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.