A Brief Career Self-Portrait

My personal history has been one of productive conflict between my right brain and my left brain. From my earliest days I’ve been simultaneously drawn to the arts and to the sciences. In college I majored in physics, math, and music. Following college my left hemisphere dominated and I went to graduate school in physics.

In graduate school I worked in a cryogenics laboratory, doing experiments in Rayleigh-Bénard (thermally driven) convection, turbulence, transport phenomena in liquid helium, and critical phenomena in general.

My academic training and early scientific career coincided with the dawn of personal computers, which were quickly pressed into service in the lab. I programmed them to relieve me of as much scientific drudgery as possible.

After finishing my graduate degree I stayed with critical phenomena and high-precision temperature measurement and control, which had been part of my experimental expertise in graduate school. This time, though, I worked at room temperature—no more liquid helium! Our main technique was light-scattering spectroscopy, using high-speed digital correlators in the time-domain to do our measurements.

That phase of my career lasted for some fourteen years: we were developing a spectrometer that we could fly on the US Space Shuttle to perform our experiments very near a critical point in low gravity. A project like that takes time, money, and people. We did what we promised with the experiment and flew two missions, in 1994 and 1996.

This early familiarity with the scientific use of computers held me in good stead when career projects saw me developing computer systems that could autonomously operate our advanced scientific experiment on the Space Shuttle, and, later, run extensive self tests on the new computer brain of the Hubble Space Telescope.

I moved on that computer was installed in the HST and joined a long-time colleague of mine who was starting a company to commercialize a project we had had worked on providing satellite communications for deep-ocean research buoys. We had some success for a few years, but had to close our doors prematurely in 2002 thanks to an economic down-turn and cash-flow crisis.

I am now working at bringing my left-brain and right-brain back into alignment by Ars Hermeneutica, Limited into existence. Ars is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation devoted to understanding and communicating science: hermeneutics is what we do, science is what we do it to.