All language subtitles for 186B4B3A2E6F74A54A7962F00925D6E3_eng

We live on one level of existence,
but there are others.

These hidden dimensions of reality are
everywhere, far away, across the light

years, beneath our feet, and even inside
you and me.

We are made of atoms.

There are more atoms
in your eye than there are

stars in all the galaxies
of the known universe.

The same is true of any solid object
larger than the tip of your little finger.

I'm a collection of three
billion, billion, billion

intricately arranged atoms
called Neil deGrasse Tyson.

You're a similar collection with a
different name.

We don't usually think of
ourselves this way because that

level of reality lies beyond
the realm of our senses.

But we're not going to let that stop us.

We can go deeper.

Deeper into the wonder.

Atoms let matter do funny things.

To understand water, you need to know what
its atoms are doing.

Every molecule of water
is composed of two tiny

hydrogen atoms attached
to a larger oxygen atom.

That's why we call it H2O.

If it's not too hot or
too cold, the molecules

can slide and tumble
past each other.

There's a stickiness
between the molecules,

but not enough to lock
them into a rigid solid.

That's what makes something a liquid.

The sun warms the water, and with more
energy, the molecules move faster.

That's all that temperature is.

Those molecules are
moving fast enough to break

the weak bonds that hold
them to their neighbors.

That's evaporation.

The air we breathe is made of
nitrogen and oxygen molecules

with a scattering of water
vapor and carbon dioxide.

Incoming!

That's condensation.

A dewdrop is the momentary triumph of
condensation over evaporation.

And while it lasts, it's a little cosmos
with its own worlds, creatures, drama.

To explore the far-flung realms of this
dewdrop, we're going to need a ship.

One with twin engines, science and
imagination.

That's a single-celled
paramecia, one of a multitude

of skilled hunter-warriors
that roam the dewdrop.

But they, too, are hunted.

A dileptus, the paramecium's mortal enemy.

The paramecium might get lucky and score a
direct hit.

Even if it doesn't, the recoil
from the barrage will put

some distance between the
paramecium and its attacker.

What can I say?

That's life in the dewdrop.

That little guy?

It's a tardigrade.

An animal smaller than the head of a pin.

Don't underestimate them.

Tardigrades have been living on this
planet a lot longer than we have.

About 500 million years.

For every one of us, there's at least a
billion of them.

They can make a living anywhere on Earth.

In the frigid peaks of the tallest
mountains.

In the cauldrons of erupting volcanoes.

And in the deep ocean vents in the bottom
of the sea.

Tardigrades are so tough, they can survive
naked in the vacuum of space.

They've survived all five of the most
recent mass extinctions on this planet.

A visitor from another
world could be forgiven for

thinking of Earth as the
planet of the tardigrades.

If we're ever going to get to the bottom
of this dewdrop, better get a move on.

Every leaf and tiny clump
of moss has hundreds of

thousands of microscopic
mouths called stomata.

Plants breathe through
them, taking in carbon

dioxide, exhaling the
oxygen that we need to live.

The plants can survive without us.

But we and all the other animals,
we'd be toast without them.

The plants make food out of sunlight.

We animals can't do that.

To see how they do it, we have to go
deeper.

Make ourselves about a thousand times
smaller to get into their treasure house.

The place where they keep the good stuff.

The chlorophyll.

That's the molecule that converts sunlight
into energy.

Every one of those rectangles is a plant
cell.

And those tiny green vehicles are its
energy factories.

If we could steal their trade secrets, it
would trigger a new industrial revolution.

But to spy on them, we're going to need to
go deeper still.

What alien world has the ship of the
imagination carried us to this time?

It's the cosmos.

Contained within a dewdrop.

We're on an industrial espionage mission.

If we can penetrate the trade secrets of
the manufacturing process in that

chloroplast, let's just say our whole
future hangs in the balance.

This chloroplast is using
sunlight to break water

molecules into atoms
of hydrogen and oxygen.

It combines the hydrogen
with carbon dioxide to make

sugar and releases the
oxygen as a waste product.

To see how it happens, we have to go even
deeper.

Get even smaller.

We're talking atomic scale.

Bingo.

This assembly line is the heart of the
molecular industrial complex.

At the molecular level, things happen too
fast for us to see.

So we'll have to slow them down about a
billion times.

Those larger molecules are carbon dioxide.

