Science Slam: Karl Ahrendsen

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04/05/2018 Added

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Karl Ahrendsen, physics

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[00:00:03.710]I first knew that I wanted to be a scientist
[00:00:06.430]the summer of my junior year in college.
[00:00:09.800]I was doing summer research in North Carolina,
[00:00:13.310]and I was wandering along the halls of the Physics building,
[00:00:15.830]and I happened upon two wild physics professors.
[00:00:20.750]And they were having a conversation,
[00:00:22.410]and I don't remember exactly what they were talking about.
[00:00:25.710]It was probably some recent physics discovery
[00:00:27.590]like the Higgs boson or neutrino oscillations
[00:00:30.130]or something like that.
[00:00:31.460]But I was most struck by the way
[00:00:34.120]that they were having their conversation.
[00:00:36.160]They were talking about this in such a casual manner,
[00:00:39.190]they could have been talking about what they had for dinner
[00:00:41.930]or what their weekend plans were.
[00:00:44.130]But no, they were talking about the future
[00:00:46.090]of an entire subdiscipline of science.
[00:00:49.270]And I was struck by the way that they could talk
[00:00:50.940]about such a grandiose thing so casually,
[00:00:53.890]and I knew that I wanted to be the kind
[00:00:55.360]of person that could have those same kinds
[00:00:57.560]of conversation and do that.
[00:01:00.070]So I knew then that I wanted to be a scientist,
[00:01:02.220]specifically I wanted to be a physicist.
[00:01:05.550]So fast forward, thanks.
[00:01:07.119](audience laughter)
[00:01:07.952]Yeah!
[00:01:09.350]So fast forward two years, I'm enrolled in
[00:01:11.070]graduate school here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:01:14.500]And I'm taking really cool courses
[00:01:17.110]with names that sound awesome
[00:01:18.620]like Introduction to Particle Physics,
[00:01:21.000]and Group Theory, and these really cool things.
[00:01:23.580]And I get to have conversations with my friends like,
[00:01:27.300]why and how does a light bulb work,
[00:01:30.640]which sounds like a really easy question to answer,
[00:01:33.270]but when you dig down into the physics of it,
[00:01:35.564]comes up with some really cool ways
[00:01:37.672]why we know that light bulbs let out light.
[00:01:42.350]So even though I'm having these conversations
[00:01:44.484]about these complex ideas, do I feel like a scientist?
[00:01:50.550]Not really.
[00:01:52.250]But that's okay, we fast forward another year,
[00:01:54.560]and now I'm in a research group.
[00:01:56.770]So I can apply the things that I learned
[00:01:59.470]in class to activities in the lab.
[00:02:03.550]I can solve problems with the equations
[00:02:05.300]that I've been learning.
[00:02:07.000]And I have my own machine that I can
[00:02:08.840]use to spin polarized electrons.
[00:02:10.970]That sounds cool, right?
[00:02:14.402]The idea of this machine is that I can help to answer
[00:02:17.210]a question of why life as we know it exists on this earth.
[00:02:23.170]But do I feel like a scientist?
[00:02:26.690]Can I lie to myself to make me feel better?
[00:02:31.510]But, if I'm at this point in my graduate career,
[00:02:34.330]and I don't feel like a scientist,
[00:02:36.470]will I ever feel like a scientist?
[00:02:39.550]Do I even belong.
[00:02:43.490]It's among these happy questions that one
[00:02:47.240]of my office mates walked up to me and asked me,
[00:02:50.087]"Would you be interested in babysitting
[00:02:52.190]a dog for three months?"
[00:02:54.990]There are a number of decisions that go
[00:02:56.870]into me deciding what I will say to this.
[00:03:00.070]The first is, is my roommate okay with it?
[00:03:03.050]I'm not a completely ignorant person,
[00:03:04.860]I wanna make sure that he's okay.
[00:03:07.050]The second is, I'm a single, 26-year old guy,
[00:03:11.190]who spends most of my time in the lab,
[00:03:13.460]and girls like dogs, right?
[00:03:15.850]So this could be a way that I could meet somebody, right?
[00:03:22.040]So, whatever the decision, I decided to say, "yes."
[00:03:24.590]And it was me deciding to say, "yes," that led
[00:03:27.290]to my first experience of actually feeling like a scientist.
[00:03:31.440]So fast forward three weeks, now I'm taking care of a dog.
[00:03:35.510]His name is Ranger, he is a very
[00:03:38.410]mild-mannered pit bull lab mix.
[00:03:43.430]Things are going great, it's fun.
[00:03:45.810]And then about two hours later, reality sets in.
[00:03:51.320]My major problem is that there's a communication barrier.
[00:03:54.820]So Ranger will bark at me.
[00:03:56.960]Does it mean "I wanna go for a walk", "I want food",
[00:04:00.660]or just "play with me"?
