Slides accompanying the speech below, given at Emily Carr University of Art + Design during Innovation Fest, a celebration of Swiss-Canadian relations.
"I want to make a point right off the bat. And that is that the act of doing science is more an art, and less a science. In the next couple of minutes I’m going to prove it to you.
The way I’m going to do that is by invoking the AEgIS experiment at CERN that Michael Dosser, the previous speaker, works on. In Greek mythology, the Aegis is a shield of Athena, the Olympian goddess of war and wisdom. She is probably known better by her Roman name, Minerva. Now Athena is the daughter of Zeus and his tutor Metis, but of course Zeus being Zeus, this is the result of an extramarital affair. He is married to Hera, ironically the goddess of marriage. Further, embossed in the Aegis of Athena is the head of Medusa, a monster with a snaky haircut. Medusa's head is cut off by Perseus, and as she is pregnant with the children of Poseidon, they are born through her severed neck. One of them is Pegasus, the winged horse we see everywhere. And Pegasus is famous for helping Bellerophon slay the Chimera, a fire-breathing monstrosity.
Now the reason I’m telling you this story is that all these characters have experiments in fundamental physics named after them. If not experiments, then codes and phenomena. But that’s not all. Greek mythology is a pretty vast subject with a truly epic timeline, yet just about everyone and everything in it get a place in fundamental physics. And I want to use that fact to clarify something important about scientists. As part of our daily grind we scientists strive to be rigorous, technical, precise and skeptical — all for good reasons. But at the same time, the instincts that drive us — the bigger picture in the background that always informs our decisions — are aesthetics, narrative, awe, curiosity…
And even though I’ve shown this cartoon depicting the functionality of left brain versus right brain, I want to use it to make a broader point. Which is that this picture is highly exaggerated. Neuroscientists tell us that brain functions are more even across the hemispheres. The corollary is that we ALL have ALL these instincts, whether we choose to practise them or not.
Now let me move on to what I do for a living. I spend a large fraction of my time attacking the problem of "dark matter", which is a substance that, as far as we can tell, neither emits nor absorbs nor reflects light, hence dark. This substance is also observed all over the universe because it pulls on everything visible through the force of gravity. But more compellingly, it makes up five-sixths of all the matter in the universe. That makes everything we can see, made of atoms, just a small contamination as far as Creation is concerned. And the real crisis is that we have NO idea what this dark matter is made of. We know just about everything there is to know about the world of atoms, but we are not even close to unmasking the microscopic identity of dark matter.
Now here’s where I come in. Astronomers have seen that the smallest sizes in which dark matter collects itself is in structures called dwarf galaxies, that span around 10 power 20 metres. But there are also several attempts around the world to catch dark matter "in the flesh" in detectors like these. These are around a metre in size, as you can see from the physicists standing nearby. So if the smallest size you have measured in metres is 1 followed by 20 zeroes, and you’re trying to glimpse it in a vessel that's just 1 metre across, how do you take the leap of faith across and down all these orders of magnitude? The bridge between these scales is theory — mathematical guesses for what the dark matter could be. You must first assume some well-motivated theory and perform a search for that scenario.
Let me show you how this works in practice, while also illustrating how deeply enmeshed all this is with the act of collaboration between humans. A few years back I was having dinner with a bunch of friends at Waterloo, Ontario when it occurred to us that in these experiments you can actually look for dark matter particles at what is known as the Planck mass, the heaviest an elementary particle can be, around 10 micrograms. It’d take a whole new way of doing the experiment, but it’d work. Notice that in the title of the paper we used the word “Discovering” as we were optimistic. Also notice that we were all from different institutions, so that after that initial meeting everything was virtual, which is typical in STEAM fields. Then there were two more papers in the year that followed. We were still using hopeful words like “foraging for dark matter”. Now notice that 2 more names got added in the 2nd paper and 3 got removed in the 3rd. This fluid nature of combining and separating is also typical of science.
