This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

The first time I gave a real scientific presentation, it was to a group at Santa Cruz.

And after I finished the talk, one of the famous cosmologists in the audience stood up

and he turned around to the audience and he said, you know, I just want to point out that

this is really a big deal. This is a completely different picture. And that was the moment

where I stopped and I said, yeah, actually it's a big deal, you know, and it's sort of

somebody else had to help you, you remind yourself that this is really, you know, amazing.

That salt pearl mudder, whose big deal discovery was that the expansion of the universe

isn't slowing down as was long assumed by him and every other cosmologist,

but that it's actually speeding up and at an ever increasing rate.

The discovery won him the Nobel Prize in 2011. We talked soon after the James Webb Space Telescope

reached its parking spot a million miles out in space from where it will peer back farther in time

than any telescope before it. This is a very exciting time to be talking to you. For me anyway,

because what's happening, what's big news right now is that the Webb telescope is right where it

ought to be a million miles out in space, getting ready to take pictures of some of the earliest

events in the universe. This must be an exciting time for you as a cosmologist, no?

Every time we get a new instrument, everybody starts talking to each other about, okay, now what can we do?

What kinds of observations can we take this time? And can we solve any of the problems that we've

been wondering about? And so you watch, in this case, the pedals unfold on this telescope and you just

hope, okay, it's got to do all those little things just right and unfold to that last precision

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