full interview_sharon glotzer_1.mp3
Sharon Glotzer [00:00:00] I'm Sharon Glotzer. I'm a professor of chemical engineering here at the University of Michigan and a physicist. And I am trying to design the materials of the future.
Speaker 2 [00:00:11] What does that mean?
Sharon Glotzer [00:00:13] That means that we want to understand how... Okay. Sorry. I'm sorry. Say that again.
Speaker 2 [00:00:29] First of all, can I just say something? We're going to talk for half an hour maybe. Today, we're going end up using three minutes. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The editor is going to make you sound great. We're not here to make it sound... No, no, I understand. It's all going to get edited and so you should just go with your gut, okay? Like on a Zoom, okay. Just go with the gut and it will all work out. And I'm going to ask you, and I've got two other guys here, can you say that again? And all that. Okay.
Sharon Glotzer [00:00:54] Okay, okay. I got it now. So what was the last question you asked? What does that mean? What does that mean?
Speaker 2 [00:00:58] You're saying, I'm designing things for the future, what do you mean by that? Repeat that backwards.
Sharon Glotzer [00:01:06] Right. So when I say I'm designing materials of the future, look around us, all the materials that we wear, that we sit on, that see all around us are, for the most part, static. They are what they are and they're still going to be exactly that five minutes from or five years from now. What I wanna do is design new materials that can be functional and can respond to their environment and that can change and do different things at different times. One of the ways of thinking about how to make materials like that is to look at biology. So if you think about biology, everything in biology was made from the bottom up. Things are self-assembled. Right? Everything in the body self-organized itself into all of the patterns that then make up our cells and organelles and all of our organs and our skin and everything, right? It's all self-assembled from from the bottom up and all the materials that are making up our body are also highly functional materials, right. When we look at the kinds of materials that we have. In the world around us, there is nothing with the complexity that compares with what biology is capable of. So we want to understand how can we make materials that rival those of biology, where we can start with relatively simple components and have them self-organize themselves into materials with unprecedented complexity and function.
Speaker 2 [00:02:52] Give me an example using using words that somebody would think about when you're talking about
Sharon Glotzer [00:02:58] an example of what kind of material you might...
Speaker 2 [00:03:01] Well, about something that fits that grid.
Sharon Glotzer [00:03:03] Want to have.
Speaker 2 [00:03:04] Yeah, I mean, you said we have things that are surrounded by materials that are static and it would have been helpful to say like my blouse is still changing or whatever. Oh, oh yeah. So it just needs to be, we need a little more specific. You don't have to repeat what you said or just move moving forward. You say you're looking for just take new materials and make them behave in a certain way, but what would that actually look like?
Sharon Glotzer [00:03:28] So materials that behave differently depending on the circumstances could be like what the sports industry is trying to do. They're trying to make shirts that can respond to your body's temperature. They might open or close the weave to allow you to breathe, to allow sweat to escape, or just to do better thermal management. So those are really kind of simple examples. If we think about... You know, materials that can self-organize themselves into, say, a particular shape, or they can be a liquid, and then they can a solid, but they can also compute, or they have sensors in them. So maybe you want to be able to send materials into a battlefield, where you don't want to put people, right, you want put robots, but you don't want to your standard mechanical robot, Right, you want to have some kind of materials that that might be able to flow under certain circumstances or solidify and sense and then send a signal back or you might want to have a material that acts like an octopus where it can camouflage itself and change its patterns depending on its environment and what it wants to or
Speaker 2 [00:04:51] So where do you come in from?
Sharon Glotzer [00:04:54] So the way I got started in working on these kinds of systems is that I've always been fascinated by patterns, patterns, organized patterns, and even in disorder I have always looked for order in patterns and order in disorder. And the fascinating thing about materials is that they typically have to be organized at some level. In order to exhibit interesting kinds of function, and just even the simplest kind of order when you take water and you put it in the freezer and it turns into ice, it's turned into ice because the molecules have rearranged themselves. They've self-organized or self-assembled into a different structure than they were when the water was in the liquid form, and that structure is a periodic lattice of molecules. And So thinking about how patterns emerge, whether you're working with atoms or molecules or little nanoparticles, which are themselves made of atoms and molecules, and understanding how, first of all, what patterns do they want to form and how do we design building blocks to self-assemble into the patterns that we want, and the patterns that we are going to be those that give us the kinds of functions of behavior that we want from our material.
Speaker 2 [00:06:28] So how do you do that? What do you do here? Yeah, so. Yeah.
Sharon Glotzer [00:06:33] So what was it? And Our approach to figuring this all out is to use computer simulation. So we do theory modeling and simulation, we make mathematical models, computer models of different kinds of atomic, molecular, nanoparticle systems. We try to describe in realistic ways what the forces are at those very, very small length scales that drive the way that particles want to. Organized with with one another and we're basically using a computer to solve the laws of statistical thermodynamics because that's what governs the kinds of systems that we're generally interested in. And so we carry out what are called molecular simulations, molecular dynamics simulations, Monte Carlo simulations where you're moving things around randomly like they're being jiggled around by thermal motion. And then we study the different phases, just like you might study the different phases of water. We could study the difference phases of, say, nanoparticles in water. And we use our computer simulations to predict what structures, what patterns they want to make at different temperatures, or pressures, or density, different thermodynamic parameters.
Speaker 2 [00:08:02] Is it frustrating to work at such a small level or is it wonderful?
Sharon Glotzer [00:08:07] It's wonderful to work at this scale, because this is the scale where all the action is. This is the skill where the fundamental forces that can drive self-assembly are acting. This is where you have electromagnetic forces, you have charges, you have those kinds of interactions, you have hydrophobic interactions. You have, you know, van der Waals interactions. You can enumerate all the different kinds of forces. At that scale, we know which forces are, we're at a lane scale that's much, at the nano scale we're working at a length scale and time scale where we don't have to worry about. Many of the forces that are active at much much smaller scales when you talk about
Speaker 3 [00:09:06] Can you say that again? Sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you.
Sharon Glotzer [00:09:10] Wow. Wow. That was Siri. I didn't even touch Siri.
Speaker 3 [00:09:17] That was...
Sharon Glotzer [00:09:19] Yes, it came out of my watch! No, it came out of my watch!
