Jessica Shi
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Jessica Shi, an architecture student from Rice University. I will be your host today.

This fall we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. We gathered really cool stories and experiences that are not only inspiring but also informative about the kind of projects they work on. You’ll hear what our speakers value most and what excites them about their projects. So, join us as we embark on sharing our curiosity for how individuals define beauty in their fields, where they encounter it, and how it shapes their practices.

In this episode, our guest is Kerim Miskavi, the founder of MAS Architecture Studio in Istanbul.

Kerim earned his architecture degree from Rice University and started his private practice seven years ago. In 2022 his firm won a national competition for a university campus project in Turkey. It is the new campus for the Izmir School of Economics. He is currently designing the architecture school for it, which is kind of a dream job for any architect!

Before diving into how he defined beauty, we first asked if beauty was presented as something to aim for during his college education.

Kerim Miskavi
I think that’s a good question. Yes, it was definitely one of the parameters for our education. I think some of our professors were more explicit about it. And we had one professor who would always come in before the jury last night and say, don’t worry about it, just make it beautiful. So, so it’s definitely something you think about a lot.

Of course, in terms of the education for architecture, a lot of it is just getting the framework and the conceptual approach and understanding how to solve the puzzle of the project. But at the end of the day, it always has to be beautiful, right? Because that’s the world we deal with.

I think of it as very similar to cooking, in a way. You have to choose your ingredients. And you have to know the techniques right, you have to cook things correctly, and make sure everything is done properly in terms of technique. But at the end of the day, it has to taste good, right? And even if it’s technically executed perfectly, if it doesn’t taste good, if it doesn’t inspire you, then you’re left with a dish that you will never remember. So, I think that’s what beauty is, to what we do. I mean, all the things we have to get right technically is always there. But at the end of the day also has to be beautiful to evoke the emotions that we like to aim for as architects.

Jessica
Listen to how Kerim defines many layers of beauty when he is viewing projects.

Kerim
As you work on something, there’s a couple of layers of beautiful, I think. The first level of beauty is maybe, let’s say, a more shallow understanding of it. You look at something, you think it looks nice and you say, hey, wow, that’s beautiful. And I think we all have that response, right? Whether we are trained for it or not, we all look for beauty, whether it’s in buildings, or anything around us. And that’s a very valid response, I think. But when you start practicing, and when you start creating things, as you sort of move through, you start finding beauty in other things as well. Like little moments or details or discoveries that you yourself notice or you come across as you’re designing. Then those are maybe the moments where I’m like, oh, wow, I never thought it would turn out this way but the way the stair ended up being in the space is beautiful, or the way the light hits this little hallway is very beautiful, and I never thought it was going to be this way. So, I think as you sort of get a more trained eye, you start to get us a finer grain of beauty that you discover. And that’s, I think, quite rewarding.

Jessica
Getting a trained eye takes time. How does one develop the criteria to ensure the designs are well received? Is it by always by being mindful of or incorporating certain elements?

Kerim
I think it’s a tough question. It’s a good question as well. I think it’s sort of the process of looking at a lot of things, training your eye, finding things that you like, and then sort of building a library of things that you think are beautiful. And you always have that in the back of your head as sort of reference for things you go back to when you’re doing design as well. But then there comes a moment where you kind of internalize all of that, and you, in a way, you forget about them. And you sort of unlearn everything, and it just becomes a more intuitive process for you. And then it’s almost like you’re the spectator, or you’re discovering things that was done by someone else that you find, as you’re working through your process and you’re like, aha, that’s it. That’s what I’m looking for.

A lot of our work, I think, personally, a lot of my process has to do with this kind of learning and unlearning to find beauty, because maybe it’s also my personality but I like to approach projects in a very logical way. I mean, usually, we’re given a pretty specific brief, we’re given a specific site, we’re given specific parameters, we work with engineers, and everything is quite rigorous in terms of its overall technical expectation. So, you start by solving the puzzle. And you look at things like order, symmetry, rhythm, structure, space, proportion, and all of these basic things as you’re designing the space. But I think there comes a time, it’s almost like when it was analyzed, I think I read this somewhere, there was research on what is beauty in people’s faces. There was kind of correlation between the symmetry of someone’s face, but the symmetry has to be just the right amount. If it’s too symmetrical, then it becomes kind of difficult for someone to register, it becomes too rigid. But then if it’s too asymmetrical, then it also doesn’t involve this kind of beauty. So, it has to be just the right amount of balance between symmetry and authenticity or originality to get that sweet spot, right. And I think that’s what we do a lot as well or I do a lot in my practice. Once you get all the basics and you have a sense of the order and the symmetry then we go back and try to make it more human in a way. Like, introduce some idiosyncrasies to it or specific moments that feel that are unique in it, that create a sense of surprise or the unexpected, so that it feels more personal. Because I think if you go about, it in a very sort of engineering state of mind, then you end up with something that makes a lot of sense, but maybe doesn’t invoke the kind of authenticity or the uniqueness that you’re looking for when you’re looking for that sense of beauty. I don’t know if that makes sense. But I feel like there has to be a place where there’s like, the rule is broken, and something happens. And that’s when you kind of wake up to it. And you say, Oh, wow, that’s beautiful.

Jessica
Is there an interplay with beauty and order, beyond the balance, symmetry, uniqueness that Kerim already brough up?

Kerim
Maybe it’s also a generational thing, I think what we consider to be beautiful, both in architecture but also in the world, changes a lot over time. If you look at the classical sense of beauty, it was all about order and composition and harmony, right? So, the consistency of the rules that were applied and the proportions of the spaces or the designs were indeed the perfect measure of beauty. And the rules were followed very strictly like in the Roman architecture, or Greek architecture, if you look at all these classical examples, you see that they’re always striving for the perfect order, and trying to reinvent the order, but with small steps to find the perfect beauty in it. But I think, now we have moved to a time where perfect order and perfect balance, we know, doesn’t quite exist in the world. Things are a bit more messy. We are not all homogenous. And the beauty arises from there, the sort of idiosyncratic moments that arise in a sort of inherent order. But if everything is the same, then we don’t think it’s what we are looking for in terms of beauty. Because that’s now starting to feel like it’s too, too dogmatic or too classical or too monotonous. So now we perceive beauty differently as well, I would say.

It’s a balancing act, because I mean, you have classical approach on one side and then you have the postmodern approach on the other side, where postmodern approach says, you know, everything is its own thing, and they don’t have to talk to each other, there doesn’t need to be a specific binding order to anything because everything is different. But I think we’ve also moved past that, in a way. So, what I’m usually looking for is this inherent sense of order in the classical sense, but then moments where that order breaks down to create something unique.

Jessica
Where does architecture fit among the current art trends where the artists appear to focus mostly on making social statements?

Kerim
I think for artists it’s easier to take a critical position and say, you know what, what I’m going to create does not have to be beautiful, because that’s not the effect I’m going for. I’m actually trying to take a position, whether it’s nihilist or whether it’s critical, or whether you’re trying to evoke a different kind of feeling, I think that’s something you can do. And I think it’s worth doing, I think it has a lot to say about how that artist currently views the world as well. Maybe they say, you know, while the world isn’t a beautiful place, or we’ve had already a proliferation of beautiful things, and they just get commoditized. So that’s not really what I’m shooting for as an artist.

I think architecture has a bit of that too. But I, I think myself I’m inherently an optimist. I feel like the work we do needs to make the world a better place. And nobody wants to, or I don’t think a lot of people would want to spend millions and millions of dollars on a building for it to be something that’s just purely critical of something, right? So, I think there’s this kind of enhanced optimism in our profession, an idealism maybe in a way to say, well, if we’re going to do something, it needs to be beautiful for it to be worthwhile and for it to stand in the public ground. So yeah, I think for our work, it’s a bit more difficult to take that kind of purely critical stance than some of the current art trends that we see a lot.

It seems like beauty is not something we talk a lot about anymore. We like criticizing things, we like to talk about things that we don’t like that we like changed, but it’s nice to put all the optimist glasses and talk about things like beauty and what does it mean and try to see if there’s a common thread in that because it seems like the common threads are becoming rarer and rarer nowadays as well.

Jessica
We asked Kerim if there is something about his work or field that he wishes more people knew about that may not be visible generally.

Kerim
Yes, for sure. I think for me, one of the most rewarding parts of my work or my profession is the process. So, it’s the process of designing. That to meet a lot of times is maybe more rewarding or more interesting than the outcome itself.

When we design buildings, and they get realized a lot of the times what you see is the final results. But how you got there, what steps you went through, all the sort of lineage of the project from its beginning to the end and all the 1000 steps that are taken, all the decisions that were taken and retaken, and reevaluated and reconsidered, I think make a huge part of how the project came to be. And I think if there was a way to make that more visible or more understandable, then I think similar to art, right? When you look at a piece of art, you look at something and you see the result, but there’s always a story or a technique or framework behind it. And once you understand that, then all of a sudden you look at it differently and you then begin to evaluate or respond to the end result in a different way as well. So, I think if there was a way to get that process to be more part of understanding the outcome, that would be something that would be very beneficial for everyone.

Jessica
As an architecture student, I can definitely relate to how Kerim values the process of designing.

Lastly, a lot of people who haven’t gone to architecture school may think architects as solo workers, but in reality, it appears to involve a lot of teamwork. As we wrap up our episode, Kerim sheds light on this myth.

Kerim
There’s definitely more solo aspect to it. I think design is a very internally oriented practice. You always have to kind of step into yourself and think things through as your own. But I think even from school, you understand that a lot of it has to do with communicating what you have in mind as a designer, whether it’s to your client, whether it’s to your teammate, whether it’s to the other colleagues that you’re working on the same project with, so a lot of it is already from the beginning, based on communication.

And after school, when you start working, then that’s immediately when I stepped into a pretty collaborative practice, where we were always working as a team, even the heads of the studios were designers themselves, so we were working on the designs together. So, I learned that design is not a solo enterprise. It can be but it doesn’t need to be and I think if you work with a team, or with people, from which you have a common language, and you can bounce off ideas, and you can talk through designs, then usually the outcome is very different, and probably much better than what you would end up with, if you are working on it yourself.

[Music]

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Helen Citino
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Helen Citino, a student from Rice University and I will be your host today.

In our new series, we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. The examples and experiences they share are not only inspiring, but also informative about the interesting projects they work on. So, join us in exploring reflections on beauty spanning from science and engineering to other fields.

In this episode, our guest is Luay Nakhleh, Dean of Engineering at Rice University.

Dr. Nakhleh earned his PhD in Computer Science from University of Texas in 2004 and has been a professor at Rice University ever since.  He served as the Department Chair for the department of computer science from 2017 to 2020 and then became the Dean for the School of Engineering in 2021. In addition to his duties as the Dean of Engineering, Dr. Nakhleh continues his research that focuses on computational applications in evolutionary biology and linguistics.

We start our episode, with Dr. Nakhleh defining what constitutes as beautiful for him in his field.

Luay Nakhleh
I’m a computer scientist and computer scientists are problem solvers. I would say most engineers are problem solvers. So, we take usually a problem from the real world, and we want to devise a solution for it.

When you think about computer science and computational solutions to problems, there are at least two steps that one has to take. One is what we call the problem formulation, is that what is the question we are trying to solve? That question needs to be formulated mathematically. Like I am a computational biologist, I could work let’s say on a cancer with a cancer biologist, the cancer biologist is going to come to me and say we want to answer the following question. Right. So, we have data from cancer patients, we want to find mutations that can cause X, Y, and Z. That’s not the mathematical definition of the problem. That is, you know, biology speak. In some sense, you know that the biologist is using biological terminology to describe the problem. Our first job is to take what the biologist is talking about and formulate the problem. That’s an extremely important step, because if we formulate the wrong problem, it doesn’t matter what solution we come up with, it’s a solution to the wrong problem. So, the first step is formulating the problem, mathematically.

