w88 online game Sagebrushers season 3 ep. 16: Professor Geoffrey Blewitt

President Brian Sandoval: This is Sagebrushers, the podcast of the w88 online game. Welcome back, Wolf Pack Family. I'm your host, University President Brian Sandoval. As the lead scientist credited with making GPS accurate within a millimeter, resulting in discoveries related to the earth's shape, dark matter, tsunamis, mega earthquakes and more, today's guest, Dr. Geoffrey Blewitt, is truly remarkable. So, let's get started.

Dr. Blewitt's research has been cited over 18,000 times. He's a professor in w88 online game Bureau of Mines and Geology, a founding member of w88 online game Geodetic Laboratory and one of the leading scientists credited with making the Global Positioning System, commonly known as GPS, precise within a millimeter. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April of this year, which is one of the highest honors a scientist can achieve. Dr. Blewitt earned his Ph.D. in physics from Caltech (California Institute of Technology), then joined the faculty of the University of Newcastle in the U.K., becoming a professor of space geodesy in 1994. He joined the w88 online game in w88 online game Bureau of Mines and Geology in 1999, becoming a professor of geosciences.

Today's podcast is being recorded in the @One of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center. Dr. Blewitt, welcome to Sagebrushers. I am really excited about the conversation that we're going to have and share with our listeners a bit about the incredible research you're conducting here on campus.

Dr. Geoffrey Blewitt: Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Sandoval: Yeah, no, this is really going to be great. So, you have accomplished extraordinary things in your career so far. So, let's start by giving our listeners a broad overview of the primary focus of your research, geodesy. Now, can you tell us what geodesy is?

Blewitt: Yeah, yeah. Geodesy is one of those strange words that I'm guessing most people have never heard before, and it comes from the ancient Greeks. It's been considered the oldest science. The ancient Greeks actually knew that the earth was spherical, and they measured the size of the Earth within 2%. So, I think that pretty much established how well you can join physics with mathematics to make a discovery like that. And today we can measure it…the diameter of the earth to within one billionth of the diameter. So it's about a millimeter, a few millimeters, and we can do that every five minutes. We can average it down, we can see how it changes. We can use it to look for the drifting of continents. There's so many things you can do with Geodesy thanks to satellite technology.

Sandoval: And that was my next question. How do you do it?

Blewitt: So the ancient Greeks did it by looking at the shadows of the sun. Well, you can't do that to get millimeter accuracy across the Earth. So, we use satellites these days because the satellites can see the whole planet in perspective, and you've got satellites all over the Earth. So, we use the GPS satellites because they have signals which are designed for positioning, but they were actually designed for positioning about the size of a bathroom, and we really had to get down to the centimeter scale before it could be useful for science. So we were tasked by NASA to do that, and that was the goal, get down to about a centimeter, but we just kept going.

Sandoval: No, and it's almost inconceivable for me to understand that it comes within a millimeter. But for listeners, what is the practical benefit of all of that? How does that relate to them in their daily lives?

Blewitt: Yeah, in your daily lives, most people won't really appreciate that GPS is just integral to so many things in your daily life. I mean, of course, you can position yourself with your phone, your smartphone or your car and know which lane you're on, on the highway. But GPS is also important for timing of computer networks across the globe. And you have to time things through in a fraction of a billionth of a second. And to do that, you need to be tracking satellites and know where you are exactly. So there's so many infrastructure applications of GPS from monitoring dams, to precision landing, automatic landing of aircraft navigation but also natural disasters. So we can look at the tiny strains in the Earth that lead up to earthquakes, and we can predict quite well where earthquakes will happen, not when they'll happen, but where they'll happen. And we're very good at measuring what had happened, so the permanent movement, and correlate that with known geology over the last few million years. And we can relate what's happening today to what's been happening over millions of years, and it's actually remarkably consistent.

Sandoval: Thank you for that explanation. And it's another reason why I’m so excited that you're here, because I think a lot of what you do doesn't go as appreciated as it should because of what these problems that you're solving. And then, as I said, the everyday applications that you're figuring out.

