(Applause) It's really quite an honor to be here tonight, and I'm really glad that I stayed here and listened because I've really been inspired.
And I'm going to play some songs for you tonight that are, literally, world premieres.
I've been working on my new record and I've never played these songs for anybody except the microphone.
This is a song that I wrote about the meaning of technology, which goes perfectly with this gathering.
I started thinking about -- when I was in college, especially as a blind person, doing a research paper was a major undertaking.
You had to go to the library, see if you could get them to find the books for you, you know, footnotes and all that.
Now you can just go on Google.
Just look it up.
I wish I had that when I was in college.
Anyway, this is a song about: we have all this, but what are we going to do with it?
It's called "All the Answers."
♫ What is the weather in Cincinnati? ♫ ♫ What is the time in Tokyo? ♫ ♫ Who is this little child's daddy? ♫ ♫ And who the hell needs to know? ♫ ♫ Why do memories of you linger ♫ ♫ when I'm trying to reach my goal? ♫ ♫ And why must I move my fingers ♫ ♫ to the music in my soul? ♫ ♫ I don't know. ♫ ♫ I don't have to know. ♫ ♫ 'Cause here I go ... ♫ ♫ and I got all the answers ♫ ♫ right here in my hand. ♫ ♫ And I got all the answers ♫ ♫ and I don't have to understand ♫ ♫ 'cause I got all the answers. ♫ ♫ Think I'll rummage through the century ♫ ♫ while I listen to the sea. ♫ ♫ Oh, it's good to be so free, ♫ ♫ so free. ♫ ♫ Who was mayor of Chicago ♫ ♫ back in 1964? ♫ ♫ And why did Shakespeare create Iago ♫ ♫ to tear apart a love so pure? ♫ ♫ How can my dreams be so vivid ♫ ♫ in a psychosonic way? ♫ ♫ Why must I become so livid ♫ ♫ about the news I hear today? ♫ ♫ I don't know. ♫ ♫ I don't have to know. ♫ ♫ And here I go ... ♫ ♫ 'cause I got all the answers ♫ ♫ right here in my hand. ♫ ♫ And I got all the answers. ♫ ♫ See, I don't have to understand ♫ ♫ 'cause I got all the answers. ♫ ♫ I think I'll browse on through ♫ ♫ the tabloid news ♫ ♫ while I sip my tea. ♫ ♫ Mm, it's good to be so free. ♫ (Trumpet sounds) ♫ I never ever have to be alone. ♫ ♫ I can do it all right here in my home. ♫ ♫ Yeah, mm-hmm ... ♫ ♫ Everything that's ever been known, ♫ ♫ I can punch it up right here on my phone. ♫ ♫ Freedom train, coming soon ♫ ♫ right here in my living room ♫ ♫ from Baton Rouge to Saskatoon ♫ ♫ and all points in between. ♫ ♫ 'Cause I got all the answers ♫ ♫ right here on my screen. ♫ ♫ And I got all the answers, yeah. ♫ ♫ I got every book and magazine. ♫ ♫ I got all, I got all, I got all ... ♫ ♫ I got all the answers, ♫ ♫ all the answers, oh yeah. ♫ ♫ Uh-huh ... ♫ ♫ But I tell you what I'm going to do: ♫ ♫ I'm going to find the capitol of Peru ♫ ♫ or the latitude of Kathmandu. ♫ ♫ I'm gonna Google it ♫ ♫ 'cause everybody's doing it. ♫ ♫ And then I'll rummage through the century. ♫ ♫ I got all, I got all, I got all ... ♫ ♫ I got all the answers. ♫ ♫ Yeah, yeah ♫ ♫ I got all the answers. ♫ (Applause) Thank you.
Whew!
It's a miracle I didn't make any mistakes on that song.
That's the first time I've ever played it.
(Applause) It's a "feel the fear and do it anyway" kind of thing.
This next song is a song that started out as a dream -- a childhood dream.
It was one of the titles that I was sort of thinking about calling my record, except there's a couple of problems.
One thing is, it's unpronounceable.
And it's a made-up word.
It's called "Tembererana."
And the song is based on what I think was my first childhood attempts to think about invisible forces.
