Britain's Star Men: Heroes of Astronomy

I'm 76, and I'm aware that I will not live for ever.

And there are many things that I should still like to do.

I'd like to follow my stars a lot longer than I have done already.

Maybe I shall last a little time yet.

The telescope that I now use, it was bought from a re-equipment grant.

It was just after the end of the Second World War.

Nobody shows any interest in the telescope at all,

so I could use it whenever I liked, or whenever the weather permitted.

I set the telescope myself,

and cranked the dome round to the right place, single-handed.

I kept the Cambridge Observatory on the map

as an active astronomical observatory, for ages,

largely by my own efforts.

It's, for practical purposes, my own telescope.

Some people think we invent mathematics.

I think mathematics is there, and we discover mathematics.

It's there to be discovered.

I think about the things that astronomers see,

and I'm very interested in giving explanations to what is going on.

You have this feeling for how things work.

You then have to show that indeed they would work that way

by making sure that the numbers actually work out correctly.

Creativity is a lot of this.

We all have reunions to see what's happened to those

young, sprightly people, and see how they've decayed,

and they've often become more interesting.

Roger I see every day, but I don't see Wal all that much,

and I see Nick very little, so I look forward to seeing them.

We shared this period of at least a year together,

and it was quite a formative year for all of us.

Once you've done things like this, you know people like that for life.

And I just thought it would be fun on the 50th anniversary

to see my friends.

Four extraordinary men are going on a very special road trip

to revisit the places where they worked and explored, 50 years ago.

The four friends graduated at a time

when British academic resources were low,

and such brilliant, young scientific minds were enticed abroad.

Moving to California, the young astronomers met in 1960,

and spent a formative year developing friendships

that would last a lifetime.

Professor Lynden-Bell and Professor Griffin.

-Welcome.

-Thank you very much.

With careers spanning the 50 most exciting years astronomy has ever had,

they are all together again for the first time.

Who is this distinguished man, sitting at the table?

Very nice.

Hello, Nick, great to see you!

Hello.

How nice to see you again.

50 years, wow, what does this 50 years mean?

If you ask what is most important of the reunion,

it is that it pulls together the past

and asks you to make sense of it.

I've got the flag with me now!

LAUGHTER

You can be reunited with it.

Get it the right way up, Roger.

'After I got to America, and I discovered

'how keen Americans are on their flag,'

I thought I should have our flag,

and I bought it by post from England.

Roger's very proud of being British.

He felt strongly that you should proclaim that you're English.

Roger would say, "We must put the flag up, yes."

And we'd hold it up for him, and someone would take a photograph.

That certainly occurred in many places.

NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS

Is it the same flag?

-Yes.

-Oh, amazing!

Good to see you.

Yes, jolly good.

In 1957, Soviet scientists beat the Americans into space with Sputnik.

Shocked, the US accelerated their space programme,

and started hiring astronomers.

For young, British post-grads,

California offered great research institutions,

good salaries and the two best telescopes in the world.

Britain produced scientists,

but there was nowhere for them to go.

Anywhere where the climate was good

and there were big telescopes was fine with me.

There were postdoctoral fellowships available

to have young researchers work in the United States.

That was clearly the centre of astronomy.

It was a quite unique place, Caltech.

There were lots of people from other places -

Canadians, and there were Swiss

and there were Dutchmen.

It made it easier for people who were non-American

to feel part of it.

We were already a ready-made group.

It wasn't that we were so deliberately cliquey,

but we did immediately find that we had something in common.

Let's go, I'll get my stuff.

The first stop on the reunion road trip

is the Mount Wilson Observatory,

where Roger and Wal first observed as young postgraduates.

Do you want to start at the beginning of the trip?

That's not very long, actually,

you won't have to suffer very much.

"Dear Mum, and Alan, if he's there..."

Alan, being my brother.

"Yesterday morning, packed vast belongings into boot of car,

"piled in and set off about 1pm.

"It was good to leave the smog behind.

"Car goes very well.

"I keep the speed in the low 70s most of the time,

"but to pass lorries doing 60, it is necessary to accelerate,

"and we have twice touched 90 on such occasions.

"The old bus sure can move.

"The tyres are good, so you needn't worry.

