The State of the Universe at the End of the Millennium.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JULY 02, 1997
Time: 12:00
Tran: 070201np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: The Whole Shebang
Sect: Science
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

"What are we doing here?" and "how did we get here?" are the big questions for cosmologists, scientists who study the structure and history of the universe. Science writer Timothy Ferris points out that we live in a changing universe and few things are changing faster than our conception of it.

In his new book, "The Whole Shebang," Ferris reports on the state of the universe at the end of the millennium. Ferris is the author of the bestseller "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" and he's a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

He says cosmology today is mostly conducted within the broad framework of the big bang theory, which may surprise you considering many newspaper and magazine articles have reported that new findings put the big bang theory in jeopardy.

TIMOTHY FERRIS, AUTHOR, "THE WHOLE SHEBANG: A STATE OF THE UNIVERSE (S) REPORT": Although the big bang theory has been pronounced ill or dying or dead on the front pages of newspapers and the covers of news magazines, for some reason, I think the theory's in great shape. I would say that its status is comparable to Darwin's theory of evolution.

And the similarity between those two theories is also that each is a large, commodious theory. It's not just a narrow little account. It contains a lot of room for work. You know, Darwin went to his grave without even knowing about genes, a basic component that was necessary for his theory to be correct; without knowing the correct age for the Earth, was another problem.

And similarly, there are certainly problems within the big bang arena, but I think it's clear that the universe is expanding and that at some point, roughly 15 billion years ago, the whole universe -- all of space and time, matter and energy -- was concentrated in some form, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. It's been unfolding or blossoming like a flower ever since then.

So the astonishing thing to have discovered, and on this planet we didn't even begin to discover that until 1929. So it's hardly surprising that, you know, we've learned a lot since then because we started knowing almost nothing about the universe.

GROSS: Where is the big bang theory weakest now?

FERRIS: Well, one area of controversy with the big bang is the question of how fast the universe is expanding, which bears on the age of the universe.

For some reason, when you use one set of tools to measure the distances of galaxies, you get an expansion rate that is considerably faster -- probably a good, oh, half-again faster -- than if you use another set of tools.

And so, if that first set of tools is correct -- if those results are correct -- the universe is younger than I was saying. It might be under 10 billion years old, and that would be a problem because we know that some of the stars in the universe are a little more than 10 billion years old.

I think that will be solved and I think it will be resolved in favor of the older universe scale, and I've taken that position in the book. But that's definitely an area of controversy.

And of course, the origin of the universe remains quite mysterious. There has been some good work on that, but it might be one of those questions that is forever unanswerable. That really is an almost-unthinkable issue.

GROSS: There is increasing evidence that there are other universes, and I really can't begin to understand what that would mean.

LAUGHTER

What would it mean to have another universe?

FERRIS: Well, let's model our universe as the surface of, let's say, a soap bubble, so that three-dimensional space in this model is just the surface of the soap bubble and the bubble is expanding. That's sort of what cosmic space may be like. You can look in all directions. You never see an edge, but it's still a finite volume.

Studies have been done on how the expansion of the universe began. In recent decades, they've been using a version called "inflation." It's a very interesting form of the big bang theory. It solves a lot of problems in the theory and it gives you a natural physical mechanism for starting the expansion. It comes out of the quantum mechanics of the -- of vacuum.

So you get all these marvelous benefits from inflation, but the price you pay is that inflation envisions the universe as having begun -- that bubble -- as having begun as a bubble from a pre-existing space. It's very theoretical and it might even be impossible to prove, in which case it's not even a scientific idea, ultimately. But there is something quite beautiful and elegant about it, and it just might be true.

GROSS: If you use your imagination, what do you think this -- another universe might be like?

FERRIS: Well, one aspect of it that's quite interesting is that if you look at the laws of physics in our universe, to use that term -- the one in which we live -- there are a lot of aspects of natural law that don't seem inevitable. There doesn't seem to be any compelling reason -- perhaps there is and it hasn't been unearthed yet -- why, for instance, gravity should have the strength it has and not some different strength.

