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.

How to be Bored on the Board

I work for this company I founded, which is certainly in start-up mode, but ramping up quickly. So many decisions, and so many little choices take up much of my time, which is normal, and actually can be a lot of fun. Every person that we bring in at this time will be exposed to the same type of schizophrenic energy of creating something dynamic and new. That is the good news. Employees are one thing, because each of us as staff must work a lot right now. It is the nature of the game. Bringing on Board members is a little bit different, as the extent of their commitment is not so well defined. Board members join companies for many different reasons.

Nanotronics Imaging has approached, and luckily for us been able to enlist a new director to our board, Thomas Campbell Jackson. For those of you that know Thomas there is no need for me to explain why I would want him as a part of our inner circle in creating a business which we care so deeply about. To list two important items, Thomas is one of the nicest  and most trustworthy guys I know. For another he cares about making a difference in the world through science and technology. So that is easy. He does this often through commitments through his philanthropy. Through these he is working on stem cell research, international public health, and even ways for science to reach larger audiences through music and movies. A corporation, in theory, is less romantic. We are in the business of being a business. I have no idea if this is how Thomas feels about it, but from my perspective I could imagine how he could. Of course, this is why he is so appealing to me as a friend and now a fellow director. Thomas must have to segment his time between all of his other activities, and now being on a corporate board will only add to that already busy schedule. My hope is that through Thomas we can create a  model, where corporate activity is less about actions, and more about creativity. Thomas knows finance, and business, but he also has managerial experience, and has a Masters of Public Health from Columbia. It is that side of Thomas that I want to tap into and collaborate with as he becomes a more integral part of the company. The question for him, and for me is how to make that happen as we all get busier.

Gertrude Stein made a wonderful observation in Paris during the German occupation. She said that for creativity to reach new heights by the artist (I will extend this out to all creative activities) it is important to be overcome with boredom. This on the surface seems so opposite of my life. I fill every second to avoid boredom. My acting teacher years ago said that boredom is the worst fear of the actor, which I could relate to. At the same time Stein was exactly right. Dirac, Einstein, Godel and many other famous physicists spent hours walking. This is seemingly a boring activity. In the case of the Stein comment, it came during the forced boredom of the occupation. With a curfew and often lack of electricity, there was no choice but to sit at home and be bored. Her point though is well taken. It is in those moments where the mind can freely associate without the need to produce, that the most interesting production eventually comes. I tried this with some of my piano compositions (to admittedly mixed results), but Keith Jarrett did it with near perfect results. That is, he improvised for hours on an idea, but didn't transcribe or record them. Then after months of doing this, he went on a stage alone in front of thousands and just played. He has done this many times, and always beautifully. In essence he didn’t force a composition. Instead he forced the doing (transcribing or recording) of nothing.

I hope that the Nanotronics team, and Thomas will do some of this, because it will make the contribution so much richer than just being another commitment in a long line of commitments. Regardless of his process, I feel lucky to have him aboard. Being a board member is full of corporate activity, but what we need is creative activity as well. Therefore I hope he lets me bore him a little.

