full interview_clifford johnson_1.mp3
Clifford Johnson [00:00:00] My name is Clifford Johnson, I'm a theoretical physicist. I also use art as a tool for exploring some of the science.
Speaker 2 [00:00:10] So tell us about, you know, communication is one of the things that really motivates you to communicate with the public. Step back and tell us what is the big picture about how the public picks a website.
Clifford Johnson [00:00:26] Science is often thought of as a special thing that a very special group of people do and it's sort of often a corner on its own. And I try and push back against that. I think science is for everybody, just as much as art and history and other subjects we enjoy are for everybody. It's all part of our culture. So a lot of what I do is trying to... Pull science out of that specialist corner and have as many people engage with it as they desire.
Speaker 2 [00:00:59] Why do you think that is?
Clifford Johnson [00:01:02] It's not clear what came first, whether it was the way the media tends to present science to people and then they buy into it, or whether we got there and then media is reflecting that. But somehow our culture, our entertainment, all of these things have science and scientists. As the sort of special group, you know, there's the image of the nerd or the geek and what have you that somehow is associated with science. That I think is problematic because science really belongs to all of us and I think it would be really nice if we started helping people realize that.
Speaker 2 [00:01:47] So what kind of things do you do to move forward to make it further than that?
Clifford Johnson [00:01:53] I spend a lot of time talking about science in as many ways as possible, trying to meet people where they are, trying show that science is part of our everyday lives, not just as a sort of spinach that we should eat because it's important and good for us, but because it's also fun. It's also telling us about who we are in this wonderful universe. And that wonderful universe of course can be stars and planets and all those things people talk about. But it's also the wonderful universe of just, you know, your kitchen, you're making food, you're trying to get by in the world. Science is part of all of that and illuminates all of it.
Speaker 2 [00:02:38] Do you think that, so we have a series that's art and science, why are they, I mean, what's the separation that people have in your mind? They're thinking about art, they're thinking of science.
Clifford Johnson [00:02:51] Scientists are often thought of as very special, technical people who do things with numbers and it's all very cold and not very expressive, in contrast to things to do with art, where it's sort of warm and fluffy and it somehow... More fun, maybe, for some people, and somehow also perceived as easier to get into, and I actually think these differences are really not representative of the truth. Art and science, in my opinion, are forms of expression and inquiry, and actually the The scores into them are pretty similar.
Speaker 2 [00:03:42] That was great. That's perfect. Do it again and you're going to change the shot.
Speaker 3 [00:03:51] That was a little glare, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:03:53] So this is going great.
Speaker 3 [00:03:54] Okay, good.
Speaker 2 [00:03:58] I scribble notes to myself, but it doesn't mean I'm not listening. No, no, no. I totally understand. You said something I'm going to follow up later. Yeah, yeah.
Clifford Johnson [00:04:07] Yeah. No, no, don't worry about that. Whatever you do, I'll keep the eye-line that way and just keep saving.
Speaker 2 [00:04:22] Right. I know, I understand.
Clifford Johnson [00:04:26] No, no, no. I teach classrooms of people and as long as they're not shopping for your next thing on Amazon, which they often are, I'm fine with that.
Speaker 2 [00:04:46] No, it's a little higher than glasses. Yeah. Better? Yes. Can you put your glasses slightly down? Slightly down, like that. Just a little bit down. Yeah.
Clifford Johnson [00:04:54] Yeah. How's that?
Speaker 2 [00:04:58] Okay, yeah. Two down and then it's distorted.
Clifford Johnson [00:05:03] Yeah yeah yeah it's uh yeah okay okay head tilt maybe look at that no i'm just kidding
Speaker 2 [00:05:13] And check the other one, Andy, also to make sure that the other is not. The other one is okay, actually. The other ones recording, right? Yeah, everything's recording. I just can't tell where it's going to go. It's probably coming from over here.
Clifford Johnson [00:05:31] Oh, I see. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:05:38] Okay, all right, let's do it. Okay. All right, let's talk about art and science. Just tell us your thoughts again.
Clifford Johnson [00:05:45] Uh-huh. The differences, perceived differences, et cetera. Yeah. Let me just get myself back on track. Science and
Speaker 3 [00:05:57] Yeah.
Clifford Johnson [00:05:58] Science is usually thought of as this subject that's cold and analytical and all to do with sort of numbers and very inaccessible things to some people, in contrast to, for example, art, which is considered to be something that, you know, anyone can get into and it's fun and it's, you now, very sort of tactile perhaps. And the truth is, is that they're very similar. You can have all kinds of different approaches to science that match the person who's involved just in the same way as science, just in the same as art. I'll say that sentence again. You can all kinds of approaches to the science that are different depending upon who's doing it. And that's the same for art as well. And in fact, so much about it is the way you can find your way into it, your individual way into the subject. And sometimes you don't find that first way in school or what have you and then you go, oh, well, science, I don't have the right brain for it, and then, you're done. And that's how it's often perceived. And it may be that you just didn't find the right door. And when you find the way in and the right aspects of it that resonates with you, it's a wonderful thing.
Speaker 2 [00:07:20] What was the measure for you?
Clifford Johnson [00:07:23] Probably fixing things was the magical way and for me just trying to start that again. I found my way in by tinkering with things, building things, taking things apart and trying to see how they worked and trying to understand how the world around me worked. Which is often how I think we all start out in some ways as touching on science, as kids trying to figure out how stuff works, find our way in the world. And in some way science is still that when you're a grown up, whether you're scientist or not. It's all about finding our way into the world, understanding our place in the word, figuring out how things work. Maybe building tools to help you ask more questions, do more things. But at the end of the day, it's all about curiosity and just trying to understand the world around it.
