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IVY KUPEC: Okay, lasers are cool. They're incredibly
colorful and unbelievably powerful. Who wouldn't want to
know more about them? I'm Ivy Kupec and I work at the National
Science Foundation. When I heard that the esteemed and NSF
funded physicist and laser inventor, Margaret Murnane,
would be one of our distinguished lecturers I jumped
at the chance to talk with her about these technological
marvels and, specifically, her lab's research.
Margaret, that was such a great talk on lasers,
I really enjoyed it.
MARGARET MURNANE: Thank you, Ivy. The audience
was just terrific.
IVY KUPEC: I was wondering if maybe we could grab a cup of tea
and talk some more?
MARGARET MURNANE: Oh, sounds wonderful. Thank you.
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IVY KUPEC: So, I'm curious what specifically drew you to lasers
in the first place. I'm guessing it wasn't laser hair removal?
MARGARET MURNANE: No, that's right. That's right. Well,
lasers are cool. Actually, I was drawn to science by the
first realization that somebody could be excited about an idea.
So I think I was about eight years old and my dad had brought
home a book on science that had a picture of Archimedes having
jumped out of the bathtub, and this idea that somebody could
get so excited that they would run through the streets,
yelling, "Eureka," just because of an idea and forget to put on
their clothes on top of that. But before that I had thought
that science class was about learning things and it
just never occurred to me that it was about inventing
or discovering something.
MOVIE CLIP: Pretty wonderful, eh, Archimedes.
MARGARET MURNANE: I was an undergrad in Ireland and we had
some – at the time we had some very simple lasers to play with,
but I must say just that beam of light, how it scattered – if you
were in a dark room you could see these little pinpoints of
light everywhere. That was attractive to me, but what I
didn't understand at the time is that I just, I didn't have to
just use lasers I could invent lasers.
IVY KUPEC: Wow. Has there always been this focus on really
high speed, short burst lasers like what you work on?
MARGARET MURNANE: Well, that's the focus of my area of
research. Very early on in making what we call now
femtosecond lasers or lasers where we compress all the energy
into very short bursts of light, and so I was very excited at
that prospect being able to build my own lasers and invent
more powerful versions of them.
IVY KUPEC: So what is the difference in color beam
of a laser?
MARGARET MURNANE: In the supermarket checkout line you
can see the red laser scanner and sometimes you have a hard
time having it to read the bar code, and that's the kind of
laser we're pretty familiar with and that has a very pure color.
It's just pure red.
IVY KUPEC: Sure.
MARGARET MURNANE: And then if you think about the green laser
pointers that we see.
IVY KUPEC: Oh, yeah.
MARGARET MURNANE: Then that has a very pure green. You can
think about them as the equivalent of sound with a very
pure tone. But think about in a clash of sound, you get many
frequencies or harmonics, similarly with a laser, if you
want to make a very short burst of light as lots of different
colors together, but that makes it very beautiful, too. So
these are very short bursts of light that we can use to
understand the fundamental processes in nature, but we can
also use those same short bursts of light to make very clean
cuts. And that's great, for example, eye surgeries or for
cutting very precisely. With short bursts of light we can
concentrate the energy both in space and time.
IVY KUPEC: And is the focus in the lab more on developing new
ways to use lasers, or is it more on even always looking for
a better, faster, shorter burst kind of laser?
MARGARET MURNANE: Actually, we do both. So we have some sets
of students who are developing the next best X-ray lasers, and
then other students who are trying to figure out how do we
measure things really precisely by using laser light. We've got
very good control over that light, so we can measure motions
that are much smaller than an atomic dimension. In effect you
could almost think about our lab as developing new types of
cameras and making movies but not of real people like you
and me sitting here, Ivy, but of the nano world
or the nano molecules.
IVY KUPEC: Now, you said a really nice – I mean a really
nice statement in your talk, too, about how a student's
not a scientist –
MARGARET MURNANE: Oh, until they make
a discovery, absolutely.
IVY KUPEC: Love that.
MARGARET MURNANE: So one of our students, when we were back in
Michigan, he made a discovery and it was about, maybe 1:00 AM
in the morning and he had his Eureka moment, and so he ran
through the corridors and he just yelled until somebody in a
lab came out and then he was able to say, "Look, I was able
to make this discovery," so he could share it. Because this
is, when they do have a Eureka moment then you have to share
it with somebody.
IVY KUPEC: Sure.
MARGARET MURNANE: You want to be able to communicate oh, my
goodness, I just figured this out and it was and you know,
that they're a scientist when they recognize they've made it,
and then they know why is it important and that's when you
really know that we have a new scientist.
IVY KUPEC: Well, I really appreciate your spending a
little time with me after your talk today. This is great.
MARGARET MURNANE: Thank you so much for a wonderful chat, Ivy.
Now I go catch a plane.
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