I'm probably in this field today because of the Apollo Space
Program. When I was just a few years old, that's when the
astronauts were going to the moon, and I thought there
couldn't have been a more fascinating thing for people to
do. They're going and exploring a brand new world and they're
bringing back samples. They're seeing all these things that no
one's ever seen before, and that really set the chart for
my life. I have horrible eyesight. I wear contacts, so I
knew I could never do what the astronauts could do. But being
part of the exploration process, being part of understanding what
they were finding, and what does that tell us about the solar
system, was something I always wanted to be involved with. So
probably from that very early time I decided I really wanted
to be a planetary scientist.
So in terms of advice, there's several pieces of advice I've
learned in my career. Some have been much more valuable than
others. For what I do, which is solar system dynamics, I do this
in large part because of advice I got when I was in graduate
school. When I started graduate school I didn't have any
computer programming skills. And a professor told me that
essentially in what I was trying to do, I was functionally
illiterate unless I could understand how to write
computer code. And so from that point on I enrolled in a
computer class, I got computer code. And that allowed me to do
a lot of the things I see today. More generally, I would say one
of the best pieces of advice I saw was actually from just a few
years ago. I was watching a television program on the
producer of 60 Minutes. His name is Don Hewitt. And he
described that the theme for his show was he would not try to
describe something, but he would want the people on 60 Minutes to
tell a story. And I found out myself that I'm really driven by
stories. I like to follow stories. What's the story of the
solar system? What's the story of this planet? How did this
evolve? And I find if I can tell that story, it makes it
interesting to me and makes it interesting to others,
and that allows me to stay in this field and do my job. So I
guess I'm motivated by stories, and so maybe that was some of
the best advice I've heard.
So when I was a kid I liked to go into the bathroom. And my dad
used to keep all his shaving equipment in there- the shaving
cream and the shaving lotion and all the rest. I used to like to
mix that all together. So I'd take almost every bottle or
thing we had in our cabinet, put it into one big thing and swirl
it up. I never was quite sure what was gonna happen. Usually
nothing happened.
I just got a really stinky mess. But I just still like to mix
things together. And I still, sort of, whenever I go into a
bathroom and I look at all the stuff, I always wonder, gee, I
wonder what that would be like if I mixed it all together. So
that's probably my first experiment.
What I love about being a scientist or being a researcher,
is I get a chance to answer questions I've always wondered
about. I guess I get a chance to be an armchair explorer. You
know, back 200 years ago, if you wanted to be an explorer you had
to go risk life and limb, and you had to go off to the deepest
Africa, or far parts, far away parts in Asia. And you'd have
to raise all this money, and maybe you wouldn't come back
alive, or maybe you'd be missing life- maybe missing
an arm or something like that. What we get to do today is sit
at our computers with our coffee cup, and we actually get to be
explorers and watch spacecraft as they go to interesting worlds
around the solar system. To me, that's just one of the most
amazing things one can do. And I still get to go home and
have a reasonable life. So I think the most exciting thing
about being a scientist is actually being an explorer.
I love that aspect of it.
To be a good scientist, there's several things you have to be.
First of all, you have to be curious. It's just not enough to
be curious about your own stuff, though. You have to be curious
about almost everything that goes on in the science field.
You never know what's gonna come in handy. Also, I think one of
the best things you have to do is, you have to be, remain- be
humble. You have to have some humility. In a sense that when
you go into a field you almost always don't know as much as
other people that have been in that field. So you want to go
and talk to them. You want to go and listen, you wanna get a
feeling for the field. And by doing that you can actually
learn a lot about what they're doing. And sometimes you can
find places where if you can bring enough elements
from across different fields together, you could do some new
and interesting science. Scientists love to work in their
office with closed doors, and not talk to anyone. If you can
be one of those people that interacts with a lot of
different scientists, sometimes you can do really, really
interesting things. And that's how I've gotten to
where I am today.
I think there's a lot of things that our research does for the
human condition, in a sense. That, first of all, I think
everyone is curious. Why do we, why are we here? Why are there
humans on Earth? Why is the earth a habitable place? Where
do oceans come from? Why do we have life? How delicate and
fragile a balance it is. I think to answer some of those
questions we need to understand our history, go all the way back
in time to understand where our solar system came from, how our
planet evolved, those sorts of things. But also how delicate is
the balance. How much can we do to our environment before it no
longer is self-sustaining before we can no longer
come back from this? So I think part of our job is to determine
the origins of why we are here, and why is our planet here. But
also to give us the context so we can make important decisions
about how we're going to proceed in the future. If you don't
have a sense of your history, you're doomed to repeat
mistakes. And so we want to avoid that. And the way to do
that is to understand as best we can how we arrived at this
place we are today.
Probably the person who's had the biggest influence on my
career as a researcher has been a colleague of mine, who's Hal
Levison. He taught me something that was very, very important
about research. He says that almost every time you do
science, you want to ask yourself the question, what
problem are you trying to solve. Science is driven by problems.
And so we all have to sort of decide what outstanding issue is
there in the field that's interesting to other people,
that we want to go after? Once you've identified what problem
you want to solve, the rest almost always takes care of
itself. But it's not enough to simply go and just do
interesting science that has no ramifications. You want to go
after interesting problems that really are exciting. And I think
that once he taught me that, it changed my science in a large
respect because now I have a feeling for whenever I start a
problem, is it interesting to others, is it a big problem, and
is it something that we want to explore. And that's what I do.
I guess the thing that would be the most surprising about being
a scientist is that we don't run around in lab coats and talk in
gibberish all day to other people, no one else can
understand us. We actually have a great time. I get to come in
normal clothes to work every day, I get to sit and joke and
talk and yell and scream at all sorts of other people, over
science, right. We argue over it every day, but that's how we
make scientific progress. And so in a sense what I think people
would be surprised at is how social we are, and how much we
spend time communicating our work to other people, trying to
get to the right answer. And how much we struggle with trying to
find out what the right answer is to all our problems.
So I think that people mostly think that scientists are going
off to some mountain somewhere where they work all alone in
isolation and never talk to anyone else. In fact, I think
for science to work best, it has to be something
where there's a lot of communication going on between a
lot of different people, in all different forms. And from that,
we get a lot of interesting work being done.
If I could rescue one thing from my office, it'd probably be my
computer. Most of the things I have in my office are books and
papers, and they're things that could easily be dealt with. Even
my computer is backed up. But you're never quite sure what
would be saved or not. So I'd probably grab it and run out of
the building if I knew there was a fire.
I'm sort of a fuddy duddy when it comes to music. So probably
most of the music I play goes back to when I was a kid. So
back to the 70's or 80's. So anything by Bruce Springsteen,
Dire Straits, U2, all the rest. All the groups that were sort of
big back in the 80's are something I play. I haven't
really evolved much into the more modern music. I like a
little bit of it. But mostly my musical tastes are stuck back
in this bygone era that will never come back again.
But at least it was my era, so what can I say.