The second thing, once the problem is formulated, we have to come up with the algorithm that solves it. And I have used beautiful in both phases. And what beautiful to me means is that it’s an elegant formulation and an elegant solution.

When you speak to a biologist for days and weeks, literally, I mean, the conversation takes a long time for us to understand what the problem is in many cases. Then after all of that, you formulate the problem in 2 -3 lines using mathematical symbols and mathematical concepts. To me, that’s beautiful. You look at it and say, this is an elegant formulation of the problem. It’s not messy. It is not complicated. Anyone, even if they don’t understand biology but understand mathematics, they will be able to understand the problem. So, for us, and when it comes to the problem formulation, when I myself said this is a beautiful formulation, I meant it’s elegant. Because at the end of the day, I feel one of the biggest contributions of a computer scientist is, or one of our biggest skills is abstraction, the notion of abstraction. You can take a complex problem and abstract it using mathematics. And that’s where beauty can come into the picture. Something that, a problem that’s formulated over three pages, it’s very rare to see someone saying, oh, this is a beautiful formulation. But if you can take a complex problem and distill it using mathematics in two lines and saying the input to the problem is this and the output is that and it’s just two three lines, that’s beautiful.

When it comes to the algorithm, it’s a similar thing. Algorithms can be very complex. Can be very compact. And when we talk about a beautiful algorithm, we are talking about an elegant algorithm. An algorithm that is very concise, very precise, solves a problem correctly, but not overly complex. And it is not a long list of cases that we are dealing with it. It is really much more compact and efficient.

Helen
We hear the word algorithm used in many contexts these days, here is how he defines it.

Luay
So, algorithm is basically a solution that a computer can implement and run. You know, just example; you have your phone and you want to meet with someone at a restaurant, you go to your Google Maps and say, Okay, where is the restaurant and give me the path to that restaurant, right? So how does that Maps application gives you that? That’s an algorithm, that algorithm took as input what we say as input, your information about the restaurant that you want to get to, and your current location. You are at Rice University, and you want to go to a restaurant X. You tell that to Maps, right? So, the Maps application knows that. What it gives you back in return is the path. You know, it will tell you take this route to that restaurant. That’s an algorithm. The algorithm will say, okay, I know the current location, I know the restaurant location, I need to give you back the route there. An algorithm is the solution to that problem. Right? Sometimes some people even in textbooks that will give you even simpler examples, when you follow a recipe for making cake or bread. That’s an algorithm as well, right? I mean, you get these are the ingredients, this is what you do with them. And this is when you put it in the oven. And this is that’s an algorithm in some sense.

Helen
We wondered if what constitutes as beautiful evolves over time with the different roles individuals take on.

Luay
The one change that happened is when I became dean of engineering, it is not that my sense of my notion of beauty and so on has changed, but when I became dean of engineering, that was the first time I was really exposed at that level to disciplines beyond computer science. Because as a PhD student, I was in computer science. As an undergraduate, I was in computer science, and I became faculty of computer science, and I was chair of computer science. So, my world was computer science. I am an interdisciplinary researcher. So, I worked with biologists and historical linguists, so I had some exposure there. But then when I became Dean, it became very, very different. Because as dean of engineering, I work with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, right? I have faculty members in the school who work on energy transition, clean energy. They work on, you know, additive manufacturing. They work on cancer. They work on gene editing. So, there it is, again, not that the notion of beauty has changed but now I am seeing different areas of research different areas of work, and how people appreciate the beauty in them. This is why I’m saying that I don’t think the notion of beauty has changed. But I see for them for each one of them in their own discipline, what is elegance for them, right? Sometimes designing that special material that has certain properties. To them that’s beautiful, right? Or if you’re working in gene editing, which is going there and modifying the genetic code of an organism. The beauty is, for example, is to do it effectively and without having side effects, for example, right. So, this is what I got exposed to more areas beyond computer science and computational work.

Helen
We often hear how valuable it is to be finding one’s passion early on to ensure success in a field. Dr. Nakhleh started his graduate work in computer science in an area defined as “formal verification systems.” This had piqued his interest while he was still an undergraduate. However, halfway through his PhD studies, he lost interest in it and switched his focus to computational biology. He describes how finding your passion is important but there is another element that is essential too.

Luay
It’s two things that I always tell the PhD students about. One is the passion. If the passion is gone for that field, you know, no matter how hard one works, it’s just not gonna work like that, because one should be passionate about something they are doing research and PhD. The second thing, which is, to me, the most important thing in a PhD program is the relationship or the chemistry or the alignment between the student and their advisor. If the student and advisor are not on the same page or not on the same wavelength, are not aligned, things are not going to work. Even if the student is passionate, even if the student is hard working. If the student wants to do something, and the advisor is in a completely different direction. And these two things were the key issues there. The passion was gone for me and the second one was the alignment with advisor was gone. He wanted to go in one direction what he wanted to focus on research and that didn’t align with what I was interested in.

And I started looking for a different advisor, different area. There were some very general broad thoughts in my mind about what area I would move into. So, I did not think about computational biology, which is my research area. What I thought about was, what I would refer to it as, practical algorithms. So not algorithms for the sake of algorithms or for the sake of theory, but algorithms that are applied. And that’s when I started talking to this faculty member at UT Austin. And she was working on applied algorithms in one area of biology. And I got intrigued by it, I started working with her and the rest is history, that’s where it all started.

When I made the switch, actually the first the alignment was there, then the passion followed. So, the alignment as in my advisor was working on applied algorithms, I was interested in applied algorithms we weren’t there. My passion for biology didn’t exist at the time. Actually, I hated biology growing up. You know, doing biology in high school, it was not my favorite thing, because I always viewed it as memorization. You know, memorize this, memorize that. I didn’t like topics of that required memorization. And I’m still not good with memorization of these kinds of technical concepts. Remember, this is what happens in the cell and this is, what the mitochondria is and so on. That’s not my favorite part. But as I started getting in the field from a research perspective, I started seeing the logic in biology. And that logic really came because I was working on evolutionary biology. So, I started understanding how you can explain biology through the theory of evolution. And that’s when it clicked. And that’s when I became passionate about it when I saw the logic to the thing. When it is memorizing things, I’m usually not passionate about these topics. When I see the logic to something, that’s where I could become passionate about it. And that’s what happened.

Helen
His research projects also expanded to historical linguistics. He was intrigued by the phenomenon in linguistics where some words and grammatical structures have been borrowed between languages as people migrated around the world. For example, if you look at English and French, the word “bon appetite” in English is borrowed from French. In order to understand the changes happening in languages he defined them as computational problems.

Luay
You think about evolution and how these languages diversify…traditionally, people would look at it in terms of a tree structure. Tree structure means there was an ancestral language that split into two.  These two started diversifying and changing because the populations that speak them split and separated. And this historically to a certain extent these are what happened. As people, humans were migrating, they started diffusing different languages or changing the language and then we started considering them different languages. So, if you think about modeling this mathematically, this is what we call a tree structure You know one thing divides into two another these two divide into four and so on.

So, when you have this borrowing between languages, that’s what we say that violates that tree structure. So, you start having these horizontal things happening between languages that have diverged from each other, but every now and then they share some concepts because of, again, the migration of individuals and some individuals coming from one population to another speaking the language and so on. So, my research focuses on this. How do we reconstruct this, because all of this happened in the past. We are talking about 1000s of years ago, when these languages started splitting and diverging from the ancestral language. Now, we don’t have necessarily a record of the past. So, you try to reconstruct it from data that we have today. And that’s where it becomes a computational problem. So, my research is about how do we reconstruct the past while accounting for the fact that every now and then there was borrowing and then people came together and exchanged. The same thing I do in biology.

I try to work on problems where we want to reconstruct the past from genomic data. So, you can give me the genomic data of all let’s say, all the trees, all the plants at Rice, on the Rice campus. There are different species of plants on the Rice campus. Now we want to, you know, build their evolutionary history going back to the past. So, there’s a computational problem. But plants also, they don’t just diverge from each other, they hybridize every now and then. So, hybridization in plants, for example, is analogous to borrowing between languages in the linguistic world. If you think about bacteria, bacteria do the same thing. They exchange genetic materials. Right? So, these are the problems I work on is that how do we build the past? How do we reconstruct the past, from the data that we have today, while accounting for these complexities that we know happen? Bacteria exchange genetic materials, plants hybridize, languages borrow words from each other, and so on. That’s most of the work I do.

Helen
Listen to what he has to say when asked if there is an aspect of his field that is not visible to most people but which he wishes others knew more about.

Luay
That’s an interesting question. I mean, look, on the technical side, I was telling you about the problem formulation. When people read the research paper, they don’t see any of that. They don’t see any of that. The research paper starts with the problem cleanly formulated, and we present the solution, but they don’t know that it could have taken months of these conversations and back and forth with the biologist, whoever, to formulate the problem. And to me actually, that’s a bit sad, because that’s a lot of the beautiful work happens there is that how do you take this mess, that is biology and biology is really messy. How do you take all that mess and turn it into this problem that is not described in details or anything like that in the paper. That’s all hidden as we start. We’re saying, here’s the problem. We give a few paragraphs about motivating it from a biology perspective, but the paper doesn’t do justice at all to that process of formulating the problem. That is completely hidden from the public, in some sense.

I was teaching a course that I created about 11 – 12 years ago, it’s called Algorithmic Thinking. And I described algorithmic thinking to students as a five-step process. And one of the first steps is formulating the problem. So, I was always influenced by my own research and how I work. I wanted computer science students to understand that typically you don’t have the problem formulated for you and given to you on a gold plate. You have to work on formulating it. Especially in areas like biology or physics or social sciences. If I were to work with a social scientist, social scientist is not necessarily going to come to me and say, here’s your problem defined cleanly mathematically, no, social scientist is going to be using their own terminology. And some fields of social sciences, it’s not very mathematically precise. It’s our job to turn it into mathematically precise problem. That’s, to me one of the most beautiful parts of computer science. Actually, for me, once I formulate the problem, it’s a big, big part of the, of the work has been done. And it is the most important step because as I said is that if you formulate the problem incorrectly, then you are almost wasting your time after that, because you’re solving a problem that’s not what the social scientist wants, or what the biologist wants.

Helen
As Dr. Nakhleh circles the conversation back to beauty, we asked for his thoughts on the role of creativity in science. As scientific and artistic endeavors seem to be usually looked at as two separate things, we wondered if he saw it that way.

Luay
No, not necessarily at all. I mean, especially when we talk about problem formulation, that’s all an art. There is no formula that you follow. There is no cookbook that you follow and say, just do steps 1, 2, 3, and your problem is going to be defined for you. That is not the case. So, you have to be very creative. And creativity here really means, you know, connecting the dots and using the different types of knowledge that you have acquired over time. And this is why experienced people do a better job in general when formulating a problem, because someone who’s been in the field for 30 years, has a much bigger toolbox that they can pull from to formulate that problem. Because if I’m trying to formulate a problem, sometimes it might require that I use tools from probability theory, probability and statistics, sometimes it requires that I use tools from some other field. So, the more knowledge you have, the more experience you have, your creativity improves, because now you have a much broader or much bigger array of tools that you can work from.

The same thing with algorithms. And this is why I feel like computer science is considered hard and challenging by the students. Because even once the problem is formulated, I wish there was again, a recipe that you say do step one, step two, step three, and here’s your algorithm. It just doesn’t work like that. Right? So, one has to be creative. And again, for me, creativity is how do you draw on your knowledge and the knowledge that’s out there and draw from sometimes even very, very different fields to get the solution to the problem. You want to get the bits and pieces of the solution from different fields put them together to solve that problem. It’s all it’s all about creativity.

