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FERMI SURFACE*
One of the many items included on the golden record on the Voyager space probe is a recording of Ann Druyan’s brain waves. Druyan was the creative director of the golden record project. At the time of the recording she was newly engaged to and madly in love with Carl Sagan. They had been collaborators and friends but never pursued a personal relationship until a phone call they shared in 1977. Druyan left a message for Sagan while he was out of town, something regarding a new piece of music she had decided to include on the record, and when he called back they spontaneously decided to get married. They had never even kissed before. She describes this phone call as a Eureka moment of sorts, like coming up with a way to perform a particularly difficult calculation while you shower – afterwards it seems to make so much sense that you are baffled by your past inability to come up with it. They married three years later and remained together until Sagan’s death in 1996. Her brain waves, encoding the meditation on her love for Carl, are still out there, traversing the Solar System.
The story of Sagan and Druyan sounds like something that only happens in movies and even then only to professional dreamers like Sagan. It is a remarkable story and an inspiring one as it is comforting to believe that such Eureka moments are possible. But it is also a painfully saccharine, cheesy story. In fact, it is probably saccharine enough to be dismissed as rash decision making, misguided romanticism and something of a statistical outlier. Most of us would not support such behavior form our friends let alone enact it in our own lives. People shy away from unrealistically saccharine things.
This past weekend I attended an annual retreat for a mentoring program within my department. As a child I never had the chance to attend summer camp so these retreats act as some bizarre form of time travel that allows me to take place of my eight-year-old self and make tie-dye shirts, play ridiculous field games and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a cabin decked out in Girl Scouts paraphernalia. This is a lot of fun.
In this program graduate students mentor undergraduates in order to foster a greater sense of community and provide practical career advice. It has also proven to be one of the best avenues for discussing issues pertaining to diversity and inclusion within our department and the physics community at large. One-on-one mentoring is after all a very good way of showing underrepresented students that they can be a part of the physics community and that people similar to them have been successful within it before. As a part of an effort to think about these issues as a group, the retreat this year included a short workshop on stereotype threat and the impostor syndrome. Both are psychological phenomena that seem to be more pronounced in underrepresented or marginalized individuals. Following a presentation explaining the two terms and corroborating them with numerous studies we were asked to write a list of our own insecurities – things that may reflect negative stereotypes we are susceptible to or that contribute to our feelings of not being deserving of our achievements. This was followed by a small group discussion about the presentation but the reason for physically writing this list was mostly so that we could burn it on our bonfire later that night. The workshop facilitator somewhat jokingly apologized for setting us up for an act as cheesy as literally burning your insecurities.
There are many confusing lines drawn when it comes to discussing insecurity and other feelings. Sharing too much can be seen as narcissistic or needy while sharing too little can be interpreted as a lack of warmth or insincerity. Too much enthusiasm paints one as naïve, too much energy as melodramatic, too many complaints as bitter. The calculus that goes into answering questions concerning how we feel, especially about ourselves, entails enough steps that it is often much easier to offer a stock answer that barely reflects our feelings at all. Feelings seemingly come with a set of rules for organizing, stacking and then being sealed off as if it takes extra energy to allow one to surpass this superficial answer level. In one of the better books I read last year, The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison writes about sentimentality being perceived as an emotional indulgence. She points out that even the use of the word saccharine – a sugar substitute – points to too much feeling being looked down upon in the same way as something like a cupcake binge. In fear of being melodramatic or cheesy many of us seem to go for the equivalent of ordering a salad even though you really want the pizza. Almost by default one leaves such a situation unsatisfied.
While issues pertaining to psychological stresses underrepresented individuals experience in highly competitive fields and communities such as physics cannot be resolved without systemic, collective work towards dismantling of various societal structures that negatively influence all of us**, I do often wonder whether many of us would feel more of a sense of belonging if we were just slightly more willing to occasionally come off as cheesy or melodramatic. Sometimes when I tell people I am a physicist and they respond with the obligatory ‘Oh you must be so smart, I hated physics in high school’ I reply with something along the lines of ‘It is actually really difficult and I just try to work hard’. This does not make for particularly stellar small talk but I surreptitiously wish to hear the same from my colleagues. If we could all openly tell each other when something is hard or when we are feeling inadequate maybe we would collectively have a better notion of what the average experience is and identify a better benchmark to measure ourselves against. It is remarkably easy to think you are failing when everyone else that might feel that way claims they are fine and their projects are developing well. There is ultimately a lot of strength in a community that allows its members to be vulnerable. The take-away from the Druyan and Sagan story is similar – it takes courage and honesty to live the saccharine story they did. And there is joy in such unabashed emotional indulgence, in giving into a feeling so much that one phone call seems enough or celebrating all of our Eureka moments as if they are going to change our lives forever even when it is just identifying a rogue minus sign. Many of us get involved in science because of an overwhelming sense of wonder that is quickly replaced by fear of sounding stupid and we similarly downplay our achievements in fear of social and academic criticisms. We avoid excessive emotions and settle for an often-unsatisfying cool instead. To borrow the food metaphor again, maybe this is the rare case where a cupcake or two would be beneficial.
Best,
Karmela
* In physics, fermions (named after Enrico Fermi) are particles with half-integer spin that obey the Pauli exclusion principle. This means that two fermions cannot be described by the same set of ‘quantum numbers’. For instance, an s-shell of some atom can accommodate two electrons only if they have different spins (otherwise all parameters describing them would be the same). As a direct consequence an energy level can only hold a finite number of fermions. Given some number of electrons, they are be distributed, in a quantum mechanical system, until some non-trivial number of energy levels is filled (if they did not obey this exclusion principle they could all simply reside in the lowest energy level, as bosons do). The final level that is filled determines the Fermi surface. The Fermi surface therefore indirectly indicates the minimum amount of energy for a state of the system accommodating all of these fermions. If extra energy is added into the system fermions can get excited and surpass the Fermi surface. Such excited electrons can lead to conduction and similar phenomena.