Each one of them is made of one carbon and
two oxygen atoms.

When sunlight strikes a green molecule of
chlorophyll, it sets in motion a series of

chemical reactions, breaking apart water
molecules and freeing energetic electrons.

And that's just the day shift when sunlight
supplies the incoming stream of energy.

There's a second
shift that works day and

night, using the solar
energy kept in reserve.

The energy of the free
electrons is put to work,

combining carbon dioxide
with hydrogen from the water.

The end product is sugar, which stores the
solar energy.

The chloroplast is a three billion year
old solar energy collector.

This submicroscopic solar battery is what
drives all the forests and the fields,

and the plankton of the seas, and the
animals, including us.

The solar-powered biosphere
collects and processes

six times more power
than our entire civilization.

We understand on a chemical level how
photosynthesis works.

We can recreate the process in the
laboratory.

But we're not as good at it as plants are.

And that's not surprising,
considering nature has been at

this for billions of years,
and we've only just started.

But if we could figure out the trade-off,
the trade secrets of photosynthesis,

every other source of
energy we depend on today

coal, oil, natural gas,
would become obsolete.

Photosynthesis is the ultimate green
power.

It doesn't pollute the air, and is,
in fact, carbon neutral.

Artificial photosynthesis, on a big enough
scale, could reduce the greenhouse effect

that's driving climate change in a
dangerous direction.

Uh-oh, place is evaporating.

Time to get out of here.

How fleeting is the life of a dewdrop?

It condenses from
thin air in the cool of the

night, only to vanish
with the heat of the day.

And what if its inhabitants, the
tardigrades?

They'll be fine.

They can go without water for years.

It's hard to imagine, but plants covered
the surface of the Earth for hundreds of

millions of years before they put forth
their first flower.

That was about 100 million years ago,
shortly before the dinosaurs.

Our world must have been
a relatively drab-looking

place back then, dominated
by shades of green and brown.

Yeah, there were giant trees and ferns and
other plant life.

But not the purple of an iris.

Or the crimson of a red, red rose.

Orchids were among the first flowering
species to appear on Earth.

And they're the most diverse.

Darwin was particularly fascinated by the
comet orchid of Madagascar, a flower whose

pollen is hidden at the bottom of a very
long, thin spur.

There can be no stronger test of an idea
than its predictive power.

On the basis of his theory of evolution
through natural selection, Darwin

speculated that somewhere on
the island of Madagascar, there

must live flying insects with
extraordinarily lengthy tails.

Tongues.

Ones long enough to reach the pollen.

No one had ever seen such a beast there.

But Darwin insisted that an animal fitting
this description must exist.

Few people at the time believed him.

It wasn't until more than 50 years later
that Darwin was proven right.

In 1903, a huge
hawk moth called the

Morgan's sphinx was
discovered in Madagascar.

Attracted by the comet
orchid's scent, the moth

slurps its pollen with
its foot-long tongue.

Exactly as Darwin expected it would.

It's even more amazing that the Morgan's
sphinx was discovered when you consider

that more than 90% of Madagascar's
rainforests have been destroyed.

In the years since Darwin's
famous prediction, this moth

species could have easily
become extinct with all the others.

Every one of them.

A unique phrase of life's poetry,
written in the atoms by eons of evolution.

Ah, fragrance of lilacs.

It's one of those scents that triggers a
whole constellation of associations.

All those Junes of long ago.

But how does that happen?

How does a smell prompt a movie to start
running in your head?

It's not something we can see.

Could it be a wave of energy, like light?

Or is it some kind of microscopic
particle?

It's actually a molecule.

Every odor we can sense,
whether it comes from

burnt toast, gasoline,
or a field of lilacs.

It's a cloud of molecules.

These molecules have particular shapes.

When I inhale them,
they stimulate a

particular set of
receptor cells in my nose.

An electrical signal
then travels to my

brain, which identifies
this scent as lilac.

Other scents are carried by different
molecules with different shapes.

But when I smell a flower, or
the smoke from a campfire, or

the grease of a motor gear,
I'm often flooded with memories.

Why is it that a simple thing,
such as the scent of a flower,

can trigger powerful memories?

It has to do with the way our brains have
evolved.

Our sense of smell kicks in when the
olfactory nerve in our brain is stimulated.

That nerve is located very
close to the amygdala, a

structure that is integral to
our experience of emotion.

