son and michael stepson is been and he's quite wonderful too who grew up in this town so all in all i'm just thrilled that we can be here together and talk about michael and what he's been doing which is pretty remarkable michel roux up here and i love science and i wanted to do something but didn't want to get involved in equations so who's very clever and turned around he is a science journalist and here he is michael thank you for it's in your comb and you share so many wonderful things with us but one of the things i would love to have we're going to be talking about science of course  and talk about the universe and how it unfolds and what it's all about of why this is how the sun shines and so forth your physical science he's also in the prince environmental institute he is he's an opinion research and opinion editor and scientific american he was involved with and wrote fifty covers for time magazine dealing with science and he's involved with this cover and wired and scientific america he just really knows his stuff but another time perhaps but i have i'm just but there's so many aspects to science that you know where to begin it's very hard for me to say i'd like to know about the environmental situation i'd like to know about ok all right well ok why don't you i want i will what gives you pleasure ok that's that's the best question so what gives me pleasure first of all is to is writing about science that as you as you mentioned i i love science and my father was a scientist he was a physicist on the faculty at princeton and very famous one hereon lemonick well certainly famous in this town and i grew up just being in thrall with his stories that he would tell me as a child about atoms and molecules and particles and galaxies and all sort of physics and astronomy stuff especially and he never told me the dark secret about it which is that in order to be a physicist or an astronomer you have to learn all sorts of advanced physics and mathematics and it's very hard very complicated and so i fell in love with science as a series of stories about how the universe works and when i tried i actually tried to become a scientist in college i majored in astrophysics and it turned out that that part of it all the equations the lab work in the lectures and the the all that stuff was not what i wanted and so i was not cut out to be a scientist but i was still in love with the topic and so that's as you say that's where i found a way to turn it around and find a way to tell stories about the universe and the world and how it works and so that's that's all out of me to stay involved with this topic at a level that really appeals to me oh if there were only more of your father here and you're spreading it for us well thank you this juries are date oh and i'm working on the seventh case all right anyway there's going to have to come back to come to continue ok so it's so it's all over the place i've written about biology and environment and genetics and astronomy and physics and all that stuff but my first love that's why i told you about my father is with astronomy and and so i wrote a cover story recently for scientific american on something that fascinated me since i was a child and that is the question of whether there's another planet lurking out there at the outer edges of the solar system this is something i knew about from growing up because the planet neptune was the last planet discovered well that's actually i should say it that way but so the planet neptune was discovered to everyone's surprise in the eight hundred hundreds and then they went out looking for another planet in the early one nine hundred and they found pluto which they thought was this gigantic enormous thing and it turned out that it wasn't and in fact it's so small that it was demoted in two thousand and six five or two thousand and six it's now you dwarf planet but the question has still remain is there something big out there be just beyond our telescopes and it's that that kind of mystery that i love you know the question of something something we don't understand we think might be true but we're just not sure how can we find out and just in the past couple of years astronomers have started get some evidence that maybe there is a big a huge planet now beyond pluto that we still can't see and in february i wrote about it and it turns out there is pretty good evidence so you know we think of the planets that we grew up learning on whether pluto is one of them or not all the other names are familiar mercury venus earth mars jupiter saturn those those are totally familiar and we get the idea that this is what is what is this is what our own solar system is like and the idea that there would be something else one more piece to this puzzle didn't even occur to people and now suddenly we have this prospect that the solar system is nothing like what we thought it was another thing that's excited me along the same lines over the past twenty years now do go around other stars now we know about more than two thousand planets that are beyond our solar system so it's yeah that's that's just a tiny fraction we think there are millions and billions out there  d in the mid sixty's nobody knew whether there were that was true at all there was no evidence to support it people thought it might be true and sixteen of the sixty's and a group of physicists at princeton set out to try and look for the evidence and the evidence was going to be in the form of this very faint light left over from that event what if it was there and they set out they were building they were top of you know hall building a detector that was going to look up great but but so they were they were getting ready to look for this and they got a phone call saying that some other scientists over at bell labs in home dell new jersey had found this mysterious microwave source and they didn't know what it was and so the people who at princeton who were setting out to look for it were scooped by this other group who didn't set out to the fort and that other group got the nobel prize but they deserved it they princeton is universally acknowledged to be one of