When I was a child my great-grandfather was still
alive. And he lived until almost 100. And he had worked in
Edison's laboratory when he was a young man. And he had himself
a laboratory that looked like Doctor Frankenstein's laboratory
with big double-pull double-throw switches and sparks
and bottles of mercury. And I mean, it was every kid's dream.
I thought it was amazing. And that's, that got me
interested in science.
I often think about something. It wasn't exactly advice. It was
that, I used to develop my own pictures, old chemical pictures,
pre-digital. And I remember reading once that if you really
wanted to make a good picture that everything had, each part
of it had to be done fully. You had to sort of fully expose the
picture and fully develop it and not rush, and fully fix it, and
fully dry it, and just do, do the whole thing all the way
through. And I often think about that in my work. And not
that everything that I try comes out wonderfully. But the idea
of trying to just finish something out, something that
I, I somehow got that message from photography when I
was pretty young. And I like that idea, because sometimes you
try something and it turns out not to be the direction you want
to go in. But at least if you sort of finished it out, you,
you know where you are, and you can go on and change course or
do something more.
Well, I had a really bad one- which you probably shouldn't
even print. But I, I thought, I had seen these pictures of
chemists. And my mom had these things that looked like test
tubes that were plastic hat pin holders. And I thought it would
be really cool to try to mix all the chemicals that I could find
in this. So I, I mixed them all in this thing that looked like a
test tube, and then we went out. And it turned black and melted
through, and spread this horrendous junk all over the
floor. That was my bad scientific experiment.
My first successful scientific experiment was, I read
instructions for making a box camera that could go on my
little kid's microscope, just a box of wood with a hole at the
top, and a piece of frosted glass, and it went on top of the
microscope. And you would focus the microscope on some salt or
some hair or something, and then take the frosted glass away and
put a piece of photographic film on it. And I thought that was
the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I just thought it was wonderful
to see these beautiful crystal cubes of salt, or these hairs
that you could see every detail of. That was my first, my
first successful experiment.
I think figuring things out is really great. I, I, I love when
I, sometimes figuring out the question is very hard. But you
know, figuring out how to ask a question the right way. And then
if you can solve it, it's, I think it's, it's, it's a
wonderful- to me it's like a, it's like being a kid in a toy
store. It's like, it's like a present. It's like a gift. I
think it's, it's a wonderful feeling to figure something out.
I think to be effective, a scientist needs to be really
curious, to really wonder about things, and to be really honest
with themselves about the work that they're doing. Have they
really solved something? Have they really thought of all the
different explanations for why they might be wrong? Have they
really sort of pushed on it because, or are they fooling
themselves? So I think honesty with yourself and curiosity are
the two most important things.
I like to think about the way different kinds of scientists
work with each other, or the way scientists work with people who
are not scientists. And my hope is that I could contribute in
some way towards understanding between scientists and the rest
of our society about the big questions that face us.
Questions like, where are we gonna get our power, and how is
it gonna be safe, and should we have nuclear power, and what
kind, and are we gonna drill for oil, and where, and how are we
gonna save energy, and how are we gonna integrate our energy
needs with our ecological desires. So those are questions
that are both scientific, but they're also questions for us as
a country and as a world. And I hope to contribute in some
small way to a dialogue between scientists and society.
Some of my teachers had a huge effect on me. I think in, in the
younger grades as a, as a child, it was mostly just
encouragement. Encouragement to go off and read and find things.
And then in college and after, and graduate school, it was
learning, watching somebody- a great historian like Gerald
Hulton, or a great scientist like Steven Weinberg- work on
problems, and learn to think, learn to be able to imagine what
their voice would say. What, to have inside your own head a
really good way of thinking about a problem. And that's a
great gift that a teacher, at any stage of education, can
give a student. Which is, a way of organizing new information.
A way of asking questions, a way of asking yourself if you've
really done the best work you could do. So that, I think, is
the most important thing for me, is, is learning to internalize
that, the voice of a great scholar or scientist.
If something were to surprise people in a good way about what
I do, I hope it would be to see science as made up of ideas and
actions that are related to ideas and actions that they know
from their own lives. Most people that I meet from all
different kinds of professions- non-scientists- strike me as
actually pretty smart about their world. And I think that a
lot of what goes on in science could be accessible to them, and
they could find really interesting if it's presented in
a way that is sophisticated but not filled with jargon. And so
I really believe that it's possible to explain things about
science and about science's, the place of science in our world,
that people would find very compelling. And I think it can
be done in a way that doesn't depend on the specialized
vocabulary of science.
I think I'd take a couple of books that were especially
important to me. And a few photographs. I mean, I think in
real life I'd probably rescue my family pictures, even though I
have, I have copies of them, just that as much as I
love science, I think probably my family would
always come first.
I, I listen to a mix of things, you know, from alternative rock
that's contemporary to stuff from sixties, seventies,
eighties. So a mix of rock and roll. And so those are the two
things I think I listen to most, if I was honest. I mean, I'd
like to say I listen to the far reaches of classical music. But
I'd say it's split between jazz and rock.