Speaker 3 [00:09:25] Thank you very much.
Sharon Glotzer [00:09:27] Okay, do not disturb. Thank you. Thank You, Siri. That was awesome.
Speaker 4 [00:09:31] That was no cat news, right?
Sharon Glotzer [00:09:34] Okay. I want to say something different anyway. All right, so. Thank you, Siri. Yes. Thank you Siri. Working at the nanoscale in the way that we do has significant advantages because it's right at this length and time scale where simulations and experiments can look at the same phenomena. Simulations today, we're able to get to system sizes, like numbers of particles. That are large enough that they match with the lane scales that different experimental characterization techniques like different kinds of microscopes are able to go down to. And so simulations come up and the experiments go down and we're able to overlap in this range, which means that we can make models and immediately test them by collaborating with experimentalists. We can make... Predictions with our simulations that can be immediately tested by our experimental collaborators. Our experimental collaborators can give us data. They can show us images that they took or, you know, the structures that they found in their lab. And then we can, by running our simulations with our models that we have validated using their previous experiments, we can help them understand why they see the structures that they see.
Speaker 2 [00:11:04] And so...
Sharon Glotzer [00:11:10] What's happening.
Speaker 2 [00:11:12] Thank you very much.
Speaker 4 [00:11:14] Get down.
Sharon Glotzer [00:11:21] So let me say also something else about the nanoscale. What's also exciting about being able to describe nature and materials at the nanoscale is that that is precisely the scale at which biology is operating, right? That is where the forces are driving the self-organization of structures in biology. And we're trying to harness basically the exact same kinds of forces to make things that don't exist today, that dont. Exist in biology that maybe have functions that biology just hasn't come up with yet.
Speaker 2 [00:12:00] So can you, if I said, give me an example of something that, in the real world, okay, not the academic world, the real word that your work could lead to, what might be an example?
Sharon Glotzer [00:12:16] Um...
Speaker 2 [00:12:19] Okay, I'll tell you, when I was here last year, one of your researchers talked about how it might be possible for medication, you know, in terms of dosage of medication, if you know how the behavior of the nanoscale affected the drug industry. So, I mean, something just to kind of connect it with the viewer will go, oh, I can see what they're doing and I can how, five, ten years from now that might work.
Sharon Glotzer [00:12:43] Yes, so the simulations that we do and the kind of predictions that we can make... Be able to, I'm sorry, I'll say it again. So our work could help lead to a variety of different kinds of technologies. For example, it might lead to coatings or lenses or, you know, new types of, Jesus Christ, sorry. What was the expression? I wanted to give a couple of different examples. I mean, because some of the examples are super technical and aren't super interesting.
Speaker 2 [00:13:33] Yeah, and I don't want you to invent something that's not true, but, uh...
Sharon Glotzer [00:13:37] No, no, no. But some of them are just so technical that it's not even worth explaining. Let's see. So do you want to talk about the work in general or specific, certain examples of work that we saw?
Speaker 2 [00:13:53] I want to hear about how you run your lab and what we saw today, but I still need to make a connection between what you do here and the quote unquote real world. Also, what motivates you? Does that matter or is it simply about I just want to know more about stuff at the scale, there's so much more to learn. Yeah, both of these things. Both of these things, yeah. So just talk about that.
Sharon Glotzer [00:14:21] So the work that we do is I like to call application agnostic. Because what we're doing is so fundamental, we just want to understand how matter organizes itself and how we can intervene to get matter to organize in new ways. So that can have applications to all sorts of technologies in the automotive industry or the aerospace industry. It could lead to new kinds of coatings or computer screens door. It could be used in wearable electronics and new kinds of technologies that integrate with the body. It could also be used, again, not tomorrow, but at some point, to design little colloidal robots that could, you know, do repairs in your body, or that could bring drugs to... Certain places in your body with very targeted, personalized specificity to a particular organ or a particular type of cell. There are just so many ways in which materials that are designed and made at the nanoscale can be implemented that that makes it very exciting for us because there's all these ways in we can have impact. But what really drives us is understanding. Where do these patterns come from, and how does the material figure that out? And can we outsmart the system and say, well, if we tweak this and tweak this in ways that are experimentally actually possible, maybe not today, but again, tomorrow or the day after, can we get these materials to do new things that they don't just naturally do on their own.
Speaker 2 [00:16:12] So is that something that when you were younger and you thought about becoming a scientist, it was that sort of pursuit of knowledge, was that driving you?
Sharon Glotzer [00:16:25] The first time I remember realizing that I want to be a scientist, it was because I wanted to discover stuff. I think I was seven or eight and I had a microscope from school that I borrowed and unfortunately still have. I have it today on a shelf at home because it became so long that I forgot to return it and then I graduated from sixth grade and then it was too embarrassing to bring it back. And then I always felt bad about, I can't just get rid of it, so I. I kept it, but I used to use that and go to a local pond and get pond water and look at the little things in there, like paramecium and things, and I thought that was the coolest thing. But then, after that, I was driven because I wanted to cure cancer, because my grandmother who lived with us got sick with cancer, and that was first time I'd heard this word cancer. Um, and it was annoying that there wasn't a cure for it and the people didn't understand it. And I thought, okay, well, now I know what I want to do. And uh, and that drove me for a while until I wanted to be an astronaut. And then I realized, no, that's not going to work. Then I started taking a physics class. In college. I never even took physics when I was in high school. I took a physics class that just grabbed me. I learned about quarks and that there were things smaller than atoms and I just thought, you've got to be kidding me. And I learned that there could be 11 dimensions of space-time, and I got really excited about it. That, you know, the very fundamental fabric of the, of the universe. And I was, that was it. I was hooked.
Speaker 2 [00:18:23] Great. And patterns. So how does that fit into patterns?