"To be continued.

"With love from Roger."

It was dreamed up to start with certainly as a way

of visiting all the observatories in the south-west.

But they were in marvellous country,

and it was a way of seeing these wonderful sights along the way.

I was very interested to come to a different country,

and particularly one with such a varied landscape.

The sense of freedom, the escaping from ordinary life,

which somebody from the working classes was desperate to do.

We had all these people crammed in the back like this,

and somebody had to ride on the middle one, if you remember,

and we used to exchange places.

Well, I always put this down

to the fact that you'd been to public school...

-That's right.

-..where the upper classes are taught

-to tolerate discomfort.

-That's correct.

So that they can then use this

as an excuse to make the lower classes uncomfortable!

LAUGHTER

Oh, Wal, I'm amazed you've still got

a chip on your shoulder about school!

The Mount Wilson Observatory,

the site of revolutionary astronomical discoveries,

was founded in 1904 by the astronomer, George Ellery Hale.

He was both an excellent astronomer and a great entrepreneur.

And he knew how to get money out of millionaires.

Hale had a great saying - "Make no small plans."

He believed in making BIG plans.

The telescope was retired in 1985.

It was too close to Los Angeles,

and light pollution and smog ruined the observing.

Here's the grand old beast.

Roger began observing here 50 years ago, and returned often.

It's nostalgic, of course.

I last observed with it in 1985.

While we're here, we could look in this room.

Can lights be put on round here?

These lights have burned out, I'm sorry, Roger.

I'm sorry to see the way

the telescope is not properly used any more.

Although it looks splendidly old-fashioned,

the fact is it's a very effective telescope,

and it's a pity to see it being, as it were, demeaned.

Roger spent most of his time

in the room that houses the telescope's spectrograph.

What I actually did here was I sat on a chair here,

and I looked in an eyepiece that was here, and guided the telescope.

And I took photographs of the spectra of stars.

When astronomers pass light through a prism and photograph it,

they can analyse its spectrum, and see what a star is made of.

Every element has its own signature.

It was supposed, at one time long ago,

that we would never know anything about

what the stars were really like,

because we had no sample of them that we could actually touch.

But with the discovery of spectroscopy,

it suddenly became possible

to discover in unbelievable detail

what remote objects were actually like.

Astronomers continued to glean information from light.

Roger used spectra to measure the velocities of stars.

The highlight of his career was the development of a spectrometer

that automated the process,

making it hundreds of times faster and more accurate.

Planet hunters adopted his method

to find planets orbiting other stars.

The method was strongly resisted

by the astronomical establishment at the time.

People who'd spent their lives measuring stellar radio velocities

by the old method, they couldn't bear to hear

that there was a young man in Cambridge who could measure them

so much better and quicker and more accurately.

It took about ten years to overcome the resistance.

But, eventually, the method was adopted around the world.

Roger is scrupulous about stars.

He made an entire atlas, mapping the light of just one star.

This is the Arcturus photometric atlas,

showing the intensity of light in the spectrum of Arcturus.

It has a few pages of introductions...

..even a picture or two,

and then the rest of it is all graphs, like this.

Hundreds of pages of tracings,

and they all represent the spectrum of this one star.

A big job.

The graph paper was made by a little man in the printer's office,

who had a ruler and a pen,

and every fifth line is stronger than the other lines, you know,

and every tenth line is stronger still.

It must be a terrible job to draw on graph paper like that.

The telescope is old now,

but in its day, it enabled ground-breaking discoveries.

It was this telescope that Edwin Hubble used to resolve stars,

and show that they were outside our galaxy, the Milky Way.

What had been thought to be dense clouds of gas

were shown to be other galaxies, made of billions of stars.

People had been amazed already

at the understanding of how big the Milky Way was,

and then Hubble came along and suddenly showed

that the universe was way, way bigger than that.

Hubble went further.

He used his data to prove that the universe was expanding.

An expanding universe suggested a dynamic universe,

a universe that was different in the past to how it is now.

It really created modern astrophysics,

but it went back to Darwin.

Darwin gave the impetus to see things in a context

of how they developed over time, and that has been the crucial thing

that has allowed astronomy to move ahead.

Astronomy would make sense

when all the pieces were put together into a pattern.

