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I'm Padi Boyd, and this is NASA's
Curious Universe.

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[Music]

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NASA has begun to do something

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astronomers
have been dreaming about for decades.

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The James Webb Space Telescope
is peering into our universe's early past

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at some of the very first stars
and galaxies to ever form.

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And the first light after the Big Bang:

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cosmic dawn.

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Cosmic Dawn is also the title of a
new NASA documentary that covers

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the untold story of the James
Webb Space Telescope’s

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design, construction and launch.

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You're in for a treat.

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You get to peek inside NASA's clean rooms,

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beryllium mines,
and even weather a hurricane.

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There are a lot of twists and turns.

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I wanted to talk to someone who knows
the Webb Telescope better

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than just about anyone, because he's
one of the people who first dreamed it up.

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John Mather, welcome to Curious Universe.

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Thank you, Padi, it's
great to be here with you.

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I'm delighted that you're here.

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It's the first time
we've seen each other in a while

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since the James Webb Space
Telescope launched.

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So, first of all, congratulations
on what an amazingly successful--

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It's a wonderful, wonderful observatory,

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and it's working beautifully.

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So we referenced cosmic dawn just a moment ago.

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What is cosmic dawn?

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The cosmic dawn is the beginning of things
turning on after the Big Bang.

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So we didn't know until now
how that started.

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But, you know,
the Big Bang gave us an expanded universe,

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but didn't have stars
and galaxies in it yet.

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That was 13.8 billion years ago.

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So time passed and something happened
and stars turned up and black holes.

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And we'd like to know what that was about.

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We call it the cosmic dawn.

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It's the first lights in the universe.

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So let me take you back a little bit
to a different kind of cosmic dawn,

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a different beginning: your origin story.

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So you grew up in a rural part
of new Jersey,

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-Right. 
-Yes.

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This house straight in front of us
was the one I lived in.

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That was our guest room upstairs,

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and then I had this room up here
with the three little windows

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looking out.

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Do you remember, like a certain moment
in your childhood

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when your curiosity about the universe
was first ignited?

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It's hard to remember
accurately that far back.

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I didn't have a lab notebook
to write in when I was six,

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but I do remember when I was about six,

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my dad told me at bedtime,

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you know, you're made out of cells
and there are chromosomes inside,

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and they control your future in some way,
and you don't know how.

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And I thought,

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“That's really interesting,”
but I did not end up becoming a biologist.

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Right.

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Then by the time I was eight,
I was already aware of astronomy.

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We'd been to see the Museum
of Natural History in New York City

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and the planetarium show and,

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they showed the planets
going around on the ceiling.

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And there was

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this giant meteorite that sits
just outside the door of the planetarium.

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I thought, this is pretty exciting.

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Did you have a telescope?

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Eventually I did.

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In high school,
I finally got my allowance together,

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and I bought a mirror
from Edmond Scientific.

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And it was that big around.

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And I bought some lenses,
and I made some eyepieces and,

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with cardboard and hoops and things, and,

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And I made my telescope so I can see through it.

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-Amazing. 
-I still have it.

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That's amazing.

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So were you ever thinking that moment
as you were building this first telescope

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that someday I'm going to build the most
amazing telescope that will launch

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-a million miles away from Earth?
-No, I’m--

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that was long before the Space Age.

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Yeah.

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So, no, there was no hint of that.

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So let me just pop in for a second here
and explain how John

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Mather and his groundbreaking research
became a big deal.

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While John was beginning his career
in the 1960s,

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scientists made a remarkable discovery.

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We refer to it as the cosmic microwave
background radiation.

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Eventually, John led a mission to measure
and study that radiation from space.

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The Cosmic Background Explorer
satellite has been designed to study

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the cosmic background radiation,

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which we think is the remnant
of the primeval explosion.

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The aim of the COBE mission
is to measure these primeval conditions

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that would have led to the formation
of the giant voids,

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the strings of galaxies,
the formation of stars and planets,

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-and, finally, people. 
--engines start and liftoff!

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Liftoff of Delta--

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NASA launched a spacecraft called Cosmic
Background Explorer, or COBE for short.

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John led COBE’s entire life cycle,
conceptualizing the mission

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and leading the team who pioneered
some really elegant scientific techniques.

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This work with COBE
is what earned him a Nobel Prize.

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I was at a meeting of astronomers in 1990,

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when John shared
the very first findings from COBE.

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And this might sound crazy,
but that presentation

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was absolutely electric.

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I was a graduate student,
and I was so excited

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to see the first results from COBE,

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and what I didn't realize
was that virtually

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everybody else at
the meeting was as excited as I was.