Blewitt: That's right. So geodesy is kind of not this neat label that you can attach to a science like physics or biology or chemistry. And so it kind of goes underappreciated because in order to do geodesy, you really have to be delving into all kinds of different sciences and learning about them because they all apply when you're trying to get down to that last millimeter. You have to know about the atmosphere. You have to know about the oceans and how they affect the shape of the earth, quite substantial. You have to know how the Earth's rotating in space and how that's changing in time. You have to know what's going on with the ice sheets. You have to know where the water is on the Earth. You have to know about satellite orbits. The force of the sun's rays on the satellites. Orbits, for example, will give you a two-meter error if you don't account for it. And then there's Einstein's relativity. Without that, you'd be off by the size of a room.

Sandoval: And you're doing all this from our w88 online game.

Blewitt: That's right. But I have to say, it's been a long road. So, I started this in the 80s. It's taken decades to get there, but every year we can see the improvements, and it requires a bit of patience, but it's also fun because it's like peeling an onion. You don't know what's going to be next. To get down to that next level, you've got to learn something else. And so, it's actually been quite a journey.

Sandoval: Let's talk about that journey. Talk a little bit about your experience in the U.K. and then you've been here on our campus for 25 years.

Blewitt: Yes, that's right. So we have a group of about three professors. There's three professors, including me and a technician and students of course. And we've been together for 20 years. So we've been working on this for quite a while. And we've developed a network of GPS stations across the state and beyond. In fact, it's the Western United States, I would like to say. And we can see geology in action today, how w88 online game's actually increasing its area year by year.

Sandoval: Oh, I like that.

Blewitt: And it's about a basketball court, so I don't know who actually gets that, who actually gets that land. And then we can see the Sierra w88 online game rising, and that was quite an interesting puzzle. If there's time, I could explain a little bit about that. But we've got a lot of data. Our philosophy is try to process all the data in the world, make it freely available, and then people come to us with interesting problems and we work with them. And so that way we get to, get into other disciplines that we're not maybe comfortable with or used to, and we learn a lot more, and then we apply it back to geodesy to get more accuracy out of it.

Sandoval: So if I may, I'd like to get a little dark with our listeners and not the dark that may come to mind first with discussion of dark matter. So while scientists still don't know what dark matter is, your GPS research is helping to inform theories predicting that dark matter affects atomic clocks. So can you walk us through how that research is developing?

Blewitt: Sure. It actually goes all the way back to my Ph.D., but I was doing a Ph.D. in experimental physics, and it required timing down to a billionth of a second or a fraction of a billionth of a second. And so my research has always involved very high precision timing. And the atomic clocks, it turns out, are some of the most precise exquisite instruments that humans have ever developed. And if you're going to see something interesting in the Universe, maybe you're going to see it in atomic clocks. And there's good theoretical reasons for that. Some of the theories of dark matter predict, well, it's because of another kind of force that we haven't discovered yet. And that kind of force could interact similarly to the electromagnetic force and actually change the rate of time of atomic clocks in its presence. And since we're working with atomic clocks on the Global Positioning System, then it seems you can make the leap and say, well, maybe we should be looking at the clocks rather than looking at the satellites or looking at positions. And in the past, we thought of the clocks as, well, it's something we have to look at, but we compute it, but we don't really care too much about the clocks. But now we do. So now we're looking at the clocks to see if they misbehave or behave in a way that theory might predict if dark matter is around. So that's what we've been doing in collaboration with the Department of Physics. My colleague Andrei Derevianko and his students, we've been working together quite closely for 10 years now.

Sandoval: Well, that's extraordinary. So now you have a long history of connection with NASA as two of the three software patents you have made were used in NASA laboratories. You also established w88 online game Geodetic Laboratory at the University in 1999, which is supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Energy. So can you describe the work done in that lab, in the lab's approach to sharing data with the international scientific community?

