Paul Sutter the Spaceman: Adventures in Science and Outreach

Sarah Webb  00:00

I’m your host, Sarah Webb, and this is Science in Parallel, a podcast about people and projects in computational science. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, I encourage you to hit that button wherever you’re listening today.

Sarah Webb  00:14

[Theme music fades in.] In this episode, in our creativity in computing series, we’re exploring where science and science outreach meet. My guest is Paul Sutter, who wears many career hats as an astrophysicist, science communicator, host and author. He’s a visiting professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. 

[Theme music continues for 20 seconds.]

Sarah Webb  00:59

Paul completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in 2011. Nearly a decade ago, he launched his communication work with Ask A Spaceman, a popular ongoing podcast where he muses about conundrums in cosmology, physics and beyond. He’s the author of three books, including Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt. Join us for a conversation about Paul’s adventures charting his career path, how algorithmic thinking shapes his work, his critique of today’s scientific enterprise and the ideals that he hopes can guide it toward a more sustainable future.

Sarah Webb  01:41

Paul, it is great to have you on the podcast.

Paul Sutter  01:44

Oh, thank you so much for having me on in parallel and not in series. This is wonderful.

Sarah Webb  01:48

That’s great. I love it. Paul, so I’m curious, how do you define yourself? How do you explain at least a concept of what you do to other people when you meet them?

Paul Sutter  01:59

What’s funny is every time someone asks me, I always stumble, even though I try to practice and rehearse. So let’s go with I’m a scientist, an author and a host.

Sarah Webb  02:10

Let’s start with the science piece. How did you get interested in science and astrophysics? Where did the roots of all of that come in for you?

Paul Sutter  02:19

I remember as a kid absorbing any book I could get my hands on. I loved reading. I loved reading nonfiction. I loved reading about all sorts of topics, space, astronomy, physics, biology, paleontology, chemistry, just anything. I was just a sponge. But I never, ever realized that being a scientist was a job. I never made the connection, and no one in my educational sphere pointed that out to me. And of course, my parents loved me and cared for me and helped me go to school, and my there were guidance counselors and teachers to who adored me, at least I feel like it. But no one ever said like, you can be a scientist. So I was still a super nerd. So I went into computer science, computer programming, software engineering, as my major. And it wasn’t until my third year of college I took an astronomy elective because I needed to fulfill that part of my curriculum, and I liked astronomy. I liked reading about astronomy, so I thought I’d take the class. Fell in love with it right away. Had never seen science through a mathematical lens. I’d only seen it through a popular science descriptive lens, and seeing the equations behind the concepts opened up a whole new world for me. The professor notices we started chatting. I remember Professor Poling.

Sarah Webb  03:47

That was Professor John Poling at California Polytechnic State University, or Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.

Paul Sutter  03:55

And he said, “You know, Paul, you can be a scientist if you want to be.” Like, wait what? He’s like, “Yeah, it’s a real thing. You can switch majors. We have a physics major here on campus. You can become a scientist.” Less than two weeks later, I switched majors. Never turned back,

Sarah Webb  04:09

But computing was still a part of what you did with all of that? How do you feel like computing has shaped your work as a scientist?

Paul Sutter  04:18

Oh, yeah, I transitioned from being a professional computer scientist to an amateur computer scientist with applications in the scientific world. Computing was still my lifeblood. I was incredibly lucky to be awarded the CSGF fellowship.

Sarah Webb  04:34

The CSGF is the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. This podcast is a media outreach project of that program.

Paul Sutter  04:44

I used supergiant computers, HPC resources in my graduate career to explore magnetic flows from active galactic nuclei. Even after my Ph.D., I turned away from primarily HPC use, but still, computing has always been the backbone of my scientific career.

Sarah Webb  05:06

You were talking about your host and author hats, so communication is now a big part of what you do. Where did that start?

