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GS: Allowing molecules to be held in place allows them to be studied more
accurately, is that the advance?
SC: Well, we can simply see things we couldn't see before. The theories in polymer
physics depended on what the confirmation the polymer was in. You couldn't see
individual molecules so you would then derive consequences. Because polymers
were moving in this way or doing that thing, they would exhibit themselves in
the flow properties of a fluid. If you put polymers in a fluid, the flow
properties would be different -- all sorts of things like that. Injection mold
plastics, we want to understand how that works. We want to understand other
polymers like corn starch. If you stir it there is this sheer thinning, it
starts getting thin. Many properties of polymers, the fundamental aspect of
them, start with what shape and how they're moving in the fluid.
We couldn't
see that. Now we can see it directly. That means there's certain models and
conjectures about what they were doing that you can test directly. What we
found is that the real behavior of polymers is not just the average behavior.
The average height of a people in the room would be one thing. But you can have
a room full of basketball stars and people who are very short and the average
height can be the same, but it's entirely different. Once you're looking at
billions of molecules all at the same time, you find only an average behavior,
and there was a presumption that the average behavior was the same, especially
at the molecular level -- that all the molecules did that. They don't. And
that was a big surprise to us.
GS: What are the implications of this molecular individualism.
SC: It means that you'd better start thinking there could be different pathways,
that identical molecules pasted under identical conditions could act
differently. That many of the chemical and biological processes that we took
for granted as being a very discrete pathway could have many paths. This is now
out there and people really know it's happening. When we found it in polymers,
others began to see it in other things. It just means that the dynamic behavior
of the world is much richer than we had thought. In hindsight as in all things
you say of course that must be true, but it never hits home until you actually
say, I found a room full of pygmies and giants. In the abstract is that a
possibility? The impact is that we simply can measure things we couldn't
measure before but we have a deeper intuitive appreciation of the microscopic
world.
GS: And this optical tweezing is based on the same technique of atom cooling?
SC: The optical tweezing has been very important in measuring forces and
displacements of molecular motors, and I helped get that thing started. But
what I'm doing now is fluorescence techniques to measure single molecules,
something I didn't invent. But it's become a very powerful tool and also
combining the tweezers or the atomic force microscopes that measure forces and
displacements with fluorescence techniques. That's the part I'm most excited
about because it feels like the early days of trapping. It's something very
very new. Nowadays, there are hundreds of people in this field [of cooling and
trapping], or thousands, and it's becoming mature. Now there is a lot of
serious engineering you can do. One is still inventing new things. I'm not
saying that the discovery period is over by a long shot. It's not, but the
other stuff, the single molecule work in biology is in the very beginnings of
discovery phase where everything we've looked at, every problem we've looked at
there's been a little surprise. That's what scientists want more than anything
else. They don't want things to come out the way they expect.
GS: Do you see this as an enabling technology for nanotechnology?
SC: Definitely.
GS: Few people have the slightest idea what a prominent physicist does day to day. Can you paint us a picture of what a physicist does day to day?
SC: I'll paint two pictures. One is what a practicing scientist does, and that's
where, yes, you get up, you brush your teeth, you eat, you do things like that.
But what you're doing is thinking about the problem at hand. And you're
thinking about it not only day to day but hour to hour. It becomes so much a
part of you that it's in your subconsciousness, which means that even if you
don't intend to think about it, you are in the background. So you could be
looking at an airplane or taking a shower or hiking or eating and all of a
sudden you get this little flash. It's most apparent when you're bored or
you're listening to a boring talk or if you're in an airplane trapped or you're
sitting on the toilet or in the shower. Or in the early morning when you're
about to wake up, you're half asleep, half conscious, and then your mind is
mulling over these issues and problems.
It's not really all-consuming because it's somewhere in the background and you
know it's in the background because even when you're not forcing yourself to
think about it you have thought about it because then there's a little lightbulb
that blinks. It's under those conditions that creation actually occurs for the
most part. There are other times when, yes, you're saying now is my time for
thinking and you're doing this as well. But it becomes so much a part of your
thinking that it occurs as part of your background as well.
GS: Physically what are you doing?
SC: Most of my days are frittered away by all sorts of things. Take yeserday. I
got up early in the morning, I ate breakfast, I prepared my lecture, I had
prepared most of it Sunday night.
GS: Which class?
SC: I'm teaching quantum mechanics to graduate students.
GS: Is that a weekly lecture?
SC: Three hours a week. Two lectures, an hour and a half each time. I must have spent four or five hours on Sunday and I spent another four hours on Monday.
GS: Is that at home that you do this preparatioin?
SC: Yes, sometimes at work, sometimes at home. Then I went and gave the lecture.
That was from 11 to 12:30. I then microwaved a quick lunch. That took 10
minutes. I did my email. There was then a visitor from CalTech, a theoretical
physicst who was giving a local seminar talk in our atomic physics group meeting
slash seminar. So I talked with this visitor for an hour. We talked physics
what he was doing. It's a very mathematical physics but it could be relevant.
He's a young brilliant theorist type who wanted from me what could be the
potential applications of the theory he was developing. We then heard a formal
presentation of that. I talked with some students for a couple of hours. And
then from about six to eight o'clock or eight-thirty I worked on a proposal,
then I went home and ate dinner. I usually go home about eight.
GS: What's the favorite part of your day?
SC: Well, when I'm preparing a lecture, I'm trying to understand more deeply or
better or more clearly or more precisely what's going on. Sometimes that's
enjoyable. Certainly when I'm talking to the person about new ideas, then
rehashing his talk with a colleague of mine, you always want to say, what was
the new thing, what's new, what's old? And so we said okay, essentially this
part is the new thing and we don't know why that is. That's a mystery, even the
speaker doesn't know why that was. And that's part of his research and he
discovered something and he's trying to figure why it is. So I think that's
enjoyable.
I spent forty-five minutes talking to a person who wants to work in my group who
hasn't done that well. He's done a trial period and he's gonna have another
trial period but I had a heart to heart with him, saying what did he want to do.
He wants to be a professor. Okay, if you want to be a professor you have to
understand that you have to have a level of commitment that's different than an
ordinary job. I still work seventy hours a week.
GS: So you work weekends too?
SC: Yeah, I work 10-11 hours a day and also weekeneds.
GS: Both days of the weekend?
SC: It used to be one day, now it's one and a half which is not good.
GS: When do you exercise?
SC: Normally, I would have exercised today and I try to exericse every day.
GS: Doing what?
SC: This interview has gone on a half hour longer than we had planned. So I'm
getting off now. Things like this are very time consuming. This is not a once
a year kind of thing. It's once a month.
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“It's most apparent when you're bored or
you're listening to a boring talk or if you're in an airplane trapped or you're
sitting on the toilet or in the shower. ”
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