Light Truth and Illusion

The talk I gave yesterday at the MPA Nanotech conference had plenty of normal attributes to criticize and then even some more. Mainly I was speaking about regenerative medicine, which is something I didn’t even know existed last year at this time. I admitted this the second I started talking as way to disarm the attendees from shooting it back at me later. I talked about what I know with some authority. When I spoke about new topics I became like a child discovering the wonders of the sea his first time at the beach. In this case those are new body parts made of silly putty, which I must admit sounds even more childish than I mean it to. When questions came around  I got one which was completely different, and to me must have come out of a philosophical wing of the nanotech community that I didn’t know of. The question surrounds some images I had taken at high resolution of the surface of a pig’s stomach called ECM, and of a piece of rubber (this is the silly putty). These are two kinds of scaffolds that can be used to regenerate organs. The man, who I later learned was not a philosopher at all but rather a material scientist at a Polish technical university, asked me “how do you know those images are real?” I was certain that this was a language issue, so I spoke slowly to him in a condescending way that I  try to avoid in complicated technical talks with people who come from different linguistic origins. I told him that I used a highly repeatable microscope and special image recognition software that my company actually made, and that indeed I could assure him that the images were in fact real. That wasn’t the question he was asking exactly however. He wanted to know how I could trust imaging for evaluating nanoporosity, which was what I was showing. This was far deeper, and I became defensive, telling him with even more superiority than before that light had been well established for a long time as a reality of physics. “But they are just grey pixel values. You should use other methods such as absorption of nanoparticles to verify your findings” he told me. The fight went on for some time with the rest of the room joining the debate with a surprising number, I thought, agreeing with the Polish scientist. I had truly entered a debate about what type of physics was more real. Was a photon less real than a carbon particle? Were pixels more removed from direct observation than weight measurements after absorbing nanoparticles? I didn’t agree with his argument, but appreciated it all the same.

Right after I sat down from the debate I started thinking about something my wife Marine had shown me. She is a speech and language pathologist. She showed me an example of something called the McGurk effect. (see video below)This is an illusion of sorts. A man repeats a sound and we watch him. We then see him with a different mouth movement than the word uses. We hear a change in sound, even though he has not changed the sound at all.  This is because our visual sensation over powers our auditory sensation. This is verified when we close our eyes, and the sounds are clearly perceived as being the same. Marine works with children with autism and told me that with autism the McGurk effect is not always present, which is a fascinating look at the symptoms of the different neural structures of people.

So what does the McGurk effect have to do with my experience at the conference? Maybe nothing. Maybe it is as simple as Polish material scientists view the world differently than American physicists. That however is only part of it. It is true that different disciplines in science see things differently. We are trained differently and it makes us skeptical of other approaches. Looking at it this way both he and I were objectively wrong. We should have realized that it was just a matter of perception. From another perceptive however it could be like the other aspect of the McGurk effect, and that is not the difference between autistic and non-autistic observation, but rather the accuracy of the autistic observation. It is likely that the McGurk effect points to an important survival skill. Perhaps vision is a more urgent sense to rely on. What the McGurk effect shows however is that the non-autistic sense is not as accurate as the autistic perception. So both views of the world have a subjective truth, but only the autistic view is actually the objective truth.

So what about using microscopes with sensors and image processing rather than weighing nanoparticles after absorption? Is one more objectively real than the other? Perhaps the Polish scientist is right in one way. We are programming our computers and designing our sensors with our human minds. These are the same minds that survive well due to the misinformation as shown in the McGurk effect. But science is more of an autistic style endeavor in some respects. We avoid human variability whenever possible in order to see what is really going on. The answer still remains unclear to me however. When working in domains such as the nanoscale, we are forced to create information using algorithms. We make an artificial vision of the invisible. We use computers to model what we expect is happening on a scale we can see with our eyes. When creating these models, more and more we use a form of AI which tries to learn as we do, taking into account variability and disregarding what is not important. In essence we are programing a McGurk effect style response into our machines, and those machines then tell us about a reality which is similar to the subjective one we experience. We don’t often even admit to ourselves that this is what we are doing, but it really is. Maybe this is the point of the Polish scientist, but if it was he is also missing the McGurk style effect in his own measurements which are also designed by humans, and involve several steps of extrapolation where we are likely blinded by our own errors the way that we are when viewing McGurk.

All of this leads to an important point though. Science must aim to observe as independently as possible, or when not, to acknowledge what it is doing. Bio mimicry for example is a technological human activity which embraces and acknowledges perception as the basis for creating AI. The problem is that we remain stuck in a loop of thought on this topic. We have our always compensating brains deciding what to do, even when we allow our machines to learn.

Nanotech by the Sea

For father’s day my seven year old gave me a great gift, which is the gift to explore within the borders of her creation. That sounds a bit grand for what it was, which was ten pieces of pure white paper, with borders that included two styles of drawings, one of a microscope, and the other of wrapped candy. They were tied in string. She said that I could: 1. Draw abstracts, 2 Write poems, 3. Invent things, by which she mean do patent drawings, like the ones on my office wall. She understood me so well. These three would be hard to choose from, and together they make up elements of me, even to the point by which my own little girl would understand. She left me with an impossible choice, so like in life I will fill those pages with a mixture of her three suggestions.

Today I am in Alvor Portugal for a very academic conference on Nanotechology called the MPA, which like so many European organized conferences happens in one of the most beautiful settings imaginable. I even went to a tire conference in Cannes, France one time, which shows just how committed Europeans are to scenic locations for meetings. This always tests the attendees’ dedication to the topic at hand, as the sea and sangria wait just outside of the conference room walls. Today though the blend of international and interdisciplinary speakers kept me in that windowless room for 8 hours, as talks about everything nanotechnology related were discussed and debated.

Nanotechnology attracts and requires a diversity of expertise not usually present at academic conferences. This is obvious when a physicist (myself for instance) presents a paper, and the chemists and biologists react strongly with other approaches. This can seem confrontational, but for me it is a wonderful relief. So many of my efforts to get people of difference backgrounds talking ends so politely that it becomes clear to me that despite mutual respect no new science will emerge, as the languages spoken are just too different. Here, and in nanotechnology in general, there is a forced tension as none of us will succeed without the other.

This struggle of ideas and focus is not just among departments, countries and companies in nanotechnology, but for us technologists working in this field it can often be like the father’s day present my daughter gave me. It can have defined borders with empty pages that need filling in.  What to choose from to create is infinitely large. Today I spoke about regenerative medicine. Tomorrow I will work on semiconductors. The schizophrenic nature of this requires a different sort of discipline that is more associated with movie making than with science. A filmmaker must master cinematography, editing and acting, while a nanotechnologist must master biology, chemistry and physics. Our goal is to become auteurs of the molecular.

So tonight I will write of the sea and sole in verse, draw fullerenes and nano silver particles interacting in strange abstract forms, and claim an idea for a new material patent on those candy and microscope bordered pages. All the while I will recognize that creating a future of technological progress requires long conferences, the sun and some encouragement from my little girl.

Evolving Archimedes

There are moments in parenting that are not so different than moments in science; where a eureka type moment is really just an incremental progression of previous experiments, but feels all the same like a momentary revelation. Actually it is not so much parenting, but observing my children when this happens. I am an inactive guest at the museum of discovery.

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.