there are certain things you can see every week you can go to the museum, visit the planetarium, and we bring in bars and a deejay or band. it is a different feel from during the day, something different every week. tonight , we have beer and music. -- tonight we have great beer and music. it is beer week. we have a dozen local brewers in african hall. we have a deejays to set up throughout the museum and a live performance at 9:00 p.m. tonight. >> what has been your favorite part as a participant or as an observer? >> my favorite part is to walk around the aquarium in to see people with a drink in their hands, getting to know maybe somebody new, may be looking for a day, or chatting with friends. there jellyfish. i mean, they are beautiful. >> the culmination of the animals. >> it is very impressive. we do not have this at home. >> tell us a little about some of the spider's we see here on display. >> at the california academy of sciences, there is a very large collection of preserved and live specimens, which are the evidence about evolution. we have the assassin spiders, which are

there are certain things you can see every week you can go to the museum, visit the planetarium, and

i believe you call our ward winning production of freedom rising, a cross between a planetarium, the laser light extravaganza, and an experimental one-man show. [laughter] [applause] >> that shows how inspired i was about it. even in that short presentation, when the "me the people" is broadcast, until it was right -- you have to read the book is a full understanding. i am so inspiring by freedom rising that i decided i was going to rewrite the constitution. >> you did. >> it was very inspirational. >> we have opportunities here. you could have a first amendment roller coaster, you can have a preamble labrecque, a second amendment shooting gallery. you probably wouldn't want that, actually. [laughter] [applause] >> you are right, we are about getting people active in civic we engaged and getting them to do something. you mentioned that we follow little bit short. what else should we be doing differently here? >> what else would you like to see in a museum? >> what i would suggest is on a day like this, and something i would suggest to congress as well, it seems to me that the only wa

he is a brilliant astrophysicist, director of the hayden planetarium in new york, and author of many. his latest is "space chronicles." welcome back, neil. >> thanks, my second time on the show. thanks for having me. >> so what is the higgs boson? and why is it called a boson? >> well, so there is actually an indian physicist named bose who had early discussions on a class of particle that might mediate forces. the foton of light that we're familiar with, many people are familiar with. just light. that's a boson. and a proposal was put forth by someone named higgs that there would be a kind of boson out there that, if it existed, it could be responsible for granting mass to the fundamental particles in nature. and by the way, it was so elusive to -- >> because it's a subatomic particle? >> yes, and only exists at high energies for short amounts of time -- >> explain how short. >> oh, oh -- billionth of a billionth of a second. yeah. >> that's it -- it exists for a billionth of a billionth of a second? >> ten minus 23 seconds. it's billion -- yeah, one -- so yeah, it's -- so in order

derek pits from the franklin institute plan nair plan nair -- planetarium and. tom, to you first, talk about the mission that is the last marches mission plan for quite some time. it will be a pretty technologically sophisticated thing to get the lander on the ground on the martial surface. explain what they will do. >> very. it weighs the ton, size after mini-cooper. so they will lower it with rockets suspending the rover from a harness and as the rover touches gently down the rocket system will cut the at the time they ares and fly away. it is called a sky crane. never been flight tested because we don't have mars gravity back here. nasa is putting 2 1/2 billion dollars in faith on this system. they have done a lot of component testing. but the real proof will be on august 5th. jon: derek, if they can get this thing onto the surface of mars safely and effectively and the thing actually works, it is nuclear powered as i understand it, what do they hope to learn? >> what they're really looking for are environments where it may have been possible for life to flou