Now, if there are a lot of universes, it could be that each universe has an arbitrarily selected set of natural laws. They just fall out as a result of the parameters of the vacuum from which the universe originates in that bubble.

And in that case, you would -- you could imagine universes in which the gravity -- gravity's a lot stronger. Such a universe might expand and contract again and oblitherate in a fraction of a second -- no life, in such a universe.

Other universes might have a much weaker gravitational constant and the expansion would continue -- the universe would just go through this inflationary phase in which it's just an empty, expanding bubble with nothing ever in it -- forever. It's an interesting philosophical question whether such a universe may be said to exist. It would -- no life, no observers.

So one curious element of this theory is it lets you start thinking about even the fundamental laws of nature as perhaps just one option. It allows you to think that perhaps some universes play host to life and others don't.

GROSS: Gee.

LAUGHTER

It's -- yeah, it's just really difficult to grasp ideas like that. Now, let's get back to something that you were talking about, which is inflation. Do you want to explain what inflation is?

FERRIS: Hmm.

GROSS: Is this too hard to do?

FERRIS: No, no. Inflation is a model in which the expansion of the universe begins at a much higher rate than takes place thereafter. The universe expands much, much faster than the velocity of light, which it's allowed to do, by the way.

The universe gets a sort of hall-pass that exempts it from the relativity limit that you can't -- things can't go faster than light, because it's the expansion of space itself, and it determines the inertial frame within which these things are measured.

The inflationary model has this super-luminal -- this faster-than-light expansion begin when the universe is about the size of a proton, and it ends in a fraction of a second, for our universe, when the universe is about the size of a grapefruit. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but it actually makes a tremendous difference in what -- in the universe that you get out afterwards.

And one difference is the universe turns out to be much, much bigger. The part of the universe we can see -- the observable universe -- is limited by the amount of -- by the age of the universe. We -- the universe is only 15 billion years old, let's say, so the radius of the observable universe is 15 billion light years. That's as far as we can see.

And it used to be thought in the old models that that was about two-thirds of the whole universe. But if inflation is correct, then the universe is much, much bigger, and if we modeled the whole universe as the surface of the Earth, let's say, the observable part of it is only about the size of a silver dollar. So one consequence of inflation is the universe is much bigger.

And another is that the curvature of cosmic space will look flat to everyone. Now this was sort of a mystery in cosmology. We thought from relativity -- we know that space ought to have a global curvature to it, but it's been very hard to find any. And it seems weird that, you know, how come we look out for billions of light years and we still can't measure curvature yet.

But if inflation is correct, the answer is because you're looking at a silver dollar-sized patch on a something like -- you know, like the Earth and it's -- it's just very hard to see any curvature in that little space. So all observers in this inflationary universe will think that cosmic space is flat, even if overall it's four-dimensionally a sphere or a saddle or something of that sort.

GROSS: Timothy Ferris is my guest, and his new book is called "The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe (s) Report." That's "universe," parenthesis, with another "s" attached to it, just in case there's more than one universe.

Hedging your bets there.

FERRIS: I want to be covered on that.

GROSS: Let's take a short break and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

Back with science writer Timothy Ferris, author of the new book The Whole Shebang. Do you think the impulse behind cosmology is to find our place in the world?

FERRIS: It is for me. There's something -- something terribly lonely about being human. We have the companionship of one another, but we don't know of any other, what we would call "intelligent" species -- not a value-laden term, but just any other species with whom we can compare ourselves.

We're orphans in a way. We've had to put together our own history as best we could. No one wrote it down for us. And I don't think that we're really going to know who we are until we have some other example of some creatures that at least have some remote similarity to us.

I don't think they'd look like us, but creatures who are capable of, you know, reasoning or technology or whatever it is that we want to say makes us human, with whom we can compare ourselves. So part of cosmology, I think, is to understand our relationship to the big picture and to see what the role of life is in the universe.

GROSS: You know, that's very similar to the reasons that send some people to religion, and in fact on page 303 of your book you ask the question: what can cosmology tell us about God? That's like the last line of the page. You turn to page 304, and your answer is: nothing.

