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The Current Transcript for February 22, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I think we have a very tremendous summit. We want de nuclearization, and I think we have a country that will set a lot of records for speed in terms of the economy.

AMT: The Trump braggadocio has been on full display in the lead up to the summit meeting in Hanoi between the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea. But while his detractors shutter both President Donald Trump's possible expected missteps and mistakes in trying to stop Kim Jong Un's nuclear ambitions. Others say Mr. Trump's statements are part of a strategy that may be working in ways years of attempted diplomacy and sanctions have not. We're asking what to expect in just a moment. And while we look for political signs, Jo Dunkley looks to the stars.

SOUNDCLIP

I look out as far as it’s possible so look out in space as you look further back out in space you get back in time and I look at the furthest back point we can see.

AMT: Do yourself a favor and let this astrophysicist help you consider the wonders of the universe or the multiverse. You will hear children delighted to think about what else and who else is out there. You'll learn about the women who have discovered advances on everything from dark matter to the pulsar only to be lost in the space of history. Jo Dunkley takes us through our universe in an hour. And at a time when some schools have rules against playing with snow because it's dangerous, we are in search of those who are reimagining recess.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It means awesomeness.

VOICE 2: And it means playing imaginary games.

VOICE 1: I play grounder and tags some times.

AMT: One principal who is infusing more play and the school day reports students are more focused, absenteeism is dropping and the kids are happy. Hear more about that in half an hour. I am Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Trump doesn't see 'the big picture' on how to handle North Korea, says military analyst

Guests: Simon Denyer, Sung-Yoon Lee, William Arkin

SOUNDCLIP

[Camera clatter]

AMT: That is the clattering cameras as you President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met for dinner in Hanoi, ahead of an historic summit in less than eight months since the last one between traditional arch enemies. They're hoping to hammer out some kind of deal. But whether it will bring the world closer to a deal nuclearize north or a lifting of U.S. sanctions remains to be seen. We are going to hear some different opinions on the potential at the summit in a few moments. But first Simon Denyer is the Washington Post bureau chief for Japan North Korea and South Korea and he joins us from Hanoi. He is reporting on the summit. Hello.

SIMON DENYER: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: Well I know that there was a photo op with a little bit of that to readers. Give us just a sense of what was said there and what the expectations are.

SIMON DENYER: Well both men spoke. They looked they both looked a bit sort of stiff and nervous at first. I think there are a lot of cameras going off and they didn't quite know whether to sit or to stand or what to do at first. But you know Trump made fairly predictable comments about the great relationship and I'm sure this summit is going to be a success the sort of thing we've heard from before but what is really interesting for me was to hear Kim Jong Un speak. He did make some brief remarks. He said you know disbelief and misunderstanding were everywhere, old hostile habits were getting in our way but we've overcome those. He said it's been a time you know since the last summit that has taken agony, effort and patience more than ever. But I'm confident a great result will be produced this time to be welcomed by everyone. And I'll do my best towards that goal. So you know I think that that's interesting in the sense that he's coming out publicly before the summit and saying he's optimistic that they will produce a result which will be welcomed by people. I'm a little bit contrarian because I'm a little bit more optimistic than the consensus here and I might well be proved wrong because I really don’t know what's going to happen. But my gut is telling me that they are going to try and get a deal which has some significance it isn't just talk.

AMT: And you know this is taking place in Hanoi. They both traveled a long way. He came in by train, did he not, Mr. Kim?

SIMON DENYER: He clearly came on a 65 hour 2500 mile train journey made it pretty fresh at the end of it. I have to say when he got off the train that is probably fairly well looked after during that train journey. They were in a specially made armored North Korean train that's specially made for him. So that's Kim Jong Un. Obviously Donald Trump came on air Force One as you know. But yes I mean you know Vietnam is a venue that the U.S. would like to invest with a lot of significance. Donald Trump really wants to tell North Korea this could be your opportunity. Vietnam is a very vibrant economy. You could have a vibrant economy like this. And as he said to Kim Jong Un, just now, you know we can help with that and we will help with that. So that's the carrot that he's dangling. Now we have to see what the two men can agree.

AMT: Remind us what was agreed to at the last meeting that they had.

SIMON DENYER: I mean there were a lot of fine words at the last meeting. They agreed to establish a permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula. They agreed to transform their relations and they agreed to work towards the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But they did agree that North Korea would on its own denuclearize. So there's been a lot of skepticism since then that North Korea hasn't actually agreed to do anything to dismantle its nuclear program. And that's you know that's justifiable skepticism. What we need to see at this summit is some moves some concrete promises for North Korea to meaningfully start to roll back its nuclear program.

AMT: And that would of course mean that there would have to be some kind of verification in place to make sure was actually happening, too.

SIMON DENYER: Right. And it's not going to be an overnight process. They're not suddenly going to say we've got this many nuclear bombs and this many missiles now you can come and dismantle them. I mean what we're looking at in the first stage, the thing that South Korea wants to see, I think that the U.S. wants to see is a closure of the Yongbyon nuclear research complex which is where North Korea has its nuclear reactors. The main nuclear reactor that produces plutonium for bombs. So this I wouldn't stop them. It wouldn't do anything to dismantle the current nuclear weapons. It wouldn't do anything to dismantle their missiles. But it would slow down the rate at which they could produce more bombs and if you allowed in inspectors it would give you a lot of information about their nuclear program, and you know potentially it would be a step in the right direction if it's done in a credible and verifiable way.

AMT: Simon, how much sway behind the scenes does South Korea have on any of this?

SIMON DENYER: Well North Korea's actually played an important role. Moon Jae-in, the president, has been a really strong advocate of engagement. And so last year after the Singapore summit, after those kind of fine words that I described - you know fine word but no concrete pledges - things really broke down between the U.S. and North Korea. They weren't meeting and when they did meet they weren't necessarily getting anywhere. The North Koreans really didn't seem that interested in talking to anyone except Trump. So South Korea managed to keep the process going. They you know they relentlessly talking to the North Koreans. Moon Jae-In is relentlessly advocating a sort of a you know a moderate position. So he's kind of relentlessly communicating to the Americans and relentlessly communicating to North Korea. So we played a role really in keeping the process alive and I think both sides probably acknowledge that. You know the South Koreans aren't here of course but they're keenly watching.

AMT: And you make the point you are a little more optimistic than the consensus. There are a lot of naysayers. They point to Mr. Trump saying, a little bit of bravado, but what is the expectation. Is there a strategy there?