It's also very close to the hippocampus,
which helps us form memories.

The network of neurons that
carry the scent signal from my

nose to my brain has been
fine-tuned over hundreds of years.

Millions of years of evolution.

It's a survival mechanism that can alert
us to danger or guide us to safety.

If you can detect the predator before he's
near enough to strike, or the fire before

it traps you in the forest, you
have a much better chance

to survive and pass on your
genes to the next generation.

That lovely scent
from this field of flowers

sets off a unique
combination of nerve signals.

Only that exact combination
can crack the safe where

the memory of lilacs is
stored inside my brain.

Wonder who they're for?

Maybe we'll find out later.

But first, there's another hidden cosmos
waiting for us.

The plants are softly
breathing, inhaling molecules

of carbon dioxide and
exhaling molecules of oxygen.

And I'm doing the opposite.

Unlike snowflakes and
fingerprints, atoms or molecules

of the same kind are utterly
identical to one another.

With every breath we take,
we inhale as many molecules as

there are stars in all the
galaxies in the visible universe.

And every breath we
exhale is circulated through

the air and mixed gradually
across the continents.

It becomes available for others to
breathe.

Breathe with me.

We all just inhaled about a hundred
million molecules that once passed through

the lungs of everyone who ever lived
before us.

Think of it.

This kind of atomic reincarnation is
another link to our distant ancestors,

including those who first launched us on
our explorations of the unseen universes.

These universes are as real as you or me.

And they surround us.

There was a moment when we awakened to a
new way of thinking and seeing.

It happened about 2,500
years ago on the Greek islands

that lie between the empires
of the East and the West.

There, merchants,
tourists, and sailors freely

mingled, exchanging tales
of great kings and gods.

In Ionian cities and towns like Miletus
and what is now Turkey, the most

fundamental elements of the way we live
now first appeared.

Here, for the first time, reenactments of
aspects of life, created and executed by

professionals with the expectation
of touching something deep

within the hearts of the audience
or just making them laugh.

The first plays, dramas, and comedies were
performed.

Here also was born a radical new idea.

Government by the people.

The first inklings, imperfect then as now
of a democracy.

And the notion that the
ordinary citizen might possess

certain rights come to us
from this time and place.

But in my view, the most revolutionary
innovation of all to come to us from this

ancient world was the
idea that natural events were

neither punishment nor
reward from the capricious gods.

The workings of nature could be explained
without invoking the supernatural.

The first person to express this thought
was a man named Thales.

When the thunder clapped or the earth
quaked, it was not because something you

did had somehow displeased the very
demanding gods.

No, it was the result of natural processes
that we were capable of understanding.

Though none of the books he
is said to have written survive,

Thales kindled a flame
that still burns to this day.

The very idea of cosmos out of chaos.

A universe governed by the order of natural
laws that we could actually figure out.

This is the epic adventure that began in
the mind of Thales.

Only a century following Thales' death,
another genius came along.

And he, more than any
other, was the first to discover

the existence of the hidden
universes that surround us.

Democritus of Abdera
was a true scientist, a

man with a passionate
desire to know the cosmos.

And to have fun.

This is the man who
once said, a life without

parties would be like an
endless road without an inn.

You mean that's it?

That's all there is?

Just a bunch of atoms in a void?

Yup.

Well, think about it.

The world has to be made of countless,
indivisible particles in a void.

Otherwise, nothing could move or grow,
be divided or change.

Without atoms, an empty space for them to
move in, the world would be solid,

static and dead.

So don't be sad, my friend.

Just think of the
infinite possibilities that

arise from different
arrangements of those atoms.

Here's to the atoms.

In this cup.

And in this wine.

And to the laughter they make possible.

Dispersed through the clay of the cup are
microscopic mineral grains.

Different kinds of crystals, each with its
own distinctive atomic architecture.

Mineral structures are exquisite,
but they have a limited repertoire.

A grain of quartz is a lattice of the same
three atoms, repeated without variation,

over and over again.

Even a relatively complex mineral lattice,
like topaz, composed of ten or so atoms,

can only repeat the identical atomic
structure again and again.

To lift matter to another dimension,
to free it from the lattice prison of

endless repetition, you need an atom that
can bond in all directions, with other

atoms like itself, as well as with atoms
of different kinds.

Behold, the carbon atom.

The essential element for life on Earth.

Why?

Carbon is special because it can bond with
up to four other atoms at a time.