Speaker 2 [00:08:17] It's been pointed out to us that in many ways art and science are looking for sort of the same answers, just in different ways.
Clifford Johnson [00:08:29] One of the core things I think that we're all about, once we've found warmth and food and the basics, is really just trying to understand our place in the world. I think science is a way of finding answers to that kind of question, and art is a ways of finding answers to that question as well. They're both processes of distillation, trying to make sense of all of this stuff, and build it, perhaps boil it down into some palatable things we can understand, and the process of representation in art or expression from what's going within. It's very similar to the processes of representation in science, trying to model what's going on and trying again to find our way of connecting to that model. So the processes are very similar.
Speaker 2 [00:09:32] And hang on one minute, I think I know what you did. Just do something. Of course, I have to lean my way through here. I'm not checking anything off.
Speaker 3 [00:09:49] You're doing the you're you're acting
Clifford Johnson [00:09:53] out the things I'm saying. We do experiments, sometimes they don't work, but even a null experiment is informative.
Speaker 2 [00:10:14] Well, that's really something, though, that they say, what does this feel like? What you just said, these kinds of experiments, what does it feel like to experiment? What is it? Because we talk to artists and artists talk about, in processing, they try a million things, you know? What's it like with the science?
Clifford Johnson [00:10:34] Trying to get the answers to certain questions about nature means that you do experiments and sometimes they don't work, sometimes because the experiment was flawed, but sometimes because you don't know what the outcome is going to be and it could go either way. You're asking, you know, is this thing real, is the effect that my equations suggested that I might find as a theorist, you now, maybe I talk to my friends who do an experiment and they go away and check it. And it may come out that yes that thing is real or no that thing isn't real. Either way we've learned something and so that is an important process, the experiment itself. Regardless of the outcome, if it's a well-designed experiment it'll tell you something, it'll inform you and on you go. It's a great feeling when you actually have confirmation from nature about something, whether it be positive or negative. And again, that's true in other processes as well, just in life in general. Some certainty, you can build something on. Right or wrong, positive or negative, you have some certainty about an outcome that allows you to move on.
Speaker 2 [00:11:52] We often think about, you know, creativity as something that is for an artist. What about science? Science creative?
Clifford Johnson [00:12:03] There's a very frustrating terminology that people have which is that somehow the people in the arts are referred to as the creators and I find that stunning because among the most creative people I've ever met and among the most creative historically are people who do science. It requires an incredible amount of imagination, of playfulness. Of tinkering and serendipity, all these things that we associate with creativity in the arts requires all of that to do science. Whether you're a theorist dreaming up new equations and trying to understand, you know, profound things about our universe, or whether you're an experimentalist who's trying to figure out the best way of testing some of those ideas, the creativity needed. At the highest level that I know of, just as much as it is in the art.
Speaker 2 [00:13:06] Why is it frustrating when you're not recognizing it?
Clifford Johnson [00:13:09] It's really frustrating when you hear scientists not thought of as creative people, because of course they're simply wrong, but it also means that some people don't realize that their creativity could be in the sciences instead of in the arts, or as well as in the arts. So there's missed opportunities there, because of a misunderstanding, again, of how certain professions are marketed, as it were.
Speaker 2 [00:13:39] Does anything have to do with the way that, you mentioned school before, the way we teach these subjects?
Clifford Johnson [00:13:48] A lot of the flaw, I think, goes back to how we teach the subject, certain cliches about how certain subjects are, about who can do certain subjects, about what happens when perhaps you show an inkling in one direction or another and then it's assumed that it shuts out all these other subjects. Oh, they're good at this, so that probably means that that's their thing. Most people can do many things. And the route into science doesn't mean that you should no longer do art. The route into the arts doesn't means you should not longer do science. But we're taught these sorts of things, we perpetuate certain myths and really drill them into the next generation and we keep producing these same divisions in every generation as a result.
Speaker 2 [00:14:39] You mentioned clay. The importance of clay.
Clifford Johnson [00:14:44] It's all about play in some sense. The business of trying to explore, trying to tinker, trying to find your way into a question, trying find the right question sometimes. These are all things that come from playing around. Play is a word that in itself needs rehabilitation because it's often thought of as something to do with being childish. In some ways, it's about being childlike, which is a good thing. Being open and playful and looking for opportunities, looking for that inspiration. And that's what play really is, and it's crucial in science, just as it is in the arts.
Speaker 2 [00:15:30] Can you say the second part again? Because it plays around, just from where it needs to be written.
Clifford Johnson [00:15:38] Yeah, play is a word that needs rehabilitation, I think, because it's often thought of as something to do with, I'll start at the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I got it. I just, I started fluttering. Play is a world I think that needs rehabilitation. It's often though of as something to do with being childish, whereas really it's about being child-like in the sense of exploration, being open, looking for opportunity, tinkering and seeing what happens, and that's the core of some of the best science and some of the best art.
Speaker 2 [00:16:18] But tell us what you do to help spread the gospel there and bring people together.
Clifford Johnson [00:16:25] One of the things I do a lot is use visual arts in some of the communication I do about science, some of invitation I do to people to be involved in science. I think actually one of the thing that happens in the way science is presented, certainly in my field and others, is there's this belief that you should write you know, these books with lots of fancy words and in some ways put aside some of the things we actually do as real scientists, which is communicating with visuals. We don't do that enough when we communicate with the general public, in my opinion. So I try and draw, illustrate, try and tell people that actually there's a lot of visual language in the art. I'll start that sentence again. So I try and show people that actually there's a lot of visual language in the science that we do, in how we communicate with each other, how we think through certain thorny problems. And it has the benefit also of sometimes being more accessible. I think people can really grab onto an image and then find their way into the subject that way. And so a lot of what I do is visual in that sense in communicating the science.