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In fact, it was a packed house, standing room only.

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I'm telling you,
it felt like a rock concert.

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And as soon as John showed
the early results from COBE on an overhead

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projector, we all jumped to our feet
and gave him a standing ovation,

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because what he was showing us
was the clearest picture yet of the early

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evolution of our universe,

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and it was just a taste of things to come.

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Anyway, long

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before he started developing the James
Webb Space Telescope,

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John made a name for himself
by revolutionizing what we know about

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some of the universe's earliest moments,
shortly after what we called the Big Bang.

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When did you first hear
about the Big Bang?

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Well, I had a summer school in physics
after my junior year in high school.

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Went up to Cornell.

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By the time I got to college,
you know, the people who discovered

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the cosmic microwave
background radiation in 1965.

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I didn't know how much it was going
to turn out to be a big deal for us.

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Yeah.

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At first, you know. Okay. It exists.

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You have no idea that you're going
to get so much information out of it

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that we eventually got from the COBE
satellite and others that followed.

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Yeah.

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So that to me is the biggest surprise
of that work.

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Not that the Big Bang happened.

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-Why wouldn't it?
-Yeah.

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But how could we find out so much,
which we have.

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Right.

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So you learn about
the cosmic microwave

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background radiation
being measured in the 60s.

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How do you go from that to
leading a project to launch a telescope?

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Oh my goodness. Oh, that's a long story,

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but NASA says we want proposals
for new science missions.

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It's just, what, 1969

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we landed on the Moon.

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This is five years later, I guess.

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Golden age.

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Oh, okay. So. Okay.

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Anybody got any ideas?

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Okay, boss,

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my thesis project failed,
but we should try it in outer space.

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And he knew it was a good idea.

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He was already familiar with the reasons
why it would be a good idea.

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So what NASA did was
they said, that's interesting.

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Well, here's a little money to go
a little farther, and we made an idea.

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-Yeah. 
-And that's what we eventually built.

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Built it, launched it, operated it.

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Got an amazing result.

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And within weeks of the launch,
we knew the expanding universe story

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that everybody calls
the Big Bang was correct,

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because, there's a thing
called the spectrum which says, how bright

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is this radiation at every wavelength?

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And it is exactly as it was supposed
to be, if it's really the remnant of that

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early moment.

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Right.

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And so got a standing ovation for that.

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-I was there, John. 
-You were there?

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Yes!

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I don't know if I've ever told you that.

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Thousands and thousands were there,

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and I thought,
you know, my perspective was warped.

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I thought, It's Saturday. Nobody's coming.

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But everybody came.

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It was jammed.

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-It was jammed. 
-Yes.

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-It was standing room only. 
-Yeah.

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I think we all knew it was never going
to be like that in our career again.

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We're not going to have a moment like that

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where everybody just
has this simultaneously sort of joyful

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recognition
of what's happening here with this data.

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But what was it like for you,

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like the first time you saw that curve
that you just described?

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What was the moment
like when you were seeing it?

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What actually happened
is I remember it is the people

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that worked on the calibration process,
on the software,

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called me up one morning,

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“You got to see this.”

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So they had a graph, and

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Oh, you got to see this. Okay.

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This is exactly what I thought it would be.

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Wow.

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And I hope we get to
to announce this real soon.

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And such an important result
as time goes on

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that it ends up being the Nobel Prize
winning work.

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Well, yes it does,
although that's only part of it,

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because there's a second,
even more significant result

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that we got from the other instrument on the mission.

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We made a map to see if this radiation
is equally bright in every direction.

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Right.

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And it should be if it's really cosmic,

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and it should be a little bit different
and over there than over here

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because we're moving
relative to the rest of the universe.

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And that's true.

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And that sort of matches up
with what we thought.

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And then the big question is: does it
have spots in it?

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Is it, is it spotty?

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Is the Big Bang non-uniform
or totally smooth?

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And this was the first real proof
that it was spotty.

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So other people had been working on it.

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And there was evidence

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measured from the ground.

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Other people had claims,
but it wasn't such a big deal.

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We made a map of the entire sky.

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So you couldn't miss that

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the pattern was there.

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So not only did you know spotty,

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-but you knew where the spots were.
-We know where the spots were.

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And so Stephen Hawking saw that map,

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he said “That's the most important
scientific discovery of this century,”

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-Wow. 
-“if not, of all time.”

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And it didn't fully appreciate right away
why he thought it was so important.

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But I think what he meant was

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the early universe
was not the same everywhere.

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So it means gravity could pull back
some of the expanding material

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and pull it back together
to make galaxies.

