Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Okay.
You got the preview.
We think about things that are incomplete.
We think about the improbable,
maybe even the singular event,
and try to defend it as having great importance,
potentially overriding importance.
We think about transitions.
We need to bridge the gap, as it were, to understand what happened in the past.
We think about limits, extremes.
I try to define what I do,
and one phrase that I come up with continually for -
especially when talking to younger kids -
is "adventure with a purpose."
That's what I felt when I walked in that museum I told you I did.
I felt a sense of excitement.
The feeling of discovery was palpable.
It was wrapped up with so many different things:
travel, science, art.
One thing that is a constant in good science is hard work.
First, there's adventure -
this is someone crossing the Sahara for the first time in their life -
and there's a sense of playfulness about science.
This is your emcee
at a more arduous moment in her career.
There's hard work.
I don't care if you're in a white lab coat in the Sahara -
a lot of hard work goes into science.
We didn't know how hot it was because our thermometers only went to 125.
(Laughter)
And it may not be temperature.
It may be a jealous colleague.
It may be inadequate equipment.
There's all sorts of hurdles.
One thing it's likely going to involve is teamwork.
And I couldn't have moved the millions of pounds of earth
around here and there
without a lot of the eyes and a lot of teamwork.
Where does it begin, my field?
Go to a place like this - Sahara.
Look at that.
There's a camp, if you've got really good eyes, over there.
How do you find something?
How do you make a discovery in paleontology?
You've got to see it,
but you can never see the whole thing.
If you see the whole thing,
then time has seen that whole thing a lot before, long before you have
and it's fragmentary and eroded.
The best way to make a discovery is to see the corner of something.
But then you have to visualize what you can't see,
and these encyclopedic images are passing through our head
time and time again.
Here we are, the early dinosaur beds.
And we're wondering what it takes to make a discovery.
This one was made -
just a tooth or two showing at the surface
before we realized what we'd actually found.
I'm going to give you two examples of -
I'm going to take it this clock is off.
I'm going to go with my own wristwatch.
Okay.
I'm going to give you two examples -
one I just announced and one we're working on -
to give you an idea of what we're involved with.
We found this thing, this early dinosaur, Eodromaeus.
Badlands - the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Months, years it took to visualize what this animal was about,
casting, molding to properly communicate it,
to put it together,
to see it in three dimensions,
and ultimately,
to reconstruct it for the public.
This not purely whim,
but rather built on top of a cast of the actual material,
following all the traces we could
to understand whether it was scaled, feathered, bristled, whatever.
Here's another example - what I'm going to come out with soon.
Here's the moment of discovery.
We couldn't see anywhere near the whole skeleton,
but we felt we had something important.
And if we could turn these lights down -
you can see out there better than I can see up here.
It's a little raptor of some kind.
Hind limbs like an emu,
forelimbs - and you see it, they're twisting around -
like an armadillo or something that digs.
It's an "emorillo."
We don't have anything like this living today.
How could you convince a scientist
that you've got something that runs at lightning speed
and digs like an armadillo?
You really have to visualize it
to see what these things do and look like.
Now, my art began in high school.
I drew this, and psychologists would call it "monocular depth cues."
I was good at shadow, atmospheric effect, contrast -
all these things I didn't even know -
I was good at it.
This is my grandfather.
It turned me around.
I got into college not far from here.
This transition was difficult for me.
Understanding that art could be something more,
that there was a meaning beyond what was in front of your nose,
that imitating three dimensions and two dimensions
was not the only thing,
that you could look at a life model and see through to something inside,
to express something beyond just what was in front of your nose
but at the essence of something.
I eventually gave up brushes
and decided that since art is 30,000 years old as a record,
the first paintings,
these people didn't have canvas:
"I'm just going to try to get to the essence of human form."
These people weren't doing monocular depth cues
in what they were symbolizing.
It was something more important,
something essential about their lives and the animals around them.
Eventually, tried to create rock surfaces - carve into it, literally.
Gave up on brushes.
Now, this comes from a journal.
Niels Bohr was known to have said -
I see the time's going backwards -
Niels Bohr's known to have said
that cubism really influenced,
or it certainly helped him to understand
the particle, the wave - whatever was going on, deep atomic structure.
This was written in a journal very sympathetic:
"The Future of Science is Art?"
It's hard to believe that a work of abstract art
might have actually affected the history of science.
Cubism seems to have nothing in common with modern physics.
When we think about the scientific process,
a specific vocabulary comes to mind:
objectivity, experiments, facts.
