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.

Flying with Ray

I have been listening to a lot of NPR over the last few days since I have been driving so much to visit customers. I should be forced to do this more often (as I am sure I will be), as I get to catch up on all of those things I have become uninterested in due to time, and annoyance, such as politics. I was recently at book party with a friend who is an astrophysicist, and the writer of the book was speaking about the political landscape during this pre-presidential election period. This friend seemed to not be paying much attention. I asked her what she thought about the writer’s ideas, to which she responded “Oh I am sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. I am not so interested in local politics, and by local I mean the earth.” She should coin this quote, but I will leave it to her to accept or deny. I loved this, and actually I have always obsessed over politics, but truthfully without much real interest, just frustration, so I have turned to other things to occupy my obsessions. So, most of NPR was politics, but there was something that happened yesterday that extended beyond the local of my physicist friend, and that is the death of Ray Bradbury, who while of this planet was a sci-fi writer that looked far  beyond.  There was a great quote that someone mentioned of Bradbury’s which may be the best thing I heard all day. Once Bradbury was asked about how to do something really important, and he said “jump off of a high cliff, then build your wings on the way down.” It gave me a bit of a chill because it struck me not as a poetic piece of advice from of writer, but also something that we have been living with our company Nanotronics Imaging. We took a leap about a year ago, and are flying now, though perhaps not as high as we would like yet. This seems like obvious advice for an entrepreneur, and it is one that is getting popular with Eric Ries's ideas on the Lean Start-up, but traditionally this not how things have been done. Usually a product is built, refined and released. We don’t do things that way. We jump, and build wings. This means that we partner with customer, give them what we have and improve on that daily. It means constant iterations. It means improving until we have the best products on the market, and then still not being happy until we are better.. This is constant beta mode, agile development, but as Bradbury points out it also involves many moments of free-fall, which we all are in from time to time (ok almost daily).

So, this is just a short thank you to the now late Bradbury for not only creating great fiction, but also entering into the realm of business inspiration for me. Though he considered himself a writer of fantasy, his ideas are becoming scientific reality thanks to his own jumping, and flying.

The Skeptical Anarchist

If I look over my blogs and Facebook posts, I realize that two topics tend to come up more often than others: superstition and free expression. Though I have made attempts to connect a number of ideas together in the past, I think I have failed to unite these two accurately, mainly because I think that there are enough internal contradictions that I am disposed to what I condemn; belief. The belief I am speaking of is the creation of order through chaos. The music I like, and play is free, even anarchistic in form. There is very little applied structure, yet when analyzed later by critics, musicians and listeners of any kind cohesion can be found, even if that unity wasn’t intended. This happens all of the time to me. I speak with a musician, and compliment them on the use of spectral dissonance through harmonic clustering, or something pretentious like that, only to hear “we were just jamming at midnight.” Now that doesn’t make my analysis wrong, or the intent wrong, but it does suggest that I am deeply involved in trying to mentally connect dots, even though the dots were actually laid out randomly.

 The wonderful documentary film “Between The Folds” http://www.greenfusefilms.com/, explores a world of extremely serious origami artists and scientists, which I had no idea existed. This group includes a range of people, from the compulsive paper folder who creates life like animals with over 1000 folds, to an MIT mathematician who uses origami techniques to solve some of math’s most difficult questions to a group of style improvisers of the form, which the film calls The Anarchists. The absolutely contradictory styles of the Mathematician and the Anarchists especially appeals to me. The Mathematician concentrates on the perfection of each fold in relation to consecutive folds. He uses computer models to enhance this. While this may seem crazy, in doing so he was able to not only solve some esoteric mathematics theories, but even practical ones, like the most efficient way to fold an airbag for car safety. The Anarchists by contrast bunched and folded paper in completely random chaotic ways. It is the free jazz of origami, and like free jazz they create something that is both highly interesting, and also complex when analyzed. The forms they create may or may not resemble figures, but they do have inherently enlightening results at their best. The Anarchists even perform improvised experiments on the completed forms, like seeing the effect of sunlight over time, or water, or heat. You in a sense viscerally learn things that the mathematician would have trouble formulating.

