When the Renaissance scientist Galileo defended the heliocentric model of the Universe, he was condemned by the Catholic Church. Modern scientists, however, frequently face their fiercest opposition not from religious authorities but from within their own ranks. In his new book, I Told You So!, Matt Kaplan—a longtime science correspondent for The Economist—traces a lineage of internal resistance to paradigm-changing scientific ideas from the Victorian era to today. The engaging narrative, which draws on historical archives and interviews with contemporary researchers, also highlights fault lines the scientific community must address to meet pressing challenges.

Central to Kaplan’s narrative is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, an obstetrician at the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-19th century who discovered that puerperal fever was often spread by doctors moving directly from autopsies to the delivery ward. His remedy—thorough handwashing with calcium hypochlorite—could have spared countless women. Yet the finding languished for decades. Semmelweis’s observations were rejected at the time, Kaplan notes, partly because physicians resisted examining their own role in maternal deaths and partly because the obstetrician lacked a theoretical framework. Germ theory would later reveal microbes to be the true agents of infectious disease and explain the efficacy of Semmelweis’s intervention.

Louis Pasteur, who helped transform germ theory—a minor medical theory in the mid-19th century—into a cornerstone of modern medicine, drew on the work of rivals, omitted their contributions, and withheld methodological details to present a simplified narrative for funders. Those invested in Pasteur’s legend excuse these actions by saying that he “knew how to play the game.” Through Pasteur, Kaplan exposes a pattern: scientific prestige sometimes built on ethical shortcuts and a system that too often rewards them.

Such patterns persist in the modern scientific enterprise. Biochemist Katalin Karikó—a Hungarian immigrant to the United States—played a crucial role in developing the mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine, yet the implications of her research were not recognized immediately. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she spent nearly two decades, she was demoted and shunted between labs before leaving for the private sector, where her ideas finally received the support they deserved. She won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When a former colleague casually remarks to Kaplan that the university was right to fire Karikó because she did not bring in grants, he is stunned by the cold, mercenary logic. But the colleague is correct that securing funding is inseparable from doing science. Karikó’s story exposes a larger truth: Money tends to flow to projects with a better chance of success, leaving researchers with unusual ideas out in the cold.

Kaplan points to alternative funding mechanisms—among them a well-designed lottery system and the Villum Foundation’s “golden ticket” model, which allows individual reviewers to champion high-risk ideas that consensus-driven committees would almost certainly overlook. He also highlights proposals to reduce bias related to an investigator’s gender, nationality, or seniority by blinding committees to grant-seekers’ identities. The blinding tactic is hardly new, but it could be adopted far more widely than it is today.

Where big money flows, corruption can follow. Kaplan argues that the scientific community must devote more resources to identifying and punishing fraud, noting that publications, too, are a kind of currency. When gatekeepers admit low-quality or fabricated papers into the literature, they erode the very foundation of science, which depends on the reliability of prior results.

Kaplan also illustrates another fault line in science: Cooperation collapses under competitive pressure. Here, he recounts the story of two groups racing to rescue the northern white rhino who chose competition over collaboration. The contest to be the first to do so—despite the risk of dooming an endangered species—captures a deeper malaise. Just like Pasteur, he writes, these modern researchers were keeping their cards well concealed so that they could best reap the glory of their efforts by being first. Under these circumstances, he argues, collaboration should have been the only option.

Threaded through the book is Kaplan’s own story. With academic publications to his name as an undergraduate, he left paleontology for science journalism, provoking disdain from some of his research peers. That same background, however, makes him fluent in science’s language and culture, and it gives this book its authority and authenticity. If success in science requires knowing “how to play the game,” Kaplan invites readers to consider the possibility that the game itself is fundamentally flawed—no small achievement. I Told You So! makes a compelling case that if science is to remain faithful to its core principles, reform is overdue.

Here is the pdf.

Note:

The book’s message seems to have found resonance. I have been hearing from original thinking researchers who (rightly) think I am sympathetic to their cause. It does sound like the book’s message has some resonance. Another reason I am receiving these mails may be simply this: the author Matt Kaplan does not seem to have left contact information anywhere — not even on his excellent and aptly titled website.

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For over a decade now, driven by sheer curiosity, Bhamla and his research group have been studying the behavior of a variety of living organisms. “In our lab, when we see amazing things like slingshot spiders and wriggling worm blobs, we can’t help but ask: HOW? How do organisms do that? What is the physics behind it? What extraordinary discoveries or inventions can be made using the same biological principles?” it says on his website.

