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>> Michael let's talk how a failed astrophysics major became a successful science writer. Well he'll talk a little bit about how he got his job and. In terms of background he was at Harvard he was a 1st an astrophysics major and got a D. minus on a test and he switched to economics.

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And then he went to Columbia to study journalism since then he's worked at a number of venues most prominently TIME magazine where he's published hundreds of articles including over 50 cover issues so 50 P.C. years worth of Time magazine is kind of due to Michael Lemonick. Now he teaches.

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Science Journalism at Princeton University and he's published this book he came partly here for. The science festival it's called the perpetual now a story of amnesia memory and love. It's on sale a pile of books and these so there would be no slides tonight he just give you a vulnerable authentic writer's presentation of everything he has so let's welcome him one last time thank you thank.

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Well thank you all I see that things have not changed since I was in college nobody in the 1st 2 rows this is this is a very natural. And familiar. David gave away one of my good lines but that's OK I have more and I don't know if I'll tell you all I have because you know how much time do we have here anyway but I will I will fulfill the promise or the threat of the title because I was indeed a failed astrophysics major as an undergraduate and it's.

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It's a how shall I say a harrowing tale of. Disaster and lack of self understanding and. It turned out OK So that's the that's the punchline but I find it when I talk about this to my own students because I always like to tell them where I came from.

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To be the person standing in front of it in classes and I sometimes give talks to journalism students and students of all kinds and many of them find it very reassuring because the fact that I. Had a terrible time in college and and a terrible time for a while after and was a complete lost soul and it looked like we were heading for disaster and then I finally figured out what my life should be about after quite a few years it's very reassuring to undergraduates who don't know what they want or what they are going to do and they're undecided and they worry that you know they're their friends are have I have this great career path laid out in front of them and they're applying to law school or business school or whatever they're having interviews for for a consulting firms and somebody even in this audience might be thinking you know but what about me and.

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I have no idea it's all the from here so so maybe you will take a lesson that it's not necessarily all downhill from here although in my case this this. Bizarre path and I took. It could have turned out very badly so the fact that I'm even here talking to you is an indication that that it all worked out but anyway at the time there was no reason to think that it did so I know I'm going to.

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Talk for a while and live up to the the promise of the title and then I will be very tired of myself talking and maybe you will be too and I will be open to questions and then if there are no questions I will start talking again so that's your warning take notes think of things to ask me so that you won't have to to listen to be drone on forever OK so so so not only did I become so I was a failed astrophysics major certified It's right there in my record and and not only that I become a science writer with some success but I'm also.

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Listed in the Princeton faculty as a visiting lecturer in astrophysics which is pretty funny I also served on the visiting committee that comes to to observe and comments on the curriculum and the astrophysics department at Harvard where I failed as a undergraduate and also in the visiting Committee for the astrophysics department at Princeton so it's gets crazier all the time but it all makes sense I hope by the end so.

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We will start. When I am a young child a very young child and my father was a professor of physics he was. The ended up at Princeton University and he was on the faculty there for probably 40 years before he retired and the thing about my father was that you have never heard of him almost certainly because he you know he was no Stephen Hawking he did not come up with fantastic new theories to explain cosmic phenomena he didn't discover any new particles he was he was an elementary particle physicist.

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And one reason for that is that he was early in his career he made the transition from being a physics teacher to and a physics researcher to being administrator became a dean. But he was a gifted teacher and by that I mean that 1st of all he was passionate about his topic he loved physics he loved the idea that human beings who just you know a couple 1000000000 years ago we were walking around naked and eating raw food because we don't know how to make fire hitting each other with stones and somehow these sort of ape like creatures evolve to the point where we can talk about what's happening far below our ability to see in terms of the microscopic in the sun microscopic in the subatomic and figuring out what's going on down there even though we have no senses that can actually perceive it and also that we can look up into the sky and our cave dwelling ancestors would look up there and they would see lights and they had no idea what they were and they made up gods and all sorts of things but that we got to the point where we could actually look at the sun and look at the stars and look at the galaxies and look all the way to the edge of the universe and figure out what was going on.

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Completely beyond our sight so he was he thought that was the most incredible thing and he was excited by it always and he took that excitement into the classroom and so when I still. To this day have old men with gray hair and older than me with more gray hair than I have come up to me and say I had your father for physics and 962 he was the best teacher I ever had and this literally happens happened as recently as a couple weeks ago.

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So not only was he really passionate about it and had a lot of energy and you can tell that he just loved this stuff but he was incredibly good at explaining things and making them seem as exciting to other people as as they were to him and so.

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He could talk to you know a senior faculty about about physics and get them excited he could talk to graduates and come to undergraduate students he could talk to high school students and he could even talk to you know for a 5 year old kid who happened to be his son and get that little kid excited about that they are and the majesty and spectacular stuff going on in the universe at the very largest scales in the very smallest scales and the ruler he did it.