Sharon Glotzer [00:18:26] And patterns, so when I went to graduate school, when I was at UCLA I actually got a summer job at TRW Space and Technology Group, they're now Northrop Grumman, and I got to actually do some research there and then when I got into graduate school I joined a group where I could do the same kind of research, but the group I joined did experimental research. And I spent a year designing a flange that would be that, you know, I had to work in the machine shop with all the machine-shop guys and I had to design something that would fit into this big vacuum chamber and that electron guns would stick into to sputter yttrium, barium, and copper, this was 1987, when high-temperature superconductivity was discovered. And we were trying to make these high-tc, high-temperature superconductivity films. And I remembered reading about the theory of superconductivty and working through the theory of superconnectivity and loving that. And just being, so, you know, that flow mode you get into where you forget to look at your watch. And before you know it, seven hours has gone by and it's two in the morning and you don't even feel tired because you're so in it. So that would happen to me when I was working out theory. But when I in the lab doing the experiments, I never felt like I was good at it. And one day we were pumping it down to vacuum and the vacuum pump blew up all over me. And I came out of the lab, and I was just covered with... The person who was going to be, by the end of the day, my new PhD advisor, who was also teaching a class on statistical mechanics, he was walking up the stairs and saw me and said, you look like a theorist, come up and see me later, and that was it for me. And then I joined his group and I started using computers and that really was my first time ever really programming a computer and it turned out I was really good at it and I loved it. Boston University where I did my Ph.D. Had just gotten this brand new supercomputer that was a parallel computer with 65,536 individual CPUs. And I was one of the first people ever to learn how to program that. And that became my tool. That became like my microscope into the world of science. And one of the things that made me want to join this group and do this research was that when I learned about statistical thermodynamics, I learned fractals and these patterns in nature that are self-organized and exhibit this kind of self- organizing pattern. And we would study these different kinds of tilings that, you know, there's a pattern and then the same pattern is repeated and the same pattern is is repeated. And then you start to see those patterns everywhere. And I think that's when I really first started realizing that these patterns are not all understood and that you could use computers to study them. I'm gonna interrupt you for a second. Yeah. I'm going to interrupt you for a second.
Speaker 2 [00:22:05] So when you say you start to peek through those patterns everywhere, do you mean in life, in nature, when you walk around the street? Mm-hmm. Do you mean when you're looking, you know, when doing simulations?
Sharon Glotzer [00:22:16] I would see patterns everywhere. I would them walking around. You would see them, you know, if I had a head of broccoli, right, you'd start seeing Fibonacci series everywhere, right. I'd start looking at pinecones, like I, you, know, I remember the first time I learned about the Fibonochi series, I never looked at a pinecone the same way again. And then you start to see these things in a lot of places. And what's really exciting about, you now, so if I think about the kind of science that I do. It's really... I live in the world of statistical thermodynamics. Statistical thermodynamics is this branch of science that says that it's different from, say, Newtonian physics where in, say, astronomy, it's all about Newtonian motion and you have gravity and you're trying to figure out like all of you know something what's the word I'm looking for You make these predictions that are, what's the word I'm looking at? You know, like if you throw a baseball, if I tell you what is the initial velocity and the angle and I know there's gravity, blah blah, I can tell you exactly where that one thing is going. Statistical thermodynamics deals with systems made of lots of objects, like lots of atoms, lots of molecules, lots of nanoparticles. And it tells you that it doesn't need to know what every single individual constituent is doing. It just needs to know about the averages. And you can predict all sorts of things. Like if you take a thermometer and you put it in a glass of water, you can take the temperature. You find out what's the temperature of the water. But the temperature the water is coming from all the jiggling of the molecules. But that thermometer doesn't need to know about what all the molecules are doing. It's taking a sampling, right? What's exciting about statistical thermodynamics is that it can apply to flocks of birds. It can apply traffic flows. It can try to apply to huge crowds of people where you have objects. They're interacting, right, and there are patterns that emerge because of these kinds of local interactions. It doesn't even have to be a real thermodynamic system.
Speaker 2 [00:24:37] Tell me about we.
Sharon Glotzer [00:24:38] You look like you're great, like I feel like I'm talking too much, because you're like ehhh. No, no, no. My job is to listen. My Job is to Listen. Really? Yeah. Okay. Because he's like, looks like he's glazing, I'm like, uh-oh.
Speaker 3 [00:24:51] I'm actually keeping an eye on the audio level. Okay, good. Yeah. Sorry, I'll be more, you know.
Speaker 2 [00:24:59] That's okay, that's okay. So sorry I failed. Tell us about, so today we saw you in your lamp interacting with all these people. Yes, my favorite place. So what are you trying to do here at the lamp in terms of the warmth and the emotion and the flow of knowledge and all that sort of thing?
Sharon Glotzer [00:25:19] Well... Being a professor, one wears a lot of hats, and there's all sorts of different things that we do in our jobs as professors, right? But the thing that makes me, that really gives me a lot energy, and that I love the most, is working with my graduate students and post-doctoral students, discovering science. And when I was a graduate student, I, my advisor had a big group and we were all very interactive and we were just discovering stuff all the time, all the time. It was a very social dynamic and I think that's why I felt so comfortable there and I thrived in that sort of environment. I was out, you know, really thinking about it consciously. I think I tried to recreate that here when I became a professor here almost 22. Years ago. And so I have been fortunate to build a large group with, you know, 20, 30 PhD students and postdoctoral students. And When we're working together doing science, I don't think of it as I'm the mentor or I'm the advisor or I am the teacher or I am the guide. I interact with my students as colleagues. We're just bouncing ideas off. We're all trying to understand the same thing. We all bring different points of view, different skill sets, different superpowers to the table when we're discussing something. To me that's where the magic happens and I've made this comparison before when thinking about creativity in music and creativity in science is that for me doing science is as though playing in a jazz band where everyone's got their instrument and you basically know the basic theme of what you're supposed to be playing. But then you kind of riff off of each other, right? And it goes in different directions. And if just one of those instruments wasn't there, the music might still be good, but it would be different somehow, right, and the ideas that come out. You know, interaction are exciting because they're typically things you wouldn't come up with just on your own, right? And so this collaborative nature of this collaborative way of doing science is what really excites me. I've never been the person who sits alone at desk or in front of the computer and just works on my own. I have to talk about it. I have talk about. I have to express it out loud because I don't I don't really understand it until I can express it to someone, and then I need a reaction. I want that person to say, yeah, but, or yeah, and also, what is this? What is that? So that's what I love to do.
Speaker 2 [00:28:43] So you're describing something that's... I'm going to change batteries while you answer this question.