SIMON DENYER: It's so hot it's hard to say. You know President Trump has the ability to sort of say completely the wrong thing to be taken in by the North Koreans to suddenly surrender some concession that he doesn't even realize is a major concession. Last time he started to talk about U.S. South Korea military exercises as war games, and actually agree to suspend them you know, taking up a North Korean talking point as it were without apparently getting much in return. So you know we can't be sure that he's not going to sort of undermine U.S. alliances in Asia, or give too much away. But I would say that since Singapore the U.S. administration has become a little bit more coherent. Steve began the U.S. envoy to North Korea has impressed a lot of people, got his head around the issues. He's met an awful lot of people, made a very good speech in Stanford last month where he kind of set out the U.S. position in much more detail than we've seen before. So you know I do think that people are right to be concerned about you know President Trump in a negotiating process against a very experienced and deft North Korean negotiators on the other side. But you know I do think that a bit more preparation and a bit more work has gone into this summit in trying to work out what a coherent U.S. position would be.

AMT: Okay Simon we'll leave it there. Thanks for bringing us up to date.

SIMON DENYER: All right that's a pleasure. Thanks a lot.

AMT: That is Simon Denyer. He is the Washington Post bureau chief for Japan, North Korea and South Korea. He joined us from Hanoi. Well the summit is just the latest twist in a diplomatic rollercoaster ride for President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He came into office, President Trump came into office calling the North Korean leader a little rocket man, at the time Kim Jong Un was firing rockets over Japan. There is a thaw relations and it may be a welcome development but there are fears by some that President Trump is being played. For more we have to guess standing by with different opinions on all of this. Sign Sung-Yoon Lee is the Kim Koo Korea foundation professor of Korean Studies and an assistant professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He's in Burlington, Massachusetts today. William Arkin is a military analyst and columnist for The Guardian. He is in Irvington on the Hudson, New York. Hello to you both. Welcome.

WILLIAM ARKIN: Thank you.

SUNG-YOON LEE: Thank you.

AMT: William Arkin I want to start with you. What are your expectations for this second meeting between these two leaders?

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well I don’t really have high expectations that there will be a concrete result. I hope that the United States and North Korea will continue this dialogue towards denuclearization. And frankly some part of what Donald Trump is offering in terms of economic help in many ways undermines the process of denuclearization. The Listener should understand that there has been progress and that the United States already is getting a return in its dialogue with North Korea. The country has not tested a nuclear weapon since March of 2017. It has not tested a long range missile since November 2017. There has been a significant reduction of tensions between the two countries. There has already been a backing off of military confrontation and military activity. It's behind the scenes but it's significant. And so even though people talk about North Korea continuing to build weapons or or manufacture nuclear materials - which I don't doubt - I already see tangible evidence that there is a ratcheting down of tensions between the two countries and that gives me some hope that that will open the door for the diplomats and for the specialists to come in and begin to negotiate. But if the exchange is going to be economic help to North Korea - which is a straining of the North Korean regime without really any tangible evidence of a denuclearization which means a reduction in their capabilities - then I'm afraid that that really is playing into what exactly Kim Jong Un wants, which is for that country now only be recognized but also for it to be strengthened. I'm hoping that we can separate the economic from the military and achieve the military results first. But I am afraid that Donald Trump is not the man who necessarily sees the big picture in order to achieve that.

AMT: Sung-Yoon Lee how do you see this?

SUNG-YOON LEE: First of all what are we talking about here? It's nuclear diplomacy. One state is trying to deprive the other state of the most important strategic asset that it owns, nuclear arsenal. In history there have been only four nations that had nukes that had developed or inherited nukes and negotiated them away. And in each of those cases there was a new political environment; a regime change, a transition in leadership, radically different opportunities and interests. The three former states of Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union imposed apartheid South Africa. North Korea is a seven decades old dynasty. It has spent five decades to build the bomb and to presume that, with artful diplomacy led by President Trump, that the North Korean dictator would be amenable to completely giving up his nuclear arsenal under the current circumstances render us lacks leverage - even the kind of financial leverage that the Obama administration exercised in trying to get Iran back to the negotiating table - is a bit farfetched.

AMT: Then when you said to what William Arkin says though, Mr. Lee, that in fact we were seeing a reduction in tensions, that Mr. Trump Has already brought this forward to a point that others may not have been able to.

SUNG-YOON LEE: Well you know if that's victory slightly over a year of non-flagrant violations or over a 10U.N. Security Council resolution that prohibit nuclear and ballistic missile tests then I guess George W. Bush and Barack Obama deserve maybe three Nobel Peace Prize each. Because there has been periods extended periods of non-testing, non-testing non provocations. North Korea's first nuclear test was on October 9th 2006. The second may 2009. So not quite three years. The third in February 2013 almost four years. And then three years later the fourth came in January 2006. So this lows you know these periods are of no means provocation do not necessarily mean they're not working [unintelligible] at enhancing their nuclear capability.

AMT: William, what do you say to that?

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well I think there's two things that are important here and I would not referred to the former states of the Soviet Union as examples of denuclearization. I would look more at the Iraq case and the East German case. So here is the playbook that the United States follows in the world. We could look at the Iraq playbook which is that weapons of mass destruction are more important than anything else in the world and unless we deal with the weapons of mass destruction to our satisfaction we're going to go to war and we're going to pursue regime change. That's the Iraq playbook. We all know what happened there. The East German playbook as a more interesting one which is you open up the country to understanding where the benefits are being part of the West. You seek reunification. You seek a different political outcome and we also, the result was there as well but it took decades for East Germany and West Germany to combine. Now the history lesson is important in terms of what has happened but a lot of that is driven as well by just technology. North Korea is not a technologically advanced nation. It is not really capable of putting together all of the pieces of a confident and reliable nuclear arsenal. That's really more responsible for that time frame of how when they've tested etc. but there are new factors involved. There are new factors involved that are behind the scenes that a lot of people don't see. For instance in November 2017 when North Korea tested its most long range missile ever,there is evidence that the United States interfered in that missile test probably with some kind of cyber intrusion. And that missile test was catastrophic in its failure. It was the most catastrophic test that North Korea had ever conducted. Clearly something happened that communicated to North Korea that the United States had the capacity to threaten North Korea in a way that it hadn't previously been able to or willing to do under the Obama administration. So when I look at the pure facts and what's going on I see no conditions. Am not optimistic that North Korea is just going to give up its nuclear capability. I'm not optimistic that that's going to happen this year or in this administration per say, but there are different factors also at play. And one of them - as has already been mentioned is South Korea - another one of them is in fact that the United States has perfected many a cyber-offensive capabilities which really do impede North Korea from continuing to test. And so as I look into the future I say to myself I think that Donald Trump, not my strategy, definitely by ego, trying something different is not something necessarily that is going to fail. Now it's up to the professionals to take over and figure out whether or not these two countries can find benefit in denuclearize okay.

AMT: Let me ask Sung-Yoon Lee what would success look like to Kim Jong Un?