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You may. Guess or you could guess if you had time to think about it he did not make me do any math at 5 years old he did not make me solve any problem sets we didn't go into the lab and have me you know measure accelerations he did not have me.

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Write up lab reports or read physics textbooks because I was 5 years old what he did was. As as a gifted teacher he pitched his his explanations to the level of the audience so he he did not talk over people he did not talk under people and what he did was to tell me stories about what we've discovered about the universe and that and how we know and what we still don't know and it was the most exciting thing to me and he once told me the story of Halley's comet are you off until you were that it was big in the eighty's yes anybody OK so some of you are familiar with it anyway if this comet that was discovered I don't even know how long ago but but.

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In the 1500s of the 1600s I could look it up. Somebody calculated that this object that had been seen before was actually the same object and it was orbiting around and it came back through the inner solar system and it lit up and it had a long tail and and somebody predicted I think was Halle who predicted that it would return again 76 years after its last appearance and then he died but sure enough it appeared and every 76 years it comes back and but you know that's the science part of the but then there was the romantic part so.

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How he's come it was in the sky when Mark Twain was born the year Mark Twain was bored and it was back again the year he lay on his deathbed and you know he died at the age of 76 and sure enough it came back that year that was 1910 I believe yes and so so romantic you know this is the thing comes back to light up the sky and it's the bookend of Mark Twain's life and the best part my father told me was it's going to come back again in 1986 and in 1010 and it was spectacular and it was just the most amazing thing so just wait and we're now talking in 1960 this was when I was 7 years old maybe he was telling me about this so it's like 186 that's that's that's forever and I'll never come.

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But and how will I be I can remember how when I was but I was a lot older than I could conceive of being and I was inspired I was just inspired to learn about about the sky and I would read popular books about about astronomy and the frustrating part for me was that at the time at least all the popular books about astronomy.

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I did the whole history of astronomy So the 1st chapter was this is what the Babylonians believed you know it was we were on the backs of turtles I don't remember but it was that kind of stuff and then this is what the what they saw Marion's believed and then this is what the Greeks and the Romans and then the great and by the time we were 3 quarters of the way through the book where it Isaac Newton So we're still hundreds of years ago and finally we got to the very last chapter and this is modern astronomy you know this is what we know today that wasn't I want to know a lot more about what we know today and what we don't understand the mysterious things that we don't understand I remember in one of those books there were pictures of objects there's a galaxy and there's your planet and we didn't have telescopes like we have today so they were all kind of blurry and but on the last page there was this weird bright object with seemed like had a jet of light coming out of it and this was something called a quasar it was a it was a thing so bright that it could be seen billions of light years away and but it was really tiny a pinpoint of light that was very concert and nobody at the time had any idea what it could be what is this beacon of incredible light that shines on the way across the universe.

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And if you were there as they figured out that mystery was what really gravity so it was the romance of what we know but also the mystery of of what we are going to find out or what we don't know what we wonder about so I just when I was very into it frustrated by those books and I get the next book out I'm Babylonians again so so I had to endure that there was not at the time a lot of news about science in the media and by media I mean newspapers magazines and one of 3 television networks that never ends I mean it's news anyway.

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I knew at that point that I was going to be an astronomer I mean what what else would you be when you were captivated by by the mysteries of the heavens. You know we haven't been to the moon at that point the best pictures we had of the moon were very blurry and we the close ups so we didn't really know what the moves like we didn't really know what the planets were like Mars was this Bob.

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And over the next few years during the $1960.00 S. Of course we sent people to the moon and we had close up photographs of the the footprints and we had we sent probes out to Mars and Jupiter into all the planets and all this amazing stuff started coming in all these mysteries about the way you know what we send people to the moon there were a number of scientists who thought that the moon was probably covered with a very deep layer of dust and that with the astronauts landed they were just should sink into the dust like quicksand and there was people actually worried about that well so it didn't happen that was good.

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But you know that was another mystery in they solve that mystery so I'm going to be an astronomer and because I wanted to learn of these amazing secrets of the universe and probe deeper than anybody ever to probe it for. And of course you know elementary school and middle school and high school you had to take science it was not an option.

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And I was going to be a scientist so this should have been a great fit except that I hated every science class I ever took they were the textbooks were boring. The lectures were boring the lab exercises were annoying you know I had had it have to do those things my father didn't make me do may measure it drop something you measure the acceleration and you figure out if I think Newton was right about gravity you know.

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I think he was I think we knew that but we had to do those things that were in biology class I remember. You had to cut up a frog to see what was inside So 1st of all that's disgusting Secondly I didn't care what was inside a frog I honestly just didn't care and 3rd if I really did care I could look it up I didn't have to like take a knife and chop it apart so that was my attitude toward science and science classes and and I continue right through high school physics class was no better and chemistry class was worse because I had a crotchety old teacher.

