How Astronomy Has Opened the Gates to Humanity’s Greatest Inventions | Alex Filippenko| Big Think

How Astronomy Has Opened the Gates to Humanity’s Greatest Inventions

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Alex Filippenko is a

Hertz Foundation Fellow

and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. Where does UC Berkeley Professor Filippenko begin to explain the importance of astronomy? In this video he explores how it captures the attention of children, who then grow up to become scientists across all disciplines; and the more abstract, impractical research that eventually leads to spinoff technology that radically changes our lives. With the support of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, Filippenko pursued a PhD in astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

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ALEX FILIPPENKO :

Alex Filippenko is the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences. His accomplishments, documented in more than 800 research papers, have been recognized by several major prizes, including a share of both the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2007) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015). One of the world's most highly cited astronomers, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015). He has won the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and has also been voted the "Best Professor" on campus a record 9 times. Selected in 2006 as the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions, he has also received the Richard H. Emmons Award for undergraduate teaching (2010). He produced five astronomy video courses with "The Great Courses" (see below), coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 100 TV documentaries, including about 50 episodes of "The Universe" series. He has given nearly 1000 public lectures or other presentations, was awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, and received the prestigious Hertz Foundation fellowship for his PhD studies at The California Institute of Technology.

Filippenko is the only person who was a member of both the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team, which used observations of extragalactic supernovae to discover the accelerating universe and its implied existence of dark energy. The discovery was voted the top science breakthrough of 1998 by Science magazine] and resulted in the 2011 Nobel prize for physics being awarded to the leaders of the two project teams.

Filippenko developed and runs the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), a fully robotic telescope which conducts the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS), the most successful nearby supernova search. He is also a member of the Nuker Team which uses the Hubble space telescope to examine supermassive black holes and determined the relationship between a galaxy's central black hole's mass and velocity dispersion.[3][4] The Thompson-Reuters "incites" index ranked Filippenko as the most cited researcher in space science for the ten-year period between 1996 and 2006

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TRANSCRIPT:

Alex Filippenko: One can wonder why does astronomy, or any sort of abstract pure research for that matter, make any difference to us – to the typical person in the world?  Well first of all thinking about the universe and figuring out how things work is something that of all animals only humans can do, only we have the intellect, the curiosity, the opposable thumb with which to build machines to explore nature.  So some of us should do it.  Second of all these kinds of discoveries, discoveries about the cosmos excite kids.  I like to say that astronomy is the gateway science.  It gets kids interested in science and technology because they hear about all these amazing discoveries.  I myself as a kid was thrilled by the lunar landings of the Apollo mission. Now most kids won't go on into astrophysics, but what they'll do is they'll study science and technology and they'll go into fields that are more immediately useful to society, such as applied physics and engineering and computer science and medical physics. But the bug that bites them is often astronomy.

And finally you never know what practical spinoffs there might be and let me give you a few examples.  A century ago when quantum physicists such as Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg and Schrodinger were developing quantum physics they had not the slightest practical application in ...

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