Two physicists share their “ideas worth spreading” at the 2011 TED conference

Where would you expect to find physicists sharing the stage with Pulitzer Prize winners, renowned artists and musicians, former heads of state, and social activists? Lately, that place has been at the annual, invitation-only TED conference , originally founded as an idea incubator for luminaries in technology, entertainment, and design. The 2011 conference, titled “The Rediscovery of Wonder,” was held 28 February to 4 March in Long Beach, California, and featured such speakers as Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates, singer Bobby McFerrin, and film critic Roger Ebert.

But just being famous won’t get you invited to a TED conference. Organizers look for people they consider to be “the world’s smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries, and most-inspiring teachers.” One such invitee, cosmologist Neil Turok, lectured the TED audience in 2008 on his cyclic model of the universe and collected the $100 000 TED Prize for his African Institute for Mathematical Sciences’ ”Next Einstein in Africa ” educational initiative (see the news story about AIMS in Physics Today, May 2008, page 25 ).

Neither of the two physicists invited to speak earlier this month were winners of the 2011 TED Prize (that honor went to an anonymous street artist called JR, whose goal is to “turn the world inside out” by galvanizing volunteers to photograph and hang portraits of people in their community). But both physicists conduct research that met the conference’s “ideas worth spreading” criteria, and, like Turok, both pursue interests outside of their primary vocation.

Barnard College theoretical physicist Janna Levin , who kicked off the five-day conference, has conducted several public lectures—including on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report—on the early universe, gravitational waves, and black holes. “TED brings together people who are thinking about the big picture,” she says. “People who are definitely engaged in the world at large and are also experts in their specialty but have an ability to reach out and make broader connections.” Levin has also served as a scientist-in-residence at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and wrote two books, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (Anchor Books, 2003) and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf Publishers, 2006).

Aaron O’Connell was invited to the 2011 TED conference to discuss how he built “the world’s first quantum machine” in the lab of University of California, Santa Barbara physics professor Andrew Cleland —a feat that was recognized as the 2010 “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science magazine. As he is described in the TED conference brochure, O’Connell grew up “reading philosophy, playing guitar, and generally not thinking about science” before being propelled to graduate school by “a series of positive research experiences as an undergraduate” at Eckerd College in Florida. “Actually it started in elementary school,” says O’Connell, who completed his physics PhD degree last year. “My sixth grade teacher had a bunch of batteries, wires, motors, metals, beakers, and other stuff in the back of the room. His rule was that you had to either be doing the classwork or be in the back playing in an undirected way. It was a no-brainer for me. I spent at least half the day in the back of the room.”

Physics Today‘s Jermey Matthews recently talked with both Levin and O’Connell about their experience at the 2011 TED conference.

PT: What did your talk at TED focus on?

LEVIN: I talked about how black holes can play drums on spacetime, how they can ring out a song in the form of gravitational waves, and how we’re aspiring to pick up the pale echo of the coalescence of black holes as well as the Big Bang. There is a substantial community of independent researchers who model black holes ringing spacetime. I talked about that community effort and played some songs from my research where we simulate what the black holes would sound like if we could pick up the wobbling of space, which we hope to do in the next few years with LIGO [the Caltech–MIT operated Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] and, if we’re lucky, with LISA [NASA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna].

I also talked about how we can observe the universe in a totally new way—what it was like before Galileo and then what it was like after the Hubble Space Telescope, and what huge cultural shifts were created. If [LIGO or LISA] can pick up a soundtrack of the universe that we’ve never heard before, a whole new perspective on the universe would open up.

O’CONNELL: I gave a talk on the work I did [designing] the first human-made visible object whose motion follows the laws of quantum mechanics. It is the first macroscopic mechanical resonator to reach the quantum ground state. We were then able to excite the resonator to a single phonon state by transferring a single quantum excitation from a superconducting qubit to the mechanical resonator. During this process we also created entangled qubit-resonator states. However, my talk was mostly about creating a superposed phonon state: the equivalent of the mechanical resonator vibrating a little, the quantum ground state, and a lot, the first phonon state—at the same time. If we think about the atoms, then for the majority of the time, every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn corresponds to the entire mechanical resonator being in two different places. For the talk, I mostly stressed this mind-bending view of our conception of space and identity—that one thing can be in more than one place at a time.