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But I was going to be an astronomer this was a constant and and I knew that when I got to college it would all the veil would be lifted and I would be dealing with the mysteries of the universe Now this wasn't perhaps. Very thoughtful as I probably could have found out again my father was a physics professor.

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And I could have gone to his classes I guess and see what it was actually like and was not romantic even though he's a great teacher there is still a lot of math and but I got to college and I'm going to sign up for Astrophysics. And. So to do that and to Major astrophysics you had to take the introductory physics.

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Course that physics majors and astrophysics majors all had to take and I. I went to the class I got the textbook and to my surprise and so I should tell you right now that this I had told you in the introduction I meant to that this is. The part of this was an exercise in profound lack of self-knowledge.

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Because I managed to kid myself that I would I would fall in love with this eventually. And in fact my I blame my father for this too because he said he said you know you'll go to college and you'll fall in love with a subject and just become passionate about it which is what happened to him so he assumed it would happen to me.

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And so I went to this physics class and it was just like my classes in high school except much harder so the math was harder in the lab exercises were were more complicated no lab reports had to be done just so. And they were kind of awful. And the lectures and I all of it.

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And the problem is that. There are many of you here who might have had classes that you didn't really enjoy very much but you know you're you're here and you've got it you're going to do your best you don't care it's you might not like it but you're going to do the homework and you're going to do the best you can I want to ask you to raise your hands but I'm sure you're out there.

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But I wasn't like that so I just couldn't make myself do it. I had a very low tolerance for or boredom I'm beginning to sound like a pretty. Pretty lame person but bear with me. And the thing I had also learned going through elementary school and all of the education before that and even in my writing course as an undergraduate.

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I turned out for some reason I was pretty good at writing writing not fiction because I didn't have that much imagination but but explaining stuff so if I was. Explanatory prose I said I had a feeling for and maybe I had heard that from my father was greater explaining things.

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But so what you know so now I can write. Papers for my classes but this has nothing to do with anything I would do in real life. So anyway we got to the end of the 1st semester of the physics course and we had the final exam and in my in my university the final exams were 3 hours long and the rule was that you had to sit there for at least the 1st half so you would work on the exam for an hour and a half and then you took a break and then you had another hour and a half but after the break you could leave whenever you were finished you couldn't leave before that so I sat down and opened up the booklet and I looked at the 1st problem I started working on it and I worked on every problem that I could and got all the answers I could and I looked at my watch and minutes had gone by I was done and not in a good way but I had to sit there for the next hour and 20 minutes because you couldn't leave and everybody's furiously scribbling in on kind of pretending to scribble and then the then the half hour point comes I mean the halfway point comes OK it's break Officially you're now allowed to leave the course who would leave this is a you know in a physics exam I got up and I walked out of the room and everybody says wow he must be so smart he finished the thing at half the time.

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But when the results came back and you heard it they didn't want to be mean and give me a failing grade so they gave me a D. minus which is basically a failing grade and. And my father the physics professor in those days they sent all the grades home to your parents.

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So I couldn't hide it very well and he was not happy. And I actually went back and did the 2nd semester of this course and I wrote brought my grade up to a C. minus which was a big relief because you know I could have done worse but when it was clear that if I was doing this badly on the.

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On the very most elementary course I was not it just was going to happen there was no way I was going to be an astrophysicist So that is why I am. Called I failed I call myself a failed astrophysicist because I tried not very hard and and I failed miserably so so then the question is I've been a member I've been my whole life my whole conscious life I've been looking forward to becoming an astronomer and it simply was not going to happen there was just it was not possible and I find they accepted this so the question is now what right so I had no plan B. There was no thing that I was.

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Secondarily interested in. And in fact I took a year off and to try and figure it out and I came back and I hadn't figured it out. And what I decided was I think major in economics I've never taken a course in economics and now a junior in college but there Harman's are manageable and maybe it'll be really interesting in a no and it's a good career kind of degree to have so I took intro to economics my father my junior year and I didn't like it much but at this point I I had to.

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I had I just had to finish and get out so I gritted my teeth and I passed the courses not with very high grades and I graduated with a degree in a field that I wasn't interested in I wasn't very good in and. And I could never have a career and I couldn't get a recommendation.

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For grad school or for a job because none of my professors would say nice things about me because I was just completely nondescript And anyway so this is not sounding good i hope you realize and because I did not have the advantage of the perspective I have now I could see my life spiraling downhill in a very bad way and so I.

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There's this phenomenon that's of course very familiar nowadays where a student graduates from college and they can't find a job so they move into their parents' basement right you've heard of this I invented that I was a pioneer so in the 1970 S. I moved into my parents' not literally the basement but.

