Jim Braude:

So our next guests are current and former MIT scientists working to expand our understanding of the bizarre infinitesimally, small majesty of our known universe. But sometimes that truth is better conveyed for people like me and Marjorie through poetry, which is why they took part in creating something called the Poetry of Science. It's a gallery of words and photography highlighting the research of a handful of emerging scientists at MIT. It's also available to view online. Joshua Ana is co-produced and directed the exhibit alongside a team of scientists, poets, and photographers. He studied neuroscience with MIT's department of Brain and cognitive science, and he's currently a neuroscience marketing professional, a writer and fine art photographer. He joins us along with one of the scientists, photographed and featured for the show. Who would be Mc ogu? Nike McKinney is a PhD candidate in physics at MIT. He researches quantum systems, whatever they are, and new states that matter that can create better and better our world. It's also a Harvard graduate holds a master's of science and the philosophy of physics at Oxford. My God currently runs the Harvard MIT chapter of the National Society of Black Physicists, and we should alert both of them. Marjorie, that they're now talking to me who got a D in physics at Penn in my only physics course. And to Marjorie who, and this is absolutely true, I'm raising my right hand,

Satisfied her science criteria, a criterion at Stanford by taking what course? Marjorie

Margery Eagan:

Physics for poet. So lemme tell you, it was touch and go pass fail. I just barely, I just barely squeaked by you. We are your audience, you guys. If you want to talk to two people who know nothing about science,

Jim Braude:

You're doing it.

Margery Eagan:

You are

Jim Braude:

Doing it. Mc and Joshua, welcome to the show. It's really good to talk to you

Margery Eagan:

Both. Yeah, thank you very much for being here.

Joshua Sariñana:

Thank you so much for inviting us and giving us the opportunity to talk about our project.

Jim Braude:

Our pleasure. Yeah.

Margery Eagan:

Appreciate it. Oh, we're thrilled to talk to you. Let's start with you, Joshua. There's a lot of new science going on around here. Give us a sense of what we're talking about.

Joshua Sariñana:

Well, with regard to the project, it consists of over 20 participants, and it was started over a year ago when we applied to a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council. And our scientists come from a variety of backgrounds, biology, robotics, physics, chemistry. And so we have a wide swath of all the sciences that are covered and several poets that have worked with our scientists to create new poetry about the scientist's life, their history, their motivations alongside their research. So this new poetic work captures a lot of the research, but also their inner world as well.

Jim Braude:

Joshua, why do you stay with you for a second? Why do you think poetry is a good medium to convey important scientific truths?

Joshua Sariñana:

Well, one reason we chose poetry is it comes from the fact that I was reading a lot of James Baldwin, who is a cultural critic and a playwright. And one reason I was reading it because of last summer's protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and Baldwin speaks about the role of artists in the community. And he often refers to artists as poets and how poetry is incredibly important to the lives of the people and telling the truth of people. And this gave me the idea of how to translate the inner lives of people, particularly scientists as I myself as scientists and scientists try to seek out truth. And because science is often a very difficult thing to penetrate because people usually don't have the ability to access graphs and a lot of the jargon of that poetry would be a great way to translate the really abstract concepts into more of an emotional complexity of who the scientists actually are.

Jim Braude:

We're going to get to one of those poems that does just that in a minute.

Margery Eagan:

Yeah. Tell us from your perspective what you are looking at McKinley as well before we get to that poem. What is the area of your research?

Makinde Ogunnaike:

Is this a question for me or for Josh? Yes, Mackin. Yes. Yes. Mackin, yes. I'm sorry. Thanks. No, no, no problem. So my area of research is in theoretical physics, though it's in an area that's a bit unfamiliar to people. It's called condensed matter physics.

So instead of looking for new particles or trying to find extra dimensions that will explain some of the fundamental structures in the universe, I actually look at much more mundane things, collections of electrons and atoms that when they're put together actually manifests some absolutely bizarre and crazy quantum phenomenon. And we use many of the same techniques, but because it's grounded in things that are a bit more familiar, sometimes it can actually give even more insight into fundamental structures of our physical theories. So my research is particularly in these things called graphene bilayers, it's little collections of carbon atoms that are all put together and under the right conditions, they can act like superconductors, things that don't have any resistance to electrical currents. They can change the way that electrons acts around each other in ways that the hole is greater than the sum of its parts. Single electrons can't really move without a few brothers next to them.

Jim Braude:

And there are climate change implications of that are there not McKinley?

Makinde Ogunnaike:

So there are some very practical ones with all the resources that it takes to do this research. But I think the longer term ones, and the reason I actually get any funding at all, I think is because there's lots of hope that some of the materials that we're researching that we're looking into all their odd properties may give rise to high temperature, superconductors may give rise to novel forms of electronics or information processing technologies. The idea is that we can use our understanding of quantum mechanics to actually produce new technologies that hopefully will help us in future

Margery Eagan:

Makin day. One of the stories we read in preparation for speaking to you today was about the power grid in this country shedding heat at a loss of billions of billions of dollars a year. And I didn't think of the heat that's coming from my computer. I'm looking at the heat that's coming, but it's a big deal, all this wasted heat.

