Interview: Professor Bernie Bates BY OLIVIA DANNER
Bernard Bates, who tends to go by Bernie, is a physics professor here at UPS. He largely teaches astro-related courses, and if you’ve ever had a class with him you know it’s easy to get him to wander off on long tangents.
He’s full of stories and anecdotes that range from funny to fascinating, but he’s also skilled at circling it back to the topic formerly at hand. His office is in Thompson 158, packed full of books, knicknacks, posters, and other items amassed over the years – his big weakness is going to Goodwill and buying discount graphing calculators, telescopes, mirrors, CDs, TV remotes, and anything else he can get his hands on. The window of the door is plastered with decorations, including a blue-and-white sign that says ‘Bernie,’ left over from Bernie Sanders’ campaign – there’s a story behind that, too. His wife helped him to tidy up the office space and clear out some of his excess stuff in spring of 2022, but it’s slowly been piling up since then. Bernie grew up in Brooklyn and attended Brown University for his undergraduate degree,
where he received a BA for a constructed major called “Math and Physics,” created by a student before him with the aim of leaving room for a lot of elective courses. All of the science courses he took outside of physics were geology – his main interest was planetary science. Applications for graduate school all tend to be upwards of fifty dollars, so Bernie’s focus was finding the cheapest application fees – which he fully admitted was not the best mentality. University of Pittsburgh and University of Washington gave him the best deals with teaching and research assistantships. It turned out that the chair of the astronomy department at UW, George Wallerstein, was also a trustee at Brown, so Bernie was able to interview with him. In 1977, he chose to move across the country for his masters and Ph.D on our lovely, rainy Northwest coast. That summer, within a week of graduation, Bernie was able to jump straight into graduate school. He told me that the funny part of the story was this: “George was a spectroscopist, and I started roughly at the point where it became obvious that planetary astronomy should be part of planetary science, which really was a part of geology … According to George, it isn’t astronomy if you can get to it. Astronomy should be everything you can’t get to, and so the planets were now out.” He slowly worked his way through what George considered astronomy, then moved into geology and remote sensing. He came back to astronomy because a faculty member at UW was interested in micrometeorites, which became the focus of Bernie’s graduate research: proving that the micrometeorites found in the Atlantic really were cosmic in origin. If a meteorite enters Earth’s atmosphere at the right angle, it will slow down enough to simply melt instead of vaporizing, like it would if entering headon. Micrometeorites like Bernie worked with are bits of those meteors the size of tiny ball bearings, or marbles. On land, he said, “If you were to measure how much stuff is just falling out of the sky, you get something ridiculous, like a meteor every thousand years.” The number that fall into the sea is more reasonable, a meteor every million years. Although it might seem backwards, this actually means that it’s easier to find micrometeorites in the ocean – imagine scouring the entirety of Earth’s surface for bits of rock the size of ball bearings, and compare that with trawling the seafloor. Still a lot of area to cover, but comparatively more reasonable. Comets and asteroids, the two possible
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