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And I got a job delivering liquor for a liquor store and then I got another job driving a truck for Educational Testing Service driving the the scores from the the place where they were printed over the post office it was it was not very challenging. And during that and during that time I really realized that this is not a life I wanted for myself and all my friends were going to graduate school and law school and they were on Wall Street making millions or thousands at least which is still a lot from my perspective and and I was driving a truck and.

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At that point by that point I kind of thought well maybe I can become a writer that sounds very romantic and you know then you could be famous or something still not a lot of self-knowledge but what I write about I didn't know and. I finally moved up in the world I got a job at a small publishing company as a proofreader because while I would have nothing to offer.

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As a scientist and nothing really to offer as a writer because I had nothing to write about I was really good at spelling. So I passed that test and I was I was hired but I had greater aspirations and so. What happened next and when I say Next I'm now 2526 years old was that something completely external to me happened that the universe decided to take pity on me.

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And we're now in the late 1970 S. and suddenly out of nowhere remember I thought I'm interested in science and I have some ability to write but so what the 2 have nothing to do with each other and almost like magic in the late 1970 S. the field of science journalism suddenly emerged from obscurity to be everywhere the New York Times which has a science section every Tuesday created that section at that time so to the Washington Post they had a section so did the San Francisco Chronicle newspapers suddenly started creating science sections.

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And a number of science magazines were also founded at that time so if you've heard of Discover Magazine yes some people are not ing it was invented at exactly that time the American Association for the Advancement of Science the professional organization for scientists in the US created its own popular magazine another magazine was founded a couple others and remember I have always been frustrated to read those books and I get a little thin chapter at the end of the mysteries that we don't know.

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Well that's what all of these magazines were about that's all all they were about there were no frogs to cut up there were no stories about about you know. Going to the lab and trying to recreate Newton's laws of gravity by definition these were news outlets You had to write about something new so all of these magazines all these newspapers wrote about the newest things happening in science the leading edge of research the things were just discovering the mysteries that were just solving and I ended up this is what I had been looking for since I was 5 years old.

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And they and these were not told as you know reports or dry kind of. Lists of I don't know statistics or something and these were stories they started out with you know I remember one from one of my favorites. The reporters up on the top of a mountain with an astronomer and they strung was gazing up at the sky and and he sees the stars to your beautiful light clear night in Arizona or someplace and he sees the stars and then you can see the glow the faint glow of the of the the Andromeda galaxy the nearest major galaxy to ours and he's looking at all this stuff and this is the writers describe this and he knows that what he's looking at is not what the universe is mostly made of because there's a growing understanding there some stuff out there that we call dark matter because we don't know what it is it's dark in the series and it's also it doesn't shine there's no way to observe it directly and yet there's so much of it that it weighs 6 or 7 times as much as all the stars and galaxies we can see everything we can see is kind of a and impurity.

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In there in the real universe and nobody knows what the stuff is and we're going to try and find out we know it's there because it's gravity pulls on the stuff we can see so galaxies are spinning faster than they should they should fly apart unless they're surrounded by a cloud of dark matter that holds them together.

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And other evidence I just love there you know it was romantic it was exciting it was a mystery it was science it was making discoveries about things that we hadn't even suspected were there. And it one point finally now remember. I was significantly older than most of you at this point I was I was in my sort of the 2nd half of my twenty's and a light bulb went on in my head I was a slow learner but I had Wait a minute science writing that's how they come together in exactly the kind of way that is most exciting to me so I am going to be a science journalist of course I'm going to write about astronomy I'm going to go to the mountaintop and interview the astronomers and you know stay up all night which I by the way even though I did finally get to the mountaintop and never managed to stay up all night I have ever reputation among professional strong memories he's the guy who goes to bed it midnight because he just can't handle it.

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OK So so I have some family connections because you know if I was a physicist and and I sort of we did my way into a conversation with some journalist say well how do I do this how do I go about this. And they say well you know one thing you do is just try and get an entry level job so I knocked on a lot of doors and I said I want to write about science for you I could really be good at this and they said good.

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Your enthusiasm is great what can you show me as evidence that you did you take any journalism courses in college now we didn't have any of us did you write for the college paper you know because I didn't know about science journalism I wasn't interested in the other stuff did you write for the high school paper you know the take and you have a degree in science now I don't have it I didn't tell them I failed astrophysics that seemed to be too much honesty.

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But they pay you know the best Basically I said you know you're a nice kid and and we love your enthusiasm in your confidence yet the heck out of here in til you have something to show us not just your confidence they'll come back and I was kind of depressing but it also is a reality check why would they hire me if I have nothing but my own confidence.

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And so. I went away again and talk to more people in bunch and said Well you know you should go to graduate school for journalism and focus on science and I thought well it's school and I know my experiences with school have been so great of late but it sounds like a really promising thing in the truth was I was very confident but I wasn't certain that I'd be good at this you know confidence is is helpful but not doesn't guarantee anything so I applied to.

