WEBVTT 00:00:01.797 --> 00:00:04.264 So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world 00:00:04.264 --> 00:00:06.990 from a totally unique point of view, 00:00:06.990 --> 00:00:10.015 and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world. 00:00:10.015 --> 00:00:12.595 I've found, after doing this for many, many years, 00:00:12.595 --> 00:00:15.311 that there's a magical world behind reality. 00:00:15.311 --> 00:00:18.470 And that can be seen directly through a microscope, 00:00:18.470 --> 00:00:20.575 and I'm going to show you some of this today. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:20.575 --> 00:00:24.262 So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small, 00:00:24.262 --> 00:00:26.526 something that we can see with our naked eye, 00:00:26.526 --> 00:00:28.967 and that's a bee. So when you look at this bee, 00:00:28.967 --> 00:00:31.863 it's about this size here, it's about a centimeter. 00:00:31.863 --> 00:00:34.151 But to really see the details of the bee, and really 00:00:34.151 --> 00:00:37.880 appreciate what it is, you have to look a little bit closer. 00:00:37.880 --> 00:00:40.966 So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope, 00:00:40.966 --> 00:00:43.313 and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has 00:00:43.313 --> 00:00:46.144 thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia, 00:00:46.144 --> 00:00:48.576 and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes 00:00:48.576 --> 00:00:50.945 so they know when they're right up close to something, 00:00:50.945 --> 00:00:54.649 because they can't see in stereo. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:54.649 --> 00:00:58.353 As we go smaller, here is a human hair. 00:00:58.353 --> 00:01:01.172 A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see. 00:01:01.172 --> 00:01:03.906 It's about a tenth of a millimeter. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:03.906 --> 00:01:05.082 And as we go smaller again, 00:01:05.082 --> 00:01:08.488 about ten times smaller than that, is a cell. 00:01:08.488 --> 00:01:11.071 So you could fit 10 human cells 00:01:11.071 --> 00:01:14.737 across the diameter of a human hair. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:14.737 --> 00:01:16.323 So when we would look at cells, this is how I really got 00:01:16.323 --> 00:01:19.591 involved in biology and science is by looking 00:01:19.591 --> 00:01:22.058 at living cells in the microscope. 00:01:22.058 --> 00:01:24.129 When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was 00:01:24.129 --> 00:01:28.028 absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like. 00:01:28.028 --> 00:01:31.344 So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system, 00:01:31.344 --> 00:01:33.168 they're actually moving all over the place. 00:01:33.183 --> 00:01:36.933 This cell is looking for foreign objects, 00:01:36.933 --> 00:01:39.290 bacteria, things that it can find. 00:01:39.290 --> 00:01:41.938 And it's looking around, and when it finds something, 00:01:41.938 --> 00:01:44.234 and recognizes it being foreign, 00:01:44.234 --> 00:01:45.526 it will actually engulf it and eat it. 00:01:45.526 --> 00:01:49.810 So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium, 00:01:49.810 --> 00:01:55.432 and it engulfs it and eats it. 00:01:55.432 --> 00:01:58.613 If you take some heart cells from an animal, 00:01:58.613 --> 00:02:01.509 and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat. 00:02:01.509 --> 00:02:05.099 That's their job. Every cell has a mission in life, 00:02:05.099 --> 00:02:06.900 and these cells, the mission is 00:02:06.900 --> 00:02:10.427 to move blood around our body. 00:02:10.427 --> 00:02:13.211 These next cells are nerve cells, and right now, 00:02:13.211 --> 00:02:16.147 as we see and understand what we're looking at, 00:02:16.147 --> 00:02:18.261 our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this 00:02:18.261 --> 00:02:20.803 right now. They're not just static. They're moving around 00:02:20.803 --> 00:02:24.305 making new connections, and that's what happens when we learn. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:24.305 --> 00:02:27.095 As you go farther down this scale here, 00:02:27.095 --> 00:02:29.999 that's a micron, or a micrometer, and we go 00:02:29.999 --> 00:02:32.347 all the way down to here to a nanometer 00:02:32.347 --> 00:02:35.104 and an angstrom. Now, an angstrom is the size 00:02:35.104 --> 00:02:38.471 of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. 00:02:38.471 --> 00:02:40.104 That's how small that is. 00:02:40.104 --> 00:02:42.406 And microscopes that we have today can actually see 00:02:42.421 --> 00:02:45.479 individual atoms. So these are some pictures 00:02:45.479 --> 00:02:48.312 of individual atoms. Each bump here is an individual atom. 00:02:48.312 --> 00:02:51.141 This is a ring of cobalt atoms. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:51.141 --> 00:02:53.799 So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here 00:02:53.799 --> 00:02:56.994 is called the nano world, and the nano world, 00:02:56.994 --> 00:03:00.128 the whole micro world that we see, 00:03:00.128 --> 00:03:03.161 there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and 00:03:03.161 --> 00:03:07.556 the whole -- and that is the world of molecules and atoms. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:07.556 --> 00:03:10.014 But I want to talk about this larger world, 00:03:10.014 --> 00:03:12.351 the world of the micro world. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:12.351 --> 00:03:16.470 So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower, 00:03:16.470 --> 00:03:19.621 what would that flower look like, if the flower was this big? 00:03:19.621 --> 00:03:22.136 It wouldn't look or feel like anything that we see 00:03:22.136 --> 00:03:25.430 when we look at a flower. So if you look at this flower here, 00:03:25.430 --> 00:03:27.262 and you're a little bug, if you're on that surface 00:03:27.262 --> 00:03:31.328 of that flower, that's what the terrain would look like. 00:03:31.328 --> 00:03:33.704 The petal of that flower looks like that, so the ant 00:03:33.704 --> 00:03:36.385 is kind of crawling over these objects, and if you look 00:03:36.385 --> 00:03:39.729 a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here, 00:03:39.729 --> 00:03:42.474 this is the style of that flower, and you notice 00:03:42.474 --> 00:03:46.699 that it's got these little -- these are like little jelly-like things 00:03:46.699 --> 00:03:51.441 that are what are called spurs. These are nectar spurs. 00:03:51.441 --> 00:03:54.058 So this little ant that's crawling here, it's like 00:03:54.058 --> 00:03:55.884 it's in a little Willy Wonka land. 00:03:55.884 --> 00:04:00.019 It's like a little Disneyland for them. It's not like what we see. 00:04:00.019 --> 00:04:03.922 These are little bits of individual grain of pollen 00:04:03.922 --> 00:04:07.368 there and there, and here is a -- 00:04:07.368 --> 00:04:09.946 what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen, 00:04:09.946 --> 00:04:11.910 when you look in a microscope, it's actually made 00:04:11.910 --> 00:04:15.674 of thousands of little grains of pollen. 00:04:15.674 --> 00:04:17.909 So this, for example, when you see bees flying around 00:04:17.909 --> 00:04:20.714 these little plants, and they're collecting pollen, 00:04:20.714 --> 00:04:23.137 those pollen grains that they're collecting, they pack 00:04:23.137 --> 00:04:25.570 into their legs and they take it back to the hive, 00:04:25.570 --> 00:04:28.200 and that's what makes the beehive, 00:04:28.200 --> 00:04:32.018 the wax in the beehive. And they're also collecting nectar, 00:04:32.018 --> 00:04:35.929 and that's what makes the honey that we eat. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:35.929 --> 00:04:39.186 Here's a close-up picture, or this is actually a regular picture 00:04:39.186 --> 00:04:41.859 of a water hyacinth, and if you had really, really good vision, 00:04:41.859 --> 00:04:44.420 with your naked eye, you'd see it about that well. 00:04:44.420 --> 00:04:47.048 There's the stamen and the pistil. But look what the stamen 00:04:47.048 --> 00:04:50.562 and the pistil look like in a microscope. That's the stamen. 00:04:50.562 --> 00:04:53.213 So that's thousands of little grains of pollen there, 00:04:53.213 --> 00:04:56.499 and there's the pistil there, and these are the little things 00:04:56.499 --> 00:05:00.218 called trichomes. And that's what makes the flower give 00:05:00.218 --> 00:05:04.178 a fragrance, and plants actually communicate 00:05:04.178 --> 00:05:09.572 with one another through their fragrances. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:09.572 --> 00:05:11.940 I want to talk about something really ordinary, 00:05:11.940 --> 00:05:13.864 just ordinary sand. 00:05:13.864 --> 00:05:15.794 I became interested in sand about 10 years ago, 00:05:15.794 --> 00:05:18.355 when I first saw sand from Maui, 00:05:18.355 --> 00:05:21.502 and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui. 00:05:21.502 --> 00:05:24.533 So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. 00:05:24.533 --> 00:05:27.444 Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. 00:05:27.444 --> 00:05:30.027 But when you look closer at this, look at what's there. 00:05:30.027 --> 00:05:33.529 It's really quite amazing. You have microshells there. 00:05:33.529 --> 00:05:35.722 You have things like coral. 00:05:35.722 --> 00:05:39.256 You have fragments of other shells. You have olivine. 00:05:39.256 --> 00:05:41.452 You have bits of a volcano. There's a little bit 00:05:41.452 --> 00:05:44.079 of a volcano there. You have tube worms. 