Speaker 2 [00:17:56] So just, you know, forget to do this concisely, but just tell us about your book, okay, because it's not, I mean, you say it generically, but you have a specific thing, do you have this book? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, why that? Yeah, well, I didn't, yeah... Why that? Yeah.
Clifford Johnson [00:18:12] So one of the things I do to help communicate science is make it more visual. I wrote and drew a book that's about various science ideas about how the universe works but it's very visual. It has people talking to each other, it has dialogs going on. And people are in conversation with each other about the science. So it's illustrating the science itself and also people in the act of conversing about the science, which I think is very important for people to be invited into having conversations about science. So you're seeing conversations about the finance. You're also seeing from time to time that the people talking might scribble on a napkin some of the bits of the science, because that's what we do when we talk as scientists. So why not show that? And a lot of that stuff normally isn't shown when we write books about science, when we communicate science. We tend to make it all about grand words from some sort of authoritative voice about what's going on. And that's fine, but there's also lots of different people involved in having conversations impartial. That's what I wanted to say, meant to say imperfect. I'll start that again. Let me, where should I pick that up? We tend to use words. Yeah. We tend be encouraged to just use words, to write books with the... As scientists. Yeah, as scientists, yeah, thank you. As scientists, we tend to be encouraged into this tradition of using lots of words as... The main tool for communicating the ideas and it's not actually representative of what we do ourselves. We're often very visual in how we communicate and so I'm trying to show that a lot by writing it, by drawing it and bringing all of these things together, both image and words help make the concepts get communicated.
Speaker 2 [00:20:21] You chose to use that particular form, which is a particular form.
Clifford Johnson [00:20:28] Yeah, and I could say more about that. The graphic novel form is incredibly powerful and I think incredibly underused in quote unquote serious communication because so much of how we distill things, whether we're thinking in art terms or science terms. Is very visual. We have symbols that represent things and we move those symbols around and how they interact and form a narrative. That's actually what graphic novels are. So these sort of childish sort of comics, graphic novels, what have you, are actually incredibly sophisticated tools for communicating ideas. Why not use them for science?
Speaker 2 [00:21:18] You talked about the fact that physicists, I guess, are always drawing things. They have a couple of visual tropes that appear over and over again. He makes a Feynman diagram and a Tenner's diagram. So maybe you could tell us, tell me that. We'll draw that for you. You can do it later on. Yeah, sure, no, I understand. But imagine it as a race over, you know. This is actually a drawing all the time. You can start by that. Yeah. And then we realized we actually have an example of the Feynman diagram. Why don't we go step on out of there?
Speaker 3 [00:21:54] Oh, great. Great. Good. Good, good, good. You're right. He didn't tell you what that was?
Speaker 2 [00:22:01] Right, right, right.
Clifford Johnson [00:22:06] Yeah, yeah, well I can, if you want, I can bridge right from the graphic novel thing to that. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:22:15] One of the things that you said, which I love, you said comics equals physics. Right. I mean I love that. Yeah. You can incorporate that.
Clifford Johnson [00:22:25] Yeah, yeah. So, well that's an additional thing. No, let me drop that in and then I'll get to the diagrams. In fact, the whole business of having various visual elements that are moving along in time and constructing a narrative about how things move through space and time is what physics is about. So in some ways comics are physics in some core way. They really are very naturally adapted to the business of communicating physics. And so, so much of what I've been trying to do in that book and hopefully other books is about that. The irony is... That there's this snobbery that you get sometimes about comics and things like that and you know serious science and what's it doing there and one of the ironies is that one of the most powerful tools in the history of science is a is a cartoon is a comic device and that's what's called the Feynman diagram. So, so much of what you hear about the great results in particle physics, the discovery of the Higgs boson, the discover of whatever the next particle is and so on and so forth. These are possible because there's certain important calculational tools that are used in order to calculate the results and predict them for the experimenters to go and test them. And they're done using things called Feynman diagrams. And Feynman diagrams are distillation. Of all the possible processes that are going on at the quantum level when particles interact. And physicists use these distillations in diagrammatic form in order to compute the precise numbers. And you can actually draw, there's a set of rules for drawing the diagrams, but there's lot of freedom in how you draw them as well, and different people will draw them in different ways, so there's little bit of artistic freedom there. The different diagrams combine to give you the numbers which are the outcomes of the experiments you're going to measure and One of the most wonderful things is that the most accurately known experimental results that have also been checked By doing a computation are done using Feynman diagrams. And so what you have is on the one hand a calculation And this started again, got a bit gobbled, yeah. So what you have as a result of that, for example, is that you can calculate to better than one part in a billion using Feynman diagrams, and then you can go out and check that experimentally. The context there being, for example, how electrons which are fundamental particles, interact with photons, particles of light, and the certain properties you must compute. And you can check that to that accuracy. And it was said by Feynman many years ago that's better than, sorry. As was said by Feynman many years ago, that's equivalent to calculating the distance between New York and Los Angeles to better than the width of a human hair in terms of accuracy. Not just calculating that, but going out and checking it experimentally as well. That's coming from using what's essentially a cartoon to do a real science computation. Computation. There's nothing else in science that's known or computed that accurately.
Speaker 2 [00:26:15] So the book came out. How did your colleagues, I don't mean immediately, but how did people in the field?
Clifford Johnson [00:26:25] Well, one of the, okay, one of the interesting, okay.