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To grad school for journalism at Columbia New York and now you may remember your so when you apply to grad school in anything you have to get recommendations when nobody in my undergraduate institution would even know who I was literally and they certainly would give me yes this this guy got a C. minus in my course thumbs up it was not a good idea but fortunately I was far enough away from my undergraduate school.

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That I mean far away a time that it didn't seem weird even though it was weird that I didn't submit any recommendations from. From undergrad what I did do because I realized I had to be clever about this is I went out and got a part time job at a local small newspaper because they would hire anybody and also I had a connection so I mean it was.

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So I got this job and I was coming to school board meetings and and municipal government meetings in small towns you know the process of purchasing a garbage truck is much more well now it's no more interesting than you think it's really don't or the school budget and how much of it but I had to do this stuff and I had some pieces published in this newspaper so now I had some evidence for the grad school.

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That I was serious about journalism and I had got a recommendation from my editor because I really wanted I really wanted to succeed so I worked hard at these stories about things that were that interesting and he said yeah this kid is great he's going to go places so he wrote this letter for me and I took a night course at N.Y.U. in journalism and I made friends with an instructor and we went out for a beer after after class and I told him that my ambitions and so so he wrote me a recommendation and I forget who the 3rd person was but but it was also somebody I know it's a very well known journalist for The New Yorker magazine a guy named John McPhee who wrote sometimes about science and he was my my hero.

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I got an introduction to him and and he found out so this is how life works he found out that I worked as a proofreader and he happened to have one of his books that was just being published and he would always proofread it himself because he didn't trust the proofreaders of the publishing company he was a perfectionist he said well you know what why don't you work for me as a proofreader So I got the galleys for his book I never worked so hard and so carefully at anything in my life because here's my hero here's my chance to show him that I'm worth something and it turns out that that I found many more errors than the publishers proofreader did so I was golden and I did a couple books for him and I went to I said I'm trying to grad school will you write me a recommendation this was pretty audacious because he was already pretty famous.

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But he was also very generous so he said I can't write a recommendation about your journalism because I've never seen it you've never done any but I will write you a reference anyway and I guess I don't know what he said but. I think he said boy this guy's I have a speller he can spell words I don't know what he said but the fact that he said anything that was very impressive and so they took me even though they probably shouldn't have and I was also again very focused on this career which I really decided I wanted and we did not know yet if I'd be any good at it fortunately I turned out to be good enough that I did OK in journalism school and I made friends with the professor the science journalism professor and I go to grad school I learned a bit about how to do it properly but I also got a piece of paper that people took seriously and I got a network of former graduates who are out there in the world and who are favorably inclined to alumni and you probably already know this but the alumni network in almost any field that you choose to go into can be really valuable because they'll you know they get 100 emails from from people who want to talk to them about their career but if you come from Georgia Tech and they went here they like you already anyway so so.

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So as by the time I graduated it's and thank goodness it worked out because rumor astrophysics was planning a didn't work out. Economics was Plan B. didn't work out if this was now planned see if this didn't work out I'm not entirely sure. What would have happened but I probably would not be here talking to you.

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So so I there was an opening for a job at a science magazine and one of the members of the previous year's class had been promoted and he had his job was open he called his old professor and said Do you have any students you recommend and he said yes this Lemonick fellow he's he's top notch or something so they sat me down and I and I got this job and I began working for one of those science magazines I told you about it was called Science Digest how many people here have heard of Science Digest I always do this no you haven't they you're completely wrong it went out you might some of the older people might it went out of business in 1906 and it was never very well known before it went out of business so you're probably thinking of something else there's readers that you might be think of Reader's Digest or something.

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But but it was a science magazine it was a National Science magazine and so I started writing for them and I would sometimes go and get on trips to interview people and it was on the new standard at the airports it was always in the back row and Discover Magazine which was really the good one was always in the front row so I would take copies of my magazine and put it in front of discover to try and boost sales somewhat.

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But I got but it was a it was a real magazine and I was really in this profession I was actually doing what I had always dreamed of I Am i went to a mountaintop with some astronomers doing some cutting edge research and I went to bed at midnight but before midnight I learned what an astronomer actually does what you know what it's like to be in that dome looking at the monitor and stepping outside and looking at the sky and just CRANE It was just incredible they explain to me what they were doing it it was just fascinating and it was cutting edge stuff and after 3 years there.

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At Science Digest I heard about an opening at Time magazine which people you know so when I was in Science Digest I would call up a scientist and say hello I'm a reporter from Science Digest and they would say what they said Science Digest What's that so I had to explain it was a science magazine and they would usually talk to me but not always but.

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I'm not going to go through the whole song and dance about time but but through a series of weird coincidences I got this job at Time magazine and. People had heard of that and so when the caller from Time magazine say you know I'd like to interview you for time.