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So we're here because there's--
the early universe has spots,

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and then of course, there's
a big puzzle of what made this spots.

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And we have no idea.

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Some year

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we might have a reason
why those spots are there.

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Maybe it'll be quantum gravity.

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Maybe it'll be some other story.

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Right now, we don't know why they're there.

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This is a long time ago now, 2006,

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but I think I remember that
that was a big day here at Goddard,

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the day that you found out
that you won the Nobel Prize.

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Can you tell us what that moment was like?

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Well, it was a what happens

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is, you get a phone call at a quarter of six
in the morning in the Eastern time zone.

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Were you told to be, like,
to be on the lookout for a call?

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I had been given some hint
that this might be our year.

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So, anyway, the phone call does come,
and I'm lying in bed,

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I'm awake.

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So that happens,

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you talk to the people in Sweden
for a little while.

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Yeah.

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And then they say,

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“Can we put the journalist on?” and do that
for a little while and you hang up.

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And, then the second you do
that, the phone rings again.

243
00:10:46,646 --> 00:10:47,179
Yeah.

244
00:10:47,513 --> 00:10:48,981
And again, and again and they talk,

245
00:10:48,981 --> 00:10:52,184
and after a little while, you realize
you're never getting any breakfast,

246
00:10:52,485 --> 00:10:54,654
still in your pajamas, not going anywhere.

247
00:10:54,654 --> 00:10:56,622
If you keep talking to these people.

248
00:10:56,622 --> 00:10:59,625
So, put the phone off the hook,

249
00:11:00,092 --> 00:11:02,561
and go about your day.

250
00:11:02,561 --> 00:11:05,031
But within an hour,

251
00:11:05,031 --> 00:11:08,300
there were journalists at my door,
and my neighbors had balloons up.

252
00:11:08,467 --> 00:11:09,201
Oh!

253
00:11:09,201 --> 00:11:10,336
Yeah, so it was wonderful.

254
00:11:10,336 --> 00:11:11,137
Yeah!

255
00:11:11,404 --> 00:11:12,238
And how long is it

256
00:11:12,238 --> 00:11:15,408
between when you get the phone call
and when you go accept the prize?

257
00:11:15,541 --> 00:11:18,477
Well, I guess it was October
when we got the phone call,

258
00:11:18,477 --> 00:11:20,680
and the ceremony is on December 10th.

259
00:11:20,680 --> 00:11:21,113
Oh!

260
00:11:21,280 --> 00:11:24,717
So when you go to Stockholm, it's
a totally overwhelming experience.

261
00:11:24,717 --> 00:11:25,151
I bet.

262
00:11:25,251 --> 00:11:26,752
And you don't just get off the airplane,

263
00:11:26,752 --> 00:11:30,890
you're met by diplomats and whisked away
on a car to a special waiting room,

264
00:11:30,923 --> 00:11:34,927
in which there is a stack of chocolate
Nobel medals that high.

265
00:11:34,927 --> 00:11:35,294
Really?

266
00:11:35,995 --> 00:11:36,529
And before

267
00:11:36,529 --> 00:11:39,699
you can walk into the hotel,
there are autograph seekers everywhere.

268
00:11:40,299 --> 00:11:41,600
Oh, my God, I don't want to do this.

269
00:11:41,600 --> 00:11:43,369
I want to go to the bathroom.

270
00:11:43,969 --> 00:11:49,108
So anyway, you deal with that and then you
fall asleep as soon as you can.

271
00:11:49,141 --> 00:11:49,909
Yeah.

272
00:11:49,909 --> 00:11:52,478
And it's a very,
very overwhelming experience.

273
00:11:52,478 --> 00:11:54,013
I can't tell you how

274
00:11:54,013 --> 00:11:57,950
it makes my little heart go pitter patter
even now to even remember that.

275
00:11:58,317 --> 00:12:00,219
-What an amazing day. 
-Yeah.

276
00:12:00,219 --> 00:12:02,188
So I think we all felt we're family.

277
00:12:02,188 --> 00:12:04,356
We did this together,

278
00:12:04,356 --> 00:12:07,093
and we're proud of ourselves
because we did it together.

279
00:12:07,093 --> 00:12:11,497
So you've got all this amazing information
now building up on COBE.

280
00:12:11,997 --> 00:12:16,569
How did you go from, say, COBE
and the Nobel Prize in Stockholm,

281
00:12:17,336 --> 00:12:19,071
like a great accomplishment,

282
00:12:19,071 --> 00:12:22,074
maybe a lot of people would be like,
“Ah, all done.”

283
00:12:22,208 --> 00:12:23,743
But no, you weren't all done.

