Podcast #105: Nathaniel Kahn on Outer Space, Weird Science, and Film

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
March 29, 2016

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Nathaniel Kahn is a filmmaker who has twice been nominated for Academy Awards for his documentaries Two Hands and My Architect. In his newest project, a Discovery Channel Documentary called Telescope, he explores the story of the Webb, perhaps our greatest chance since Hubble to see farther into the reaches of the universe. For this week's New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Nathaniel Kahn discussing powerful telescopes, weird science, and the innocence of scientists portrayed in his latest film.

Nathaniel Kahn LIVE from the NYPL

Nathaniel Kahn LIVE from the NYPL

In Telescope, Kahn captures not only the development of the Webb telescope, but some of the mind-boggling scientific discoveries that have led us to current scientific research. He noted the strange phenomenon of seeing things that once were as though they exist in the present:

"We’re not really seeing each other at the same time. If you look at the moon it’s about the way it was two seconds in the past, when the sun rises, it’s the way it was eight minutes ago. If the sun disappeared we wouldn’t know for eight minutes. These are very, very important things. You start to look at stars, you’re talking about hundreds of years, thousands of years. You look at the Andromeda Nebula, which is the farthest thing we can see with our naked eye, you can see it on a dark night... That’s two, that’s almost three million light-years away, so we’re seeing that thing the way it was three million years ago. Think about that for a moment."

One of the ways of seeing he is, of course, most interested in is through the Webb telescope. He compares it to a piece of origami:

"The Hubble is only three hundred miles over our heads, so just to give you a sense of this new telescope that is being built. Because we don’t talk about it much, we don’t have time to show you those clips. The James Webb Space Telescope will be, yes, a hundred times more powerful than Hubble, but there are other things about it that make it quite remarkable. One of the most remarkable things of it is it’s bigger than can fit in a rocket. So it has to fold up, it’s really an origami telescope... So talk about precision. This thing has to fold up perfectly and then it has to unfold perfectly, and the difference with Webb, of course, is that with between Hubble, Hubble is one mirror, it looks like basically a ground-based telescope, only in space, but Hubble has eighteen mirrors, all of which have to work together, fold up, unfold, work together to create a single image, and also unlike Hubble, Hubble is 250 miles over our head, the James Webb Space Telescope, because it is also an infrared telescope, it has to be very cold, has to be much further away from the Earth, it’s going to be a million miles away."

Kahn has made a number of films, but he notes that what unites them all is a focus on fascinating characters:

"Films are films and I almost, I really resent sort of the definitions between them, but luckily I think the definitions are breaking down, which is good. A movie’s just a movie. Is it entertaining, does it take you from place to place, does it tell a story on a screen? That’s a movie. What makes a great movie is great characters. And one of the things I think documentaries have given us over the past few years, which is so marvelous is characters that do things that are unpredictable, that surprise us with emotional things that suddenly come out of nowhere, and in making this film the reason I knew I was on to something great is one scientist after another who I met, there’s a marvelous innocence to you scientists in a way. The enthusiasm is the enthusiasm of a child, of a young person, they’re doing—This is not a job for them, this a great passion, but they’re also weird, they’re strange people, in a good way."

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