LAUGHTER

How did you reach that conclusion?

FERRIS: This is called a "contrarian" theological afterward -- that chapter. I came to that conclusion reluctantly. Through much of my career, I -- I'm an agnostic if it matters -- but I often had written about the fact that there's no need for hostility between science and religion and -- which I believe -- and also about the similarities between science and art.

But I'm coming to put more emphasis on the philosophy that good fences make good neighbors. You know, it's -- there isn't any reason for science and art or science and religion to be mushed together into the same thing, any more than when you're served a nice dinner -- you know, you should just mush all the food together before you start to eat.

There are good reasons why these are distinct subjects. I think it was a great mistake -- demonstrably a great mistake -- for religion to set itself up as an authority on cosmology. It simply did not have any grounds to claim such authority. And I also think it's a great mistake for science to start making religious pronouncements.

Some of my scientist friends have had some loose talk lately about how this or that theory would show you the mind of God or the handwriting of God or the face of God. That's just a lot of hot air.

You know, these are scientific theories and whether one believes in God or what one thinks about God is a separate issue, and I think always will be and properly should be.

GROSS: Was the difference that one has to do with faith and the other with more of an empirical proof?

FERRIS: Yes, and also specifically with cosmology, one can certainly imagine a scenario in which God proved his existence. You know, the skies open up and God makes an indubitable demonstration that "here I am." It would be in poor taste, perhaps, but it could be done.

But I cannot imagine any way to disprove the existence of God. I mean, after all, there's plenty of suffering and injustice and horrible things in the world, and to some people that disproves God's existence and to many more, it does not. And I can't see anything in cosmology that would prove or disprove it.

So I conclude that cosmology is not of any -- if you can't disprove the existence of God, it's not a scientific question and science doesn't seem to bear on it.

GROSS: And cosmology doesn't ask some of the questions that religion asks, such as: well, why do we exist? I mean, what's the larger reason?

FERRIS: Yeah, that's a deep one, isn't that?

LAUGHTER

I often wonder -- I mean, if there were an answer to that and we found out the answer, wouldn't it be so terribly depressing? I mean, how could the answer possibly be good enough, you know? Suppose the, you know, the writing appeared in the sky: "OK, you've been asking and asking. All right, here you are -- you know, the purpose of life is..."

It just seems to me whatever the rest of that sentence was, it would -- it would have to be a disappointment. And what a let-down. That's it? You know, it's hard to imagine how you could do that.

GROSS: One thing that seems to trouble you about the coming together, for some people, of cosmology and religion is that you think that some people use religion to fill in the spaces of what scientists haven't figured out yet, and that it's kind of cheating and it's unfair to religion.

FERRIS: I think it's a -- I think it's a very impoverished view of religion to say to science: well, what about this? You know, you haven't explained this yet?

You know, how -- why is the weak force exactly the strength that it is? You know, how come there are -- the gas giant planets are exactly where they are instead of closer in? Well, you don't have an answer? Ah well, that's because God made it that way.

That's just a dreadful way to conduct religion, and it's also doomed, because it means that the more things science is able to explain, the smaller and smaller part of the unpainted part of the floor is left for this poor God that you've created to occupy. That doesn't -- it just seems silly.

It's the path that one is drawn into when you start trying to use nature to prove God's existence. William Blake walking down the street in 18th century London did not need any further proof of God's existence. You know, he saw it in everything.

And someone else walking down the same street sees no evidence there of God's existence, and that's not a difference that's ever going to be settled by empirical investigation or rational argument. It's a question of one's perspective on existence.

GROSS: Now there are some things that you say you find illogical and unconvincing if you think of God as the creator of the universe. For example, if he created the universe with a specific purpose in mind, then why did it require billions of years to attain it?

FERRIS: The progressive view of evolution has done a lot of harm, I think, to human thought. It was the self-congratulatory view, you know, that evolution worked its way up and finally created us.

