My daughter Juliette has had 2 complete sets of foam letters and numbers in her bath for 3 years. She is in kindergarten so has progressed significantly as a reader and writer. The letters were used for pure abstraction last year. Earlier this year she went through a period of using them as tools for vocabulary. Now she has inventively moved them back to artistic and mathematical expression. First it was interesting groupings, and patterns, and as of last night she took the colored foam and arranged them as fascinating abstract sculpture, somehow without knowingly embracing the lessons off both Dadaism and abstract expressionism. Of course I likely exaggerate the import of the art itself, but the mental process of the 3 years to come to the formation of these sculptures is truly interesting to me, and when I consider it, not different at all than most things that I do unconsciously.
It occurred to me that there is something very much like foam letters in my life, and I am sorry if this thing is even less interesting than the letters. That is one of the only things in science that I think I know a lot about, dispersion of nanofillers in a rubber matrix. Not surprisingly I didn’t start out life with the goal of being an expert in this. In fact I still don’t really care that I am, except that by becoming proficient in something, it allowed me to see beyond the traditional uses of it. The measurement and comprehension of my subject is something that I started work on nearly 12 years ago, when my family business, Tech Pro, acquired a product called the disperGRADER from a Swedish firm called OptiGrade. Since my Dad and others at our company had a much better grasp of the rest of the instruments that Tech Pro made than I did, I spent most of my time trying to be the expert on this one. That time of my life was very much like Juliette with the foam before she could read at all. She was interested, and somehow could experiment with shape, but did not understand any symbolic meaning behind them. The disperGRADER is at first glance a simple instrument. It is a microscope that takes images of cut filled rubber samples, and does analysis on them. Of course to create something like this is not so simple, and now that I have worked in the microscope business I certainly give Optigrade a lot of credit. Still, the science seemed straight forward, yet the more I dug into it, the more I realized that there was still a lot to be learned about the way that particles behave in polymers, and there were not many people in the world working on these problems. Though this may sound boring, it wasn’t at all. It required me to learn quantum physics, and optics, and a number of other fascinating subjects. In a way it pushed me into grad school to get my Ph.D. because I wanted and needed to learn more. This was not so different than Juliette learning to use the symbols for what they were intended for. She knew how to create a word, and I knew what a filler aggregate was, and how to image it. Yet we both had not yet made a connection from these objects and the literal uses to more advanced thinking. For me it occurred because I actually did start to know enough about the basics of the subject. Actually that is not true, as I still have a lot more to learn, so it would be more accurate to say that I had started to see beyond the basics of the subject. Likewise Juliette can’t read Proust yet, but she is fairly proficient in foam letter words. So I took the experience with dispersion and developed an algorithm for a new microscope. This algorithm seemed like a eureka moment but was not. The entire time I had worked on imaging and filler dispersion I knew that if better tools existed, more could be known. I just didn’t know that I was seeking that solution. Juliette's sculptures to me are much the same. An evolution and a revelation, and to stick with tradition I have encouraged her to jump out of the bath and run around screaming Eureka.
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