Sharon Glotzer [00:28:52] Oh, I also want to say something about, like, the what-if. The what-ifs of science.
Speaker 2 [00:28:58] Okay. Yeah, you can do it. You can tell me. Tell me what the white is, and then I'll, I, Mike, Mike. It's a larger question anyway, it's a higher level question.
Speaker 3 [00:29:05] Okay. One more of those claps.
Speaker 2 [00:29:07] Thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 [00:29:10] Thank you everybody.
Sharon Glotzer [00:29:12] There's so many different styles of doing science. There's problems that need to be solved, and there's puzzles that need to be deciphered, right? There's things that need to be discovered. The way we work in my group, I think, is a little bit different than the way many scientists might work where there's a problem and they're trying to solve it. In my group we tend to ask a question differently. We don't necessarily say, how can we do this better? Or how can you solve this one problem? We think, what if? What if you could do this? What if one could make this and make this and put these together? So that one plus one is seven instead of two. We're thinking of what if. And one of the things that we've been, I think, that has made us successful at what we do is we look at where the field is now, and we try to extrapolate where it's going. And then we try anticipate, so what questions will those amazing experimentalists who are actually making the things that we're trying to envision. What information will they need to know? Will they need design rules? Can we give them blueprints? Or can we motivate the people who are going to actually make the materials to make this instead of that by exploring with our computer simulations? Because we can try things much faster than you can try in an experimental lab, right? And we can also try things that are impossible today. But the laws of nature would absolutely allow it. And so we do a lot of this what if work. And so you were going to ask me about the things we looked at today, because they're all.
Speaker 2 [00:31:11] I actually was going off some of this, I'll get back to it. You're describing a particular kind of creativity, a creative process. When people think of creativity they're talking about regular folks. They often think of artists or musicians. They don't necessarily think of science. But it sounds like that's what it is.
Sharon Glotzer [00:31:36] I think creativity is absolutely critical in science. You need creative people who can think out of the box. You need people to come up with solutions that others haven't come up before. Creativity involves a lot of extrapolating. It's like you see things and then your mind somehow invents something new. On top of that, whether it's, you know, art or music or whatever, but that's what we do in science as well. We see the data, but then our minds are saying maybe there's a hidden structure to this data or maybe there are hidden rules that connect all of this data to each other. And I think it takes also additional creativity to imagine the future. And to think about, okay, this is what we have today, this is we can make today, but I wonder what we'll be able to make tomorrow. And so we try to be as creative as we can, bounded by reality, right? Bounded by what is possible, given the way that the laws of physics dictate that things must behave.
Speaker 2 [00:33:01] So when we talked to Matt yesterday, maybe I can see still there.
Speaker 3 [00:33:04] Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:33:06] He said, you know, he was initially, he really wanted to work with scientists when he first came to Ann Arbor. But he said, I was a little worried that they were going to be too results-oriented, that it was going to too rigid.
Sharon Glotzer [00:33:16] And then he met us.
Speaker 2 [00:33:19] Yeah.
Sharon Glotzer [00:33:22] Well, yeah, I mean, when we met Matt, we're like, I think, we were like kids in a candy store. We're like oh my god, can we fold stuff too? And they're looking at all the patterns and we looked at this art that he was creating and again, it was just patterns, patterns, but it was a new way of making patterns and envisioning patterns that I hadn't seen before, right, because he has this approach in his art that's... That's new and what makes him so brilliant and creative. And that was really inspiring to us to just think about patterns in this new way.
Speaker 2 [00:34:04] You don't often see scientists taking cues from artists. Other way around them all the time. Artists love to show off, oh, I've worked with biologists. Oh, I'm working with cosmologists about the sounds of Pluto. But it's sort of rare to have it come the other way.
Sharon Glotzer [00:34:20] It is rare to have art inspire science and not the other way around, which you see a lot of. But I think this is the case where, again, because the way that we approach the science that we're doing is through patterns, then it's really easy for us to be inspired by because whether it's the kind of... Uh paper art that Matt is doing or you know it's painting or it or it's music uh as art, they're patterns in in all of these things and so so it's very easy for us to be inspired by, by art.
Speaker 2 [00:35:08] Looking back, I'm going to get to everything, but you've got me going here, so I'm improvising. Um, art and science... They have something in common. If you look through human history, what would you say? Like, really on a high level, artisites have something to say.
Sharon Glotzer [00:35:28] Well, I mean, certainly artists and scientists are lumped together as somehow, what's the word, like they're different somehow, they're other, right? Artists are thought of as creative. I think that the public considers scientists as creative, or maybe they just think about Maybe what connects artists and scientists is people of the mind, people of the brain, right? They might have the creativity might come out in different ways like left brain right brain but it's they're they're brain driven somehow in the work that they do. You know a long time ago there weren't you know the word artists precedes the word scientists. In history, right? And at some point, scientists were, I think, natural philosophers, or philosophers of the natural world, or something like that, right, we observed. We observed, and we we tried to explain why things are the way they are before people like Galileo started doing experiments and dropping things from towers. And so it was, it was a lot of, It was very abstract in the way that art can be abstract.
Speaker 2 [00:36:50] They both seem to be also about sort of interpreting the universe. I mean, you know, looking for questions, right? Looking for answers or asking the questions.
Sharon Glotzer [00:36:59] Yeah, I think that's right, I know that when many of us think about science, we do think that scientists are solving problems, we are finding answers. But for me, doing science is about asking questions, what are the questions? What are the question that haven't been asked here? Because if you find the right question, then I mean that's To me, that's the really exciting part, is figuring out the right question to ask. Then you find the answer to that question, but you can answer questions all day long in science and it's not important, right? It's not impactful, right, just like with art, anyone can paint and make a picture but that doesn't make it art and that doesnít make it have impact. But if you can figure out, and I don't know if artists think this way, if they think in terms of questions versus answers, right, that they are trying to express something, right? And if they do it right, then it has, you know, this incredible impact on us.
Speaker 2 [00:38:09] I think artists are always searching, you know, they're always like trying to figure out what if, I mean the what if question I'm sure is shared.
