The Passion Principle
From: A Universe of Particles: Cosmological Reflections
Say the word “scientist” and the picture that comes to mind for most people is a bespectacled, dispassionate type, plodding along in a carefully rigorous, decidedly unexciting, way to test some specific hypothesis or conjecture. Those of a certain age will conjure up images of an unimposing fellow with a slide-rule jutting from his belt, while others will envision a pocket calculator proudly on display, but while the technology changes, the essential stereotype does not: scientists are essentially nerdy, Spock-like types who methodically go about their business in a quiet, matter-of-fact sort of way, deliberately eschewing any great outburst of sentiment or emotion.
Well, meet Rocky Kolb. Upon first encountering this lanky, gregarious Louisianan, you likely wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was anything from a stand-up comedian to a chief sales executive to a former professional basketball player. But Rocky is none of those things. He is a highly accomplished theoretical physicist who specializes in applying abstract mathematical concepts of modern particle physics to the early universe.
And he is also someone who has made an entire career of being strongly guided by his emotions, right from the start.
“I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the dog days of summer, we’d play baseball in the morning, but by noon or so it was simply unbearable to be outside — or inside for that matter. The only place I could walk to that was air-conditioned was a small public library branch. So to be cool, I went to the library. And when I got to the science section of this little library, I remember the librarian coming over and pulling me away from the science section, saying, ‘No, you want to go to the children’s books section’.
“I had already read those books — they didn’t particularly interest me — but the science books, they were forbidden. And every time she wasn’t looking, I would run over and get a science book, and then put one of these big golden books outside of it, so I’d be reading science when she wasn’t looking.
“And it turned out that I really loved it; and the part that I really loved, were the parts about physics and astronomy. I was fascinated with both the smallest things that people knew about, and also the largest things — in astronomy. And that sort of stuck with me.”
Of course most people have a nice, heartwarming story to tell about how they began their careers — a good tale to tell your grandchildren about, if nothing else. But for Rocky, his strong, emotional attachment to both the intellectual appeal of physics and the warm, collegial atmosphere of the scholarly community only continued to strengthen.
“In the late 1970s I became interested in neutrinos. Could neutrinos have mass? Could there be any number of neutrinos? And my advisor, Duane Dicus, said, ‘Well, doesn’t cosmology or astronomy say something about neutrinos?’ This was a really great thing. He didn’t know any cosmology, I didn’t know any cosmology, I’d never taken a course in cosmology. I’d never taken a course in astronomy or astrophysics.
“And so we learned it together — I tell people that, I picked up astronomy on the streets. He was a little bit faster than I was, but it was a great experience to learn something with my advisor. I think this was a much better experience for me than having an experience where the mentor already knows something about the subject and you just try to absorb it. It was really a great learning experience.”
And then, a few years later, as a postdoc at Caltech working with the Nobel Laureate Will Fowler, there was an even stronger emotional experience:
“Perhaps he greatest thing I learned from Willy was to appreciate the work done by your students and postdocs. It’s rarer than you might think: to really appreciate and celebrate what your students and people who work for you are doing. He always showed real enthusiasm. He wasn’t involved in the papers: he didn’t really know the science of particle physics very much, but he really loved it; and he instilled in me and many of the people who worked there, really, an idea of a sort of ‘family pride’: we were ‘Willy’s boys’.
“I remember being at a conference somewhere years later and a bunch of Willy’s former postdocs and students were sitting around talking, and there was a senior professor from another institution — I won’t mention his name — made some comment to the effect, ‘Well, of course, Willy did all these things because his postdocs and students were so good’, or something like that. It was sort of like, ‘What did he do?’ You know, ‘He was just at Caltech. He just got great students and postdocs’.
“And I truly feared for his life. There were several of us who got very red in the face and looked dangerously close to strangling him.”
Well, OK, you might think to yourself, I’ll grant you that in any professional community passions can run high when it comes to matters of internal sociology and protecting vested interests. One can even imagine — albeit dimly — that different schools of chartered accountants can be roused to near-passionate expressions of tribal loyalties. But the actual practice of something like theoretical physics — surely that’s a domain where any strong emotions are left at the door.
But yet again: no. Here’s Rocky talking about dark matter, for example:
“Personally I love this idea of an elementary particle to explain dark matter, which holds galaxies and other large scale structures together, because my original loves when I was a 10-year-old boy were astronomy, the big things, and particle physics, the little things.
“I had never thought — nobody, I suppose, had thought — that there might be a deep and profound connection between the two. So it’s wonderful that I just came along at the right time.
And here he is talking about dark energy:
“Dark energy, to me, is like fingernails on the chalkboard. It just drives me nuts. I don’t like it. I don’t like it; I admit that it’s a prejudice, but there it is. I don’t have a good explanation. It’s not a logical thing. It’s not that I say the observations are wrong — although I did for at least a couple of years. I kept saying, ‘There must be some other effect responsible for these observations’, until I was finally convinced otherwise. I just can’t swallow it. I think we all have these prejudices, these ideas, that we just can’t swallow.”
Like Rocky, most scientists don’t like to admit that their professional judgements are influenced by their emotions. At some level they feel they should be able to somehow transcend such base sentiments and be able to look calmly and objectively at the facts that are presented to them. But that is not just impossible — because science is a human activity done by humans — it is often very far from desirable. Many of the most impactful scientific accomplishments, for example, were made by those who were motivated — often very strongly motivated — by a deep and abiding aesthetics sensitivity: a quest for beauty, for harmony, for simplicity.
And then there’s the simple and obvious fact that scientific success, like success in any highly-challenging domain, requires a level of dedication and commitment that naturally springs from the deepest wells of personal desire and passion.
It was all of a piece, then, that when I asked Rocky what advice he would give to science teachers, he had this to say.
“If I could sum it up in one word it would be ‘passion’: have a true passion for what you do and convey that to the students, trying to ignite a passion in them. Don’t be so preoccupied with the specifics of the curriculum and all these other things: it’s the passion that matters most. Nothing else matters.”
This is the introduction written by Howard Burton of the book, A Universe of Particles: Cosmological Reflections, which is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Rocky Kolb, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. The book is broken into chapters and includes questions for discussion at the end of each chapter. The book is also available as part of the 5-part Ideas Roadshow Collection called Conversations About Astrophysics & Cosmology.
Visit the dedicated page for Rocky Kolb: https://ideas-on-film.com/rocky-kolb/. Watch a clip from the filmed conversation: https://youtu.be/pfX3jCUpjB4.