The expansion of the universe, the birth and growth of galaxies,

of stars being formed and producing heavy elements,

that material going into space, forming new stars, new planets.

It became an evolving universe, and it suddenly all came together.

We'd taken Darwin's idea of evolution

and applied it to everything.

I wanted to be an astronomer from about the age of six.

I was born in Banstead, in England,

it's a village about 15 miles south of London.

The war started when I was just four.

Bombs would fall during the night, you know,

and houses nearby would be demolished.

Of course, I had the impression

that that sort of thing went on all the time.

Nobody was allowed to show a light after night,

so that the German bombers couldn't see.

The policeman, or ARP wardens -

that would be Air Raid Precaution wardens -

would patrol,

and there'd be a knock on the front door

if there were so much as a chink in the curtains.

So there was no light pollution at all.

From that time, I knew I wanted to be an astronomer.

OK, we're now in the Palma Valley, which has...

..citrus, mainly orange orchards.

We all liked the countryside, the open air,

the views.

One of the attractions of astronomy is the excuse to go up mountains.

I was always drawn to things involving mountains.

The fact that telescopes are on top of mountains,

with often beautiful views, spectacular scenery,

is one of the attractions, at least for me.

And I came from an area of England

in which the highest promontory was around 300 feet.

I was born in a small village called Elsham in North Lincolnshire.

My father was the gardener in a house which had servants.

I was born in the gardener's cottage, which came with the job.

It didn't have electricity or running water.

There was a woman who was handicapped,

and my mother used to go and clean house for her,

and she would sometimes come back with books.

Volumes of a thing called The Children's Encyclopaedia,

and my brother thinks that

instead of being paid the ten shillings a week,

or whatever it was, for doing the house-cleaning,

that my mother actually took the books as payment.

My mother had an ambition to send my brother and me to Oxford,

although she didn't really know what Oxford was.

And so that was on the back of at least her mind.

The books contained astronomical pictures.

I started reading them and I learned quite a bit

that I'd not learned at school.

But I think the real expansion started in February 1951,

when I was 16 years old.

I heard some lectures on the BBC Radio by Fred Hoyle,

the prominent astronomer.

He gave a series of six lectures, which talked about the planets,

the stars, that kind of thing.

'The sun is enormously greater than the Earth and all the other planets.

'It contains about 1,000 times as much material as Jupiter,

'the largest planet, and over 300,000 times as much as the Earth.'

This excited me considerably,

particularly because Hoyle had a Yorkshire accent.

And England is a very class-ridden country

and for the first time, I realised

that people with an accent like mine could do that kind of work.

The next stop on the road trip is the Mount Palomar observatory.

Wal introduces the men to his colleagues.

Professor Lynden-Bell from Cambridge

and Professor Griffin from Cambridge.

-Nice to meet you.

-Pleased to meet you.

We were all together at Caltech in Pasadena...

-50 years ago.

-..in 1960...

..and we've come back to experience what it was like to be young!

LAUGHTER

Not bad for a 1935 elevator!

It's as old as we are!

-Hello, good to see you.

-Good to see you, sir.

Wal has worked at Mount Palomar since the 1960s

and served a three-year term as its director.

That's a big telescope.

Hale ordered a mirror five metres wide

and it was the best telescope in the world for 45 years.

The first time I saw it, it was an amazing experience.

I came in and looked at all this

and I thought, God, how am I going to survive?

For several years, I was scared of it.

I would come up here and there would be a slight pit in my stomach

because I was worried that the science I was doing

wouldn't be good enough for such a grand machine.

OK!

They're going to move the telescope.

We get in there by using the elevator over there.

Going up the side of the dome slit, all the way to the top,

and then you clamber in to that cage, the shiny thing,

when the telescope is pointing vertically.

My longest time up there was ten hours.

You have gloves and we would sometimes wear flying suits,

war surplus flying suits,

that would plug into an electrical connection up there.

Those of us who like astronomy

would cheerfully do this for hours at a time

and be as happy as pigs in shit.

Wal made a discovery confirming the Big Bang theory

by observing the relative abundance of helium

in these irregular blue galaxies.

And with his observations of hydrogen in the space between galaxies,

he laid the foundation for an entire new field,

studying how matter is organised in the universe at the largest scales.