SUNG-YOON LEE: Well it's happening right now. You know the Vietnam model that Secretary Pompeo and President Trump preach, I imagine Kim Jong Un having daily fits of uncontrollable laughter at the US [unintelligible]. Hey, you to do it. You can have this miracle. You know you can remain I guess implicitly a single Communist Party dictatorship and grow richer and put the past behind. Look at Vietnam. That's what Pompeo said on his visit to Vietnam last July after he was rebuffed by Kim [unintelligible] and this was what President Trump has been saying in recent days recent weeks. The Vietnam model has a particular definition in North Korean statecraft. Kim Il Sung the founder, the grandfather visited Beijing April 18th to 26th 1975 as the South, as Saigon was falling to a communist North Vietnam, pleading with Mao Tzedong for support insisting hey we two can do this. We can roll in and into the South, South Korea that is, and complete our revolution. So the way that North Vietnam of course achieved its revolution unification was to become an undesirable political liability to the US, compelled the U.S. to sign a peace agreement and compelled the US to abandon the South and then just move right in. And now that Trump administration is amenable to signing some end of war declaration which will pay, which is some new prelude to a more formal agreement if not a treaty, that has been North Korea's long cherished dream for over 50 years without going it.

AMT: Gentlemen we have to leave it there. You've given us lots to think about looking at this from different perspectives but we are out of time. So we're going it ended there. Thank you so much for giving us your perspective on that. That is Sung-Yoon Lee who is the Kim Koo Korea foundation professor of Korean Studies and an assistant professor at Tufts University. He's in Burlington Massachusetts William Arkin is a military analyst and columnist for The Guardian. He's in Irvington on the Hudson New York. Stay with us. The news is next. And then it's that all important part of the school day that happens outside of the classroom. We're looking at why some educators say it's time to re imagine recess. We're asking what they've got in mind I may Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why experts say schools shouldn't shy away from a little physicality during recess

Guests: Paul McKay, Mariana Brussoni, Tracy Vaillalncourt

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme].

AMT: Still to come there is a reason we sometimes call the stars in the sky the heavens. For plenty of us the last time we really lost ourselves in wonder at the universe around us was when we were kids. Astrophysicist Jo Dunkley wants to change that not only by illuminating the night sky, but also by revealing how many of the hidden stars that was thrown at me over the years have been women. She's my guest in our next half hour. But first the all-important fourth "R" from our school days.

SOUNDCLIP

[Bell rings]

[Kids chatter]

AMT: No matter how long ago you went to school it's hard not to feel a little thrill at the sound of the recess bell. That period of being a free range kid between classes, running around on the playground with your friends - and enemies has changed over time and in some surprising ways. We'll get to the most recent changes in a moment but first our producer Samira Mohyeddin dropped by the Clinton Street Public School in Toronto to get a feel for the state of recess today and how kids would like to see a change.

SOUNDCLIP

GEORGE: I'm George.

JOHN: And I'm John Wolf, I'm nine.

GEORGE: And I am eight.

SAMIRA: I just want to know what does recess means to both of you.

GEORGE: It means awesomeness.

SAMIRA: What sort of things do you do?

GEORGE: I play rounder’s and tag sometimes.

JOHN: Basically I just me my friends imagine stuff. We create all these monsters and we make them fight.

SAMIRA: And if you could change one thing about resus what would it be?

GEORGE: Swings, we don't have swings.

JOHN: It could last a little longer.

GEORGE: Yes.

SAMIRA: Are there any rules?

GEORGE: To what?

SAMIRA: To recess.

JOHN: Not necessarily. There is no fighting.

GEORGE: No violence, you can't go past the borders.

JOHN: Yes, and also you have to watch over cars and you can't go on the ice.

SAMIRA: How about snowballs? Are you allowed to play with snowballs?

GEORGE: No we're not.

JOHN: No, especially if they're made form ice.

GEORGE: It's so sad, it's so sad.

JOHN: Yes it's really so sad.

SAMIRA: You'd like to throw snowballs at one another.

JOHN: Yes snowballs are awesome.

GEORGE: So awesome.

SAMIRA: Would you like it to last longer, too?

JOHN: Yes.

SAMIRA: How long is it now?

GEORGE: It's 15 minutes. I want it to be the entire day.

JOHN: The afternoon one is one hour. But I think I'd change into one hour and 15 minutes. The 15 minute one I'd change it to one hour.

AMT: Well George and John Wolf aren't the only ones with a few ideas how to change up recess. Educators have been reimagining recess lately from introducing more of it to inviting a bit more recklessness into it. In Quebec, a handful of schools are introducing sanctioned roughhousing zones on snowy school yards. It's a spot where the kids can get a bit my hands on. Valerie Dionne mother and council chair at L'Ecole Chavalier-Blanc told CBC's Ottawa Morning what she thinks of the idea.

SOUNDCLIP

Young students like that they need to canalise this energy debt they have. In class they just lose appetite of learning. Did I have the energy to put into listening to a teacher for an hour in a row. And so if they can use that energy outside they're more apt to receive information in class.

AMT: And in Bruderheim, Alberta, just near Edmonton, the local elementary school is doubling down on recess time inspired by examples set by Finland. Paul McKay is the principal there. And we've reached him in Sherwood Park, Alberta. Hi.

PAUL MCKAY: Good morning.

AMT: So I want to hear about what you've done at your school to revolutionize recess.

PAUL MCKAY: Yes certainly our staff - when I started at the school about two years ago - our staff sat down together to talk a little bit about how we could work with our students to prepare them a little bit better for learning when they arrived for a quarter of the day. So we spend our first year working on self-regulation strategies within the classroom both teacher directed and student directed. And then this year we added a second layer to it where we added- basically our school consists of four recesses.

AMT: So take me through how does that work? When do they start? How long are they?

PAUL MCKAY: Yeah so we start school day at 25 in the morning and basically the day is designed where the students spend no longer than an hour in their classroom. And so our first recess happens an hour after the first bell time. And our first recess is a little bit unique because when we discussed it as a staff we thought we needed to figure out a way that we can set a tone for what a good recess would look like through the students. One of the things that we learned is that just being outside isn't necessarily enough or just having that break the kids need to be active. So our first recess we establish what we call an instructional recess. So all the staff including myself the teachers are educational assistants head out with the students and they just join them in play at recess time. We don't teach volleyball skills at recess or play any really organized games however the teachers may join the kids in a game of tag where the teachers themselves might just set up a game that first one in the morning. And then we are again back to school, another hour of instruction. And then we start would look like a more traditional recess, where the students set out with a number of supervisors not the whole staff at that time, back in for an hour. Then we have a lunch recess where the kids will eat for about 20 minutes, head outside for another 15 minutes. Back in the classroom in the afternoon for an hour and then a last 15 minute recess in the afternoon and we finish school around 3 o'clock.

AMT: And how did the teachers respond to this?