Makinde Ogunnaike:

It is. And one of the things that people often don't think about is that information is actually not free. It costs energy to store and to send information. And so in this information age, when everything's stored in the cloud and everyone has all of their things backed up, those are actually being stored in some server somewhere. And to maintain those servers and to maintain and transmit all that information requires vast amounts of energy. And so the superconductors and things that we're studying, if they could be maintained at slightly higher temperatures than four degrees Kelvin, almost absolute zero that it do go a long way to saving some energy.

Margery Eagan:

We're talking to McKinney OG and Joshua Sarne from MIT. Before we get to the poems, there were a couple of these stories that really fascinated me, and maybe we can start with you on this one, Joshua, this great story about your mind living forever on the internet,

Jim Braude:

Mind uploading, it's

Margery Eagan:

Called I learned today. Yeah, mind uploading your mind functioning in kind of this virtual way so that grandma could be sitting at the Thanksgiving table 20 years after she's dead. I think that was it. Please explain.

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah. So the digital afterlife has come up more and more in the media. So generally dealing with transforming your experiences from your brain and uploading it to the cloud or your digital device. And a lot of futurists are kind of making these assumptions that you can eventually overcome these technological hurdles to upload your brain up into the cloud. But kind of what McKenzie is speaking to is that energy, it does not come free. And being able to upload all the content of your brain into a digital device, at least in my opinion, may not actually be possible. But what may be possible is the use of AI technologies to accurately full of people that a representation of who you are is basically who you are. So with things like deep bakes or natural language programs, you could essentially take all your digital remains, your photos, your texts, your anything you've ever written, your blog posts, your electronic health records, and you can use this to create simulations of who you are and to create not only a visual image or videos, but compile 'em all to create an avatar that represent you. And there's a lot of pretty amazing technologies out there that are in development right now that can actually use this information to predict your mood, your psychiatric state even. And I think in this sense, you can use these types of memories in with regard to digital memories, to reconstruct who you are as a person in probably the near future.

Jim Braude:

By the way, I don't disagree with you, Joshua, but there are many people in American politics where if you attempted to upload everything from their brain, it wouldn't use much energy at all, actually. It would be an incredibly simple and cheap process. Can we turn to the, well, Margie, you're about to do that. Let's turn to the poetry.

Margery Eagan:

Let's turn to the poetry because this gets into another area that McKinney's into that I'm really interested about. Now, I don't know which of you gentlemen wants to read McKinley's Quantum World. Do you want to read it McKinney?

Jim Braude:

It's great, actually.

Margery Eagan:

It is great. By Maryanne Ani is the poet since it's about your quantum world. Do you want to read it?

Makinde Ogunnaike:

Sure. If you'd like.

Margery Eagan:

Absolutely. I love this poem. Here we go.

Makinde Ogunnaike:

He goes, he believes physics is not about fancy mathematical formulas with elegant Es and lies. We're discovering elusive particles. Its inner heart is about understanding our world, broken and fractured under the gravity of the eternal, an everyday world that is wildly weird at the quantum level where he studies systems that are Alice and Wonderland, topsy-turvy worlds entangled like silky strands of a spider's web woven tightly into our lives by our weaving eyes, woven loosely by what we do not see. Tangled with the air touched, entangled with the skin, brushed, entangled with the apple touched of the supermarket, then tangled with the tear, wiped and woven away, tangled with even things very distant like Mars dust that unravel themselves and touched by Argos revealing their hidden essence like a strain hold to unwind and not footprints of the infinite spiral in this teeny tiny quantum world where he tracks God and unravels delicate threats of the hidden divine.

Margery Eagan:

Mary man, Gladney has written a wonderful poem. So McKinley talk about the intersection of physics and your religious faith that she references at the end of that poem.

Makinde Ogunnaike:

Yeah, well, I think there are two levels where physics and faith kind of intersect. For me. There's one level which I think many people of faith very much resonate with, which is just a brute force spa at the incredible structure, the incredible subtlety of the world around us. I've been studying physics basically my entire life, and every year, every month, every week, I'm still kind of taken aback by how crazily intricate the world is, how very delicate the theories are that describe it, but on even more to me, shocking level, there are lots of parallels between the actual mathematical formalism, the tenets of physics, and some of the descriptions that come from, in particular Christian or more broadly, Abrahamic faith.

There are things that talk about the soul and its connection with body throughout space that seem to mirror some things that have to do with quantum entanglement. There are some very, very odd things when you look at the way general relativity bends time and space that speak to how you can have incongruous beliefs or convictions that may actually all account for each other in a broader picture. There are even some very compelling ideas about, say, fate and determinism, which when you look at quantum mechanics from one perspective, it seems completely deterministic. But the second you have to actually talk about observation about what actually happens, the theory actually allows for things called wave function collapse, where what it predicts is actually a probability of what you will see. And so from one perspective, it looks as though it's completely fatalistic. Everything is predetermined from another. It seems like there's not just lots of room, but almost an assessment of free will and of the intervention of human beings. And so I actually see these two things as kind of being complimentary both very much help me understand the world and both actually kind of help me understand the other

Jim Braude:

McKinley I want you to know you can't see her, but you made Marjorie smile broadly, I should say.

