2133rd Stated Meeting | March 9, 2025 | California Science Center, Los Angeles, CA
On March 9, 2025, the Academy’s Los Angeles Committee hosted an event for members and guests on Science and Creativity. The program began with welcome remarks from Academy President Laurie L. Patton, followed by the presentation of the Rumford Prize to Andrea M. Ghez and then a brief introduction from Cynthia M. Friend (The Kavli Foundation; Harvard University). The program continued with a discussion on how creativity and imagination fuel scientific discovery, and how science inspires artistic expression. The discussion, moderated by Thomas F. Rosenbaum (California Institute of Technology), featured Andrea M. Ghez (University of California, Los Angeles), Kip S. Thorne (California Institute of Technology), and Risa H. Wechsler (Stanford University). An edited transcript of the program follows. The event was supported in part by The Kavli Foundation.
The Rumford Prize Awarded to Andrea M. Ghez
Citation
Established in 1839, the American Academy’s Rumford Prize recognizes contributions in the fields of heat and light. The prize is named for physicist and inventor Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the nineteenth-century revolution in thermodynamics. The Rumford Prize recognizes scientific discoveries and their potential applications that could fundamentally alter our understanding of heat and light. In the words of Count Rumford, the award is for work that “in the opinion of the Academy tends most to promote the good of mankind.”
For remarkable achievements in “heat and light,” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences hereby recognizes Andrea M. Ghez for her groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of black holes and their profound implications for the nature of light and gravity.
Through her pioneering work in high-resolution infrared imaging, she has revolutionized the study of the Milky Way’s center, providing definitive evidence of a supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Using cutting-edge adaptive optics, she and her team have developed innovative observational techniques that have enabled the precise tracking of stars orbiting Sagittarius A* and provided the most direct empirical proof of Einstein’s general theory of relativity in extreme gravitational conditions. Her work has transformed our understanding of the interplay between light and gravity, revealing how these forces shape the universe at its most fundamental levels. Her innovative methodologies and leadership in astrophysical research have set new standards for the field, her dedication to public outreach has enhanced the public’s appreciation of space science, and her contributions to science communication have helped make complex astronomical concepts more accessible to a global audience.
Nobel laureate, passionate educator, beloved mentor, and tireless advocate for science education, your influence extends far beyond the research community. You have inspired generations of scientists to follow their passion to explore new ideas and fostered a broader public appreciation for the mysteries of the cosmos.
Awarded the Ninth Day of March, Two Thousand and Twenty-Five
Andrea M. Ghez
Andrea M. Ghez is Professor of Physics & Astronomy and Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics at University of California, Los Angeles. She was elected to the American Academy in 2004.
I’m touched and honored to receive this award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in particular, to receive it here in LA. The work that’s being recognized today started in LA and has continued over the last thirty years. It started when I first got my job at UCLA, when all I was thinking about at that time was how to get tenure. It began as a very small, short-term, three-year, small investment, high-risk project. And the first telescope proposal was turned down. That’s when I really learned to embrace what has now become my favorite expression: every challenge is an opportunity. The opportunity then was to learn to communicate better, to write a better proposal, to understand the importance of giving talks and convincing your colleagues that this is a good idea. Fortunately, we succeeded, and the following year we were off and running. It’s a project that has grown beyond our wildest imagination. Frankly, I could not have imagined where we would be today in terms of the scientific questions that we’re asking. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later, so I’ll leave it at that. This was and continues to be a team effort. It is, without a doubt, a great example of where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Let me acknowledge and thank the team members who are here today: Eric Becklin, Mark Morris who couldn’t make it at the last moment, Tuan Do, Shoko Sakai, Greg Martinez, and Chris Borgman. Thank you once again for this recognition.
Cynthia M. Friend
Cynthia M. Friend is President and CEO of The Kavli Foundation and the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, Emerita, at Harvard University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
Congratulations, Andrea, on receiving the Rumford Prize. It’s a pleasure to be here and to see so many people interested in our topic: creativity in science. The Kavli Foundation is a strong supporter of basic science and of scientific research in astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience, and theoretical physics. And we are committed to all of this for the long run.
The idea for this event originated about a year ago at another Academy event held at The Getty that focused on creativity in the arts. Several of us, including Tom Rosenbaum, our moderator today and president of Caltech, wanted to underscore the creativity that goes into great scientific breakthroughs and ideas. We often think of science as being factual, as being analytical—and, of course, it is. Some people would say science is boring and geeky, and maybe that’s true. But I think it’s essential to recognize that creativity is very important in science. You cannot have a scientific breakthrough, an emerging idea, without creativity. Luckily with Geoff Cowan’s help and guidance, we were able to bring this topic to fruition.