The fascination with these two approaches is what leaves my time partially in the quantitative and experimental world of applied physics, and partially in the anarchistic world of free jazz and surrealist poetry. Somehow I think that by doing both I will be able to recognize patterns that are unique and surprising. Though I suppose that there is nothing wrong with this, there may be nothing right about it either. In his recent TED Talkhttp://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception.html, the great skeptic Michael Shermer points out that animals (humans included of course) are predisposed to search for patterns, even when they do not exist. There is good Darwinian reasons for this because the problems with not seeing patterns in life and death situations are more immediately life threatening. He speaks of a predator/prey situation. When an animal has before heard a predator rustling leaves, he learns to run. Therefore even if he hears the wind rustle leaves, he is likely to run. He may have been wrong, but it was safer to be wrong. With more highly evolved pattern recognition we can arrive at misinterpreted correlations, which in turn can do harm.  Decisions made about education, food, weapons and drugs, which are based on false pattern recognition can do a great deal of harm, and do all of time. In fact Shermer points out that we are not even all that good at recognizing patterns. We see patterns in everything, and not always the correct ones, as he shows with some slides of dots, some of which have embedded figures and some nothing. People will see figures where none exist, see wrong ones where they do, and sometimes get it right. All is possible with our limited abilities.

So what is the point of all of this introspection about my own abilities at pattern recognition? Perhaps it is to enjoy the anarchy even when there is no pattern to be found. There is truth in its own right in chaos, where our thoughts and anxieties so often reside. Then, perhaps some lucky time useful patterns will emerge that will allow a communication between reasoning and freedom. 

The Second Law of Corporate Dynamics

If you have ever wondered why your life seems increasingly chaotic, and your desk ever more cluttered, you might find a good answer in one of the most basic laws of physics. The law is the second law of thermo dynamics, and was perfected by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1871. This law guarantees that entropy never decreases in nature. In other words everything either stays the same (which is rare) or grows increasingly more chaotic. This has always been the case, from the very low entropy, well ordered singularity of the big bang, to the ever increasing, and cooling universe we are a part of. It is also true in everyday life. Not only do your things become more cluttered, unless you arrange them, an omelet never becomes an egg again.

The 20^th century physicist and science/art advocate CP Snow loved to encourage all of society to think creativity about the way nature behaved. He was an admirer of Einsteinein thought experiments, and a rebelliousness amongst people to try to prove the laws of nature to be wrong. Even with this adventurous, and risky mentality, Snow said something to the effect that you can prove anything wrong, but if you find evidence that the second law of thermo dynamics is wrong, your results must be in error. For physicists, material scientists, and biologists, there is nothing more important than this law.

Since this is so well established in science, and its analogies fit so well, I wonder whether certainty of moving towards a more chaotic state doesn’t also apply to our society, especially to businesses. I watched the major Bank CEOs testify before congress last month about the financial crisis of 2008, and was left with one of two possibilities about these businesses. Either the businesses were so large that the CEO had no idea what each division was doing, or the businesses were so large that they needed to keep growth at such a high level that they were willing to compromise good business practices. Though I can’t speak to the intentions of these leaders, I would guess that both of these apply. During the same time that the banks were receiving TARP funds, General Motors was getting a bailout from Washington, because it was either, too big and bureaucratic to keep up with a quickly changing marketplace, or it was too big and bureaucratic to keep up with its own research. Again, I would guess that both of these statements are true. Large companies by nature become more difficult to manage. They become slower, and like the once densely hot universe, they become colder. This is why when you read Wired Magazine, or MIT Technology Review, so few of the summaries of new inventions come from large companies. Start-ups have greater potential energy. They are not spread across the universe of board rooms, and private jets. They are crammed in garages and studios, building up Intellectual Property, and exploding outward.