** It seems appropriate to mention that emotionality and many characteristics and actions related to it are typically perceived as a feminine trait so that issues such as sexism cannot be de-coupled from this discussion. While I do believe that the overwhelming male-ness of physics as a field is a factor in the way we shape our conversations with each other, this might be a topic for another time.
***
ABOUT THIS WEEK
LEARNING: My work schedule has been unexpectedly busy this week and despite having Monday off it feels as if I haven’t stopped working for days. My research work for the week is culminating in a three-hour series of meetings, mostly about finalizing papers I will be a co-author on, and I am still haunted by that one particular phase diagram. I guess more and more of my weeks are like that.
My atomic quantum gases class continues to be interesting even though it is starting to be more and more geared towards experimental physics, something that I only fully realized once I saw that the assigned problem set continued actual numbers. Hopefully, this will help me build some intuition about the limitations of experiments and systems that are actually available for study. I am definitely one of those theorists that off-handedly mention that ‘you can do that in cold atoms’ whenever an interesting system is brought up in conversation so it seems appropriate to learn more about when you actually can.
Additionally, I have spent a fair amount of time this week on preparing problem sets for the quantum mechanics class my advisor is teaching and was reminded just how much work goes into teaching of any sort. The situation in which I am spending a morning writing and assigning problems and the afternoon solving my own homework is also one of the many indicators of graduate school being only a partial foray into adulthood.
LISTENING: I am still catching up on all of the podcasts that I have not had a chance to listen to while in Croatia so my choice of favorites for the week is not particularly coherent. I listened to a great This American Life story about Afrofuturism that I found both informative and touching, and Ira Glass’s choice to invite an actual person of color to host this episode of the show seems like a good example of what inclusivity should mean in media. In addition to thinking about the future, the past seem to be something we are all actively thinking of these days so this discussion of whether history is really bound to repeat itself on Stuff to Blow Your Mind came across as particularly interesting. Their discussion of the science of secrets is also something I have been thinking about and debating with my boyfriend (a real life social scientist) in the past few days as studying secrets turns out to be an interesting experimental challenge. Finally, Reply All ran another Gibson-esque story about mysterious phone calls and ingenious phone schemes. It is always remarkable to learn about ways in which technologies can be abused and it is even more fascinating when the technology in question has been around as long as telephones. (And if you would like to learn about Voyager's incredible journey you can listen to a Radiolab story, featuring Ann Druyan among other people, here.)
WATCHING/READING: Since it has been such an unexpectedly busy week, my media consumption has really been minimal recently. I brought a book about the Manhattan project to the retreat but never even had a chance to open it (I was helping with cooking the meals and all of the accompanying tasks) and I missed a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker at a local art theater because I worked late. I am hoping to make up for both this weekend.
EATING: The weather here in Illinois has gotten colder much more quickly than I expected and the fact that fall is near is slowly starting to sink in. I am not looking forward to cold weather but I am excited for fall produce, all sorts of orange squash and apple-heavy desserts. Accordingly, I am sharing a butternut squash grain bowl recipe below. In addition to being somewhat seasonal, this a also meal well suited for tight schedules as all components can be made ahead of time and then assembled whenever you get a chance to actually eat.
For two meals, you will need:
1 medium-sized butternut squash, cubed (mine was about 6 cups)
1 red bell pepper, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 green bell pepper, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 cup of cooked quinoa (or rice, millet, any other grain)
1 avocado
2 cups thinly sliced red cabbage
1 tablespoon coconut oil (or canola or olive oil)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar (or more)
Salt, pepper and red pepper flakes
Preheat the oven to 400 F and line a large baking sheet (or two smaller ones) with parchment paper
Toss the squash with coconut oil and peppers with olive oil. Season both with salt. Arrange on the sheet so that not many pieces are touching and bake for 20-25 minutes until the squash is fork-tender and the peppers slightly charred. (The peppers are likely to bake a little faster so checking doneness after about 15 minutes can be helpful.)
(If you don’t have a pre-cooked grain, quinoa will cook in these 20 minutes as will rice in a rice cooker)
Mix the peppers with balsamic vinegar*
Assemble: in a bowl, arrange 1 cup of cabbage, ½ cup of grain, half of the squash and the peppers and ½ of an avocado topped with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes
* Since this is essentially a cheater’s take on proper roasted peppers, these are the best after they had been refrigerated overnight and slightly broken down by the vinegar. You can also add some finely chopped garlic if you like the taste.
Tip: Make this ahead of time! Roast the veggies and cook the grains on a Sunday so that you can just pull things out of the fridge on a weeknight. I briefly warm up the squash in my toaster oven or under the broiler but the rest of it can even be enjoyed cold.
This is also a meal that can be customized without too much thought: most squash can be substituted for butternut and two sweet potatoes would likely be a good substitution as well, kale or spinach would be good stand-ins for the cabbage (if eating kale raw consider massaging it with olive oil to get rid of some of the bitterness first; you can similarly toss the cabbage with some lime or lemon juice). If you do not have quinoa on hand and worry about protein, some spiced black beans or baked tofu would be a good addition. Finally, you can always add more roasted vegetables like carrots, broccoli, or cauliflower.