Superstars of Astronomy: Garik Israelian

GarikSuperstars Israelian, astrophysicist of Astronomy at the Page 1 of 24 Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands Dave Eicher: Welcome to the Superstars of Astronomy podcast from Astronomy magazine. I’m Dave Eicher, editor in chief of Astronomy, and I want to thank Celestron, manufacturer of superb telescopes, for generously sponsoring this podcast series. Each month I’ll share the thoughts and research of the world’s greatest astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists and planetary scientists with you in these hour-long chats. I’m very excited to have a wonderful guest for our second show, Garik Israelian. Garik is a professor of astronomy at the Institute for Astrophysics on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. His research involves an array of interesting areas interwoven with spectroscopy including extrasolar planets, supernovae, and black holes. Garik is extremely well-known as the founder and director of the Starmus Festival, a unique and amazing get-together of astronomy enthusiasts including astronomers, astronaut explorers, musicians, artists, and forward-thinkers of all types. The second Starmus Festival just occurred this past fall in the Canaries, and the first took place in 2011. I had the pleasure of participating in Starmus and also working with Garik on the book of speeches from the first conference, and so it’s a real pleasure to welcome you, Garik, for the next hour. Thank you so much for joining me. Garik Israelian: Thank you Dave. Thanks. Dave Eicher: And you’re a guy who’s working on a lot of things these days — and we’ll get into some of them — but you’re very, very busy with projects, always on the go, and it amazes me your energy and your involvement in this, that, and everything. And we’ll get to talk of course a lot about Starmus. But start if you would by telling me a little bit — you were born in Armenia — tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into astronomy as an interest originally. Garik Israelian: Well, you know I was a really, really lazy boy at school: no interest at all in sciences, in math, in physics. Any my physics teacher was so, so tired of me and so that — this is the truth: I mean I was not interested at all in science … I was 17 years old and had no interest. I finished the school with very low marks in math and physics — this is true — so I didn’t know what I was going to do. www.Astronomy.com Page 1 of 24 GarikSuperstars Israelian, astrophysicist of Astronomy at the Page 2 of 24 Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands And so I went to work in a theater as a worker to put decorations and you know just a worker in a theater. And this one day by chance I went to see a film — a movie — with a friend, and it was a sci-fi movie — it was a Solaris film, the Soviet Russian one, the one made by Tarkovsky. And I got so excited, the film has just — it took me out of here and I couldn’t believe it because for me the world was really flat. For me there was nothing interesting in the world. Everything was so standard, so black and white and no colors and everything was so … and then this film has actually shown me that there are so many interesting things in the world — and everything is in space basically. So if you want to find something exciting and interesting you have to look for space. And so I decided to open the books of sci-fi and read them because the subject excited me a lot. And the first books I read were Ray Bradbury, Clifford Simak, and Arthur C. Clarke — so I read through all this classical sci-fi literature, and I was literally knocked down by it. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. I was so, so excited by sci-fi literature. And this is when I decided that astronomy was something that really seems very interesting and there were so many wonders in the universe that I want to study astronomy. But the difficulty was that I had no knowledge in math and physics, so I had to study alone, and that’s something which I’m really surprised — I still don’t understand how I could do that because my parents were pushing me to find a private — to get private classes in physics and math to prepare for exams at the university. And fortunately the Soviet system was quite democratic, and so no matter if you were good or bad at school, as long as you pass your university entrance exams, you are admitted. So basically they didn’t care for your school exams — if you were a good or you were a bad schoolboy — as long as you pass the university exams you are admitted. So I had to go and study all 10 years of math and physics from primary school alone. Dave Eicher: This was an enormous effort at this point. Garik Israelian: An enormous effort. So I’m really surprised how could I do it in one year because in the mean time I was working in the theater and www.Astronomy.com Page 2 of 24 GarikSuperstars Israelian, astrophysicist of Astronomy at the Page 3 of 24 Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands I was spending six, seven hours every day, all my evenings and nights working on studying physics and math — basically the school subjects. So I had to start from very, very years back to since I was 10 years old because I abandoned basically all the studies, you know? I had to go back very, very, very — but fortunately I did it, and it was really hard. And thanks to those years and I could overcome all those difficulties, and I went to university, and the thing is I passed all the university exams with excellent marks. That was again quite shocking because nobody could believe that me being a very bad student at school you could pass university exams with excellent marks, and I did it. And then I was actually one of the best, best students at the university in physics. All the lecturers knew me, I got the highest grades, the excellent top marks, and I got to something which they call the “Red Master Degree” which means you have the top marks — and I got one of those. It was quite a big contrast between me at school and me at the university, so I turned 180-degree difference. And my physics teachers couldn’t believe that someone like me who was so bad at school could become the best student of the university. Dave Eicher: Wow, this was really a magical, special year for you. Garik Israelian: Exactly. Dave Eicher: The drive, the inspiration was really the sci-fi hook for you to — Garik Israelian: Absolutely. Sci-fi was a key for inspiring me, and films and books and so on. And this is one of the reasons I decided to create this Starmus Festival, because I was so convinced that without inspiration — without inspiration you cannot get kids studying serious subjects — science and math, physics and so on. You cannot do it by force. You cannot force them to study. I mean it makes no sense. They have to be inspired. You have to inspire them. And once they are inspired they will work 24 hours, they will do anything and they will understand and they will find it much, much easier, and they will not get tired, and they will be always optimistic about the future and so on. www.Astronomy.com Page 3 of 24 GarikSuperstars Israelian, astrophysicist of Astronomy at the Page 4 of 24 Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands So the message of inspiration I think is fundamental; it’s absolutely fundamental. You need to inspire students and kids, you know? So this is one of the reasons I decided to create the Starmus Festival: to inspire students and kids and in general everyone. Because I think that no matter how old you are — you can be 50 years old or 80 years old — and the moment you are inspired in any sort of science — if it’s astronomy or chemistry or whatever — I believe you have enough force and intelligence to do whatever you want to do, you know, it’s just a matter of having enough fuel for inspiration; you have to be inspired enough to do those things … Dave Eicher: It’s a very powerful message. And tell us, before we get into more of the background — for those who don’t know tell us a little bit of an overview of what Starmus is because there’s really nothing else like it in the world. Garik Israelian: Yeah. Well, Starmus is like a very high-profile science festival which is focused around astronomy. So space and astronomy are in the core of the festival, OK? So you can have talks by Nobel Prized scientists and very high-profile scientists about chemistry and so on and so on, but in the center of the festival — in the center — the core of the festival — it should be the science of astronomy and space. Everything should be around — it’s like the solar system: you have the Sun, which is astronomy of space in this case, and then you have planets revolving around the Sun.

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