Inventing a Better World

I find that most of us delude ourselves by thinking that what we do is important. I know countless actors, artists, social workers and of course preachers who see their job as no less than a cosmic duty to fulfill a purpose. In general when divine consultation comes into the discussion I dismiss it as either completely delusional, or utterly arrogant. Rather than judge people who have the audacity to claim a calling for a profession, I should be more humble myself and think about why I do the things I do, and whether it is not the same human drive of self importance that is calling me to business, teaching, music and most obviously writing all of these blogs. I am aware that part of anything we do, other than roll out of bed, and watch football all day, has some sort of pointless, yet intuitive feeling of purpose attached to it. Sometimes there is an obvious benefit to what I do, like some small philanthropy, but most of the time I feel as if my contribution is myself, which if I contemplate this further doesn't hold much weight. There are very few if any people that the world could simply not do without, and a professor with a specialty in rheology, who starts tiny tech companies, and plays experimental free jazz music is certainly not one of them (yes that is me!). The accepted evolutionary evidence for this type of mild narcissism was described in the famous Richard Dawkins book "The Selfish Gene" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene ) , and in many more recent genetics studies, which find ancestral evidence of a time when knowledge of our own mortality may actually have been a useful survival tool. This is not impossible to imagine, even as it now, in the age of western wealth, can seem paralyzing. Imagine that in some stage of our evolution we no longer needed the fur that protected our primate cousins, as we could build shelter and prepare clothing. At the same time those technologies were rather basic, making life less enjoyable than we might want. We had hunting tools, while other primates had none (or at least only very basic ones). We eventually had language and music. Which of these two came first is a long debate that I am greatly interested in, but since I have no reason to know the answer to it, will not even take a guess. It must have been that survival was not the efficient sort that many animals experience. We were not trying to survive momentary harm only, but the entire season, and then multiple generations. Death then could be pondered, and purpose became an abstraction, which was different from the rest of the animals. This is so basic and obvious that I don't know why I mention it here, except that I believe this unique survival instant is very relevant not only to the things I am doing with my life, but with the larger moral decisions that we are faced with as humans collectively.
After reading Jeffrey Sachs' wonderful book "The Common Wealth", (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs) I was again moved by his optimism, and saw my place in his global vision from environmental solutions, to ending world poverty. Dr. Sachs taps into that part of me, and likely others, who are self confident (or self delusional depending on your perspective) to think that we can participate in fixing the world. His statement that we must look at what is needed, not what others say is "politically impossible", is so attractive and inspiring. As a technologist and small time entrepreneur, I am attracted to the often criticized sentiment that we can invent our way out of all of our problems. Though Sachs is much more nuanced than this, as he addresses political, economical and geographical issues, I do think that in all of this there is a sentiment that technology created and dispersed with the right intentions, and with appropriate resources could indeed solve most problems. Whenever I speak about this, I am reminded that it is more complicated. When I wrote a blog about the importance of thinking about GM foods and human genetics research in the same way, I was criticized by friends who are very much trying to find other, non-technical solutions to poverty and climate change. Still everything I read I think of as a technical challenge that can be solved.
As inspiration I often go to the classic sources. Last week however I was surprised when a universally praised genius actually discouraged me some. I was looking at the scientific notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, because as with generations of others, he has let me see that human potential for creating art, technology and business are all possible. I may have some arrogance, but not the type of arrogance that would think that comparing me to Da Vinci is even a worthwhile thought. Still, looking at a master is what keeps museums going, and biographies selling, and for me it often works. This time though it had a rather sobering effect on me. I looked through the pages of his detailed drawings and explanations of inventions, none of which were to be realized. These were stunning, and brilliant, but because of the lack of supporting technology available in renaissance Europe, they were impossible. We can look at this and say that they were still brilliant and important because they inspired engineers of the future. This is likely true in an abstract way, as many of us looking at them are motivated to find our own creative vision. Still the times were so wrong for them that by the time the inventions could be created which were in some ways similar to Da Vinci's, his designs seemed simplistic and wrong. There is no question that he was right to do them, because they were every bit as imaginative as his other creative endeavors. The more practical, and at the same time existential question though is; did he invent solutions that helped the world? In a purely practical sense he did not, which is shocking. He had designs for water relocation systems that would end wars without violence, but violence continued. He had designs for machinery that would not destroy peasant workers, but they didn't yet work. The list goes on. So, they were indeed ingenious efforts, but if really pressed on whether he invented the world out of any problems, I would have to answer no.
A counter argument to this has to do with the exponential rate of technology growth that we are experiencing now. For Da Vinci, a concept for a flying machine just couldn't happen in a few generations. Now the distance between imagination and integration is so small that we all can experiment and experience it. What I mean by this can be seen in some profound examples, and some less important but still telling ones. On the latter point, I recently heard an interview with James Cameron about the technology that he used for "Avatar". He said that he had written "Avatar" in the early 1990's before Titanic, but because the technology wasn't available to make the movie as he wanted, he made Titanic first, and waited (helped a bit too) and eventually cameras, computer graphics, and optics caught up with his vision. This is a shame for Da Vinci that things couldn't move as fast in his time. The other example really did save lives, and very quickly. 10 years ago it was discovered that the HPV virus was responsible for 95% of all cases of cervical cancer. This is an incredibly high figure. There had not been an HPV vaccine in the past, but because of this new knowledge a vaccine was developed very quickly and it saves thousands of lives. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have recently donated huge quantities of the vaccine to the world's poorest countries.
So this leaves an important question: Are we diluting ourselves that what we do is important? I would say that we might be doing just the opposite. We might be thinking too small. It is possible that I am telling myself that it is important that I play jazz on a Friday at a bar. This is underselling real important contributions I could be making, either as a composer of an important work, a producer of a film that changes the way people think, or more likely by inventing a solution to a technical problem that could save lives or save the planet. We should all be inventing everyday in notebooks (computer or otherwise) like Da Vinci did, because it is now possible for the wildest of ideas to become reality.

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.

Excel or Regress

A truly disruptive technology not only changes the way we behave but also the way that we think. I like to imagine technologies of the past that meet this standard, and ones that don’t. My guess is that the automobile itself was less of a disruptive technology than good roads. Being able to move in a car changes the way we behave, but not necessarily the way that we think. By the time that cars were fast enough, cheap enough and roads were good enough cars made it possible to go places that we would never, or rarely go by ourselves. Once that was possible people must have thought about home, time and space much differently. I think the motion picture was disruptive as were airplanes, the phonograph and countless other technologies. During my lifetime, I have seen many such changes from the PC to the internet to MP3 players and e-books. Still the one I want to talk about here is perhaps more accepted as mundane than it is thought of as disruptive. That is the Microsoft Program Excel.