PAUL MCKAY: Well when we initially started brainstorming the idea there were certainly a little bit of trepidation when it comes to getting kindergarten and Grade 1 kids in and out of their snowsuits four times a day. We decided to tackle it anyways and the results that we've seen have been nothing but positive.

AMT: They know how to get in and out faster now, don't they? Practice.

PAUL MCKAY: Yes. Practice makes perfect with anything.

AMT: What about the parents?

PAUL MCKAY: You know feedback's been really positive from the parents. We obviously we pitched it to our parent council when we were brainstorming the idea and active kids, nobody can really argue about getting their kids more active. And we were able to explain to them that we can come up with this new timetable and still meet our educational minute requirements. So they were all for it. And a lot of the feedback that we’ve been getting from parents is that they actually noticed that their kids are having less homework at home that grades are going up in just an overall enjoyment, or a greater enjoyment in coming to school every day.

AMT: I was saving the kid reaction for nest. So tell me how is it like? What changes have you seen in the kids at your school?

PAUL MCKAY: Yes its hard not to find a kid who wouldn't want more recess. So it wasn't too hard of a sell with the kids. But one of the things when we broached it with them last spring before we decided it started in the four was we needed to find out what they wanted for recess time, what things would keep them active. And so we got a lot of feedback from them and so we got lots of individual little games out there. Lots of sort of what we call our camping games, where there have been big tosses and net games. The kids are even bringing sand toys for when the snow is not covering the ground, actually even use them during snow times. And so we got a lot of different activities and so the kids rush out and they come yeah knowing that there is only going to be another hour before they get to go on continue their next activity.

AMT: The teachers, how are they in class? Are they more attentive?

PAUL MCKAY: The teachers are reporting that their academic rigour, their ability to attend to the activities that they're teaching in classes improved. They aren't having to create sort of some of those artificial in class breaks that they need- those brain breaks that give kids during classroom instruction time because the kids know and the teachers know that we've only got an hour. We can settle in. One of our teachers has actually said to me you know there is nothing that these kids can't do for an hour and so the approach that we which is kind of neat.

AMT: Do you have restrictions at recess? We've we heard that some kids aren't allowed to play with now. Are the rules like that?

PAUL MCKAY: Well certainly there's still rules at recess time. We discourage roughhousing. We do have boundaries that are recess, just for kids' safety. Our school is located next to a secondary highway in our town and so we keep those. But as far as the free play and the use of snow and those types of things you know we encourage them to explore all the playground and try many different things, obviously keeping safety in mind.

AMT: How long have you been in education?

PAUL MCKAY: Well just over 20 years.

AMT: And how have your ideas about recess changed over time?

PAUL MCKAY: Well you know I worked in many different settings. We are in Alberta, you know in Sherwood Park here, and now back out in rural Alberta. Well I've seen many different timetables from your traditional one in the morning one at lunch one in the afternoon to one in the morning with an extended lunch with no recess break in the afternoon and you know they have their merits, but what I really started to notice was that students were having trouble attending. They were having trouble staying focused for 90 minutes in a traditional model. So we were looking to high performing school districts, divisions like the one in Finland, and their model actually is even a little bit more extreme than ours is, where they go 45 minutes before they get their 15 minute break and then their school days are actually a little shorter. And so we thought you know what? We want to try to give every students every opportunity that they can to succeed when they're in the classroom. So we thought why not try this active model.

AMT: Okay well that's good to hear from you. Thank you.

PAUL MCKAY: Yes you bet. Thank you.

AMT: That is Paul Mckay, he's the principal of the Bruderheim school at an elementary school just outside of Edmonton. Now as a kid recess may feel like the one part of the day when you're leaving learning behind but experts in child development know better than that. It is not just about the quantity of recess time that a child gets at school. The quality as well as important. For more on that I have two guests with me. Mariana Brussoni is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. She is a developmental child psychologist who has investigated child injury prevention and children's outdoor place. She's joining us from our Vancouver studio. Tracy Vaillancourt is a developmental psychologist at the University of Ottawa and the Canada Research Chair in school based mental health and violence prevention. She is in Ottawa. Hello to you both.

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Good morning.

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Good morning.

AMT: Mariana Brussoni, I want to start with you. What do you make of the new policy that some Quebec scores that allow a little rough housing?

MARIANA BRUSSONI: You know that's an interesting model and it's great to see schools moving in a direction where they're giving kids more freedom in terms of how to play. And it sounds like they've really thought about it in wanting to let kids you know get this energy out. I haven't visited it myself but some of the thoughts they had in terms of how I've heard it described is, they've described a particular zone where it happens. They've described training that happens beforehand and strict supervision. And so some of the concerns that I would have would be something like, well you know when you have kids at play it really needs to be spontaneous and driven by the child. Otherwise it's not really play. And so the idea that you would have a particular zone so you would have kids kind of planning to roughhouse at a particular time and moving to a part of the playground is a little bit kind of unusual. As well we know that children play differently when they're supervised and when they're you know when they feel like that an adult is watching them. So I kind of wonder about how it's being played out. But I hope that it's encouraging other schools to consider the same thing and will provide some learning for that school as they roll it out.

AMT: Tracy Vaillancourt what do you think of an approach like Paul McKay's case in Alberta where they're expanding how much recess the kids get?

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: I absolutely love it. Recess are an important context for learning and kids play a lot during recess and they also move a lot during recess. And this movement is like things like increase neurogenesis which is the birth of neurons and angiogenesis which is the development of new blood vessels, dendritic complexity. And these neurological changes which is something Paul alluded to are associated with enhanced learning and memory and better executive function. So exercise is a great neurological reset and it's so important for learning.

AMT: And you have studied how these things are handled in Nordic schools, Tracy what have you found?

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Well I actually lived in Nordic schools and it's very different than it is here. You know recess is a priority in Scandinavia. They recognize the importance of play for kids. They recognize the importance of what Mariana was talking about this being spontaneous, the importance of movement. So I sit there thinking about it a bit better than we are or have been.

AMT: Mariana, what is it about recess that's different from the kind of physical activity a child might experience in a gym class for example?

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Well really it's the self-directing spontaneous movements that kids can do where they can really decide for themselves what they do and how they do it. And so this makes a really big difference in terms of kind of the developmental outcomes. So we know that kids get more physically active in these kinds of situations. They're less sedentary. But they're also able to develop kind of their own social rules which really enhances their social emotional development. And it would have put potentially effects on their executive functioning as well. So the kinds of things that led them to set goals and figure out the steps to meet those goals and direct their attention in a particular way because they can set their own rules and decide what they're doing, they're making those decisions rather than having an adult directing them what they're going to do and how they're going to do it.

AMT: Now some schools do have strict rules around recess. For example as we heard no picking up snow, no touching. I want you to hear a clip. Patti Bacchus is a former trustee and chair of the Vancouver school board. She says there are issues around liability and supervision.