Today, when it’s more important than ever to underscore the value of creativity in science and the vital role that scientific research plays in our world, we are fortunate to have a talented group of panelists who exemplify and illustrate the creativity that I’m talking about. It is my pleasure to introduce them. Andrea Ghez is the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Los Angeles. She is a Nobel laureate, a member of the American Academy, and now the recipient of the Rumford Prize. Not only is Andrea a world-class scientist, but she’s also an incredible communicator and has inspired countless numbers of scientists. She is devoted to fostering the next generation of scientists in astrophysics.
Kip Thorne is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech. He was elected to the American Academy in 1972, and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017 for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and for his groundbreaking work in gravitational research. In addition, he writes poetry and books and has been involved in a number of movies, most notably Interstellar.
Our third panelist is Risa Wechsler, Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University. She’s also the Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford. And she was the coleader of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) experiment. In addition, Risa is a prolific ambassador for science and is devoted to science communication. She was elected to the American Academy in 2023. It is my pleasure now to turn the podium over to my colleague, Tom Rosenbaum, President of Caltech, Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair, and Professor of Physics, who will moderate today’s discussion.
Thomas F. Rosenbaum
Thomas F. Rosenbaum is President of the California Institute of Technology; Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair; and Professor of Physics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.
Thank you, Cynthia, and welcome all. It’s wonderful to see old friends and new friends, especially at fraught times, to remind ourselves that what we do is an important endeavor. I hope that in this exploration with our distinguished panel, we’ll have an opportunity to do just that. Now it is my pleasure to turn to Kip Thorne.
Kip S. Thorne
Kip S. Thorne is Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at California Institute of Technology. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972.
Thank you, Tom. I would like to describe a creative and beautiful breakthrough in 1981 by one of my students, Carlton Caves, that will serve as a foundation for some of the remarks that I’ll make later in the program. Caves’s breakthrough is on its way to impacting twenty-first-century technology in a big way. The concept underlying Caves’s breakthrough is vacuum fluctuations. If we take a box and remove from it everything that possibly can be removed, then the laws of physics dictate that there remain incredibly tiny fluctuations of everything that could have been in the box. For example, protons, electrons, and photons fluctuating in and out of existence randomly. Virtual particles, they are sometimes called.
As further background for Caves’s breakthrough, the universe manipulates vacuum fluctuations in amazing ways. For example, there is much observational evidence that the universe was born in a big bang explosion, with space expanding or, as we say, inflating exponentially rapidly. And it was born containing the minimum amount of matter that is allowed by the laws of physics: just vacuum fluctuations. These vacuum fluctuations have voracious appetites. In our universe’s earliest moments, the vacuum fluctuations fed off the energy of the inflating space, extracting just the right amount of energy to convert themselves into all the matter and all the radiation that we see in the universe today. This was familiar to Caves, along with other powerful ways in which the universe manipulates vacuum fluctuations.
In 1981, when Caves was just completing his PhD with me at Caltech, my colleagues and I were working on R&D for LIGO, an observatory for detecting gravitational waves and thereby creating gravitational wave astronomy. In a simplified version of LIGO, two mirrors hang from overhead supports at the ends of two arms of an L. A laser produces a beam that gets split in two, with the two beams going down the two arms. Each beam bounces off the mirror at the end of its arm, and the beams then return to the beam splitter. If the two arms have identical lengths, then the beams completely interfere and no light goes into the photodetector. When the gravitational wave stretches and squeezes the arms, the interference is modified, so the photodetector sees rising and falling light intensity—the gravitational wave signal arriving at LIGO’s output port. In the figure below, we see a photo of one of the mirrors thirty years later. It’s big and heavy—40 kilograms, 88 pounds. The laser beam records the motion of each mirror’s center of mass, the average location of all of the mirror’s atoms. That center of mass oscillates in response to the gravitational waves by such an incredibly tiny amount that quantum fluctuations of the center of mass position, 100 million times smaller than an atom, were a serious worry for us in 1981. Those mirror fluctuations produce noise in the output signal—call it mirror noise—that might be big enough to hide the gravitational waves we were seeking.