Speaker 2 [00:26:33] Well, let me tell you, I'm imagining, I don't know what you said, but it always seems to me to be a split between the, oh that's great, explain what I do to the world, and why are you desperate, but then there's always people who go, well, he left us out, or he simplified that, you know, it's not good enough, or not safe to use comics. It's kind of an idea that if you ever see a film about your topic, you watch the teacher, and then you kind of see the teaching script. They would never do that. They would always leave the kids in the classroom. You can't get out of that head. Right, right. And so I'm just curious about that.
Clifford Johnson [00:27:11] Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a good question. I didn't get as much about that. I think...
Speaker 3 [00:27:18] Overall, out.
Clifford Johnson [00:27:20] I was very encouraged overall by the reaction of my colleagues to the book in the sense that I think people are very excited that someone is engaging the public with writing a book. I think a lot of people were surprised at the format, because we're usually just... Writing words and saying things and using the usual analogies and so on and so forth So I was really trying to do something different I think some people probably can't get past the fact that it's a comic book and they think it's just this thing for kids Not that there's anything wrong with that but I I I do think there's still a lot of work to be done in getting people to realize exactly the power of that format for communicating to people of all ages. And it's going to take time. The good news is that I get a lot of publishers now getting in touch to help me, let me start it again, the good news the good new is that now a lot of publishers including many of those who weren't interested in publishing the book because it was too unusual they're now all rolling out their own versions of books like There's a lot more. Graphic novel type science books at the level that I was trying to reach that are coming out and I think that's an important and exciting change.
Speaker 2 [00:29:03] It used to be, going back 500 years, or maybe even 200 years, the world had necessarily distinguished between artists and scientists. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Clifford Johnson [00:29:17] Something about our modern world meant that we went a long way perhaps too far in the direction of over-specializing and I think that definitely meant that the idea of having someone who's a scientist and an artist, these things really got split apart and that specialization happens perhaps out of some necessity the way we structure careers and things like that. But I think it has meant that we miss a lot of opportunities to recognize. The capabilities within people. You know the old saying that we contain multitudes and indeed I think we contain a lot of us. Perhaps most of us I would venture to say contain the capabilities of expression and exploration that we would ascribe to a scientist and an artist. They're all in there in each of us if we're trained in the right way, if we are allowed to explore things in the right way if we're left alone to follow our muse a bit more than perhaps we are.
Speaker 2 [00:30:27] That's great. Can you say that again? That's perfect. I have no idea what I said, Mike. No, no, no. I like it. You can start to say it. But it can take you long to do it. I mean, that's what the poet really is. No, it was fine. No, that was great. You're right. You're a mind at work. It's wonderful to watch. Maybe we'll go with that. But try again.
Clifford Johnson [00:30:49] From multitudes? Okay, the saying goes that we contain multitudes and I think that's true in the sense that we have many different modes of expression within us, modes of inquiry within us. Some of which are associated with being an artist, some of which are associated being a scientist. But I think most people, I would venture, have both kinds within us And it would be nice if our culture was such that we were allowed to do more of that within our careers and within our everyday lives. I think we'd enrich the kinds of things we can produce as a society.
Speaker 2 [00:31:35] Here's something about everything life, you mentioned before, which is food, okay? Tell us about cooking, and is there anything that's hilarious? The reason I'm asking is that we have a whole story about Pali. You know what Indians do?
Clifford Johnson [00:31:55] Right, right. Yes, yes, yes. Show me a little bit about it, too.
Speaker 2 [00:32:01] And it's a wonderful story, you know, and we have a guy who's a chemist who has become, he did chemistry for a while, and now he's a chef. He's a cook, he's an Instagram cook. He cooks on Instagram, this beautiful cook. I forgot that, Nick Sharma. But what's kind of interesting is that it's all about the chemicals that are coming together in the food. And with Indian food, it's unbelievably complex. And yet, these were unlettered people living in villages who came up with all this food. And so the question is, can you see kind of the art and science in something like cooking that isn't celebrated as such? We'll just pick about that part.
Clifford Johnson [00:32:45] Cooking is a great example of where art and science come together. In some ways I think most people think of cooking as this great artistic endeavor, but it's so much a scientific endeavor as well. You really are doing certain kinds of processes that must be done at the right time and must be... Done in the right order and things like that, the right quantities, these are all things that we think of as to do with the science and somehow we forget that we do that in cooking and it's a bringing together of ingredients and ... Okay, yeah, yeah no, well hopefully you can still use some of that. I'm just gonna... Yeah, that'll be the front end, yeah, that bringing together of ingredients and the right conditions and then you're adding heat and you're allowing heat to escape and you raising things to certain temperatures, these are the words of science but you're doing it in this way that's, you know, it's thought of as intuitive and artistic and what have It's science, and it's also art. It can be both. And one of the wonderful things, of course, besides the fact that it hopefully tastes good at the end, is that there's a joy in the process, there's joy in the whole ritual associated with it as well, and there's the experimentation. And they're trying it this way, they're changing these ingredients, they're substituting, because you didn't have the right things, you forgot to get that thing in the grocery store, and you're going, well, okay, now I need to maybe change the amount of this, but this might need to be compensated for by this other thing. You're doing science there, as well as you're doing the art. And these are wonderful things that I think illustrate some of the core processes. That we do in science, and show that in everyday life something that we may have thought of as an artistic endeavor is just as much a scientific endeavor.
Speaker 2 [00:35:04] The fact that it's done by, I'm not going to say there's, we all, those of us who cook, I don't include myself in that, the time we cook and we do that, but there's also this whole tradition of people, you know, hundreds and thousands of years, came up with all this amazing food that we eat. You know, whether it's Mexican or Indian or Jamaican or whatever it is. They kind of knew what they were doing, but you would never think of them as scientists. You wouldn't think it was RBC, but they just kind of, you know, it's like the antics, or whatever. Yet, there's something going on in their brain that they know. There's some knowledge there. I think that's what I'm trying to get at, is that it is psychic.
