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>> Kirsten Wiley: So good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley. And I'm here

today to introduce and welcome Theodore Gray, who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft

Research Visiting Speaker Series. He's here to discuss his book "The Elements" and also to talk

about the importance of public displays of science.

The elements are what we and everything around us are made of. But how many elements has

anyone actually seen in pure uncombined form?

"The Elements" provides this rare opportunity based on five years of research and photography.

The pictures in this book make up the most complete and visually arresting representation

available to the naked eye of every atom in the universe.

Theodore Gray is the author of Popular Science Magazine's Gray Matter column, the proprietor of

periodictable.com, and the creator of the iconic photographic period table poster that's seen in

university, schools, museums and TV shows, from Myth Busters to Hannah Montana.

In his other life, and how many of you might know of Theodore Gray, he's co-founder of the major

software company Wolfram Research, creators of the world's leading technical software system,

Mathematica. He lives in Illinois. Please join me in welcoming Theodore Gray to Microsoft.

[applause]

>> Theodore Gray: Hello. Is this microphone on? So I'm delighted to be here in Microsoft land,

even if under somewhat unusual circumstances. Normally I would be here to discuss software

with people at Microsoft, since we do a lot of business with Microsoft in one way or another.

But this time around I'm here entirely at the pleasure of my publisher, who wants me to go around

all over the place talking about my new books, since that's how they sell them.

I basically have told them I don't do that, but I'll come to Microsoft because it seems like a nice

place. [laughter]. So, yes, I'm basically here simply for the books, not to do with software.

Although I might happen to mention it in the course of my talk.

These are basically the result of what I would refer to as an out-of-control hobby. By

out-of-control, I now have almost a full-time employee that does my hobby for me because I don't

have time for it anymore. [laughter].

A little bit of background: So this basically got started when I was reading a book called "Uncle

Tungsten" by Oliver Sacks outstanding book. I highly recommend it. He has a chapter where he

starts off talking about a periodic table that he visited in the Kinsington Science Museum when hewas a child. And I had this picture of a table, a table with legs that had elements sitting on it,

because that sounded to me like how he was describing it. And it was horribly disappointing to

discover in the next paragraph it was actually just on the wall like everybody else's periodic table.

That was just crushing to find out that the world didn't have a periodic table table. So I built one.

This is what it looks like shortly after I finished it. And this is what it looked like a couple years

later, because you see it has compartments underneath each of the engraved wooden tiles; you

can lift them up, underneath there's a spot to put the elements.

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I felt obligated to find those elements and put them in those spots that I had created. And here's

Oliver Sacks who came to visit my periodic table after he found out about it. So that was a nice

satisfying little complete circle there.

So let's see. So actually quite shortly after building it -- so this is the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize, which

is basically a joke prize that the Journal for Irreproducible Results gives out. In this case for the

construction of a periodic table table.

I have no idea why they chose this. I'm incredibly honored to have been given an Ig Nobel Prize.

It's certainly the highest honor for which it's conceivably eligible. [laughter].

Anyway, so based as far as I can tell, almost solely on the prestige of the Ig Nobel Prize, Popular

Science asked me if I would like to write a column for them. I think they also read my website

which had by that time a lot of writing about the various elements that I put in the table. They

asked me if I would like to write this monthly column. The first one appeared in July 2003. And

I'm basically still at it.

When I started the column, a couple months after I started, I thought, hmm, in about five years I

would have enough columns for a book. This represented a tremendous degree of hubris at the

time.

But, sure enough, five years later, like clockwork, it was time for Mad Science, because I had 48

columns, and that's about how many you need to fit in a book.

So we put this book together. And it was published. And people like it. It's basically the same

thing as the column. In fact, the body text is almost identical. But we got to expand out what had

been one page in the magazine to two, four, six, in this case this wonderful thing about how to

make trapped lightning gets two and a half full spreads in the book where in the column it only got

one.