So "tembererana" was these dreams, in which I would be running away from bad feelings -- is the only way I can put it.
So this is called "Tembererana."
It's based on an Argentinian rhythm called "carnivalito."
♫ A dream within a dream, ♫ ♫ a world within a world, ♫ ♫ the sound of a primal scream ♫ ♫ travels out across the land. ♫ ♫ Images flickering, ♫ ♫ the sound of the war machine, ♫ ♫ a procession of limousines ♫ ♫ travels slowly across the land. ♫ ♫ Another child could use a hand. ♫ ♫ Reaching out from within ♫ ♫ tembererana, hey, tembererana ... ♫ ♫ Annihilation moves. ♫ ♫ The earth is an open tomb. ♫ ♫ The sound of the final boom ♫ ♫ rumbles fiercely across the land. ♫ ♫ Fear, you're the enemy. ♫ ♫ Obliterating all but thee. ♫ ♫ You see what you want to see. ♫ ♫ Before I'm blinded, I will toast ♫ ♫ the shade of power that I love most, ♫ ♫ the power of creation. ♫ ♫ Tembererana, hey, tembererana ... ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da ♫ ♫ As a child, alone and afraid, ♫ ♫ escaping the impressions every feeling made, ♫ ♫ I would run, run away ♫ ♫ into a world where the good was the aim of the game ♫ ♫ and the sum of invisible power ♫ ♫ had a name. ♫ ♫ It's the same name. ♫ ♫ Tembererana, hey, tembererana ... ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da ♫ ♫ Tembere, tembere, tembere, tembererana ♫ ♫ Tembere, tembere, tembere, tembererana, hey ♫ ♫ Tembererana, hey ♫ ♫ Tembererana ... ♫ (Applause)
During World War I, one of the horrors of trench warfare was a poisonous yellow cloud called mustard gas.
For those unlucky enough to be exposed, it made the air impossible to breathe, burned their eyes, and caused huge blisters on exposed skin.
Scientists tried desperately to develop an antidote to this vicious weapon of war.
In the process they discovered the gas was irrevocably damaging the bone marrow of affected soldiers— halting its ability to make blood cells.
Despite these awful effects, it gave scientists an idea.
Cancer cells share a characteristic with bone marrow: both replicate rapidly.
So could one of the atrocities of war become a champion in the fight against cancer?
Researchers in the 1930s investigated this idea by injecting compounds derived from mustard gas into the veins of cancer patients.
It took time and trial and error to find treatments that did more good than harm, but by the end of World War II, they discovered what became known as the first chemotherapy drugs.
Today, there are more than 100.
Chemotherapy drugs are delivered through pills and injections and use "cytotoxic agents," which means compounds that are toxic to living cells.
Essentially, these medicines cause some level of harm to all cells in the body— even healthy ones.
But they reserve their most powerful effects for rapidly-dividing cells, which is precisely the hallmark of cancer.
Take, for example, those first chemotherapy drugs, which are still used today and are called alkylating agents.
They’re injected into the bloodstream, which delivers them to cells all over the body.
Once inside, when the cell exposes its DNA in order to copy it, they damage the building blocks of DNA’s double helix structure, which can lead to cell death unless the damage is repaired.
Because cancer cells multiply rapidly, they take in a high concentration of alkylating agents, and their DNA is frequently exposed and rarely repaired.
So they die off more often than most other cells, which have time to fix damaged DNA and don’t accumulate the same concentrations of alkylating agents.
Another form of chemotherapy involves compounds called microtubule stabilizers.
Cells have small tubes that assemble to help with cell division and DNA replication, then break back down.
When microtubule stabilizers get inside a cell, they keep those tiny tubes from disassembling.
That prevents the cell from completing its replication, leading to its death.
These are just two examples of the six classes of chemotherapy drugs we use to treat cancer today.
But despite its huge benefits, chemotherapy has one big disadvantage: it affects other healthy cells in the body that naturally have to renew rapidly.
Hair follicles, the cells of the mouth, the gastrointestinal lining, the reproductive system, and bone marrow are hit nearly as hard as cancer.