Bhamla has an impressive record of publishing in prestigious scientific journals – Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and Current Biology. He also takes the time to collaborate with professional science illustrators and has built a gallery with over a dozen comics that turn the lab’s research into playful, visual stories. Bhamla earned his degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2010, followed by a PhD and post-doctoral work at Stanford University.

Scroll caught up with the prolific Bhamla to talk aboutThe Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms – comics that make complex science accessible, inclusive and fun.

Why do you go to the trouble of converting peer-reviewed papers into comics?

I put a lot of energy into comics, storytelling and outreach. Children need wonder; the general audience – they don’t want to see equations either. The science in the graphic version is still rigorous, but the way we share it has to be accessible, visual, and fun. Comics aren’t a gimmick. They let me take what’s happening in the lab and connect it to kids, to the public, to the next generation of scientists.

For instance, we do research in the Amazon rainforest. When local school students come to the field station, we want to tell them what we’re doing. No kid is ever going to want me to hand them a research paper. Nobody’s asking: “Can I see the supplementary information? I want to study figure 4.” Nearly all our comics are translated into Spanish. This is something tangible to give them. Typically, people from my lab translate the comic into their first language, so they can share their work with their families back home.

My eldest is now six. Every time we make a new comic, I take a printout and my wife reads it to our son – he gets so excited. That’s my way of telling him what new stuff I’ve done.

The protagonist of your first graphic novel was a spider. How did you realize this was an extraordinary organism you had just encountered?

In 2017, as a new assistant professor at Georgia Tech University, I didn’t have enough research ideas, so I thought, well, one way to find ideas is to just walk into nature’s laboratory, and maybe something will hit me. I wanted to study bugs and I went to a field station in Peru and spent two weeks studying leafcutter ants.

On my last night, my guide – a naturalist who knows the forest like his backyard – pointed to a tiny black dot near the bathroom door. He snapped his fingers, and suddenly this little spider launched itself in that direction like a slingshot. “Everybody knows about this,” the guide said, but I realized nobody in science had studied this spider’s kinematics.

We say mammals and primates are cool because they can make tools, but here’s a spider that is building a tool to hunt. Her web isn’t just a trap. She sits in the middle of it, testing each fiber, tuning the stiffness, and the Young’s modulus just right depending on the weather.

A roboticist we worked with even tried to build a robotic web, and it was incredibly hard to keep it under tension. The spider, though, just sits there, holding and holding, until a mosquito buzzes past – and then she launches and catches this insect. All this is happening in the dark. How does she do the sensing? Maybe the web acts like an amplifying antenna. Maybe Doppler effect [in essence – it is the change in how waves sound or look when the source is moving relative to you] – is at play.

What’s fascinating is that the silk itself works like a spring. Not just a single fiber, but a whole constructed structure – a metamaterial spring. But then comes the puzzle: launching takes so much energy – how does she stop? That’s when we realized there’s a clutch mechanism. She’s holding onto one of the tension lines, and that grip lets her release energy in a geared, controlled way. She can reload and do it again and again.

So why is the slingshot spider so cool? Because she’s not just spinning silk – she’s engineering a spring‑loaded hunting machine, complete with sensing, launching, braking, and reloading. We described it in a Current Biology paper .

Apart from making comics, you gave a TED talk about the fluid dynamics of insects peeing. The protagonist, which you saw in your backyard in Atlanta: is the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Then, you observe their cousins – cicadas in the wild.

On another research trip in the Peruvian Amazon, we were traveling by boat from the field station. Midway, the driver stopped in a small riverside village – an unplanned break in a place where illegal logging happens. While wandering around with cameras, we felt droplets falling from a lone Indian almond tree (Terminalia catappa).

Looking closer, we saw cicadas clinging to the bark, camouflaged, expelling streams of xylem fluid. To us, it was a perfect chance to capture rare footage. To the villagers, this was a sacred tree. They called it the weeping tree. “Jesus is crying and blessing us,” they say. To them, the water was not insect excretion but a miracle.

We tried to show them slow‑motion iPhone videos – 240 frames per second, clear evidence of cicadas spraying fluid in high-speed jets. But the villagers refused to believe that a bug could produce so much water. Their conviction was unshakable. Ironically, it was their faith that protected the tree from being cut down. It preserved the very site where we could collect data.