And as Bertrand Russell said at the time, you know: if I had billions of years to -- and an entire planet to work with -- I wouldn't think that human beings were all that much to boast about as the final product of my efforts.

But evolution is not, in fact, progressive and there is, I think, such a think as cosmic evolution. I think the universe is becoming more varied and complicated as time goes by, and if there's a lot of life in the universe, as I suspect there is, then that's really the icing on the cake of this evolution.

And evolution itself may be a very deep and useful concept in cosmology and elsewhere. But it's not a long, laborious task aimed at doing one thing, so far as I can tell.

Now maybe, you know, maybe we're all just blind to it, and there is some point. Maybe the universe is going -- ultimately going to hook itself up into a single-thinking entity, and that's why, you know, in our little corner, we're so busy making the Internet, you know, and all of these things contribute our little part to this eventual nervous system.

But we're talking science fiction there, I think, more than science.

GROSS: I have a friend who is a curator at a science museum, and she was saying that she finds really frustrating is that science as it's taught in school is really about, you know, just facts and theories. And all the kind of like larger meaning is taken out of it in the typical science education in school. I'm not talking necessarily about college, but you know, before that.

Whereas, like the great scientists, the great physicists -- they're always wrestling with the larger meaning of these theories. And in fact, they all -- they often approach it through asking questions about meaning. Would you agree with that perception?

FERRIS: Yeah, my experience in school was that it's mostly criminal, you know? I think most of what goes on, in my experience, in most schools most of the time is a deplorable activity. It consists of boring you to death with some dreadful litany and then stamping on that morass a term like "this is Shakespeare" or "this is history;" "this is the study of physics;" "this is classical music."

It's worse than ignorance, you know? Because you come out of the experience saying: "well, I don't like Shakespeare."

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

FERRIS: "I'm bored by music." And science is the same -- science teaching is the same thing. Most high schools do not have a single person teaching, let's say, physics who even has a degree in physics. Most of the time it's the coach of the athletic team who's pressed into service to teach physics.

And so you get some horrible, you know, thing and that's called physics. And then -- it's usually not even 20th century physics. For some reason, we're still teaching kids Newtonian mechanics. A lot of kids, I think, don't like what they then call "science." They don't like this Newtonian physics because it's such a mechanical, lifeless, cut-and-dried sort of a thing.

Well, it's not surprising. It's a 19th century theory. You know, it's a tiny subset of relativity. But it's all most kids learn on the subject of gravitation. I don't see why just because the human species had to go through a learning process that led up to Einstein -- we finally got a perfect theory of gravitation, for the large-scales at least.

I don't see why that means that every kid has to recapitulate this whole process. You know, why can't they just get the Einstein here? It's not some terrible secret that we have to keep from them. It's deplorable what goes on in schools. Just about -- it can drive kids just about crazy. It just about did me.

GROSS: Timothy Ferris -- he's the author of The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe (s) Report. He'll be back in the second half of our show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with science writer Timothy Ferris. His new book, The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe (s) Report, summarizes the latest scientific theories about the origins of the universe. Ferris is a bestselling science writer for a good reason. He knows how to communicate the fascinating concepts that underlie difficult-to-grasp theories.

I think the great frustration, both for scientists and for people like me who are kind of interested, but don't really understand scientific language, is that, OK, if you're describing the universe in terms of what Zeus did, it's all -- it's all a narrative. You know, I can understand that -- you know, that one God did this and another God did that, and there's all these stories.

But if you're talking about scientific theories and, you know, I don't have the education to really understand the language and all the equations that lie behind it, you're just going to leave me in the dust. And I won't really comprehend what the latest theory is of the creation of the universe.

And that must be very frustrating for the people who have the information and want others to learn about it -- and for those of us who want to learn, but don't quite have the goods to comprehend some of it. I guess that's where you come in, too, is -- you know, part of your job is trying to translate all of this for us.

FERRIS: That's right. And it's also part of the tradition of science. There's a strong sort of a social tradition in science to make sense of what you're saying. That you shouldn't be allowed to get away with saying: oh, this is too technical to explain in normal language. Even though these theories are very complicated, you should apply to yourself the rigor of explaining them.