the top three or four places for astronomy and physics in the world really yeah and you know they they they have this informal competition with  every time they come up they approach a new crop of grad students or they just say say to grad students in astronomy and physics you know we're offering you a place at princeton and so they like to know how many do we get as opposed to how many cal for over lunch maybe but well as a matter of fact is that a specific reference or are you just being general there is every tuesday something called the book call lunch named after john mccall who physicist an astrophysicist who first started this custom every tuesday all of the astronomers at the university and at the institute so that's quite a group and and anybody who happens to be visiting to give a talk gets together for an informal lunch and talks about very reason and i i go there sometimes and you hear people talking about things that are a year away from the public knowing them but you sit there  just go there every tuesday not at not just anybody can go but the world's greatest astrophysicists are in the room at any one time talking about the things that they are excited about  yeah it's an extraordinary resource and it's just there we are in our town and because son was a classmate of my son and i mean it's just a small world and his wife was very active as well as she is at the  a lovely oh wonderful well that is fascinating because you know we hear a little bit like john wheeler was here and had a daughter who was the same engine i was and we hear about the black hole and then all of a sudden i heard oh well you know the tissues father's gone to texas because that's where it's really lively so i've sort of thought we were a little more diverse didn't realize that prince a wrist still so way out there oh it's absolutely you know there's no question about that well the black hole is another yes well when i first started writing about about astronomy i don't i don't think we've even proven that there were any black holes at that point ok and now we have we know that there are black holes or small black holes that are not that far away from us and then there are just get the black holes inside of almost every galaxy including a road and some of them are as big as ten or fifteen billion stars they weigh as much as ten or fifteen billion stars and they seem to be responsible for a lot of the know should is is something you know the first doesn't necessary even i started the universe doesn't always listen but but it turns out they do exist and they're they're really important we still don't completely understand  i mean just and we talk i mean there are so many things that we can talk about i think of genome and edit out certain traits and it in other traits that this is now commonplace and ethicists really kind of worry about how you're going to back this and how much can we allow it to be done with humans and if you know so there are there are many levels to this and other professor who was a princeton lee silver was very involved in the ethical questions and he asked very reasonable question you know if if your child has some kind of genetic disorder and that makes him or her disabled in some way is it ethical to edit their genes to to remove that to sort of though everybody would agree of course that's that's a treatment for a disorder ok so what if what would maybe argue no this is who i am this is so it is a mistake to call what i have a disorder and so maybe it's unethical to bring your child up to a more typical height on the other hand  maybe it's cruel not to and then you get into questions of of things that we can't do yet we don't really know how they work but what if you know intelligence is obviously a factor in success in life what if you or your child has sort of average intelligence perfectly normal intelligence well what if we could figure out a way and that we don't we honestly don't know if that's possible but what if we could figure a way to boost your child's intelligence and make him or her do well in the s a t s is that ethical w that's kind of you know only rich people could do that presumably and so that's kind of an unfair advantage but we allow rich people to pay for a safety prep courses and so how is that server you know so so these these nice part in some ways about astronomy is that the geology is that there are nearly as many ethical questions once you start getting to human health and happiness it becomes much tougher you know so we learn well i'm accepting i spoke too soon you know we we figured out how to make an atomic bomb home without worrying too much about the ethical questions and we know that einstein was appalled  generally in physics and astronomy it's much less of an issue so i have not written nearly as much about about these genetic issues as i a news magazine like time the idea was oh my gosh we have to do this story this week grab you know the lance writer and get him up to speed and have him do that story and for about a week or two i was the world's greatest expert on that topic but if i don't return to it frequently and then i start it starts to fade of course so i could i could stand here and give you an entire lecture about the history of the big bang in the universe off the top of the head and it would be mostly accurate see so much having been accomplished in your field it is that i mean that's the beauty about science it's always something new and surprising and exciting and questioning and is which is the part of the brain that keeps memory and he is very much alive and very wonderful as usual and is living in the present and michael tell us a little bit more about lines soon and what has happened i just knew or when she was fine right and i didn't wonderful i didn't know when she was four and so which is which is too bad too grew up in princeton she went to princeton high school and we overlapped by one year  while but she was a senior and i was a freshman and so she was very intimidating and i never actually met her although we may have played in the orchestra together right some point because she would love the violin yes she