DISCOVER
OJAI MONTHLY
SHOOTING FOR THE STARS Bret Bradigan
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman Horn Canyon looks like the aftermath of a giant infant’s play party, boulders strewn like a messy box of blocks. Rugged and ancient, the canyon holds layers of secrets. On the northside ridge, a ridged metal dome stands out like an anachronistic thumb. That would be the Thacher School Observatory, where its 16-inch reflector telescope reveals the secrets that loom above us in the vastness of space. Dr. Jon Swift has been heading up the prestigious school’s astrophysics program for ten years now, and in doing, has helped the young students earn professional credentials, co-authoring dozens of scientific papers, discovering and studying exoplanets especially, the earth-sized globes that orbit distant stars. From the first confirmed discovery in 1992 of two planets by radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail, now more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered, many earth-sized at an earth-equivalent distance from their suns, the so-called ‘‘Goldilocks’’ range, where it is most likely that life as we know it might exist or even flourish. Swift was interviewed on the Ojai: Talk of the Town’’ podcast. Check it out wherever you catch your podcasts. He talked about the program’s importance to the increasingly-connected world of astrophysics, where it is difficult to book time on major observatories to test or confirm studies and observations, and how the science that goes on in Ojai is just as important to the larger picture of our understanding as any other observatory. The observatory’s history goes back much further, to the days of cosmologist Edwin Hubble, who gave the school’s commencement address in 1942. Caltech’s Richard Feynman gave 9 lectures at Thacher’s Summer Science Program between 1960 and 1980. Feynman’s genius, or one of them at least, was bringing complicated and theoretical physics to vivid understanding with sometimes nothing more than an orange and a pencil. He was also quite a character. Besides bringing scientific rigor to the calculating of quantum electrodynamics (for which he won the Nobel Prize) and inventing the concept of nano-particles (‘‘There’s always plenty of room at the bottom,’’), he was, at age 21, the Manhattan Project’s youngest scientist. One of the great advantages of living in Ojai is that we have so many truly outstanding private schools. I believe our public schools benefit, not only because of the competition, but because of the opportunities for collaboration. I’d love to see some cross-hybridization that brings in Ojai’s best and brightest Nordhoff science-oriented kids to work with their Thacher peers. Not only would it be a chance for broadening exposure for students who would not ordinarily meet each other, but it could launch stellar careers. There’s probably a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t work, but at the moment I can’t think of a one.
OM — March 2021
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