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They dropped whatever they were doing they really there was an enormous amount of exposure and prestigious less prestigious Now I think I don't think people read it nearly as much. But at the time it was a big deal and so. So all of these things happen and you know I have the 2 hour version of this talk which I will not subject you to.

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But the number of sort of coincidences and. Just I'll just give you just give you 2 very quickly. The same friend of mine who'd who'd opened up the job at Science Digest was now in the Los Angeles Times and he called me up he said I hear there's not being a time for us for a science writer and I knew enough to pick up the phone immediately hang up pick up the phone immediately not wait a minute maybe 15 seconds and call Time magazine in reach the science desk and and say you know I hear you have a job opening in the sector said Yes yes well you know send us here that resume will be in touch which basically means.

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Forget it not going to talk to you a minute later the phone rings answer it is the science editor himself who overheard the conversation and said Who is that and he she told him and he said no I'm calling him back and he called me back and said I know your work think you know I don't think so you must be Well it turns out that I wrote about the things astronomy and physics that he cared most about and he had been the founding editor of Discover Magazine and so we were in a sort of a we were sort of a competitor so he read the competition no other way in a 1000000 years with the editor of Time have been familiar with my work but he was and he liked it and he and he you know asked me a couple of questions and he said Are you a fast writer and I said yes which was actually true I would have said yes anyway but it was actually true.

[00:40:51]
It's like I started work there and started writing about about science every week for this major national magazine and people start were actually reading it and and they'd heard of it and I was there after a year I was there and a star exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is a satellite galaxy the Milky Way and it was the closest this is called a supernova and it's really important event in astronomy we just don't see in that often in fact the last one we saw in our own galaxy even closer by was happened about 10 years before Galileo 1st pointed a telescope in the sky so there were no telescopic observations this was relatively close it was a big deal for astronomy and I ended up writing my 1st cover story about it which was just an incredible thrill.

[00:41:42]
And then I wrote another one about. Superconductivity and another one about about beach erosion I as a science writer I had to write about all different topics but astronomy was was my favorite I got to do that fairly often anyway so that satisfies the promise of the talk this is how a failed astrophysics major became reasonably successful I should put reasonably in the title because that's a little more it sounds a little bit more less.

[00:42:16]
Egotistical but reasonably successful so and so I was there for 21 years wrote those 50 cover stories. Moved on after that to us Lawlor organization a nonprofit that did climate change research and journalism so so I was writing about climate which I cared a lot about and 1st written about that in 1987 also and.

[00:42:42]
And it turned out that they were badly organized and they were a. And the editor the managing editor of The News website was a truly horrifying and evil person so we didn't get along as I was a very nice person and finally I had to leave there and I ended up it.

[00:43:05]
At Scientific American the current job where on the I'm the chief opinion editor I don't think David blew my punch line for that one. I am also the only opinion editor so I basically have lost myself around and I complain about my my mean boss. It's ridiculous but that's the title and.

[00:43:27]
At the best place I've ever worked the people are smart and knowledgeable but most of all unlike even time which is a relatively friendly place everybody there is not only very good at what they do but we all like each other and we all support each other and it's just it's a wonderful environment the only problem is my commute to New York from Princeton New Jersey where I live is if everything goes perfectly it's 3 and a half hours round trip and nothing ever goes perfectly so.

[00:43:59]
So there's got to be a downside to everything I think it's time for me to shut up and just remember the warning if nobody has any questions I will start talking again so he where Thank you. A question yes you get a say again I can come back there would be like a T.V. quiz show host going up and down the aisle.

[00:44:37]
How did you get here. Fred OK So so this hero. Works for The New Yorker magazine that's his main thing but he lives in Princeton he actually went to my high school and. He and during reunions alumni reunions they have panel discussions with alumni talking about their their professions and there was a journalism panel and I knew he was going to be on and so I went to that panel and I sort of stood in the back and afterward I walked up to him and I said you know I introduced myself and I said you know I'm really interested in journalism would you mind giving me some advice now the fact that my father at this point was the dean of the faculty and this guy was teaching a course at Princeton So basically my father was his boss although they you know deans that we don't tell their faculty what to do but still the name was familiar to him that might have been a factor and so this is actually this is are a really.

[00:45:34]
Good lesson that having a pursuit of a privileged upbringing in a certain sense gave me big advantages over all the people who didn't have those connections and that's something I didn't even think about in those days and I think about it more now as people who don't have all those connections you know I have more trouble getting ahead in a lot of professions and that's Thank goodness that's changing.

