University of Maryland Commencement Speech, December 20, 2008

John Mather, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771

Marissa Shirron, President Mote, graduating students, parents, friends,
and University of Maryland faculty and staff, ***congratulations***! We
are gathered to recognize your accomplishments, and to look forward to
our future, a future we can not predict but will nevertheless create
together.

Many of you have reached this proud day by overcoming enormous
obstacles. Perhaps you had no money. Perhaps you were the first one in
your family to reach college. Perhaps you traveled thousands of miles
from other countries to participate in our community. Perhaps your
friends told you your dreams would not come true. But here ***you***
are. And in this historic year when we have learned the power of the
simple words, 'Yes ***we*** can,' congratulations!

And we are here to give ***thanks*** to those who made this journey
possible. We thank the citizens of Maryland, who have supported this
wonderful school for 152 years. We thank those whose generous donations
have supported the school and made scholarships possible. And we thank
the families and friends who have supported your personal adventure here
with love and money and friendship.

**Did you know** that archeologists have found little stones with
letters from students to parents from ancient Egypt, and even 4000 years
ago, students wrote to tell of their dreams and complain about the food
and ask for more money? So we join in a ***very*** long tradition.

Carl Jung said this: "When a man has a certain fantasy, another man may
lose his life, or a bridge is built\... Everything you do here \-- all
this, everything, was a fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper
reality. That is not to be forgotten; fantasy is not nothing. It is, of
course, not a tangible object, but it is a fact, nevertheless."

On July 4, 1776, our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their
fortunes, and their sacred honor, as they wrote our Declaration of
Independence, their dream for our future. So what matters today are your
dreams, your fantasies, your words trying to become real. Dream great
dreams, and see what you can do. Dream dreams that are worthy of you as
a creative human being, dream of a life that shines with kindness,
empathy, compassion, and generosity, and not just of owning shiny
things.

So while you\'re thinking about that, I have a few observations from the
world of science. When I was just 28, I had an idea, which was that it
would be good to try to repeat my thesis experiment, which had failed
the first time, using a NASA satellite. It seemed an impossible dream.
But I found a good team, we sent in a proposal, our ideas were heard,
and 15 years later our idea was launched into space. That\'s NASA\'s
job, to turn fantasies into reality, and we\'re still doing it after 50
years. It\'s one of the reasons people love NASA, and why we nerdy
people who work for NASA are happy with our jobs. So 17 years after our
satellite was launched, I got a call from Stockholm, saying that our
idea, our fantasy, had been a very worthy one, and I got another
diploma, from the King of Sweden.

I've been working all my professional life with an amazing team, the
NASA team at Goddard Space Flight Center. We have the job of building
what has never been built before, to discover what was never known
before. It takes a lot of nerve to start, but at the core, this is a
very humbling and awe-inspiring experience. So I have a few suggestions
for you, from watching the way we work.

First, scientists have a really strict code of ethics. Maybe it's easier
for us to keep to our code than for some people, because we know that
we're going to be found out if we try to cheat mother Nature. It's not
like an exam at the University, or over at Wall Street, where perhaps
nobody will notice for a while. If I publish something that is wrong, my
friends are going to find out. If I find out it's wrong before they do,
I'll publish a correction, and I've had to do that once, for a mistake
in algebra. For a scientist, there is only one easy path, the path of
scrupulous honesty. Honesty is relaxing. There is nothing to hide and
nothing to fear.

Another thing scientists do is to be skeptical of a lot of things. If I
don't see how it works, I might not trust it. And if I can't explain it
in words my grandmother can understand, I probably don't understand it
either. And scientists have a very high motivation to find something
that isn't right with the way we think. But being skeptical doesn't make
us all real popular with people who are already pretty sure they know
something, or who have a secret they don\'t want you to know.

I hope that your years here at the University have shown you how to be
skeptical too. If I had a penny for every misleading advertisement in a
political campaign or in the commercials for diet and beauty products,
I'd own the entire planet Earth. So I urge you to be skeptical of sound
bite politics, sound bite economics, sound bite science, and sound bite
morality.

I have something else to say about working with the NASA team: We have
to get things right, or our wonderful satellite is not going to work.
When it comes to astronauts, if we don't get it right, somebody may die.
You can't fool mother Nature. Our satellite doesn't care one bit if I
think it's going to work. It only is going to act according to what we
built. You know what that means? It means we have to get the engineering
skeptics together too, the ones who can review our plans and our designs
and tell us when we're about to make a big mistake. So for us at NASA,
the most important people may just be the ones who tell us we're full of
beans and disagree with us the most.

So we have to listen to our critics and figure out if they're right, and
be our own best critics, and then act accordingly. It's easier to say
than it is to do, because we all love our own ideas. But we have to get
it right anyway. So when you are building your own teams, I urge you to
include some people who don't agree with you. Don\'t let them stop you
from your dreams, but they might be your most important teachers.

Our Founding Fathers thought this way too. They set up a Federal
government in three parts with checks and balances, so nobody could make
a big mistake without somebody finding out. They knew what didn\'t work,
because they had read their history books, and they had fought for their
rights from the British government, and they set up an experiment in
government that\'s now running a few miles south of here.

There's something else from science and engineering for you to consider.
Nature and human society are full of what we call feedback loops. These
are situations in which some system sends a bit of the output
information back around to affect the input. The human body does that:
if you eat enough, your body tells you to stop eating. The world of
business does that too: if you see a market for a new product, and you
build it, and it takes over the world, then by and by somebody else
figures out how to build it too, perhaps with better features, and
presto, you have competition. What this means for life is that nothing
is ever simple for very long. If we say, let's save lives with
antibiotics, isn't that great, let's do it around the world, then guess
what happens? The bacteria figure out a way to survive by becoming
resistant to our antibiotics. And now we're running short of new
antibiotics to fight those bacteria.

Winston Churchill said it better. He said, "Victory is never final." So
I am quite sure that there's not going to be an end to the need for
experts on every subject you have studied here. Of course those experts
are you! We're going to have to keep at it for the rest of history. Your
life is not going to get boring, because the world keeps changing. You
graduates are going to have to pay attention! You are going to be busy!

First, and most important, look around you and see what you love to do.
What are ***your*** fantasies? If you're employed, congratulations! But
life is too short for you to spend it doing something you don't want to
do. Life is too long for you not to do what you want to do. So do what
you love to do. If you can see that direction and give it your whole
heart, who knows what may happen for you?

I have been amazed at the creative power of plain ordinary persistence,
to produce extraordinary results. Aim high, you might actually succeed!

Second, be an optimist, or a realist, or an idealist, or a skeptical
scientist, but keep on going for what you love. They say an optimist is
a person for whom the glass is half full, a pessimist is one for whom
it's half empty, and an engineer is one for whom the glass is twice as
big as it needs to be. But whatever, keep on going where you want to go.
You can't see the other side of the forest before you go through it, so
don't give up too easily just because you can't see how to do what you
want.

Finally, remember that we are all in this together. Our families, our
friends, the citizens of Maryland, our teachers, have all come together
to get you, the graduating students, through school, because we know all
our lives depend on it. This is our way of saying ***we love you***. In
my opinion, we have just educated the most brilliant generation of
students ever to walk the Earth. We're counting on you youngsters to run
the planet, to make life better with science and technology and arts and
literature and law and all the other areas you\'ve studied, to manage
global warming, to feed us when we're old, and to raise up the next
generation to follow after you, as our ancestors did before us, and as
our children's children will do tens of thousands of years in the
future.

So, on behalf of all of us, to all of us, I say thank you, may all
blessings come to you, congratulations, and good luck!