Gravity’s Cosmic Symphony with Kelly Holley-Bockelmann
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Chuck, if you give an astrophysicist a cookie, they'll ask for more. We weren't happy with LIGO. No. There's more black holes to detect.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now we got Lisa, which, you know, I have to say, better name than LIGO.
That's for sure.
Coming up, everything about the next generation gravitational wave detector on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, got with me my co-host Chuck Knight. Chuckie baby, how you doing? Hey, what's up, Neil? How's it going, buddy? All right, yeah. Professional comedian and actor and... And acting like a comedian. I've even seen you on TV commercials. Yes, you have, but not enough.
Not enough TV commercials. That seems to be the problem. That's what I'm trying to convince the industry of. The public is clamoring for more Chuck Nice TV commercials.
Oh, okay. So, today, we're revisiting a topic we've done in several different dimensions, in several different angles. Really?
Yeah. See, this is when I wish I would have read the e-mails. About what the show is going to be.
Because I don't know. We're going to be talking about gravitational waves. Oh, sweet. Nice. And while I know a little bit about it, I'm no expert. And so we combed the landscape. Okay. And we found one of my colleagues who's on the frontier of that. Oh. The future of gravitational waves. wave detection. And that is in the incarnation of Kelly Holly Bottleman. Kelly, did I pronounce your whole rest of your three names correctly?
Yes.
That's a serial killer name if I ever heard one. You're a professor of physics at Vanderbilt University. I think that's in Nashville, correct? It is, yes. Nashville, Tennessee. Recent chair of NASA's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. sensibly acronym Lisa, Lisa of their study team and your recent chair of NASA's astrophysics advisory committee. Yeah, I served on that many moons ago, maybe before you were born, but I wasn't chair. I was just a member of that committee. This is the closest NASA has to a board. Right. NASA has people who advise them, not only astrophysicists, but others in the full spectrum of NASA's portfolio. And you are director of the Fisk Vanderbilt Bridge Program. Oh, my gosh. One of the most extraordinary and successful programs I have ever seen enacted for its intent and its purpose.
And in fact, I want to lead off with that. So I. Vanderbilt and Fisk University have a partnership through this bridge program. Right. And if I understood it correctly, Fisk does not have the full up research programming and facilities that Vanderbilt does. And so in a bridge program, you get students from one university who can participate in another. Are you ahead of that? So tell me more about it.
Yeah. Thanks. It began about 20 years ago. So we're about 20 years. Right. This has been going. Yeah, it has been going. We started off with the idea that, you know, the traditional metrics that that choose graduate talent are, you know, things like standardized test scores and grades and. That'd be the GRE, right? That's right, the GRE. They select, you know, people who are really great at taking tests and very smart people. But, you know, science isn't like that. And so we need folks that have diversity of thought and background and who are creative to be able to tackle the big problems of today. And so, you know, we designed metrics that search for that that search for creativity and like you know, community mindedness and, and yeah, that those are the things that, that end up making scientists and in our mind.
Sounds to me like we're going to have to cancel you. Creativity, diversity of thought, diversity, all bad things.
So what's interesting to me, of course, is, yeah, you can get high scores on an exam, but modern science is no longer an isolated activity. You have collaborations, collaborators, you write grants. There's a public side of it, especially in our field. And these are dimensions of who you are that don't show up on an exam score, certainly not a standardized exam score.
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