And I got to do some more detailed instructions about each experiment to kind of explain exactly

why you shouldn't do it, among other things.

So the other thing we got to do is use many of the pictures that we couldn't use in the magazine

because there wasn't room. So this is a great example. If you're tired of the stale store-bought

sort of salt that's been sitting underground for millions of years, and you want to make fresh salt,

of course the way you do that is by blowing chlorine glass into a bowl of molten sodium and they

will react. [laughter]

And so this next picture, this is the picture that the art director argued with me for weeks that we

should use as the main shot in the magazine. And I kept having to tell him, no, no, this is theflaming disaster picture. [laughter] not the one from a few seconds before where everything

appears to be working perfectly.

Of course, what happened was that the heat of the reaction, I didn't take into account the net

that's holding this popcorn which we're salting was made out of some kind of a thermoplastic and

it melted almost immediately and dropped the popcorn into the molten sodium.

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If you know anything about sodium, you know that's a bad thing. But it is a beautiful picture. And

the great thing about the book is we get to use both, because there's enough room in the book.

So, yes, this book -- the best review I read of it was written by a chemist for CN News a

publication for professional chemists. His first sentence was he was all prepared to pooh pooh

the subtitle and say experiments you can do at home but probably shouldn't. Weren't aware of

the subtitle.

He was prepared to say, well, whatever of course we can do these things at home. Then he

actually read the book. And even writing for an audience of professional chemists he's not sure

that people should be doing this.

So we have a very stern safety warning section, which I highly recommend. And it's a lesson of

why you should wear safety glasses.

Actually, magazine lawyers are very paranoid, much more so than book lawyers. So although

there's some stuff in here that people really shouldn't do, the dangers are carefully described and

properly disclaimed. And they even made me redo this particular shot using, this is an off brand

imitation Barbie, because when I did it with actual Matel brand Barbies, it was like, no, we're not

going to show that being done to a Matel brand Barbie.

Okay. So in the meantime, while I've been writing that column, I was also continuing to expand

my element collection. First at periodictabletable.com which has now something like 2300

different objects, each of which is an example in some way, shape or form of an element.

And we do a significant amount of business licensing these images. We're basically the only

stock photo library that has a complete coverage of all the elements consistently photographed to

a high standard. So textbook publishers and science documentaries and things like that quite

regularly license these images.

At some point it became clear to me that I need to own periodictable.com. I felt that it was not

being utilized to its highest potential. But if anybody -- if any of you have tried to buy a URL, this

is a difficult psycho financial negotiation with the person who owns it.

But after about a year of careful, making of my case and carrying suitcases of cash and things

like that, I finally managed to buy it. And I now own periodictable.com, which is a fabulous URL.

I've really made an effort to make it live up to its potential as an online periodic table.

So I published this poster, which turned out to be a great investment. It was a bit of a leap of faith

to think that people would buy a photo periodic table, but they did. And since then I've developed

sort of a whole line of products, which you can find at periodictable.com. Of course, the most

elaborate example of that is this book that many of you seem to have copies of, thanks toMicrosoft, "The Elements." These were published, both books, through a proper publisher as

opposed to self-published like everything else, which is not really a financially advantageous thing

to do, but it's good for egos, because it means it shows up in bookstores and you can walk in and

see your book there can, which is much harder to do with self-published books.

The book is full of nice big pictures of elements. Some of the more popular elements actually get

two full spreads like that. And it's just basically lots of big pictures.

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So it raises the question, though, why do this? Is there really a point to it? Because I don't really

like spending this amount of time without feeling there's a point. So of course the answer is yes.

But why? What is the point of doing this? So let me give you an example of other people who do

this.

So this past week, last week, was actually National Chemistry Week which the American

Chemical Society puts on every year as sort of their big outreach.

They publish sort of a curriculum supplemental 20-page newsletter which they print something

like a quarter of a million copies of and distribute to schools everywhere. Naturally because the

theme this year was the elements. They have a nice little two-page spread of me, Mr. Elements.