So, is the inefficiency and cluttered landscape of large corporations as inevitable as the second law of thermo dynamics? It might very well be, except that there is a caveat in the law which large businesses often don’t acknowledge. The law states that entropy will never decrease. It is possible to stay the same. Not changing is looked at as the enemy of innovation, as innovation itself is a change in doing things. What is neglected in this is that as companies become larger they are changing automatically due to size. This change in size is happening regardless of what the leadership does. If a company then does nothing dramatically different in the way the company operates, you will have enormous change. If however this were acknowledged, it may very well be possible for a company to retain the energy it had during its big bang to success. In a way Google is doing this by continuing to require employees to work on independent ideas during work hours. Toyota did this by having employee feedback through its ground breaking production systems. What neither of these examples did was to succumb to increasing entropy, but rather to remain ideologically stagnant. It may well be though that this cannot last forever. Toyota is now the largest car company in the world, and experiencing quality problems.

When I look at corporations, and the government explanation that certain companies are too big to fail, I recognize that naturally the opposite is true. At some point a company can be too big not to fail. The only hope of keeping entropy at bay is to explode again the way they did the first time. This knowledge is not obvious, and is not what most business people believe. It requires that quarterly profits and growth not be stressed above all. It requires a self awareness that as growth occurs so does the tendency towards chaos. This might be a hard sell to a group of investors or a board of directors; unless that group is made of physicists. 

The Poetic Life of Scientists

More than any interview of a physicist of my generation, last Friday's NPR Science Friday Interview with Cal Tech Physicist Sean Carroll created a mystique for the life of a theoretical scientist. It happened in one moment, which was just marginally different from the common job description of a theoretical scientist. Ira Flotow asked Carroll if he spent his time thinking up these big ideas about time, which is what his new book "From Eternity to Here" (http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0525951334/lecturenotesonge) describes to a general audience. He said that is his job. He goes to the wine bar with a pencil and paper, and thinks of new ways to visualize time and space, and new equations to put the puzzle together. He also said that he was lucky that he worked in such a dynamic field where he could discuss his ideas with colleagues, who we get the impression are his friends. In that moment he managed to elevate the image of a gen x physicist in Pasadena, to lost generation poets in Paris. This is a needed transformation of the imagination. Scientists of my generation and younger have been caught in a historic limbo where social and solitary explorations of the mind have been replaced in large part by social and solitary explorations on-line. We think that science happens only because of computing power, our information gathering resources, and our mass connectivity, while all the while admiring with nostalgia the thought experiments of Einstein, the Eagle Pub of Watson and Crick, or long walks through Copenhagen parks. My favorite book of 2009 was Steven Johnson's, "Invention of Air" (http://www.amazon.com/Invention-Air-Science-Revolution-America/dp/B0031MA7UW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265357899&sr=1-1) which not only told of the contribution of Joseph Priestley, but about how coffee bar culture in London led to many of the most important ideas in English science.
Over the last year there have been several books about the need for scientists to be better communicators with the public. I like "Don't Be Such a Scientist" by Randy Olson (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265357791&sr=1-1) which dealt with this topic, by describing the necessity of scientists to use film, and other multimedia tools to demonstrate ideas to a larger public. What I realize now though is that there is an essential step missing from the picture of going from the lab to the screen. That is the step where we write, draw and eventually talk with each other, not at seminars, but at wine bars. A Greek symposium was a long night of drinking and discussing. A college symposium usually takes place in a classroom during the day and is much shorter, but for some reason I think I would be much more likely to sleep in that daytime class than drunk on Plato's sofa. While poets and philosophers have searched for ways to explain the human condition, scientists are exploring ways to understand nature in its entirety. Friendship, debate and Pinot Noir are welcome companions in this pursuit.

Unfinished Business?