It can connect with many different kinds
of atoms, as well as other carbon atoms.

It can curl into rings and
string together into chains,

building molecules far more
complex than any crystal.

No other atom has the same flexibility.

Even atoms that have similar chemical
properties, like silicon, can't form the

amazing variety of molecules built on
carbon.

The carbon-based molecules we call
proteins, the molecules of life,

contain literally hundreds of thousands of
atoms.

Carbon atoms are the
backbone of the molecules that

make every living thing
on Earth, including us.

That's the difference between rocks and
living things.

Life can make enormous molecules of
stunning size and complexity, freeing

matter to improvise, evolve, and even
love.

Take it easy, Dad.

He never actually touched her.

In everyday life on
our world, on the scale

of atoms, material
objects never really touch.

Each atom has a tiny
nucleus at its center,

surrounded by an electron
cloud of lines of force.

As the atoms approach each other, the
boys' electron clouds push away the girls'.

More than 99.9% of the matter of any atom
is concentrated in its nucleus.

The nucleus is surrounded by
an electron cloud, which produces

an invisible field of force
and acts like a shock absorber.

The configuration of the electron cloud
determines the nature of an element.

In the ordinary course of things here on
Earth, the nuclei never touch.

We have a sensation of touching,
but that's really just our invisible force

field overlapping and repelling each
other.

The nucleus is very small compared to the
rest of the atom.

If an atom were the
size of this cathedral, its

nucleus would be the
size of that mote of dust.

An atom is mostly empty space.

To understand the nature of matter,
we have to go deeper still, to a place

100,000 times smaller than the atom,
its nucleus.

The simplest and most plentiful atom in
the cosmos is hydrogen.

Its nucleus is a single proton,
which makes hydrogen element number one.

The clouds that surround
it are the realms where

this atom's lone electron
is permitted to roam.

What happens when you have a nucleus of
two protons?

Protons repel each other.

In order to hold them
together in a nucleus,

you need other
particles called neutrons.

Their job is to keep the protons from
getting out of line.

They overwhelm the protons with their
strong, attractive nuclear force.

A nucleus with two protons is element
number two, otherwise known as helium.

A nucleus with six protons
is element number six, which

is carbon, the fundamental
building block of life.

The nucleus of a gold atom has 79 protons.

They attract 79 electrons and clouds
around it.

The way light interacts with those
electrons is what makes gold glitter.

Every additional
proton in the nucleus

requires enough neutrons
to bind them together.

Up to a point, there's an upper
limit to the number of neutrons

you can stuff into a nucleus
before it becomes unstable.

I know a place where
the nuclei of different

atoms actually do
touch each other.

The sun looks like a solid object,
but it's not.

It's so hot that all its atoms are always
in their gaseous state.

The bonds that join atoms to
make solids and liquids on Earth

are not strong enough to
withstand the heat of the broiling sun.

Those arcing streams of incandescent gas
that dwarf the Earth are guided by

magnetic lines of force that emanate from
below the surface of the sun.

Why is the sun so hot?

Because its own stupendous gravity is
squeezing its atoms together.

The energy of gravity is being transformed
into the energy of moving atoms.

That's what heat is.

The deeper we go
into the sun, the greater

the squeezing and the
higher the temperature.

In the heart of the sun, the atoms are
moving so fast that when they collide,

they fuse.

Their nuclei touch.

The sun is a nuclear fusion reactor held
together by its own gravity.

It's balanced between
the inward pull of

gravity and the outward
push of its hot gases.

That balance has lasted
billions of years, providing

stability that made possible
the evolution of life on Earth.

In the sun's core, the fusion
of hydrogen into helium

releases nuclear energy
in the form of photons.

These particles of light
slowly work their way

to the surface where
they're seen as sunlight.

Helium is the ash of the sun's nuclear
furnace.

The sun is a medium-sized star.

Its core is only a lukewarm 10 million
degrees.

Hot enough to fuse hydrogen, but too cold
to fuse helium.

There are many stars in the
galaxy that get much hotter

because they're more
massive and have more gravity.

Such stars fuse helium into heavier
elements like carbon and oxygen.

In their old age, they gently diffuse
these elements into space.

Other stars, more
massive yet, live fast and

die young in cataclysmic
supernova explosions.

In our galaxy, such stars go supernova
about once a century.

Those explosions are far hotter than the
core of the sun.