In that half‑hour stop, with nothing more than the iPhone, we captured the phenomenon that became the foundation of our PNAS paper “Unifying fluidic excretion across life from cicadas to elephants.” For me it was a lesson in serendipity and perspective: science revealed the mechanism, but belief gave the tree meaning – and ensured its survival.

That is quite a story! Sometimes, your protagonist is a creature many of us have seen without traveling to exotic places – the flamingo.

A postdoc from our lab observed how flamingos look absurd when they feed: bending their heads between their legs with their bills upside down. It seems clumsy, but we learned that the posture, head bobbing, and foot‑stomping are all significant. Each move manipulates water flow: their bills filter food while vortices stirred by bobbing, chattering, and stomping funnel prey toward the beak. What looks silly is actually a precise fluid‑dynamics strategy.

By mimicking flamingos’ vortex tricks, engineers could potentially design filters that resist clogging – turning a bird’s bizarre feeding into inspiration for cleaner water systems. We describe thr research in a PNAS paper.

Overall, how do you decide which organisms to study? And are you afraid you’ll run out of things to study?

For me, it’s like a Venn diagram. A problem has to check a few boxes. First, the organism – it has to be unusual, something weird or understudied. Second, there has to be some physics, some principle or mechanism we can dig into.

I’m always a little nervous about just finding what I’d call a point solution. Those are fine – they show extremes – but what excites me is a principled framework. My goal is to use a system as the focal point to identify broader principles. That’s why we bring in math modeling and robotics, because they let us move from one system to another.

And once you look at science through that lens, there’s endless material to pick from. If you’re not scared of creepy crawlies, there’s a lot of window shopping to do. Enough inspiration for lifetimes, really. But the challenge is you can only take on so much.

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In 1997, at a University of Pennsylvania photocopier, molecular biologist Katalin Karikó met immunologist Drew Weismann — a chance encounter that would change her career, and medicine, forever. At 42, Karikó had made little headway with her radical idea: that messenger RNA, the fleeting molecule that instructs cells to make proteins, could be harnessed to fight disease. Her grant proposals were repeatedly rejected. She had little funding, no staff, and scant recognition.

Weismann described his plans to create vaccines by delivering antigens into cells. Instantly, Karikó saw a new role for her pet molecule. Their collaboration would lay the foundation for the mRNA vaccines that proved vital during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Breaking Through, Karikó recounts the origins and evolution of her scientific journey. She grew up in a small Hungarian town, the daughter of a butcher. A high school biology teacher introduced her to Hans Selye’s The Stress of Life — a book that shaped both her scientific outlook and her philosophy of living. “Do not blame. Focus on what you can control. Transform bad stress into good stress.” This mantra sustained her through decades of setbacks, when her work was belittled and her grants repeatedly denied.

Her greatest frustration came when synthetic mRNA triggered inflammation in cells. A vaccine might still be possible, she and Weismann reasoned, but therapeutic medicine would be impossible until they solved the immune activation problem. In 2005, they reported that modified mRNA avoided inflammation — a landmark finding later licensed by two biotech firms. Yet the discovery went largely unnoticed.

Stripped of funding, Karikó was relegated to a cramped lab, hardly fit for mRNA work. It was the last straw. In 2013, both BioNTech and Moderna — the firms that had licensed her breakthrough — offered her jobs. She left for Germany, while her husband and daughter Susan, now a two-time Olympic gold medalist, remained in the U.S. Karikó likens science to her daughter’s rowing: the crew rows backward, blind to the finish line, trusting that effort will carry them to the right destination.

Her discovery proved vital during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the story of synthetic mRNA is only beginning. Researchers are now exploring its potential for cancers, cystic fibrosis, rare metabolic disorders, and vaccines against other infectious diseases. Karikó predicts an explosion of mRNA therapies in the coming decade.

Breaking Through is both a testament to perseverance and a critique of a scientific reward system that nearly buried one of the century’s most transformative discoveries. It is a moving memoir that reminds us how much science depends not only on brilliance, but on resilience.

Epilogue
In 2023, Karikó and Weismann were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work on mRNA technology. The honor was a fitting culmination of a journey that began with rejection slips and cramped labs, and ended with a discovery that reshaped global health. Her memoir now reads not only as a chronicle of struggle and persistence, but as the backstory to a Nobel-worthy revolution in medicine.