Paul Sutter  05:12

Yes, this is something that when I look back at my career, of how obvious it was of a trajectory and a choice for me to make, but it wasn’t obvious at the time. Looking back, I remember how much I enjoyed giving talks and conference presentations, how much I enjoyed writing papers and describing my new results and how I would even catch some flack. I remember when I was a postdoc I gave a talk, and I was the most nicely dressed person in the room. Physicists tend to wear whatever clothes are laying on the floor that day at a conference. But I had a suit on because I wanted to make an impression. We were announcing a big result to a very large major conference, the Rencontres de Moriond conference, and this was in La Thuile, Italy. And I gave a talk, and I had rehearsed the talk, I had practiced the talk. I put a lot of effort into giving a very, very solid presentation. And I remember later, other people spoke to my advisor, not directly to me, like, what does he think he is? Steve Jobs? I was like, I just wanted to share my results and do it in a professional way. Excuse me for actually trying to polish my presentation.

Paul Sutter  06:02

So I always liked that part of the scientific work. And around 2014ish, 2015, 2016, what is time? Dates are a little fuzzy. I decided to start a podcast just on my own. I had enjoyed podcasts for years. I would download them and then burn them to a CD so I could play them in my car during long commutes. And so I’d always been a fan of podcasts, and I think I can make a physics and astronomy podcast. No clue what I was doing, totally making it up on the spot, which I still am today. That podcast is Ask a Spaceman. Very simple premise: People ask me questions online. I make a list, and then I pick from the list twice a month to record my thoughts, my answer. I bought a microphone, looked up online how to make a podcast, did all the editing myself, the recording myself. Recorded seven episodes in a row, right as a batch to get started, released them and then started. I went down my email contact list one by one, personalized email saying, Hey, I just started a podcast. I’d love for you to listen. Share it if you find it interesting. Very, very early, very quickly, I was very lucky to get a sizable audience. Not huge by the podcast titans today, but it was way bigger than I ever thought it could be. I still do that podcast today. I have a backlog of over 600 questions. I have a thriving community that I adore, and I still release two episodes a month. And that laid the seeds for a transition into a primarily outreach-based and communication-based career. Was just a little experiment on the side that kind of, sort of worked out.

Paul Sutter  06:28

What is the back and forth like for you with the loyal members of the Ask A Spaceman community?

Paul Sutter  08:05

The Space Cadets! No, it’s a wonderful audience, and there are people who have started listening to the show in 2017 and have not stopped and send me questions. Every other month I’ve been able to meet people. I’ll go to a random science museum to give a talk, and people will come and say, Oh, I’m a huge fan of your podcast. It’s so interesting because, as you know, podcasting, it’s almost in a vacuum, like you’re just talking to a microphone. You’re staring at the wall of your closet, pretending someone is listening, And then, yeah, you can see the download numbers, but that’s all abstract. You get the emails, but that’s abstract. But then you meet someone, and they say, I’m a huge fan of your podcast. I’m a huge fan of your work, and that is one of the most touching things, that human connection, the reminder that I’m not just speaking into the void of space. I’m actually connecting with other people and forging relationships based on science and based on this wonderful process of discovery and sharing that discovery and bringing people answers that they crave. There’s nothing like it.

Sarah Webb  09:40

So it sounds like the podcast was the beginning,

Paul Sutter  09:42

Yes.

Sarah Webb  09:43

So what happened next? How did this expand out from Ask a Spaceman?

Paul Sutter  09:48

Once Ask a Spaceman started, I was in the middle of my second postdoctoral appointment, and what came next was a few years of a giant hot mess of not really knowing where I was going because the outreach and communication stuff was growing.  And it was very interesting and very seductive and very fun, and so I was wanting, naturally, to invest more time into it. It was also making negative $200 a month for hosting fees and all that stuff. And as the podcast grew, I started to get more opportunities. People would just find me and invite me to do more things. So I got invited to start writing articles for Space.com. I got invited to appear on morning news TV, to do interviews about whatever space topic just happened to be in the news that day. And this was very fun. I started to do more community events, I started to visit more classrooms, I started to visit more museums, and I was devoting more and more time to that. And I was recognizing that I was chipping away at my available research time, at a time when I was supposed to be ramping things up to apply for faculty positions.