Caves had the crucial insight that vacuum fluctuations of light entering LIGO through its output port and traveling into the two arms and onward to the end mirrors will beat against the laser light to produce random fluctuations of light pressure on the mirrors’ faces, and thereby control the mirror fluctuations, and the mirror noise in the gravitational wave signal that is exiting the output port. Caves also had a second insight—and these insights were so radical that no one else in the community had come close to them before. His second insight was that the vacuum fluctuations themselves returning to the output port will beat against the light signal there to produce random fluctuations, called shot noise, that contaminate the signal. And this led Caves, with some help from his friend Bill Unruh, to the biggest insight of all: By manipulating the incoming vacuum fluctuations in a very clever way, called frequency-dependent squeezing, the shot noise and the mirror noise in the output signal can be made to cancel each other.
That was a radical insight, and it was completely unexpected. LIGO can be completely protected from both quantum noises, at least in principle. Caves told us what needed to be done: squeeze the vacuum fluctuations. Jeff Kimble, down the hall from Caves at Caltech, figured out how. He invented and demonstrated the technology for this frequency-dependent squeezing. Bringing that technology to fruition has been a near forty-year concerted effort, mostly by the LIGO team. The result, called quantum precision measurement technology, has now been fully implemented into LIGO and is one of the major keys to LIGO now seeing several collisions of black holes each week. This quantum precision measurement technology is closely related to quantum computing and quantum cryptography and will have many other applications beyond LIGO in the coming years.
At Caltech, a new building with underground laboratories, called the Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement, is under construction. Caltech and a number of start-up companies are now pursuing quantum precision measurement on the atomic and nanotechnology scale, under the alternative name of quantum sensing. So that’s where this has all led in the end. Thank you.
ROSENBAUM: Thank you, Kip. We wanted to make this real and give you a sense of the objects and machinery that are used in the scientific creative process. Continuing on that theme, let us now turn to Risa.
Risa H. Wechsler
Risa H. Wechsler is Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology; Humanities and Sciences Professor; and Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. I would like to talk briefly about the kind of work I do and highlight both the collaboration and communication of this work. I’m a cosmologist, so I study the entire universe. I’m interested in how the last 13.8 billion years unfolded—what happened over that time, how we use measurements of galaxies to learn about what the universe is made of at its most fundamental level, and how galaxies like our Milky Way formed. We use very large cosmological simulations run on supercomputers to help us do this. A wonderful thing about these simulations is they enable us to see what is happening in the universe over 13.8 billion years and make predictions for what we measure when we survey the universe.
We think every one of the hundreds of billions or trillions of galaxies in the universe forms in the center of a clump of dark matter. One thing that the three of us on this panel have in common is that all of us, in different ways, use gravity to teach us about what the universe is doing—the influence of gravity on light teaches us about the things we can’t see—from dark matter to black holes. For me, the key thing that we can’t see is dark matter, but these calculations enable us to see it. One of the things I love about my work is we can map the universe at high precision with large telescopes, and I work with incredibly large teams to do this. In the first image below, the middle of the image shows a galaxy like the Milky Way, and what you see here is the structure surrounding that galaxy. With the kinds of surveys that we are able to do now, we are starting to make maps that look like this, and we are seeing this structure, which we were predicting for a long time.
I would like to end by telling you about an interesting collaboration. I am working with Camille Utterback, an incredible artist who is a professor of art practice at Stanford. We have been friends for about a decade and have been talking about the universe: how we think about it and how we explain it to people who are not cosmologists. She is not a cosmologist. She does a lot of large installation work, which includes interactive video. Recently she was commissioned to develop a permanent work for Stanford’s new data science building, which has an incredible three-story stairwell. Her installation uses five different triangles, which represent different kinds of data—from the first mechanical histograms to studying water in the Seine to Jacquard weaving, which was a complicated way to track various kinds of data.
The triangle on the left that we see in the image below is an example of a piece of the universe that forms the Milky Way. It is a beautiful, etched, hand-painted piece of glass. We received a grant last week to start working on incorporating new data into the exhibit. There’s an incredible telescope called the Vera Rubin Observatory that is operated jointly by the NSF NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford. We built a 3.2-gigapixel camera for this new observatory, and it was installed just three days ago. This telescope is going to be surveying the entire southern sky starting in a few months. We are excited that the Rubin data will give us a better understanding of our universe and delve into the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. In addition to the many scientific discoveries that we hope to make, we are also thinking about how we communicate that to people in very broad ways. And so with Camille, we’re working on ways to incorporate those new data and discoveries into her installation. Thank you.
ROSENBAUM: Let’s turn now to Andrea Ghez.