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A good book can take you to unexpected places. The whiskey room at a giant tech company — furnished with beanbags and foosball tables — is one of them. When coders at Google hit a creative wall, they can apparently pop into this room for a dose of liquid inspiration. It’s a sanctioned pause in the workday, but it is not a place to get drunk alone. In his fascinating new book Drunk, Edward Slingerland argues that such spaces, which combine face‑to‑face interaction with easy access to alcohol, can act as incubators for collective creativity.

The creativity boost alcohol provides to individuals, Slingerland writes, is amplified when people drink together. For millennia, across cultures, humans have used intoxicants to get high. Some archaeologists even suggest that the first farmers were motivated more by beer than by bread.

If intoxicants were merely hijacking pleasure centers in the brain, or if they gave humans an evolutionary edge once, but are purely vices now, then evolution would have put the kibosh on our taste for these chemicals, the author points out. So, why does Mother Nature turn a blind eye to our fondness for the tipple, given alcohol’s deleterious side-effects?

Slingerland, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, gives us this thought-provoking thesis: “by causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal – to live like social insects despite our ape nature – intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups.” In short, civilization might not have been possible without intoxication.

It’s an audacious claim, but Slingerland marshals evidence from history, anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, genetics, and literature — including classical poetry composed under the influence — to make his case. He is an entertaining guide, deftly weaving disparate studies into a coherent argument.

Without a science-based understanding of intoxicants we cannot decide what role they can, and should, play in modern societies, Singer reasonably points out. In small doses, alcohol can make us happy and more sociable, he says. Still, consuming any amount of intoxicant does seem stupid, Slingerland concedes, because the chemical immediately targets the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

This late-maturing region of the brain is the seat of abstract reasoning, which also governs our behavior, and our ability to remain on task. All the data suggests that small children are more creative because their PFCs are barely developed, he writes. A childlike state of mind in an adult is the key to cultural innovation. And intoxicants, he says, allow us to access that state efficiently by temporarily taking the PFC offline.

OK, drinking once made humans thrive as a species, but is it still a good thing in the modern world ?

Slingerland cites research which uses a natural experiment to test the idea that the communal consumption of alcohol can be a driver of innovation. American Prohibition, which was imposed a hundred years ago in the U.S., saw a decline in the percentage of patents, in counties that were previously “wet,” as communal drinking centers closed.

The book also considers modern alternatives to alcohol without the hangovers, the danger of liver damage or addiction. In centers of innovation, microdosing, or taking tiny doses of purified psychedelics, is growing in popularity. It also discusses non-chemical ways of achieving the same end but concludes that alcohol is a very low-tech, efficient way of temporarily taking the PFC offline.

After exploring the stress busting, creativity-boosting, trust-building, pleasure-inducing aspects of alcohol, the final chapter of this book dwells on the dark side ranging from drunk-driving to alcohol-induced violence. The chapter includes practical takeaways to make non-drinkers feel included in professional settings where alcohol is already integrated.

The book is not prescriptive in telling you how, and when, to consume alcohol to enjoy only its benefits. It does, however, tell you not to drink too many distilled spirits (wine or beer is better),  and if possible, never, to drink alone.

Ultimately, this heady book is an ode to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. It does us all — drinkers and open-minded abstainers alike — a favor by taking a hard look at the merits of drinking without moral judgement.

A version of this review for New Scientist.

And feedback: From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK
*Letters to the Editor in New Scientist*
Vijaysree Venkatraman’s review of Edward Slingerland’s book Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization got me wondering whether an analysis of recording devices placed in the bars of Magaluf in midsummer might prove useful for the future of humanity (5 June, p 30).

From Vijaysree Venkatraman, Cambridge, MA, USA
Bryn Glover’s wry suggestion (Letters, 5 July) to install recording devices in the bars of Magaluf as a means of understanding the future of humanity made me chuckle—and nod in agreement. As I noted in my review of Edward Slingerland’s Drunk, the idea that intoxication has played a catalytic role in human cooperation, creativity, and even civilization itself is both provocative and oddly persuasive.
But perhaps we don’t need covert surveillance in Spanish party towns. The data is already out there—in karaoke videos, WhatsApp voice notes, and the collective memory of bartenders. The real challenge isn’t gathering the evidence; it’s interpreting it. What does it mean when a group of strangers sings “Bohemian Rhapsody” in perfect unison at 2 a.m.? Is it Dionysian chaos or proto-democracy?
If nothing else, Slingerland’s thesis invites us to look again at our most unguarded moments—not as lapses in judgment, but as windows into the social technologies that have shaped us. So yes, let’s raise a glass to the anthropologists of the future. 