was a violin player  and even more of the older player piano and later on she was a very very talented action and then she went on to become a highly successful commercial artist indeed she did covers for the new yorker magazine  organic dairy business on the side it just an extraordinary person and as you say she got this disease in satellite it's an infection of the brain right and it destroyed the part of the brain where memory is not where memory is stored so much is where memory is processed and so so the result is that shit it's very hard for her almost impossible except through over and over repetition to learn new things and so if you go in there so she didn't know me before this illness but i've met her since if i go into a room she introduces herself and that's my name and we chat for a bit and then if i leave and i come back five minutes later she has no idea she's ever seen me before and this will happen even if i do it again and again and again and  it first seemed to me like just a terrible tragedy one good thing and this is due entirely to her sister leni and her mother maggie who died last summer last spring  yes but but they also decided that in order for this not to be a complete tragedy she should they should try and make this they should try to use this to help other people to to help scientists understand how memory works and maybe help other victims of memory loss and so they've been working with scientists from johns hopkins and princeton mostly for years now these scientists studying bloody sue in many many different ways to try and understand what she can still do and which is a lot and what she can't do which is a fair amount to understand the role that this these these brain structures have because we don't really understand still completely how memory works and so she is even though she doesn't she does she does she now does remember in a sort of sketchy way she is not contributing in a positive way to science and it's funny i went with her once to a testing session and she as we were walking in she looked at me she said are they going to study my brain so that she already knew you could remember that that's learned and as i told you i was working on the seventh book that that the book is about money says and who she was when you knew her and what happened and how things have changed since then it's just an extraordinary story and i forget what it's been saying but it figured oh i know it so i went into it thinking yes this is a tragedy and it's very sad and of course it isn't some ways in many ways reserved a way yes yes human interest but she was a she was she stood out for almost everybody yes a matter as a as an unusually remarkable person which i never experienced but i have most of these descriptions so i can talk about secondhand and almost everything they describe is still there so the essence of her personality and her embrace of life and even her artistic ascetic shouldn't she's she's doing ar again she is doing our again and the wonderful thing is that she's so excited about it and she continues and she just now certainly is drawing and planning various things that sound was very clever and brought her crossword puzzle book and she just went into it like crazy but there was also a problem they couldn't stop or she was so excited about everything that was going on and everything and especially you words and letters and definitely words  who had the same condition and the very first one that we were scientists studied he developed it because of surgery not because of illness but it was the same condition and this was in the one nine hundred fifty s and and basically for the rest of his life he died in two thousand and eight or two thousand and seven something like that he mostly spent his time watching t v and he did crossword puzzles too but he was just he just didn't he just didn't do much and he was content but his life was pretty featureless and her life is anything but she has and it is due in part two to  mother and sister but it's also due to her relentless need to be active and to create it's are true and that was the bad creativity is really what spurs are on yeah and so so in ma thing i mean i actually talked to an an artist that she knew in her days living in new york and they used to do really notice a man named ron fleming's ok based in washington and they used to be best pals they would loss but he went into a back room with her and they sat down started drawing and playing and making puns he said it was just so wonderful to have my friend back for her for him the essence of who she was hadn't changed at all so it's just a remarkable story is a remarkable story and so thrilled that you're doing a book it needs to be done and this is a world that we live in and things are possible things are o challenge to talk about the science which you know new obviously so that's fun it's wonderful and there's another princeton connection here robert landau the soup way thing is johns hopkins is a doctor oh my god when she was working at columbia so we got to know each other then and we realized at that time and this is a before either of us knew about money so then we realized at that time that her father and my father had been friends growing up in philadelphia and had gone to penn together and gotten degrees in physics so the number of connections oh that is remarkable that that is totally her market down yet oh michael what a treat well i can't thank you enough this is just been incredibly wonderful and i hope we can do it again i would love to frankly but there's much to be talked about i was going to mention is wonderful telescope pearl and it is being billed in chile and it's going to be the largest possible telescope in the world and what it can tell us about the speed of light and so for that i mean we just go on our own oh and there's a new telescope that's going to go into orbit to replace the hubble it's going to be bigger and better and more powerful that's a couple you know there's there's always something ok well i think we should plan another gathering and i thank you all for joining is it's been a wonderful pleasure michael