So they spend a huge amount of money on this every year. And basically the point of it, as far as

they're concerned, is trying to do what they can to present sort of public or sort of positive views

of science.

Why should you do science, why is this a good thing. And that is essentially, for better or worse,

what I've been doing, although I kind of stumbled into it. I write a lot about chemistry. The first

goal in writing this column is to get something, anything about science actually published in the

venue of Popular Science, which is not a science magazine by any stretch of the imagination. If

you read it, it's more like people magazine than it is like Scientific American.

So I have to find some way of phrasing the topic and framing it in a way where it will not actually

get replaced by a Cialis ad which is the fate of any such writing which doesn't hold its own.

People are going to pick up the magazine, if they pick it up to my page, they open it, I have to

grab them. I have to make them buy the magazine, otherwise I'm out.

And so there's a lot of beautiful pictures. Grabby, there's the salt one. Text that kind of tries to

immediately engage the reader. Alcohol and fire. Good combination, [laughter], if you're trying to

engage the reader and catch their attention.

So, for example, hydrogen salt bubbles. This is actually a standard demonstration. One I wanted

to write about for a long time, you blow hydrogen gas through soapy water and you get bubbles.

And you run after them with a candle and try to light them. For guys, in the sense of guys, there's

really no need for a reason to do this. [laughter] but in order to make it a compelling enough topic

for the column, it took me a year to figure out how to explain to my editor why he should let me

write about this.

The answer was it's an excellent explanation for why occasionally people come home from

vacation to find their roof in their basement and their walls scattered around the surrounding fields

and there's always fields around these houses, because their house is heated with propane.

When there's a propane leak, it's viscous and heavy, and settles into the basement and slowlybuilds up until it finds a pilot light somewhere and it explodes. And this column is all about why it

is that same propane gas that burns gently on a stove, if you premix it with air, will actually turn

into a bomb that blows your house into smithereens. That's the thing that makes people able to

relate to it so I could actually write about it.

Okay. So I think we have a video of it now. Yes.

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There's quite a lot of effort put into it. You start off with pure hydrogen. Then you start mixing

oxygen in. When it's pure hydrogen, it burns slowly and gently sort of like a fire jellyfish. There's

a slow motion video of it.

And then you start mixing oxygen in. Maybe we can skip ahead to the oxygen. Those are pretty

nice, too. So once you start mixing oxygen in, it burns much faster. And they were wondering

why I had earmuffs on and a face shield, until you get to point where you have a stoichiometric

ratio of hydrogen to oxygen. [laughter] at which point my old professor, who first showed this

described it as causing white lung disease, because all the chalk comes off the chalkboards when

you do this in a lecture hall.

This is another column I wrote, bacon lamps. Device constructed entirely of bacon which cuts

steel. Of course the secret is that you're blowing oxygen through, and in an atmosphere of pure

oxygen, bacon is extremely flammable. [laughter] and it does actually cut through the steel in the

end.

And this one, I couldn't think of anything that this is relevant to, but it's a bacon lance. So he let

me write about it anyway.

And then I believe we did a vegetarian version also. [laughter] which they've -- skip ahead here.

The secret for vegetarian version is cucumber stuffed with breadsticks. And the cucumber is the

airtight pipe and the breadsticks are the fuel.

It worked quite well, too. Moving right along. I think we'll skip that one. So we'll have time for

questions here. Actually, you're welcome to ask questions.

So I only get 350, 400 words or so for one of these columns. I get one page. I get to do

whatever I want to do on this page as long as it's exciting. That's not a lot of words.

So I have to write something that the average reader will understand, and not talk down to them.And yet try to communicate some meaningful content.

A lot of Popular Science's readers are quite young, middle, high school age, and I feel a

responsibility to sort of leave little breadcrumbs for them, because I can't actually explain much of

this science, but I can leave little hints, words they can Google or Bing, whatever the verb form of

Bing is. They didn't understand it, but they could look it up. If they happened to have an actual

science teacher in the school, which may be unusual, but if they do they can ask their teacher.

