I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to a special edition of Science Matters from the Origins Podcasts, from the Origins Project Foundation.

I'm doing this because it's the end of the year and it's nice to have a celebration, but also to celebrate several other important things.

First of all, this week, the Orisons podcast passed 100,000 subscribers and we're quite excited about that.

And I thought in honor of that I should do a special science matters.

But also this week, a very important event in science happened, and that was the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.

You've heard a lot about it, but I thought I'd spend some time maybe more than you see in the standard television soundbites talking about the science of the space telescope, what it might do, and why it's built the way it is.

So this is a Science Matters holiday special,

the James Webb Space Telescope.

And I want to talk about the nature of the telescope.

You may have seen these images a few times.

The Hubble Space Telescope is basically a primary mirror,

a lens that a mirror that looks for more or less visible light,

as you'll see.

It's got a little hole in the center,

and its size was roughly about 2.4 meters across.

And when you consider that the area of the mirror is pi r squared and r is about 1.2 meters,

you'd think it might be the, when you work it out, it might be greater than four or five

meters squared.

But when you have to take out the fact that there's a hole in the center,

and you work out to be, it's about four meters squared.

When you take the area of the big circle minus the air, the little circle,

you get about four meters squared.

...