Andrea M. Ghez
I grew up in a household with lots of art, and one of my favorite pieces is Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. I had a poster of this photograph on my bedroom door when I was in high school. Today, the photograph is in my living room. I love this piece of art on many levels. There’s an obvious juxtaposition of masculinity and femininity, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that appealed to me as a young girl going into the sciences and headed off to MIT. But today, I think of it slightly differently, in the sense of what happens when you bring together ideas that we think conflict, and the resolution of those ideas leads to something that’s very beautiful.
As a scientist, my tools are different but similar to what Mapplethorpe used. I also use a camera like Mapplethorpe but my cameras are the largest telescopes in the world, co-owned by Caltech and the University of California. In fact, they were just opening as I started my faculty job. It’s why I wanted to work at UCLA. I was interested in using these telescopes in a new and different way.
Astronomers love big telescopes. They let us see things that are very faint so we get to study the distant universe. But they also let us see a lot of detail, which has been harder for us to achieve. Much of my work is focused on overcoming the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. The analogy that I like to make is to Pointillism, about getting closer to a painting to see the details, and that’s possible in the universe. It’s been a long journey of technological development—about forty years. And we can now see the universe in a completely new and different way, which has upended our notions of how the universe works.
We’ve been trying to understand if there’s a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. And that involved discovering stars and showing that you could actually measure the orbits. It was a long process of figuring out that we could measure these orbits and do this kind of work. The evidence has been increased by a factor of 10,000,000 for the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy. This was also a unique opportunity to understand the interplay between the black hole and its host galaxy, which really gets at what Risa was talking about in terms of the role black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies. The wonderful thing about technology is that not only are you able to answer the question that you set out to answer, but often, you have surprises. In this process, we’ve discovered more questions than answers. And that’s the fun of science.
ROSENBAUM: Thank you, Andrea. To get our discussion going, I’ll start with Kip, but I hope everybody will jump in. How did you first become interested in science and technology? Were you drawn to both from the start, or did one lead you to the other?
THORNE: When I was about eight years old, I wanted to be a snowplow driver. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains and the plows pushed the snow three times higher than my father was tall. But then a lecture about the solar system broke my fixation on snowplows and in its place enchanted me with the vastness of the solar system. My mother showed me how to do calculations to scale the solar system down to where the sun was a four-foot circle on the sidewalk in front of our house and the Earth was about a centimeter in diameter in front of the third house down the street. Just seeing that and the vast emptiness in between inspired me.
For me, science and technology are so intimately intertwined that it’s not clear where one ends and the other starts. The motivation for Carlton Caves’s insights was the challenge of detecting gravitational waves, an enormous technological challenge. His insights were based on science: a deep understanding of quantum physics. He was immersed in a research group that had lots of ideas floating around, and they triggered his insight into how to control quantum fluctuations. The result was today’s technology. So the science and the technology are totally intertwined.
ROSENBAUM: Risa, tell us about your intellectual journey.
WECHSLER: I was always curious about everything. I was one of those annoying kids who asks “why” about every topic. I love to be in nature. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and spent a lot of time in the mountains, and I was always interested in how things worked in the world around me. But the biggest questions also inspired me, and for that reason I decided to be a physicist. I thought physics was asking the biggest questions, such as what is the universe made of? How did it form? I feel incredibly lucky that today I still get to ask these types of questions. To me, that’s the most wonderful thing about a scientific career in cosmology. There is such universal interest in questions about astronomy and that keeps me curious every day.
What’s interesting is that initially I didn’t have a real interest in technology. But I have learned to appreciate that in physics and really in the last thirty years in astronomy the data have driven all of our discoveries, and technology has enabled us to make those measurements. I’ve had many collaborations with people who are building precision instruments that enable the kinds of discoveries that we’ve been able to make. And those collaborations have been so valuable.
ROSENBAUM: Andrea, your mother ran an incredibly famous art gallery in Chicago. Did that influence your pathway into science in some way?
GHEZ: That’s an interesting question. My mom was a great role model. She also was an example of the American dream because she started in an art gallery as the administrative assistant and then became the director who was well-known for identifying artists. And that’s the kind of soup I grew up in: fearless and no barriers. What enables you to go in that direction is really curiosity. For me, the scientific seed that I can identify is the moon landing, when I was four years old. It completely captured my imagination. My parents gave my sisters and I a telescope, and we looked at the moon for a while, then we started looking at people’s apartments, so the telescope went away! But it seeded this idea that there’s something so much bigger than what we can see. One of the amazing things about the field of astronomy and astrophysics is that gateway into exploring your curiosity about science. By the way, I also wanted to be a ballet dancer and drop out of school when I was sixteen, but I quickly discovered I had more talent in science than dance.
