Writing, producing and directing Award Winning document for National GeographicDiscovery Science history, pbs, and the Howard Hughes medical institute. He has produced films on how galileo, newton, einstein and hawking made their greatest discoveries. The archaeology of custers last stand, a theory on dinosaur evolution and the scientific search for alien life. Dan his career as a peace corps volunteer in kenya, teaching high physics and biology. Gabrielle emanuel, who is our moderator for tonight join wb you are as a Senior Health and science reporter in 2021 she started her journalism career at npr, first as a kroc fellow, then as a reporting fellow for the education team. She also five years as a reporter at gbh. Gabriellas stories regularly appear on nprs morning edition and all things considered, and she has reported episodes for planet and code switch. Her has appeared in the New York Times and the atlantic. She has received numerous awards, including national and regional. Edward r morrow lords, a sigma delta cheer award and a clarion award. Gabriella received her bachelors degree from Dartmouth College and her doctorate from oxford as a rhodes scholar. First, well hear from dan in just a moment. Hes going to start us off with a reading. But first, to give us a little bit more background. Id like to welcome gabriela over and shes going to fill us in. Gabriela. Welcome. Thank. It is good to be here. As she just said, if you could all be thinking about questions during while we chat, we will be coming you shortly. And i also just wanted to say, when i started reading book, i was in chicago with my inlaws and i just kept reading passages from aloud to to the household because it was that good. And by the time i came back to boston, they were like making sure they had the title right so they could order it. So this is a fantastic book and afterwards at the book signing, it is worth getting one copy signed and also getting copies as gifts because that what i will be doing. Well, what this book does is its incredibly ambitious and successful, but it takes us on a journey, a 13 billion year journey from, the big bang up to me and you and follows the atoms how how they became us and at the exact same time it does Something Else. It also takes on a journey of discovery of how. Found all of this. And that is takes us up in the sky in air balloons and down into the grand. I mean, you go all over. So i wanted to see if we could start with a an excerpt or a passage that captures that sense of wonder and discovery. Can you hear me . Okay, so let talking into the mic or am i good . Okay, great. First of all, i wanted to thank Boston Public Library for having us here. Id big fan of libraries and this is fabulous one so thank you so much and and thank you gabrielle im so that youve that youve agreed to do this with me and i appreciate it. So the book traces many scientists journeys as they try to learn about the journey of our atoms. And one of the things that you see over and over again is people are looking for one thing. And they find something completely different that they werent even looking. And so id like to just give you a taste of the book and read one passage that i think illustrates that quite well. The the just to set the scene in, 1977, there was a oceanographic vessel that went close to the galapagos islands. In the pacific ocean. And had the alvin, which was this deep sea submersible which can go with the ocean bottom. It was filled with geology artists because they were there in 1977. They continental drift was still a questionable theory and they were actually looking to see if they could find evidence for something no one had ever seen, which was a hydrophone or vent which might support the hypothesis of continental drift. So thats the setup. Ill just read you a short passage. At dawn on february 17. Jack corliss, the geologist, van andel and the pilot donnelly climbed down narrow conning tower into the alvin. The alvin is the submersible that was going to go down. They crouched by the small portholes and prepared for descent of 1. 7 miles in the titanium submersible, built to withstand pressures of £9,000 per square inch through the thick glass, they saw the choppy water suddenly around them. The light dimmed as the color of the water faded from blue, green to dark blue to darker blue than pitch black for an hour and a half. They saw nothing, just the occasional fleeting of a ghostly bio luminescent creature at. Long last. They reached the bottom. In the first moments. Their searchlights only black flows of lava formed when cold met molten rock. But then, as they approached the clambake location, they saw no one else had ever seen. Though the water nearby 36 degrees fahrenheit, almost. Here they saw cloudy, cloudy, blue water Shimmering Minerals rising from the ocean floor. They would learn that the temperature in some places was a balmy 63 degrees. Comfortable enough to enjoy without a wet suit. If it werent for the crushing pressure they had for the first time. Found a hydrothermal vent looking through porthole, corliss saw a that forever impressed itself in his memory. Using his acoustic phone, he called his graduate student debbie sticks on the lulu above. Deborah isnt the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert . Snakes took a moment to consult her. Fellow geologists. Yes, she replied. With all these animals down here, he said, he was gazing at clams as wide as dinner plates. Giant mussels, albino lobsters and orange and white crabs. It made sense. He was over 8000 feet down. Cut off from sunlight and food from above. Frantically cordless and vine. Until scrambled to collect data and capture a few specimens. With alvins robotic arm. The next dives, more vents and creatures even more outlandish. Spaghetti like worms large pink fish and seven foot tubeworms with. Red plumes swaying languidly. Flowers back on the rv near the scientists examined their finds with. Wonder. Cathy crane, the exhibitions navigator, radio biologist at woods hole to ask for help in identifying the strange creatures they couldnt the startled geologists had little to preserve them with except a small jar of for aldehyde. A graduate student had brought and some russia vodka and vodka they purchased in panama. They would have to store the creatures in tupperware