Sharon Glotzer [00:38:15] The what-if question and the what's next question, right? Artists are not like, scientists don't ever say, oh, so I figured that out, I'm done, I can go home now, it's five o'clock. I mean, that's not how we work. It's always like, what's the next question? What's the question? We say that about a PhD dissertation, right. A PhD dissertation should create more questions than it answers, right, a really impactful scientific paper should set the stage for more questions. Than for answers, right? In science, we're not often doing this, we are doing this.
Speaker 2 [00:38:53] You anticipated, I was going to say, because we've guessed every artist, so when you finish a work of art, how do you feel? And there's a whole bunch of answers, I'm depressed because it's done, there's nothing more to do, I can't wait for it to interact with the public, see how they respond, they're the ones who finish it. But with science, is there ever an end? No.
Sharon Glotzer [00:39:16] No, no, it's never done. It's never done. And for me...
Speaker 2 [00:39:20] In science.
Sharon Glotzer [00:39:22] In science, our work is never done because, again, we're always trying to ask the right question and to ask it in such a way that what you learn in your investigation leads to more questions. So, for example, when we write a paper, right, we finally have enough to say about something that we're writing a paper that we want to have published and we submit for publication. Well, when we push that button and submit it for publication... Um, maybe we should just go out and celebrate and go home. But instead we're like, okay, what's next, right? Let's do the next thing. For me, it's invigorating. I feel that way. Also when I write proposals, submit proposals, I like, it gets me going and I want to do the thing.
Speaker 2 [00:40:10] Now, science, unlike art, I think, you're standing on the shoulders of every scientist who came before you in certain ways. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Talk about how that works and how that feels.
Sharon Glotzer [00:40:26] Well, as a scientist, it's an amazing feeling to just contribute to the knowledge of humanity. One small brick in the wall. If you're lucky, maybe you add two bricks to the wall while you're here on this planet. And everything you do, like everything I do, rests on all these people that came before. But also all these people who are working now. We don't do our work in isolation, there's an entire ecosystem of scientists out there that are constantly producing new knowledge, new ideas, and it's our job to absorb that and help that influence what we're doing. It feels exciting to me to be part of that community and, you know, in fact, we have collaborators and colleagues and science friends all over the world. I remember in grad school one of my professors saying, when you're a scientist, you're a citizen of the world, and it's really true in that science is such a global enterprise. And maybe art is that way too. I mean, artists are also standing on the shoulders of giants like scientists are, right? Depending on what kind of art they do, it's maybe a Picasso, even a Picasso stands on the shoulder of those who came before. It's just the next people are going to stand on the shoulders of Picasso, and we have our Picasso's as well.
Speaker 2 [00:42:13] I'm imagining, and I'm an artist, but you know, sort of thinking about, I'm maybe trying to solve certain kinds of artistic problems and challenges, but for you, you're solving problems and challenge that may not be answered until after you're no longer a rant. Yeah. So, what does that feel like? That's a sort of special, I want to put myself 500 years in the future to see how this all comes out.
Sharon Glotzer [00:42:41] Yeah, so I do often think about the fact that we're trying to solve problems or invent new questions about things that we won't see the answer to in our lifetime, and that sucks. That would be nice. And it's true. I would love to go into the future so you could look back and see. But that's just part of how things are, right? It's needed. It's exciting, so. Even as a graduate student, even to today, there are these rare moments when you realize that you understand something that nobody else knows at that moment. It may be a tiny little thing, maybe a big thing, but there's something that you now know that you think others will want to know. And for that moment, you were the only person on the planet. Who knows it. And that is like the coolest feeling in the world. The next coolest feeling is going and sharing it with other people, right? Or when my students come to me and they're like, oh my God, look at this. Look at this thing. This is this way because of whatever. And we're like you know, now we're the only two people in the universe or three people in universe who know this one thing. I'm contributing those in that way. Is really meaningful, and yes, we may not find out the answer to the big thing, but we're creating knowledge, and that's satisfying enough.
Speaker 2 [00:44:28] Look around the lab here and there's all these toys and fun things.
Sharon Glotzer [00:44:32] Yeah, we like toys.
Speaker 2 [00:44:34] Why?
Sharon Glotzer [00:44:37] You know, as theoreticians or computer simulators, we're oftentimes just sitting in front of the computers all day long. Well, students do, I don't get to do that anymore, but the students do. And being able to walk away and hold something in your hand, and not just visualizing on the computer, but hold it in your hands so you can like see all around it in three dimensions can help you have new perspectives. It's just also a different way of engaging the brain. I remember when... Back in 2007, 2008, we discovered something in a computer simulation that was super cool and ended up being written about in the New York Times. One of our images from the simulation became the BBC Image of the Week. I think that was like the one, a weekend in December of 2009. And Uh. And the first time we made this discovery in the computer, where we had taken a bunch of tetrahedrally-shaped particles and jiggled them up in a computer and without even turning on any inter-particle interaction. So they're just like billiard balls in a box. Imagine you're shaking them around. And they self-organized into one of the most complex patterns. That has ever been seen in nature, that have been known for years, but not from these little things. And the first thing we did was order 10,000 Dungeon and Dragon dice from China so we could have them in the lab, because we just couldn't believe it. We couldn't this was happening. I mean, we knew our simulations were right and everything checked out, but to really you know, hold it in your hand and be able to build it was, you know very satisfying.
Speaker 2 [00:46:30] And generally, yeah, there's this kind of visual patterns everywhere, like when you're thinking about the things we saw today when you were showing people around, it's just, even though you're working on a tiny scale, it is very visual.
Sharon Glotzer [00:46:47] Yeah, the work we do, practically speaking, we're working with models of nanoparticles that are much smaller than the width of a human hair, and you can't see them. But the particles, they have shape, and so you can make a macroscopic object and hold in your hand and try to understand how things fit together. You know, in many of the materials that... Or material systems that we're studying with our collaborators, the particles have really interesting or strong interactions that pulls them together and then they try to all match up and make a nice tiling, but they don't quite fit. And so they build up a strain, a geometric strain, and then that strain propagates and ends up giving you maybe a twisted object like a helix. But when you have the little dice in front of you, and you can start gluing them together face to face, and then you start to see the strain building, then it gives you an intuitive, more intuitive feeling. For me, we work with shapes and patterns all the time, but it's still really hard for me to see in three dimensions. And so, holding something and looking at it from both sides is something that I need to do for my intuition.