SOUNDCLIP

I think schools face the same challenge parents really do in finding that balance between safety and prevention and letting your kids do the kinds of activities that help them to develop. Unfortunately it can take either a lawsuit or some sort of tragic event to change people's thinking and that can really frighten people. Some parents can be very very distressed when their child even gets a minor injuries. So schools have to you know really strike that balance.

AMT: Mariana Brussoni how well do you think schools deal with striking that balance?

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Well at the moment we're doing a lot of work to try and push shift the pendulum. So what we're seeing is basically kind of tendencies towards overprotection. And for schools to really base their policies around their own fears and anxieties as we heard from Patti Bacchus's rather than putting the child at the center of their decision making in what should be happening.

AMT: And so you know people know play is positive. Why has the safety mantra become so dominant?

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Well it's challenging because you know anxiety is tending to take over in the fears years of what could happen. And so there's been a few shifts over time. Patti Bacchus talked about the fears of liability. We're not quite sure about how big that issue is because the data aren't public, but I can tell you that in terms of injuries you know I look at injury statistics all the time and we don’t see the kinds of limits and fears that these set reflected in the injury statistics. Deaths are extremely rare you know there's been one in several decades. And also in terms of serious injuries those are also quite unlikely. And so the kinds of things that they're worrying about are pretty minor injuries. And I think if you if you do some work with the parents and you tell them about why you're doing what you're doing then you can head off some of those fears around the liability.

AMT: Tracy Vaillancourt, what do you think about the level of risk kids should be exposed to recess?

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Well it's kind of work. Mariana was speaking again. So I think that we have this really increased- We've increased our risk aversion to the point where were not make sound decisions on child development. I'm not worried about recess. Well, I'm worried about recess in the sense that they're not using it to the best of their ability. So recess is really about this reset. It's really good for emotional self-regulation. Kids learn about the politics of the playground they learn about how to get along with each other in an unstructured way. So if we eliminate risk, physical risk, then what are the social risks? What are the educational risks? And I think we haven't, in a sense we've overreacted to the point where now we're not thinking about the other side of that equation. So I think this actually is reflected in perhaps a developmental bias of teachers too which doesn't really match what we know about what's best for learning. So some teachers will focus their cognitive development and think that this is the end all be all. But the truth of the matter is that social emotional development has the strongest body research implicating me in academic outcomes. So I think we need to rethink recess and avoid this like over exaggerated response that you know somebody is going to get hurt, really physically hurt, and focus more on the whole child and what it means for development and learning.

AMT: There can be injury I guess and the fear and you've just pointed out that the fear is greater than the reality but the fear of injury but also fear of bullying. Mariana there and there are insurance brokers are looking at this. Are they not?

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Yes that's correct. We've been working with insurance companies to develop alternative models for how you can provide insurance in situations where play providers like schools or other educators or anybody really can offer greater opportunities for kids to engage in risk, while following best practice, so that they can really kind of stem their fears of liability as well as have a strong insurance package that makes sure that that what they're doing is based on the evidence.

AMT: Is there talk of limiting liability? I know that some jurisdictions do that in Europe.

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Yeas, one of the recommendations we've made is to limit joint civil liability which has really been a big contributor to this risk aversion. And what that is basically that the person or the facility with the deepest pockets will pay the bill if anything comes out. So for example if a municipality or school is found two percent responsible for an injury they could potentially still be on the hook for the entire bill if far if the other person hasn't been- it doesn't have any insurance to cover it.

AMT: Tracy I'm wondering about bullying and mental health in children. What's the link between how kids spend their time at recess and the likelihood of bullying?

ACY VAILLANCOURT: Well it's funny and what a great segue, because we think about risk but we don't think about the risk associated with boredom. And one thing about kids is that when they're bored they try to remedy this uncomfortable state and it tends to be nefarious in nature. So our studies show over and over again that places that are not well supervised like the playground or recesses is that is where we have low slower supervision, we tend to see more bullying and bullying is associated with tremendous mental health costs both immediately and the long term. So my concern also but recess is not just about the missed opportunities for play, the missed opportunities for physical activity, but also the increased risk of being bullied, the increased risk of other forms of negative peer interactions.

AMT: So in other words if you can't play in the snow and you can't go in certain areas and roughhouse a little better something, you're just standing there and you're thinking of ways to get somebody?

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Well that's interesting. Studies show that when we ask kids why they bully others one of the number one reasons is because they're bored. So we have tremendous educational equality in Canada when applies to our curriculum like mathematics achievement and the like. But when it comes to how our playgrounds look and how they're supervised, there's quite a bit of difference. So we have some playgrounds that are amazing and others are just barren fields with very little supervision and that's, there's a lot of time there to get into trouble. So over and over again -- and studies from around the world show this -- that when we ask kids why they bully others, it's to create some drama.

AMT: So that has to do with funding as well. How school spend their money or house school more and spend their money on the actual playgrounds?

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Yes I mentioned this before in another article it was a little email about how I think schools need to be taking recess more seriously. It's such an important context for child development and I think it needs to be planned with purpose that's based on past practice approaches. So we need to make sure that our playgrounds are captivating places to play and make sure that children have access to the same infrastructure. I'd like to see recess standardized like we see other parts of the curriculum satirize such as the way we teach mathematics. And that's not really what's happening today. So you can see one playground that's just amazing area to learn, there's great infrastructure than another playground. It's just that barren field and I don't understand why we tolerate this. We know and we've said it throughout this program that this is an important context for learning.

AMT: So I was just going to ask you what if you could design an ideal reassess what it would look like you started there? Keep going.

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Well the kids at the beginning of this segment got it right. They told us about basically they what equipment they want it to last longer. I like the one kid who said it should last the entire day but really that's not where we should go with it. But think like that, sometimes we have really motivated school councils that understand that this is a priority and you see it reflected in their school ground and in other schools where it's not the case. So the one thing I like about Canada is that we have equality in education for the most part. We don't have many differences between private and public schools on academic achievement so we should really be thinking about how we can level the playing field.

AMT: Mariana Brussoni if you could design and do your research what would it look like?

MARIANA BRUSSONI: Well it's important that you provide lots of variety of play and opportunities for kids who say may run around in the soccer game to actually also have things to do. So one of the most important things we've seen is for example the provision of sports. So it could be things like sticks and rocks and mud and crates and tarps and things like that, but it's really the kinds of things that allow kids to shape the play to mould it so that there is constant variety on the playground. Because one of the issues we've seen is with fixed equipment that it gets really boring really quickly especially if you think about kids who are spending years and years on the same playground. So we want to promote that variety.

AMT: Okay well we'll leave it there. Thank you both for your thoughts on this.

MARIANA BRUSSONI: My pleasure.

TRACY VAILLANCOURT: Thank you.

