, correspondence, there’s this, this permanence of knowledge that people believe this count of planets means to them. And they’re getting conflicting information and they’re upset by this. And I could not otherwise account for it other than to say to myself, Why are Americans reacting this way, in ways that Europeans are not? And I looked around and said, Is there anything else named Pluto?
EC: Think it all had to do with the name? Particularly for kids?
NT: I think so. Even though an American discovered Pluto, you could argue maybe Americans would be a little more jingoistic about it, but I polled people who are Pluto lovers, and they said, “No idea.” So…maybe ten percent of them knew that an American discovered it. So that was not the driver of this American sentiment. And I have to conclude that it was just the dog. There it is, the dog. That was the beginning and end of that.
EC: But I would think…
NT: Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Just to flesh that out. First sketched the same year Pluto the cosmic object was discovered. So they have the same tenure in the hearts and minds of Americans.
EC: But in a way, as much as it became a controversy…and kind of humorous to some extent too.
NT: Yeah, I mean, no one, no one you know went to duel over this. But it was nonetheless, emotions were flowing, people chose up sides.
EC: But wasn’t it a good thing…you got to write a book about it…but…
NT: The book was catharsis for me. Not that I got to write it, I HAD to, otherwise I would’ve gone insane.
EC: But it brought this focus for kids, and other people, on science, the universe, all those things that that’s what you want.
NT: It’s true. I like science literary in a population, whether or not it’s astrophysics, chemistry, or biology, it doesn’t matter to me where it derives. But it made cosmic subjects front page story for many years, and particularly when an official vote was taken by the international community of astrophysicists…in 2006—that’s now six year delay—we did it first, we were the first public institution to re-think Pluto’s public identity. It came to an official vote later on, which created another media storm at that time, but now it was not focused on what we did—because this was a vote taken by the International Astronomical Union—not a labor union in that sense, it’s a society of astrophysicists. They took a vote, in Prague, so all the press went to Prague for that. I was home, doing a backstroke, I was fine because I was not the focus of this. And the vote came down to redefine the word “planet” in such a way that Pluto does not apply.
EC: But what you’re really doing here in this book is explaining how all of this came about.
NT: Exactly. The book is not some diatribe. Most of the book is a celebration of the public’s reaction to this, this Pluto controversy.
EC: In a lighthearted way…
NT: I think so, I think so, yes. You get the science and you get the back story.
EC: What is all this stuff you have in here about Pluto water…
NT: Back in the 1920s, just in the decade that preceded the discovery of Pluto—an American discovered Pluto but an American didn’t name it, nor could an American have named it—because it was a widely advertised, heavily used mineral laxative, called Pluto Water, with the logo: “When nature won’t, Pluto will.” No one’s thinking cosmic object at that time. So in fact it got named by an 11-year-old girl in England, who happened to be very well connected by the way… Her father was like head of the Cambridge Library, friends of the Astronomer Royal, so and she’d just learned about Roman mythology and saw that Pluto was far and distant and underworld—so she nailed it I think, in that effort.
EC: With the work you do…the writing, appearances…are you trying to open people’s minds to science, to the universe? For a lot of kids…science is an intimidating thing.
NT: Well I think it’s intimidating because people believe that they won’t be good at it, or they won’t understand it. And no one likes not understanding something—it’s frustrating, it can be embarrassing. And I think there are levels of approaching science. I think of science as this ladder, and it can go very high, to the point where every next rung fewer and fewer people understand what’s going on that rung until you get to some top rung, where you get the three people in the world who know what’s going on there. But the rungs go all the way down. And my concern is people not even approaching the ladder at all. And I think there are plenty of rungs there that are well within reach, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds. And a lot of what I do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on in the minds of people in the public—what their different backgrounds are, what TV shows do they watch, what books do they read. And that’s the profile of the wiring of the brain of an audience. And I go into an audience as best as I can with an understanding of that brain wiring. And I take, find out, which rungs on that ladder best fit that audience. And then they’re grabbing at the rungs, and they feel like they’re connected to the cosmos. Or at least they behave—they behave like they seem like they know what’s going on.
[Laughs] So that’s a good feeling. It says that there is a way that the science that’s around us can become part of the—just part of what you think of as life. Rather than, Now I’m about to do science. No, no—science is just there all the time. All the time. There’s ice melting in my water glass here. There’s hot air rising up from the hot lamps. There’s always something going on around you that’s science. It’s not something separate—it is life.
