Professor David Gross, Nobel Laureate in Physics 2004, visits The HEAD Foundation and speaks with Dr Xiong Chi of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University, about STEM education in Asia, updates on China’s super collider project, and the future of the human race.
I watched your recent talk “My life in physics: from quarks tostrings” (Jan 2017) on YouTube. For the question “What quality do you need to do good science?” you said “luck”, and the “ability to create luck”. Can you elaborate on this “ability to create luck”?
There are many qualities that are needed to do good science. Sometimes I’m asked: “What quality do you need to win a Nobel Prize?” Sometimes I answer “luck”, because that’s true, you have to be lucky; you can’t be a great general unless there’s a great war. If he lived in a time of peace, Napoleon would be a failure! You would have to be lucky to be at the right place at the right time when discoveries can be made. But there are some people who are lucky over and over again, and so while I said it’s important to be lucky, it’s also important to “make luck”. The way you “make luck” is to somehow have an intuition to choose the right place to be, at the right time, where you have an opportunity to make great discoveries. There’re other ways of increasing your chances of success, but it helps to be lucky. I was lucky early in my career in physics. I started as a fresh researcher at a time when there was a lot of experimental data about the nuclear sub atom and very little understanding, a perfect time for a theorist to create new theories about nuclear physics. If I had come along five years later, after we had solved the problem —that would’ve been unlucky. Timing is crucial, but having a good nose, good intuition helps make luck.
How has your family influenced your physics career?
I came from a family of intellectuals, so ideas were always important in my family. As a young child during dinner there would always be discussions about ideas, politics, and other things. I think I learnt very early to be interested in ideas and to have serious discussions even as a very young child. That influenced me very much. My father had very broad intellectual interests and was always stimulating me as a young child to participate in ways that were just above my abilities, so I guess that was very important in my development.
“You need to change the mindset of parents, teachers and students — tell them what opportunities are available and how exciting science is.”
You are a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and have been involved in the proposal and the related disputes on building next generation large colliders in China. You wrote an article with Edward Witten. You also replied to some questions from Prof C N Yang (Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1957). Would you tell us your main point on this issue? Any updates on the CEPC (CircularElectron Positron Collider)?
The project is going well. It has managed to get the funding it needs from the government and from the city of Beijing, where they’re constructing now a big centre in the outskirts of Beijing for high-tech, super-conducting magnets. The CEPC is an experimental project and requires a lot of R&D to get to a stage where they can start working on a tunnel. The plan is that in about 3 years, we’ll be ready to construct what’s called a technical design report, which is essentially a blueprint, like what an architect does for a building, so that they can go to the government and ask for approval to begin construction. This is a big and expensive project, so who knows what will happen, but I’mpretty optimistic. China, as you know, is very ambitious, and has the resources. As for Yang’s opposition, I think much of it was misplaced. His main argument, in the end, was “China is too poor.” China isn’t poor, China is the biggest economy in the world, or shortly will be, and when people say: “Well, that’s true, but China also has the biggest population in the world so we can’t afford it!” I would say that’s the wrong way to look at it. China’s population is four times as big as that of the United States, the same size as the economy, but no one is asking China to build four accelerators, so per capita, the accelerator is very cheap. It is a very small fraction of the GDP of China. It is actually a little cheaper, relative to the current GDP, than the Beijing electron-positron collider (built back in the 70’s) which has been a great success and very beneficial to China. The advantages I think are clear and I think this is well understood in China, and it will happen. But, it’s impossible to make predictions about governments and their support for science and politics with great certainty.
I understand that you visited the annual Asian Science Camp in Malaysia earlier this week and met with more than 300 science students from 30 Asian countries. What is your impression of science students in Asia, compared to the students you have in the US. Have you observed any fundamental differences and similarities?
I’ve gone to quite a few Asian Science Camps around, and they are always great. One of the reasons I go is because the students are so exciting, so passionate and so interested. I feel like an intellectual vampire; I suck their enthusiasm! In Malaysia, in Kampar, the camp I just visited, it was really amazing to see students from all these different countries all passionate about science. I think these activities, that this organisation helps support, are really important. Aside from listening to eminent scientists, which excites the students, they network with other students. These are often students who have never been out of their own country, have never met someone from a totally different culture and have never been exposed to one of the great things about being a scientist or being involved in science, which is the fact that you have colleagues who speak the same scientific language and are interested in the same problems everywhere around the world. So, I think it really helps. I’ve been doing this now more and more during the last 20 years and I am now in a position where I meet people, who come up to me and say: “I heard your talk at Lindau, or at the Science Camp 10 years ago and it changed my life. Thank you so much!” That gives me a great feeling of pleasure.