and plastic. Sometime later one of the expedition leaders, a message from woods hole returned to port instant. Early biologists coming. In all caps. Needless to, say corliss did no such. He had no intention of being scooped. So its a great example of this discovery these geologists made are completely overturned, are of how life, the first life on earth might have formed. So this book is all about an origin story of atom. But i wanted to see if we could start, by hearing about the origin story of the book. How did the book come into being and as a project . What did you say four or five years ago . Oh, maybe more. Thats right. Okay. So how did it come about . It started with the question when my daughter was becoming vegetarian, my teenage daughter, like any good parent, i was wondering what she would have to eat order to remain healthy and pretty soon i realized that i actually had no idea what my body was made of. Thinking about it a little bit, i realized that i had no idea where it was came from and with a little bit of googling and i discovered something that i had never really realized before, which was that every Single Particle in our bodies, your bodies and came from the big bang. 13. 8 billion years ago. And so once i that that journey from there here must have been incredible. One, i was really hooked the idea and that was the impetus for it. Vegetarianism. So tell me. The big bang. One of the themes that you will see throughout the book is that scientia is often trip up and dont realize groundbreaking new information. They they cant almost process it. And actually falls into that with the big banks. So i wanted to see if you could tell us that. That story. Yeah. So there was a catholic priest, all people by the name of Georges Lemaitre who showed einstein that he was wrong by convincing einstein that the universe actually had a beginning. And this was in the early 1920s. Its a great story because at the time lemaitre learned of some astronomical observations that, suggested that the galaxies that were furthest away from us were expected, were flying away from us faster than galaxies closer to us to lemaitre that suggested the universe was actually expanding. So he wrote a paper, no response tract down and einstein said, youve got to be kidding me. No way. Actually what he told him was he said, your physics is great, but your physical intuition is wrong. Rape is terrible. This atrocious atrocious for limit for einstein it was just too weird to be true. It just mesh with his intuition. Lemaitre went back and dug into einsteins theories. Einsteins theory of equations of general relativity further and discovered that to the equations the universe either could be part contracting or actually expanding, and he was able to show that that in fact was what was happening. Einstein didnt want to believe it because honestly, a priest telling that the universe a beginning. Right. I mean, it actually hit actually to a certain felt too much like there was a hint of religious religiosity to it. But ultimately, einstein had to he looked at evidence and he changed his mind. Lemaitre convinced him. And now thats the big bang theory. When we when we say the hub of the james Webb Telescope shows us images, the early earliest universe, 13. 8 billion years ago. We know that we now accept the theory that lemaitre brought forward. And its one of many stories in the book of of new theories we now consider groundbreaking that at the time were just very, very well respected scientists wouldnt consider because were just too weird. How could the universe be that . And do you a sense of of why we fall into these traps of not believing things that end up being true and groundbreaking . Well, you know, when i. When i got through the first draft of my book, i started to scratch my head that. And the reason was that the book traces many, many discoveries along the way from. The big bang to now. Right. It traces from the big bang through the creation of the elements in stars, through the creation of solar system and planet earth to the origin of life and to those elements found their way to us. And theres so many groundbreaking, fundamental theories we accept now that i trace in the. But what i discovered was almost every time these theories were initially proposed, they were treated with complete skepticism or scorn. And so i scratch my head about once i finished the first draft because i it just seemed way too. It seemed to be happening too often. Yeah. Yeah. So. So i ended up giving them nicknames. So theres the too weird to be true theory. Theres the if. It doesnt if if the evidence doesnt match. So you you look for and see the evidence that matches your theory. But theres the the worlds greatest expert might be correct. But and so i came up with actually six of them that in the particular story that i tell came up over and over again. And. You know what . I came to realize is that they are cognitive they and they are shortcuts that seem just like the rest of us use to navigate in the world. Right. Like you, if youre a science host and you dont think that that the worlds greatest scientists should be listened to often, you can if you try and reprove everything over and over again, you just be paralyzed. You couldnt do it just like the rest of us. You know, if we had to constantly question everything, you couldnt do it. So these shortcuts that we all have, but. You know, its something that scientists like the rest of us fall into. Yeah. Yeah. Its useful until its not. So tell me one of the other themes that came out across this book to me was how important. The tools we have at our disposal are the technology. I mean, at often this the story is periodically about actually coming up with the tools to figure out the discovery. What the role of scientific equipment in the almost the technology in the in these discoveries. Well that was another thing that i really struck by once finished the book was that. The discover that i traced over the last hundred and 50 years, largely are things that we now take granted now. And its just incredible how much we know that we didnt know. 150 years ago, the time of my great grandfather, perhaps, right. We didnt know that there were atoms. We didnt know why the why or the sun generated heat. We didnt that the universe had a beginning. We didnt know we no idea how. The molecules, our cells create life. We didnt have a clue which is why the theory of vitalism was actually very among many, many many respected scientists. 