2008 Woodie Awards
Speaking Astrophysics to Alaska's youth
Brianna Dym
Issue date: 7/29/08 Section: A & E
The event known as freshman convocation always has a guest speaker come in to address UAA's new students. This year, the astrophysicist known as Neil degrasse Tyson will be brought out from his home in New York to greet the freshmen. Tyson is an accomplished scientist who hosts the PBS show "Nova science Now," and oversees the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History.
This will not be his first trip to Alaska, seeing as Tyson's wife hails from Fairbanks and still has family in the interior. The Northern Light interviewed Tyson on July 25.
Q: You have a show out for the summer called "Nova scienceNow". What is your main focus of study in this show?
A: It's main goal is to make people comfortable with all the frontiers of science in a way that has you recognize that science is not some medicine you have to take, but the life around you and that the people who do the science are like regular people. They're not crazy lab coat people. You know, like mad scientists. There may some of those out there but these are just people enjoying their profession.
Q: You explore something called 'dark matter' in "Nova science Now". What exactly is it? What do we know about it?
A: Actually, the show covers many topics. One of the segments on the show was about dark matter, and so I visited a mine in Minnesota far below the earth's surface where there are physics experiments being conducted. They're searching for a particle, an elusive particle, that they think accounts for the dark matter.
85 percent of all the gravity in the universe is traceable back to something we know nothing about. All the atoms and planets and stars and gas clouds, even black holes, only count for about 15 percent of all the gravity out there. The rest comes from something else and nobody knows what it is. It's a big mystery.
The episode was not meant to show people what dark matter is, but to say nobody knows what dark matter is, but they want to know badly enough that they're conducting these experiments under extreme conditions.
This will not be his first trip to Alaska, seeing as Tyson's wife hails from Fairbanks and still has family in the interior. The Northern Light interviewed Tyson on July 25.
Q: You have a show out for the summer called "Nova scienceNow". What is your main focus of study in this show?
A: It's main goal is to make people comfortable with all the frontiers of science in a way that has you recognize that science is not some medicine you have to take, but the life around you and that the people who do the science are like regular people. They're not crazy lab coat people. You know, like mad scientists. There may some of those out there but these are just people enjoying their profession.
Q: You explore something called 'dark matter' in "Nova science Now". What exactly is it? What do we know about it?
A: Actually, the show covers many topics. One of the segments on the show was about dark matter, and so I visited a mine in Minnesota far below the earth's surface where there are physics experiments being conducted. They're searching for a particle, an elusive particle, that they think accounts for the dark matter.
85 percent of all the gravity in the universe is traceable back to something we know nothing about. All the atoms and planets and stars and gas clouds, even black holes, only count for about 15 percent of all the gravity out there. The rest comes from something else and nobody knows what it is. It's a big mystery.
The episode was not meant to show people what dark matter is, but to say nobody knows what dark matter is, but they want to know badly enough that they're conducting these experiments under extreme conditions.
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