Eternal Sky Film About Jim Simons and the Simons Observatory Now Streaming

“I’m fascinated with beginnings,” Simons Foundation co-founder Jim Simons says in Eternal Sky, a documentary now available for streaming. The film, directed by Debra Kellner, chronicles the lead-up to the construction of the Simons Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. That project, designed and built by an international collaboration funded and brought together by Simons, aims to answer an enduring question: How did our universe come to be?

Eternal Sky follows Jim Simons, Marilyn Simons, Simons Foundation President David Spergel and the observatory’s scientists, including Brian Keating, Suzanne Staggs and Mark Devlin, as they expound on — and debate — the origins and fate of the universe. Did the Big Bang happen? And, if so, what happened in the moments that followed? Or did a Big Bounce occur instead when a forerunner universe collapsed and then exploded outward to create the one in which we live? And what does such a tale mean for the fate of our own universe?

Jim Simons died on May 10, 2024, just weeks after the Simons Observatory began its study of the oldest light in the universe. The film offers a portrait of Simons familiar to those who knew him best: A leader with foresight who contemplated the universe’s biggest questions and had the curiosity and tenacity to keep searching for answers.

“I don’t believe in destiny — I think we have to make our own destiny,” Jim Simons says in the film. “I’ve done some mathematics, and I’m very proud of a number of things that I’ve done. But is it destiny? I don’t think so. I think it’s just perseverance you have to have. You have to believe in something and then just stick with it. Sometimes you realize this is just going nowhere, and you have to drop it. But I’m pretty tenacious, and that’s worked for me.”