Speaker 2 [00:48:11] You were, was I correct in understanding that there were patterns that you're seeing on the nanoscale that reflect Islamic tiles?
Sharon Glotzer [00:48:22] Islamic tiles, there's these ancient Islamic temples where you walk in and the floor is this just astounding mosaic of tiles and there's lots of tiles that we have. I have tiles on my kitchen wall, people have tiles in their bathroom and those tiles or tilings we call them, you know, in the mathematical sense. Tilings... Are typically regular, you know, you have squares and you make a square lattice of them or maybe you have triangles and you have this nice triangular lattice and that's a tiling. But the tilings in these ancient Islamic temples might take just two simple shapes like a four-sided rhomb shape, but two different aspect ratios or maybe three different shapes or something. It might take a square, squares and triangles and rhombs and you look at the pattern and you see that there's no... Repeat unit right like if you look at a checkerboard you can say, okay, there's a square red square black square That's the repeat. I now I know what to do but in these tilings There's no repeat unit like that. You look at it and you see you clearly see order, right? You see this ordered pattern, but it's not a periodic ordered pattern There's a no repeat units that you can cut out and say, ok So now I put down these tiles and so they make these exquisite. You know, beautiful. Structures. And those structures were discovered in the 1980s in real materials, in metal alloys, mixtures of different kinds of metal atoms together under certain conditions can crystallize, but not into a periodic ordered crystal like ice, but into one of these kinds of That's exactly like these what we call quasi-crystals. They didn't call them that way back then, but in the 1980s, some theoreticians who were looking at the problem came up with this word, quasicrystal, because they thought it was a crystal.
Speaker 2 [00:50:33] So what you're saying is that this pattern existed on these little Islamic tiles going back about a thousand years ago or something like that? Yes, yes, yeah. And then the pattern was discovered in nature only in the 1980s? Correct. Okay, can you just tell me that that's a really interesting...
Sharon Glotzer [00:50:51] Yeah, so the patterns were discovered by artisans thousands of years ago when they built these temples. But no one was necessarily looking for them in nature. People weren't trying to make materials with those patterns. There were a lot of mathematicians and physicists, theoretical physicists. Who were studying the mathematics of tilings and tiles and thinking about what happens when you can take regular shapes, little polygons, and stick them together in a way that makes a pattern but not a repeatable pattern, but didn't necessarily make all that connection. They were looking at it much more from an esoteric sense of, oh, isn't this mathematically cool. Until they were discovered in an experiment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, something that later won a Nobel Prize for the discovery. And so now quasicrystals are found in many different kinds of materials, and we study because they're this brilliant example of a really complex pattern. That can arise from very simple simple rules. One of the things that that my group discovered is that, and we discovered this again with the computer simulation, is that even without any interactions whatsoever between particles, no stickiness, no rules that tell a particle you connect to this particle and this particle wants to sit next to that particle. Just throwing shapes into a box and basically shaking and giving them this thermal agitation, they self-assembled into a quasicrystal pattern. And that was a big deal because we found the simplest possible shape, 3D shape, a tetrahedron that's the simplest three-dimensional shape you can have because it has only four sides. That that simple shape could self-assemble into the one of the most complex patterns that's known. Um, was, was really exciting. Failures and mistakes are opportunities. If you don't fail, you're not taking big enough risks, right? If you're don't make mistakes, then you're not trying new things and learning new things. So you know, mistakes and failures happen all the time in, in science. Um, but, but that's part of the process, right, that's of any learning process that's part of it. Um, any discovery process, you know, there's many times when we see something and immediately our brain thinks, I wonder if this is happening because of this, or I wonder this is having because of that. You form this theory in your mind and it might be that you just need a little bit of data to show you, nope, that's not how it works. Okay. So then you come up with another theory and you know it makes it exciting when your first guess, your second guess, your third guess are not right, because then you think, well, how can this be, right? Like, what's the secret? And so, yeah, mistakes are good. Mistakes are growth.
Speaker 2 [00:54:17] I'm sorry, I'm still here, I can't hear you.
Sharon Glotzer [00:54:21] Oh yeah, where is it? I thought you were taking it off of here. I thought you were taking it off of here. Yeah, because I move when I talk, so I'm playing in it.
Speaker 2 [00:54:33] I know, but it was fine before. It's just something you can't do in the last month or two. Because I get a couple of things, but is there anything specifically you want to, you want to, if you'd like? Alright.
Speaker 5 [00:54:45] I got a stop at the finisher.
Sharon Glotzer [00:54:56] This probably isn't relevant for this documentary, but mistakes in science, it's so important to embrace mistakes. You can't have a scientific enterprise without scientific honesty and integrity. We need to know that we're going to make mistakes sometimes. We're going publish mistakes sometimes, not on purpose. Right, but we need we need scientists and the young students that were training to be the next generation of scientists to embrace mistakes and forgive mistakes and feel comfortable saying, I'm in a mistake. Because that's the only way that science works.
Speaker 2 [00:55:45] You mentioned, in the first one, you mentioned this movie, Eon Flux, right? But so, so that's kind of an interesting example of, presumably, the artistic community, maybe the commercial artistic community but they're artists, sort of coming up with an idea that kind of like pinged you somehow or spoke to you.
Sharon Glotzer [00:56:07] Mm-hmm. Um, you know, I love science fiction. I love good science fiction and also Okay, hold on.
Speaker 4 [00:56:14] One adjustment here.
Sharon Glotzer [00:56:38] Already. So I love science fiction. I'm a big fan. I love to read science fiction and dystopian novels. And I like good science fiction, and I like really bad science fiction that's so bad that it became good again. And there's all kinds of, you know, crazy cool ideas out there in science fiction, about science fiction that... If somebody came up with this creative idea, right, the difference between science fiction and science is that science fiction doesn't necessarily follow the laws of physics, right? There's some crazy idea, but it's not really possible because that's not how gravity works or something like that, right. But there are all kinds of examples in science fiction that are scientifically possible today or becoming scientifically possible. There's this classic movie. What's it called? Fantastic Voyage. Fantastic Voyages where they shrink this little submarine down and the submarine goes through your body and they're like fixing stuff or whatever. Yeah okay well we're never going to shrink a submarine down with little people inside that are going to go do this but we're going to make little robots and that are going to be you know the size of a cell or smaller than a cell and they are going and they're they aren't going to make these sort of repairs and so Science fiction is an art form that absolutely inspires the kind of science that we do, that we think about. There's a lot of times when I'm watching a movie and I think, oh my god, that could be a thing. What would we need for that to be a think? What would have to be true? What would people have to able to do to make that work? And a lot of that drives are asking the question, what if?