There is a wonderful scene in the film “Six Degrees of Separation”, which as a parent I think about nearly every day. The Kittredge family, who provide the bourgeois Upper East side backdrop of the film, also provide a number of insights into excesses and ambition in contrast to natural instincts. As modern art dealers, they academically understand that the textural and prospective flattening of images represents not merely a shift in aesthetics. It also characterizes a reduction of experience, emotion and philosophy to a two dimension painting. In this particular scene Flan Kittredge, as played by Donald Sutherland, reminisces about his daughter’s second grade class. He remembers how when visiting the classroom, he was stunned, as if entering a gallery at MoMa. All of the paintings of the children struck him as spectacular. He asked the teacher how she managed to get such profound art from every student. Each piece was like a Matisse, a Cezanne, a Kandinsky or a Picasso. The teacher replied that she did nothing. Only that she knew when to take them away. In other words all children are modern masters, but by leaving them to continue work on a painting, that masterpiece may be disguised and colored over.


Children are experimenting with paints and drawings, as we continue to with blogs, with lovers, with restaurants, with financial instruments, and with scientific experimentation. What we often lack however is the equivalent of the teacher who tells us when the experiment is over. For anyone who has played free jazz with a group of musicians for the first time, they will know that it is nearly impossible to bring a piece to its conclusion. This is one of the things that I love about improvisational music, but also one thing that separates those initial experiments from a band that is fully connected. At the heart of free jazz is an assumption that there is nothing a musician can play that is inherently wrong. If a dissonant interval from one instrument is played against a consonant interval from another, it may not be planned, but becomes an idea that requires exploration. During those first meetings of a group, every second of playing is packed with these micro experiments, all of which are of interest to the musicians. Resolving those tonal and rhythmic variations without discussion or pause is an infinite process, which leads to long sessions. For me this is often where jazz starts and ends, as I often don’t have time to rehearse or perform regularly with one particular group. I am often the sit-in pianist who comes into a session with a group who understands each other in such a metaphysically intense way that they instinctually know the movements of the others. It is still a process of experiment for these musicians, but one where a hypothesis has already been stated, and the theory is being tested. I then become a dependant variable in this equation. When it works, the process becomes a calculus, or more metaphorically accurate, a quantum wave function. When listening to the recording the results can be heard, but only as an approximation. Like a subatomic particle whose position and velocity cannot both be measured with complete certainty, neither can any one moment in the cacophony of the sound scape be isolated and understood. It is an evolving process, which as a whole can be experienced. Like the second graders, it takes discipline or a leader to know when to remove your hands from the keyboard.

A science lab can be much the same as this, and like the examples of the children’s art and the free jazz session, it is not completely clear to me that a solution to an experiment ever truly represents a completion. Perhaps it is merely a disciplined end point, chosen aesthetically, artistically or randomly somewhere in the middle for any number of reasons. A corporate research project must have a point at which a conclusion is made, or a product would never be released. We know that the results are rarely perfect, as all products have some degree of uncertainty built into them. A drug is effective in a percentage, hopefully high, of the users, but not 100%. A Ph.d dissertation also must have a completion date, or the student would never get the diploma. American innovation is actually tied to this ability to wrap up an experiment. The first personal computers, IPODS, cell phones and MRI machines weren’t perfect when released, and the scientists who worked on them knew it. But an entrepreneur or manager knew that the product needed to be released.

There is a dilemma for me in this question of creation and completion, which I also think about when watching my daughter paint. It is not whether a painting will look better if it is taken away from her at a certain time. It will certainly be more understandable if it is. We could all be like the second grade teacher in “Six Degrees of Separation”. The big question is rather by taking it away I am stopping a process which for psychological and even artistic reasons should continue to play itself out as long as she wants it too. For my daughter I would want her to continue, as the goal is not for her be a Matisse (at least not yet), but rather to have fun, and express herself. Who I am I to say that she is finished? As we consider ourselves more mature when playing in a band or on nuclear physics experiments, we start to want to be master something rather than just express it. Is that mastering or compromising? Of course it is necessary, and in the cases I mentioned it is important. I wouldn’t want a cure for HIV or cancer to be in a lab somewhere with a scientist saying, “I am not satisfied yet. It only works on 99% of test patients”. I also wouldn’t want every recording to be like most pop albums, where every moment is produced, and planned. This may all seem very trivial and obvious, but it is a question I face every day, as a professor, as a musician, as a scientist, and as a father.