Sort of leave little hints that there's more depth and more to be learned about these topics that I

don't have room for here and give them a hook to be able to find it.

So it's not so much that there's a lot of science being communicated, but what there is is a

description or sort of an attitude about science, a positive image that this is a good thing. This isinteresting. This is fun.

It's kind of a game. How much science can I squeeze in before they tell me no. You know, too

much science, back off. There's actually a lot of precedent for sort of doing science purely for the

spectacle of it. In fact, the very first generation of professional scientists, people like Joseph

Banks and Humphrey Davery and Michael Faraday, they were all renowned as public speakers,

and it was in fact their spectacular public demonstrations, the public lectures at which all the

victorian ladies were swooning at these fabulous men of science, this is what created the public

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support for the institutions that eventually ended up professionalizing science, the Royal

Academy and places like that.

If it had not been for their public demonstrations of science, the profession wouldn't exist. So in

fact it was Michael Faraday who invented the Christmas Magic Show, the Christmas Chemistry

Magic Show, which is now an institution at many of your finer research institutions will do it every

year. This happens to be at the U of I at Illinois that we filmed last Christmas. Everyone has a

great time. The professors get to blow stuff up, normal actual research professors, it's not what

you get to do in chemistry. But they get to do this. And lots of kids get to come and see all kinds

of fun chemistry stuff. The hope is, of course, 10 years later some of them are going to come

back as university students and become actual scientists. So that goes on.

And speaking of Davey, this is my next month's column is on the Davey safety lamp, which is an

amazing device that prevents, prevented miners from blowing themselves up when they were

carrying lit candles into mines where the atmosphere was explosive because of methane.

And the thing actually, yeah, so we're basically blowing propane gas into the cylinder which is

made out of mosquito netting.

And the fire doesn't go through the mosquito netting. Even though the flammable gas came in

from the outside, the open mesh of the mosquito netting stops the fire, which it's mind blowing. I

had no idea that it would actually work. But people would go down into the mines soaked in

methane with lit candles relying only on that effect to prevent themselves from being blown to

bits. So that was Humphrey Daveys. That's what everyone thought would be his great

contribution to the world, then people developed electric light and the whole thing became

irrelevant.

Anyway, so the moral message here is that these kinds of what I call public demonstrations of

science, they were critical in the 19th century, and I think they're critical now, too. There's really a

very strong anti-science current. There's a degree of willful ignorance that we've not seen forsomething like 100 years. That's combined with a serious decay in public schools and public

instruction on the topic of science.

There I think is to a greater degree now than there has been for a very long time a serious and

realistic threat to the presence of sort of the prominence of science as the way in which

civilization advances.

Everyone needs to do their bit to do something about that. And one of the most encouraging

things that I've discovered in the last few years is that apparently science is cool. It never used to

be. And I think it's kind of like what happened with computer nerds and such in the whole dotcom

era, it suddenly became cool to be involved in computers and be a hacker and everything.

You can see the same kind of thing happening with science hackers and science geeks. So

Make Magazine is a successful magazine and they have this wonderful new science room they

launched not too long ago, which is basically for science hackers in the same way that there's any

number of resources for computer hackers. And they talk about bio hacking and their

programming life. You can go to conferences and people will talk to you about genetics and

exactly the same way they would 10 years ago have talked to you about hacking computers.

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And you know what Make has done is basically a first semester chemistry course, but it's framed

in terms of do it yourself. They use words like open "source chemistry hacking" which I think is

ordinarily referred to as academic chemistry. But it's their way of looking at it.

And maybe it's all kind of silly, but on the other hand some of the people who get involved this

way are in fact going to transition into doing real science, academic commercial setting or in their

basement. And it's a way of sort of the young generation coming around and saying this has

gone too far.

And we're going to recapture science as a thing. That's good. So, yeah, it's not lost, but people

need to work at it. And that's ultimately the justification of books like this and columns explaining

this kind of effort on it, is to help with the effort of making science be something that people

actually want.