Clifford Johnson [00:35:48] Yeah, yeah, I guess one thing I could add to that, try and encapsulate that. In some ways the whole cooking enterprise, the whole business of coming up with a recipe and handing on that recipe, passing it on, all of those things are traditions that have some reflection in science as well. We do experiments, we discover things, we try and understand how that thing works and then we write it down, we write papers and other people carry it on. A lot of that happens in the cooking world as well, in the sense that we discover in our kitchens ways of doing things, perhaps over years. And then it gets codified, it ends up in stories, it end up in scribbled down recipes, and it gets passed on as tradition, as culture. And that again I would say very much what's going on with science as well, in some ways it really amplifies the idea that science is itself culture and it's part of our culture. It's a human thing that we do, it's a way of inquiring about certain kinds of things and things are discovered, experiments are done, the results are passed on and everybody benefits.
Speaker 2 [00:37:17] Do you have any personal memory of like a food where you, you just ate it as a kid and then at some point as a scientist you sort of figured out what was actually going on? Like, oh that's my artery actually. Oh, yeah, uh, that I think
Clifford Johnson [00:37:39] I mean, there are just some obvious things, right? Sort of just growing up as a child and watching and then getting involved in baking various things, whether it be bread or the various other kinds of cakes and things like that. And then learning later on what's going on and how to control those things and then, you know, as a grownup, then baking for one's own family, for one own children and passing on some of that. And trying of course to have the joy of it, the ritual, but also trying to explain a little bit about what's happening, what's going on, because that's what helps you then become an experimenter yourself, some knowledge of what's going on. At least some working theory as to what's going on which you can go on and test.
Speaker 2 [00:38:29] We asked artists, how do you feel when you finish a work? And we get a variety of answers. Can you ask the scientists that? Is science ever finished? Is your work ever finished.
Clifford Johnson [00:38:42] The work as a scientist is perhaps never done, but there's little stories inside the big story. Which is probably true for artists as well, where there's a particular project, there's a particular question perhaps, and what happens with science is you tend to have big questions and you bite off little chunks into smaller questions, you're trying to answer those smaller questions and often they then lead to new questions and so on and so forth. And so there is a sense in which you can finish a project and feel that it's done, that it is good, you've got an answer and you've discovered something that's very satisfying, whether it be personally satisfying or whether it's a really big thing that everyone pays attention to. There can be these moments of sitting back and going, okay, that feels good, it's done. It might be that you've written the paper and it's now out there in the world and other people are now reading it and commenting on it and maybe it's informing their own research. Or it might be when the paper got published in a journal, a matter of taste as to exactly what that moment is. But there's certainly something that represents the finished product, this equation that came out of this long line of inquiry that summarizes what's going on, or some experimental results that really point to the underlying mechanism. Whatever it is, there can be that thing you can hold up and go, okay, this is done, Time to move on that was good
Speaker 2 [00:40:28] What about the fact that there are questions that you're probably engaging in your work that, I don't know, it might be 150 years before somebody finds an answer, I assume. Possibly longer. So that seems pretty, I dunno, it seems like you have to condition yourself for that. I mean an artist can say, you know what, I'm an architect and I'm building a building until it's done. The general thing about artists I've found, we share this, is that when you're done with something, you're really done with it.
Speaker 3 [00:41:12] Mm, yeah. Right.
Speaker 2 [00:41:13] Like it can't be chased, can't even see the flaws. They go, he must be so excited he's going to work with us. And there's no more potential. There's no potential. It's like, yeah, you don't see the stuff that I really wanted to get into. Yeah, yeah. But it's hard to see to be different because it seems to be part of this continuum. You know, one, you know, Luis Alvarez. He said that, you, we are standing on the shoulders of giant. Right, right. I don't know if you share that view or just the way you see yourself in kind of the race, you know, the work and the woof of scientific knowledge.
Clifford Johnson [00:41:53] The whole process of science is, in some ways, there's this long chain of which you feel part. And so it's never done in the sense that there are big questions that we may or may not find the answer to, there are lots of little questions that perhaps you can answer on the way to answering the big question. And it's wise to content yourself with answers to the little questions, the things that you have control over. And then there's this comfort in knowing that you've contributed to the larger narrative, which is a narrative that is thousands of years long. And even the greatest giants among us can only contribute a little bit to that giant narrative. So, the satisfaction comes from doing your best. To make sense of what you can, I think a lot of the satisfaction also comes from contributing by training the next generation to take up the mantle and move things along as well. And so we do that through teaching and all sorts of things that sort of leave some kind legacy of the material. And that's, I think, where a lot of the day-to-day satisfaction comes as a scientist. But I think there are also times when there's a project which is just a lovely thing to have worked on. And it's just nice to have gotten as much as you can about that story, wrapped up as neatly as you can. It's never always, it's never going to be perfect but there's a point at which you can go, that felt good, I now got that worked out, I understood that and I can move on and that may only matter to you but at the end of the day that's the most important thing, just making sure that you can sit well with yourself as it before you move on.
Speaker 2 [00:44:10] I think we have one more question, and then Andy's got some questions, and maybe we can shift. Sure, yeah, I can draw you some things. Music, and I want to say music in physics, or music in science, where does music fit in your life, and as a physicist, do you see some connection?