Hot enough to transform
elements like iron into

all the heavier ones and
spew them into space.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a
neighboring galaxy of our Milky Way.

It's visible in the skies of the southern
hemisphere.

When a supernova explodes, its brightness
rivals that of its entire galaxy.

But all that light is
only about one percent

of the energy liberated
in the explosion.

The rest of the energy
is carried off by the most

common and the most
mysterious particles in the cosmos.

There are trillions of them passing
through you right now.

And yet, tracking down
even one of them will

take us to one of the
strangest places on Earth.

Stalking the wild neutrino is the rarest
of sport.

The lengths one must go to track them down
is nothing short of astonishing.

Welcome to Super-Kamioka.

A subterranean Japanese neutrino detection
chamber.

We're more than a half mile beneath our
surface.

You might ask, well, who
in their right mind would

bury an astronomical
observatory so far underground?

Those who hunt the most elusive prey in
the cosmos.

The neutrino.

This enormous array of light detectors
surrounding 50,000 tons of distilled water

is a trap designed to catch neutrinos
only.

Other particles, such as cosmic rays,
mostly protons and electrons, that rain

down from space, cannot get through all
that rock above us.

But matter poses no obstacle to a
neutrino.

A neutrino can pass through 100 light
years of steel without even slowing down.

Neutrinos hardly interact with matter at
all.

That's why you need so much of it to catch
even one of them.

On those rare occasions when a neutrino
actually does collide with a particle of

ordinary matter, it produces a ghostly
ring-shaped flash of light.

They're lying in wait.

For a particle that weighs next to
nothing.

Even the minuscule electron has more than
a million times its mass.

There.

When the supernova in the
Large Magellanic Cloud blew its

top in 1987, this is what it
would have looked like in here.

Now remember, the Large Magellanic Cloud
is in our southern hemisphere.

So the neutrinos didn't come through that
half mile of rock above us.

They had to pass through
the thousands of miles

of rock and iron below
us to reach this detector.

But the coolest thing was
that those neutrinos hit Earth

three hours before the
light from the supernova did.

If nothing can travel faster than light,
how could that possibly be?

This is a dead star walking.

It may look normal, but deep within it
something cataclysmic is happening.

This blue supergiant star has already
begun to explode inside.

Like rats deserting a sinking ship,
the neutrinos produced in the heart of the

exploding star race outward
and near the speed of

light through the overlying
mass in only a few seconds.

But the shockwave of the exploding gas
plods along from the center of the star at

one ten-thousandth the
speed of light until it finally

reaches the star's surface,
turning it into Supernova 1987A.

It took hours for the explosion
to reach the surface of

the star and blow it wide open,
exposing the superhot core.

The neutrinos had an insurmountable head
start.

That's why the flash
of light arrived on Earth

so much later than
the shower of neutrinos.

Before anyone had ever
snared the wild neutrino,

it existed in the mind
of a theoretical physicist.

Just as Charles Darwin knew there must be
an extremely long-nosed creature flying

around somewhere in Madagascar,
a twentieth-century physicist named

Wolfgang Pauli was desperately seeking a
particle to rescue one of the pillars of

modern physics, the law of the
conservation of energy.

So why didn't I flinch?

Because the laws of
science differ fundamentally

from those of other
human endeavors.

In order for an idea to become a
scientific law, it has to be unbreakable.

That's why I was willing to bet on the
laws of conservation of energy.

Now, if you try this at home, take care
not to give the cannonball a push.

That's adding energy, and the ball will
surely come back and do some damage.

You just have to let it go.

Like this.

By lifting the ball,
you give it gravitational

energy, which is the
potential to fall and accelerate.

The cannonball is going fastest when it's
at the bottom of its arc.

At that moment, it's
converted all of its

gravitational energy
to the energy of motion.

As it swings, the cannonball
is constantly exchanging

one of these two kinds
of energy for the other.

But the total amount of energy remains
constant.

That's an example of the law of
conservation of energy.

Once the cannonball
is released, it can never

gain more energy
than it had to begin with.

It has no way to fly up and break my nose.

The energy accounting books are always
strictly balanced.

There's no such thing as cheating.

So in the 20th century, when physicists
first calculated the energy of atoms

precisely, they were startled to discover
an apparent violation of this law.

They found that in some
radioactive atoms, the

nucleus can spontaneously
eject an electron.