So continuing. We have to go really fast, this is an entirely new talk that I'm trying out on you

guys. So we're going to go pretty fast. So periodictable.com is the thing I've spent an inordinate

amount building over the last couple of years.

It has lots and lots of stuff in it. Many, many pictures, descriptions of many objects. Lots of

technical data about every element. So here's everything you can see about uranium, graphs,

charts, things that illustrate periodic properties. These are -- this is a decay chain of uranium

U235 showing how it decays.

So here's -- this is a slightly smaller decay chain, you can see the whole thing. Something you

may not immediately recognize about periodictable.com it's in fact an intersection with my day

job, the entire thing is completely generated by a Mathematica program, writes out all the HTML,

creates all the diagrams. For example, this decay chain image, this is a portion of the

Mathematica code that creates those images.

It's nice you can put the images -- do you see the cursor there? You can put pictures in line withthe text. Works nicely for a sort of visual programming environment. And, of course, one of the

nice things about programs is that once you've written them, you can just kind of push a button.

So here we have not just one diagram but actually a moving version, a movie version of this

diagram, which is perhaps silly. This is perhaps more so than some of the other things. I think

it's actually a good way driving home the point it's really a transmutation of the elements. The

alchemists were not wrong, they didn't realize they need a nuclear reactor to do it. Now you can

make gold if you wanted, but it's too expensive.

There's actually lots of -- is that playing? At this point I think I'm going to turn the lights down just

a little bit. I think we can make it look better. So this video is also created completely in

Mathematica. Every frame of it is direct output of Mathematica and it would be tricky to do this

using traditional video editing software because the range of the pan and zooms is such that youcan't really start with one large video and zoom in. There's too much resolution there. So we'll let

that play for just a minute. There's a lot of images that go into that particular piece of video.

And I'll go back to regular. So let's see now we're going to play -- I forgot. We're going to play

one little -- do we have sound? I'll skip ahead here. We skip ahead right here.

[music]. This one I'm going to let it play.

[singing]

>> Theodore Gray: The first time there, iconic performance of the elements.

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[singing]

[piano]

>> Theodore Gray: Recorded in 1959. It's never been equalled.

[singing]

[applause]

>> Theodore Gray: And he actually gave me permission to do that. I use that in a promotional

video for my song. And even though he must be 120 years old by now, but he has e-mail and

he's very nice.

[laughter]

He's planning to put his entire repertoire in the public domain in his will. Nice guy. Well, so

anyway, there's just more videos. And I hope -- it has to some extent, you know, affected your

impression about what Mathematica, about the fact it's the best way making videos like this,

people probably don't think of technical computing software as a way of making videos.

But, anyway, so let me show you another little thing I think is an interesting excursion in the

element. This is a decay chain for U235, links together different isotopes. Starts with U235 and

ends up with lead 207 and 206 as the two possible stable end points.

You go choose another one. This is U238. It's in the middle, U238. Decay chain, everything it

decays into, as well as going backwards, everything which at some point passes through U238

and its decay chain. That links together even more of them. It turns out, if you look at the entire,

there's about 3100 known isotopes. And almost all of them are linked to each other.

And so you can build this diagram which the thing on the top is every single known isotope. And

every line is a connection, a decay chain. So there's an awful lot of time and money in that

diagram. Probably every one of the dots in it is somebody's Ph.D. thesis studied that isotope.

And the thing on the bottom is a magnified version of it. And this is the entirety of the

Mathematica code that generated that diagram. And seriously that's it. I don't have a whole

bunch of stuff hidden behind it, except to the extent that Mathematica has an awful lot of stuff

hidden behind it. The graph plot is a spring electric, algorithm, and isotope data is a function data

access function that knows pretty much all there is to know about all the isotopes that are known

and you kind of build the network and then you say graph it.