And you see a lot of great scientists doing this. Stephen Hawking is a good example -- works very hard on the writing of his papers, so that as he puts it: someone from outside the field can at least read the abstract and get something from it; not be too technical. Ernest Rutherford (ph) used to tell his students that if you can't explain your theory to a bartender, it's probably that your theory's no good.

It's this -- so I find that, you know, with top scientists, they're very communicative and they try to make themselves easy to understand. It's usually the third-raters who say: oh, this is too difficult.

I was on a panel once with Willie Fowler (ph) -- now the late Willie Fowler, Nobel laureate -- addressing a big gathering of the best science students in high schools all around the State of Minnesota. And Willie was talking about a very sophisticated theory about the big bang.

And he said: "you know what solved it? Good old lithium. I forgot, you have a little lithium and you whack it with a nucleus of lithium and, you know, that thing's got two neutrons in it -- or is it three? I forget -- but anyway you whack it with..."

And that audience was just transfixed. All these kids had this moment when they thought: he's got a Nobel prize in physics and he doesn't remember how many neutrons there are in the nucleus of lithium. Therefore, that's not it. Right? It's not about learning that stuff, you know?

GROSS: Right, right.

FERRIS: It's something else. And that was a great moment in education I thought. Willie did that.

GROSS: Huh. What are you most hoping to find out about in the 21st century?

FERRIS: Explanation of quantum weirdness, I think, would be the one -- at the close of the 19th century, one great physicist said that well, you know, we've just about got physics all wrapped up here. There are just two clouds in the blue sky, and one is radioactivity and the other one is the question of whether the ether exists.

Well, behind one of those clouds -- the radioactivity -- was quantum theory. And behind the other one was relativity, which transformed science in the 20th century.

Now lately, we've had a little bit of loose talk about how, once again, people say hey, it's the end of the century and things are just about wrapped up. There are only a couple of clouds, and one of them is this quantum weirdness -- the fact that the quantum systems down to sub-atomic scale behave in ways that just don't make sense. They don't make any logical sense.

And we've either got to say, well, they don't make sense -- and accept it, which some people do. Or we've got to say this is signalling us that there's something deeper here that we need to understand.

And I suspect it's going to turn out to be that something deeper; that there's a whole other side to nature and that this little thread is going to, you know, unravel the tapestry and present this whole other side in which, to speak metaphorically, the universe is still all one thing.

It would be as if the other side of nature never knew that things -- doesn't think that the universe is big. It still thinks that the universe is all one thing -- the way it was at the beginning. I suspect -- this is just a suspicion -- that this odd little question of quantum weirdness may open to an entirely new perspective on cosmology, on the universe.

GROSS: Can you give us an example of what is so weird and inexplicable in the subatomic level?

FERRIS: Yeah, it's very -- this is very hard to describe, and it's a real headache to understand. And I've seen experts get confused, you know, at the podium trying to do this.

But if you take a subatomic system and blow it up so, for instance -- I don't mean destroy it; I mean, just make it bigger -- so that for instance you split a photon into two pieces and take it out so it's separated by the width of a desk top, let's say.

And you fiddle with the part of it that's over here on once side of the desk top. It appears that you instantaneously alter something on the other side.

And this can't happen, according to relativity theory. A signal has to be propagated from one to the other and it has to go at the velocity of light. But over -- my colleagues at Berkeley and some others in Europe and elsewhere, have done these experiments in a variety of ways.

And you keep finding that there seems to be this instantaneous action at a distance. It's as if the quantum system does not know about the intervening space. And there are some other clues that this might be true.

For instance, a photon of light. You know, if you and I go out at night, we look at a star that's 1,000 lightyears away -- like say, the stars in Orion's belt -- 1,500 year-old light. We way to ourselves: well, that photon has been traveling for 1,500 years, you know. That's great. You know, we're seeing this -- you can look back in time. It's one of the basic principles of astronomy.