150 years ago. And of course brilliant scientists, great mathematics, brilliant thinking, created a lot of wonderful new theories. But what was just as important was the electron microscope better telescopes. Paper. Without high speed centrifuges. Paper. Chromatography. The electron microscope. We have no idea how molecules in our cells create. Now we know all about these things that happen, and we understand. But light microscope. Even in a 1920s, was added at its limits. You couldnt see any further. And so without those other advances we would just know so little of what we know today of course makes you wonder. Right. 150 years from now, i was going to say where where are we going . What will . Well, what is the next hundred 50 years going to bring . Do you have any. Exactly. Yeah, i know. Guess is probably better than mine, but but thats the really the question is you know how much more. Well, we learn because it is incredible how much how much weve learned in just a such a short period of time. Yeah, it is remarkable. So i wanted to ask you a little bit about the process of writing the book throughout book, you have these incredible characters that are three dimensional. You have vignettes about their childhood. I mean, what was the process of researching these often unsung people we knew . Ive never heard of, i can say, whove done remarkable things, but. But then you bring them to life. Its not just an individual whos accomplishment. You read about. You meet them as a full character. How how did you pull that off. A i spent a lot of time probably the most important thing is i spent a lot of time, a lot of time googling. A lot of time in the library. And looking for interviews. Just looking for as much as i could for first first person accounts. But but there were also many people that i got to talk to that were in the book. And that was that was tremendous, tremendous amount of fun as well. And thats why some the the portraits are so strong, like. One of my favorite people that i got to talk was a wonderful biochemist by the name gunter vester houser, who completely overturned how we think about how formed because he was one of the first to come up with a very theory of how life could have formed actually at the ocean bottom by hydrothermal vents that were discovered by the album and how its a very it was a very contentious theory at the time, because at the time believed just about everybody believed that life formed on the earth, on the earths surface, in a pool of water, on the surface of the ocean. So here it was coming along and saying, no, sorry life actually formed deep down. Right. And it can i read just because its fun. So that. This was one of the one of the more fun interviews i that i did and youll see why i read you just a couple of passages. So the theory that he was criticizing was called the prebiotic broth theory. That is that the surface of the earth, all these organic, which are the molecules that were made of, came together and somehow formed a life. Factor house. He didnt buy it. So he said, in one of his first papers, the prebiotic broth theory has received devastating criticism for being logically incompatible with thermodynamics chemically induced chemicals. Sorry, chemically and geo chemically implausible discontinuous with biology and chemistry and experimentally refuted. That was his opening salvo. Now the people that he was criticizing came back and. Jeffrey miller, who was stanley miller, rather, who was the person had originally found the first Experimental Work to the prebiotic broth theory came back and he said the hypothesis, he said to a journalist, a real loser. I dont even know we have to discuss it. So, so but the fun part is when i talk to dr. Houser, you know, and i said, well, how did you feel about being attacked like that . And this was the interesting part. He said to me, as far as im concerned sorry, he said to me, i was what you call a counterpart puncher. Science is the field of controversy, even a scientific topic. Theres no controversy. You have no science. So i wouldnt say that ive been treated. I know people have me. But he said, consider what im doing to them. So so it was it was great fun as well to. Talk to people who were really part of this story. Yeah, yeah. I. I still, while reading it, was marveling at how many different people. You were able to pull into three dimensions. What . And one of the things that does is it made the book incredibly accessible, not just accessible but fun to read. And i was curious if this is real science, but its available to everyone. Did you feel like you had to any of the details to simplify things to make it available to to everyone . You know, i didnt because it was actually the opposite, which is i knew almost nothing when i started the book, what was in it and what wanted to do was tell this story in a way that everybody could appreciate the way that i did, because i just learned so many mindblowing that i, you know, i mean, look, every particle in your body came from the big bang, right . So at one point, everything in your body was in a teeny tiny, infinitesimal point of time and space in all of us, all visible. It exploded. The Hydrogen Atoms and the protons that formed in stars. All the chemical elements that made of all of the 118 elements on the periodic table, made of 24 of them. Its those are the molecules of life. Those the ones that we trace. And actually 98 of our up your mass and mine comes from only six of them. Right. They they found their way to earth life was created. Were here. Were made of those particles and. Now were look we can actually look back, retrace that journey, which is i mean, its just incredible, right . I mean, and thats i wanted to recap capture whats so incredible about discoveries, because you learn about big bang in school. You learn about photosynth, you learn about a lot of other theories. And and we kind of accept them. But if you actually stop and sit back and really think about them, theyre mind blowing. And thats really one that, you know, i my mind was blown and thats what i wanted to convey. It comes across. Does it change you think about us and our lives.