And this is its automatic layout of that particular Web. So there's an awful lot of things that

Mathematica has built in to do with data. And you may have heard about our most recent little

development Wolfram Alpha, which is sort of, the biggest application written in Mathematica, the

entire implementation of it on the server side is five million some lines of Mathematica code. And

it's available as a free website wolframalpha.com. This will actually turn back around intoelements. We're doing a little sidetrack through Wolfram Alpha.

So we call it a computational knowledge engine. You can ask it questions. It's not a search

engine. It's a computational knowledge engine.

And what it does is it does math for you. It looks data up for you. It operates on it. So here

we've given it a formula. It gave us plots. We had a little homework day to introduce this to

teachers, because it does things like this. You give it -- you ask it to integrate something.

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It can integrate pretty much anything that computers know how to integrate, because we have the

best integration algorithms. You can click the show steps button and it will show you how it did

that integral. Students know about this. I think teachers are -- teachers are still sort of learning

about it.

But it's out there. It's a free website. Any student can go to it. There's not anything their teacher

can do about it. This is buzzing. That's not going to help.

So let me make this stop here. So it's hopeless to try to explain everything that Alpha will do. So

let me bring this back to elements. One of the things it knows how to do is balance reactions.

So, for example, I asked it magnetite, plus aluminum goes to aluminum oxide plus iron. Notice I

don't put the actual chemical formulas, but it knows magnetite is FE304, writes it in a funny way

for some reason. It knows aluminum oxide is ALO20, which I may not have remembered, and it

balances it for me.

The question, of course, for those of you who recognize this reaction, how much aluminum do I

need? So I say I've got 100 grams of magnetite. And if I say how much aluminum do I need.

The answer is 31 grams of aluminum. That will make thermite, which is definitely in my book.

One of my most favorite reactions.

Basically what happens, and what you don't see captured quite well enough here, is that on the

right-hand side of the reaction you have iron and aluminum oxide. What Alpha doesn't tell you is

that the iron is white hot liquid iron when it comes out of this reaction. You put it this in a crucible

with a hole in the bottom, the iron drips out the bottom as a liquid. You can make iron castings

that way. And so I will now leave you with a video, although actually technically I had better video

of titanium thermite. This is actually the same thing except titanium oxide and aluminum reacting

to form. Let me turn the lights down here, to form titanium metal.

And this one -- yeah, so it reacts energetically, as they say, exothermic reaction, and Iintentionally didn't contain the pots -- what's dripping down there, some of it is liquid titanium.

Most of it is probably liquid corundum or aluminum oxide and liquid fluoride, because in this case

you use a fluoride flux.

So tremendous amount of heat released. So that's an example of the usefulness of Wolfram

Alpha. I no longer have to calculate how much thermite I need for these reactions, I can just ask

Alpha.

So, well, thank you very much. Remember periodictable.com.

[applause]

And I'm happy to take any questions.

>>: Can Maple do the same kind of --

>> Theodore Gray: Call Maple a competitor. I mean, no. [laughter].

Maple is much more of a straight symbolic math program. It doesn't really have the same breadth

of trying to do everything sort of as Mathematica does. I think Matlab is actually more directly a

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competitor in the sense that it has image processing libraries and things like we do, whereas

Maple is much more narrowly focused on symbolic math for its own sake.

>>: Have you ever severely injured yourself in experiments?

>> Theodore Gray: Never. And I don't know why. But it's because I'm actually an incredibly

timid and cautious person, as are I think everyone who is involved with this kind of stuff. If you

look at people who do special effects or stunt men or whatever, they're all complete ninnies,

because otherwise you're dead. [laughter]

So although I might appear in my public persona to be somewhat irresponsible, you know, read

the safety section of my book. It's really fairly straightforward. You don't get -- you don't hurt

yourself because you make it impossible. You set things up in such a way that no matter what

goes -- what goes wrong you'll be fine. And that's the way that, that's the way you have to do it

because otherwise you just won't survive.

>>: You mentioned bio hackers, is there any other areas of science that you're finding translate

well into this sort of medium?