But the photon itself does not experience any passage of time. We know that because it's moving at the velocity of light and special relativity tells us that at the velocity of light, the passage of time goes to zero. So from the photon's standpoint, it left us -- the moment it left the star and the moment it struck your eye here on Earth 1,500 lightyears away was the same instant.

And there are just a bunch of these clues -- that there may be a side to nature in which space and time has a very different meaning that in the classical picture.

GROSS: Oh, I hope you're right and that we do learn more about that in the 21st century. That's really pretty interesting.

FERRIS: It's a headache to think about.

GROSS: Yeah, right, right.

FERRIS: I'm almost apologetic for bringing it up. I know why -- lots of people do like to just sort of wave it away. I suspect it's not going to go away.

GROSS: My guest is science writer Timothy Ferris. His new book is called The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe (s) Report.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

Back with Timothy Ferris, and we're talking about his new book The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe (s) Report.

One of your previous books was on "SETI" -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

FERRIS: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: So I'm kind of interested in what you think of this new Air Force report on the town of Roswell.

FERRIS: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Would you explain a little bit about what this is about and where this fits into the whole UFO extraterrestrial cosmology?

FERRIS: Well, you know, UFOs got started at right about the same time as public concern about nuclear weapons, and I expect that there's a connection. And it was overt in a lot of science fiction stories, including "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was the best of them...

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

FERRIS: ... in which the aliens really are sent here to save us from our own destructive impulses. So I think there's a religious component to the flying saucer business. It certainly is a very persistent belief.

You know, I can't think of anything else except for, you know, things like ghost stories and so forth, where so many people are willing to believe so much on so little evidence.

You know, it's -- it's actually gone the wrong way. Instead of having more -- higher standards of evidence, we now have the alien abduction phenomenon in which you have therapy groups of people, you know, meeting to heal themselves from the trauma of having been taken away in flying saucers.

And no one even proffers any evidence anymore. At least in the '50s, you were supposed to show, like, a burn spot in the back yard, you know, and say here's where the saucer came down. Now, there's absolutely no evidence, and yet millions of people are prepared to say they've been abducted.

So I assume there's some deep motivation for this, and I suspect it has to do with the sense of wanting a personal intervention by some divinity -- you know, some sort of greater being that will save us from ourselves.

This has infected SETI, too. I think there's a kind of an unscrupulous argument that's made for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in which I'm sorry to say people have gotten up and said, well, you know, if we can bet a signal from the aliens it will teach us how to bring about world peace or cure cancer.

What -- one of the many things that troubles me about these stories is that the people who claim to believe them I don't think really believe them in the sense that one could take seriously.

I recently met someone who described himself as a freelance journalist and he told me that he believed the Roswell story and he knew that these bodies were in a hangar at I guess it's Nebraska or Texas now, where they're supposed to be.

And I said, well, have you been out there? And the answer was "no." And I said well, why not? You know, if you're a journalist and you think that there are bodies in this hangar, why are you here? Why aren't you there? He said well, it's very secret, you know. It's classified.

That's not a serious belief. You know, if you really thought they were there, you know, you'd be in the fun zone near the base buying cheap beer for the GIs and digging up stories.

So it's something else. It's in the nature of a religious conviction. It's something that makes life interesting and tantalizing. And it's certainly -- I certainly am fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrial life. It's just that I see absolutely no reason to think that there's ever been a spacecraft that's landed here on Earth.

You have to keep in mind how much space there is out there. It's probably not easy to go journeying around for anyone. But the fact that they haven't shown up doesn't mean that they're not out there.

I performed once a thing called the "lobster" test. I -- one of the arguments against extraterrestrial life is that they would have come here by now, and I think that's an erroneous argument. What I do is: I wanted to have lobster one evening, so I opened the front door and set a place at the table. And I waited, and no lobster came in. So by 11 o'clock, you know, I concluded that there aren't any lobster, you know?

LAUGHTER

GROSS: I guess what interests me in the reports of abductions by aliens is that there's certain like themes in a lot of those stories, and you wonder why -- why are there so many similarities in each of the stories?