Paul Sutter  11:12

And many senior faculty, if they were kindhearted, they were giving me very kind warnings, like, Paul, you’re putting your career at risk by devoting more time to outreach. And then there were some not-so-kindhearted faculty that I would encounter at my own institution, other institutions that would say, Paul, you’re wasting your time. What are you doing? You’re not even a scientist anymore. But I was just following my heart and my gut, and after a couple years, at the end of that postdoc position, I was able to carve out a position at the Ohio State University where I was half-time researcher with the Department of Astronomy, and then halftime chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry, the science museum in Columbus, Ohio. And so that was my first time I was getting paid to do science outreach in my role as chief scientist, and I held that joint position for about three years.

Paul Sutter  12:07

And I knew that by accepting these positions and going down this path, I was essentially cutting myself off from traditional faculty lines. I was not going to be tenure-track professional researcher at a major university, and I really struggled with that for a few years. But also it was a job. I was making money, and I was having a really good time. And after three years in those positions, I was based at Columbus, Ohio, and I was growing even more. I was starting to appear on national television. I was starting to appear on some major television programs. I was writing even more articles. I was starting to travel more. My first book had come out, and I realized that I was spending almost all my time in either New York or L.A., and I needed to simply move to either New York or L.A.

Paul Sutter  13:07

So I left those positions, moved to the New York area, and when I did, I made the jump to be 100% freelance. So all my income derived from bulk royalties, speaking fees, Patreon subscribers to my podcast, articles that just wherever I could get a buck, I was gonna do it. Once I made that jump, I seriously curtailed my research activities because I had to, because I was trying to jumpstart a brand-new career. But then, starting about two years ago, I found myself in a lucky situation where I was deriving more than enough income from my outreach activities in not a full-time, 40-hour-a-week setting. And so over the past couple years, I’ve been able to devote some more time to research on essentially a volunteer basis, which has its downsides. Like when I engage in my scientific research, I work with my collaborators, I develop a software tool. I don’t get paid for it, but on the other hand, I don’t chase grants. I’m not filling out applications. I’m not worried about tenure. My bills are paid, my family is supported, my retirement is continuously funded, and I get to do a little bit of research on on the side, on my own terms. And so I truly enjoy that kind of freedom. The freelance lifestyle is mostly scary, because you never know when the next paycheck is coming. But it’s also maximally liberating because I get to make all my own choices. I’m my own boss.

Sarah Webb  14:49

What I find so interesting about this is that if you think about scientist communicators, or most scientist communicators, they’re the people who are doing the outreach on the side,

Sarah Webb  14:59

Where the income is coming from this faculty position or the lab position, or whatever the science job is, and you’ve you’ve completely

Paul Sutter  14:59

Yes.

Paul Sutter  15:09

Inverted it, yes, exactly. Yeah, that is outside of like professional science writers, most science communicators that the public engages with have a job. They have tenure. They’re getting their paycheck no matter what, and they’re taking a little slice of their time to write books or appear on TV shows. And that career just wasn’t for me.

Sarah Webb  15:33

Well, the part of the communication that we haven’t talked about yet is books. I want to learn a little bit about that, because, of course, writing a book is,

Paul Sutter  15:41

It’s a beast.

Sarah Webb  15:43

A huge project. It can be an intimidating process. How did you get started with your first book? I really equate a book project to working on a big science project. There are different big projects, but they’re of similar scope.

Paul Sutter  15:55

Oh, absolutely. Every time I finish a book and it’s finally published, I say I’m never doing that again, and then I start drafting my next book. And also, in the story of my first book, is a perfect example of how I’ve learned in the media world, in dealing with major media companies, publishers, agents, managers, the whole deal, there is no straight line to anything. None of my projects have followed a linear path over the years. And so, for example, my first book, I was approached by a small publisher based in Columbus, Ohio, years ago, who said, Hey, found your podcast. You’re based in Columbus. We’re based in Columbus. Would you like to write a book? That’s like, Sure, I’d love to have a book contract. And they said, Okay, here’s the contract. There was no advance. There was just a royalty percentage. I had no agent. I had no representation. The contract seemed fine to me. I signed it. Started working on a book.