Excel is not the first computer spreadsheet to be invented, and it is generally considered to be very good. Still it is not considered by most people to be disruptive in the same way as the previous inventions I mentioned. Nearly everyone in nearly every discipline uses Excel; however it is not just using it that makes it important. It is disruptive because it changes the way that we think. This may or may not be a positive societal shift. I had always considered Excel to be as close to a perfect program that was possible. It is not self organizing, but it is self solving. It is always a highly functional tool, or even tool box, which didn’t tell me what to build, but helped me build it. This is still true of course, and I am glad that Excel exists. I don’t know how I (others certainly have) would do anything in science or business without it. This leads me to its ability to change the way we think. Excel gives solutions, not proofs. I have grown up with this tool, and my mathematical instincts have suffered from it. For instance, one of the most important things that scientist do every day is compile data points, which can be for example the results of a number of experiments. When a number of experiments are run there is generally some noise (also known as scatter). This scatter can be interpreted in thousands of ways. The first thing the scientists needs to consider, is rather it is noise at all, or actually a difference in data points, which are not just a statically anomaly. Traditionally this was done by plotting these points by hand, choosing the type of graph that seems most valid from your experience of doing this before, then calculating a statistical fit which is most representative. If you had no knowledge of how to do regression analysis, you would plot the points and connect them all. This would give in essence equal importance to every point, when in all likelihood some were outliers and should not be considered with equal weight. There are a number of ways to achieve this, by doing the simplest linear fit to a very complicated polynomial.

All of this can be done with a click of the mouse button. This inevitably makes those of us who were not math geniuses comfortable not only with math, but also something far more complicated. It makes us think we understand the probability of the calculated results. It makes us believe that we can take complicated noise which seems to us random, and fit it onto a graph, where no matter what chaos is inherent in the results, we can fit it in a smooth and simple to read curve. The problem with this is that Excel is a language in itself. It is a language none of us truly whether we have a mathematical background or not. For mathematicians, the way in which formulas are written is not the same as the mathematician formulates theorems and proofs. It is a special code, that requires help menus, or memorization. This is in contrast to the last 2000 years of mathematical processes that have had an organic progression from Euclidian Geometry, to Cartesian Coordinates, through Newtonian Calculus to Born Matrices. Those were all different and unique, but followed from logic and necessity, and from an instinctual desire to create an understandable code to solve the next questions nature presented itself with. Excel is not a new form of mathematics. It is not even a simplification of current mathematics. Instead it is tools, which in the process of helping us speed up complicated regression analysis, also leads to a different type of regression. It is a regression of critical thinking. It forces on us a deliberately bizarre way of following a formula, only to ultimately give us the solution we want, whether it best represents reality or not.

This all seems rather harsh words for one of the best computer programs ever written, and as a standalone criticism it is. Excel is not a problem, it is instead a symptom. I am not the kind of scientist who can do extremely complicated proofs, and equations on my own. I need tools, so Excel has been a constant companion for me. I am only raising a challenge to myself, my colleagues and my students to step back into the dangerous waters of nature, and scientific experiment, and see if we really have the answers.

Evolving Music

Last night for the opening Gala of the World Science Festival, I was manic with ideas, dreams, and general excitement. Here was a room of some of the world’s greatest scientists, artists and musicians, all successfully blurring the lines of creativity and rigor, elegance and structure, and all the time being extremely entertaining. The second act was a new composition by Philip Glass with projections of stunning nature photographs by Frans Lanting. It would be difficult to imagine a better night for me, who spends so much time on the fringes of these worlds. It was a chance to be inside, and really experience ideas and art that relate to science. For some reason though there must be a devil on my shoulder, which acts as a grumpy cynic telling me to be overly critical. While in the taxi going home I told my wife Marine that I was disappointed by the Glass score. I felt it derivative of Copland, and essentially reactionary in style. Marine, rightly so, rather than rolling her eyes in the dark, put a stop to this musical elitist talk, by saying something like “isn’t beauty and symmetry through harmony a way of representing nature, whether it is “Appalachian Spring” years ago, or Philip Glass today?”

This was impossible to argue rationally. As James Watson said during his speech at the Gala, all we have is evolution. Brian Greene, in his presentation with Josh Bell gave a cosmological time line of the universe, and put the seconds of existence of humanity in prospective. Even evolution of organisms is so incredibly slow; that the time between 1944 when Copland composed “Appalachian Spring”, and Philip Glass composed his piece which was premiered last night is irrelevant in evolutionary terms. Certainly species have not changed so quickly. Why then do I make this analogy of evolution in nature to evolution in art? I expect progress. In my mind this means something unique which is representative of our present time. If the representation is nature, then isn’t our time basically the same as any other time that humans have been around? Of course it is, but for some reason I am brought back to the question of what makes humanity, this often destructive force in nature, unique and full of potential. Last night’s Gala actually gives me an answer I am content with. We are always working hard at understanding something about ourselves, and our universe. We are searching for something that we didn’t know before we read an important book, or before we took a class, or before we saw a dance concert. While evolution happens slowly, comprehension happens quickly. We experiment to understand, and are continually left with questions, and more experiments to do.

Coming back then to whether art, music in this case, needs to evolve rapidly, even when it is representing something that is evolving slowly. I think we are driven towards asking artistic questions the way we do scientific ones. That is we experiment, and find an answer, only to have another question and then do an experiment again. Like Newton, Darwin or Einstein who discovered amazing truths in their lives, it would not be enough to rediscover them now. In the same way, we need to push ourselves musically and artistically in general to see and hear something unique and new.