Image: Hip, Hip, Hurrah! by Peder Severin Krøyer (1851–1909) was one of the leading figures of the Skagen Painters, the Scandinavian artists’ colony that gathered in the late 19th century at the northern tip of Denmark. This is a jubilant outdoor toast among the Skagen artists — sunlight filtering through leaves, glasses raised, laughter suspended in paint.

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The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word.  But you don’t need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated stories. In fact, Dilip Kumar, the acclaimed author of the Tamil original is not a native speaker of the language. The Tamil literary culture is inclusive and has porous boundaries in who gets to make it and who partakes of it.

 In the title story “Cat in the Agraharam,” we meet Babli Patti. The devout old lady wants to get rid of a stray cat that has taken to raiding her flat to lap up milk, which she offers to Lord Krishna in prayer. Her son makes an appeal to their godless relative, Suri, “the one-man kangaroo court for all of the wrongdoing in the Agraharam.” This hooligan, who can swear fluently in both Gujarati and Tamil, breezily says, “Consider the job done!” Eventually, this humane layabout ends up saving the cat from the deadly clutches of his pious aunt.

Unlike R.K. Narayan’s creation Malgudi, Ekambareshvarar Agraharam is a real place on the map.  This Agraharam is a set of three-story buildings around the 350-year-old temple of the same name, in Sowcarpet, an old neighborhood of North Chennai. The translator or “second writer” is Martha Ann Selby, an American scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit, at the University of Texas in Austin. In her introduction, she provides context, so we can better appreciate the stories. The Gujaratis of Sowcarpet come alive for us, in English, via Tamil. And to understand why this neighborhood matters so much to the stories, it helps to look briefly at how Sowcarpet itself came to be

Sowcarpet has been a stronghold of North Indian immigrants in Chennai. When the capital began burgeoning into a center of commerce in the 17^th century, some of the Gujarati weavers, who had settled in and around Madurai, took up residence near the Ekambareshvarar temple. Then came the Gujarati merchants or “sowcars,” from Gujarat, who gave the neighborhood its name, followed by traders from Rajasthan. In local parlance, these relatively affluent immigrants are known as saits. In Tamil films, the stereotypical sait, is often a money lender, and speaks broken Tamil interspersed with nonsense words like “nambal, nimbal.” Kumar’s stories push back against this caricature, grounding these communities in lived detail rather than stereotype.

Dilip Kumar is, in fact, the very opposite of those movie saits. His ancestors moved from Kutch to Coimbatore and they belonged to a prosperous community. But following the early death of his father, a rich businessman, he had to drop out of school and take up a series of dead end jobs to support his family. Such circumstances gave him plenty of experiences to draw on later, as a writer. He spoke the local language well. His humanistic, hyper-realistic fiction, which touches upon a range of themes, tends to be laced with humor. Knowing this biography enriches our reading of the stories, because it reveals how closely Kumar’s empathy is tied to his own lived precarity.

Ekambareshvarar Agraharam teems with relatable characters. My favorite is Gangu Patti who makes “beautiful use of vast numbers of Gujarati swearwords, turning them into cubes of jaggery.” Young women seek her advice on everything, “including sex, religion, pickle-making, and the nature of time and god.” As Patti holds court in her flat, we get her tragic backstory through a series of conversational vignettes. The hardest part of translation, Prof. Selby says, is rendering dialogue correctly. These conversations sound pitch perfect. To my mind, the best of the 14 stories are set in Sowcarpet. It’s here that Selby’s translation and Kumar’s ear for speech meet most seamlessly.

Other stories have their own appeal. Some of them have autobiographical elements from the author’s life, Prof Selby points out. The young worker in “The Bamboo Shoots,” and the suicidal poet in “The Scent of a Woman,” the letter writer in “The Letter,” are versions of the author. (A recent Tamil drama-film, Nasir, which premiered, and won an award, at this year’s Rotterdam film festival was based the author’s “A Clerk’s Story,” not part of this collection.) “The Miracle That Refused to Happen,” is the Indianized version of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play “A Doll’s House.” These shifts in setting and style show the range of Kumar’s concerns, even as his voice remains unmistakably his own.

