Future Light Cone
Science = Future = Hope
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FUTURE LIGHT CONE*
Most middle- and high-schoolers that fall in love with physics after reading popular science books want to become astrophysicists or study particle and high energy physics. They may be aware of quantum mechanics since it often plays an important role in either of those fields, but popular science books rarely present disciplines like condensed matter physics with as much enthusiasm as all the star stuff and all the Higgs stuff, if they do so at all. It’s kind of funny to realize this when condensed matter physics (and its older sister solid state physics) are relevant for so much that is around us, including the machine you are likely using to read this. It’s kind of frustrating to come to the same realization when you’ve devoted your life to one of these less commonly shouted-out branches of physics. I had a mentor in college who told a story about writing a piece focusing on the many physics Nobel laureates in the area of condensed matter (and there really are many) just to have the publication they had pitched it to run with it as a story about the one researcher on that list that dabbled in parapsychology later on. My former mentor was displeased with this experience. Whenever it came up, we’d seamlessly slide into griping about how little of the popular science spotlight condensed matter physics gets. I was already half-way through my PhD when relatives stopped asking me what I had learned about space while I was away at school. That old gripe would rise halfway up my throat before I’d manage to squeak out something about not being “that kind of physicist”.
There is certainly a lot of joy in commiserating with a colleague and now that I have a successful doctoral defense under my belt the array of colleagues that would share my complaints is wide and impressive. But this kind of bittersweet bonding can only get you so far. After a few good complaint sessions, you sort of need to get up, stretch your legs and come up with an action plan that will help you feel something other than frustrated. This is an overused joke but certainly true in my case: I am a theorist, so I am slow and cautious with experimental implementation. In other words, it took me a long time to turn my college gripes into an action plan, and act on that plan instead of grinding my teeth at family dinners. But I did. Towards the end of 2019 I gathered up some courage, attended a science communication workshop aimed specifically at physics students, then turned what I learned there into successfully pitching and publishing an article on one of the Scientific American blogs. I was sure I would embarrass myself almost every step of the way. In the end, however, there it was, way too many words on ultracold atomic physics research, a popular science representation of the kind of physicist I actually am. My mom sent it to a lot of her friends.
Emboldened, I blocked off some time in late March to attend a bigger science communication conference and more boldly engage with this new part of my life-long project of Being a Scientist. I secured a travel grant to travel to Portland and registered for Science Talk, a big gathering of science communicators of all sorts sponsored by a non-profit of the same name. I was excited, and not only because I ate some great things and hung out with some great people the last time I visited the city. You probably don’t need me to tell you what happened next. The and-then-we-all-stayed-home-and-moved-online plot twist is already so integral to our current reality that I hesitate to frame it as a twist for the fear of making light of a rather heavy situation. Health anxieties notwithstanding, Science Talk went fully virtual and I fully stayed where I was already. I attended the conference in my in-law’s living room in Brooklyn, surrounded with empty tea and coffee mugs, my computer perched at the top of a dinner table overrun with quickly scrawled notes I took while teaching introductory thermodynamics through Zoom in the days prior.
While a space full of scientists interested in communicating their work in creative and accessible ways is exciting, it was also intimidating. Intimidating because I am inexperienced in this field, my training almost always having been focused on writing for academic journals and talking to professors that may sit on one or other committee I have had to report to, but also because of that odd condensed matter physics unpopularity issue. How could I compare my projects to those of scientists studying fascinating deep-sea creatures? Or those raising awareness about water pollution or developing smart drugs? Or those actually talking about telescopes and stars and, you know, the beginnings of the physical universe? During a Science Talk presentation about a very effective texting campaign that regaled its subscribers with pictures of cephalopods (“Internet cats of the sea”, as one conference attendee put it), I tried to think of what an equivalent effort in my field could look like. Could I text out fun facts about ultra-cool-able atoms or maybe compounds that can superconduct? I couldn’t imagine an average popular science consumer getting enthused over differences in the fine structure of rubidium 87 and sodium 22. I signed up for a mini texting campaign the presenter had put together to illustrate the power of this outreach tool and received a very cute picture of a type of mite paired with a fact about its antennae. Even a mite seemed more engaging than a potassium atom or the current cuprate superconductor du jour. I reminded myself of the whole “having an action plan to avoid frustration” paradigm that was the reason for my attending Science Talk in the first place.