In college at MIT, there was a group that played an important role in X-ray astronomy, which opened up studying about black holes. I first got introduced to the power of technology when I went off to Caltech, thinking I was going to follow high energy astrophysics. And then there was this cool, new technique that people were advertising that could solve all these problems about black holes, so I drifted over there. But it didn’t deliver on its promise. I wanted to share this because there’s an interesting juncture when students often have to decide between pursuing the science or the technology. I decided to stick with the technology. That was my journey.
ROSENBAUM: Thank you. I would like to share a quote from France Córdova, who was director of the National Science Foundation and she earned a PhD in physics from Caltech. About seven or eight years ago, she wrote, “Perhaps surprisingly, the single thing that most prepared me to persevere with the trials of graduate school was rock climbing. Climbing requires trust in one’s partners, patience, practice, and more practice. The moments of expansiveness when you are at rest, perched on a crag hundreds of feet above a valley floor with your mind roaming freely, can lead to epiphanies.” So tell us about your epiphanies, whether you’re on a crag hanging above the ground or not.
THORNE: My epiphanies usually come in the middle of the night. If I’ve been struggling with some issue, I have many different aspects of it in the front of my brain, and at night, my subconscious can somehow make connections between things that the front part of my brain doesn’t make. There just seems to be too much going on during the day. I’m one of those people who wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea. I write it down, and frequently, it’s a good idea!
WECHSLER: Like Andrea, I was a ballet dancer when I was young, and ballet taught me the perseverance that I needed in order to be a physicist. Ballet actually has a lot of things in common with physics. There’s rigor, and you have to practice and practice. There’s a vocabulary, but you can be creative within that vocabulary. I’m not like Kip. I don’t have brilliant thoughts in the middle of the night. They are mostly too jumbled. Most of my epiphanies come from collaboration and discussion. And that’s why I try to get brave with the kinds of collaborations that I have. I hire postdocs in my group who have very different expertise than I do. I like to collaborate with artists and musicians because they help me see my own work in different ways. They help me look at a problem in a new way.
GHEZ: My most productive or creative place is the pool because I like to swim. When you are swimming you really have to be one with your thoughts. You can’t put headphones on, you can’t listen to a podcast, you can’t distract yourself in all sorts of ways. It’s similar to having your best ideas in the shower. It’s a place where you can let your brain rest. But there’s also something about the activity that gets your brain in a different state. Some of my lane mates are here. They know when I’m in that mode and lose count of my laps.
ROSENBAUM: All of that resonates with me in terms of letting your mind go. I’ve written the first few paragraphs of papers in my head while running! We’re all in the business of training the next generation. How do you communicate this incredible and palpable sense of the excitement of science to your students?
THORNE: I’m not in that stage anymore, but for nearly fifty years, I had a research group at Caltech, which I patterned after the research group that Robert Oppenheimer had at Berkeley and Caltech many years earlier. I had grad students. I had postdocs. I had research faculty and visitors. I built a group in which there was a rich plethora of ideas so people were always bathed in exciting ideas. Some of them deep, some of them not so deep, some tied to technology, some tied to science. And my students’ inspiration often came from being immersed in that ambience.
GHEZ: I think there are two forms of mentoring students. One is in the research world, where we’re training them on how to do research, and to figure out those structures that allow you to be unstructured. In my group, those opportunities often come from using the telescope in what we call traditional ways. You’re assigned your night, and then you stay up all night controlling the instrument yourself. But the cloudy nights are actually the most interesting because that’s when you work on the new ideas, and that’s when you brainstorm. My group and I have spent many very productive cloudy nights together. And that’s when I really see students light up because they get much more than just the mechanics and how to do problem sets. It is the opportunity to interact with them that is exciting. And when COVID took that away, I began to appreciate how important it was to our work. The other form, of course, is teaching in the classroom, and I’ve discovered the joys of teaching at the introductory level, because that’s when the students are keen to learn. That’s when you really can share the joy of doing science with them. So I think bringing the research into the classroom is important.
WECHSLER: I love teaching undergraduate cosmology to nonmajors. These are people for whom this may be their first and last science class in college, and in that environment, I like to share the excitement, passion, and joy I have as a scientist—the fact that we are able to have this incredible curiosity and then make real measurements of our universe. In my research group, I try to give every person agency for their own career and their own research questions. I really see my role as helping them figure out what that vision is and then giving them the tools to achieve it.