[00:04:02.799]I have no idea, and sometimes I do all three things
[00:04:07.020]and he still wants my attention for some reason.
[00:04:10.460]I don't know.
[00:04:13.400]The other major problem that I have is that
[00:04:15.350]my schedule was no longer my own.
[00:04:17.680]I have to go home every night at the same time
[00:04:20.330]so that I can walk Ranger, and I have to wake up at
[00:04:22.780]six in the morning so that I can give him a walk every day.
[00:04:29.160]That works against me as a graduate student,
[00:04:30.730]because sometimes you have to stay late and work in the lab.
[00:04:34.972]So I was really frustrated by this at first.
[00:04:37.040]But then I had an idea.
[00:04:39.290]I realized that since I was going and walking Ranger
[00:04:41.960]at the same time each morning and each night,
[00:04:44.420]that I effectively had a control variable.
[00:04:47.970]So I could use my walks with Ranger
[00:04:49.660]as a way to explore the world around me.
[00:04:52.900]I could count the number of people
[00:04:54.340]that I see walking around as I'm walking the dog,
[00:04:57.120]and then get a measure of he activity
[00:04:58.720]in Lincoln as a function of time.
[00:05:02.160]I could track the price of gas and see
[00:05:05.360]how it fluctuates as I walk by the gas station
[00:05:07.670]and note the price and see how it fluctuates
[00:05:10.140]on a weekly and monthly basis.
[00:05:13.620]I made a spreadsheet to record all of these values.
[00:05:16.059](audience laughter)
[00:05:18.300]As I'm walking the dog, I pull out my phone
[00:05:20.480]and I make notes so that I don't forget
[00:05:22.240]the numbers as I get home.
[00:05:24.080]And at the peak of my involvement with this,
[00:05:26.870]I had the brilliant idea that I
[00:05:28.240]could measure Ranger's metabolism.
[00:05:31.430]I can measure the amount of food that I feed him,
[00:05:34.120]and then I can measure his output.
[00:05:37.470]So I would clean up after Ranger as I'm walking him,
[00:05:40.930]take it home, measure it on the kitchen scale.
[00:05:43.610]I kid you not, I did this, it was sanitary though.
[00:05:46.700]I'm considerate to my roommate.
[00:05:49.400]And I measured Ranger's output.
[00:05:51.310]Now, if this were a movie, this is the point
[00:05:54.590]where I would show you a beautiful graph of the data
[00:05:56.670]that I collected, and tell you
[00:05:58.280]about how I published a paper about all of this research.
[00:06:01.060]That's not the case, my life isn't a movie.
[00:06:04.060]What actually happened, is after the third time
[00:06:06.580]of me collecting Ranger's output,
[00:06:08.620]I realized that some questions are,
[00:06:11.140]the effort required to answer those questions
[00:06:14.043]just isn't worth the trouble.
[00:06:18.640]So, though this experiment failed,
[00:06:22.200]I realized something.
[00:06:24.497]This is something that I do all the time,
[00:06:26.890]and I really enjoy doing.
[00:06:28.590]I come up with a question,
[00:06:30.930]usually my questions are related to food,
[00:06:34.320]and then I collect data on that,
[00:06:36.760]which usually means eating the food, which is also good.
[00:06:40.550]And then come up with an answer to the question.
[00:06:43.080]So an example of this is,
[00:06:44.420]I had the idea that I could save money
[00:06:46.200]on Valentine's Day candy each year
[00:06:48.342]by buying Valentine's Day candy after Valentine's Day,
[00:06:52.040]then waiting a year and then giving it to people.
[00:06:56.610]The answer is, no, it doesn't work.
[00:06:58.600]The candy does degrade significantly in that time period.
[00:07:04.660]So, what I realized was that my concept
[00:07:07.860]of what a scientist was had gotten confused
[00:07:10.090]with the public perception of what a scientist is.
[00:07:13.280]Being a scientist isn't about the conversations that I have.
[00:07:16.900]It isn't about the knowledge that I gain.
[00:07:19.480]And it's not about the equations that I use.
[00:07:21.720]Being a scientist is about asking questions,
[00:07:24.860]and collecting data in a methodical way
[00:07:27.440]so that you can get an answer to those questions.
[00:07:31.210]And this is something that I do all the time,
[00:07:33.320]and I really enjoy doing.
[00:07:35.950]And it took me a long time,
[00:07:39.490]and a little bit of dog poop, to figure this out.
[00:07:43.820]But what I realized, thanks to Ranger,
[00:07:45.820]is that even though as a graduate student in physics,
[00:07:48.970]I do science every day.
[00:07:51.650]It's in doing every day science
[00:07:54.650]that I first felt like a real scientist.
[00:07:58.064](audience applause)

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Science Slam: Karl Ahrendsen

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