Blewitt: Yeah. So I think one of the reasons for our success, whenever we write a proposal, it seems to fly through every time. It's because we share everything that we do, and we've always done that. So our philosophy is quite simple. Number one, we process all of the data that we can get our hands on in the world, and that encourages other people to make their data available. And we process all of that data and make it publicly available. So that's number two, make everything publicly available. Currently, we're processing data from 22,000 stations around the world, every five minutes, going back 30 years. That's the lifetime of the GPS system. We get surprised by which scientists use that data. For example, right now, there's lot of atmospheric scientists who are interested in climate change, who are using our data to help verify their models.

Sandoval: So Dr. Blewitt, you're truly humble and modest, and we're so happy and proud to have you as part of our Wolf Pack Family. The impact you've had on the scientific community has recently been recognized by the National Academy of Sciences with your election to The Academy. That's a well-earned and incredibly impressive honor. So if you could for the listeners, explain the magnitude of that recognition and then what it means to you.

Blewitt: Yeah, it's a huge honor. I really didn't expect to get that election, which is from the current members themselves. And a lot of these members go on to be Nobel Prize winners. And I'm just thinking about this, some of those people who voted for me, are Nobel Prize winners, and there are not many of us. It was established by Congress and signed by Abraham Lincoln. And in all that time, I think I'm only the second Nevadan to have this honor.

Sandoval: Wow, wow.

Blewitt: Yeah, it's quite an honor. And like I say, I didn't expect to be in this situation, but here I am.

Sandoval: And what does it mean to you? I mean, you've talked about how much work and what you do.

Blewitt: Well, on a very personal level, I'm thinking of who's on that Academy. And a lot of them are like my Caltech professors from the 80s who were Nobel Prize winners. And I'm thinking, wow, they're voting for me? But they must be recognizing something that I've done is good in their minds. So maybe I'm doing something right.

Sandoval: Well, again, I'm just so proud to have you as part of our campus, and you bring such esteem and appreciation and respect to the University.

Blewitt: Thank you.

Sandoval: Grateful for that. So we still have a little bit more time. And I was thinking to myself as I listen to you, does your brain ever get a time off? And if it does, what do you like to do in your spare time?

Blewitt: In my spare time, well, I'm a bit of an engineer as well as a physicist, but on the engineering aspect, I like to do model railways, so.

Sandoval: Nice!

Blewitt: So I have a room full of that, and I like to get into the history of that too, and the art that's involved. So it's a bit like my work. I like to try to do many different things and make it interesting for myself.

Sandoval: And do you have a group of graduate students that you work with?

Blewitt: Yes. Yeah. We've got graduate students who wonderful and help us write wonderful papers too. So we can’t do it all ourselves and we've got to pass it down to the next generation. And I have to say, geodesy is one of those subjects I've mentioned that people don't know what it is. So we're lucky to actually get students interested in what we're doing. And thankfully they'll help carry the torch forward.

Sandoval: I imagine these students come from all over the world that really seek to have the privilege of working with you.

Blewitt: Yes, that's true. It's very international and interdisciplinary, and we honestly couldn't do any of this work without working with people from all over the world because you have to get observations all over the world, and you have to have experts all over the world to help this whole system to run. And people, it's like a thankless task. People don't know that people are doing this, but if they didn't, well, they would see their lives change pretty quickly if it wasn't for GPS.

Sandoval: And I will say, that's why I'm so excited to have you as a guest, because many of this I didn't know myself. And for our listeners to have the benefit of your wisdom in describing your research and your passion, it truly is remarkable.

Blewitt: Yeah. Thank you very much.

Sandoval: Well, I very sorry to say that we are out of time. Is there anything else that you wanted to add, Dr. Blewitt?

Blewitt: I just like to make people aware that we are monitoring natural hazards in w88 online game, and we do monitor earthquakes as they occur. And we are trying to pass on that information as to where earthquakes are likely to occur for the benefit of citizens of w88 online game.

Sandoval: Well, again, my heartfelt gratitude for being with us today, and for our listeners, join us next time for another episode of Sagebrushers as we continue to tell the stories that make our University special and unique. And until then, I'm University President Brian Sandoval, and go Pack.