[00:45:57]
So he said yes I'd be happy to and he said I'm not sure you know can I just call you when I'm I have a moment I said sure so I was at my job proofreading I was spelling my way through a document and I got a call and it's him and he said look I'm driving out to my desk and my eye doctor in the next town over and maybe you could ride with me and we could and I could talk to you so I literally I got in the car with him and we drove over to the next town and I went into the examining room with him as they were testing him for bifocals I was I was the 1st person in the world besides the doctor and this guy himself who knew that he needed bifocals so this was a great great coup but I didn't tell anybody.

[00:46:39]
And and he was incredibly generous with his time and and that's when he learned I was a proofreader and so that's how it happened. You know just a generous person in a position of of prestige and authority was generous enough to give his time to me as and he said I have one condition which is that when you are in a position like mine you will help young journalists and give them advice and so I've always followed that.

[00:47:10]
And I tell them they have to do it too and in the movie Pay It Forward you know that that I believe that phrase comes from a movie it was out in the ninety's that didn't exist but that's what he wanted me to do yes. Well so so the science writing I was talking about was most most yes yes yes what what what made the transition in the in the business in the industry from writing about the Babylonians to writing about breaking discoveries in science and the difference was that that was mostly in books and in books people often you know start with a very historical perspective and science journalism per se was rarely there it rarely happened it was just was not a thing that newspapers and magazines and T.V. thought much about and.

[00:48:10]
But when it starts being journalism it has to be something something new you can't say you can't say this just in Babylonians you know chart the phases of the Moon 5000 years ago it has to be new or else it doesn't belong in the newspaper and so that's what happened and I'll just tell you very quickly that why did it happen why did all those things suddenly appear in the answer is Steve Jobs by which I mean that this was exactly the time when personal computers were invented and 1st being sold and people want to sell computers when they want to advertise where do you advertise so you know the advertisers like to be in a place that's sort of naturally where their customers are going to be you might see if you look at a commercial newspaper that a traditional newspaper that the sports section has a lot of car ads in it because look men follow sports and men love cars I mean it's a stereotype but there's some truth to it so they wouldn't put the they wouldn't put the car ads in the arts section you know because people go to places they don't buy cars.

[00:49:14]
But when you put computers they haven't existed before it was a part of and when he put the ads and the answer was Well if we started a science section people who are interested in science. Would probably also be interested in buying a computer because it's sort of science in techie and literally all of the computer advertising at that time went into the science section of The New York Times into science magazines it was basically a funding source that led a lot of people who really cared about science and one in science journalism to be a thing to get the publishers to let him do it.

[00:49:51]
And he had the luck for me that came along just at the point where I was you know at a really deep depression and out the entire rest of my life was. Ridiculous but what good you know question or somebody in this yes. Right so he advice from somebody in the place where they didn't really know know where they want to go is unfortunately.

[00:50:24]
It's very dependent on who you are as an individual so so I mean if I had myself to talk to I would have grabbed myself by the lapels and shaken myself live and said You idiot Be realistic What are you good at you're not good at science give it up and you know start getting in touch with who you really are and what you really care about and if you are interested in science you're not going to be a scientist you suck at it.

[00:50:55]
What could you possibly do that's related and maybe I would have started thinking about it earlier so so I guess the advice is be aware of who you are and what really interests you and what really matters to you and not what you sort of think you should be interested in.

[00:51:14]
That has to be that vague because I don't know you that well and it's different for each person. How long do I think newspapers will be used as a form of media I have no idea nobody has any idea people will tell you that they know they don't know everybody in many people have opinions and they're very confident about them but you know there are 10 different opinions out there and one of them might be right but we don't know which one if you do you know if you talk about newspapers not as physical news I think physical newspapers will go a you know OK within within 10 years I think it is that they're just wasteful they're costly.

[00:51:55]
They're. They're not super portable. The news organizations or the New York Times will still exist but probably not as a physical newspaper because all the people who grew up you know a lot of people my age will say Yeah but there's just something special about it holding the newspaper and smelling the newsprint and feeling the texture of the pages and the rustle of it there's nothing special about it it's just what we're used to it's just what we grew up doing and it's and it feels like it must be the right thing because it's what we're used to and you know just as when cars 1st came in people said but horses there so you know you have a relationship with them and it's you can.

[00:52:34]
Horses are are are more real cars are so impressed Well you see how well that went. And they genuinely believed it because that's what they were used to and we and. And that's really what it is so all the people who grew up with newspapers will die and then they'll go away and they want us.

[00:52:56]
I remember you said your father was also a physicist How did he if you you were so successful in physics and how do you feel after you became what successful science writer writes always so when when I flunked out of physics My father was. Really kind of annoyed because they were paying my tuition among other things and and you know he was the kind of person who just had to get an A in everything no matter whether he's interested or not and he just couldn't understand how I could be that way so he was very upset.

