 July 16, 1945. This is the darkness of a desert morning. And here in New Mexico, a group of men wait tensely, expectantly. Behind them, three unbroken years of work. Work done in unprecedented secrecy. Lola Bell Lawrence, the New York Times reporter. He said, on that moment come eternity. Time stood still. Space was contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the Earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the birth of the world. To be present at the moment of creation when the Lord said, let there be light. At Trinity in 1945, we proved a self-sustaining reaction could become an explosive force and that the implosion principle was sound. We had a starting point. They were simulating an aerial burst because they knew they were going to do aerial burst over Japan because they wanted to get the maximum explosion on the ground or maximum PSI on the ground. And you do that by exploding above ground. The one used at Nagasaki was identical to this one. That material for that bomb was already on a boat headed for Tinian when this test was done. You know, this site produced more fallout than either the Japanese sites. More radiation fallout, radioactive fallout. Looking for trinitite. Trinitite was sand fused when the blast went off and it's radioactive. That one's, it usually looks like a green glass or slag. And we're a group of geeks here from all over the country to come to one of the two days a year the place is open to see what it looks like. It doesn't seem to register much above the background. I don't know that you would be able to kill somebody with it. More than any other group of individuals, the world's great scientists like physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer realized the grave responsibilities of our new knowledge. Science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life, both materially and in ways of the spirit as well. It has extended the range of questions in which man has a choice. It has extended man's freedom to make significant decisions. No one can predict what vast new continents of knowledge the future of science will discover. But we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they think, free to think what they must, science will never regress and freedom itself will never be wholly lost. Used to be that we would get people coming here that actually saw this test. People that lived in the area. And that was always interesting to tell their stories. It's usually I was awakened by a shockwave or I saw a flash of light that lit up the sky and they had no idea what it was of course until afterwards. I would also run into World War II veterans who would come and a lot of them will come up to you and say, you know, this saved my life. I had orders for the Pacific. Survived the Battle of the Bulge and now he's got to go into the Pacific. So that was always interesting. Technology can be used for a wide range of things. You can make big things that go boom and you can also make things that research the universe and are no direct threat to anybody. The goal of astronomy is to resolve, is the physics of distant objects. We're trying to understand the evolution of objects, the evolution of things that we see, the origin, the physical processes. One of the key things you need for that is spatial resolution. So in order in radio astronomy to get high angular resolution, we need really big telescopes. And it turns out that you can get the information you want, although not all at once. If you build little telescopes, separate them by 20 or 30 miles, bring their signals together and process that product and that will eventually, after considerable processing, get you the same information. By looking at the spectral composition and the spatial composition, spatial meaning with angle, astronomers can get very strong clues into the physical processes that are going on in the particular object. The RAY was officially completed in 1980 and since that time it has been the most productive, the most powerful, flexible radio telescope on Earth. So who funds this? The National Science Foundation, which has a mandate for pure research, funds the Very Large RAY and funds the great majority of the funding for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Why does the National Science Foundation do this? I don't actually have a really good answer for that. I can give you my personal answer. Research is like a window to the future. It opens up new things. It is also by doing this kind of research, we inspire the next generation, not necessarily to do astronomy or physics, but into exploring their curiosity, to understand their environment. So the National Science Foundation, from the way I look at it, funds research projects, not necessarily to improve the gross national product, not necessarily to solve any specific human or technical issue, but to open up new information that might be of use in the future.