Similar to cancer cells, the rapid production of these normal cells means that they’re reaching for resources more frequently— and are therefore more exposed to the effects of chemo drugs.
That leads to several common side effects of chemotherapy, including hair loss, fatigue, infertility, nausea, and vomiting.
Doctors commonly prescribe options to help manage these side-effects, such as strong anti-nausea medications.
For hair loss, devices called cold caps can help lower the temperature around the head and constrict blood vessels, limiting the amount of chemotherapy drugs that reach hair follicles.
And once a course of chemo treatment is over, the healthy tissues that’ve been badly affected by the drug will recover and begin to renew as usual.
In 2018 alone, over 17 million people world-wide received a cancer diagnosis.
But chemotherapy and other treatments have changed the outlook for so many.
Just take the fact that up to 95% of individuals with testicular cancer survive it, thanks to advances in treatment.
Even in people with acute myeloid leukemia— an aggressive blood cancer— chemotherapy puts an estimated 60% of patients under 60 into remission following their first phase of treatment.
Researchers are still developing more precise interventions that only target the intended cancer cells.
That’ll help improve survival rates while leaving healthy tissues with reduced harm, making one of the best tools we have in the fight against cancer even better.
“A few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes/ And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned clock… must be resurrected from the ruins and examined.”
This is the premise of Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel "The God of Small Things."
Set in a town in Kerala, India called Ayemenem, the story revolves around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, who are separated for 23 years after the fateful few dozen hours in which their cousin drowns, their mother’s illicit affair is revealed, and her lover is murdered.
While the book is set at the point of Rahel and Estha’s reunion, the narrative takes place mostly in the past, reconstructing the details around the tragic events that led to their separation.
Roy’s rich language and masterful storytelling earned her the prestigious Booker prize for "The God of Small Things."
In the novel, she interrogates the culture of her native India, including its social mores and colonial history.
One of her focuses is the caste system, a way of classifying people by hereditary social class that is thousands of years old.
By the mid-20th century, the original four castes associated with specific occupations had been divided into some 3000 sub-castes.
Though the caste system was Constitutionally abolished in 1950, it continued to shape social life in India, routinely marginalizing people of lower castes.
In the novel, Rahel and Estha have a close relationship with Velutha, a worker in their family’s pickle factory and member of the so-called “untouchable” caste.
When Velutha and the twins’ mother, Ammu, embark on an affair, they violate what Roy describes as the “love laws” forbidding intimacy between different castes.
Roy warns that the tragic consequences of their relationship “would lurk forever in ordinary things,” like “coat hangers,” “the tar on roads,” and “the absence of words.”
Roy’s writing makes constant use of these ordinary things, bringing lush detail to even the most tragic moments.
The book opens at the funeral of the twins’ half-British cousin Sophie after her drowning.
As the family mourns, lilies curl and crisp in the hot church.
A baby bat crawls up a funeral sari.
Tears drip from a chin like raindrops from a roof.
The novel forays into the past to explore the characters’ struggles to operate in a world where they don’t quite fit, alongside their nation’s political turmoil.
Ammu struggles not to lash out at her beloved children when she feels particularly trapped in her parents’ small-town home, where neighbors judge and shun her for being divorced.
Velutha, meanwhile, balances his affair with Ammu and friendship with the twins not only with his employment to their family, but also with his membership to a budding communist countermovement to Indira Ghandi’s “Green Revolution.”
In the 1960s, the misleadingly named “Green Revolution” introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the damming of rivers to India.
While these policies produced high-yield crops that staved off famine, they also forced people from lower castes off their land and caused widespread environmental damage.
When the twins return to Ayemenem as adults, the consequences of the Green Revolution are all around them.
The river that was bursting with life in their childhood greets them “with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.”
As Roy probes the depths of human experience, she never loses sight of the way her characters are shaped by the time and the place where they live.
In the world of "The God of Small Things," “Various kinds of despair competed for primacy… personal despair could never be desperate enough...
personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.”
When I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark.
The darkness is where the monsters are.
And I had this little night light outside of my bedroom so that it would never get too dark.
But over time, my fear of the dark turned to curiosity.
What is out there in the "dark-dark?"