In the passive tense of the scientific paper,
we imagine a perfect reflection of the real world.
And I put this in italics:
paintings can be profound, but they are always pretend.
This, to me, fundamentally misunderstands not only what science is about
but also what art is about.
Let me take you on a journey of some of the discoveries I've made.
This site - I raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and risked my career
to bring a team back to this spot in the middle of the desert,
and all I could see at the surface
was that.
But I had an intuition,
and I had some facts
that led me to believe much more was under the ground.
Students couldn't believe it: "You came all the way back for this?"
When we dug, we came out with tons and tons of bones.
That is not a single object; that's a composite.
In reality, it doesn't exist.
It belongs to three or four skeletons.
This - no one had ever seen a Spinosaur before.
We had to put together his skull with the proportions of a crocodile.
It was so long it didn't look like it belonged,
but we had to follow the bones, follow our clues, and put it together.
This thing, this gigantic skull,
found - this is my wife - on the cliffside of Morocco
at the edge of the Sahara desert,
came in hundreds of pieces.
We didn't even know they belonged to the skull.
We certainly didn't imagine we had found - even after taking it off the continent -
a gigantic, T-Rex-sized beast
until we put it all together.
This I had to visualize with CAT scanning preparation
until I could ultimately understand
how the jaws of this animal actually worked -
it came with a whole new way of chewing for this dinosaurean nutcracker.
It wasn't chewing when I saw it.
How about this animal? A Mesozoic cow.
This reconstruction really captures the notion
that this animal was, in fact, with its muzzle, close to the ground.
It was so fragile.
We found the skull pulled apart.
We couldn't actually cast the pieces;
we had to CAT scan it, reflect it, put it back together
until we could see the mug of this thing for the first time.
And was it a shocker.
The endocast, the brain, that doesn't exist either.
That's from the hollow inside the skull.
The ear region - reconstructed painfully from slice after slice of CT scan.
How about this?
A giant crocodile - its jaws on the ground.
Can you imagine the whole thing?
We didn't have the body; we had parts.
We went to modern crocodilians
to see how they scaled when they got larger.
We had to capture the very largest ones
to realize what this animal looked like 40 feet long.
This is supercroc.
What about its relatives?
This is more recent work, just out.
They had limbs that were upright.
I felt, likely, they were gallopers,
gallopers like this recent crocodile - coming into the picture on the left -
Northern Australia, Darwin.
You have to watch your fingers when you let these guys go.
But when they go, they go.
This is slow-speed film of a galloping crocodile.
There was only one species that gallops today - this is it -
under certain conditions.
And what shocked me to no end -
it was wonderful seeing this thing gallop.
It was the closest I could get to my fossil.
But what it did when it hit the water
shocked me:
it turned into a fish, side to side.
And I realized what I was looking at.
What I was looking at was an evolutionary transition
that I was going to pin down when I got back to my office.
200 million years ago, they adopted - readopted -
a fish-like style of swimming when they hit the water.
And this one species -
this is the only one where you can see
both modes of progression, in operation, alive today.
Because other animals that walk upright, ourselves included,
do not walk and run like primitive fish, like swimming like them.
But they have a very unbelievable system, the mammalian system.
Here we see it in a cheetah.
It's like a 4-wheel drive, independent system.
The shoulder's all loosened up.
Unlike the crocodile, it is completely the body, the momentum -
in prey and predator alike -
at high speeds,
at turning corners is absolutely level.
They can do that with a loose shoulder.
When did this appear? I wondered, and I'm working on right now.
Well, I enter the story in the middle of the Gobi Desert, Mongolia,
where I saw a white speck
but imagined that, maybe, with that suture, it was a small mammal.
That's where this change occurred 100 million years ago,
but nobody had found the shoulder girdle.
But our specimen - see how small it is? That's my thumb there -
preserved it.
And I reconstructed it upright,
but the gurus of the day said, "No, no, no."
Now, it walked like a frog.
And so I thought how could I convey ...
Words, long papers - nothing would convince them,
and then I thought of a way.
I CAT scanned it.
I segmented it.
I printed it the size of a big cat.
And I put it together physically - at the bottom of your screen -
visualizing our hypothesis,
profoundly showing the difference between them.
That is science.
How about this? Human site.
This I saw dimly out in the field,
what might be a triple burial.
Now, we're only 6, 7, 8, 9,10 thousand years ago.
This turned out to be 6 thousand years old.