In its totality, the conference was wonderful, and I spent an awful lot of time Tweeting about it and telling everyone who gave me the now standard social distancing check-in about how much I appreciated the virtual setup and its unexpected advantages. In addition to watching talks and presentations on a livestream, attendees could take part in a simultaneous chat open to everyone. This allowed everyone to talk to everyone about a given presentation as it was happening without anyone’s speaking time being disrupted or anyone having to be put on the spot or awkwardly fiddle with a microphone in a whispery conference room. The virtual platform was more accessible to a variety of people as well: those that find it difficult to travel due to their health, those that may not always find PowerPoints the easiest to see or talks the easiest to hear, those that may have needed child care of financial assistance and so on. The switch to virtual was impressively functional – most of the glitches consisted of speakers’ cats jumping on keyboards – and made the whole affair feel more equitable and inclusive. During one of the early talks, the livestream speaker answered a question about how our identities as people may interact with how we are perceived when we communicate science. After their response, the host was able to say, “I see some pushback to this take in the chat” and the dialogue kept going. Folks who could not have attended otherwise could both attend and make their voice more heard because we had all met in cyberspace. Recalling all the glib Internet jokes about our current shared reality being a dystopia none of us meant to sign up for, the two days I spent at Science Talk came close to what I might have thought I wanted after reading too much cyberpunk in high school.
The second day of the conference started with a discussion of how science communicators should approach COVID-19 and all of the complicated and convoluted information that surrounds its outbreak, management and treatment. It was comforting to have the space to voice some of our shared anxieties. The conversation between the panelists, the moderators and all of us crowding the chat box while also casually lounging in sweatpants at home eventually focused on a few specific issues at the top of everyone’s minds. One particularly struck a nerve: what should those of us that aspire to write and present science to non-scientists be doing at this time if we are not epidemiologists or virologists or have medical training? Part of this question is motivated by the fear of spreading disinformation. At the same time, the question is also partly motivated by a more abstract concern of “is my science even relevant?” or, even more scarily, “is my science worth anyone’s time?”. I recognized this undertone as the very thing that fuels my insecurity about being a condensed matter physics theorist in a space crawling with seemingly more appealing kinds of scientists.
More often than not, writing an introduction to a paper that will be submitted for publication in a peer reviewed journal is a little bit like having your teeth pulled. Even for the limited and highly specialized audience consisting of an editor and a few reviewers, it is a challenge to come up with a grand-enough justification for why they should care about what you’ve done. How many papers can really claim to bring us closer to commercially viable quantum computing or change our understanding of space and time? A while back a friend was writing a paper related to black hole physics and complained about how much of the language surrounding the topic sounded unrealistically flowery and grand. The choices for nudging someone’s attention towards your mind’s labor seem to be troublesome in that we have to either over-sell it or risk making it sound awfully small and bland. Or so it at least often feels. Between ourselves we tend to dismiss the whole process of finding the middle between these extremes by saying that we should not have to “sell” our science. As if the universe heard me the last time I exasperatedly said that, the Science Talk keynote address included ample use of the phrase marketing.
I am not so naïve as to think that marketing is always a dirty word nor am I reluctant to learn about strategies that may have at some point been used to achieve troublesome ends. The marketing lessons for a science communicator are quite valuable: we need to start by identifying our communication goals, get to know our audience, figure out how they see us then let all those facts shape an effective communication strategy. This is at least slightly familiar to anyone who has spent time in a classroom, trying to teach a difficult subject under the guise of a general requirement course or to students with little previous relevant training. It is also what we secretly do when we write different-sounding papers for different journals even though the projects we are presenting may be similarly motivated in our minds. Many scientists are engaging in marketing-like activities fairly often, we just don’t quite always do, or want to, acknowledge that. The keynote speaker, Chris Volpe of ScienceCounts, laid it all out very explicitly and meticulously, making clear punchlines driven by survey data. The part of my brain that loves a flowchart was very satisfied. What stuck with me most as I thought about Science Talk in the following days centered on how the average person perceives science, what connotations the word conjures up before they are thinking about it all that consciously. Volpe framed this by considering the “brand” of science as a common starting point between the science communicator and their audience. When people buy a Harley-Davidson, they are buying the brand of unboundedness and freedom, what do they think they’re getting with the brand of science? It turns out that they are hearing science and thinking about the future, hearing science and feeling hope.