FERRIS: "Leda and the Swan" is one of the themes -- the alien with sexual intent. It seems to be a common theme. I assume that the reason that there are commonalities is that they are projections of common hysterias.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

FERRIS: I'm not a psychiatrist, but I would assume that it's the same reason that -- you know, it's like asking why are the constellations in the sky shaped like animals? You know, it's because it's a projection of our sensibility onto the sky.

Cosmology, as a science, is largely an attempt to prevent that. It's an attempt to erode away the parts of our beliefs that are just projections of our personalities onto the sky and to leave behind the structure of what's really out there.

GROSS: That's an interesting way of looking at it. I'm wondering if you are starting to collect any end-of-the-millennium beliefs, fears, hysterias -- that are vaguely rooted in science?

FERRIS: I haven't, no. Sounds like a depressing task.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Don't you think you ought to be starting?

FERRIS: Starting my collection...

GROSS: Yeah.

FERRIS: ... while there's still time. Every -- I'm resisting. I'm in denial about everything that has to do with the end of the millennium. All of my friends are planning to go somewhere. This seems like such a nightmarish prospect. Have you made plans for the millennium? What are you doing?

GROSS: What, are you kidding? Of course not. No. What kind of plans are your friends -- where are they going?

FERRIS: Oh, you know they've -- a game preserve in Kenya or, you know, charter a yacht. There's a kind of hysteria building up because all the hotels are getting booked up and you have to act now.

GROSS: Really? Gee, I didn't know this.

FERRIS: Yeah. And it just seems like the idea of, you know, going -- getting on an airplane just when zillions of other people are all going to go celebrate the millennium seems so depressing. But one tends to get caught up in these things, and I'm afraid, you know, that if you're not caught up, then it comes along and you're this stick in the mud.

I would like to just be up at my observatory, you know, doing what I always do, just to look at distant galaxies. You know that's perfectly -- that's as happy as I get. There's something really enchanting about astronomy. I've never been able to get it out of my blood. I got afflicted by astronomy when I was five or six years old and it is my author.

GROSS: Did you grow up in a city or in the country where you could actually see the night sky?

FERRIS: Yeah. I grew up mostly in rural Florida and then later on on Key Biscayne, which was more rural than it is now. And we had great skies down there in those days. You could see the Milky Way beautifully. In those days -- talking now more toward the middle of the century; let's say in the '50s -- most kids could see lots of stars. That heritage is gone now.

I've been trying to work with a few people who use the term "light pollution" about this -- trying to convince people that it's -- we don't really need so much light. We don't need to be flooding the skies of our cities with all this light. It's not -- it wastes energy. It's not -- doesn't help anything. It's just inefficient.

And if we could reclaim -- a few cities have done this, you know. Tucson is one of them because there's a big observatory near there, where they -- mainly you just work on keeping your light pointed down where you want it. They have an ordinance that does this.

And it's amazing -- you can drive down the main street in the middle of Tucson and everything's all lit up. It's a downtown area, but you can also see a thousand stars overhead. It's quite beautiful. And I hope more towns will go that direction in the future -- saves money and it's aesthetically pleasing.

GROSS: Timothy Ferris, I want to thank you a lot for talking with us.

FERRIS: Thank you. It's really been a pleasure.

GROSS: Timothy Ferris is the author of The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe (s) Report. He's a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Timothy Ferris
High: Science writer Timothy Ferris. He's the author of the bestseller "Coming of Age in the Milky Way." His new book is "The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the Universe (s) Report." Ferris is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Spec: Books; Science; Astronomy; Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright (c) 1997 National Public Radio, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. under license from National Public Radio, Inc. Formatting copyright (c) 1997 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For further information please contact NPR's Business Affairs at (202) 414-2954
End-Story: The Whole Shebang
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JULY 02, 1997
Time: 12:00
Tran: 070202np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Remembering The Byrds
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:55

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Country rock has been around so long that we take it for granted, but there was a time when it was such a startling innovation that it stopped the career of The Byrds, one of America's most popular groups in its tracks.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, MUSIC BY THE BYRDS)

SINGER: I think I'm going back
To the things I learned so well
In my youth
I think I'm returning to
Those days when I was too young enough
To know the truth

ED WARD, FRESH AIR COMMENTATOR: Probably the hippest music magazine in America today is "No Depression," which has virtually defined a genre which would like to resist being called alternative country.

