What is the intersection
between technology, art, and science?
Curiosity and wonder,
because it drives us to explore,
because we're surrounded by things we can't see.
And I love to use film
to take us on a journey
through portals of time and space,
to make the invisible visible,
because what that does,
it expands our horizons,
it transforms our perception,
it opens our minds
and it touches our heart.
So here are some scenes
from my 3D IMAX film
"Mysteries of the Unseen World."
(Music)
There is movement which is too slow
for our eyes to detect,
and timelapse makes us discover
and broaden our perspective of life.
We can see how organisms emerge and grow,
how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor
to look at the sunlight.
And at the grand scale,
time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion.
We can view not only the vast sweep of nature,
but the restless movement of humanity.
Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane,
and by turning air traffic data
into time lapse imagery,
we can see something that's above us constantly
but invisible:
the vast network of air travel over the United States.
We can do the same thing with ships at sea.
We can turn data into a time lapse view
of a global economy in motion.
And decades of data
give us the view of our entire planet
as a single organism
sustained by currents circulating
throughout the oceans
and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere,
pulsing with lightning,
crowned by the aurora borealis.
It may be the ultimate time-lapsed image:
the anatomy of Earth brought to life.
At the other extreme,
there are things that move too fast for our eyes,
but we have technology that can look into that world
as well.
With high-speed cameras,
we can do the opposite of time lapse.
We can shoot images that are thousands of times
faster than our vision.
And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work,
and perhaps we can even imitate them.
When a dragonfly flutters by,
you may not realize,
but it's the greatest flyer in nature.
It can hover, fly backwards,
even upside down.
And by tracking markets on an insect's wings,
we can visualize the air flow that they produce.
Nobody knew the secret,
but high speed shows that a dragonfly
can move all four wings in different directions
at the same time.
And what we learn can lead us
to new kinds of robotic flyers
that can expand our vision
of important and remote places.
We're giants, and we're unaware
of things that are too small for us to see.
The electron microscope fires electrons
which creates images
which can magnify things by as much
as a million times.
This is the egg of a butterfly.
And there are unseen creatures
living all over your body,
including mites which spend their entire lives
dwelling on your eyelashes,
crawling over your skin at night.
Can you guess what this is?
Shark skin.
A caterpillar's mouth.
The eye of a fruit fly.
An eggshell.
A flea.
A snail's tongue.
We think we know most of the animal kingdom,
but there may be millions of tiny species
waiting to be discovered.
A spider also has great secrets,
because spider's silk thread is pound for pound
stronger than steel
but completely elastic.
This journey will take us all the way down
to the nano world.
The silk is a hundred times thinner
than human hair.
On there is bacteria,
and near that bacteria, ten times smaller,
a virus.
Inside of that, ten times smaller,
three strands of DNA,
and nearing the limit of our
most powerful microscopes,
single carbon atoms.
With the tip of a powerful microscope,
we can actually move atoms
and begin to create amazing nano devices.
Some could one day patrol our body
for all kinds of diseases
and clean up clogged arteries along the way.
Tiny chemical machines of the future
can one day, perhaps, repair DNA.
We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances,
born of our drive
to unveil the mysteries of life.
So under an endless rain of cosmic dust,
the air is full of pollen,
micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets,
and supernova explosions.
People go about their lives
surrounded by the unseeable.
Knowing that there's so much around us
we can see
forever changes our understanding of the world,
and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize
that we exist in the living universe,
and this new perspective creates wonder
and inspires us to become explorers
in our own backyards.
Who knows what awaits to be seen
and what new wonders will transform our lives.
We'll just have to see.
(Applause)
Thank you. (Applause)