S1E4: Paul Jeffers

I’m not going to lie: it’s helpful when you make a friend who likes whisky to the same passionate degree that you do. That was just about the first thing I learned about Paul, right after I learned that he and his lovely wife Joyce had lived in Edinburgh for 17 years. “You a whisky guy?” was the very next question. So as our wives were becoming friends and our kids were becoming friends, Paul and I sipped a wee dram and began our friendship.

When I learn what people do for a living, I can’t help but be amazed. And for me, it doesn’t matter as much what it is but how you feel about it. I have a friend who is an electrician but he’s not passionate about it. He’s good at it, but doesn’t love it. So we rarely if ever talk about that work. But if he was passionate about it, I’d have questions for days. I mean, come on: how does a person harness electricity?!?! How do you make it do what you want?! Amazing.

All that to say, Paul Jeffers has one of the most amazing jobs I’ve ever heard of: he runs the day-to-day operations of systems integration for the NOA Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope that sits atop Haleakala, the 10,000 foot volcano that makes up most of the island of Maui. It is THE most advanced solar telescope on the planet. Remember those images that showed up in the news back in February? The video footage of these cells bubbling on the surface of the sun, each cell the size of Texas, with magnetic fields pulsing in between.

Yeah… that was Paul and his team of freaky-smart scientists and engineers.

In this week’s episode of the podcast, Paul attempted to alleviate my cramping brain by putting what they do up there in layman terms. And after touring the telescope, I can say that I think I understand it a bit. But you can understand it better if you go to the NSO website and browse the incredible gallery and information about the telescope. The telescope is funded by the National Science Foundation and I found myself browsing their site for a while as well.

Hint: do that before you listen to the show. It will really help give some of what we talk about some visual context. Because this is high level stuff.

And prepare to be smarter. This is the kind of stuff you want to bring up at a dinner party.

-DGT

Paul Jeffers and I at the Wailea Film Festival a few years ago.