anthony: what do they do down here? some pretty trippy shit as it turns out. this is the bicep in the dark sector lab and the south pole telescope, ten meters across mapping thousands of degrees of sky. today, they are installing the most advanced camera of its kind. dan: it s the third generation south pole telescope camera. 16,000 pixels, it weighs about 2,500 pounds. in a couple of days, we re going to pull it up into the telescope and try and see if we can hit the sky with it. anthony: very cool, it s like a bond villain stuff. dan: yeah, i know, that s right. anthony: astrophysicists like dan marrone will be looking through those telescopes at, get
accrued understanding. anthony: who s interested? like who s most likely to benefit? dan: there s no immediate answer to that question. anthony: but you re asking basic questions about the fundamental nature of matter, time, space. surely there were people asking those kinds of questions that led directly to technologies that we take for granted now. dan: that s right. i mean there s no question. we have to solve hard problems to do these things and when we solve them they have other applications. i ve always thought of this basic research trying to understand the universe as one of the most hopeful things that humans do. we just want to know. anthony: what s at the other end of that? wouldn t you kind of like to know? at a time when science is held in open contempt, when painfully acquired data is actually being deleted from computers if it conflicts with preconceived policies, these guys are looking at some deep stuff. where do we come from?
anthony: what do they do down here? some pretty trippy shit as it turns out. this is the bicep in the dark sector lab and the south pole telescope, ten meters across mapping thousands of degrees of sky. today, they are installing the most advanced camera of its kind. dan: it s the third generation south pole telescope camera. 16,000 pixels, it weighs about 2,500 pounds. in a couple of days, we re going to pull it up into the telescope and try and see if we can hit the sky with it. anthony: very cool, it s like a bond villain stuff. dan: yeah, i know that s right. anthony: astrophysicists like dan marrone will be looking through those telescopes at, get this, sagittarius a, the freakin black hole at the center of the milky way. dan: we think we know what black holes look like, but no one s ever actually looked at one and if you can build a telescope the size of the entire earth, you can actually see with
enough resolution you can watch things just swirling around disappearing into the black hole. we re basically taking every sublinear telescope in the world to synthesize one telescope that s 11,000 kilometers across, basically the size of the entire earth. anthony: really? dan: so that we can take the picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. anthony: wow. south pole is particularly useful because dan: there s no other site like this. the atmosphere is extremely stable. it s extremely clear. there s no water in it, water absorbs the microbes we re looking at. so, you can just map the sky day and night for 6 months a year without stopping, and it gives the best maps we can make short of going to space. anthony: i grew up in the kennedy era, where the space program was everything. the first man on the moon, the space race, the whole nation can t wait till we could get to mars. nobody gives a [ bleep ] now. i mean, have you seen that change because i felt it chang
like who s most likely to benefit? dan: there s no immediate answer to that question. anthony: but you re asking basic questions about the fundamental nature of matter, time, space. surely there were people asking those kinds of questions that led directly to technologies painfully acquired data