EC: Carl Sagan.
NT: Carl Sagan. I met him like only four times in my life, but three of them were significant. The fourth was just sort of a brief encounter—[but three] were significant. I, coming out of high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science—I grew up in the Bronx)—
EC: Da Bronx.
NT: Da Bronx, thanks for correcting me. By the way, the most formative years of my life were at the Bronx High School of Science. This is a school that has seven Nobel laureates counted among its graduates. So there’s a legacy there. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with the teachers. It really has to do with just the general environment that you’re in, where everyone cares about learning. This was back when being a nerd was not something that got the respect that it does today – because today the nerds fix your computer. Back then you didn’t have a computer for them to fix, ok?
Today if you’re not in arm’s reach of a nerd you’re missing out on something that’s going on with the technology around you. So I applied to colleges, got accepted at Cornell. A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail from Carl Sagan. He was already famous at the time, he’d done the Tonight Show. He said, I noticed you’re very interested in the universe. If you’re thinking of coming to Cornell, come by. If you come by I’ll be glad to meet you and show you the lab. I’m thinking, Carl Sagan?
So I went up to visit Cornell, he met me outside the lab, showed me his office. Reached behind, and pulled out one of his books, signed it to me. Cool—just reached there and get one of your books just sitting on the shelf. Took me, spent half the day with me. Took me back to the bus station—it’s a bus ride from New York City, four hour bus ride from New York City—started to snow, and he said if the bus doesn’t get through, here’s my home number, come and spend the night. I’m thinking, Who am I? Here’s a famous guy, brilliant scientist, who am I to him?—other than someone with ambition? And to this day—I remember then, I said to myself, if I am ever in a position of influencing others the way he’s influencing me, I’m going to do that.
And so, here I am now a scientist and I’ve got books on the back shelf, I can now do that. I’ve got the books on the back shelf and when students send me e-mail—which would not have happened back then of course, there was no e-mail—they’re the first e-mails I reply to. I have this commitment to this next generation of people in the educational pipeline that was instilled in—within me—simply because Carl Sagan spent time on me and I was nobody.
EC: Isaac Newton.
NT: Isaac Newton—smartest guy there ever was. I’ll make my replies shorter because you said you wanted this to be faster. Smartest guy there ever was, bar none, I don’t care who—Leonardo, Einstein, I don’t care who you say—Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of optics, the laws of motion. One of them is the seatbelt law, by the way: things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by outside force. People who don’t wear seatbelts never learn that law, right? See so physics can prolong your life!
The laws of gravitation. A friend of his says, why are they orbiting in ellipses, in that shape—planets, ’cause they’re not circles, they’re an ellipse, a flattened circle. [He says] I’ll get back to you. Goes home for a couple of months, comes back: Here’s why. Conic sections—you cut a cone and you get the shape. Well, how did you get that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to solve that problem. The guy—and then he turned 26.
EC: Oh my gosh.
NT: Isaac Newton. I can’t read about him without the hair standing up on the back of my—if I had hair there it would be standing up on the back of my neck. It’s spooky how connected to the universe he was.
EC: You’re the father of two children.
NT: Yeah, one aged now eight, and twelve.
EC: Are they interested in science?
NT: I don’t press it on them. I’ll tell you this, by the time I’m done with them they’ll be scientifically literate…whether or not they want to become scientists. In fact if you ask them today…my daughter wants to be a novelist - very much not a scientist - It’s something else completely. But I can tell you this, she’s scientifically literate. And the science literary is coming from the—how I immerse them in their environment at home, when we travel. What surrounds them that forces them to think about how the world works. And I’m actually doing a study on them about the causes and effects of these—of the environment versus how they think.
People think science literacy is being able to recite facts—how long does it take for the moon to go around the earth, how does your microwave oven work. And it’s not that. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part is how do you look at the world. What lens, what does the world look like through your lens. If you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. It’s not just a lot of mysterious things happening, there’s a lot of things we understand out there! And that understanding empowers you – to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second, it’s a, there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you’re not scientifically literate, you are in a sense disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process. And you don’t even know it. So, whatever my kids become, I want them to become scientifically literate.
EC: Well I think they have a heck of a mentor. Your book again, is called the Pluto Files, one of many books that you’ve written. Plus Nova Science well.
NT: Thank you very much.
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