And it turns out that trying to understand the darkness is something that's fascinated humans for thousands of years, maybe forever.
And we know this because we find their ancient relics of their attempts to map the sky.
This tusk is over 30,000 years old.
Some people think that it's a carving of Orion or maybe a calendar.
We don't know.
The Fuxi star map is over 6,000 years old, and it's from a neolithic tomb in ancient China.
And that little pile of clamshells underneath the dead guy's foot in the middle -- that's supposed to be the Big Dipper.
Maybe.
The Nebra disk is uncontroversial.
You don't have to be an astronomer to know that you're looking at the Moon phases or the Sun in eclipse.
And that little group of seven stars, that's the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.
But in any case, the point is clear: astronomers have been mapping the sky for a long time.
Why?
It's our calling card as a species in the galaxy to figure things out.
We know our planet, we cure our diseases, we cook our food, we leave our planet.
But it's not easy.
Understanding the universe is battle.
It is unrelenting, it is time-varying, and it is one we are all in together.
It is a battle in the darkness against the darkness.
Which is why Orion has weapons.
In any case, if you're going to engage in this battle, you need to know the battlefield.
So at its core, mapping the sky involves three essential elements.
You've got objects that are giving off light, you've got telescopes that are collecting that light, and you've got instruments that are helping you understand what that light is.
Many of you have mapped the Moon phases over time with your eyes, your eyes being your more basic telescope.
And you've understood what that means with your brains, your brains being one of your more basic instruments.
Now, if you and a buddy get together, you would spend over 30 years, you would map 1,000 stars extremely precisely.
You would move the front line to the battle.
And that's what Tycho Brahe and his buddy, or his assistant, really, Johannes Kepler did back in the 1600s.
And they moved the line, figured out how planets worked, how they moved around the Sun.
But it wasn't until about 100 years ago that we realized it's a big universe.
It seems like the universe is just infinite, which it is, but the observable universe is finite.
Which means we can win the battle.
But if you're going to map the universe, you're not going to do it with one or two of your besties.
Mapping the universe takes an army, an army of curious, creative, craftspeople who, working together, can accomplish the extraordinary.
I lead this army of creatives, in the fifth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SDSS.
And this is how astronomers have managed to shepherd individual curiosity through its industrial age, preserving the individual ability to make discoveries but putting into place mega machinery to truly advance the frontier.
In SDSS, we divide the sky into three mappers: one for the stars, one for the black holes and one for the galaxies.
My survey has two hemispheres, five telescopes, or 11, depending on how you count, 10 spectrographs and millions of objects.
It's a monster.
So let's go through the mappers.
The Milky Way galaxy has 250 billion plus or minus a few hundred billion stars.
That is not a number that you hold in your head.
That is a number that doesn't make practical sense to pretty much anybody.
You never get 250 billion jelly beans in your hand.
You know?
We're nowhere near mapping all of those stars yet.
So we have to choose the most interesting ones.
In SDSS-V, we're mapping six million stars where we think we can measure their age.
Because if you can measure the age of a star, that's like having six million clocks spread all throughout the Milky Way.
And with that information, we can unravel the history and fossil record of our galaxy and learn how it formed.
I'm just going to cut right to the chase here.
Black holes are among the most perplexing objects in the universe.
Why?
Because they are literally just math incarnate, in a physical form, that we barely understand.
It's like the number zero being animated and walking around the corridors here.
That would be super weird.
These are weirder.
And it's not just like a basketball that you smoosh down into a little point and it's super dense and that's weird.
No, smooshed basketballs have a surface.
These things don't have surfaces, and we know that now.
Because we've seen it.
Or the lack of it.
What's really interesting about black holes is that we can learn a lot about them by studying the material just as it passes through that point of no information return.
Because at that point, it's emitting lots of X-rays and optical and UV and radio waves.
We can actually learn how these objects grow.
And in SDSS, we're looking at over half a million supermassive black holes, to try to understand how they formed.
Like I said, we live in the Milky Way, you guys are all familiar with that.
The Milky Way is a completely average galaxy.
Nothing funny going on.
But it's ours, which is great.