00:05:44.079 --> 00:05:48.805 An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand. 00:05:48.805 --> 00:05:51.484 And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island, 00:05:51.484 --> 00:05:53.850 a lot of the sand is made of biological material 00:05:53.850 --> 00:05:56.847 because the reefs provide a place where all these 00:05:56.847 --> 00:06:00.737 microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow, 00:06:00.737 --> 00:06:03.075 and when they die, their shells and their teeth 00:06:03.075 --> 00:06:05.417 and their bones break up and they make grains of sand, 00:06:05.417 --> 00:06:08.387 things like coral and so forth. 00:06:08.387 --> 00:06:12.180 So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui. 00:06:12.180 --> 00:06:14.717 This is from Lahaina, 00:06:14.717 --> 00:06:16.447 and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually 00:06:16.447 --> 00:06:19.901 walking along millions of years of biological and geological history. 00:06:19.901 --> 00:06:22.368 We don't realize it, but it's actually a record 00:06:22.368 --> 00:06:24.941 of that entire ecology. 00:06:24.941 --> 00:06:28.099 So here we see, for example, a sponge spicule, 00:06:28.099 --> 00:06:30.685 two bits of coral here, 00:06:30.685 --> 00:06:34.535 that's a sea urchin spine. Really some amazing stuff. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:34.535 --> 00:06:36.912 So when I first looked at this, I was -- I thought, 00:06:36.912 --> 00:06:38.661 gee, this is like a little treasure trove here. 00:06:38.661 --> 00:06:40.827 I couldn't believe it, and I'd go around dissecting 00:06:40.827 --> 00:06:44.136 the little bits out and making photographs of them. 00:06:44.136 --> 00:06:46.647 Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like. 00:06:46.647 --> 00:06:49.908 These are quartz crystals and feldspar, 00:06:49.908 --> 00:06:52.369 so most sand in the world on the mainland 00:06:52.369 --> 00:06:56.119 is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock. 00:06:56.119 --> 00:07:00.470 So mountains are built up, and they erode away by water 00:07:00.470 --> 00:07:02.497 and rain and ice and so forth, 00:07:02.497 --> 00:07:03.803 and they become grains of sand. 00:07:03.803 --> 00:07:06.253 There's some sand that's really much more colorful. 00:07:06.253 --> 00:07:08.322 These are sand from near the Great Lakes, 00:07:08.337 --> 00:07:10.348 and you can see that it's filled with minerals 00:07:10.348 --> 00:07:13.840 like pink garnet and green epidote, all kinds of amazing stuff, 00:07:13.840 --> 00:07:16.224 and if you look at different sands from different places, 00:07:16.224 --> 00:07:19.475 every single beach, every single place you look at sand, 00:07:19.475 --> 00:07:24.507 it's different. Here's from Big Sur, like they're little jewels. 00:07:24.507 --> 00:07:26.996 There are places in Africa where they do the mining 00:07:26.996 --> 00:07:31.165 of jewels, and you go to the sand where the rivers have 00:07:31.165 --> 00:07:33.464 the sand go down to the ocean, and it's like literally looking 00:07:33.464 --> 00:07:36.327 at tiny jewels through the microscope. 00:07:36.327 --> 00:07:39.504 So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different. 00:07:39.504 --> 00:07:42.686 Every single grain is different. There are no two grains 00:07:42.686 --> 00:07:44.386 of sand alike in the world. 00:07:44.386 --> 00:07:47.918 Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere. 00:07:47.918 --> 00:07:51.646 They're like a snapshot in time. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:51.646 --> 00:07:55.069 Now sand is not only on Earth, but sand is 00:07:55.069 --> 00:07:57.667 ubiquitous throughout the universe. In fact, outer space 00:07:57.667 --> 00:08:01.331 is filled with sand, and that sand comes together 00:08:01.331 --> 00:08:04.528 to make our planets and the Moon. 00:08:04.528 --> 00:08:06.110 And you can see those in micrometeorites. 00:08:06.110 --> 00:08:08.653 This is some micrometeorites that the Army gave me, 00:08:08.653 --> 00:08:11.747 and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole. 00:08:11.747 --> 00:08:14.493 And they're quite amazing-looking, and these are the 00:08:14.493 --> 00:08:18.917 tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in -- 00:08:18.917 --> 00:08:20.832 the planets and the Moon. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:20.832 --> 00:08:24.076 So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand, 00:08:24.076 --> 00:08:26.339 so they sent me sand from all the different landings 00:08:26.339 --> 00:08:30.817 of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago. 00:08:30.817 --> 00:08:34.457 And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes. 00:08:34.457 --> 00:08:37.424 This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing. 00:08:37.424 --> 00:08:41.207 I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting. 00:08:41.207 --> 00:08:43.870 Now, the way my microscopes work is, normally 00:08:43.870 --> 00:08:46.336 in a microscope you can see very little at one time, 00:08:46.336 --> 00:08:49.283 so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope, 00:08:49.283 --> 00:08:53.074 keep taking pictures, and then I have a computer program 00:08:53.074 --> 00:08:55.548 that puts all those pictures together 00:08:55.548 --> 00:08:58.670 into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like, 00:08:58.670 --> 00:09:01.905 and I do that in 3D. So there, you can see, 00:09:01.905 --> 00:09:04.607 is a left-eye view. There's a right-eye view. 00:09:04.607 --> 00:09:07.160 So sort of left-eye view, right-eye view. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:07.160 --> 00:09:09.528 Now something's interesting here. This looks very different 00:09:09.528 --> 00:09:11.906 than any sand on Earth that I've ever seen, and I've 00:09:11.906 --> 00:09:15.706 seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me. (Laughter) 00:09:15.706 --> 00:09:18.664 Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused 00:09:18.664 --> 00:09:21.003 by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon. 00:09:21.003 --> 00:09:23.360 Now, the Moon has no atmosphere, so micrometeorites 00:09:23.360 --> 00:09:26.576 come in continuously, and the whole surface of the Moon 00:09:26.576 --> 00:09:29.176 is covered with powder now, because for four billion years 00:09:29.176 --> 00:09:31.970 it's been bombarded by micrometeorites, 00:09:31.970 --> 00:09:34.360 and when micrometeorites come in at about 00:09:34.360 --> 00:09:38.370 20 to 60,000 miles an hour, they vaporize on contact. 00:09:38.370 --> 00:09:40.280 And you can see here that that is -- 00:09:40.280 --> 00:09:42.874 that's sort of vaporized, and that material is holding this 00:09:42.874 --> 00:09:45.420 little clump of little sand grains together. 00:09:45.420 --> 00:09:47.599 This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing. 00:09:47.599 --> 00:09:49.759 And that's called a ring agglutinate. 00:09:49.759 --> 00:09:53.703 And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that, 00:09:53.703 --> 00:09:57.160 and you'd never find that on Earth. 00:09:57.160 --> 00:10:00.413 Most of the sand on the Moon, 00:10:00.413 --> 00:10:02.112 especially -- and you know when you look at the Moon, 00:10:02.112 --> 00:10:04.472 there's the dark areas and the light areas. The dark areas 00:10:04.472 --> 00:10:08.613 are lava flows. They're basaltic lava flows, 00:10:08.613 --> 00:10:11.278 and that's what this sand looks like, very similar 00:10:11.278 --> 00:10:15.041 to the sand that you would see in Haleakala. 00:10:15.041 --> 00:10:18.464 Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in, 00:10:18.464 --> 00:10:21.553 they vaporize and they make these fountains, 00:10:21.553 --> 00:10:24.176 these microscopic fountains that go up into the -- 00:10:24.176 --> 00:10:26.540 I was going to say "up into the air," but there is no air -- 00:10:26.540 --> 00:10:30.760 goes sort of up, and these microscopic glass beads 00:10:30.791 --> 00:10:33.304 are formed instantly, and they harden, and by the time 00:10:33.304 --> 00:10:36.689 they fall down back to the surface of the Moon, 00:10:36.689 --> 00:10:39.585 they have these beautiful colored glass spherules. 00:10:39.585 --> 00:10:41.130 And these are actually microscopic; 00:10:41.130 --> 00:10:44.098 you need a microscope to see these. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:44.098 --> 00:10:47.535 Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon, 00:10:47.535 --> 00:10:49.689 and you can see that the entire 00:10:49.689 --> 00:10:52.172 crystal structure is still there. 00:10:52.172 --> 00:10:54.320 This grain of sand is probably about 00:10:54.320 --> 00:10:56.602 three and a half or four billion years old, 00:10:56.602 --> 00:10:58.793 and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand 00:10:58.793 --> 00:11:02.812 on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling, 00:11:02.812 --> 00:11:06.062 air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion 00:11:06.062 --> 00:11:10.669 down here by the Sun, has these solar storms, 00:11:10.669 --> 00:11:15.432 and that's erosion by solar radiation. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:15.432 --> 00:11:18.018 So what I've been trying to tell you today is 00:11:18.018 --> 00:11:21.587 things even as ordinary as a grain of sand 00:11:21.587 --> 00:11:24.562 can be truly extraordinary if you look closely 00:11:24.562 --> 00:11:27.867 and if you look from a different and a new point of view. 00:11:27.867 --> 00:11:32.242 I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said, 00:11:32.242 --> 00:11:34.784 "To see a world in a grain of sand 00:11:34.784 --> 00:11:37.538 and a heaven in a wild flower, 00:11:37.538 --> 00:11:39.871 hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 00:11:39.871 --> 00:11:42.204 and eternity in an hour." 00:11:42.204 --> 00:11:45.933 Thank you. (Applause)