284
00:12:23,743 --> 00:12:25,644
You moved on to the next amazing thing,
right?

285
00:12:25,644 --> 00:12:28,380
Actually,
what happened was I was thinking, well,

286
00:12:28,380 --> 00:12:31,383
we're never going to do anything
as cool as that again.

287
00:12:31,383 --> 00:12:34,787
And, I got a phone message
from Ed Weiler at NASA Headquarters:

288
00:12:35,221 --> 00:12:38,390
“We're going to start a study of the new
telescope that will follow after Hubble.”

289
00:12:38,624 --> 00:12:39,225
Okay.

290
00:12:39,225 --> 00:12:39,792
Okay.

291
00:12:39,792 --> 00:12:43,028
“And, by the way, if you want to do
this, I need a proposal tomorrow.”

292
00:12:43,162 --> 00:12:43,796
Oh, boy.

293
00:12:43,796 --> 00:12:46,766
I started meeting with engineers
and other scientists to say, well,

294
00:12:46,766 --> 00:12:49,769
what is it we need to build
and why should we build it that way?

295
00:12:49,869 --> 00:12:52,805
And so that was in ‘95.

296
00:12:52,805 --> 00:12:54,473
-Oh boy. 
-Started in on that,

297
00:12:54,473 --> 00:12:56,675
so even before the Nobel Prize came.

298
00:12:56,675 --> 00:12:57,710
So how did you know,

299
00:12:57,710 --> 00:13:00,179
like what would be the telescope
after Hubble?

300
00:13:00,179 --> 00:13:03,582
What was the next big innovation,
and how did that idea come about?

301
00:13:03,649 --> 00:13:07,219
Well, people had been thinking about this
for like 20 years,

302
00:13:07,686 --> 00:13:09,989
even before I got to it.

303
00:13:09,989 --> 00:13:12,758
So they knew
what the next opportunity would be.

304
00:13:12,758 --> 00:13:15,694
What can you do in space
that you can't do any other way?

305
00:13:16,829 --> 00:13:19,465
And so it turned out to be infrared astronomy.

306
00:13:19,465 --> 00:13:22,268
So why can't you do it from the ground?
Well, the telescope

307
00:13:22,268 --> 00:13:25,271
on the ground glows
with its own infrared radiation.

308
00:13:25,337 --> 00:13:29,208
The atmosphere is--it glows
and it's also opaque in many wavelengths.

309
00:13:29,208 --> 00:13:31,377
So you just can't do it any other way.

310
00:13:31,377 --> 00:13:33,879
You have to build a telescope
if you want to make any progress.

311
00:13:33,879 --> 00:13:34,513
Right.

312
00:13:34,513 --> 00:13:36,782
And what could you see
if you could build it?

313
00:13:36,982 --> 00:13:37,817
Number one,

314
00:13:37,817 --> 00:13:41,787
you could see much farther back in time
to the very first galaxies.

315
00:13:42,755 --> 00:13:46,725
You could see inside clouds of dust
and gas where stars are being born,

316
00:13:46,926 --> 00:13:50,296
because dust clouds are more transparent
for infrared wavelengths.

317
00:13:50,863 --> 00:13:53,399
And number three, you can see things
that aren't even warm enough

318
00:13:53,399 --> 00:13:56,569
to light up and to sign
with their visible wavelengths.

319
00:13:56,602 --> 00:13:59,438
So okay,
so this is the great new opportunity,

320
00:13:59,438 --> 00:14:02,074
and we knew right away what we had to do

321
00:14:02,074 --> 00:14:03,642
and why we had to do it.

322
00:14:03,642 --> 00:14:06,378
And it turns out, as you know,
it'd be extremely hard to do it.

323
00:14:06,378 --> 00:14:06,779
Right.

324
00:14:07,146 --> 00:14:09,448
The documentary is an amazing story,

325
00:14:09,448 --> 00:14:11,684
you know, very emotional,

326
00:14:11,684 --> 00:14:16,555
and there are a lot of moments in there
where things looked hard, right?

327
00:14:16,555 --> 00:14:19,291
Things looked like maybe too hard.

328
00:14:20,326 --> 00:14:23,028
That must have been very stressful
for your team.

329
00:14:23,028 --> 00:14:26,632
How do you, as a leader, navigate
those struggles?

330
00:14:26,632 --> 00:14:31,003
How do you keep the team working together
towards something when it gets tough?

331
00:14:31,303 --> 00:14:35,474
Well, I don't think I did anything
very obvious about leadership about this,

332
00:14:35,741 --> 00:14:38,744
but my perspective has always been:
we're going to do this.