Paul Sutter  16:59

I turned in my first draft of the book, like six months later, and they got back to me and they said, What is this? Why is it so conversational? Why are there so many jokes? We were expecting something more serious, a proper science book. I said, You said you liked my podcast, and I just wrote it as if I was writing notes for my podcast. And they said, Well, we don’t like it, and they pulled the contract. So I had the draft sitting there, spent another few months, then looked up how to find a literary agent. Found a literary agent, which was an enormous undertaking of spamming a dozen, two dozen, three dozen agents until one likes your pitch, and he sent it around to publishers, and no one picked it up.

Paul Sutter  17:46

And so okay, this idea doesn’t work, so I came up with another idea, and that book got a publishing contract. And so it was the second book I wrote, but the first one to be published, which was Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence. And that came out in November of 18, 2018, and then once I had that book– and that book did well– it was very easy to go back to my first manuscript and sell that one. And so that came out, that’s How to Die in Space. And that book also has done very well, and that went on to have international sales and multiple translations in many countries and be a wonderful, wonderful book.

Paul Sutter  18:30

And then I decided to depart from that to write my latest book, which I wrote in the summer of 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. And that book would become Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt, which is not whizzing around the universe, looking at supernovae and colliding galaxies all that, but a very sobering look at the process of science, how we interact with the public, and what I believe we are doing to erode trust in our own institution. And that book had quite a journey. It went through three different publishers, which most authors, when they say like, oh, 25 publishers turn this book down, you that’s true of every single book. Most publishers turn down most books most of the time. But what was different about Rescuing Science is that I went through three different publishers who signed a contract, liked the pitch, liked the proposal, liked the content, and then when they saw the finished manuscript, pulled out because they got too scared, and they didn’t know how to sell it. What’s the market for a book that is from a fan of science yet critical of science? And that’s a very difficult book to position. Finally, my agent found a publisher, Rowman and Littlefield, and it took until February of 2024, for the book to finally come out to market, nearly three and a half years, which is a very long time,

Sarah Webb  19:56

It is, but it’s a very interesting book, like you said. I mean. This critique of science from someone who loves science, who is a science Insider. So talk about where the pieces of that came for you

Paul Sutter  20:09

During the summer of 2020, 1) I had nothing to do. And 2), I was watching in real time, the erosion of trust in science, and I was seeing science become ever more vilified and politicized, and people would come out, and they were burning effigies of Anthony Fauci, anti-vaxxers like even the rhetoric was starting, even in the summer before we even had the vaccine. And just watching and saying, What is going on and what is causing this breakdown? And of course, I realized right away there are nefarious actors out there who will take advantage of anything, who will scapegoat science and you look at scientists and use them as representatives of the elite system and leverage that to gain a political power. And I thought, okay, that’s definitely a component. Also. I have no idea how to fix that. I don’t know how to combat that directly.

Paul Sutter  21:11

But I realized there was another side of the coin, which was the conduct of scientists themselves, of how we interact with the public, or how we don’t interact with the public, how we treat our young students and the rigors that we put them through without the promise of a career ahead of them, of the publish-or-perish mindset, of how fraud in science has exploded over the past 20 years, of how scientists don’t engage with the public and they don’t engage with politics. Many of my colleagues would say, oh no, we don’t talk about politics. We don’t get our hands messy but realize, like most fundamental research science, the kind of science that I like to do, is publicly funded, which makes it, by definition, a political enterprise. But then we’re refusing to engage in the political process and in instances of fraud, instances of lack of engagement with the community, lack of engagement with the political process, sneering disdain for other attitudes, speaking down about philosophy or the arts or humanities.