This book, in all likelihood, will whet your appetite for stories by other Tamil masters. In that case, pick up a copy of Dilip Kumar’s comprehensive anthology, The Tamil Short Story: Through the Times, through the Tides. The tome traces the evolution of short fiction in Tamil through 88 stories published in the twentieth century. It’s a natural next step for readers who find themselves newly curious about the tradition Kumar is writing within.

Or you may simply want to read more of Dilip Kumar’s well-crafted short stories. Prof Selby points out that the author, who taught himself Tamil by reading newspapers, writes in short, “almost telegraphic” phrases. This insight suggests that even an intermediate reader of Tamil, like me, can hope to read the contemporary master’s work in the original. It is an unexpected takeaway from this book of superbly translated stories. It is a quietly thrilling realization—one that turns this superb translation not just into a window onto Tamil literature, but into an invitation to step right inside it.

Read the “edited” version here. html.

sowcarpetchronicles

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Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn’t just a woman in physics, which is rare enough. She is an immigrant from Pakistan and a self-described “out, queer person of color.” “I don’t mind being on the fringes of any social group,” she says. With a toothy grin, the gregarious mother of a 4-year-old child explains why she likes her outsider status: “You are less constrained by the rules.” She may still be an outsider, but she’s no longer obscure; her 2010 MacArthur Fellowship saw to that. In addition to the cash and the honor, the award came with opportunities to speak to an interested public about her somewhat esoteric research. “That is the best part,” she says.

I am just myself, … but out of that comes something positive.

Mavalvala and her collaborators are fashioning an ultrasensitive telescope designed to catch a glimpse of gravitational waves. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these ripples in spacetime nearly a century ago, but they haven’t been observed directly yet. Theoretically a consequence of violent cosmic events—the collisions of black holes, the explosive deaths of stars, or even the big bang—gravitational waves could provide a brand new lens for studying the universe.

When she became a MacArthur fellow, former female students wrote to her saying that she was a model for what was possible for women. At different points in her scientific career, lesbian and gay students and colleagues mentioned something similar: They had been inspired by the example she had set for them. She embraces her role as role model. Something important is happening, she believes. “I am just myself,” she says. “But out of that comes something positive.” By being just herself, she is a source of inspiration for a wide range of individuals from groups underrepresented in the physical sciences.

The girl from Karachi

Mavalvala, who came to this country as a teenager to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has a natural gift for being comfortable in her own skin. “Even when Nergis was a freshman, she struck me as fearless, with a refreshing can-do attitude,” says Robert Berg, a professor of physics at Wellesley. While many professors would like to treat students as colleagues, Berg observes, most students don’t respond as equals. From the first day, Mavalvala acted and worked like an equal. She helped Berg, who at the time was new to the faculty, set up a laser and transform an empty room into a lab. Before she graduated in 1990, Berg and Mavalvala had co-authored a paper in Physical Review B: Condensed Matter.

Her parents encouraged academic excellence. She was by temperament very hands-on. “I used to borrow tools and parts from the bike-repair man across the street to fix my bike,” she says. Her mother objected to the grease stains, “but my parents never said such skills were off-limits to me or my sister.” So she grew up without stereotypical gender roles. Once in the United States, she did not feel bound by U.S. social norms, she recalls.

Her practical skills stood her in good stead in 1991, when she was scouting for a research group to join after her first year as a graduate student at MIT. Her adviser was moving to Chicago and Mavalvala had decided not to follow him, so she needed a new adviser. She met Rainer Weiss, who worked down the hallway.

“What do you know?” Weiss asked her. She began to list the classes she had taken at the institute—but the renowned experimentalist interrupted with, “What do you know to do?” Mavalvala ticked off her practical skills and accomplishments: machining, electronic circuitry, building a laser. Weiss took her on right away.

To catch a wave

In the early 1990s, Weiss, a pioneer in the measurement of the cosmic microwave background, maneuvered his research group into a new field: the detection of gravitational waves. Advances in laser technology made it plausible, but big practical challenges remained. Gravitational waves stretch and compress spacetime, subtly distorting objects they pass through. If they pass through a pair of objects, the distance between the objects changes. Up till now, those changes have been imperceptible.

In principle, a laser interferometer, with its two equally spaced mirrors, can use the change in interference patterns to register the passage of gravitational waves. The displacement of its mirrors would be tiny, however, roughly the equivalent of a thousandth of a proton’s radius. And just about anything can move the mirrors by much larger amounts: a car speeding in the distance, a seismic tremor, a clap of thunder. Even the distortion caused by the laser beam itself would need to be accounted for after the system had been shielded against all those external disturbances.