We think that the Milky Way, and all the Milky Ways, have this really disturbing past of literally blowing themselves apart.
It's like every average guy you know has a history as a punk rock teenager.
That's very bizarre.
Stars are blowing up in these systems, black holes are growing at their centers and emitting a tremendous amount of energy.
How does that happen, how does this transformation happen?
And at SDSS, we're going to the bellies of the beast and zooming way in, to look at these processes where they are occurring in order to understand how Sid Vicious grows up into Ward Cleaver.
My arsenal.
These are my two big telescopes.
The Apache Point Observatory hosts the Sloan telescope in New Mexico, and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile hosts the two-and-a-half-meter telescope, the du Pont.
Two and a half meters is the size of our mirror, which was huge for Tycho and Kepler.
But it's actually not so big today.
There are way bigger telescopes out there.
But in SDSS we use new instruments on these old telescopes to make them interesting.
We capture light from all of those objects into our aperture, and that light is then focused at the focal plane, where our instruments sit and process that light.
What's new in SDSS-V is that we're making the focal plane entirely robotic.
That's right: robots.
(Laughter) So I'm going to show them to you, but they're fierce and terrifying, and I want you all to just take a breath.
(Exhales) Trigger warning.
And with no apologies to all the Blade Runners among you, here they are.
(Laughter) I have 1,000 of these, 500 in the focal plane of each telescope in each hemisphere.
And this is how they move on the sky.
So these are our objects and a star field, so you've got stars, galaxies, black holes.
And our robots move to those objects as we pass over them in order to capture the light from those stars and galaxies and black holes, and yes, it is weird to capture black hole light, but we've already gone over that black holes are weird.
One more thing.
Stars are exploding all the time, like this one did back in 1987 in our cosmic backyard.
Black holes are growing all the time.
There is a new sky every night.
Which means we can't just map the sky one time.
We have to map the sky multiple times.
So in SDSS-V, we're going back to each part of the sky multiple times in order to see how these objects change over time.
Because those changes in time encode the physics, and they encode how these objects are growing and changing.
Mow the sky.
OK, let me just recap.
Global survey, two hemispheres, five telescopes, 10 spectrographs, millions of objects, mow the sky, creative army, robots, yeah.
So you're thinking, "Wow.
She must have this industrial machine going, no room for the individual, curious, lone wolf genius," right?
And you'd be 100 percent wrong.
Meet Hanny's Voorwerp.
Hanny van Arkel was a Dutch schoolteacher who was analyzing the public versions of the SDSS data, when she found this incredibly rare type of object, which is now a subject of major study.
She was able to do this because SDSS, since its beginning and by mandate from the Sloan Foundation, has made its data both publicly available and usable to a broad range of audiences.
She's a citizen -- yeah, clap for that.
Clap for that.
(Applause) Hanny is a citizen scientist, or as I like to call them, "citizen warriors."
And she shows that you don't have to be a fancy astrophysicist to participate.
You just have to be curious.
A few years ago, my four-year-old asked, "Can moons have moons?"
And I set about to answer this question because even though many four-year-olds over all of time have probably asked this question, many experts, including myself, didn't know the answer.
These are the moons in our solar system that can host hypothetical submoons.
And that just goes to show you that there are so many basic questions left to be understood.
And this brings me to the most important point about SDSS.
Because, yeah, the stars, the galaxies, the black holes, the robots -- that's all super cool.
But the coolest thing of all is that eensy-weensy creatures on a rubble pile around a totally average star in a totally average galaxy can win the battle to understand their world.
Every dot in this video is a galaxy.
Every dot.
(Cheers) (Applause) I'm showing here the number of galaxies that astronomers have mapped in large surveys since about 1980.
You can see SDSS kick in around Y2K.
If we stay on this line, we will map every large galaxy in the observable universe by 2060.
Think about that.
Think about it: we've gone from arranging clamshells to general relativity to SDSS in a few thousand years -- and if we hang on 40 more, we can map all the galaxies.
But we have to stay on the line.
Will that be our choice?
There are dark forces in this world that will rob our entire species of our right to understand our universe.
Don't be afraid of the dark.
Fight back.
Join us.
Thank you.
(Applause)