Wal is among the best of his generation

in observational astronomy.

He needs a big telescope because he couldn't do it

without the best big telescopes around,

but he is extremely good at thinking of what is important

and what will be important.

OK, guys, come along.

Yes.

I was up here one afternoon, looking at the weather,

the prospects for the next night,

and some tourists down below shouted up to me,

"How did you get up there?"

-Meaning...

-How do we get up there.

Yes, by what means of ladders or elevators or whatever.

And I replied, "I studied bloody hard for 15 years!"

LAUGHTER

Isn't it amazing that we get paid to do this?

It was wonderful.

When I came here, I was supposed to be a theorist

and after a few weeks,

some of the post-docs who were observers

took me up to the mountain to see what it was like

and I found this absolutely entrancing.

I loved it.

Sitting there in the dark,

gently guiding the telescope

and then...listening to music.

The whole thing was very glamorous.

Well, I don't know whether it's a question of science and religion

but I've found the notion that...

..an all-powerful God would interfere

with the progress of the world if I said a prayer,

I found that pretty silly.

So...

And I would certainly back off

to the point where I might believe in a God who set things going

but then left things to work themselves out.

I pray sometimes.

Not very often, but I pray.

I think the evidence is not very strong...

..but there we are, that's, er...

And I was brought up in this tradition

and I love some of the tradition, I think it's lovely.

The idea that people should at least once in the week

be taken out of themselves and made to think in a broader way,

and away from their local lives,

is actually rather important and, to me, I do that in church.

Time only began at the instant that the universe is created

so you could say that God only came into existence at that point,

but that then doesn't deal with the fact

that there has to be a before, in some sense, a prior.

I think in terms of all processes being caused.

The road trip continues on to a dry plateau 6,000 feet above sea level.

The Very Large Array is a set of 27 antennae,

each 25 metres in diameter,

mounted on 60 kilometres of railway track.

Each dish weights 200 tonnes.

Astronomers position them along the tracks to act as one dish

36 kilometres in diameter.

Donald excelled at explaining images radio observers produced.

It was the first new window on the universe.

I mean, we'd been looking really...

in the...in the optical

for hundreds of years and then,

the radio astronomy opened a totally new way of looking at the universe.

Astronomers mapped the radio sources in the sky

and called them quasi stellar objects, or quasars.

The first one they measured

was 10 million million times brighter than the sun.

A quasar is a large black hole surrounded by in-falling matter,

some of which has been so heated in the process

that it glows very, very bright

and it outshines the rest of the galaxy in which it is in

and it can be seen for incredible distances.

Nothing actually comes out of a black hole.

It has a very deep gravitational pull

and therefore, as they swirl around,

as they do in your bath when you pull the bath plug out,

you get a swirling out

and sometimes you get a great gurgling.

That gurgling is the stuff getting so hot that it gives out light.

Donald realised they were seeing

discs of gas spinning around super massive black holes.

Using his extraordinary mathematical skills,

he developed a theory that there was a black hole

at the centre of every big galaxy - including our own.

You know, I was always reasonably good at mathematics

but I wasn't good at anything else

cos I couldn't read or found reading very hard.

Most things involve reading

and I think I was probably dyslexic.

I always said to my parents that I would be a carpenter

and that they didn't need to read.

But they didn't agree with me.

So they plotted the number of words I read each night on a graph

and I understood graphs perfectly well.

So they plotted the number of words I read each night on a graph

and I wasn't allowed to go to sleep

until I had read more this day than I had yesterday.

As Donald tapped a love of mathematics

that would lead to his career as a theoretician,

Nick excited a free-ranging appetite for knowledge.

I grew up in London,

probably less supervision than people would have thought wise

and actually, probably all the better for it!

I wanted to be an explorer.

The wonderful thing I remember as a child

was being allowed to read anything.

I would take a topic that I was interested in

and I would read everything that I could about it as fast as I could,

not worrying about whether I'd really understood it

because I was just going to read more and more until finally

it sort of gelled as to what it was all about.

Then, after about two weeks,

I would say, enough of this, let's go on to something else!

On the next leg of the road trip,

the friends set off for the University of Arizona,

where Nick was a professor for 34 years.