Paul Sutter  22:20

And I thought, I can’t fix the bad actors outside of science, but I can try to keep my side of the street clean. And maybe we can talk about this. Maybe there are flaws in not science as a philosophy, not science as an approach to understanding the natural world, but in the modern process of the scientific enterprise, how academic science works at a nuts-and-bolts kind of level, and how this might lead to planting the seeds of mistrust. For example, I explore in the book the concept of fraud, this publish-or-perish mindset, which I grew up in, all of my colleagues grew up in. You gotta publish. You gotta publish. You gotta publish. You gotta publish as often as possible. Let’s aim for Science. Let’s aim for Nature. Let’s go. Let’s do it. And how this leads to outright fraud, because the prize is big, you know. It’s faculty appointments, it’s a big H-index, it’s grants, it’s awards. So you’re tempted to cheat. Also, it leads to laziness and shoddy research and rushed research. When you’re a graduate student and you have to get your dissertation done right now, otherwise your financial aid is gonna get cut off, and all of a sudden you end up with a result like even if you’ve spent months not really getting anywhere.

Paul Sutter  23:44

And I believe most scientists are well intentioned, kindhearted, good people, honest people. These are my friends. These are my colleagues. This is myself that I’m talking about. But we end up allowing fraud into our publication output, and then the public asks us for answers, like when a deadly pandemic is taking away our grandparents. And we’re trying to figure out what to do, and then we try to give them the answer. And the public says, Well, you’ve lied in the past. You’ve been caught lying about this, you’ve been caught lying about that. You’ve been bought out. Oh, there’s this one time when you were bought out by a pharmaceutical company to produce shoddy research, or you were bought out by an oil company, or you published this major study. It turned out it was all a house of cards because it was based on shoddy, poorly done research. Why should we trust you? Now that’s a very, very tough question to answer. It’s not an impossible question to answer, but it’s a very, very tough one, when the malignant actors on the other side can find weaknesses, can find instances of fraud or plagiarism, and use that against us, it’s like, Man, I can’t stop them, but we don’t have to give them the weapons of our own destruction.

Paul Sutter  25:04

Maybe we should police fraud more. Maybe we should reduce the pressure to publish. Maybe we should lower our expectations of what a good scientist looks like. Maybe we should find different avenues to define what a successful scientist looks like. Maybe we should be more active with policing fraud so that the next time those malignant actors come, you know, nothing sticks to us, because we can say, Oh, yeah, there was fraud, and that person lost their job right away and they were removed from their position. They don’t get to call themselves a scientist anymore. And here are all of our active ways that we root out fraud, that we police against fraud, that we guard against our own integrity. So we have responses and answers that. This is one example like one chapter I explore in the book of how we’re not exactly blameless in the growing lack of trust.

Sarah Webb  25:59

So what kinds of responses have you gotten to that? Right? It sounds like it was a journey just to get the book published. So now that it’s been out in the world, what kind of feedback have you gotten?

Paul Sutter  26:11

Oh, wonderful, wonderful feedback. There are always the curmudgeons, and I spent all spring on book tour giving public-facing talks about the nature of the book and to the public, they’re shocked that this is how science works. I like to ask even scientists, how many refereed journal articles were published in the world last year across all fields of science and across all languages. So it’s a large number. Can you guess?

Sarah Webb  26:38

Hundreds of thousands?

Paul Sutter  26:39

Hundreds of thousands? That is the median answer by scientists. It’s in the ballpark of hundreds, that. . . It’s 5.1 million.

Sarah Webb 

Oh, wow.

Paul Sutter 

And just saying that number, like, wait a minute, did we really generate that much new knowledge, like 5.1 million refereed journal articles? The public has no idea. They have no idea that very roughly across all sciences, we produce 10 Ph.D.’s for every one open faculty position, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, except we pretend that we’re training future academic faculty and not training industry leaders geniuses to go out into the world and share their joy and knowledge of science. We train many faculty, and it turns out 90% of them aren’t going to get a job, and we’re not really transparent about so the public doesn’t know. So they’re just blown away. Among scientists, I gave two, three dozen academic talks over the past six months, institutions across the country. The vast majority: they get it. There are a lot of reluctant nods and exasperated sighs as I go through my talk. Typically, the graduate students and postdocs are like crying because they feel seen. There’s always one or two curmudgeons that I’ve had people raise their hands and say, I think everything you’ve said is wrong, which I’m used to that. They’ll say that about my research. And so I just say, Okay, fine, if you want to believe that we’re doing nothing wrong, then let’s run an experiment. Let’s not change a single thing, and let’s see where science is in a generation. If we have more or less of the same amount of funding and public support, let’s run the experiment. Maybe I’m wrong. I could be. I don’t think I am.