AMT: That is Mary and Sony developmental child psychologist and child injury prevention researcher at UBC. Tracy viand core is a developmental psychologist at the University of Ottawa and the Canada Research Chair in school based mental health and violence prevention. Stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour we're getting reacquainted with the universe, some of the pioneering women who shaped our understanding of it. Astrophysicist Jo Dunkley is my guest 90 seconds from now. I may Anna Maria Tremonti. This as The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on CBC Dutchie is slash The Current, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Astrophysicist hopes history's trailblazing women can help young girls look to the stars

Guest: Jo Dunkley

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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[Music]

VOICE 1: Space. Is just so far so interesting because it' so vast and so intricate and so detailed almost like the most gorgeous piece of artwork I've ever seen.

[Music]

VOICE 2: When I look at the night sky I feel like the universe is much much bigger than I imagined it to be. You look at the night sky I feel like I'm sort of drifting away like in a spaceship. It makes me feel dreamy, sleepy, like I want to grab a couple of stars and keep them in my pocket. I would just pull myself up and just leave Planet Earth, if I could. I would come back.

VOICE 3: If you home by dinner, they won't know you're on.

AMT: Some girls and boys in Vancouver are full of wonder about the universe.

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VOICE 4: When I look out there I think not only what could be out there, but like what could I do and all those possibilities. I wish I could go out there and see for myself but it's not possible yet.

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VOICE 3: Also things like black holes and light bending and time and all that. Makes me wonder for some kind of simulation exactly because it's kind of nuts, kind of mind [unintelligible] I want to do things, but not for too long because it makes my head hurt.

VOICE 5: What I found interesting about spaces that problems will have a year like energy crisis, or things like that, there are limitless amounts of it there. For instance when a star goes supernova. The amount of energy output that is, that could power, probably would be the entire world foe a day. Space makes me feel more adventurous, like I want to see and want to know.

VOICE 6: One of the most interesting things about space for me is when stars Supernova, because it`s a big explosion and who doesn`t love explosion.

AMT: There you go. It can be mind boggling and wonderfully inspiring. Humans have wondered at the mystery of the night sky since our earliest days. Our oldest astronomical tools date back 20,000 years. In recent decades the aliments astronomers study from dark matter to multiverses have become far more complex as have the mass of telescopes and computer systems they use as tools. Astrophysicist Jo Dunkley worries that for a lot of people now the night sky has become a daunting thing to contemplate. And she wants to bring back the sense of childlike curiosity that you just heard as well as tell the stories of the many women who have helped build our knowledge of the universe. To that end she has written Our Universe, An Astronomer's Guide. Jo Dunkley as a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University and she joins us from Princeton, New Jersey. Hello.

JO DUNKLEY: Hello.

AMT: What are you thinking as you listen to those kids? There between eight and 12 years old.

JO DUNKLEY: Well I just couldn't stop smiling because I love their excitement and I love the questions they're thinking about and how enthused they are and that's how I feel you know with my job which is to study space.

AMT: And it's great to hear that- I think we may have all been like that. You know maybe as adults we lose some of that but that curiosity and the smartness of that curiosity is so interesting, huh?

JO DUNKLEY: That's right. And I think that you know as humans it's intrinsic to our nature to ask questions. But I do think we sometimes forget about asking the questions as we get to be older and kids are very good at asking the questions.

AMT: So help us discover our inner children. Why is it important for people who aren't astronomers to take an interest in what is outside our planet?

JO DUNKLEY: Well to me it's kind of enriching as humans to know what is this bigger place we're part of you know we live here on Earth but we are part of something far far bigger. And knowing what that bigger thing is improves our human experience. And it's not just knowing what the bigger thing is it's knowing where we've come from too, you know we find ourselves here on Earth, on our little planet. But it turns out we have this 14 billion year history that got us here and understanding the story of how we got here in the bigger home we live in, that is something that makes our lives better as humans.

AMT: And it can be intimidating though it can lead to complex ideas like relativity and dark energy?

JO DUNKLEY: It can. The universe is enormous and trying to visualize how big it is and what's in it. You know it certainly ties my head up in knots sometimes but I think the picture of how we fit in, how we live in our solar system in this bigger place to be called a galaxy full of stars and how we fit in to the universe. We do actually have a good picture of it now. And the things that's really been this huge advance is how we do think we have a pretty good story of how our whole universe does fit together. Even though there are big questions within that still.

AMT: What is your own specific research in astrophysics?

JO DUNKLEY: I am a cosmologist which means I try and ask questions about the large scale features of the universe. I want to know how it began and what it's made of and how fast it is growing. It turns out whole space is in fact growing. So I look out as far as it's possible to look out in space as you look further back out in space you look back in time and I look at the furthest back point we can see with telescopes in Chile actually.

AMT: Tell me more about that because it limits you is time not telescope - right - in terms of how far back you can see.

JO DUNKLEY: That's right. So we can only see things that light has had time to reach us from. So actually this does this wonderful thing that when you look at his base you look back in time but we think that the whole of the universe has only been in existence for about 14 billion years. So the furthest we could possibly look out into space is the distance that light has had time to travel in that time in 14 billion years. So it's still pretty far. But there is this kind of limit beyond which we think the universe still stretches on further. But we just can’t see it.

AMT: So tell me more about that. Well the universal quite nearly 14 billion years ago? What do you see?

JO DUNKLEY: It turns out to be a bit boring compared to the universe now. So when we look around us into space now we see this beautiful sky full of stars. And if we can look further with a telescope we see these magnificent galaxies these kind of swirling disks of stars but they haven't always existed. If we look back to the very earliest moments in the universe we actually find something a bit featureless . it hasn't yet got any stars or galaxies or planets or black holes. It's kind of this sea of particles. But what we do get to see are these kind of lumpy regions of space where there's just a bit more stuff than in other regions. And those are kind of the beginnings of the formation of everything we then see in the universe. So I look at these little lumps and try and work out where they came from and how their will then grow to become all these beautiful things we see around us now.

AMT: I have to admit to you as I listen to you. I still need to get my head around. Like I understand archaeology. We look at little things and know that we can follow the pattern, but to look up and out and to be able to see that the whole concept is mind boggling.

JO DUNKLEY: We sort of live in it. It's a bit like an onion around us with layers. So when we look just at our son for example, we're seeing as it was eight minutes ago because the light takes eight minutes to reach us. The nearest star takes four years to reach us it's light and then the further ones take tens or hundreds of years and then if we want to step out to galaxies beyond our own we're looking millions of years back. And it is this incredibly useful thing because even though it kind of does tie our heads into slight knots when we're thinking about looking out and looking back in time, it allows us to piece together how we think we got to be here because we can see other parts of space as they were a long time ago.

AMT: Well tell me more about that. What have we been able to learn in the last century about how the universe started in what is likely to happen to it in the future?

