INTRODUCTION: This is AudioExplorations, a podcast series from AccessScience, the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology Online at www.accessscience.com. I'm Jessa Forte Netting. Today Dorian Devins speaks with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for this AudioExploration: Pluto. This segment: "The Cosmos as A Physics Lab and the Globalization of Science"

DORIAN DEVINS: Well, you mentioned the Big Bang and I guess back in the 60's with Penzias and Wilson who were radio astronomers.

DR. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yes they are.

MS. DEVINS: They, I mean, their contribution for instance, as an example, opened the doors for so much physics after that. I mean astronomy has really kind of led a lot of the cutting edge physics…

DR. TYSON: That is an excellent observation because you can ask "How do you test the limits of physics in a laboratory?" Well, usually you have to get a big particle accelerator, you have to get — the farther along you are the bigger your apparatus needs to be to get to the edge of what is known and unknown in the world of physics, typically. Whereas if you view the universe as your laboratory, there's all manner of places where the laws of physics are being tested and explored. In order to test Einstein's theories of relativity we went to space to do that. The very first measurement of general relativity was the total solar eclipse in 1919 conducted by Arthur Eddington, a very brilliant British astrophysicist. And so the Big Bang and all the episodes that unfolded thereafter, all of the — that era of the universe — is a particle physicist's dream state, it's hot, it's high density, all of matter is broken apart into its constituent parts, and we needed to knock on the door of the particle physicist to gain insight to that part of the early universe. And that launched a whole new branch of study called astroparticle physics. And so the universe has a way of being inclusive, as you noted a moment ago, not only with the public but also among other sciences. Our search for life we bring along biologists to search the soils of Mars. I don't, I wouldn’t know what I was stepping in, but you bring the geologist because the rocks there have similarities to the rocks here. So yes, it’s inclusive and it taps many of the other fields that previously were taken as separate.

MS. DEVINS: You have an unfair advantage having such a big playing field I guess.

DR. TYSON: Yes.

MS. DEVINS: You create a lot of these interstitial sciences.

DR. TYSON: That's right, cross pollinated sciences.

MS. DEVINS: Yeah, uh huh. Speaking of the way that astronomy is done, it seems that it's almost becoming a model for — I'm not sure this is the right term to use — but the globalization of science. I mean in astronomy you've been able to have people make observations around the world and sort of plug them into a main computer, and it seems that biology and other sciences are starting to look into doing this as well.

DR. TYSON: I agree 100% and that's an excellent observation. So the general astrophysics community — I use astrophysics and astronomy interchangeably here — the more accurate modern term would be astrophysics. But either term is just fine. From very long ago when there what we would call transient phenomena in the universe, events that you want to — they happen and you want to follow up on them immediately. We've had a clearing house of … we've had the ability to send information to every observatory in the world within moments. So that if you're at the telescope you can say, "Quickly, turn to here, there's something, there's a comet coming, there's a star that just exploded". And that ability created a landscape of international cooperation that was very early compared with what you might have found with other sciences. And nowadays we have telescopes that are international consortiums because they're so expensive that you have to pool your resources together. Modern examples of that in Europe would be the particle accelerator that they all chip in to build and use. It's in Switzerland, it's called CERN which is an acronym for High Energy Physics Center. So we… so it's an excellent observation and I agree with it.

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