And sometimes even there is another area of computer science that some people might think is not creative, which is when you have an algorithm, usually that algorithm is described almost in the language of like English, I can describe the algorithm in English. But computers don’t run on algorithms written in English. They have to be written in a programming language. So even that what might sound like translation, okay, someone has come up with the algorithm, they described it in English. Now take it and write it in a programming language like Python or Java or whatever programming language. That also requires creativity. It is not a simple translation. It is not like I am saying, you know, just a quick example translating between languages. Yes, I mean, I could ask Google Translate to translate a book for me, but it’s not going to be as artistic. Right? I mean, you know, if you have a novelist who writes a novel, or a poem, let’s say, a poet, writes a poem in Turkish. And if you take it and translate it as is in English, using Google Translate, it might lose its beauty, and its meaning and so on. The same thing here when you take an algorithm written in English and translate it into code. You could lose the beauty because the algorithm in English was elegant and somehow, we created a monster that spans 500 pages of code. That now is no longer beautiful. You could introduce lots of errors. Yes, the algorithm is correct when we described it in English, but when we translated, we made it actually wrong, and many other issues. So that also requires creativity. So, I cannot think of anything like in the field of computer science that doesn’t require creativity, from understanding the problem to formulating it, to coming up with the algorithm to translating it into actual code.

And even take after that, you know, once we have the computer program, I go to the biologists, I say, I have the program, let me analyze the data for you. There’s a lot of beauty after that, and you can look at papers, you look at the figure that they generated, say, wow, this is beautiful, versus a figure says, well this doesn’t look professional, right. So even presenting the results, you know, after we have done all the work, and when figured out the solution and ran it on the biological data, how you present the results. There’s also beauty there.

Another thing, actually I completely forgot about, I love good writing style. And that’s another area where there’s beauty. And I’m talking about technical papers. Because there are technical papers, when I finish reading them, I say, I want to write like that. They are so beautiful. The way they made the case, the way they drew the figures, the aesthetics, all of that is beautiful. And there are some papers, you know, I would look at them and say this is exactly how I don’t want to write.

So again, beauty spans everything from solving the problem to writing the paper to presenting the result. In our field, we give a lot of presentations as well – us and our students. There are beautiful slides, and there are ugly slides, right. And sometimes it’s not easy for you to define what is a beautiful slide, but something is very attractive about it. Right? All of that, by the way, requires creativity. Creating beautiful slides, is again, it’s not a trivial task.

There is one thing I want to share with you, I don’t know, if you’re aware of this. Today, we live in a world where there are lots of videos online, people explaining all sorts of algebra and calculus and so on. But there is one special channel on YouTube. The name of the channel is 3Blue1Brown. If you want to see beauty, you should look at that. The gentleman who’s behind it, the amount of time he puts into visualizing mathematical concept, computational concept is just, you know, I would look at that person and say, I want to do something like this. Of course, I would never dare to get into that, because he’s specialized in this. This is all he does. But that is to me, a very, very high standard of beauty. How you explain, how do you visualize, how do you illustrate that very complex concepts in mathematics and computing. It’s amazing, and I highly recommend anyone to look into that. It’s 3Blue1Brown.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is part of a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Evalyn Navarro
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we are bringing innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Evalyn Navarro, a student from University of St Thomas and I will be your host today.

In this series, we are presenting highlights from conversations with professionals, to share examples of what they consider beautiful in their work.

For this episode, our guest is Linda Welzenbach Fries.

She is a science writer, planetary scientist, and curator of planetary materials at Rice University. Her experience in curation started at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History when she was the manager of the meteorites collection. Currently, she is conducting advanced curation research with NASA and the European Space Agency.

Our episode starts with her response to what she considers “beautiful” in her work. Let’s get started.

Linda Welzenbach Fries
I was very much surprised, engaged and enamored the first time I looked through, and it’s not the first time I looked through a microscope, but it was the first time I had observed meteorite chondrules through a microscope.

As part of being a geologist, we work in scales, from the macro scale, observing the geology in situ, out in the field, to collecting samples and then looking at them in hand, at the hand scale, to looking at everything on a microscopic scale. I absolutely adore looking at geologic materials through the microscope.

One of the first books that I acquired when I was a graduate student were a whole bunch of these called Atlas of Rocks and their textures, and it’s basically nothing more than pictures of rocks at the microscopic scale. They were given to me by my uncle, who lovingly supported my geology habit since the age of seven. If you go to my website, you’ll see that, basically, he’s the reason I am a geologist today, and it was mostly because he gave me minerals. And minerals are beautiful. I mean, they have beautiful shapes, they have beautiful colors. You know, the thing that I find beautiful about them definitely comes from that part of my life.

Going back to the beginning here, chondrules in meteorites are unique in the sense that you can’t find anything on Earth like it. Each and every one is different. Each and every one is just really beautiful in the sense that they are colorful. They have unique shape. They have a unique structure. I think part of what makes them not only just visually engaging and beautiful, is understanding of where they come from. So, I think, as a scientist, there’s a kind of a spontaneous reaction. There’s that initial response that is completely sort of instinctive. It’s subjective. It’s the whole eye of the beholder beauty. And then as you gain more and more knowledge, you have a depth of understanding that enhances that beauty. It can become more beautiful, or become beautiful, if it wasn’t originally. I would say looking at rocks that originate from places beyond Earth and the way they are formed, to me, was beautiful on two different levels. One, because they were visually engaging, and two, because I had this knowledge of what they were and where they come from.

Evalyn
For those unfamiliar with chondrules, they are little spherical grains that make up the materials of asteroids which came to Earth as meteorites. Here is how she illustrates them.

Linda
Think of like a kaleidoscope. When you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, you see a lot of symmetry. You see a lot of color, especially the ones that are made from, like chips of glass. And then, of course, the mirrors, the number of mirrors inside of a kaleidoscope, give it a symmetry. And as you rotate the end of the kaleidoscope around, it changes. And so that’s not dissimilar from the kinds of things that we see in the microscope when it comes to planetary materials.

So, meteorites are interesting in that they were for a very, very long time, they were collectible objects because they’re odd. You know, they come from outer space. They’re interesting. When we gained the ability to do things like date rocks, analyze them in very small detail, the science for these planetary materials grew. That was around the late 1960s early 70s, especially associated with the Apollo era, when we were interested in understanding the origin of the Earth and the origin of the Moon. The Smithsonian has had a meteorite collection. Those collections came to the Smithsonian through a variety of means associated with a program that they are involved with called the US Antarctic Meteorite Program. They discovered that Antarctica was kind of a treasure trove of meteorites. And between National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and the National Science Foundation here in the US, along with NASA, they basically went and collected meteorites from Antarctica, starting in the mid to late 70s. The goal there was to better understand the breadth and the diversity of materials from our solar system through this program. Because, you know, meteorites are originally, mostly from the asteroid belt. There are some that come from beyond that, and then certainly some that come from our nearest neighbors, the Moon and Mars, that have been falling over the Earth for a very, very long period of time. Some places preserve them better than other places. Antarctica in particular, preserves them really, really well because it’s very cold and dry. Each piece basically fills in or creates a more complete or coherent picture of what the earliest part of our solar system was like. What was the composition of the solar system? What were the processes that were operating? We can’t find any of that information here on Earth. We have to look outside of that. And meteorites are essentially a very inexpensive delivery of this kind of information. And so, it’s really important for like museums and other programs to preserve as much of this material as possible, because each one is unique. Each one tells a different story, and collectively, together, we can better understand what’s going on.

Evalyn
What is the role of scientific collections in education for future generations?

Linda
I think we can use both the objects, the imagery, and what they’re telling us, obviously, in ways that can open the doors for the next generation to become explorers. I think one of the hardest things that we have to do is tread the line between being super sensationalistic about it and yet be truthful and excited about the science.

I think it’s important to also let them know this is the place to start, and that we want to hand the baton. We want to pass the baton to that next generation. I’m hoping, in the process of conveying the excitement or the beauty of what we’re doing, we’re giving them opportunities to ask new questions, to plan new ways to explore.

Evalyn
So, what does it take for a scientist to work with museums? Here is what she says.

Linda
I think the hardest areas of careers for most people who want to engage in and would love to know how to do it, or engage in it, is working in a museum. Museum is actually an amazing place, because it is the nexus of research, public engagement and essentially art. And it takes a village of scientists, designers, artists and engineers, essentially to create an exhibit that engages the public. And it’s storytelling, which is not an easy thing to do, especially when you’re trying to tell stories to a wide audience.

We’ve been able to start that process at a very small scale in our department. One of our faculties, Cin-Ty Lee, has always wanted to have an exhibit in our department as a way to also kind of balance the more artistic sort of exhibits of minerals that are over in Houston Museum of Natural History, to create a little bit more in-depth content and also make that content sort of more relevant today how geology kind of impacts our everyday life. And it was a great opportunity, because I was able to engage undergraduates and graduate students and even postdocs, and in just a couple months we developed a lot of content, and we’re able to get that printed up. And I have to say, I’ve been quite impressed with the random people that have been wandering into our ground floor area just to see the minerals and read what we have put on the walls.

Our department is evolving, and one of the things that has sort of been targeting in terms of new faculty is, is to enhance or grow our planetary science focus. And as part of that, we’ve just recently hired a meteorite scientist. I was tasked with, and super excited about actually buying a bunch of meteorites that we can use both for education and for display.

Evalyn
Curious about how to become a museum professional? Listen to how she ended up in her first role at the Smithsonian.

Linda
The reason why I became interested in museums from the get-go, and I never assumed that I would become a museum professional. My uncle gave me minerals, so I was a mineral collector, and I had access to local museums. That’s not something that everybody has and I had access to the Smithsonian because I lived in Maryland, in the Maryland, DC area. I went to school assuming that I would just become a professional geologist or maybe even go to graduate school, and I wasn’t sure what the future held, I’ll be honest, and I when I went to graduate school, I happened to be looking through the back of a magazine called Geo Times, and I saw the advertisement basically to work on a brand new exhibit at the Smithsonian, and the due date for the application was, like, two days, and there was a telephone number, and I just cold called the number, and I ended up talking to basically my future boss. And at the end of the conversation, I had basically explained, hey, you know, I’ve always collected minerals. I’ve been to the Smithsonian all my life. You know, this is part of the reason why I’m a geologist today. And I just said this would be the most amazing opportunity for me ever. This is the dream job. And then I got the job. I was just like; I can’t believe this!

Now there are programs out there. More programs for museum curation and museum science now. Every museum is a little bit different, but typically, the chief curators of most collections, regardless of the type of collection, are almost always research scientists, and they may not have any museum experience whatsoever, but they get on the job training. But I think that the profession museum studies, museum curation studies, there’s a lot more in the humanities side of thing than there is on the natural materials side of things, and I’m hoping that maybe through my job at Rice, I can help students see what is available. I can point them in the right direction. I know where a lot of these programs live, what schools provide this kind of training if they’re really interested, hopefully through a little bit of opportunities within our department, they can gain some experience. I’m at present working with Duncan Keller, who is a postdoc who came from Yale University and actually worked in some of the mineralogy exhibit development there to basically have one class, or a couple of classes devoted in exhibit development, text development, concept development, those kinds of things that you don’t normally have the opportunity to get as a student in any program, any science based program.

Evalyn
Does art influence science in the museum exhibits?

Linda
Museums are interesting in that, there is like art, there’s some degree of flexibility, except when it comes to the knowledge that they are trying to convey to the public. The way you convey that knowledge can change over time. The level of that knowledge will change over time based on the education level of the public. You have to reach some median goal. You have to account for things like accessibility and so on and so forth. But the truth of that knowledge has to be verified by experts. There are various ways to make sure that everybody agrees that the knowledge being presented is the correct knowledge. Most scientific museums try not to be anything other than objective, not subjective. Art is a little bit more subjective in my opinion. Eye of the beholder, you know, everybody is going to perceive art in a different way, and that’s okay.