And then I got started on an actual search for this kind of dark matter at an experiment called DEAP-3600, that uses the largest dark matter detector ever built. The search took more than 2 years to complete, but we did not find dark matter. The difference between the previous papers and this one is that this is an actual statement about Nature, which is why it took us so much time to make it. Now here are the people who formed the working group, doing all the hardwork and innovation sitting in these various countries. But when the paper came out, here is the author list. That’s 97 co-authors. Partly because almost everyone on board the experiment had a stab at the draft. But mainly because it was the policy of DEAP to list everyone on the collaboration. For good reason: everyone was involved in the experiment in some capacity in the past, like designing it, constructing it, improving it, and so on. And of course, one cool perk of this policy is that I got to be co-author of a Nobel laureate. That’s because among DEAP’s ranks is Art McDonald, co-winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Speaking of Collaboration with Art, here is the main finished product of an art-and-science project for Leaning Out of Windows, organized by Ingrid and Randy, with the theme of “Invisible Forces”. And here is the team of fantastic artists with whom I worked. In her own words, Ranu Mukherjee works on “hybrid forms of painting, film and installation”, and here’s an example of her work titled "Shadowtime". Haley Bassett does "sculpture, installation and social practice" and often uses "floral motifs", and here's one of her installations. Kyla Gilbert specializes in “multimedia shows” and "sculptural work"; here is an example. We had a terrific and exciting collaboration, and we are all proud of the work we created.
And here is why I think we clicked. The first key to a successful collaboration, in my opinion, is rapport. Isaac Asimov had said it best: “For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality… encourage[s] a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness.” Rarely does this work out in practice, but that’s just what happened for us. An important matter was that very early on, we were pretty comfortable with what we did not know about each other’s worlds, and asked a lot of questions. Another amazement was how we used language. Not only did we have to modify our specialized language to reach out, we were also unconsciously using it as an engine of ideas. To illustrate what I mean, here is a white board from one of our early meetings. These are basically phrases that we spontaneously uttered that someone or the other resonated with. One of the phrases I had casually used was “past presence” and that gave us an idea for interpreting "Invisible Forces": invisibility acting through time.
The 2nd key to our successful collaboration was our diversity, be it in our talents, ethnic backgrounds, or gender. We were inherently equipped to bring in something unique and essential to the project, making for an unbelievably fun and eclectic collaboration.
Now somewhere along the line came my placemat, which shows a cartoon of the timeline of the universe. The various layers here correspond to cosmological epochs that shaped the universe as we see it today. In one of our meetings I showed my placemat to illustrate how forces act invisibly across time, and that picture became one of our central themes. Now what I don’t genuinely remember is which one came first, the idea of arranging fabrics in layers or the idea of making cosmological epochs a theme. We have to go back to our Zoom recordings to see how it came about. But then, that is just the nature of deep collaboration: it’s messy and entangled. What I know for certain is that these two ideas constantly informed each other in the making of our sculpture and a pamphlet that accompanied it.
Speaking of which, here is our exhibit and here’s me. And these are extracts from a handout I wrote that kind-of-sort-of explains what’s going on in our sculpture. Ranu took the pains to stencil these extracts on some of her prized fabrics. And the write-up happened at all because it was the artists who encouraged me to contribute as a writer, not just as a physicist. I would like to think this is because they wanted to bring out the artist in me in return for awakening the scientist in them.
All that constantly reminded me of "Renaissance men" such as Leonardo da Vinci. I couldn’t help thinking that it wasn't just that he was an artist and scientist rolled into one; more likely his artistic sense INFORMED his scientific endeavours, and vice versa. To draw the same lesson from a different Renaissance artist, here’s Johannes Vermeer and one of his paintings that captures light as though it’s a photograph. Well, there is a theory that he did use a device like a camera, called a camera obscura, to get his lighting realistically. The line between artist and innovator those days used to be pretty blurry, as it should always be.
And that brings me to my closing remark, which is to urge everyone to embrace their inner Renaissance person — and not define themselves by simple labels."