>> Theodore Gray: I think everyone is trying to figure out eco- ecological energy technologies.

Everyone is trying to figure out what could we do? What would be some clever trick that would

save the world or prevent global warming or whatever.

I don't know. I have mixed feelings about it. Because on the one hand it's great to celebrate this

sort of do-it-yourself spirit. On the other hand, it's not clear to me to what extent it works in

science as well as it did in computers. In computers people are just in their basements invented

technologies that became hugely important and took over the world.

I don't know if that works in science, in the kind of science where you sort of need to do lab

experiments and things. I don't know if 20 years from now somebody will have invented thesolution to go global warming in their basement or not. It would be great if they did. People are

certainly trying. Even if they don't succeed there, maybe they'll move on and start doing things

that, on a scale where it is more successful.

>>: So the trick by seeing the kind of mathematic steps that explains integrated stuff, what level,

college level? Do you have something down to elementary level? Or middle school, high school

level?

>> Theodore Gray: Here's an analogy. My daughter -- she's older now, but back a few grades

ago when she learned how to subtract numbers, she had a whole sheet of numbers to subtract.

And I realized fairly quickly none of these require borrowing. Right? Because they hadn't taught

borrowing yet. So then eventually they teach borrowing and you can subtract any two numbers.

Integration is similar. The way that calculus is taught these days is analogous to teaching

subtraction without borrowing, because the range of integrals that human beings are actually

capable of doing is very small in comparison to the range of integrals that you might want to do.

And the computers can do. Computers are just much better at integrating, doing symbolic

integration than are people. So the Show Steps button works for the subset of integrals where

there are techniques that's plausible for human beings to actually apply.

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If the integral was actually done using Grobner basis or something there would be 50 pages of

completely impenetrable algebra, it won't show that to you. It basically tries to show you steps

that would be first, second semester, the stuff you learn in a course at college on calculus or

fancy high school calculus.

>>: I was going to ask whether the show steps for lower level of education.

>> Theodore Gray: Oh, yeah, there's show steps for expanding polynomial factoring, solving

equations. There's a lot of -- not everything, but quite a few things have show steps.

>>: What's a product called Microsoft [indiscernible].

>> Theodore Gray: I've heard about it. I'm not very familiar with what it did.

>>: [indiscernible].

>> Theodore Gray: The hard part, you need the underlying algorithms. That's where

Mathematica has its advantage, that it's 20 years worth of very serious hard core symbolic math

development, which is then available as a resource to Alpha.

So Alpha is not something that we just sort of invented. It's the past 20 years of everything we've

been working on sort of brought together and given free to the public on a website, which has its

own little challenges.

[laughter]

Any other questions?

>>: What do you think about programs like Myth Busters?

>> Theodore Gray: I love Myth Busters, I think it's the best science show on TV. Because

although they don't talk explicitly about science, they use the scientific method, and they never

question the idea that if you want to know the truth about the world, what you should do is go out

and try it.

And that is, of course, the very definition of science: Don't believe what somebody else tells you,

go try it yourself.

>>: Is that something similar with chemistry?

>> Theodore Gray: A chemistry Myth Busters, I think that would be a great show. A mad science

show, for example. Yeah, I totally agree. Maybe over here.

>>: So of all the elements you went out and collected, what was the most interesting or difficult or

fascinating one for you, personally, to track down?

>> Theodore Gray: To track down. Thorium is tricky. Although I found it in my own backyard.

Figuratively speaking. There's a company, I have a friend who has large stockpiles of thorium.

It's probably the hardest for most element collectors because there's nobody that will sell it to you,

even though it's perfectly legal to own it, up to 15 pounds, as long as it's not isotopically enriched.

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But I don't know, people keep asking me what my favorite element is, and I don't have a favorite

child either, you know. [laughter]. They're all beautiful. But titanium is really nice also. Jet

engine parts and things are good. Sodium is good because you can throw it in a lake and it

explodes. And that's good.