Here he was part of a team tackling astronomy's next big problem -

how to make an even bigger mirror than the Hale telescope at Palomar.

This particular 12-sided stand

can hold mirrors up to 8.4 metres diameter.

This stand is also the only place in the mirror lab

where we can turn a mirror upside down.

You can get a crane and grab it at the top,

pull to the centre and the whole thing will turn down.

Over there is the furnace.

The team developed a rotating furnace

that pushes the molten glass into a natural dish.

Casting the mirror takes just over four days.

How long does it take to cool?

Three or four months.

So, it's a long time in the oven.

You ought to see this side.

The side is interesting.

Unfortunately I can't turn it round for you

because if you drop it, it's a lot of years of bad luck.

Now we are coming to the polishing lab.

Each mirror takes two years to polish.

The one here with the really shiny surface

is the first mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope

and then the one behind is the mirror, will be the mirror,

for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

The quality of surface you can get out of a milling machine

is good to about a 10,000th part of an inch.

We are making these mirrors

with a surface quality of two-thirds of one millionth of an inch.

Nick has made many contributions to astronomy.

He built the first multiple mirror telescope,

pioneered adaptive optics to make telescope images sharper,

and devised an instrument for NASA

to find earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

I never realised what I was doing, I just did it.

I don't even feel that I'm in control of the rudder,

it steers itself.

What I have to do is pull on the oars!

It's because I am connecting things all the time and asking questions,

how does this fit with that?

So when I go off in some weird direction,

it is because that's where it led

and I ought to understand it a bit better

and so I can pursue it until I get bored

and then something else turns up that is equally interesting

and moves me in another direction.

Nick also looked for suitable mountains for building observatories.

Mount Graham was the best one he found.

Beautiful view of Mount Graham there.

Yeah. It is a pretty amazing view of a mountain.

We don't have views like that in England.

It's quite snowy.

We'll never get up there!

A spade, to dig the car out of the snow.

No, we haven't got a spade for digging.

Maybe it would have been a good idea, I don't know.

But there are a lot of strong men here, who are capable of pushing.

The front wheels are not driving.

It's curious because on the trip to Rainbow Bridge,

we got the car stuck.

50 years ago.

There's a certain sense of deja vu.

Hello, Mount Graham.

Can I hear you?

Hello?

ENGINE REVS

Well, congratulations.

It's only just starting.

But we're out of it.

And now we'll go...

It all makes for a good...

They've made it to the top of the mountain

and Nick can finally show his friends around the observatory.

What is open are two doors.

One in front of each mirror.

And they will move out and leave a central strip here.

-It's very like building battleships actually, isn't it?

-Oh, yes.

Hubble said the history of astronomy

was the history of receding horizons.

There would always be a horizon beyond which we could not see.

The whole thing with astronauts has been a huge mistake.

What should have been learned from the lunar landing

is that you should not send people into space,

you should send automatic equipment.

And instead, the idiots kept sending humans up

and the main thing you've got was a huge expense

in getting the humans back alive, usually.

If they put the money into remotely controlled equipment

that was capable of taking care of itself,

they would actually get the results

and not have to worry about the humans.

But it did advance technology.

At the time, yes.

And it did send children towards working in science.

Putting people on the moon is interesting

the first time you do it,

much less interesting the second time

and by the time you've reached the third one,

even if you've got new devices up there, it's a yawner.

Ah, well.

There's a decent chance that there are

about 10 billion planets in this galaxy

that might have life develop on them.

And there are about 100 billion galaxies

spread through the universe,

and our success or failure

is hopefully not important in the long run.

We are just one of the many experiments necessary

and somewhere, someone gets through.

I think the first life that will be discovered

will be of an extremely dull form.

And will probably be bacterial.

If you mean intelligent life, will we discover intelligent life,

I think probably not within my lifetime.

Possibly within yours.

But how will we communicate?

It will be extremely tiresome to communicate.

Hey, guys. Can you hear me?

Yes. Yes, we can hear you.

Who's the telescope operator tonight?

It's Cynthia. Hi, Wal.

Oh, hi, Cynthia. And the weather looks OK?

-Yeah, it looks brilliant, I'd say.