Clifford Johnson [00:44:35] I think music is one of the, okay, music is one of those things that, I'm gonna start that again. Yeah, let me think for a minute. One of the fascinating things about being a scientist is seeing how much music enters in certain ways, either as an analogy in how one does the science and how things are put together to make a larger thing, you know, notes and chords and what have you, but also as a means of expression that a lot of other scientists tend to... Get involved in as well. So I know a lot of scientists and a lot of physicists who are intensely interested in music, some of them are extraordinary musicians. I dabble in music. I've always been frustrated that there's never enough time to to do as much as I wanted to, so I double when I can. And I love understanding and seeing the structure of music in lots of different kinds of music and understanding it. I don't perform it as well as I would love to, but I think it's really a great form for seeing some of the things that we see in theoretical physics, for example. Various kinds of structures that, you know, patterns that tend to repeat and tend to build on each other to make much more complex things. That's certainly something we see a lot in physics, particularly in the kinds of physics that I do where it's about what's everything made of. There are certain analogies that people love to talk about when it comes to some of the things I work on like string theory and notes on the string and things like that. But much more fundamentally, I think that there's an attraction to pattern. In science, especially in areas of theoretical physics. In fact, so much of what we do is about looking for patterns and appreciating patterns, and a lot of that is in music as well. So there's an obvious attraction there. I would love to understand if there's something beyond it just being this attractive thing to do with patterns, or whether something about the way our brains are wired means that we're attracted to music as much as we are, some of these other things, I'm not sure. But I would say music is certainly a very powerful analogy for what goes on in science as well as being a form of expression that we scientists can sometimes resort to when we're stepping aside from the physics. One of the other interesting things as well is that there's something about a music, pick a musical form, there's a lot of individuality even within that form, so different people will play that same song differently. And I think that's really a great example of something that happens in science as well. You have very different people coming to the same subject matter and they will find different things in it. They'll pull out different aspects of it and they'll amplify the things that resonate with them in a way that I think can be very fruitful. It speaks to the whole business of the importance of recognizing that you have new opportunities if you bring in new kinds of people into the subject, both in music and also in science.
Speaker 2 [00:48:45] Was on there, but hopefully that was pretty cool. I just want to bring you back to the graphic novel again and also your sort of work in popularizing science effectively. One of my favorite popularizers is Stephen J. Gould. Because then he would write but the way he would right is he would say, I'm not writing down they need to get it, kind of get it where I'm at. At the same time I'm not going to, you know, I am not simply speaking to my cohorts. Right. Is there something in the way that you've chosen to write, because when I look at your book, I see you're not writing that to people either, but yet you're somehow making these conversations comprehensible to a lay-on.
Clifford Johnson [00:49:29] Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:49:31] Can you talk about that in terms of kind of the dialog that you've been doing?
Clifford Johnson [00:49:34] In terms of so For me one of the most important things For me, one of the most important things in talking about science beyond just with my colleagues but to everyone is really emphasizing that everyone is invited to have conversations about science. And one of things I wanted to get away from was being the voice of authority, the guru that will say things and people will go, oh that's amazing, I will now go and believe that thing. I really want people to do what science is really about, which is to engage with it themselves, to bring themselves to it. To not just be an audience, to not just a listener, but to be a participant. And one of the key things about science is just being in conversation with each other about it. And so that was the core thing about my book. Beyond all the visual stuff, beyond all of that, was to focus on having dialogs between ordinary people. So the book will have some people who are experts, but it will also have people who are non-experts. And they're talking with each other and they're exploring the ideas. And all of those voices are important. And for me, that is the biggest change I wanted to make in how we write these and put them out there, which is to have more voices. And to have a wide range of voices, especially non-experts, involved because that really invites people to go, hey, I can talk about this. I can ask questions of all kinds. There are all kinds of simple questions you might ask that you think are stupid questions that actually turns out to be the most important question. And sometimes we forget that as experts when we're talking to people, that we should hear from them as well. And so that's one of the core things, I think, for me in trying to communicate science, which is to make it an invitation to have a conversation.
Speaker 2 [00:51:45] Did that get at what you were? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was great. You studied black holes, I know. Uh-huh. And so it's you know, it's a business that's only space and time. Space and time, space and time, right? And so... How do you illustrate that in a graphic novel? I've seen certain panels, which kind of go from a small thing to a larger thing, kind of moving along in space and time. Is that something that you think about? We can use this as a voiceover.
Clifford Johnson [00:52:16] Uh-huh, uh-huh. The whole business of trying to illustrate space and time is tricky, especially when you put them together and the thing, the working thing, since it's used, it's actually called space time. The two are connected together and how do you play with that? One of the things I learned as I was trying to come up with visual ways of talking about it is that the graphic novel format is all about space and time. The panel that organize things into different moments, and then you, as a reader, you add to it, you add the special effects of time going by, by moving from panel to panel to panel. This has been noticed before in the whole world of sequential art, as it's fancily called in the fancy art schools. But the fact that it really is also physics, I think, is important because it means it's well adapted to talking about physics. So I try and find ways of moving the redesign around the page in certain ways when you're talking about space-time, when you are talking about, for example, a black hole. What happens when you go inside a blackhole? What happens as we think happens in the early universe or inside a Black Hole? The quantum physics becomes important for space- time. Space-time itself breaks down. What does that mean? Well, it should mean that the panel structure on the page breaks down in some way. And you can play with that, you can mess with that. You could even make time machines out of comic panels if you wanted to. I don't do that in this book, but I plan to. In future books, because these are sorts of things you can do visually when you have not just words, but you have things moving around the page that are symbols, that are characters, that are elements of the universe that are symbolized in various ways on the page. And then you can really mess with space and time in that way.
Speaker 2 [00:54:16] Do you consider yourself an artist as well as a physicist? Is that something that, I mean, you are an artist, I think so, but how does that play out in your own mind?
