Interview: Professor Bernie Bates

BY OLIVIA DANNER

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 sources of meteorites, are both incredibly iron-rich. This is the key to separating them out from the other debris on the ocean floor, and ultimately the key to proving that they were cosmic. Water erodes rock, and these rocks had been lying under tons of ocean water for centuries. The outsides of the micrometeorites had been stripped of the elements that made it clear they weren’t from Earth. Their insides remained untouched, so by cutting them open and examining their interior makeup, it became clear that they were cosmic in origin. Some matched the composition of the sun,; others had lost their more volatile elements. All had iron oxide, which was also key to the project: by analyzing those oxidized iron particles, it was possible to tell when and by how much the oxygen concentration in Earth’s atmosphere had changed. “Right now,” Bernie told me, “it’s at a point where you can completely oxidize all the iron, but a billion, two billion years ago you would not run into enough oxygen atoms before the thing slowed down to oxidize everything.”

The story of how Bernie found his way back to astronomy and onto the West coast is an interesting one, but the story of how he came to UPS, and stayed here, is a sad one. He met his first wife in graduate school, while she was working towards an astronomy Ph.D. She left after getting her masters to work for Boeing, which brought them both to Tacoma in 1988. Although it wasn’t intended to be a permanent situation, Bernie’s plans changed drastically when his wife died in a rock climbing accident. With a young child to raise, he chose to stay at UPS rather than uproot both of their lives by moving. He later met his second wife and remarried, and that cemented his decision to remain here.

That led me into asking more about his time here as a professor. Since starting to work here, Bernie has taught introductory physics and astrophysics, modern physics, a few lab sections, astronomy, a couple of astronomy classes that are no longer around, and his pet courses: an SSI on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and an STHS course about Mars exploration. He told me that the SETI course is his favorite “Because I can’t believe they pay me to do it … We’re talking about aliens and I tell people on the first day that there’s as much proof that aliens exist as (sic) ghosts exist … In fact, there’s probably more proof that ghosts exist.” There’s more to it than that, though.

Central to SETI is something called the Drake equation, which is really a collection of probabilities – things like whether a star has planets and whether those planets are habitable and can develop complex life. If we know the values of those probabilities, then we can calculate the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy – or at least, that’s the hope. The equation was developed in the sixties, before we had even confirmed that other stars even had planets. As of now, we know all or most of the astrophysical terms in the equation, but that still leaves the bio - logical terms – how easy was it for life to develop on Earth? What about the steps that led us from simple to complex life? Humanity is our prime example – we don’t have other, similar life forms to compare to in order to answer these questions more thoroughly.

There’s also the question of whether these technological civilizations would even survive long enough for us to discover them, or vice versa. Bernie put it into perspective by pointing out, “We developed radio astronomy, the ability to talk over light years, at the same time we developed nuclear weapons. And both discoveries came out of a major war that could have set things back a lot.” If another civilization did manage to get to that point but blew themselves up instead, it would leave a sign – one that we’d have to be actively watching for in order to catch it.

Moreover, we have to ask the age-old question: what even is intelligence? We’re trying to figure out the probability that you get intelligent life on another planet, but we don’t even know what we mean by ‘intelligence.’ Pragmatically and astronomically, “intelligence is being able to build a radio telescope … according to that, we weren’t intelligent until the beginning of the second world war.”

The SETI class is full of discussions like that, which is why Bernie likes teaching it so much. “It’s science fiction-y in a sense, but it’s not because it’s real in terms of the search and the questions that have to be answered.” The variety of topics that he has to touch on keeps him on his toes, more than any of the other classes he teaches.

These are the kinds of things that Bernie loves talking about – so much so that, if he could teach one course, he’d create one that would unofficially be called “Stuff,” with the course description, “Bernie talks about stuff.” He said that it would cover the physics of last week, a course where the focus is learning about the wacky things that have happened in physics over the years. His inspiration for this course is a book called Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller, which establishes a baseline scientific knowledge which is important to know if you want to be responsible for a nation of people in a technological world. Bernie’s dream course would essentially allow him to talk about the weird, wacky, and wonderful developments that science has brought us.

Another topic that Bernie often seems to circle back to in class is cryptids, so I had to ask for his thoughts on them. His favorite is the chupacabra because it’s close to home. Bigfoot and Yetis are all over the world, but the chupacabra was born as a South American legend and spread northwards. He said it’s like a home-grown cryptid, something whose spread we can watch in real time – it’s ours, in a way that more mainstream cryptids aren’t, really. His love for the topic started when was ten or twelve and started noticing books about cryptozoology and thought that they had to be true, otherwise they wouldn’t be published. He’s learned since then that that isn’t how publishing works, but his appreciation for cryptids and other pseudosciences hasn’t dwindled – for Bernie, “It’s just fun. I know it’s pseudoscience, I don’t believe any of it, but it’s fun.”

To wrap up the interview, I asked Bernie whether there was anything else he wanted to say. He gave two pieces of advice: firstly, people really believe that their grades are important, but no one really cares about that after your first job. Secondly, when you’re picking classes, think back to the worst class you took in high school and if you can, take a course on that same topic in college. Every topic is intrinsically interesting; that’s why they’re being studied and taught, and why they exist. Give things a second chance. Explore.