-Oh, good.

Wal is demonstrating the remote observing room at Caltech.

From here, he can observe using the Keck telescopes in Hawaii,

some of the most powerful in the world.

Wal co-led the Keck development team

and their work helped pave the way for a new generation of telescopes.

-Should be in...?

-Yeah, and Virgo rising is about right.

Wal is not continuing on the road trip.

Although I'm not sure...

He is staying behind to look after his health.

Wal is seriously ill

and there are reasons for suspecting

that he doesn't have a great deal of time ahead of him.

None of us have a huge amount of time, but in Wal's case,

it may well be considerably shorter than for the others.

He is certainly thinking about it now.

But he feels he's had a good life and he's not afraid of death.

OK, so you lot are leaving tomorrow.

-Yeah.

-What time are you setting off?

Ever so early in the morning. Crack of dawn.

-Good to see you, Nick.

-All the best with everything.

Yeah. Yeah, thanks. I need it.

He's in a difficult position and he understands it.

And in some ways, he almost looks forward to this happening

because he was dreading giving up astronomy

and instead he's going to be able to work until the end.

I think it's rather a good way to go.

Death is part of life.

It's an inevitable part of life.

It's the way that new things get going.

And you don't get cluttered by all this memory

of what's gone on in the past.

I don't really believe that old people should dominate the scene.

I think younger people should dominate the scene.

We learn things that are untrue and incomplete,

ideas that have formed in our brain

and are going to stay with us until we die.

And so our dying, as a part of the process of those ideas going,

is very important for humanity.

Evolution rarely occurs through death.

There's not enough death in the species.

That's right. But we haven't come to terms with it.

The men's lifelong bond is built

not only on their shared love of astronomy,

but also their shared love of adventure.

Whenever the chance arose, they would set off to explore,

parking the car and heading out to the vast country,

on foot, sometimes overnight.

For the final stage of their 50th anniversary road trip,

Roger and Donald take a break from astronomy

and retrace their hike to Rainbow Bridge,

their most memorable and challenging adventure.

"From here, it is 1.4 miles to the ruins of Rainbow Lodge.

"The track no longer resembles a road

"and you'll need to engage your 4-wheel drive."

This would pass for "no longer resembles a road".

Yes. This is absolutely right.

THEY LAUGH

Hey, not so fast.

OK. Right.

Out we get.

They are accompanied by Alison, the film-maker.

There you are.

Nick will pick them up by boat.

We who are about to die...

LAUGHTER

OK, Nick. There we are.

Good.

All right. Come on, we must go.

Rainbow Bridge, in a remote part of Utah,

is the world's largest natural land bridge.

Right.

March. On we go.

It was hot when we started out

and we were all carrying quite heavy packs.

Roger's natural pace is faster than the rest of us.

So he went first.

It wasn't done in any spirit of competition.

It was purely a matter of convenience.

My heart is as light as the pack is heavy.

That's to say that the longer the hike I'm going on,

the more exciting I think it's going to be.

But it doesn't weigh on me every day and every minute

that I'm over 70, you know?

He always liked to outdo everybody else and be one up,

and I'm for trying to stop him being one up.

It was just part of Roger.

He wanted to show that he was the best.

-FILM-MAKER:

-There is Roger, way ahead.

Good.

We've done one canyon.

Though I think it should be said it's the easiest one, the first one.

This trail is a mess.

This movie is going to have a lot of heavy breathing in it.

1961, April 26.

"Dear Mum, very hot with blazing sun.

"There is a sort of rudimentary trail.

"Not exactly well beaten, as few people visit Rainbow.

"Having climbed into and out of three canyons,

"each some hundreds of feet deep, we kept stopping to rest.

"It was frightfully hot.

"And very uphill. And the trail seemed interminable.

"It seemed a hugely long way."

The description of it rings pretty true, doesn't it?

I mean, it's quite like that now.

My feet are killing me.

We walked a lot quicker in those days.

I think it can't have been as difficult then as it is now.

The trail must have been in somewhat better shape.

I suppose we have to admit that we are getting old.

Well, that's true.

And I enjoy it!

Oh, I don't.

I'll come in a moment.

I hope he doesn't find he's bitten off more than he can chew.