The diminishing interest in STEM subjects seems to have become a major concern in the education systems of many countries, including the US. In your opinion, is this something we should worry about, or will the laws of supply and demand correct the situation over time?
In the U.S., that happened 20 years ago,15 years ago, but it has now turned around. If you look at the numbers, the number of undergraduate enrolments and graduate enrolments in STEM, have turned around in the last 10 years. That’s good. Here, I gather, the number is declining. The US is often the leader in these things, so what happens there often happens elsewhere 10 years later, so you should be optimistic.The reason for the increase of interest in STEM in the US is twofold. First, is that in America there was a big tech boom in the 90s,and a lot of people instead of going to science, went into computer science or to start-up companies, or to finance or to economics. But with the economic ups and downs, and especially the recession 10 years ago, it’s not so attractive anymore. The other thing is that everyone got very worried — just as I sense is happening here in southeast Asia — that people aren’t going into engineering and science anymore. The “STEM” word itself came from the effort in the United States to improve science, technology, engineering and math. So, there was this big effort, which came from the government and the NSF (National Science Foundation) — “STEM, STEM,STEM!” — trying to inform students about the opportunities, the excitement, and increase outreach activities. And the amazing thing is that it has worked! It’s working, and you can see it in the numbers.I think that has got to be one of the reasons. I don’t know actually,I’m going to try to find out why this turnaround has occurred, but I suspect that part of it is exactly what’s happening here now. I heard this concern in Malaysia, I heard it here (Singapore). The same thing happened to Europe, too! They were also worried 10 years ago, and they too are making a lot of effort and these efforts actually work.It probably would be good to study and understand what it is that worked, because it’s hard to tell. But it is working! So this attention to opportunities in science, engineering and math is having an effect. The economic conditions, especially in developing countries, often go through a period where suddenly there are opportunities. Before real development happens [in a place], an ambitious kid often has ambitious parents who want the kid to become a medical doctor, that’s a good career. Engineer? Not so much. Scientist? What is a scientist? How can you make a living? As things begin to improve, people think about making money in finance and economics, don’t they? You need to teach the parents as much as the students, and the teachers, what opportunities exist in an advanced economy and a growing economy in the modern world!
In the US, various groups, definitely the NSF, have been trying in many ways to promote STEM education, by outreach, and by things that you do with these lectures, and the science camps. Singapore does a lot of these things all the time. There are various ways to do this, but you need to change the mindset of parents, teachers and students —tell them what opportunities are available and how exciting science is. It works, I think.
Do you expect a country like Singapore to make any significantcontribution to particle physics and cosmology? And why?
Singapore’s a small country, a country of five million, so it’s hard to have super excellence in all fields. In particle physics, it could very well make significant contributions and has some good people, but it’s not so big on experimental activity. It’s a choice. I think it partly depends on people — you need the right people. Take a country like Denmark. Denmark, 100 years ago, was a small Northern European country, with some very good science and universities. And thenNiels Bohr came along — one person. And he invented the Bohratom, dominated quantum physics and constructed the first institute that brought people together, creating enormous social impact on how science is done by creating the Niels Bohr Institute. That is an example where it depended on one person who was really special and on a society which supported him. The Carlsberg Foundation funded this new institute, the government was very supportive and they created this incredible intellectual centre in physics, which was so important in a little country. That can happen to Singapore. Maybe not in particle physics, but in a country of five million or six million, there are very likely a few such people. In what area would they stand out? What is important, and what I would advocate for a country like Singapore, is: when you have such extraordinary people or a group of such people or whatever circumstance leads to a focus of excellence, you should exploit that, and create something truly world-class and exceptional. But in reality, a country of five million can’t do that in all fields – that’s impossible.
If you allow yourself to be absolutely frank, what is your impression of Singapore and Singaporeans?
I’ve been coming to Singapore quite a bit. Singapore is amazing in so many ways. I really admire enormously a lot of things that have been done here, the spirit and the creativity. Every time I come here I learn about some new effort, which I’m amazed by and appreciative of. It’s very different than any other country I know, although it shares some characteristics with Israel, with which I have a lot of connections. But there are some issues. We were once in a high school where I was judging a high school competition and I got into a round of discussion with the teachers. I said, “Well, all this is fine, but I wasn’t clear that the projects the students were working on were self-initiated or that creative. They were sort of given a project. They did a fantastic job, but there wasn’t much spontaneity.” They explained to me that they understand that that’s a problem in Singapore and that they were trying to stimulate spontaneity — which was sort of contradictory. They were trying to “top-down stimulate bottom-up”. Maybe you can do that, somehow, but I am suspicious of “we’re going to teach people to be spontaneous.” I’m not sure you can teach people to be spontaneous. Anyway, I think that’s still an issue here. I am very impressed by the public spaces, the facilities in Singapore. A city-state like this is such an incredibly interesting place to visit. I love the place.But to be totally frank, it’s a little tense here. Part of the reason why it’s so successful is because you are always striving to do better, to think of new things. If one lives here one might get a bit tired. It definitely is a striving place.