In museums, we’re essentially providing context for the objects that the public is viewing. And you can tell a story about, say, you know, the evolution of humans, or, you know, here are the types of geologic environments that form these particular minerals. These are the processes that produce the kinds of gemstones that we all wear, so that people aren’t just here’s just a random object I think is beautiful, but here’s the reason why it’s beautiful. This is the reason why you like it so much. And sort of give it context to build that depth of understanding to make it even more beautiful.

Evalyn
Thank you, Linda, for sharing your experiences and insights and how you find beauty in your work. It was really interesting to learn more about meteorites and asteroids, and how there’s beauty present all around us.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Lipi Gandhi
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Lipi Gandhi, a student from Rice Business School and I will be your host today.

In this new series, we are presenting highlights from conversations with professionals from varied fields, discussing what they find and define as beautiful in the line of work. The examples and experiences they share are both inspiring and insightful, shedding light on the fascinating projects they have undertaken. Join us as we explore reflections on beauty that range from science and engineering to various other fields.

In this episode, we welcome Viren Desai, the founder of Opti Quant Analytics, a consultancy specializing in investment risk management for energy companies. Viren started his practice in Chicago after earning degrees in Mathematical Economic Analysis from Rice University and Financial Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

We asked him how his in finance have evolved and where he first discovered beauty in his work, and here’s what he had to say.

Viren Desai
I graduated from Rice in 2010, 14 years ago now, with a BA in mathematical economic analysis. I went to work in finance. I thought that I was studying finance when I was in college, but I wasn’t. I was studying economics. So, this is sort of how green I was to the whole area. I went to work in investment banking for a few years, and then did a couple of other things in finance. I worked in private debt investing for a little bit. And then I was on the management team of an energy company, a private equity backed energy company. That was a really interesting experience. I was the VP of Finance for the company, right through the COVID oil price crash, and I’m sure you probably heard of that event. For an oil company that’s the price of your product, the price of oil is the price of what you’re selling, you know, so when it goes down to zero or negative, it causes all kinds of problems for the company. We were a small company. We did not really have the budget to hire me as an analyst. So, I was the VP, but I was also the analyst and everything in between.

In that period, the COVID craziness basically, I essentially had to do a lot of work to try and help figure out where the company’s financials were going. My workload grew so high because there was no budget to hire an analyst. So eventually, I ended up having this sort of idea. It was like a spark sort of in the in the depths of just working super late hours and trying to get all my work done. I just had this idea that, I need to program this. The work that I’m doing, it’s a lot of numbers, if I could program some parts of this, you know, that’s going to make my life a lot easier. So, I took a $35 online Python course. Basically, just learned how to do some very basic programming. So, you know, just, hey, I know that there’s a file here, I just need this thing done with this file and that’s it. That sort of turned into a labor of love. I realized that I took to programming. I don’t want to say that I was good at programming, because you know, everyone starts from zero, and then you kind of have to learn, but I took to it. And when I started to see the effect of, hey, if I just type these commands into the computer, these various things that would sometimes take me a few hours to do suddenly get boiled down to maybe minutes. That was sort of when I realized, I think, and this was almost a decade into working that I loved the specific types of problems I was solving on the finance side, and I loved using programming tools along with Excel and other things to help solve some of these problems.

If I were to think about a moment of experiencing beauty in my work, it was sort of the first time I had a set of code that kind of did at least like five or six hours’ worth of my work on any given day, and all it took was the click of a button and I built it up from scratch, like literally block by block. This was sort of self-driven. It came out of a necessity. This just being constrained and not having anyone to help me and just my workload sort of going through the roof. But as it happened, that financial model, that system that I built, started to allow me to explore other things like, now that I can program, I can look at data sources from the internet. I can sort of start to think about like, oh, what does this data look like, which I really didn’t have a skill with before that I could do it in a small way.  This suddenly opened up the door to do it in a much larger way.

And that sort of possessed me, I would say, to googling things like, how do you predict commodity prices? Like a very simple question, nobody anticipated. I certainly didn’t anticipate that oil prices were going to crash first, how do I predict this? And that sort of led me down this road that dive into mathematics ultimately. A lot of the stuff that I had at one point known in college and subsequently completely forgotten, has suddenly started to come up in my work. Things like Monte Carlo simulation, working with statistical distributions, you know, like, what are the statistics of a given distribution, those kinds of things, and I was just kind of googling these on the fly, trying to find some way to apply it to my work to make it better. And to give the company some utility out of it some predictive value out of the work, because we had 26 people in the company, and in my mind getting the answer wrong on that was potentially putting a lot of people’s livelihoods at risk. We had a team there were a lot of us trying to work on this, but my component of it was the financial side and sort of figuring out should we spend money? Should we not spend money? You know, should we go out and try to buy something because everything’s cheap now? Should we just kind of hold on to what we have? There’re so many questions that needed to be answered somehow.

Lipi
It is true. One thing leads to another when you are following your curiosity. Viren’s searches prompted more questions, deepening his interest in the finance field.

Viren
I started to get advertised these Master of Science programs, in financial engineering, etc, on Instagram, that the program that I ultimately attended, popped up. And I thought, why don’t I just click on this website and see what they teach in this program? I found it to be essentially just an organized list of everything that I was trying to Google and had no idea how.

I was learning little components just sort of haphazardly, you know, in like Google searches, because I was learning just kind of little pieces of knowledge and everything that I learned opened up more questions. Oh, my God, I don’t know about all these other things, you know that this depends on right. So, I threw in an application to this master’s program at the University of Chicago. And then lo and behold, I got admitted with 70% Merit Scholarship, which I had never received a scholarship like that in my life. And I think that’s kind of where I really just entered a field that I find to be beautiful.

It is this area that sort of blends the markets with mathematics, programming, you know, and all of it to some degree. I’m a very visual person, I have sort of done some creative things, some artsy things when I was at Rice, one of the things I love about working in the field that I’m working in, is that visualizing data becomes very important. And, for me, that visualization of the data, being able to sort of work with this data, make informative charts, or graphics, or really kind of presentations that say, I’m just starting with a set of numbers. And then, you know, I would say, like the work that I do, even though it’s under many different banners, for products and stuff like that, at the bottom of it all, I’m just kind of going into a set of unstructured data that someone needs help figuring out what to do with and I, I bring structure to it. I read it into code. I make charts. I do some calculations. I try to connect datasets up and try to like weave some kind of story around it and then I go and present it.

That’s what my company right now, Opti Quan Analytics, does. We’re a finance and strategy consultancy. We build financial models, or machine learning prediction models, for companies in the energy space, and it’s been good so far, generating a decent amount of revenue. And that’s, that’s the circuitous pathway to beauty in the work and how I stumbled upon just kind of an area that I love.

Lipi
In his world it is all about giving order to chaos and setting up systems that ensure that the clients get the information they need.

Viren
I don’t know if it is that I have a skill in bringing structure to disorder, or it’s just that I love the process so much that I probably put in more time into that aspect. I think it’s more of the latter. You know, I can probably point to things in my career that I potentially missed out on, because I spend more time like, creating that structure than maybe just saying kind of thing, “Oh, this is good enough. Let me go and do something else.” But I think with my bachelor’s degree, and what I knew coming out my Bachelor’s, I know for sure, yeah, there’s no way I would have gotten into the master’s program that I eventually got into. It’s that I think I was in a position where I had to create some structure out of a lot of chaos and that search led me down this road.

Lipi
We wondered if the way people perceive beauty in their work shifts over time and across different roles. Viren shares how and where he finds beauty in his own journey.

Viren
I think that there’s a part of this, which has to do with sort of making these processes beautiful, but I think for me, in particular, it’s a little bit more of creating connections between things that are hard to see connections between. You know, where on the surface, you say, I’ve got this data on this market, and I’ve got this data on these other variables, you know, are they connected? Is there a way that I can connect them? Is there some sort of like relationship I can glean from these such that if I move variable A, a little bit, you know, I see with a good amount of certainty what variable B is going to do. It’s kind of an open-ended problem, because it forces what I love is that it forces me to sort of think about how could these things be connected? You know, and can I program that? Can I come up with a logical flow that connects these and know, hey, this is how accurate the connection is. And this is where it sort of breaks down.

So, I think for me, it’s a little bit more of creating those connections, and allowing people to see them through code through data visualization. And I guess it to some degree when I walk someone through it, and if I can, in a few sentences, explain something that they might have been struggling to understand or say like, oh, look, here’s a few charts that gives you insight into these things. That moment of sort of insight or clarity when someone says, ah, yes, that makes sense. That feels really good. It makes me feel like, you know, complicated world that we live in, and I added a little bit of simplicity to it.

Lipi
As we wrap up this episode Viren offers insights into his field that go unnoticed by most people.

Viren
I tend to think of finance as a field that not many people love. And most people sort of work in it, because it’s like, oh, you can make good money in, you know. I think finance in general has this perception or like people that work in finance, often there’s a perception of like, you’re the money guy. But there’s a lot of poor stereotypes around that, you know, you have sort of Wolf of Wall Street kind of things, right, which, in some circles are like, admired. And in some circles, they just kind of go reviled, right?

I think that finance is as strange and beautiful reflection of human desires around the world. I think about this a lot, because finance is a field about money. And the question often bounces around in my head, maybe because of my liberal arts undergrad background, it’s what is money? You know, what is it actually? A lot of the work that I do is, in a very simplistic, very basic way, it’s kind of just reclassifications of money. There’s money coming in, and there’s money going out at the end of the day. And you’re sort of like playing with those flows. You can do it on a spreadsheet but ultimately, what’s happening, that spreadsheet is also going on in a bank account. And what’s happening in a bank account, whether it’s your personal bank account, or the government’s bank account, in some ways, is driven by what some people that have control over that account want to do. So, there’s like a very human component to everything that we see in the markets and in the whole field of finance. And it’s probably why I think behavioral economics is like the hot new area of economics. I don’t think it’s new. But you know, it’s gotten more and more popular lately. But you know, I think about this a lot. And I think that’s something that maybe people outside of finance and I don’t know, maybe a lot of people in finance also, don’t necessarily think about day to day. You know, it’s just that, like, this is human needs around the world being represented in numbers.

And I think that’s kind of what keeps me interested in the industry also. It’s kind of like, the more you think about what’s driving these numbers, like when Warren Buffett buy shares in Occidental Petroleum, what is he actually doing? He’s giving money to, like an energy company that’s going out, and what are they doing? They are producing oil and gas from the ground that ultimately gets sold and turns on our lights and powers our cars. So you start to like, follow that chain. And it’s a big circle, like it’s a big web. At some point, you kind of have to stop once you’ve explored it enough. But if you actually start to think about all of those connections, just represented a number, it’s, it’s kind of interesting. It’s like these groups of people that are sort of moving money either towards themselves or away from themselves. Right, and we are one of them. We’re in the system. We are doing the same with our own bank accounts, what the big billion-dollar companies are doing with theirs and governments are doing with theirs. And it’s all the same money somehow going around the whole world.

Lipi
Looking at numbers from Viren’s eyes who went on the path of finance to programming, to applying mathematics to chaos makes us realize that beauty is a lot about finding simplicity in things that often seem complex, and diving deeper to understand the connections to transform the world for better.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is part of a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Zehra Karakilic
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Zehra, a graduate in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University in the Netherlands. I will be your host today.

In our new series, we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. The examples and experiences they share are not only inspiring, but also informative about the interesting projects they work on. So, join us in exploring reflections on beauty – spanning from science and engineering to other fields.

In this episode, our guest is Brandon Dugan, a professor of geosciences at the Colorado Mines University in Denver.  

We heard Dr. Dugan speak on our podcast episode 127 a few months ago when he shared information about his research about freshwater resources discovered under the Atlantic seabed. He returns to share his thoughts on what constitutes as beautiful in his line of work.