JO DUNKLEY: A century ago we actually had no idea that there was anything beyond our big Milky Way galaxy. About 100 years ago astronomers discovered that there actually were whole kind of islands of stars beyond our own galaxy separate from us. And they also discovered that they appeared to be moving away from us. And this actually only made sense if - a very long time ago about 14 billion years ago - all those galaxies had started off kind of in the same place at the beginning of the universe called a big bang. So one of the big advances is just knowing that our universe hasn't always been as it is now that it had some kind of beginning and it is growing and changing.

AMT: It's really something, uh? I've got a clip here that I want to listen to. This is one of the significant women in astronomy in the 20th century: Vera Rubin. And this clip is her speaking about her most significant research and a commencement ceremony at the American University in Washington in 2011. Five years before she died.

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We've started by taking some stars closer to the center of our galaxy than we were and further away from the center galaxy than we were. We measured the velocity of each one of these and we had a fairly great shot. Uptill that time astronomers knew that there was a sun and then there were planets. Each one moved more slowly than the one ahead. Mercury was the fastest moving. Venus was next. So they went. And that was assumed in the universe, if you study objects distant from us they would be going slower and slower. And what my students and I learned was that all the stars that we measured were going just as fast as we were. And that was believed by essentially no one.

AMT: That research was about more than solely the speed of stars. Not that that's not impressive. Why was it so significant, Joe?

JO DUNKLEY: It was enormously important. So what's been discovered by finding that these stars were going around our Milky Way galaxy faster than expected, was that there had to be all this invisible matter in our galaxy and actually surrounding our galaxy that we hadn't accounted for before. And now this thing that we call dark matter that has been kind of put forward by this astronomer Fritz Wicky and a number of years earlier. And Rubin showed that every galaxy were spinning faster than expected and that therefore every galaxy seemed to be surrounded and full of this invisible stuff.

AMT: Why did no one believe her initially?

JO DUNKLEY: Well it was unexpected. I mean I also can't help but feel that you know maybe had a very real burden being a male astronomer. Maybe people have taken more seriously. She was. She had to battle a lot of prejudices to actually make that measurements that she made in the 1960s. She had realized that she needed to use this better telescope available to her at the time which was the Palomar Observatory in California. But at that time women weren't even allowed to use it. So Rubin had applied and got permission to be the first woman to ever use it.

AMT: So interesting. What is the universe made of?

JO DUNKLEY: Well it turns out that most of it is stuff that we don't understand yet. We've only really accounted for about 5 percent of all the stuff that we think is out there, the atoms that we are made of. It seems that a lot of it - I say probably about five times as much as we are made of - is this thing that we call dark matter which we think is a new kind of particle that we just haven't found yet. Gravity works on it but we can’t see it. They are probably travelling through us right now, particles of dark matter. We also have this rather mysterious thing called dark energy which we think might just be the energy of empty space itself. You know there's a lot of space in the universe, even when it looks empty its possible it has its own energy but we're not completely sure. So there's this kind of fascinating missing component of our universe that many of us are working really hard to try to understand.

AMT: And since we're talking complex and mysterious things, what does the multiverse theory?

JO DUNKLEY: One of the ideas of the multiverse is that the power of the universe that we live in and we can see might stretch on pretty far in all directions, but perhaps that there are very distant different kind of parts of the universe where there are different physical conditions different physical laws that may be our bits of the universe started growing at the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. But there other bits of the universe could have grown differently and started growing at slightly different times and could be quite different to ours. The trouble is we can’t see them because we cannot receive light from them. So I think many of the thoughts and ideas about the idea of whether there are many other universes, I think will remain speculation.

AMT: I want to talk about the place of woman in all of this sun. As well as Vera Rubin there were other women who made significant astronomical discoveries, many of them at the Harvard College Observatory. We heard about the so-called human computers at NASA. Women many of them black women who made calculations for the space agency in the middle of the 20th century. Harvard had its own human computers as well?

JO DUNKLEY: It did, yes. So at the turn of the last century there were these phenomenal group of women astronomers and they are known as the Harvard computers. And they were hired by the astronomer Edward Pickering to work at the Harvard College Observatory to study plates images taken of stars, to classify them and to measure their brightness as their colors and to track their properties. It was quite painstaking work, cataloging thousands and thousands of stars. And you know they weren't allowed to operate the telescopes themselves. And you know they weren't paid nearly as much as their male colleagues either but they made these great discoveries. So one of my heroes in all of this is Henrietta Swan Leavitt who went to work there as one of the Harvard computers in 1895. She discovered this incredibly useful property of stars that's now known as Leavitt's law where she was looking at these pulsating stars they're called Cepheid’s stars, and their brightness changes with time. So they might pulse in brightness over days or weeks or months. And she discovered this pattern and these stars which said that the longer they take to pulse the brighter they are intrinsically. And this was only possible by her looking through thousands and thousands of images of stars and doing really careful work. This pattern, this Leavitt's law, is incredibly important because it says that we actually then have a way of figuring out how bright distant things are, and then that tells us how far away they are in space. Measuring how far away things in the night sky is actually quite hard because we can see them but we cannot get to them. So measuring how far away they are is a difficult thing. And using Leavitt's law, astronomers in particular Edwin Hubble actually were able to figure out that there were actually these galaxies far beyond our own.

AMT: And Leavitt's Law, she got credit for it then?

JO DUNKLEY: She did but it actually is only been recently called Leavitt's law. So she's not nearly as well known as she should be. I think astronomers acknowledged that she discovered this relation but you know it was Hubble who got all the fame for figuring out that there were galaxies beyond our own and also that the universe was expanding. And Levitt at the time didn't get that fame. Now theres this move to really try and acknowledge what was done and how important her work and the work of others at that time were too.

AMT: Well there was another human computer Wilhelmina Fleming who had an unusual power powerful becoming an astronomer. How did she get into the field?

JO DUNKLEY: That's right. So she actually came over to Cambridge Massachusetts with her husband from Scotland and was then abandoned with a young child by her husband, and went to work as a maid in Edward Pickering's house. Edward Pickering was the astronomer who was hiring all these women astronomer to work as computers. He sort of realised that she was obviously pretty smart and decided that she could probably do a better job for many of her male astronomer colleagues that he was hiring and so he hired her to work as an assistant. And so she's actually set up the first classification of stars.

