Astronaut Jeff Hoffman and Professor Stephen Hawking

I wrote this post a very long time ago (Spring 2016) and didn't quite get around to publishing it. My excuse would be something like my marathon training was just starting to go in full swing, but I think I just lost a bit of motivation to keep blogging. Anyway, more on all of the marathon stuff/baking things to come (more consistently, I hope)...

Spring 2016 post:
The end of my first year of grad classes was amazing. So amazing that it seems to have taken me a month or so [Edit: actually more like forever] of reflection to finally get a post out about it!

There is one week in particular towards the end of April where I got to see one talk by Stephen Hawking and then another by former NASA astronaut Jeff Hoffman. Professor Hawking gave his talk about black holes and a new institute near the Center for Astrophysics called The Black Hole Initiative. With the detection of gravitational wave from the LIGO experiment, the people at The Black Hole Initiative are getting together now to further the study of these mysterious objects. I found Professor Hawking's talk absolutely amazing and I was surprised at how well he made the talk accessible to the public and yet infused enough detail in it for me to learn so much.

One blurry photo (we weren't allowed to take them during the talk; here's an article with a better professional one) showing Stephen Hawking and the mural, painted by another astronomer, that now resides at the Black Hole Initiative building.

The main point I took away from his talk was that black holes seem to change the information about the things that fall in--the black hole information paradox. That is, the quantum information about the things that fall in is somehow different from entry to when the black hole evaporates, relinquishing this information through Hawking Radiation. Once this information escapes this way, one cannot tell if this is the quantum information of a star the was engulfed by the black hole or just some cosmic dust that fell in. It's in the top three strangest things about astronomy for me; right with dark matter and dark energy, naturally. At least with this and the new tools the community has, I feel like we're closer to understanding black holes than those other two dark things.

A few days later, just as I was cooling off from all of that excitement, I got an email with the subject line:

"Astrophysicist turned astronaut talk tonight" 

This piqued my curiosity and I read the rest of the email detailing that Jeff Hoffman, a former astronaut, would be speaking at a venue just down the street from where I lived. Despite the short notice, it didn't take much else for me to make room in my schedule to go see this.

Jeff had many fascinating stories to tell including how he began his career as an astrophysicist and how this is what led him to becoming an astronaut as opposed to the more common path requiring astronauts to have military fighter pilot training. But the most amazing (and a complete surprise to me) story he had to tell was how he flew STS-61--the space shuttle walk that restored vision to the Hubble Space Telescope! My favorite part about this story was how he received instructions from mission control that amounted to him wiggling some part inside the telescope to get it unstuck. A trivial task a face value, but remember, he did this while in space (and while working with a multi-billion dollar instrument). Jeff said that for all the research he did and now continues do to at MIT, he feels that this space mission is the most he's contributed to the astronomy community given the telescope's enormous impact on the research many other astronomers do.

Between these two talks, that was one of the most space-filled weeks I've ever had and I hope there will be more to come.


:^)