Setting traps in the desert

In graduate school, Mavalvala worked on proof-of-principle interferometers at tabletop scale. An actual detector would be huge: The greater the initial distance between the mirrors, the greater the change in distance and the better the chance of measuring a displacement. Size, however, brings its own complications. Two mirrors 4 kilometers apart would have to be aligned precisely with the incoming laser. “If there is misalignment, the beam could just walk off into the desert instead of hitting its partner,” she says. To ensure this doesn’t happen, Mavalvala devised an automatic alignment system for the complex interferometer.

Her thesis work was incorporated in the design of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is run by MIT and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 1997, Mavalvala began a 3-year postdoc at Caltech. When the observatory went up in Washington state (there is also one in Louisiana), she stayed in the high-altitude desert in Hanford for days at a stretch to get the detector ready for data runs. In 2000, she joined the team as a staff scientist.

The cool stillness of mirrors

A decade into LIGO’s existence, no gravitational wave has been detected. But the Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), which should be functional within 3 years, is on the horizon. With aLIGO, researchers hope to detect waves from more-distant sources. “The farther out you can look, the more galaxies, and hence more gravitational wave sources, are visible to you,” Mavalvala says.

“Making the mirrors stay still,” she says, “is something we devote a lot of attention to.” Using lasers to study a tiny displacement means having to contend with the momentum of photons impinging the mirror. There is also jostling from the thermal energy of atoms in the mirror and the suspending wires. Five years ago, her group demonstrated a novel technique to optically trap and cool a coin-sized mirror, bringing it to within a degree of absolute zero (0.8 K).

With that result, Mavalvala found herself at the forefront of an emerging field: quantum optomechanics. Typically, very small things obey quantum mechanics; classical mechanics governs macroscopic objects. But near zero Kelvin, even large objects should show quantum behavior. By exploring this blurring of boundaries, researchers in the new discipline hope to achieve theoretical insights with practical applications such as designing quantum information processors or building a more sensitive LIGO detector.

The genius of good mentorship

Mavalvala says that although it may not be immediately apparent, she is a product of good mentoring. From the chemistry teacher in Pakistan who let her play with reagents in the lab after school to the head of the physics department at MIT, who supported her work when she joined the faculty in 2002, she has encountered several encouraging people on her journey. In the 10 years since, she has passed on her infectious enthusiasm for the LIGO project to many of her graduate students. “That is exactly what we were hoping for,” says Stanley Whitcomb, LIGO chief scientist at Caltech. “When she speaks to reviewers from NSF, or casual visitors to the observatory, she always made it a point to present technical details clearly. At the same time, she conveys that the work is fun.” The skill and desire to reach out to a broader audience, he remarks, is not a common trait among researchers.

This fall, Mavalvala will be a keynote speaker at Out to Innovate, a 2-day career summit for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, faculty, and professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There, she will address her sexual identity and its connection to her work. Mavalvala says she was not aware of her sexual orientation as a girl in Pakistan or, later, as a student at the all-women Wellesley College.

Then, in her early twenties, she fell in love. Her girlfriend began visiting her at the lab and became part of her social life. The process was organic. “I have never had negative experiences because of this,” she says. “My work environment was very supportive.”

“Some people venture into places others consider dangerous or unsavory. They are not foolish or fearless. They read a situation and have some confidence in reading it well enough, so they go there.” In coming out, she says, she looked around and took stock of her work environment. Her sexuality, she figured, would make little difference to those around her. Her instincts proved to be right.

Above all, Mavalvala is at ease with herself. “I am not someone who is, at all, ‘in your face,’ ” she says. “I am quite happy to go unnoticed.” But being the invisible outsider in academia is one item this quantum astrophysicist may now have to leave off her wish list.

Read the entire profile here. html. pdf.

Additionally:

From the excellent Rainier Weiss Profile by Adrian Cho:

In the meantime, Weiss became a fixture in Building 20, identifiable by the corncob pipes he smoked until he suffered a mild heart attack in 1995. He would work until 2 a.m., says Nergis Mavalvala, a LIGO physicist at MIT who was Weiss’s graduate student from 1990 to 1997, and would stay even later to help a student. When Mavalvala failed her qualifying exams, Weiss had her attend “reform school” in his office every Saturday for weeks. “He didn’t give a damn about the exams,” Mavalvala says. “But he knew that I had to get past them.”

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