While we have known that it is possible to observe quantum effects on a human-like scale, that is, in objects we can see, most of the experiments up to this point were quantum coherent in the form of a condensate. Direct observation of movement in space of a macroscopic object calls out to the intuition in a way that is fundamentally different from the collective states of superfluids or superconductors. I tried to use this relation to the location of everyday objects to bring out the notion that matter may arise from the interplay of inherently quantum objects. Colloquially, it is not just that quantum mechanics says that everything is interconnected. It is more than that, because it is those connections that literally define the form of everything around us.

PT: How would you compare and contrast TED to a traditional physics conference?

LEVIN: There are no parallel sessions. It is expected that every session is of interest to everybody. And the sessions are very varied. It’s curated with a bigger organic picture in mind. There is an expectation that TED is fertile ground for people to start talking and for extremely unusual things to happen that would not happen in any other context. For example, I met artists that I might write essays for.

O’CONNELL: TED is about as far from a physics conference as possible. The idea behind TED is to embrace humanity. The nonpresenting participants are just as important, if not more important, than the speakers in shaping the experience of the conference. The running theme is developing new connections and shaping the world together. I would say the most frequent and important question asked at the conference is, “How does your work help people and how does it make the world a better place?” While these notions are the underpinnings of the physics community as well, they are never expressed or thought about that explicitly.

PT: What was the most interesting talk you heard?

LEVIN: I was really impressed with Antony and the Johnsons ; they’re incredible musicians. I didn’t get to meet [artist] Shea Hembrey , but I thought his talk on his work [creating art inspired by birds] was fantastic.

O’CONNELL: While I found some other talks more moving, I found the talk by Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche the most interesting. They own a restaurant where they create food that looks or tastes like other food. I would highly recommend watching the video once it is posted on the TED website because I am not going to do their work justice, but they are primarily interested in the experiential relationship people have with their food and what prejudices they carry toward their food’s appearance. I found the way they approach food intriguing because I believe that we should all continuously question our conceptual model of the world.

PT: Who were some of the people that sought you out?

LEVIN: I was kind of mobbed since my talk launched the conference. People are curious and are interested in and sympathetic to science. It’s important that scientists connect with nonscientists. It should not only be about whether someone can help push me over a technical obstacle I’ve encountered. I figure some of these people [at TED] might vote differently or feel differently when they hear that the government wants to cut funding for fundamental research. You get the feeling that people appreciate why science research is important. They’re caught up in the enthusiasm of it.

O’CONNELL: Let’s just say that it turns out that a wide range of people are interested in physics, from actors to technologists to CEOs, as long as you take the time to present your ideas in a clear and approachable way.

PT: How did your interest in music and the arts come about?

LEVIN: I think it’s harder to understand why people get less involved in things like art as they grow up. I just haven’t excised my interest in the arts. It doesn’t help my science to be blinded to other interesting things in the world.

At Ruskin, I got a start on writing my novel [A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines], and I worked a lot with the students in the master’s program there, critiquing their work, and discussed how their work fit into a larger context. It was a very creative free-for-all.

O’CONNELL: I was never interested in music or art until I was exposed to experimental music and conceptual art. That sucked me in. I became engrossed in anharmonicity and Dada [a cultural “anti-art” movement that began in the early 20th century]. Then I got it: What I now consider to be the best music and art isn’t meant to be subversive and simply to bring to the forefront another opinion, but rather allows the humanity conveyed by that view to be shared among people. Art challenges the world by connecting humanity.

Nonetheless, it is really difficult to stay connected to the arts as a physicist, at least for serious physicists who devote themselves to their work. The physics community at large rewards focus over breadth.

PT: What’s next for you?

LEVIN: I’m noodling around with some ideas for my next book, which is in a very early phase. Whatever it turns out to be, it will involve science. It’s the way I see the world. There’s a powerful aesthetic to science. I’m not bored of it yet.

O’CONNELL: I have found that the truly rewarding experiences in my life have had a common motif: unstructured exploration of novel ideas. Thus, rather than take the traditional academic route, I plan to start science-and-technology-based companies that have the potential for large social impact.