Margery Eagan:

Well, because I like to think that instead of having to upload my brain to continue on, there might be something else out there that I might be. But Joshua, this is something that I'm sorry we going to No, you

Jim Braude:

Go ahead,

Margery Eagan:

Joshua. This is something that physics does look at. I mean, McKinley was just talking about this, we were just talking about in this poem, but this is something that you hear about a lot in physics, I think, don't you?

Joshua Sariñana:

In terms of,

Margery Eagan:

Well, what McKinney was talking about looking at these little tiny well entanglements and looking like these atoms doing these strange things. And I am not a physicist, so I don't know what you guys are looking at, but that thing between looking at the world as a physicist and looking at the world, if you are looking for something of a transcendental nature, you know what I mean?

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah. So as a neuro scientist, we think of consciousness and how it is produced by activity of neurons. So we have the circuitry of the brain and we have brain regions and we think, well, how does consciousness arise from neuronal activity? Or how does memory arise from neuronal activity? Or how does vision arise from neuronal activity and the emergence of these cognitive functions or these perceptual abilities? It's really difficult to understand. It's almost like a form of transcendence. This emerging principle from these units is almost like a sort of transcendence. So we do try to wrap our minds around it in that sense, from a neuroscientific point of view. And we don't have a strong understanding of how that occurs, but it is something that we reflect on all the time. And there's no good way to describe it, I would say other than that, it is an area of investigation.

Jim Braude:

Gentlemen, I have one last thing for the two of you, and before you go, we have to make sure you tell people where they can access this poetry of science. I was thinking when we've been talking, I don't know if either of you saw the documentary picture of a scientist by Nova last year. Did either of you happen to see that it's essentially it's about the historical sexism, misogyny, and the world of science obviously directed at women, and it's brilliant and it won all kinds of awards. How is the world of science treating people of color in 2021 McKinney first and then you, Joshua?

Makinde Ogunnaike:

Well, I think it's still pretty tough. There's just as much of a historical legacy of misrepresentation and mistreatment of scientists of color in large part because science is the search for truth. But it's carried out by fallible and biased beings. And so oftentimes the things that we look for to be objective are actually very colored by our own preconceptions. So when looking for new ideas, if someone thinks speaks and acts differently from you, oftentimes that means that their ideas and their contributions won't be taken as seriously, which is one of the reasons that the further you go in school and in scientific careers, the fewer people of color you see nonetheless, last year or two, there have been many, many initiatives to try to make things better. This national Society of Black physicists that you mentioned was actually the result of some efforts at MIT, between myself, our head of department, and some people at Harvard. But oftentimes that still takes a toll on those very scientists of color who are trying to make room for themselves. So projects like this that Josh helped create is very wonderful because it's more of a celebration than an extra tax on people's time.

Jim Braude:

How about Joshua? Could you add something to that?

Joshua Sariñana:

Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why I did this project is because when I first got here to do my PhD is I felt so alone being I think the only Mexican American neuroscientist in my department. And looking at the numbers from the office of the Provost at MIT, we are people who look like McKinney and I are severely underrepresented. And based on their numbers over the past few years, I think there are only a handful, less than 10 black PhDs awarded. And that is a lot less than the actual percentage of the representation of Massachusetts. And if you compare Black and Latinx PhDs were six times less likely or underrepresented than white counterparts. So it's not a good reflection of the population. And if you even compare that, that's to say the prison system In Massachusetts, we're 11 times more likely to be incarcerated.

Jim Braude:

So

Joshua Sariñana:

We're overrepresented in prison. We're underrepresented in education.

Jim Braude:

I'll tell you, we could use picture of scientists. The sequel actually on that, I just checked it out. Poetry of science.org gentlemen is where you can find the poems, learn about the project, and all those sort of things. We really appreciate your time. Thank you both for being

Margery Eagan:

With us. Yeah, well, we just want to say we've been in a panic all day because this was so difficult for both Jim and me. You guys are coming from a wholly different place, so I appreciate, explain

Jim Braude:

It beautifully.

Margery Eagan:

You're putting up with our ignorance here, but thank you

Jim Braude:

Gentlemen.

Makinde Ogunnaike:

Thank yourself. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. We really appreciate it.

Margery Eagan:

Yeah, you guys were great. And thank you very much for your great work. Joshua Sariñana is a fine art photographer, a writer and a neuroscience marketing professional. He's also the director of what we were just talking about, the poetry of science. Makinde Ogunnaike is a PhD candidate in physics at MIT where he researches quantum physics and the new states of matter they can create. He also runs the Harvard MIT chapter of the National Society of Black Physicists, and thanks so much for joining us.