As a geoscientist who explores unconventional approaches to solving problems, we start our episode with one the experiences he shares around a peculiar problem that the drilling companies were facing in shallow water.  Let’s get started.

Brandon Dugan
I definitely have used the word beautiful to describe some of the things that I talk about because I study natural systems. I guess there’s just sort of an inherent beauty in nature, but I also love math. And there’s sort of a beauty in equations and trying to explain how things work. And that’s really the linkage for me is sort of this natural beauty and this elegance of being able to explain it with simple mathematics. Those linkages to me, are really amazing and insightful of like trying to understand how something works.

In the mid 1990s, there were some drilling issues where drilling companies were having. They were losing instrumentation very shallow in the seafloor, like 1000 feet of water, and then down 200 feet below the seafloor, they were losing instrument they were seeing quicksand like conditions, and they didn’t know what was happening.

Many major oil companies and drilling companies were plagued by this problem, because it was costing them money and resources and trying to figure out how to access deeper targets that they wanted to. So, they had empirical observations of the problem and the impact that this had on safety and our ability to get resources. And I, with some colleagues of mine, were able to do two things that sort of, in my mind, were beautiful extensions of the project. We were able to extend a physics-based understandings. We were able to write equations to understand why this system behaved the way that it did.

They were creating these small landslides in the ocean and people before didn’t understand how it could have happened. They didn’t understand how they could have gotten the criteria available for failure this shallow. We knew it existed deeper. So, if we went down 5000 feet or 6000 feet, we knew that we had these very high pressures that could lubricate a surface and create a landslide. But then it’s too deep dept to be a landslide. So, with some very simple equations, and thinking about the problem in two dimensions, and three dimensions, we were able to come up with a theoretical explanation for how we got these systems to fail, create landslides. And probably the most beautiful part was that in 2005, we got to go out with new instruments that we helped design and test our physics-based hypothesis with the natural observations, and we were pretty close to correct. And so that was really amazing, because we were able to take apart this natural phenomenon that was causing chaos in the working world, and explain it with pencil and paper, and then merge the two through, you know, million-dollar technology to go out and take samples of the ocean seafloor. So, it was mathematics, coupled with human applications, coupled with direct field evidence, that made us understand how this whole system worked. And now it’s been expanded to other basins around the world and even thinking about how some things like canyons formed on planets like Mars.

Zehra
So, where does Dr. Dugan see the beauty in geosciences?

Brandon
I think, for me, the natural system, the Earth system, rivers, streams, forests, mountains are all beautiful to me sort of from a sort of traditional naturalist standpoint. And in my field, where I see the beauty of being a geoscientist is trying to be able to explain the processes that we observe in nature, to break them down to their simplest pieces and understand sort of at the fundamental level, how are these things behaving. And so really, that’s the elegance and the excitement for me is trying to explain in the most simple terms, how something works, because then we can make it more complicated and still understand it but we have to understand the simple part first. So, for me, the beauty is really explaining things at the ground level of how they work and function, and the interactions between different things. So, I really look at the interaction between sediments and water, and how that creates things like landslides or water resources, or water for plants. And so how do they interact? And so, I go to the most fundamental level; how do water and rocks interact? And then, how can other things use them?

Zehra
Dr. Dugan has been working in this field both as a researcher and a professor for over 20 years. We wondered if his criteria for beauty evolved over time with the different roles he has taken on.

Brandon
In terms of how my viewpoint has evolved, and how I work with students, they’re still a little bit different. For me, when I was a student, I started my PhD research 27 years ago, I appreciated the beauty of the natural system, but I didn’t really understand the beauty of trying to understand that at its simplest level. I was still used to sort of my undergraduate training and my high school training of always trying to get the answer to something. So, I was always looking for the answer to a problem rather than the understanding of a problem. So, it was a little bit different. The approach that I thought about it, the approach that I do things is different. So now I think about how to understand it. I develop a hypothesis and a test, and I come up with an answer, whether it be correct or incorrect, then I adapt. And so now I’m much more focused on sort of the adaptations that I have to make because that’s part of the understanding for me. Twenty-five years ago, I was more focused on getting an answer and thinking that that would be the end of the process. Now, what I’ve sort of learned is, as I learn small bits and pieces, I do understand something, but I also get to ask other questions, which is more exciting. And so that’s sort of my personal evolution of how I think about things and, and the interplay between things. Now I’m more interested in the new questions I’m going to ask than just getting the answer to the original one. And nine times out of ten, I end up learning something about an item that I didn’t know I was going to discover.

With the students, for me, it’s really trying to have them understand that being wrong is okay. That’s where I find beauty is when they crossed that threshold to, I don’t just need to get the right answer, I need to understand how this works.

And so, I really work with students to try to understand that, trying and doing and succeeding and failing are all valuable. It’s not just about getting the right grade, or the right GPA or something like that. It’s about continually learning and taking what I learned to the next level from each step to step. So, trying to think about how everything builds upon itself.

For me, to go back to the how do I see beauty in this, the beauty in the relationship is when it really clicks with the students. When I see the students stop worrying about getting the right answer and focusing on, I want to learn more. That’s the winning part for me. That’s what keeps me in teaching.

Zehra
Is Dr. Dugan’s appreciation for nature primarily what got him into this field?

Brandon
It was something that I only realized later in my life, I mean, probably part of the way through my PhD. So, after I finished my undergraduate degree, and I was a handful of years into my PhD studies, I realized that I was naturally drawn towards natural systems. So, I started out in a STEM field, I started out but just in mathematics, doing an undergraduate degree in mathematics, and I appreciated mathematics, and I enjoyed it, and I liked applying it to things. But I wasn’t invigorated or stimulated in the beginning just to do math for the sake of doing math. And so, I was trying to find something where I could apply math to a problem that I wanted. And you know, you could be an actuary or an accountant or something like that. And those seemed not too exciting to me. So, I didn’t pursue them. And I just kept looking for the thing. And it was finally when I found Geosciences and that I could apply math to that. But that’s where I ended up. But when I did that, when I was an undergraduate, I had no conscious understanding that that was driven by my upbringing and spending time in nature. Later in my life, I realized that it was this appreciation for nature that sort of drew me and my math background there.

Zehra
Dr. Dugan’s current research is about freshwater resource found under the ocean.

Brandon
Probably the primary project I’m working on right now is trying to understand again, this system that doesn’t make sense at first observation is how this water exists deep, deep beneath the ocean sediments, so you’d expect it to be saltwater, and it’s freshwater.

I’m spending a lot of time right now trying to organize a project for next summer to go out and actually sample some of these waters, so we can have mathematically driven hypotheses about how old the water is, what its composition is. The next year, we want to go out and sample it south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to try and see how well our understanding of the system is. So, we can make forecasts about how it’ll change over time due to changes in precipitation with climate change, changes in sea level due to climate change. So how is this potential resource going to change over time? And how might it be accessible to people? Right now, we’re in a lot of technical planning stages. We know what we want to do and what we want to measure, so we’re assembling a science party of about 30 scientists who will participate. All geoscientist but some of them studied water chemistry, some of them have studied rock physics, some of them have studied how water and microbes interact with each other, and then organizing the drilling vessel that to go out and do all the sampling and measurements next year.

Zehra
We wondered if there’s anything about his field that may not be visible to others that he wishes they knew more about.

Brandon
I think one is, you know, we live in an era where we have access to so many different fields. And so, I think one thing that’s exciting is, or that I’d like people to know, is to become a scientist, you know, we’re not creating things from scratch anymore. We’re not Newton, we’re not Einstein. And so, it’s really working with scientists across fields where we learn the most.

And so, something that I think is exciting to me is, the geochemistry tells me a lot about these groundwater systems, how old they are, where they were sourced, but I’m not a geochemist. So how do I learn about this? I don’t go learn geochemistry. I go partner with the geochemist. I think one thing about science is that it’s hugely collaborative. And we all have our specialties and our expertise, but we learn the most when we work together across fields. So oftentimes, I talk to students, and they say, well, I want to be a geoscientist, because I want to do this, or I want to be a mechanical engineer, and I may do this. And I, I try to encourage the students to think about how they’re going to talk to people in other disciplines, because that’s where they’re going to be active in the modern world. You know, we don’t just have one job anymore, we’re working across fields. So that’s one way that I thought about that that’s interesting.

The other one is just the excitement of exploration. So, I’m studying these freshwater systems that exist beneath the ocean where you wouldn’t expect to find freshwater. And the reason we know they are there is because somebody accidentally found them looking for something else. Sometimes what we learn in one project can lead to 10, 15, 20 years of other projects. So just because something doesn’t match your original hypothesis, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pursue it farther, or think about it. We can learn from, I don’t want to say our mistakes, but we can learn from unexpected results. And that’s something that is what really motivates me is I want to know and answer the question, a question about how old the freshwater is. And when I do that, I’ll find something about how it affects microbes, and then I’ll get to learn something about microbes. And so, these studies feed into one to another. And so even where I think I’ve made a misstep, we probably still made an advancement.

Zehra
Are there any unrealized projects, something that has been on the back of Dr. Dugan’s mind, perhaps a project that has not materialized yet because of timing not being right yet?

Brandon
Just a few minutes ago, I mentioned the primary project is this water project that we’re working on, but sort of in the background, we do have this other project going on where we’re looking at the role of charcoal in the hydrologic cycle. So, charcoal that’s produced unintentionally, so from forest fires, here in the Mountain West, where I live now. When there’s a big forest fire, the ground changes quite a bit. And that affects how rainfall interacts with the soil, it affects how things grow back. Other people have looked at this sort of intentionally making charcoal and putting it in fields to increase crop fertility and yield rates and things like that. And as a place to store carbon in the in the ground rather than emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And a couple of colleagues in Mine have been toying with these ideas of different ways to track how the carbon moves through the cycle and over what timescales. So, the underlying assumption here is that we put this carbon in the ground, and it stays there as charcoal. But empirically, we know it disappears, either through chemical degradation or physical degradation, or runoff and things like that. And so, we’re trying to understand the processes with some mathematics. But we’re also trying to use some physics to figure out how we can track it during time, so people actually know where it goes when it’s moving. So, we can keep an inventory of a new carbon storehouse.

The timing hasn’t been right for different funding calls. We’ve put in some projects to net federal funding agencies and gotten some money to study it. We’ve had some industry sponsor interest, but every time we’re just about ready to get sponsored with an industry partner, they reshuffle or change or something like that. And they say, Oh, not this year, but maybe next year. And so, it’s something that we keep sort of incrementally doing a little bit of work, kind of on shoestring budget in the background waiting for the right, right time. But it’s a way to sort of maximize how much plant growth you get how much carbon you store in the ground without using fertilizers and things like that. And again, it’s another project that sort of started from an accident in Brazil. This just happened natural. There were natural fires and then there were these very fertile soils and people are like Oh, this is interesting. Can we do it intentionally? And we can do it intentionally but we’re not as good as nature, which is sort of interesting that we can’t quite figure out how nature did it so well.

Zehra
It seems there is freedom in science to create and develop projects, and for exploring funding opportunities. Whereas in the arts, projects may develop in various directions with a different sort of freedom. We wondered if the established scientific methods are what keeps scientific explorations moving forward.