Paul Sutter  26:52

One thing I want to talk about a little bit is this scientific workforce piece. I’m also a science PhD. We both went in and found our way out in into another

Paul Sutter  28:34

The real world.

Sarah Webb  28:35

Yes, into the real world.

Paul Sutter  28:37

I rile up the grad students so much when I give talks, because I say your advisors are– they love you. They’re very well-intentioned, but they also have no idea how the world works and that you just have to do your own thing, and no one’s going to tell you how to do it.

Sarah Webb  28:46

 Right. One of your proposals is to have fewer scientists. And, obviously, if you’re producing 10 graduate students for every position that there is that far too many academics. What do you think we can do better, to help the grad students in the room to say, Hey, I still love my science. There’s a way in which I feel like I can contribute to the world, even if it’s not in the way that my professor does

Paul Sutter  29:19

Exactly. And yes, we have a lot of choices to deal with the fact that we are overproducing Ph.D.’s. One is to cut down the number of Ph.D.’s, like just cut it off at the base, which seems pretty harsh, but it’s a solution available to us. So the solution I prefer is to be transparent. If 90%, and then the numbers fluctuate across various fields, but on average, it’s 90%. This is from National Science Foundation surveys. If 90% of our Ph.D.’s do not end up as academic researchers, then, one, we need to tell all prospective Ph.D. students that 90 oercent of them are not going to end up as academic faculty, and it’s not a meritocracy. It’s not that the best 10% rise to the top. I also drive other faculty nuts because I say— This is why I don’t get invited a lot of science parties— We pretend that we’re selecting for the next Einsteins as like the ultra, super smart researchers, that those are the ones we select. No, we select the ones who are most compatible with this lifestyle: with low pay, with too many hours, with too many expectations. The actual geniuses take one look at that career trajectory and peace out.

Paul Sutter  30:36

So we’re losing, actually, the most capable scientists in favor of the ones who are most compatible with this sort of lifestyle. And so we need to be transparent. We need to be open, and we need to not just acknowledge other career paths. We need to celebrate other career paths. You know, if 20% of our graduate students in our department get their Ph.D. and then go off on to work in Silicon Valley or Wall Street or independent businesses or consulting, those are the faces we need to put on our glossy brochures. Those are the people we need to highlight to show how you can take your domain expertise in science, the skills you acquire in Ph.D., take it make gobs of money, on average, twice what an academic makes, and change the world. And be a force for good, and use the skills in your insights, in your viewpoint as a highly trained, highly competent, highly intelligent scientist, to make the world a more beautiful place.

Sarah Webb  31:41

So I want to change pace a little bit.

Paul Sutter  31:43

Let’s do it.

Sarah Webb  31:44

Because one of the things that you’ve worked on was this dance collaboration, which is a completely different way to communicate science, and you alluded to art and philosophy earlier on. So talk about dance.

Paul Sutter  31:59

First off, I don’t dance. People would not pay money to see that. I talk. I do the talking and the consulting. So I love my audience. I love my podcast audience. I know the people who are going to buy my book. I know the people who are going to tune into the TV shows that I’ve hosted, that are going to show up at a public event when I come to give a talk. They’re a wonderful audience, and it’s the same kind of audience. There are a lot of people who would never search for my podcast, who would see my book on the bookshelf and just walk on by, who would see my face on the TV and keep on clicking. So very early on, I realized I want to try to reach those people, and how can I challenge myself to reach different audiences, new audiences? So very early on, I started collaborating with artists to reach into their communities, to find ways to inspire or guide or collaborate their own artistic expression and bring what I know and love about the universe to an audience that wouldn’t normally show up.