Maybe it is not surprising that people associate science with the future and think of it as being inherently forward-looking. In movies it is usually a mad scientist or a lone genius of the scientific persuasion that makes a huge discovery and propels us all into some awesome, or awful, future. Hope is inherently forward-looking too. It speaks to what we may do in the future and hence the things we may know and understand then. In his keynote, Volpe qualified that the math of “science equals hope” is not absolute and does not come without boundaries. Just because people may perceive science as being able to take them to a future they hope for, it does not mean that scientists should shy away from delivering bad news when bad news are appropriate. It also does not mean that we have to present our work as more science-fiction than fact or stake out a position of predictive certainty that is typically very elusive in the messy day-to-day of actually doing science. What it does do, this presentation emphasized, is give us a point of connection with those we are talking to and an opportunity for aligning our frames of reference with them when it comes to the topic at hand. During the conference it was repeated a few times, by speakers and attendees alike, that humans are not thinking machines that feel but rather vice versa – they are feeling machines that occasionally get around thinking. By keeping this in mind, acknowledging that our feelings about science are linked to our feelings of hope for the future, we can catch ourselves before we veer off into jargon-babble that seems to have nothing to do with what tomorrow may look like.
This framing of science communication, and the notion that knowing how people feel and think about science can help us convey our research work in a more resonant way, make for great practical advice. However, they also provide a deeper reason for not just communicating about science, but also still giving science work itself a shot even when it feels small, impractical or, on really bad days, near useless. We can always rely on science to point us to a future in which we have learned more and gotten better at understanding something that was elusive just yesterday. The notion of a better future may look differently for everyone, but more knowledge underlies so much, if not all, of what we consider to be progress. Even when we cannot say that our work has truly changed the way in which we view the world, or fixed a big global problem of some sort, the truth remains that it has pushed us forward in time by making us learn. It is easy to catch ourselves justifying our science in business-like terms in academia because we tend to operate from a sense of scarcity – there are only so many opportunities to get published and only so many grants that can support only so many researchers. Practically, we have to assume this mindset from time to time; scientists have to pay rent too. But when we are left with ourselves we can also let go of it and remind ourselves that by knowing a little more today, about some tiny, specific, seemingly un-cool (or ultra-cool) part of the world than those that studied it before us we have already built a little bit of a better future, already made some of what they may have hoped for a reality. And can there really be a better motivation to be brave and loud and talk about it to anyone who will listen?
Best,
Karmela
P. S. As an addendum somewhat complementary to the body of this letter, and something of an explicit acknowledgment of how odd it is to be thinking about the future and what we may hope to find there these days, I wanted to share a few passages from a C. S. Lewis sermon that a reader submitted to Laura Olin’s Social Social Distance Club newsletter recently. Here, Lewis is making a case for studying arts and sciences in the wartime. Though he quite strongly connects it to religion and Christian theology, parts of it resonated with me regardless of that particular context.
Olin marked the passage below as well, which may underscore how in this time of stress and fear we all want to be given the same permission to keep being interested in our interests without having to justify them against some grand goal of “returning to normal”:
Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life".
I also got stuck on this particular passage
… we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues, but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.
I am not religious and do not believe in heaven and hell, but what I hear Lewis asserting here is that we should step away from feeling like our work is not big enough, like it does not matter because some other things may matter more at the moment. And that we can make pursuing it a part of our future without feeling like that particular future is any less hopeful than the one in which we sacrificed it for crisis-content only.
I have also written about not losing faith, organizing and Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark in a previous letter here.
* In special relativity, a light cone describes how a flash of light evolves as a function of time in spacetime. If one imagines the flash as a point in three-dimensional space, there are two cones that extend upwards and downwards from it, their most pointed (most narrow) parts meeting at the flash. The two cones represent the past and the future with respect to the flash and their size (width) is set by the speed of light. The bottom cone represents all past events that could be connected to the flash going forward in time (bottom up) while the top cone collects all the events that could be reached by starting at the flash, moving in the same direction towards the future.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: As I am writing this, I am getting ready to teach my fifth problem-solving session over Zoom and I am starting to feel a little more confident about it. The switch to virtual instruction was pretty abrupt and the learning curve definitely on the steep side for many of us. Going forward I have something of a better idea of what preparing to teach, and grading weekly assessments, will look for me. It feels unexpectedly vulnerable to be the only person talking, and sometimes the only person with their video turned on, on one of these calls and I’m finding that I do really miss the messiness of blackboards, but hopefully we’ll all learn something about both physics and communication from all of this. My university just announced that our summer instruction will be done remotely as well, so I certainly hope to come out of this now long stretch of all-Zoom-all-the-time with some new skills and expertise.