Clifford Johnson [00:54:29] I don't really know what I should or do call myself. Am I a scientist or an artist? I'm certainly a scientist. I think that a scientist is all I need in terms of description of myself to also incorporate the art aspect, because I think it should be that the tools I use It could also involve things that are normally thought of as what an artist uses. But I'm paid to investigate and teach science. So I think primarily I'm a scientist and I happen to use the tools of art. Sometimes to communicate the science, I think sometimes to investigate the science and sometimes I produce products that people will buy for the sake of the art so I guess that could make me a scientist but primarily I think I'm a scientist. I think i just said the opposite there yeah yeah yeah I could start again. Sometimes I produce a thing out there that is a piece of art that may be bought. As art in its own right, like a graphic novel, and so I guess that makes me an artist, but primarily I think I'm a scientist who uses art as part of their toolkit.
Speaker 2 [00:55:55] But it's interesting, because in contrast to what you said earlier, we're all scientists, we're artists, in our own way. When I say, are you an artist, you're like shy of claiming that we have.
Clifford Johnson [00:56:07] No, I'm not shy of claiming the artist hat. The business we do of giving ourselves profession names is reflected in the culture. So I use the tools, and I don't just mean I use pencils and paper, but the way I think and things like that have a lot in common. With what's normally ascribed to an artist. But the questions I'm asking, I think, are more what we think of as science questions. How does the universe work? Where does it come from? Where does the stuff we're made of come from, where's it going? These are questions that we have more on the science side of things. But we can use all kinds of tools including the tools of an artist to help interrogate those issues. So if I had to choose I would say I'm a scientist because of the kinds of questions but I think everyone should be using all the tools available to them and that includes whether they come from the artist toolbox or the scientist toolbox. So I think that's self-consistent.
Speaker 2 [00:57:27] I don't know what I was thinking you might say, but is that in fact we can say all these things about it wouldn't be great if everybody had this stuff, but in fact... Say you're an artist, give yourself a certain kind of a, it addresses you in a certain way, and perhaps, since it's not your day job, you feel that it's, I don't want to say an imposter, but it's like you feel like, well, you know, I'm not going to get artists to go to the studio every day and do something, so therefore, I want to puff myself up. That's the nature. I can tell from your personality, you're not like Donald Trump, who claims he can do I mean, we all know those sorts of people who are, well, in art, I don't know. It's like, when you go there with Lohar, they're gonna be like, I'm not as secure like that. It's just a thought. It's a challenge.
Clifford Johnson [00:58:18] No, no, no. No, I appreciate it. There is always the concern that it can sound incredibly pompous to say, oh, I'm an artist. And at the end of the day, I am just trying to figure out stuff and I'll use whatever works. And there's a pragmatism that a lot of people have, definitely in science. You just find the tools that gets you where you need to be. And so going back to the middle of the last century, when Feynman came up with the Feynmen diagram, which were these silly little drawings, people thought, People thought he was playing these silly games until it came down to, well, who's going to compute this more accurately and more swiftly? And he was using what might be thought of as an art tool. To compute numbers faster than anyone else was able to using other methods. And that was the thing that got people interested. It didn't matter where it came from. It was just a tool that worked. And so the same, I think, works now in some of the things we do in my field and beyond. There's certain things we that look really silly when you draw them or what have you, but if they work, if they help you organize the thoughts, they help answer the questions, you adopt them. Because we're pragmatists at the end of the day. We will basically work on and with things that get us to where we want to be. So I will not call myself an artist because it does have sort of pretentious resonances to it. It really is, I'm using whatever tools I can and if it comes from the art world or wherever, I'll use it. And I happen to think that the capability of art and the expression modes that we use in art are free and available to everybody, just as the tools and the modes of thinking in science should be free and be available to everyone. And what you call yourself, I don't really care at the end of the day. Let's just get on with answering these wonderful questions about this amazing universe we live in and you know sometimes we have to put names on things because you know funding agencies and things you have to call yourself at the next dinner party or what have you. But at the end of the day, it's what tools work.
Speaker 2 [01:01:09] One question, just to follow up on that. Okay, so when you're drawing or when you are writing. This is a tough question, but can you kind of describe the way your brain is working? In some respects you're sort of saying, you're trying to convey something by drawing it specifically, but when you're actually drawing it you're thinking about the ideas that you're actually trying to contain. Sometimes, yeah. How does that work? Can you describe that?
Clifford Johnson [01:01:45] I wish I knew exactly what it was I was doing sometimes when I'm drawing either in the context of my own creativity when I am trying to figure something out in a science question I'm working on. Sometimes I'm drawing to figure out what I'm thinking. This happens also with writing sometimes you write not because you know what you're actually going to say because it's actually helping you figure out what it is you're thinking and so among that tool box is is picking up a pencil and a piece of paper and beginning to draw shapes and Pull things out and doodle a lot and and and that can be very helpful In just organizing your thoughts One of the other things that happens is when I'm deliberately now trying to communicate something. Now I have a thing I want to communicate and I am now trying to figure out how best to draw it. And that's a different process because now I'm trying to figure out perhaps what will resonate with the person who I'm about to communicate with, whether it be an audience for this book I'm working on. Or whether it be a colleague I'm about to explain something to. And then maybe I'm looking for different things in that drawing I'm doing because I'm trying to figure out what's the thing they can grab on to, what's their doorway into my thinking process. And so depending upon what I'm doing the drawing could be doing something quite different and it'll end up quite different but in all cases I've never a clear idea as to where it'll end up when I start, and you go with it.