Between research and teaching, which are you more passionate about? And why?
I think research. I love to teach; it’s one of the reasons why I like to give lectures and talks around the world. I definitely enjoy teaching. I have a captive audience — teach them something new and its wonderful to be able to see a spark in a student or a listener when they understand something that they couldn’t understand before. But in the end, I prefer research. Research is more difficult, but it offersalways this incredible potential reward of understanding somethingyou didn’t understand before, and, rarely, something that nobody else understood before or knew about before. That’s just great. And it’s fun just doing the work. So, I enjoy both of them.
Anthony Leggett once said when he was stuck in research he changed focus to teaching…
I think that’s absolutely correct, it’s very important to do more than one thing. Even if you’re doing research, it’s very important to work, I think, on more than one problem, and not focus too much. If you focus too much and you hit a barrier, you get stuck as Tony said, then you’d just bang your head against the wall. It’s good to have other things you can turn to while your mind unconsciously figures it out.
As someone who has a better understanding of the origin and history of the Universe than most people do, are you optimistic about the future of the human race?
I’m an optimist, so I am optimistic. But again, I can’t predict what the future of the human race will be. There’re so many challenges and dangers — nuclear weapons, the environment, the climate. Our ability to control nature has good and bad effects. We’re somehow trying to manoeuvre between the good and the bad: extend human life but not destroy the planet. I’m optimistic and I hope very much that we will manage to survive the damage that we are doing to our planet and the damage that we continue to do to each other. If we do, we’re probably going to change what we think of ourselves as a human race. I think if we do survive in ten thousand years, or a million years, and if I were to come back in ten thousand years, I’m not sure if I would recognise humans as the kind of humans I was accustomed to.
We’re beginning to be able to change our own genomes and evolve more rapidly, and we’re beginning to interact much more intimately and closely with machines. I think that could very well be part of our survival or part of our demise — it’s up to us. But we’ve been quite an amazing species, especially in science. The amount of understanding that we have developed in a very short period, by any biological and geological standard is just fantastic. We have a lot of good things about ourselves but we’re still, you know, primitive monkeys, to some extent, and we can do a lot of harm. But I’m an optimist.
"We’re beginning to be able to change our own genomes and evolve more rapidly, and we’re beginning to interact much more intimately and closely with machines. I think that could very well be part of our survival or part of our demise — it’s up to us. "
Do you think we (the human race) are alone in the Universe?
I think it’s very strange why there aren’t smart aliens all around us. It’s not explained except by the pessimistic answer to your previous question, that if you acquire the amount of control we are acquiring, you will destroy yourself. There’re many planets throughout the
galaxy and lots of time, so it’s very bizarre that advanced life has not yet been detected. I hope there are a lot of smart aliens out there. It will be very interesting to talk to them.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing today’s human society? And what will that challenge be in ten years?
There’re so many. Obviously, climate change and our impact on the planet, but I think the biggest challenge and danger is just learning to live together globally and locally. We’re facing increasing inequality and enormous dislocation of our economies and our societies from technological advances that we haven’t yet figured out how to make work. We have enormous power to do harm. I think the biggest danger is still nuclear weapons and the danger of nuclear war where we can truly wipe out the species and most of life on the planet in a few hours. We haven’t figured out clearly how to reduce that danger enough. I’m trying to be optimistic, but it’s not difficult to be pessimistic as well, especially considering the political situation in United States. The biggest challenge might be socio-economic
pressure, which could prevent us from dealing with the issues of the environment and the climate, and the avoidance of war. These are problems that aren’t going to go away easily.
If you were to pick a worthy cause to champion globally as a Nobel laureate, what would that be? And why?
Well, I do support all sorts of causes, some just by signing letters, but the thing I’ve been most engaged in is helping to promote science at a higher level, especially in underdeveloped countries. I have been involved intimately in three or four institutes — the type that I direct in Santa Barbara, creating them from nothing in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, etc., and that is very fulfilling. I try to help convince countries that it’s worthwhile to support science, and create institutions that can help in that effort. That is a worthy cause that I actually have a lot of experience in doing and have done. There are many other worthy causes in which I sign letters, engage in various activities, from human rights to politics.
OCTOBER 2017 | ISSUE 2
Challenges of Our Time