The bands which fill its pages, like "Whiskey Town," "Sun Volt," "The Bad Livers," and "The Derailers" fuse rock and country elements in exciting new ways. But their stories all begin in 1968 with the release of The Byrds' album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo."

By the time the band started recording it that March, they had a long history behind them, having virtually invented folk-rock, befriending Bob Dylan, and losing two original members, drummer Michael Clark and singer-guitarist David Crosby.

Crosby's replacement was Graham Parsons (ph), a Southern boy who'd come from perhaps the first country rock outfit, the "International Submarine Band," which had released an album, but was virtually unknown.

Parsons brought with him a deep knowledge of Southern music, both country and soul, and an ability to write songs that fused these elements into a seamless whole.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, MUSIC BY THE BYRDS)

SINGER: One hundred years from this day
Will the people still feel this way?
Still say the things that they're saying right now?

Everyone said I hurt you
They said that I'd desert you
If I go away, you know I'm gonna get back somehow
Nobody knows

WARD: Parsons' presence reinvented The Byrds. The folk canon that leader Roger McGwinn (ph) had mined earlier in his career was extended to include hard country, and Parsons had the talent to make it work. Listen to the way his harmony vocal delays the word "like" here. It's something no L.A. rocker could have done.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, MUSIC BY THE BYRDS)

SINGER: My buddies tell me that I should have waited
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun
But I still love them, and I sing with pride
I like the Christian life
I won't do...

WARD: It's hard to overstate just how audacious a move this turn to country was at the time. With the nation divided by the Vietnam War and the popular belief among the young that country music was the music of the ignorant rednecks who opposed the blossoming youth culture, for the band that virtually defined the Los Angeles scene to embrace this music was insane.

Indeed, the album stiffed powerfully on its release, and took a few years to make its impact felt. This, despite the fact that its opening and closing tracks were from the much whispered about "basement" tapes by Bob Dylan.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, MUSIC BY THE BYRDS)

SINGERS: Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you
Not out of spite or anger, but simply 'cause it's true
Now you must provide some answers

For what you sell was not received
And the sooner you come up with it
Then the sooner you can leave

Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take care of your health and get plenty of rest
Nothing was delivered...

WARD: Amazingly, though, evidence has just been released that "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" could have been an even better album. Parsons hadn't bothered to legally sever himself from his previous contract, and when his old label began saber-rattling, Columbia, The Byrds' label, got cold feet and made McGwinn perform lead vocals on the songs Parsons had sung.

A couple were sneaked onto the album anyway, but Columbia's new reissue of the album includes the original Parsons tracks, and shows him singing with an authority that came more naturally to him than it did to McGwinn.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, PARSONS SINGING ON "SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO")

GRAHAM PARSONS, SINGER, SINGING:
My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun
But I still love them and I sing with pride
I like the Christian life

I won't lose...

WARD: By the time the album was released, The Byrds had already played the Grand Ole Opry to a cold reception. And Parsons, refusing to join the band on a tour of South Africa that July, had already quit.

Columbia didn't push Sweetheart of the Rodeo too hard as a result, but the die had been cast: country rock was here to stay and The Byrds were in its forefront.

GROSS: Ed Ward is a music writer living in Berlin. "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" and "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" are among The Byrds albums recently reissued on Columbia Legacy.

Dateline: Ed Ward, Berlin; Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest:
High: Rock historian Ed Ward remembers the Byrds.
Spec: Music Industry; History; The Byrds
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Copy: Content and programming copyright (c) 1997 National Public Radio, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. under license from National Public Radio, Inc. Formatting copyright (c) 1997 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For further information please contact NPR's Business Affairs at (202) 414-2954
End-Story: Remembering The Byrds
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