Speaker 2 [01:03:38] That's the exciting part, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Clifford Johnson [01:03:40] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [01:03:42] We have no idea right now, we're listening to you, and you know, trying to figure out what to do.
Clifford Johnson [01:03:46] Yeah, I had no idea where that sentence was going to go either. One thing I didn't mention, Penrose diagrams in this, which you might want as over B-roll. Yeah, yeah. Not only with the orange, but maybe some orange and stuff like that. What? Another... Yeah, you think... Another... Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Another great example of it powerful tool that's used now so much all over aspects of theoretical physics is the Penrose diagram, which is a way of representing how space-time, that space and time put together in this fabric that Einstein taught us about, how that, in a given situation, how that looks. What do I mean by looks? Space and time is about events and how things affect each other, how things are connected. So you want a diagram. That is representing how all the different things can relate to each other. It's what's called the causal structure, cause and effect. And so there are ways of representing, for example, how this point Will connect to this other point if it ever can and there are ways in which you'll in that diagram be able to read Whether this point has a relationship to that other point then Once you have such a diagram you might ask well how that whole thing changes if something comes along Like an incredible amount of math that creates a black hole, that changes the causal relationship between things, things that fall behind the famous one-way horizon of the black hole and can't get back out, those can't come back out and affect things. So the diagram must represent that. And so you have these things called Penrose diagrams that can capture all of that and can capture things about our entire universe on the page. And allow us then to manipulate it and to see what consequences there might be for a new idea or for understanding how a black hole might work, how an entire universe might work. So that's what that tool is and it's incredibly powerful and really is a great way of communicating ideas between people working on a subject as well as communicating it to a broader audience.
Speaker 2 [01:06:20] One of the things that I noticed in the book is also that you're not shy of having people draw equations, which is kind of one of those things where, you know, I think you mentioned it one time. You can repeat it actually. People are like, oh you're right, you're like, one equation and everything. Right, right. But you're no shy about doing it. As a kind of graphic tool.
Clifford Johnson [01:06:42] Yeah, no, thank you for reminding me about that. It was really important to me in the book to also show more of the tools that we use as scientists, and those tools include equations, and there's this mythology about equations that people have, which is that somehow there's these scary things, it's math, I'm Have a good day at school. And it turns out that equations are also very powerful visual tools that we use as scientists to communicate with each other, to understand what's going on. And one of the things I try and push for in the book, and in fact there's a dialog about it is that we should maybe treat equations more like we do paintings. You go into a museum and you look at a painting, you don't understand all the technicalities of the color spectrum and different kinds of paint and what have you, in order to kind of understand or appreciate at least something that's going on with that painting. You don't need the whole education to understand it. And I would say with equations, the same. You shouldn't necessarily need to understand every aspect of the equation to be able understand what's going on. But maybe we should show more about how the equations are in themselves sort of pieces of expression, pieces of art sometimes. And sometimes you'll get a little bit out of it, sometimes you get nothing but at least appreciate the tools that we use is the idea. So I wanted to show equations with with no shame or stigma involved as is usually in these more wordy presentations where we're encouraged to hide the equations away. Having a book about physics that has no equations is like having a book about music with no musical instruments in it. Why would you do that? You're missing so much of the story.
Speaker 2 [01:08:43] Okay, I have one more question very quick, okay? Most famous depiction I would say of physics nowadays is the Big Bang Theory. Do you watch it?
Clifford Johnson [01:08:55] I have not really, I've maybe seen some episodes on the plane, I haven't really watched it regularly. I do have thoughts about it. Well this gets on to one of my favorite subjects, which is the whole business of scientists and who scientists are or can be or who can be scientists in the media is hugely important, whether it be in TV shows or movies or other media that we consume. I think the most important thing to do is to make sure we show that there are many different ways, many different kinds of being a scientist, many people who can sizes. And that includes sort of... You know, famous depictions of the sort of nerdy stereotypes, right alongside the more regular people who are also doing science just as well in their own way. One of my favorite movies, for example, is The Martian, which I think is a great example of so much of what's best about science on screen or what can be best about it. You see a whole bunch of different kinds of scientists. You see the sort of regular guy we all want to have a drink with. You also see the very nerdy guy back at JPL who's, you know, the sort of uber stereotype of the scientists that we're normally presented with. You're also seeing people of different races, different genders, all doing science in their own way and most importantly you're seeing them all collaborate to solve the problem. You're seeing a starring person on Mars doing experiments and sometimes the experiments fail. And he learns from that too. That's all what science is. It isn't that sort of cleaned up thing that we often see presented on just one aspect of it. And so I love that perhaps things are broadening out in film and also on TV to see the different ways that there are of being a scientist.
Speaker 2 [01:11:18] And you specifically have also advised, right, on films and on TV shows. Okay, so what's your role, then, in those things?
Clifford Johnson [01:11:27] Many many I I can talk a ton about it I don't know how much you want oh my in my own yeah Oh my in my own yeah In my own work with the entertainment media, I do a lot of advising for television and film in various ways, and of course I spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, helping them. Tell the science aspects of the story, helping them come up with new ideas for perhaps getting some science in there. Helping them understand also who their scientist characters can be, or even if they don't have scientist characters, how their characters may engage with the science and help them get that working in a way that tells the story. So sometimes I give advice as to casting, you know, I think actually you might not want to go with the usual. Here. It's maybe a tiny little part, maybe show a broader range of people who in the real world would be doing this and not just the sort of go-to character that you may have had in mind. And sometimes that has produced some good results. Sometimes it's produced some embarrassing results where I myself was cast. Sometimes it produces some unexpected results, I had people come back to me and say yes, we liked your casting suggestion, we'd like to cast you please, and you know, hey, it worked out.
