CeCe on Valerie Thomas

Transcript

Exactly as spoken. Tap a line to play from there.

Okay so this one sounds made up, but it isn't. Valerie Thomas wanted to build things, but her school wouldn't let girls take physics.

So she taught herself, got the degree anyway, and ended up at NASA. And one day she sees a trick with two mirrors that makes a light bulb look like it's floating.

Now most people see that and go, huh, neat. But she thought, what if I could do that with real images, over a distance? So she spent years on it, and in nineteen eighty she patented the illusion transmitter.

And that math is under the three dimensional images you watch now. Whole time, she was running the satellite programs that told us the ozone layer was in trouble.

Long story short, she made light lie, and then she went back to work.