AMT: And there is another, there is a list, the Northern Irish astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

JO DUNKLEY: So she's a huge hero of mine. She worked in Oxford when I was also a professor there. She made this great discovery actually as a student. This completely new class of stars called pulsars, very rapidly spinning, very very dense stars called neutron stars. What kind of happens to regular stars at the very end of their lives once they run out of fuel and they kind of collapse their middles together to make this really dense leftover star? A teaspoon of this stuff a neutron star would weigh as much as the whole mountain. They can spin around very fast and send out radio pulses of light. And Jocelyn Bell Burnell serendipitously discovered these when she was using her raided her scope that she had built as a PhD student and she picked out this unusual signal it was this very regular pulse of radio waves. Actually to begin with, they half-jokingly named this pulsing source of radio waves as LGM 1 which stood for little green men, because they thought that maybe this was actually aliens sending out a regular signal. Anyway she found this new class of stars that we now see in plentiful array. And she was working with her PhD supervisor who was then later awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, and Bell Burnell was not awarded the Nobel Prize and even though officially the reason was given was that she was just a student at the time there was of course the underlying question about whether it was also because she was a woman.

AMT: She may have been just a PhD student but she's the one who found it. So did the Nobel organization ever correct that?

JO DUNKLEY: They did not. But happily just last year she was awarded the breakthrough prize for fundamental physics for her discovery which is a three million dollar prize. It's a big prize in the world of physics in keeping with her character, she decided to use that money to help support underrepresented groups duo PhDs in the field.

AMT: We have to remember that was the Nobel in 1974 wasn't that long ago. I mean this is a woman who's still living who was totally just glossed over.

JO DUNKLEY: That's right. Yeah. I mean she's certainly well known in the field. And she's certainly been recognized. She's been a great role model to many of us including me. You know the Nobel Prize funny. They probably wouldn't give it out for the same thing twice. But I think that if that discovery was made now she would have been awarded it. But then again as many of us who think that Vera Rubin should have won the Nobel Prize for her dark matter discovery.

AMT: You know in Canada right now only 21 percent of astronomy professors are women. Is that changing?

JO DUNKLEY: I think it's changing but slowly. To me the real- Well there are few different challenges. I think where we really have to see change is in our cultural perceptions that put girls off doing physics and astronomy when they're teenagers and going off to university as well, because we simply want to see more encouragement of women doing sciences from an early age. And there are so many biases you know unconscious that are pushing really talented young women away from pursuing careers in science. There's so much that we could do to you know try and address that problem.

AMT: What are the most fascinating questions coming up in astronomy right now are the ones that the children we heard from might be answering if they become astronomers?

JO DUNKLEY: Well I think one of them is: can we find a planet or more than one planet that has an atmosphere that looks a bit like Earth's that could have signs of life? That will be something that we're not ready to do yet but perhaps some of those kids will be able to do it a few decades from now. And then another one is: Can we figure out what this invisible stuff is, this invisible dark matter? We think it's a particle. Can we make it? Can we see it? Or can we come up with something completely new as an idea to explain what we're seeing? You know there are questions that we know we want the next generation and those kids to go and answer but probably I think more exciting are the questions that we never thought of. And probably the most exciting things coming will be the things we have an expected.

AMT: Are the kids we heard from earlier did raise one question several times. Let's listen to them again.

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VOICE 1: I want to learn about whether there is other living things there like dwarfish, elfish, trollish, goblinish, fairyish, nomish or human living anywhere else in space except for earth. I want to learn about space, if there are there are aliens out there looking up at their telescopes at us.

VOICE 2: I just want to know like what planets are out there and if they have life and if we can communicate.

VOICE 3: Space like it makes you feel insignificant. Because it's got vast-- like there might be other beings in space you don't know don't care about you.

VOICE 4: On the contrary doesn't it make you feel kind of significant. I mean we haven't discovered anybody out there yet so we're kind of the only ones that are us. I mean.

AMT: There you go. What is the latest kind of research into finding other life forms?

JO DUNKLEY: Well so there's a couple of different directions. One is whether we could find hints of life are on planets or moons in our own solar system. Now they probably wouldn't look much like us or like elves or anything else if they're in our solar system, because what are the most likely places for some kind of life is perhaps the moons of Jupiter or Saturn where maybe there's life deep in their liquid oceans of those moons. And so there are probes and missions being sent out to explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn with the quest of looking to see if there are hints of life. But then there's the separate thing of looking for planets in different solar systems going around different stars, and these are the ones that we're now finding in the thousands now with new telescopes. And we're beginning to be able to try and look and see which we can see; which ones are rocky, which ones are gassy ones like Jupiter, so which ones you could for example have life living on. And we're also beginning to be able to look for signs that those planets might again have atmospheres that could support life you know. Do they have things like oxygen in them? But this is where we're going to see huge progress in the coming decade and few decades which is with new telescopes that will try and examine these planets in much greater detail and try to see whether we can find some rocky planets that look a bit like Earth. Now the idea of actually be able to go down and see if there are actually no real animals or creatures on them. That's not the scope that we're hoping to do some time soon, but finding some things, finding a planet that looks like it could have life on it and hence have life. That's something that's a real goal for people who are alive now.

AMT: Hmmm. Interesting. And I'm interested too in what would those children said about feeling significant or insignificant. When you spend your career studying the enormity of the universe, how does that affect you?

JO DUNKLEY: Well to me I think I definitely feel that I'm aware of our smallness but it doesn't make me feel so insignificant. It just makes me feel a part of something bigger, and I think when you know what that bigger thing is it's less off putting in the same way that you know in a crowd of strangers you might feel a bit alone but in a crowd of friends you don't feel so alone. And the more we get to know this world around us, I think we feel like an important part of it in the same way that every other part of it is has an important role to play.

AMT: It's a nice way to put it. With all this complexity is there still a role for amateur astronomers these days?

JO DUNKLEY: Oh yes yes so there's a couple of different ways in which amateur astronomers can play a really important role. One is their own telescopes. So one thing that amateur astronomers can do is see sudden events in the sky, things like when stars explode or something happens that produces some sudden burst of light in the sky. Amateurs may have their telescopes trained on such an object and would then be able to alert others to it. Then there's also the role that amateurs can play in any kind of mining the data that the professionals have taken. We have so much data and we sort of tell our computers to look at it. But actually there are things that humans are better at spotting because we you know we're good at pattern recognition. So for example amateur astronomers have found entirely new planets around different stars and I think that will continue as we continue to have these very big astronomical [unintelliglbe] of the coming decade or so. We want amateurs to be looking at their computers, looking at some of these unusual things. Humans are much better than computers at looking for unusual stuff.

AMT: It's fascinating. It's so inspiring to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time.

JO DUNKLEY: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Jo Dunkley professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. Her book is called Our Universe, an Astronomer's Guide. Well what inspiration do you get looking at the night sky? Let us know. Send us your most beautiful pictures of celestial bodies. Find us on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC, got to our Facebook page or email us from our site cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q and in a nod to Jo Dunkley, we'll end things off today with a musical reflection on our place in the universe with Eric Idle of Monty Python with the Galaxy Song. I may Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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[Song: The Galaxy Song by Eric Idle]

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Wednesday February 27, 2019 Full Transcript

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