I don't know what we'll do if he has.

I can't carry him.

I run the London Marathon every year.

When you're 70, if you run it in five hours,

you can get an automatic entry for the next year.

And I still did it in 3.57 last April.

More than an hour in hand.

I could stop at a cafe and have a leisurely lunch halfway round

and still make it. In fact, it would make it easier to do that,

but I don't think it would be sporting.

-Got it?

-OK.

-Thanks.

-You're welcome.

Is this where we're staying?

Yes, we can have a fire.

Man! Thank you.

-It's spring.

-Oh!

-It's spring.

Right.

It is bright and spring.

It's a good spring morning there.

Where's your alarm clock?

Are you being an alarm clock?

Yes, I am.

All right.

-Morning, Roger.

-Morning.

Oh, dear.

I'm going the wrong way, let's try the right way.

Do you see the path anywhere?

That's not a trail.

Don't you think that looks like a trail?

Where did Donald go anyway?

No sooner is the hike back on track than something unexpected happens.

Oh, getting enfeebled my old age.

How old are you, Roger?

76.

Donald's 76, but he doesn't run marathons.

Yeah.

Do you think I should make up my mind to it and sort of...

..give in?

No. I think you should just keep going.

Ignore your age.

There's some aspects of it I can't ignore.

That's true for all of us.

When I was a student and I was late going for a train

and I had to run for it,

I could remember wondering, whatever will I do when I'm 50?

I shall miss the train.

But somehow I've sort of been putting it off.

But you don't seem old to me.

Oh, thank you, Alison.

Onward.

It certainly is an amazing place.

Fantastic.

Don't you think it's fantastic?

It's fantastic scenery.

It makes one feel great to be alive, to be honest, doesn't it?

Even if it's hard work.

We look a bit small compared with the landscape.

There it is.

There it is.

That's Rainbow Bridge.

So it is.

No problems, Nick.

Just late as usual.

Doctor Livingstone, I presume.

Stanley, I presume.

Come on.

We're very glad to see you.

We were a little worried.

We tried to ring from the top of the canyon.

It didn't work.

But actually we had a good trip.

-Good.

-No problems.

It was a relief.

Thank God I can put down my pack.

Well, I was pleased to have made it

but I didn't have much doubt when we started that I'd be able to make it.

I mean, I'm not giving to sort of

dancing about and congratulating myself on anything.

Because the next thing that happens is a fall, you know.

Pride goeth before a fall.

It's difficult to grasp how big it is when you just see it in a picture.

It's about 300 feet high and wide.

I would have liked to stand on it like I did before.

But there didn't seem to be much prospect of doing that.

It's not allowed.

Are you sure it's not allowed?

Yes, absolutely sure.

I offer you a toast to Athenaeum Enterprises.

It's a great enjoyment to go hiking with friends.

To the future.

Thank you.

The numbers in astronomy, as you know, are very big.

It is easy to appreciate...

..a tenth of a second

and if you're a photographer, you might even...

or a runner, you might even appreciate a hundredth of a second.

How many hundredths of a second are there in a year?

Well, that's quite a big number actually.

And if you think about it, there are about 30 million seconds in a year.

So that's three times ten to the seven.

100th of a second, that's three times ten to the nine.

And if you ask about 100 years, that's three times ten to the 11,

which is very like the number of stars in the galaxy.

And that's very like the number of galaxies in the universe too.

Are you afraid of death?

Are you worried about it?

Er...no, I'm not worried about it.

I can't see any purpose in being worried about it.

But I'm not looking forward to it.

I'm a Christian.

And...I therefore believe,

in principle, in eternal life,

but I wonder what you'd do with eternal life.

It seems to me that...

you know, eternity is a very long time

and I don't know what you'd do all the time.

I can't believe that they have telescopes in heaven.

But I don't know what they do have.

What did you learn from a lifetime observing the universe?

Wow!

Somebody once said

that the most remarkable feature of the universe

is that it is comprehensible,

that somehow, with these ideas of cause and effect,

we can go through and make sense of all the parts of it

that we have observed and see how they all fit together.

Curiosity is a necessary part of survival.

And the thing that I like most about life is being able to ask questions.

The question is always the same one -

what the hell is out there?