Paul Sutter  33:11

The most successful manifestation of that concept is a dance project that I initiated back in 2017 with SYREN Modern Dance, a modern dance company based in New York City. We were introduced through a mutual contact. I was looking for dance companies, or, you know, any performing arts company to collaborate with. And they were a dance company. They had already done some projects investigating the intersection of science and art. They had done a piece exploring quantum mechanics through modern dance. So we were destined to find each other. We started collaborating. We created a project called “Ticktock,” which is an exploration of the nature of time. And the time is one of these wonderful concepts that we can describe a lot about the nature of time through physics, through relativity, through entropy in the era of time through neurochemistry, our perception of time the various rhythms that take place and cycles that take place within our brains, the natural cycles that we see in rhythms we see in nature and in the universe.

Paul Sutter  34:26

And then there’s a whole lot about time that we don’t understand that we all experience that we all have a personal connection to the flow of time. We remember our past, sometimes with regret, sometimes with joy and fondness. We anticipate our future. We try to stay grounded in the present. According to our therapists, you know, we were so intimately familiar with time, and yet we don’t understand it. So this was such fertile ground to explore through multiple angles. [Piano music by Mozart fades in.] So over the course of two years we developed this performance, this evening-length performance set to Mozart, which Einstein was listening to as he was developing the theory of relativity, which is why the choreographer chose that. And I get up on the stage, I introduce the show. I begin a narration. The dancers are on stage with me. I interact with the dancers. They give life to my words. I step off the stage. The Mozart comes on. I come back in the middle of the piece, while the music is playing to continue a narration.

Paul Sutter  35:30

It’s a very, very beautiful and very special performance that we still give today. We’ve toured it around the world, around the country. We were cultural ambassadors for the United States at the World Expo. We performed it on the world stage in Dubai a couple years ago. We’re looking at the next World Expo in Osaka, Japan. It’s a beautiful collaboration. It was a joyful collaboration. And my collaborator, the choreographer of SYREN Modern Dance, Kate, we started as collaborators, we became wonderful friends, and then we decided to collaborate on a family. And we got married two years ago. So I’m not suggesting all collaborations end in lifelong commitments to each other, but you know, that’s one possible outcome, and it’s an outcome that’s working very well for both of us.

Sarah Webb  36:18

Well, that’s great. Clearly, you’re talking about performing this again. Do you have other projects that your dance projects that you’re thinking about beyond “Ticktock”?

Paul Sutter  36:26

Yes, so with SYREN. Now that I’m very closely associated with this one particular dance company, they are using dance their next project is exploring AI and neural networks and especially the role that AI plays in our lives. And how do we fold in these beings, these like not-quite-intelligent as we understand it? But then what is intelligence? But they’re kind of semi-autonomous beings that we have created, and we are trying to fold them into our lives and trying to understand how they fit in the fabric of our lives. And so they are creating a dance right now that is exploring the fabric intersection between AI and regular I.

Sarah Webb  37:13

At the beginning, I was asking you what it meant to get in to science, and I guess where I’m interested in wrapping around to is what you think it means to be the best kind of scientist in this day and age, considering the book that you’ve written, considering the career path that you’ve taken, considering your perspective on where we are in society?

Paul Sutter  37:45

Yeah, because the traditional answer would be grants, awards, Nobel Prizes, full professorships, commands of armies of underlings to do your bidding. But I have a much more romantic view of science, a much, much less pragmatic view of science. I would say a successful scientist is one who is always following their own curiosity and who maintains their scientific integrity, who is willing to be wrong and eager to be wrong, because no matter what, you learn something new and is exploding with creative ideas as solutions, new problems, new questions. And is always curious, always insatiably hungry for the knowledge that’s right around the corner. If we just study this one more time. What if we twist this one more time? Who cares about publication output? Get the important stuff out. Who cares about grants? Are you following your curiosity? Are you following that passion, that spark you had as a kid? Is that spark still alive? Is it? Is it now a flame that you keep alive in your heart where you wake up every morning and you just can’t wait to get started again?

Paul Sutter  37:46

And now that you are in this place where you are getting to do science on the side, how do you think you approach that differently from your current position and from your different perspective on science? Does it affect how you think about the scientific questions that you do work on when you’re working on them?