On the Zoom front, I have now also sat through calls that doubled as group meetings, brown-bag seminars and organizing sessions. In many of these instances, I have learned that audibly speaking to a person and watching their face as they respond to you in real time is pretty invaluable and definitely can’t be matched by emailing or texting. Folks in my research group are still working on some fascinating problems and it’s been great to help bounce some ideas among us. The organizing group within the Access Network that I am co-mentoring in putting together a, now virtual, conference has also been doing some really impressive work and discussing our new practices for advocacy, education and mentoring very thoughtfully. As with my previous experiences working with the Access Network, I am enjoying growing alongside the rest of the team.
Finally, I am still searching for a job, now with the added incentive of my husband actually having secured a position for the next year. I have been working more on more on my resume and various cover letters, and actually sending them places. I do think I have improved on both fronts and finally launching my website has made me feel a bit more like a Real Adult as I go through this process. It is all still pretty daunting, however, and I can only hope that I have not made any serious mistakes just yet.
LISTENING: Since I am not living alone right now and have nowhere to walk to and no equations to absentmindedly crunch through, my podcast consumption has decreased quite dramatically. I am still starting my days with NPR’s Up First and The Daily from The New York Times, and trying to keep up with my most barebones politics (On the Media, NPR Politics, FiveThirtyEight Politics) and media shows (Supercontext, The Big Picture, Popcast) but I really haven’t indulged in anything like real storytelling or serious educational content that I’ve tended to in the past. It is odd to notice how much more podcasts voices felt essential when I did not have voices to engage with in my household. However, I expect it won’t take all that long before I return to a more intense podcast consumption as means of diversion and newness again.
On the music front I have similarly been defaulting to either running music (which I wrote about in my last letter) and something like writing music which has meant lots of Boris and a fair amount of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I love Feedbacker, I love The Flood and I’m finding that Luciferian Towers and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven also really speak to me in that grating-but-comforting way.
WATCHING: In trying to keep something like a normal schedule, my husband and I have been trying to end our workdays early enough to squeeze in a bit of TV watching, with family or by ourselves. My father in law is very fond of crime shows and New York based TV channels seem to always be playing either Law and Order or Blue Bloods so there’s been a bit of a crime theme to a lot of these couch-based family hangouts. Sticking with the theme, he also marathoned the third season of Netflix’s Ozark and since I did watch the first two, mostly as grading background, I let myself at least overhear if not honestly watch large chunks of it. I still think Ozark is not all that great of a show, and it is definitely unable to push its plot forward in any way other than constantly introducing new characters which does tend to get tiresome, but it also has a lot of momentum and just enough cliffhangers to keep you repeatedly reach for the next episode. Had I not watched it so absent-mindedly and incompletely, I probably would have been significantly more annoyed with it. We have also been slowly making our way through all three seasons of Glow, also from Netflix. The first season was surprisingly delightful, and I loved much about it, from the fashions to clever bits of political commentary to the fact that it actually made me laugh out loud a few times. While the show did not become less clever over the following two seasons, it did become more convoluted and started inching ever so slightly towards being a soap and away from being a sitcom. A few of the storylines felt rushed, in the same way suddenly canceled shows on cable used to, and a few times I’ve felt like the authors are trying a little too hard to remind us that it is a period piece. I don’t always love what they are doing with queer representation either, but that may just be a side-effect of certain characters being thrown into intense storylines after not being all that fleshed out and developed previously. We’re pretty close to finishing season three of Glow and I am happy that we watched it and happy to indulge its more than occasional corniness, but I do wish that more of the spirit of the its opening had carried into the rest of its run.
We have been less patient with movies recently, and only managed to commit to one night of serious watching of the 2011 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This film certainly does require serious watching as it contains layers of intrigue and deception, and an awful lot of recognizable British male actors playing their best rough-and-dirty-yet-gentleman-like spies. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is long, and it took me about an hour to just learn all the character names, but for its second hour and change I was pretty invested in what George Smiley might dig up about his MI6 colleagues. Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy have awful hair, female representation is minimal and claustrophobic yet appealing shots of grey-ish buildings and grey-ish skies abound. Gary Oldman is pretty great and the whole thing is pretty satisfying, though predictable in some of its unpredictable revelations, once it reaches its end. This film is probably not everyone’s idea of fun crime fiction, and a part of me dislikes that I fell at least partly for its distinct Britishness, but if nothing else it was a great counterweight to all the slightly manic Ozark nonsense.