Brandon
I would say, I would actually kind of flip it on the other side and I’d say we don’t give scientists enough freedom. So, if you look at a curriculum for an undergraduate in a science field, or an engineering field, it’s very rigorous. Like, probably 100 or so of the 125 credits that they have to take are totally prescribed, and they have to take them in this order, and this order, and this order, and this order and this order, because there are methods. You have to learn differential calculus before you can learn the integral calculus, and you know, there’s a sequence that things have to go. But then we get to this problem that I was mentioning earlier, or my version of a problem, where people get really focused on the answer, because everything’s just been way too structured. And then when you start to get to upper undergraduate level, or graduate levels type, then you have this opportunity to be more creative and presenting things because you’re working on more open-ended problems. Maybe it’s research, maybe it’s a new project for an employer or something like that, you have to think outside the box. How am I going to do this study? How am I going to present these results, and I want to present them this way, whether it be a PowerPoint presentation, or a journal presentation, you have to think about how you lay things out. And many of our STEM students aren’t getting this until their fourth year of college or their graduate education. And so, we end up with these, sort of very, I don’t want to say, sort of uninspiring presentations, where they’re just very, like I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. And that’s true. That’s exactly what they did. And so oftentimes, I’m telling students, well, you don’t have to tell them exactly the order you did them in, tell them the story of what you learned. And so, it’s sort of breaking this mold of A, B, C, D and E. And it’s, you know, you might want to tell them A, J, C, Q, because it tells a better story if you do it that way. And so, I think we’ve probably confined our STEM students too much to follow a method and sort of, we’re teaching them sort of creativity and exploration later, which is a little bit ironic, because probably most science started with exploration and trying to understand something, and then we kind of close that down and then open it back up later in their careers.

The other thing that we’re doing a lot more of in education at college level, but I think also at the high school level that’s helping our students is more open-ended questions. So rather than just a calculus problem that has an answer, sort of a question that has multiple answers, and it is sort of how you think to get there. So, students get comfort with uncertainty, because once they get a job, they’re gonna be dealing with uncertainty every day. I guess, you know, pure artists side, they get focused the same way we get focused, but for different reasons. My brother’s a graphic designer, he’s always what’s the next contract? It’s a very different routine for him because he’s a subcontractor. So, it’s one company to another company, he’s always jumping around and has to be very versatile and adaptable. And many of us in STEM fields, you know, we kind of get in our rut, and we can sit there. And so, we probably do better on both sides and sort of giving a little more structure to the traditional artists, let’s say and a little less structure and more freedom to the science, engineering students.

Zehra
Dr. Dugan has a cool style of talking about his projects. Listen to how he developed his communication skills, which started first with his interest in reading.

Brandon
I did read a lot. I still read a lot. It kind of goes in cycles, but I’ll read historical novels for a while, autobiographies for a while, and then you know, popcorn fiction for a while so it’s kind of all over the board. I read many different things. I also think a lot of it just came from my training as a PhD student. My advisor really focused on communication and making sure that you can explain things to any audience. So, I often, you know, reflect who is my audience? And how can I say things?

I have one committee member when I was a PhD student at Penn State, who told me that, I should be able to use the same slide deck and present it to a group of kindergarteners and they should be able to enjoy it, depending on how I present it. And I should be able to show the same slides to a bunch of PhDs in my field and explain it differently and they should enjoy it. And I should be able to show it to, you know, people who didn’t go to university and are practicing professionals or something like that. And they can see the same images, but how I describe them. And so, they all learn the same thing, but from different words. And so, I’ve just always sort of practice telling my story. And now I’ve been doing this for quite a few years. So, it gets better. I learn every year I every time I give a talk or a presentation or an interview. I reflect on it, what could I have done better? How can I improve? How can I be more effective with my science now? I know what I can do technically and so now I focus a lot more on communication and how can I communicate it better.

Zehra
I believe a nice remark that Doctor Dougan mentioned is how multidisciplinary work can be intellectually beneficial because it can help explore the same topic from different viewpoints while finding new approaches that could possibly lead to advancements of the same project.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Joanna McDonald
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Joanna McDonald, a recent graduate from Rice University. I will be your host today.

In our new series, we are presenting highlights from short conversations with professionals about what constitutes as beautiful in their line of work. The examples and experiences they share are not only inspiring, but also informative about the interesting projects they work on. So, join us in exploring reflections on beauty spanning from science and engineering to other fields.

In this episode, our guest is Peter Denton, an astrophysicist at the Brookhaven National Labs in New York.

He specializes in particle theory, which means he thinks about ideas about how the universe works, how it might work, how it doesn’t work. He also thinks about dark matter and black holes, but the biggest part of his research is on the elusive ghost like particles called neutrinos.

We had a chance to hear Peter speak on our podcast episode 124 earlier this year. Now he returns to share his thoughts on what he finds beautiful in the world of physics and how he sees creativity in scientific research leading to innovation. Let’s get started.

Peter Denton
I’ve been thinking about, the definition of what beauty is to me in the kind of work that I do. What I like and what I find to be beautiful is when the data and science and nature itself surprises us. Because we have these human ideas, we have these human intuitions we’ve developed over years and decades and even centuries about how the universe seems to fit together. And these provide guiding principles, which are very useful and very helpful. But nature doesn’t often care about these things. The way the world works, however, it works. And our intuition is often incorrect. And I find that when we see something that contradicts that in a very stark way, I find that to be surprising, and we learn something, obviously about the physics itself in question, but about our overall intuition and to me, I think that’s very exciting, and I think that’s a big part of why I like science. I think one can call that beauty.

So, one example that’s related to neutrino physics, that I think is very poignant, is in 1998, so not super long ago, though a little bit before my time. An experiment in Japan discovered that neutrinos have mass. This was surprising to say the least. In fact, I think shocking would be appropriate here.

Neutrinos are fundamental particles. There’re only about 20 different fundamental particles, and neutrinos are three of them. The main thing neutrinos do is that they don’t do very much. They don’t bump into things a lot, they just kind of flow right through stuff. We discovered them a little less than 100 years ago, and measuring their properties ever since that, it seemed that they were massless. And everybody expected them to be massless. People wrote down theories, assuming they’re massless. And this was the default assumption by everybody, forever. And then in 1998, neutrino experimentalist, named Takaaki Kajita, who ended up winning the Nobel Prize for this showed conclusively at very high significance that in fact, neutrinos do have mass and they do this strange thing called oscillations. And people, people were not prepared for this. This is not something that people were anticipating. People weren’t out there saying, oh, you know, the universe would make a lot more sense if only neutrinos had mass. No. People did not see this coming. And you know that surprise, that change, when the whole field has to go back and ask yourself, okay, what are we doing? What is going on? What do we know? And what guiding principles should be used when something comes out of left field that we didn’t expect? I find that to be beautiful. It’s nature telling us that our instincts and our prejudices about how the world should fit together, which are often very helpful in many cases, but sometimes, you know, they lead us to miss things that may be sitting right in front of us.

Joanna
Peter uses the word oscillation, which is not a very common word. Not everybody is familiar with it. So, what is oscillation?

Peter
I glossed over that but that’s a really important part of this whole story. The whole mystery about this thing from 1998 that turned into a massive global effort in the last 25 years, is about internal oscillations. And what was shown in 1998, and what we’ve now seen in many other environments and experiments around the world, is that neutrinos, they evolve in time.

So, if you start with some source of neutrinos, like let’s say, a nuclear reactor or the upper atmosphere, there are neutrinos being produced in all different kinds of environments, and then you measure them. You go down the street, or you go a block later, or you go to another city, and you measure them there. And then what you find is that it’s different. And it’s not just because they’re farther away but they are actually changing. The fact that they are changing over distance tells you that they experience time. The neutrinos know how far they have traveled. And because they know how far they have traveled, combined with Einstein’s theory of special relativity, this tells us that they cannot be massless. Massless particles don’t know how far they travel. They don’t have any internal notion of time. So, like light particles, they’re the same when produced, and when they travel, whether you know, it’s a foot from my laptop to my face, or from the sun, you know, a zillion miles away to the earth, it’s all the same to them. But neutrinos, they can tell. And so, that means they have mass. It’s a very subtle effect but it ends up having pretty big consequences for a lot of things.

I think, to bring this idea of oscillations back to beauty. I think one of many strange things about the fact that neutrinos oscillate is that it doesn’t happen on these human scales. When I say a kilometer, that really is what it is approximately, the measured number for neutrinos produced in a typical source, like a nuclear reactor, this is something where you just have uranium or whatever, just some heavy elements, they’re just producing neutrinos with some properties. And the thing they’re doing happen to kilometer later. And I think what they’re doing is a fundamentally quantum mechanical phenomenon.

Now when we think of quantum mechanics, we think rightly of very small things. Like computer chips in our computers and our phones and, and everywhere. They work because of quantum mechanics. And the chips have to be small, but they also can be. So, it’s a benefit, but it’s also just that’s the way it has to be. And atoms and chemistry, and these things are, of course, also all governed by quantum mechanics. And there’s a scale to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that the effect is only relevant if you’re at some scale. And that’s some tiny number. And if you’re at large things like humans, or tennis balls, or walls, or windows or trees or whatever, then these quantum effects, they average out and they go away. That’s the standard rule of how you separate quantum things, where you have to use a more complicated theory, from classical things where you know, our intuition about balls going up and down, and friction and all this stuff is pretty good. But there’s exceptions to this, and there’s things that break this. And neutrinos is one example of that.

It’s the same small parameters that says that, you know, chemistry is doing its quantum mechanical things on the size of an atom, which is a billion times smaller than human size objects. But the neutrinos do their things on scales of kilometers, or even the size of the Earth. And it’s because there’s a smallest skill for quantum mechanics, but neutrinos, remember, I said, they’re very people thought they’re massless. It turns out, they do have a mass. But we don’t actually know what it is. But we do know that it’s very small in any relative units. And it turns out that, you know, a small number divided by a small number takes you to something that is kind of big-ish. And so, that’s why you have something that would seem like it should be absolutely tiny. You should only see effects related to this kind of stuff in the size of an atom that actually happens between here and like, a block or two over there. And I think that’s so cool to be able to see quantum mechanical phenomena in distances that like you would drive or go for an afternoon walk. Of course, you can’t see the neutrinos with your eyeballs, you have to build a detector to measure them and so on. That’s how real life works but it happens on human macroscopic scales, just due to some sort of cancellation.

Joanna
Where are all the neutrino detection experiments happening? Peter had mentioned a goldmine in South Dakota for the DUNE project he works on. DUNE is Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, detecting neutrinos generated on earth. But there are also neutrinos that originate from the sun and the starts, which are detected elsewhere.

Peter
There’s many neutrino experiments around the world with different goals and different priorities. There’s one at the South Pole called Ice Cube. And this was envisioned by a physicist I know pretty well named Francis Halzen, who was a close colleague of my late PhD advisor, Tom Wyler. And something like 40 years ago, Francis Halzen, wrote a paper that said that if you instrument a cubic kilometer, or like a mile by a mile by a mile of water, and he’s thinking of ocean water at the time, you can detect these astrophysical neutrinos from explosive sources out there in space. And it took decades, it took incredibly hard work, both in terms of designing and construction and obviously getting the funds in place for this to happen. But he and a team of three or 400 scientists from around the world have constructed this. They decided to do it the South Pole for various reasons, and it has worked out very well for them.

So, the South Pole is inhospitable. It’s not a pleasant place. I’ve never been, but I have colleagues who have been there. It’s cold. It’s remote. It’s desolate. It is sunny for six months, and then it is nighttime for six months. At nighttime there’s no flights in or out. The people there are locked in. But they’ve got doctors and chefs. Hopefully everything goes well for them every winter over there.

So, Antarctica is a continent. There’s land underneath it. But there are two and a half kilometers of ice, which is just insanely tall amount of ice stacked on top of it. So, they drilled holes to the bottom. By drilled, I mean, they shot hot water, and the water melts the ice, and then they have holes, that’s just water, then they dump in a bunch of detectors. And these detectors are kind of the sizes of basketballs with a bunch of electronics and sensors and stuff on some chain of cables. And they dug like 86 of these holes, and they dropped them in all the way to the bottom. So, the bottom one kilometer out of that two and a half kilometers or so is instrumented with detectors. And they’ve been running successfully for more than 10 years, measuring neutrinos from outer space in extreme explosive events. So, when stars explode, or when galaxies start spewing out stuff, this will create all kinds of particles including neutrinos. And they’ll make it through to the earth. And Ice Cube is sitting there waiting for them to come. And they have measured them. And people are starting to use this to differentiate and understand what these extreme sources are in the universe, which I think is pretty exciting.