Paul Sutter  39:25

Absolutely, because it’s so strange, because as a graduate student, as a postdoc, I wrote gobs of papers. Continuing, even as I started to increase my media presence, I wrote gobs of papers, and then I stopped because I was busy doing other stuff. And now having restarted things about two years ago and slowly ramping that up and making sure I can maintain that equilibrium and still pay my mortgage and doing science for fun, I’ve started writing a new paper, and it’s my first new paper in quite a few years. It’s a very different experience because I am asking the questions that I am genuinely curious about, and I am not trying to chase a grant. I don’t care if five people read it. I’m curious about this question. I’m developing the tools to answer that question. I’m working with collaborators and the normal scientific networks and showing up at conferences and all that kind of stuff. But on my terms, which is a very, very refreshing and so much more relaxed approach because I don’t feel that pressure to get as many papers out before my next milestone for my next application. I can just enjoy the process for the sake of the process and see the research unfold, see the answers unfold.

Paul Sutter  40:47

And then I’ve discovered that the kinds of questions I’m interested in asking are now much, much broader than they were as a postdoc and not all of those questions are purely scientific questions, and so those answers won’t appear in a scientific journal. Those are appearing in a book that I’m drafting instead, like a collection of notes as I congeal around some perspectives and thoughts. And that’s so liberating, and I know I’m speaking from a very privileged perspective, that I’ve been able to have a successful career that enables me to approach science. And I know most people interested in a scientific career, you gotta hit those milestones. You gotta do the next thing. And if you jump both feet into industry, then your job probably won’t give you 20% of your time to do whatever you want. So I know I’m a privileged perspective here, a very lucky perspective, but one I deeply cherish.

Sarah Webb  41:48

It sounds like you are using computing in some of that work, but I’m wondering how this deep background and perspective and experience in computing informs all of these things that you’ve been doing.

Paul Sutter  42:00

I’ve thought about this before. Actually, computing continues to thread my research. It’s always been the backbone of my research, and my nascent training as a professional software engineer. It informs it’s not going to show up in my podcast, but it will inform how I organize my thoughts. It will inform how I tackle a problem. The basic mechanics of okay, you have a problem and you have a blank IDE editor open in front of you. How do you subdivide this problem? How do you organize your thoughts to approach this problem, to develop a machine that solves problems for you? I realize now that I’ve structured my career to be a machine that requires as little input as possible to generate as much income and impact and audiences and reach as possible, and then leverage that up to another goal, and so the abstract perspective of software engineering still informs my day-to-day mechanics.

Sarah Webb  43:10

This is part of a series of episodes that I’ve been doing since last year, specifically centered around creativity and computing, which is a pretty expansive sort of space. And I want to ask you, what does creativity mean to you?

Paul Sutter  43:31

That’s a beautiful question, because creativity, to me, is tapping into the unvoiced parts of our consciousness that allow us to think thoughts that have never been thought before, have ideas that are brand new In this universe, that our minds are incredibly powerful, incredibly deep, incredibly perceptive, and that we can train ourselves through methods like the scientific method, to sharpen it and to hone it and to bring it to the foreground and to allow ourselves to create something new. And reveling in that and having joy in that process of encountering a problem, not being quite sure what the solution is or what a solution might be, [outro music fades in] and just letting our thoughts run wild and seeing where our own undirected thoughts take us and letting us be surprised by the things we think.

Sarah Webb  44:48

Paul, thank you so much for your time. This has been such a pleasure.

Paul Sutter  44:53

Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on.

Sarah Webb  44:55

To learn more about Paul Sutter, the Ask a Spaceman podcast. Paul’s latest book, Rescuing Science and his ongoing collaboration with SYREN modern dance, check out our show notes at scienceinparallel.org. Science in Parallel is produced by the Krell Institute and is a media project of the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program. Any opinions expressed are those of the speaker and not those of their employers, the Krell Institute or the U.S. Department of Energy. Our theme music is by Steve O’Reilly, and that little snippet of Mozart was from the Sonata in C major from Abydos_music. This episode was written, produced and edited by me, Sarah Webb.