Speaker 5 [00:58:38] Yeah, well that actually relates to what I wanted to ask you. I wanted to sort of extract a broader statement from exactly what you're talking about. We found that there's so many easy, low-hanging examples of artists using technology or engineering or math. Is there a statement, let's say speaking to a skeptic who thinks that's the only way influence flows, is there something that a scientist can learn from an artist? You should look at me.
Sharon Glotzer [00:59:07] I understand. Is there anything a scientist can learn from an artist? Um. I think scientists can learn from artists in a number of ways. One way is, you know, with the kind of art that, say, Matt does, or artists who use kirigami and origami and things that are tactile, where they're folding or they're cutting, because you can imagine, like, those things turned into materials, like realized on much, much smaller. Scale out of, not paper, but something else, like graphene, for example. And it did that for Max Stein when Max Stein met Matt and saw, you know, the kinds of things he was doing. I think it triggered Max to think about how he could use cuts and folds in order to like solar cells, solar cell materials that could follow the sun by, you just, like... When you have a material that has a property, the material is typically static and it has that property. The mechanical strength of the material comes from the constituents of the materials and how they're all arranged. You could take a material, that can't be stretched, like I can take my pants and I can only stretch them so much. But if I were to take something and then make cuts in it, then now I can stretch that thing. I'm not stretching the material itself, but the system... I can stretch. And now you can do new things with it. So that's an example of where art can influence or inspire scientific solutions to our problems. I'm trying to think of other, but okay. Wonderful.
Speaker 2 [01:01:22] I have one other question, the whole series started as kind of a thought about education and the siloing of education, arts and science. I don't know if you have any thoughts on the way we teach both art and science in this country.
Sharon Glotzer [01:01:46] Um. You know, so let me kind of start that. Scientists can learn from artists and artists can learn from scientists. When we think about educating students, at the undergraduate level, I think it's well accepted that we want students to have a well-rounded education. They shouldn't only do math and science. They have to also take courses in literature. At Michigan, they have to learn languages, right? Other languages. They have to... You know, take courses in the humanities because it broadens your perspective. It makes you think in a very different way. It taps into different parts of the brain in different ways. We don't necessarily require science and engineering students to take art classes or that art students should have to take science and engineer classes. I think that would be fantastic if we did that. I think One unfortunate thing that happens once you get to the graduate level, right, is you have four years as an undergrad and that's your opportunity to broaden. And then you get your graduate school and you're supposed to go like super deep, right? And become the world's expert on this one very narrow thing. And there's a clock, right. You don't wanna be a graduate student forever. And the way that science is done in most countries, especially in the U.S. Is that we have grants from federal agencies. And they have deliverables. And yes, we are teaching students and training students and we're producing fundamental knowledge, but there's pressure to produce science and there's not a lot of room in the schedule to encourage graduate students to go take this art class, go learn from this person, go do a semester apprenticeship with this artist over here.
Speaker 2 [01:03:52] How would they learn?
Sharon Glotzer [01:03:57] Well, for me, art is about perspective. And when you're an artist, you're often looking at the world in an original way, in a very different way. And anything that can get you to look at something in a new way is useful. And in science, we learn a certain discipline, and we learn how to think about a problem. And that's it. And those are the tools and techniques and mindset that we bring to the problem. This is why diversity is so important in science and engineering is because if everybody is trained the same way and thinks the same and was brought up exactly the same way then we'd all come up with the same answers and the same questions and that would be boring. So we need the different perspectives and we don't just need different scientific perspectives but we just need people who aren't thinking about science. Right? And any new perspective from wherever it comes from might be the key to figuring out, you know, this scientific problem that you're trying to solve or to help you find that next big question that's going to lead to the next big breakthrough.
Speaker 2 [01:05:14] Fantastic.
Sharon Glotzer [01:05:15] Did I answer your question?
Speaker 2 [01:05:16] Oh, yeah. So-
Sharon Glotzer [01:05:16] So we didn't need to talk about entropy. Okay, let's do entropy, but then we're going to... We've got to do entropy. That's fine. Yeah, that's totally fine. What time is it? I don't know, because I took theory off. Oh, jeez. We're supposed to be done at two. Okay. Um
Speaker 2 [01:05:29] Um, okay.
Sharon Glotzer [01:05:34] Entropy. So, in the context of like these patterns.
Speaker 2 [01:05:41] This is really like, I'm an eighth grader, explain what you're talking about.
Sharon Glotzer [01:05:49] Also, I'm not sure that we, that I told you enough about the different things that we're doing, but we can do, we can follow up with that if you don't. That's not so important. Okay.
Speaker 2 [01:06:02] Oh, you know what, I'm sorry, before we do entropy, actually, thank you, is that you have these discussions where people are talking to each other because they're always sparking discussions, so we do absolutely need that, so let's talk about that. We saw that this morning.
Sharon Glotzer [01:06:17] What do you want to know about that?
Speaker 2 [01:06:18] But they do have the creativity that comes from people talking about ideas, especially South First, where people said this and then somebody asked a question and there's just kind of a creative spark that's in the air.
Sharon Glotzer [01:06:33] Yeah, so creativity for, you know, the way that we do science in my lab is a very creative process that involves a lot of talking, right? A lot of thinking, but a lot a talking and a lot sharing and a lot of throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. And one of the things that I think makes this so empowering. My lab is that it doesn't matter if you're an undergraduate student or freshman who hasn't even started yet or you're a graduate student who's about to graduate or you are a post doctor, you're big famous professor. We're all trying to understand the same thing and we're all just spitballing and reacting to each other and building on these ideas. It's a kind of democratization of science. This isn't like a teacher-student. Moment. It's 100% organic, where you're not thinking about the time and you're just in it. And that creative process is what drives almost everything that we do and results in the kinds of breakthroughs that we're able to make. I don't know if that's why here. Okay.