Joanna
Exploration of neutrinos appear to be a form of underground science.

Peter
We build a lot of our things underground. As I mentioned, DUNE is in a goldmine. So, it’s put there looking for very rare neutrino interactions with lots of other stuff. So, you want to shield all that other stuff and there’s no substitute for just rock. And putting rock on top of something is not so doable. But instead, it’s much better just go under the earth. And it’s much better to use a hole that somebody else has dug and digging your own a hole. So typically, it’s gold mines, nickel mines, things like this.

And of course, you know, famously in South Dakota, there is a pretty huge gold find there that you know, really shaped figuratively and literally, the area and dominated the culture and dominated all kinds of things for a century or more. And you know, people extract gold for any number of reasons, but mainly to get rich.

Now, we are converting these into particle detectors for neutrino experiments and also looking for trying to understand the particle nature of dark matter. And the fact is, this is going on around the world. And I think this is really cool. That people, you know, were financially motivated to dig really deep holes looking for precious metals. And at some point, it runs out either there’s, there’s no more gold, or the amount of gold is so little compared to the price of gold and whatever, and the mines eventually start to shut down. And physicists are usually like waiting, knocking on the door, like, please, please let us in. Once you guys are done, we want to take over the mine and move in and do this.

This recently happened in Australia within a pretty deep mine they had there. There’s a deep mine in China that’s being used for this, and several across the U.S. and Canada and elsewhere.

So, we put these detectors down there. In the mine in South Dakota, where they’re building DUNE right now. There have been experiments there since the since the 60s. In some parts of the mine that were unused once they dug out a region, and then they were done looking for gold there. And this is continuing on. I think it’s very cool. I think it’s quite beautiful to connect something that is so in some sense materialistic or capitalistic or about you know, profit driven, and then transitioning the same facility, and really also, many the same people in the town working there who are working to dig for gold are now you know, enlarging the caverns and adjusting the infrastructure needs for a particle physics experiment, which is a very different goals, a very different objective. It’s about just understanding the way the world works. It’s just such a stark contrast in some ways.

It’s a tiny mining town. Less than a 1000 people live there, who are working on the mine now, but also many of them were working on the mine in the days when it was a gold mine. This is their world and they’re now transitioning, in some sense, to physics. Even if they’re doing the same work they’ve always been doing, the goal and the objectives are different. And we think it’s important for the people working on it to understand why we are doing this, why are we digging these big holes in the ground? Why are we installing this sophisticated equipment in this deep underground location? What do we benefit from that? I think that this outreach like this podcast today, but also with going out and finding people. There’s pub talks where, you know, you find people in a bar, and you get a certain kind of audience for that or you go to the school and you get a different audience for that. I think that’s a very important part of science. And I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s a wonderful, it’s a nice way to connect, what the actual objectives are with people doing frankly, a lot of the hardest work.

Joanna
It’s a unique form of repurposing operations that not only expands scientific exploration but also create jobs in rural America. How well are these efforts received by the locals? Well, Peter speaks about the origins of the gold mines when they were first established, compared to the efforts in place today.

Peter
Digging this gold mine was not seen well by the people who lived there, at least the indigenous people. The Lakota, and Nakota and the Dakota tribes primarily. And the idea of scarring the earth, this land there is beautiful. It’s also one of the prettiest places I’ve been in the US. And, you know, it’s, they cut a huge gouge out of basically a mountain there, that’s gone forever. The rocks are strewn about, and the gold is obviously gone.

People came in and scoured their land, and we can’t fix that. But there’s been a number of efforts in the physics community when this has been going on to reach out and connect with these people and have a conversation. We’re interested in doing this, how do you feel about this, and it’s this okay? The responses that at least I’ve heard, and I cannot say that this is, you know, representative of everyone, but is things like, it’s it is different when it’s trying to understand nature than it is when it’s trying to make somebody rich. And that is something that they seem to feel as a different thing.

And the other thing is that some of the caverns have to be enlarged for these experiments, so they spent years digging out rock and they actually finished about a year ago, but the rock isn’t being transported somewhere else. It’s not being quarried and sold off or anything like that. It’s actually going to fill in, in some sense part of the, what’s called the open cut the big gouge out of the mountain, so it’s all staying. So, the rock is staying there, and the physics community went to great lengths to ensure that. When we need to build an experiment that is large and interacts with the land and community in a non-trivial way, we have to be cautious about to ensure that the beauty of the results are shared with everybody, and also that we’re not destroying any existing beauty that we do or maybe even don’t appreciate, but that other people do. So, this is something that we think about a fair bit.

Joanna
What is the role of creativity in scientific endeavors?

Peter
I think art and research are really very similar. Obviously, they’re portrayed as being as this whole left brain, right brain narrative, which I think is people take way too seriously. But they’re really very similar. And one thing that is certainly true in art, for my limited understanding is that pushing the envelope. I mean if you paint in the same way as Monet, or as Van Gogh, like, that’s obviously technically a fantastic achievement, but it’s not innovative. Right? You’re never going to be famous for doing something a similar style as someone else.

You know, I don’t know, what’s interesting art. I guess that’s for society to decide, but it’s innovating, it’s doing something that people haven’t done. And of course, it’s reflecting the modern age in terms of not only the culture, and the community and society, and what’s going on in the world, but also the technology and what is available and what can be done. Of course, you know, art now includes television, and movies and animated things that were not available, 20, 30, or 100 years ago. I think that’s great. And that’s wonderful.

But science is very similar, right? Doing things that are the same thing as what people have done in the past, is not really scientific research. That’s like a homework problem. So, if you’re building an experiment, or you’re doing a calculation, that’s already been done, obviously, it’s gonna be a good exercise to see if you know what you’re doing, and if you have the skills to do it, but at the end of the day, science is about doing things that no one has ever done before. And every single thing that is done is things that no one had done before. And the same way that, you know, novel art, if you want to be successful as an artist, you cannot just be out there, tracing over or using the same style as someone before, you have to create something new, something beyond.

It’s the same in physics, you have to create some new idea, and it could be new experimental technique, it could be a new idea for how the universe fits together, or, you know, some combination of the two, that is to say some way to test some new idea. And this is essential to everything is this creativity, this looking at this, and this can come from, you know, new technology, you know, we look to see what kinds of new materials are available for detecting things, and so on. Usually physicists are developing new technologies, even before they hit the commercial market. The top physicists, it’s not necessarily about being able to calculate the best and running the computer the best or doing the biggest, most sophisticated formula or something like that. It’s about having a completely novel idea about saying, let’s do this thing that nobody ever thought of before, but can be really impactful. And that’s what makes a big difference.

So I think in that way, and this notion of the role of creativity, and also, you know, creativity, combined with knowing what everybody else has done, you have to know what’s been done in the past before you can say that what you’re doing is new, and then generating a new idea out of nothing out of talking to people out of listening to what other people have to say reading things. This is exactly the same thing that painters do, the composers do, the novelists do. You have you know what everybody else has done and then do something that’s nothing like that. I think that’s an obvious connection to beauty that it’s about innovation and creating new ideas. And I often think about how this is similar to composing a symphony or improvising a solo or something like that.

Joanna
What’s interesting about what Peter is saying about the role of creativity in scientific or artistic endeavors is that it sounds similar to a piece of advice given to me by a music professor while I was still a music composition major as an undergrad at Rice University. And what he said went something along the lines of this, it’s not fair to put the expectation on yourself to completely reinvent the wheel every time you sit down to write a piece of music. Instead, seek and search out ways to create new variations or innovations or hybrids of materials that you already know exist.

[music]

Longitude

This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Tony Zhou
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi. I’m Tony Zhou, and I will be your host today.

In this series, we explore the concept of beauty within our work, spanning disciplines from science and engineering to various other fields. When we describe something as beautiful, it often reflects our deep appreciation and value for it.

In this episode, our guest Brett Phaneuf is the founder and chief executive of the Submergence Group and M Subs; sister companies that build submarines and autonomous vessels for marine exploration around the globe.

I had a chance to speak with Brett in 2021 for our podcast episodes 79 and 80 about the Mayflower Autonomous Ship. At the time they were about to launch the Mayflower from the UK for its journey across the Atlantic, opening a new era for autonomous ships in ocean research.

Brett returns with a few updates on the Mayflower before sharing his thoughts on how beauty influences engineering.  Let’s get started.

Brett Phaneuf
Well, Mayflower made it across in 2022 finally, and she went to via the Azores through Halifax, to Plymouth. And she’s in a shipyard right now we’re doing a lot of work with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. And there, we refit her last summer and refreshed all her software and hardware and instruments. And she’s going back to sea in about a month actually, and she’ll work, hopefully, consistently now in the North Atlantic with Woods Hole and other organizations doing environmental and climate science for the next 5 – 10 years. And we’re actually building a dozen new, fully autonomous, 12-meter vessels slightly different than Mayflower, but informed by her work. And those will start launching this summer, and they’re specifically for oceanographic research and exploration.

And then next summer, we are embarking on a mission, that you’ll be the first to hear about it outside our little clique of people called Challenger 25. And it’s more or less the 150th anniversary of the Challenger expedition, which I’m sure you know, was the first early oceanographic research exploration mission launched by the British. And it discovered vast amounts about our oceans, that we’re still learning from even today. And so, we’re going to go to all the Challenger locations in the North Atlantic and redeploy instruments and see what kind of comparative analysis we can do. So, we’ve got some interesting stuff on the horizon.

Tony
Next, Brett describes the role of beauty in engineering and how it differs from science. We explore how beauty can arise from the tension between form and function, particularly through the example of autonomous vessel design, which prioritizes stability, efficiency, and functionality.

Brett
So, what’s the role of beauty in engineering? I guess I should say that I see engineering sort of separate from science in a way. So, one is applied. And the other is sort of, I guess, it’s not the right word, but I’ll say esoteric, right. But from an engineering perspective, I see beauty in the tension between form and function. So, I like the idea that highly functional things tend to be beautiful. But not because they conform to any specific agreed set of beauty standards, which of course, evolve anyway, and it’s such a hard thing to put your thumb on. So, I think that I always see tension between function and form and purely functional things have a unique beauty. And maybe that’s the answer is there’s lots of different kinds of beauty. Right?

We could look at Mayflower. So, when you start designing autonomous vessels, you realize very quickly that the vast majority of the things you design, when you build a ship, are human centric, right? How do we keep people alive in a hostile environment, and I suppose it’s the same for spacecraft or aircraft although they have different constraints. And then when you start to remove those things, you start to very quickly move to it’s a class of vehicles that tend to be long and thin and multi hauled because you start taking out things and you say, oh, no, I have lots of displacement. And it’s sort of lots of empty void. And I can’t just put fuel in there, it won’t be very efficient. And then I’m going to have to move all this water around to maintain my stability, and then Oh but now it’s, it’s very thin, and it’s very unstable so I’m going to give it outriggers. That’s why a lot of autonomous vessels are catamarans or trimarans because you’re driven down this path of a function, the functionality. There really is a strong function or a component that’s function driven for things like Mayflower. And of course, it might be the medium, I mean the ocean dictates a great deal of how things have to be shaped.

Tony
Next, you’ll hear a fascinating exploration of the aesthetics and functionality of engineering design. Brett discusses being introduced to the idea of allometry through the books of American biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It’s a glimpse into the mind of an engineer who battles with the constraint of physics at each stage of product design and development.