So there was another question.

>>: Thank you for this. I'm at the right age where the space program and I were children

together, I guess, and at that time there was a lot of science, public science demonstrations.

Mr. Wizard on television. GM sent around people to schools to do science presentations.

Science and Popular Mechanics was one of my big things. It definitely inspired me to become an

engineer. I think it did a whole lot of people.

>> Theodore Gray: I think it did. I think there's a lot less of it now. It's not that there isn't any, but

there's a lot less. There's a lot less, and I think there's a cumulative effect where poor science

education after a couple of decades it means that the teachers got a poor science education

themselves.

It's like in math. New math, that managed to destroy a generation of teachers who are the ones

who taught the people who are now teachers. It's a hard hole to dig yourself out of. On the other

hand, we dug ourselves out of nothing the first time around, we can do it again. But I think there

needs to be a great deal more time and effort put into rebuilding particularly the public education

system. You can't do this by having a few fancy private high schools. It needs to be everybody

or else the place falls apart.

>>: How long has the research, the student license program, how long have you guys had that?

>> Theodore Gray: We've had student price, I don't know, at least 15 years, maybe. Since quite

early on.

>>: [indiscernible].

>> Theodore Gray: Yeah, I mean for the people who are willing to buy any sort of software and

willing to learn it. Alpha is kind of the ultimate student license, because it's free. And it doesn't

require learning a particular syntax. Just type formulas and whatever you think of and it does a

good job of picking them apart and parsing them and turning them into unambiguous math.

And it will be interesting to see. That's a whole other thread, that math education reform is

equally important to a science education, and it has its own little problems of resisting technology

and trying to keep its head well buried. And Alpha is -- Alpha is a thing that's harder to ignore

because it's free. It's completely free. It has no learning curve and it's out there.

>>: Can you talk a little bit about your visual approach to communicating very complex data like

your book?

>> Theodore Gray: Well, I don't know. I just --

>>: Is it just to make it easier for the layman to understand or is there something --

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>> Theodore Gray: I don't know that I would really hold myself out as an example in visual

presentation. I kind of know what I like and eventually struggle and get it to look right. I mean,

the fact that this entire book is on a black background that's one of the most attractive features.

The reason for that is at one point I suddenly realized I had this turntable, I wanted to take

pictures and make VR, things of each of the objects. I thought I could put them all together into a

poster. In order to do that I would have to have a completely consistent background color.

They're photographed at completely different times and different scales and the only color I could

think of that I could reliably reproduce always was black, because anything else, white, yes, but

white that wouldn't be good.

So black was just the consistent background color that I could always make this come out on

black. And sure enough it worked great for putting them all together. But it's not like I had an

artistic vision that I want black problems. I had a technical problem to solve and black was the

solution.

And I think it worked pretty well. And that's one of the things that people think is an attractive

feature of the poster and the book and everything is this black background.

But kind of like many things I just stumbled into it. But, yeah, there's quite a bit of work in

periodictable.com and the graph, for example, graph of elemental properties trying to make them

look good. And usually when something looks good it's because you can understand it, pieces

sort of fit together. I think clarity.

>>: The representation is something that's usually a table on the wall. You create a physical

table of the table even as a visual.

>> Theodore Gray: That was just a misunderstanding. There's no other way to put it. I was

confused. I thought somebody else had done it already. Since then, as far as I can tell, nobody

had done it, and I think if there was something out there somebody would have emailed me about

it by now. And the only other ones I'm aware of were ones that were built after mine, and there'sa couple of people who have done it.

But I find it surprising. You think something as obvious as building a periodic table table people

would have done it hundreds of years ago. Mendella should have built a table. Part of it, of

course, is the joke only works in English. It doesn't work in German. Actually, I don't know if it

works in Russian or not. It doesn't work in German, which is where most of the chemists were.

I don't know how long we're supposed to go on with questions.

>> Kirsten Wiley: We're about done. Thank you very much.

[applause]