I couldn't lift it because I didn't know what was under it,
and yet I had to collect it somehow,
complete,
so that I could discover that in the lab.
And sure enough, when we got back to the lab,
put this back together like nobody has before -
this is the most posed burial in prehistory.
You're awestruck when you see something like that in the desert.
And when we prepared it from both sides
and reconstructed it vertically, so you can walk around it,
we found points on the other side.
They were never used, it turned out.
They were salted as offerings in a grave with a woman and her two children,
arms and legs intertwined.
It was a symbolic burial.
We found evidence of pollen clusters.
This is visualization - my life's work.
The evolution of dinosaurs, some might say, is built on a tree.
The tree summarizes thousands of characters
in worlds that are changing and migrating millions of years ago.
It's sort of like this.
It's based on finding the common characters
that link images together.
You have sort of built in your brain
the ability to look at human faces like that.
It takes us years to figure that out with dinosaur bones,
to figure two species
over two other species that might be linked,
but it's all the same - we're trying to figure out with words what happened.
This is a way to visualize in three dimensions
the evolution of the dinosaurs -
that tree -
as the continents broke apart.
It's a three-dimensional problem, not a two-dimensional problem,
to visualize that.
And ultimately, for a computer program to work that out.
How about this?
This isn't a program. This isn't a screen grab.
This is a program I would like a programmer to build.
I published it because I knew it would stimulate that
if they could understand what it was that we wanted.
How about this?
Perhaps the most fundamental thing I will give the systematics
is a grammatical understanding
of the words we use to put together those evolutionary trees.
And it, visualized as a tree -
like a Chomskyan grammar tree -
I think is the easiest way for people to understand
what it is I'm talking about:
the lines of text that make art.
Well, visualization -
we are primates.
We have 50 million years of visualization behind us.
Our eyes aren't separate organs like a kidney or a liver.
They're actually part of our brain
that's pinched down, made clear, to see the world.
It projects back and then it projects here and there and everywhere.
A huge part of our brain is devoted to visualizing things.
Here's another quote from that same journal
in an article on the meaning of observation:
"STEM" - science, technology, engineering, mathematics -
"needs something to give it some steam,
an "A" for art between the engineering."
It goes on:
"What if America approached innovation with more than just technology?
What if,
just like STEM is made up of science, technology, engineering and math -
what if we had something like IDEA,
made up of intuition, design, emotion and art?"
Somehow, these are not disconnected.
Because if I go back to the slide at the top -
I just spent a lot of time talking about visualization,
that science, a good part of it, is about visualization.
But I thought that's what art was too.
So, could it go the other way?
Could we look at art, sort of, from a more scientific perspective?
I'm just going to give you one small example, a humorous one,
to say yes, it can go in reverse.
Giacometti - one of my favorite artists.
I was curious -
he did a lot of weird things in his day as a surrealist,
but the one we have at the art museum looks like this, his mature style,
the long-gait statuette forms.
I was sort of curious what he was doing to the human body,
being a professor of human anatomy at the university here.
And it turns out,
if we got down measuring,
very simple global transformation -
two times lengthening.
It wasn't that he took the legs and stretched them out. No.
He stretched everything out:
two times this way or minus two times this way.
It was a global transformation.
I don't know what he was taking, but he got this image in his head,
and it's global.
There's other things - texture and so on -
but I thought, "Did anybody notice this?"
No. Not a word about it.
But that really is what he was doing with human form.
So I thought I would take a dinosaur
with the human proportions like this Eoraptor -
got a tail; we don't have as much of a tail -
and do the same thing.
After all, it's a biped, like humans.
So I lengthened all the limbs twice,
put it together
and brought people to see it -
"Giacomettisaurus" I call it -
an interesting way to look at my animal artistically.
I had a lot of fun doing that.
But seriously,
what I realize after 20 years of discovery and realization of discovery:
it's a long process
which is really heavy on visualization.
I walked out of one studio 20 years ago, and I walked into another one.
And I really feel quite at home in this studio that we call science,
but it really is, in large measure, involving many of the same things.
I think about this
when we think and work with kids who don't know what they want to be -
including some undergraduates here,
but especially those kids in neighborhoods around Chicago -
because the idea of science is something very dry,
sometimes technical,
forbidding in many ways.
What if you described science as adventure?
That's the way I feel about science.
What if you described science as visualization, at its core?
Which is what I think it is - a lot of science is.
Then, maybe, we'd have a lot more scientists in the next generation
because we certainly need them.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)