This transforms the atom into a different
element.

The physicists were mystified.

The energy of the escaped
electron, plus that of the new

atom, adds up to less than the
energy in the original nucleus.

But the law says, thou shalt not destroy
or create energy.

So where did the missing energy go?

In 1930, Wolfgang Pauli predicted there
must be an undiscovered particle,

one that makes off with the missing
energy.

At the time, Pauli lamented that such a
phantom particle might be so minute,

swift, and evasive as to forever defy
detection.

But that was a rare failure of his
imagination.

Because science is always searching for a
way to go deeper still.

A generation later, Pauli's
neutrinos were actually detected

for the first time in radiation
from a nuclear reactor.

And we've been finding them with
difficulty ever since.

There are scientists today
who are trying to find a way to

ride those neutrinos all the
way back to the beginning of time.

We'll go as far as they have gone to come
up against the Wall of Furrows.

Forever.

The Wall of Forever is nothing new.

Our ancestors came up against it almost as
soon as they first started imagining it.

A million dawns ago, in the 13th century B
.C., the Egyptians built this temple at

Abu Simbel to honor the pharaoh Ramses II,
depicted here in four colossal statues.

Reigning even above this mighty king is
the falcon-headed Raharaki, god of the sun.

The temple was designed
so that the light from the rising

sun could only enter the
sanctuary on two days every year.

As the rays enter the temple,
they burnish the statues of the

gods with their golden light
before penetrating the sanctuary.

Even then, one god remains in shadow.

Ta, lord of creation, as if the origin of
the universe must forever be concealed.

Feel the sun on your face.

The energy that warms
you began its journey some

10 million years ago
in the heart of the sun.

Unlike neutrinos, the
photons needed that long to

work their way out from
the core to the surface.

Why?

Because they were colliding billions of
times per second with the sun's atoms,

every collision sending them off in a
random direction.

Once they finally reached the surface,
they were free to dash non-stop at the

speed of light in a mere 8 minutes and 20
seconds from the sun to you.

10 million year old light on your face.

What was happening when that light left
the heart of the sun?

The cosmic calendar
compresses the entire 13.8 billion

year history of the
universe into a single year.

Every month represents about a billion
years.

Every day, about 40 million years.

The universe is so old that
on the cosmic calendar, 10

million years ago, only
takes us back as far as 6 p.m.

on the last evening of the last day of the
year.

And what about us?

Humans had yet to evolve.

10 million years ago, our
ancestors were anthropoid

apes swinging through
the trees of Africa.

To us, 10 million years seems like a long
time.

But it's only the length of an afternoon
on the time scale of the cosmos.

The sun began fusing hydrogen 4,500
million years ago.

August 31st on the cosmic calendar.

Our Milky Way galaxy is about 10,000
million years old.

The first galaxies formed a few billion
years earlier.

And something keeps me from going any
further back in time.

What is this?

It's the nature of light and time.

Because light travels at a finite speed, to
look across space is to look back in time.

So the farther we see, the older the
light.

This is as far back in the history of the
cosmos as we can see, with light.

It's a baby picture of the universe when
it was only 380,000 years old.

That's 15 minutes into January 1st on the
cosmic calendar.

If we look as far as we can see in any
direction using microwave telescopes,

this is what we see.

The glow left over from the Big Bang.

Imagine that all the matter
and energy of the observable

universe was concentrated
into something no larger than this.

That's the size of the universe.

When it was a trillionth of a trillionth
of a trillionth of a second old.

All the matter and energy of the hundred
billion galaxies now splayed out across

the billions of light years were once pent
up in something the size of a marble.

Can you imagine how tightly packed that
marble must have been?

Far too dense for any kind of light to
move through it.

But no obstacle for the likes of
neutrinos.

The Big Bang must have produced stupendous
numbers of neutrinos, which flew

unhindered through that inconceivable
crush of matter.

The very thing that makes them almost
impossible to detect is what allows

neutrinos to sail through the curtain that
conceals the beginning of time.

Where are they now?

They're here.

They're there.

Everywhere throughout the universe.

Neutrinos from creation are within you.

From a marble to the cosmos.

This is the road that Thales and
Democritus put us on some 2,500 years ago.

A road of endless searching, a relentless,
systematic hunt for new worlds,

and an ever-deepening understanding of
nature.

Who among you will pick up that torch and
take us down that next stretch of road?