Speaker 2 [01:07:58] Yeah, and that's what we started.
Sharon Glotzer [01:08:00] Yeah, like Nate, he hasn't even started his freshman year yet. He just got out of high school. And he thinks he wants to be a computer scientist. But we're like, no, you don't. No, you do. You want to use computers, for sure. But look at all the fun you could be having over here. We'll get them over here. OK, so entropy. So let me just, I'm just thinking about how, there's so many ways of getting into the story, but.
Speaker 2 [01:08:50] What was the thing that we saw that most relates to hemorrhaging? Because that's what, when we use your talking, that's what we're going to be seeing.
Sharon Glotzer [01:09:01] It's the third thing that we...
Speaker 2 [01:09:04] It wasn't the squares, it was the...
Sharon Glotzer [01:09:06] No, it was the bonds, the bonding orbitals and stuff that we didn't spend a whole lot of time on. My group has come up with a new theory of entropic bonding, which is a type of bonding that's not a chemical bonding. It's not like bonding that you have in molecular systems or atomic systems, but It's an important. Physical manifestation of statistical thermodynamics in nanoparticle systems. And it's been known since the late 1940s, since the famous work of Lars Ansager. You could take hard particles, say you have billiard balls. Imagine you could take a bunch of spherical billiards balls and you could put them in, I don't know, molasses or honey, some kind of fluid that's thick enough that would make them not settle to the ground. They would just float there. And then imagine that they could be agitated so that they're acting like brownian little pollen grains, right? And they can bump into each other and they just move around. And then imagine that you put more and more billiard balls in there so that you end up with a certain density of them, it turns out that without any interactions, no sticky forces, no electrostatics, nothing, those billiards balls will spontaneously order into Crystal as long as the density of the particles is high enough. So this was something that was predicted and first shown in a computer simulation in the late 1950s. It was actually like the first molecular simulation was of this problem that I'm talking about, which they call hard sphere crystallization, right? It's this idea that without any interactions, spheres would organize into a crystal. And it wasn't believed for years. Scientists argued about it for decades at conferences. And the definitive experiment was done on the space shuttle. And the famous paper has the members of that space shuttle crew on it as co-authors, because they needed to make really small billiard balls out of, say, polymethyl methacrylate or, you know, latex. Particles and put them in a solution, I think they used toluene, something where they could match the density of the particles to the solution so that, again, you have these objects that are not falling down and you do it on the space shuttle because there's no gravity. And so you can rule out all other kinds of forces and exactly what happened, exactly what was predicted. Is what happened, and that these particles formed a crystal, which you could clearly see by looking at it and seeing all these Bragg reflections. And so that hard particles could organize, self-organize into an ordered structure has been known for years, and it's also known that if you don't have any interactions or anything like that, the only thing you have is entropy. So a system can order to maximize its entropy. What wasn't known was how ubiquitous that was and how diverse, what a diverse set of crystal structures or the extent of the complexity of the crystal structures that could be possible by simply changing the shape of the particle. And instead of having a sphere, having a tetrahedron or an octahedron, or a dodecahedron, an icosahedrion, or whatever, or mixtures of those shapes. And that's one of the major contributions that my group has made. To science is discovering these extraordinarily complex crystal structures that are identical to those crystal structures you see from atoms, only at this larger scale where they're particles instead of little atoms, and where they form for completely different reasons, right? It's not quantum mechanics, it's entropic reasons. And when we think about entropy, colloquially we think of disorder. But disorder is another way of saying, I lack information. If you have an ordered crystal structure, then you don't need a lot of information to reproduce the whole crystal structure. You just need to know the little repeat unit, and then you're done. If something, so entropy, the more entropy something has, the less you know about it, the less, you know, about the system. And it turns out that in these, what we call hard particle systems, where there's no other interactions, they just can't occupy the same space. The laws of statistical mechanics, which are always driving a system to minimize its energy, drive the system to maximize its entropy. There, the entropy is. Synonymous basically with the number of different ways that you can arrange all the particles. And if the particles stay disordered, then there are fewer ways that they can organize than if they all take their own space, you're over there, you are over there and now they can wiggle, they can move around and they actually have access to what we call microstates, There are more micro states possible, more ways of arranging the particles. If they organize, if they order, than if they stay disordered. That means that it sounds like maximum entropy can be associated with maximum order. And that's true if you think spatially, like here's the particles, they look ordered to my eyes. But actually because there's more ways of organizing the particles in ways that are consistent with that ordered structure, you actually know less about the system and what particular microstate that it's in. I don't think microstates is like an eighth grade word. But, um...
Speaker 2 [01:15:30] No, but it's sort of self, I think, I mean, context.
Sharon Glotzer [01:15:35] One of the big questions that raised for us is, how is it possible that with nothing but entropy, objects could self-organize into these incredibly complex crystal structures with hundreds of particles in the unit cell or even into quasicrystals with no unit cell. That look identical to the structures that you get from atoms, when atoms have such complicated interactions. When we think about atomic crystal structures, we think about bonding, bonds, chemical bonds, metallic bonds, ionic bonds, covalent bonds. When we think about these entropic systems, there's no electrons, there is not that kind of bonding, but the forces are acting in a directional way to line up particles. And so, We have come up with a theory that can describe the underlying physical mechanism that's driving this ordering in terms of a type of bonding, which we call entropic bonding. And so we have the first theory that could put entropic binding kind of on the same footing as chemical bonding, like the mathematical structure of the two theories is the same, for totally different reasons. But that's exciting because it means that we can use this parallelism to learn from atomic materials to design nanoparticle materials. That's what I want to say about it.
Speaker 2 [01:17:14] That's very cool.
Sharon Glotzer [01:17:19] I want to get this in there because the, I'm so excited, the Department of Defense, the Office of the Secretary of Defense just gave eight awards out, they give like six to eight awards out every year for total blue sky research and they just gave us three million dollars to study entropic bonding, to flesh out this theory of entropic bond and see where we can take it, which is just a spectacular opportunity for the group.