Brett
I read a book many, many years ago, it was a book by Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist who wrote several really innumerable brilliant books about evolution and statistics. He wrote a brilliant a statistical analysis of the Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak that he used as a teaching tool for statistical analysis of complex systems. It’s unbelievably brilliant. And he died some years ago, but he introduced me to the idea of the principle of allometry. It’s the relationship of a thing’s size to its form. And I guess the easiest way it was described by him, and I’m paraphrasing was that, given all the necessary constraints, an elephant is, can only be elephant shaped, a mammal that had to live in that environment and be of a certain size and fulfill the requirements of an elephant, whatever those might be, could only be like an elephant. It couldn’t be something else. It couldn’t be shaped like another animal. And so, I often think about whether that’s at play when we think about functionality, and beauty.

Tony
Brett explains the challenges of biomimicry in engineering design, highlighting how machines often fall short of mimicking nature’s efficiency. He shares an intriguing anecdote about a Baptist minister’s unique perspective on heaven to illustrate the functional purpose of human bodies.

Brett
You know, nature is a really good engineer, to say the things we design, are a pale comparison, is giving us too much credit. So, we tend not to be bioinspired, although there’s a whole area of research around bioinspiration. When you build a machine, it’s hard to do what’s called biomimicry with a machine and have it be effective. Because the thing itself is not a biological organism. It’s a machine. And it goes a little bit to what I was saying I guess, about allometry.

I had a fellowship many, many years ago, that supported international travel for grad students and once a month, they had guest speakers come in, and probably the most interesting guest speaker we had was a Baptist minister, which always surprised me, I still think about it today. He was really remarkable and very interesting. And he talked a lot about people’s idea of heaven, which I think is, I guess, a parallel or metaphor for what we’re talking about. This idea of perfection and eternal life and this idea of heaven. And for some reason, people saw themselves as people in some, you know, fluffy, clouded place with beautiful hills and valleys and rivers and anything you could imagine everybody you ever knew or loved, everything was there for you, but you were a person, a human. And he always thought that was strange. He said, you know, because heaven, by definition in his mind was the place least like where we are now. And that the most useless thing to have in a place that was least like where we are now would be a human body. And I always thought about that in terms of design, too. Which is why we don’t go for biomimicry because of the things we build, we’re not biological. That’s weird to it’s a conundrum, right? That biological beings create digital computers to try to approximate a human mind, or to build a device that mimics a biological propulsion like a fin on a fish. And it does it very badly, in all ways by comparison. And yet, it seems like we’re compelled to try to do this. And it’s also forever out of reach. But the beauty in this scenario is in the pursuit, I guess.

And I guess it’s the same argument about form and function. I don’t know how to resolve it. But I think about all this when we start sketching up things that we design, because there is something about, I can’t tell if the thing is beautiful, because it’s highly functional, or it’s highly functional, because it’s beautiful, or both. Because I don’t know where we start from, I’d like to think I start from a functional perspective.

Tony
In our next clip, Brett and I discuss how education, mentorship, and failure can nurture creativity and shape an aesthetic eye.

I think in order to become creative, or to develop an aesthetic eye, I think a person has to go through a period of time where the things that they’re doing don’t seem creative and seem maybe a bit formal and oftentimes, even boring. But that’s kind of the time where you’re like, in the lab, forging your sword and your technique.

Brett

Also, you know, one of the other things that maybe we think about, beauty is kind of an odd thing is, you know, when we think about younger people in engineering and their perception of beautiful, what’s beautiful, and how they’ve been taught, or not to appreciate beauty, would come into the ability to fail. I mean, sounds cliche, I know that going out and trying things and failing, helps you sort of understand what works and what doesn’t. And understanding fundamentally, you know, having a good education, a broad education, so you can understand why it happened, or why it failed. And you can adjust from there. When you get to that point that you can design something effectively, that’s very beautiful.

And there’s something beautiful about the process, too. I know I’ve said that I think at the beginning of that discussion, I mean, I don’t create things. I suppose my role is, I try to orchestrate the thing that I want to happen into being. But I don’t have the skill set to design the pressure vessel or do the stress analysis on the structure or do the power and propulsion calculation or design the micro electronic circuit that’s going to control a motor or write all the software. I mean, I know a little about a lot of different things and I’ve done lots of things in my life, but my role is in orchestration. And so, where I derive the satisfaction is when the things come into being.

I describe the process often as, you know, you’re given a box of puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle. And it’s comprised of pieces from a dozen other puzzles, there are no corners and no edge pieces, and there is no picture to guide you. You have to make any coherent picture that approximates the result you desired from the components that you have. And I sort of think of my job that way, working with all the different people, the personalities, and the skills and talents that they possess, to drive to an outcome. I don’t mean to say what I do is beautiful but there’s a great deal of satisfaction in participating in that way, in orchestrating an engineering outcome that is highly functional, but also beautiful.

Tony
Brett discusses balancing individual responsibility with collaborative efforts. He highlights the challenges of encouraging younger team members to take ownership and not fear failure, emphasizing the need for a supportive environment where creativity and accountability can coexist. It’s an insightful look at managing diverse personalities and promoting effective leadership throughout innovative projects.

Brett
I take a different leadership style. So, I don’t expect perfection. I’m okay with things being a little sloppy, because what we do is prototyping largely, and so it’s highly creative. We rarely make the same thing two or three times. And so, it’s a bit different. If I was making widgets, you know, cranking out a million of them, it’d be different. But one of the problems that we have now, with this, where we’re running into it, and where we’re really spending a lot of effort is a lot of the younger people have, because there’s generally so dependent on the technological aspects of their work, and a lot of the projects that they do in engineering tend to be collaborative now. Whereas somebody in my generation was looking for the responsibility to lead, what I find now is a lot of the people want to be in the lead but want collective responsibility. They don’t want to be seen to have failed. And so, we’re starting to spend a lot more time with people talking about leadership and failure, and responsibility, how authority and responsibility go hand in hand. And that no decision is a decision, and generally the worst one to not act. And that it’s okay, if you don’t get it right now, if you don’t get it right over and over and over again, then we have to start asking, well, why are they not getting it right? But generally, the thing we’re running up against now is people don’t want to take on tasks if they think they might not get it right and will be blamed. So, setting an environment forward now with this added complexity around sort of collective responsibility and say, no, we don’t want that we want you to be responsible and we want you to take ownership, and we want you to take authority. You, singular you. And you to lead your team, but not demand perfection and that’s not even the problem. It’s just a lot of people really haven’t been told that they didn’t do a good job or that somebody didn’t like something and I’m pretty forthright, but you do have to be a lot more careful but considered with your words. And that’s a real challenge. So, creating a space where people can be creative and collaborate and also individually excel and take responsibility – it’s challenging.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Joanna McDonald
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you. My name is Joanna, and I’m joined here today with Helen and Lipi, and today we’re going to be giving you tidbits from our newest podcast series that focuses on beauty. For this series, we interviewed engineers, scientists and others on their thoughts on what they found beautiful in their field of work. So, what we’re going to do is I’m going to allow my co-hosts to introduce themselves and then also introduce the guests that they helped co-produce on their podcast episodes. Helen, Let’s start with you.

Helen Citino
Hi, I’m Helen, and I’m a sophomore here at Rice University, studying religion and evolutionary biology. My two guests for today are Dr Luay Nakhleh who’s the Dean of Engineering at Rice, who specializes in computer science and bioinformatics, and Brandon Dugan, who’s a professor of Geoscience at Colorado Mines University.

Lipi Gandhi
Hi, I’m Lipi. I’m a first year MBA student at Jones Graduate School of Business, and the guests that I helped co-produce, as well as presenting today, are Brett Phaneuf, who is the CEO of Submergence group, working in the field of engineering submersibles used in ocean research. Kerim Miskavi, who is the CEO, architect, and founder of MAS studios, and Viren Desai, who is the founder of OptiQuant analytics and investment risk management.

Joanna
Great. And I’m going to be presenting Linda Fries, who’s a geoscientist here at Rice, and Peter Denton, who is an astrophysicist. So now that we know who our co-hosts are and the names of our guests, let’s go into the specifics of what these guests found beautiful in their lines of work.

Joanna
So, starting with Linda, who’s the geoscientist at Rice, she was struck with a sense of awe when she first saw chondrules in the meteorite under a microscope for the first time. These chondrules are very colorful. They’re different shapes and sizes, and no two chondrules are the same. And this, to her, was very beautiful. And for Peter Denton, who is the astrophysicist in his podcast episode, he talks about how neutrinos, which are very small particles, for many years in the field of physics, were considered massless, and then 1998 a Japanese experimentalist went and researched neutrinos and found that they did indeed have mass. And this fact actually rocked the physics world and opened up huge fields of research and discovery. And to Peter, this was beautiful, because aspects in physics and nature itself could surprise those who study them and show them something new. So now, Helen, would you tell us what guests found beautiful in their lines of work?

Helen
Sure. So, in Dr Nakhleh’s podcast, he talks about the elegance of formulation and using the right conversions between professional languages to accurately describe a problem. So his other passion is in evolutionary biology. But he approaches problems in evolutionary biology from a computer science solving perspective. He takes the mess of biology, as he calls it, and orders that into precise mathematical formulation. And he finds beauty in this creativity of translation and taking complex problems and distilling them into simple input output problems. And Professor Dugan finds beauty in the same ways. He takes natural systems and explains them through elegant mathematical equations. So, what he does is he understands earth systems through physics. And right now, he is looking at why different freshwater systems exist beneath the ocean. This is an unexplainable phenomenon that he is able to simplify and understand through math, and he finds this beauty in simplification of complexity. What about your guests, Lipi?

Lipi
So from my guest, starting with Brett Phaneuf, he looks at beauty from an engineering perspective. He specifically finds it between the tension that is between form and function, and he believes that it is the failures that make improving the design and the process of finding beauty to materialize it through failures. Kerim Miskavi also has a very similar way of looking at beauty, which is through the process and how before a building comes to life, there are 1000s of decisions that needs to be taken, making process central and influencing how the outcome would be, while Viren Desai discovered beauty in making the processes more efficient. Again, for him, it was through iterative process of asking questions which helped him meet the connections between mathematics, programming as well as markets, simplifying risk management.

Joanna
Thanks, Helen and Lipi, for sharing what our guests found beautiful in their podcast episodes. So now we’re going to take some time to share what we personally find beautiful in our own fields at work. So for me as a composer and musician, what I find beautiful in my line of work is sound and the potential of sound. So as a composer, when I hear a sound, I don’t just hear the noise of it. I hear the potential of what it could be if I could take it and shape it and put it into a piece of music. What about for you, Helen?

Helen
So, like Dr. Nakhleh, I’m interested in evolutionary biology. However, my conception of beauty is the opposite of my guest. I find the beauty in the complexity of these miraculous natural systems. Over the summer, I worked for a sea turtle conservation and research program, and I learned that when baby sea turtles hatch from their eggs and they’re walking down the beach into the ocean, they are imprinting on the geomagnetic field under the sand to create a specific GPS location that they store in their brain for 25 years, and then 25 years later, they come back to this same place that they hatched from to lay their eggs again. And even though sea turtles have a one in 1000 survival rate, they have outlasted the dinosaurs and will most likely outlast us because of these innate survival systems that they have that are inexplicably complex and an otherwise primitive creature, and I find that very beautiful. What about you, Lipi?

Lipi
Thank you, Helen, that’s a beautiful way to look at beauty. For me, just like our guest, Viren Desai, I find beauty an interaction of things which otherwise seem unrelated. As an economics undergrad, I enjoy juxtaposing economics concept and things like dating and attaining a spiritual path. Then after I started working in the marketing field, it was interesting to see how seamlessly behavioral economics were used with brand communication, and eventually changes the way people behave. Reaching that outcome is always a very long iterative process though. Currently, as a business student, I’m trying to understand how the creative process of artists can be incorporated with corporate teams to create more value for the business and its communities.

Joanna
Thank you, Helen and Lipi, for sharing your thoughts on what you think is beautiful and thank you for joining us today. Stay tuned for this podcast series release on beauty and to hear more episodes from us, check out our website, Longitude.site.

This podcast is produced by a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.