333
00:14:39,411 --> 00:14:42,581
I always felt that our leadership above us
had support

334
00:14:42,948 --> 00:14:44,183
that they wanted us to finish.

335
00:14:44,183 --> 00:14:46,018
They wanted us to find a way.

336
00:14:46,018 --> 00:14:49,288
I never felt that anybody above us
wanted to stop us.

337
00:14:50,155 --> 00:14:51,690
So they'll find a way.

338
00:14:51,690 --> 00:14:52,091
Yeah.

339
00:14:52,091 --> 00:14:55,461
So, we on our technical level
we'll find a solution,

340
00:14:55,961 --> 00:14:58,764
and they'll find a way to make sure
we can actually carry it out.

341
00:14:58,764 --> 00:15:00,633
So you always kept that--the shining

342
00:15:00,633 --> 00:15:03,102
knowledge that this had to go,

343
00:15:03,102 --> 00:15:05,871
if we wanted to do the science that we say
we want to do,

344
00:15:05,871 --> 00:15:08,741
it's got to be through this pathway.

345
00:15:08,741 --> 00:15:09,341
Yeah.

346
00:15:09,341 --> 00:15:10,409
That's how I always felt,

347
00:15:10,409 --> 00:15:13,612
and I always felt confident of the support
from our levels above.

348
00:15:13,646 --> 00:15:14,313
Right.

349
00:15:14,313 --> 00:15:17,316
There's the famous thing
about persistence and patience

350
00:15:17,549 --> 00:15:19,952
that's called the marshmallow test
that they give to children.

351
00:15:19,952 --> 00:15:21,620
Oh, what's the marshmallow test?

352
00:15:21,620 --> 00:15:26,058
The marshmallow test is you promise a child that
they can have this marshmallow,

353
00:15:26,058 --> 00:15:28,727
but if they can wait ten minutes,
they can have two.

354
00:15:28,727 --> 00:15:31,697
So the answer is, well,
some kids will jump right away and

355
00:15:31,764 --> 00:15:34,767
take the one,
and some will wait longer and take two.

356
00:15:35,267 --> 00:15:39,738
And I think the reason that some are patient is they trust the adults around them.

357
00:15:41,206 --> 00:15:41,674
And it's not so

358
00:15:41,674 --> 00:15:44,810
much that some kids are impatient
and some are patient.

359
00:15:44,810 --> 00:15:46,712
It's more like

360
00:15:46,712 --> 00:15:48,647
what do they think
the world is like around them?

361
00:15:49,181 --> 00:15:52,418
So I knew that
we had a pretty good system,

362
00:15:53,018 --> 00:15:57,790
that our NASA organization
is good enough to carry this off.

363
00:15:58,590 --> 00:16:00,459
I'm so happy for your team, John.

364
00:16:00,459 --> 00:16:03,762
For the project science team,
for all the engineers and scientists

365
00:16:03,762 --> 00:16:06,632
that worked for their entire careers
in some cases--

366
00:16:06,632 --> 00:16:07,199
Yes, many have.

367
00:16:07,199 --> 00:16:09,802
to make this idea into an amazing reality,

368
00:16:09,802 --> 00:16:10,970
and it's just so exciting

369
00:16:10,970 --> 00:16:14,506
to see all the results
coming out in all these different areas.

370
00:16:14,506 --> 00:16:17,743
The first galaxies, exoplanet atmospheres.

371
00:16:18,010 --> 00:16:20,245
Congratulations once again to you and the whole team.

372
00:16:20,245 --> 00:16:20,646
Thank you,

373
00:16:20,646 --> 00:16:23,082
I think our team has earned
lots of respect,

374
00:16:23,082 --> 00:16:24,917
and it's a very much of a team project.

375
00:16:25,351 --> 00:16:26,618
People think it's my telescope.

376
00:16:26,618 --> 00:16:27,886
It's a team telescope.

377
00:16:30,856 --> 00:16:33,859
John Mather is a senior astrophysicist
at NASA.

378
00:16:34,193 --> 00:16:37,563
You can experience the full
behind-the-scenes story of the James

379
00:16:37,563 --> 00:16:41,000
Webb Space Telescope
in the NASA documentary Cosmic Dawn.

380
00:16:41,867 --> 00:16:45,037
Find the film at NASA.gov/cosmicdawn.

381
00:16:45,371 --> 00:16:48,107
And it will also be streaming on NASA Plus, NASA’s

382
00:16:48,107 --> 00:16:51,110
very own free, on-demand streaming platform.

383
00:16:51,343 --> 00:16:54,079
Check it out at plus.NASA.gov.

384
00:16:54,079 --> 00:16:59,885
[Music]