ROSENBAUM: Before turning to questions from our audience, let’s finish with a lightning round. You have two bricklayers, and one says, “I’m laying bricks” and the other says, “I’m building a cathedral.” What cathedral are you building right now?
THORNE: I was a conventional professor for about fifty years, and decided that for my next half century, I wanted something different that was equally exciting and equally enjoyable. I chose communicating science to the world through the arts. I tried through the movie Interstellar to inspire people about science and about what I like to call the Warped Side of the Universe, which is the venue in which that movie exists. I started that movie together with Linda Obst, who sadly passed away a few months ago. But it was really Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan who turned Interstellar into the great success it was. Collaborating with them was a tremendous joy. I also have had a wonderful collaboration with Lia Halloran, who is a fabulous painter. I think about the laws of physics visually. My mental pictures help me to decide what research directions are worthwhile. Lia has converted my mental pictures into enchanting paintings, and we are using tightly integrated paintings and verse—her paintings; my verse—to try to communicate science to nonscientists. And it’s all enormous fun.
WECHSLER: I think that humans have been building this cathedral of trying to understand how the universe works since the first humans tried to understand why the stars and planets were moving as they were. And I feel so lucky to be a part of this quest: to understand how the universe formed and what it’s made of. I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what this dark matter is that makes up most of the mass in the universe, and it’s a really hard problem. We may not solve it in my lifetime, but it would be worth several cathedrals if we could figure it out. So that’s my cathedral, and I feel lucky to be able to put a few bricks in.
GHEZ: I’m sure this won’t surprise anyone, but for me it is the big telescope. This technology is bringing the world together. It’s a project that crosses many different countries, and it is an important role that science can play in terms of global participation and cooperation.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do we do in the face of relentless attacks on science and scientific money funding the universities that all of you are a part of? You are fantastic communicators. Please tell us how to communicate that what scientists do is important.
GHEZ: This is really the intent of the comment about every challenge is an opportunity. We have an opportunity now to think about the role of higher education in a democracy. It is an opportunity for us to think deeply about our mission and how we communicate that. There are certain structures that we work with that are hard to explain, and I think it behooves us, in this moment of complexity, to come together outside our specific disciplines to seize our opportunity.
THORNE: What I’m struck by is the extent of disinformation and misinformation that we are being bathed in from Washington and elsewhere. Let me give you an example. I had an Uber driver a couple of days ago who was caught up in misinformation about vaccines, so we had a conversation. I told him that there are places where you can go to learn the truth. There are reliable sources, like the CDC, but you need to know where to find those reliable sources. Unfortunately, the general public has not learned how to identify reliable sources of information, and I think a huge part of the challenge is to communicate this issue to the broad public and try to help them identify reliable sources of information. Universities are and should be one of those sources.
ROSENBAUM: Let me put in a plug for the Caltech Science Exchange.
WECHSLER: I don’t have any real answers, but I think a place to start is to articulate what we are trying to do over the long term and think deeply about how we have a conversation across disciplines and outside of academia about building knowledge and having access to knowledge as a fundamental human value.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In thinking about the intersection between science and the arts, science and creativity, if you ask any thoughtful person about these intersections, high on the list would be religion. Is there a connection between cosmology and religion?
WECHSLER: There are many ways in which both religion and our study of the universe are fundamentally about trying to understand how things work. It’s also about awe. That is something that cosmology and religion have in common, which resonates with a lot of people. I think we should look for opportunities to share our wonder and our awe in the universe in ways that don’t conflict with people’s beliefs.
GHEZ: The Templeton Foundation is interested in this intersection between science and religion, and a lot of astronomers have been supported in that arena. To me, it makes perfect sense.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We are all mortal creatures. If you could come back fifty years after your death, what question from your scientific research would you be most interested to see answered, especially through the work of a student, researcher, or someone who carried your research forward?
GHEZ: I would like to know, what is a black hole?
WECHSLER: I want to know, what is dark matter?
THORNE: I want a reliable understanding of the birth of the universe and the laws of quantum gravity, which presumably controlled the birth of the universe.
ROSENBAUM: So we will reconvene in fifty years, and you will hear the answers to those questions. I thank our esteemed panelists for this extraordinary conversation, and I thank our audience for joining us.
© 2025 by Andrea M. Ghez, Cynthia M. Friend, Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Kip S. Thorne, and Risa H. Wechsler.
To view or listen to the presentation, visit the Academy’s website.