[00:53:29]
When I asked when I finally found something that was related to science and I was successful at it he was so relieved it was like a this this kid will not be living in my basement forever. So he was very happy about that and it got to the point where he was not following the in them the most current Here's a I love this example so we were on vacation on an island in the middle of a lake there were no no electricity no T.V. no radio except he had a portable radio in his cabin and he came up to breakfast one day and he said you know I just heard this thing on the radio and it's I must have been dreaming because they were talking about a meteorite that came from Mars and I said that's ridiculous there's no such thing as a meteorite that came from Mars but I already knew that there was such a thing that we have found such meteorites in Antarctica where they they were blasted off the surface of Mars wandered around for a few 1000000 years and fell to Earth on the ice of Antarctica where you can find them easily and we can tell because of the landers that went there in the seventy's what the composition of the of the rocks were like there in the atmospheric composition the isotopes of different chemicals so we know these things came from Mars and he didn't know that so I was able to the know dad actually we we have found.

[00:54:47]
Meter us from our so I was able to start educating him which is kind of funny I saw yes in the back. Well so that it's in the work I had it was so the question of did you hear it all. The I had already acquired the kind of skills that I needed at Science Digest magazine because the stories we wrote were very much similar to what you would see in Time magazine similar length similar structure so so this editor who had seen my work knew that I could do the actual job not something resembling the job.

[00:55:38]
And so that was so there wasn't a big learning curve there obviously I wasn't part of that in the I got edited but I really kind of knew how to do the job I was fast because Science Digest was a monthly magazine which meant once a month you had to write several stories here you had to write every week because it was a weekly magazine and sometimes you didn't even know what you're writing in till Wednesday and the magazine had to be all closed up by Friday so you had to be fast I just naturally happened to be for a reason no reason I can explain just it's just a fact so that worked out.

[00:56:16]
And one thing that. They thought would be a drawback after I'd been there for a couple months the editor came to me and said Now look you can do great we like your work but there comes a time in EVERY TIME magazine writers early career where he was all almost all he at that time or he or she suddenly realized my god my words are reaching millions of people every week and they freeze up it's just too overwhelming and he said Don't worry we all go through it.

[00:56:47]
You'll get over it never happened and the reason never happened is because I never quite believed it so I was writing these stories you know in my little cubicle at Time magazine but the idea that millions of people were actually reading them it seemed too ridiculous to believe and I had evidence obviously that you know but it just it seemed like.

[00:57:10]
Some alternate universe where this is your so I never I never got frightened and I just can't do it again very lucky I see one back there right well so so I didn't learn so I myself have a stepson who was 12 when I. When I got married and for most of the teenage years he assumed I could actually do the science I was writing about and he was very disillusioned and I said you kidding me I couldn't do any of this so I learned about science but only at a kind of a narrative level a level of storytelling and you know the way I learned was to go to science and say what you know your own newspaper and it seems to be saying this can you explain it to me you know tell me what you did and how you did it and what you found out and how you felt about it and if the explanation was too complicated I would say I didn't understand what you just said please can you do it a little more simply pretend you're talking to you or your.

[00:58:20]
You know your brother in law the used car salesman who you know only finished 8th grade or something. And only by doing that did I gradually begin to understand what a particular story was about and I would repeat back what my understanding so I didn't mess up too badly.

[00:58:40]
And you know as I did this over and over I began to get a greater sense of what the different things were that scientists were working on and where a new discovery fit in so so with something like biology I was basically scrambling all the time because I never did.

[00:58:59]
Really deeply grass biology and genetics and stuff I could write about and they're very superficial way but we're strong to me which is what I was still interested in I learned enough that I could actually and this is not a threat but it's a fact I could start now and give you a I talk about the big bang in the evolution of the universe and dark matter and dark energy off the top of my head and be more or less accurate.

[00:59:26]
Simply because I've been talking to people about it for so long so doing stuff over and over for many many years forces you to learn whether you want to or not and that's how I end up writing a couple of books about astronomy and you know even my knowledge got deeper and again it's nothing compared to the knowledge of a real scientist but I don't need the knowledge of a real scientist to translate the science as long as I can ask questions and I can ask dumb questions and not be embarrassed by it.

[00:59:59]
You know I consider science so are you saying that such and such is why a star explodes you know that's not it at all let me explain it again as long as you're willing to be dumb. Yeah you can say you can learn a lot of a lot of stuff a lot of information I think we're Yeah well that's about 7 o'clock things like.

[01:00:20]
This firing off 5 D. minus. National sized And last thing is the reason I'm listed on the astrophysics faculty is that I write a lot about astronomy we have no journalism department but to get it to be have an academic appointment in Princeton you have to be affiliated with a department so that's the most natural one so they stuck me in there but if you if I got up and tried to give a lecture on actual astrophysics it would not be good so he'll linger here for about 10 min or so he's got business cards I mean he met with the technique in any way and interesting interview and op ed Sure I'll give you one of his free business cards and you'll read your email.

[01:01:00]
But let's thank him one last time thanks all for coming out.