EATING: We continue to eat well, and I continue to fail to write down recipes. My husband made a riff on these noodles Singapore and this chana masala and both were pretty great. I tried my hand at this lemon olive oil cake (with minimal adjustments to its sugar and lemon content), these five ingredient almond flour cookies, these vegan crepes (we had them rolled-up with jam, exactly the way I had them as a kid in Croatia when my mom used to make something similar) and this no knead overnight bread (I miss my sourdough routine, but am nervous about the wastefulness of the starter-growing process) and was equally successful. We tried some ice-cream from Oatly and loved it and picked up some aggressively umami Indian snacks when a long walk took us past one of the many ambiguously ethnic stores near Brighton Beach.
Since I am trying to avoid frequent grocery shopping as much as possible, I have also been taking advantage of the highly non-trivial, possibly forgotten, amount of dried beans in my in-law’s pantry. The recipe I am sharing below is for some very simple brothy cannellini, navy or great northern beans made in a pressure cooker and ready to be eaten as soup, with a side of crunchy bread or ladled over spaghetti squash like we had it for one of our lunches. I have included a note on cooking these without a pressure cooker and some more detailed serving ideas as well. Let me know if you dig up something similar in your pantry!
For about 8 servings you will need:
2 cups dry navy, cannellini, or great northern beans
Enough water to cover the beans by about an inch
1 teaspoon dried rosemary or a small sprig fresh
1 teaspoon dried thyme or a few sprigs fresh
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (or less if you don’t like spicy)
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1-2 bay leaves
1.5 tablespoon lemon juice (about one small lemon)
Zest of half a small lemon
4-5 cloves garlic, whole
For finishing: more lemon juice, olive oil, chopped parsley, baby spinach, cherry tomatoes cut into quarters, pre-cooked small pasta, roasted zucchini or squash
1. Add all the ingredients to a pressure cooker and cook on high for 30 minutes
2. After the time is up let sit for at least 10 minutes then release the pressure or, preferably, wait until the pressure naturally drops
3. Finish off with more lemon juice, olive oil, baby spinach, chopped parsley and cherry tomatoes, pre-cooked small pasta or roasted vegetables
Notes:
On pressure cooking (or not): I have an Instant Pot and my mother in law has a Ninja Foodi and they work pretty much exactly the same. If you soak the beans overnight (cover with plenty of cold water and rinse well before cooking, discarding any beans that may have floated to the surface), the pressure-cooking time is 2 minutes for pretty soft beans. If you do not have a pressure cooker, soak the beans overnight, add all ingredients to a large pot then bring to a boil. After the mixture has boiled, lower the temperature so it stays at a very slight simmer and cook for 30-40 minutes more or until the beans are done to your liking
On spices: leave out any spices you may not have and feel free to use vegetable broth instead of water, add a bouillon cube or add a splash of soy sauce, even some miso paste dissolved in warm water could be a great addition once the beans are done
Ideas for serving:
a) turn the beans into a soup by mixing in some baby spinach, small pasta you have cooked separately and a little more lemon juice and olive oil
b) Mix in parsley, quartered cherry tomatoes and some roasted vegetables (toss zucchini or butternut squash cut into bite sized pieces with some olive oil and salt then bake for 30-40 minutes at 400F, shaking the pan halfway through the baking time)
c) Mash some of the beans to make a thick and chunky sauce then mix in pasta like rigatoni or penne and a few tablespoons of cashew cream and a sprinkle of nutritional yeast (or some equivalent dairy products if you consume them) or spoon the mixture over a roasted sweet potato
d) Serve as a warm salad by mixing with lots fo steamed or sautéed kale and adding a good drizzle of balsamic vinegar
e) Spoon over a well-roasted spaghetti squash with extra olive oil, lemon juice, cherry tomatoes and parsley (pictured below, to make the squash: cut it in half, remove the seeds with a spoon, rub with salt, pepper and olive oil, then roast cut side down for 30-40 minutes at 400F, until soft and hollow-feeling to touch, slightly caramelized and it is easy to separate the “spaghetti” with a fork)