Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Nobel Laureate Donna Strickland: Experimental Physics Is Fun! (#380)

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

I had the pleasure of interviewing the one and only Donna Theo Strickland for our Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner series. Donna Theo Strickland is a renowned Canadian physicist widely recognized for her groundbreaking contributions to the field of pulsed lasers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2018 with her colleague Gérard Mourou for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification.  In this fun discussion between two experimental physicists, we talked about the Nobel Prize, the experimental minimum, why physics you can see is the coolest physics, lasers, pedagogy, and much more! Tune in.  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) How does Donna approach pedagogy? (01:00) What is the experimental minimum? (04:30) How did Donna reach her scientific breakthroughs? (06:26) What discovery won her the Nobel prize? (07:56) Laser technology (11:28) Gender inequality in science (15:46) Do scientists have a moral obligation to communicate science? (19:21) Final four existential questions (22:53) — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we feature Donna Strickland, a world-renowned optical physicist widely recognized for her groundbreaking contributions to the field of pulsed lasers. In 2018, she was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification alongside her colleague, Gerard Maru. Her brilliantly blazing research has left the lasting mark in many fields, and most notably it is a significantly advanced laser eye surgery, something I benefited from myself many, many years ago, which has enabled doctors to help millions of people around the world. Donna fell in love with science early on, and as she grew up, so did her love of science. Today, she'll share some of the love with us. So buckle up and get ready to peek into the fascinating mind of a Nobel laureate.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Welcome everybody to this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Today is a special segment, a part of our series called Fake, like a Nobel Prize winner. And that's because we have an actual, honest to goodness Nobel Prize winner. The fourth one has been in this room and the 17th one that's been on the podcast. So I'm just overjoyed with gratitude that Donna is here. We're going to talk about technology.

We're going to nerd out as experimental physicists. But the first thing I really wanted to talk about is pedagogy and sort of philosophically. How do you approach dealing with students? Have you seen changes in your attitude or perspective in teaching over the years? Had there been any technological improvements? I'm always looking to learn different tools to apply for my students and curious about how you approach and divide your time, research, and pedagogy. So what is your philosophy as an educator as a, mentor to student. Well, now I don't teach because I won the Nobel Prize and I'm traveling all the

time. Before that, the other thing, I mean, I did follow physics education research. And the one thing I am doing for undergrad education right now is changing the labs. I am supposedly the director of undergrad labs, but since I won, they've hired someone to do the actual work. But it's still my vision. And really, because at Waterloo, we have this perimeter in suit of theoretical physics. So so many of our students come thinking the only kind of really cool physics is theory. So I'm trying to fight back on that and say, no, I think seeing things happen in front of your eyes and optical physics is the best for that. One of the things I'm aiming for is to have a first-year G-WIS lab just for the Honor

Physics students because I want the students from that program to leave that lab coin. Too bad for the rest of you, you don't get to see these labs. because usually first-year undergrad labs leave everybody like, oh, I'd rather be a theorist, right? And so it's not going to be to teach them concepts because physics education researchers show that the first-year labs, where we've done them for decades, doesn't do that. So instead, we'll still have a set of first-year labs to teach them skills and stuff. But this one, and the one I wanted to do was white light generation. That requires too expensive a laser and possibly one where laser safety may be more of a concern.

So in my optics one, we're going to do frequency doubly. and let the students just say, well, just think about the experiment yourself. You want to find out, is it energy dependent, power dependent, intensity dependent, and a little pre-thing about what those differences are. But just let them figure out how to do the experiment and let them make observations. And of course, they probably won't come up with the right answer. And who cares? Nobody cares.

It's the fact that they get to see it. They get to think like an experimentalist and say, well, what should I try here with the equipment that I have with the scheme that we what can I try to figure out if it's power dependent, engine dependent, or intensity dependent. And just see the light just turning from infrared to blue is one thing. You know, it's a cool thing to see. So that's what I'm trying to do is just get them excited about what is science. Because I think the biggest mistake we make teaching all the way up through undergrad is we're always teaching what science we already know.

And science is about not knowing, right? It's really about figuring out how to ask the question why or how. properly. It's not about learning how everything else has already been done. I'm not saying we don't need to know that, but we don't really instruct asking, you know, the right questions as opposed to knowing the answers. Yeah. And oftentimes I feel like students get these canned experiments, and we already know that they're going to work. And they don't work, and that's frustrating. And yes. But that's when you learn, right, when this thing is supposed to actually do. And that's why, you know, I always find it so much fun when my theoretical colleagues come into the lab. And

They're stumbling about like their, you know, toddlers and an NBA game trying to play against LeBron James or Toronto Raptors in your case, closer to you. But when you think about the kind of crown jewels, we were talking earlier before we started recording about, you know, the paradigmatic Nobel Prize winners, the Einstein's, the Fermis. These are, well, well, well, but the Dirac's and the, you know, the gelmans and Feynman. And it's almost seen that the prestige in physics goes a lot to the theorist. And yet, I find that a complete physicist should know my philosophy is my grad students need to know as much theory as a theorist grad student, but they don't have to do new theories. What about when you were teaching, when you advising, what is the experimental minimum? Or what do you wish theoretically inclined students, like those at Perimeter, who are some of the best, that they knew about experimental? What should they know about experimental physics?

The limits. I mean, mostly, it's the limitation, but also I think most people don't realize how much patience and experimentalist needs. And the fact that the theorist gets to nonstop, always think about their theory at the end of the day, it doesn't stop, they'd pick it up exactly where they left it the next day. I might have to remind themselves a little bit. Whereas we turn our lasers off, we spend the majority of the time just getting the laser back to where it was the day before, before we can even start our,

experiment, right? And so there's a lot of that frustration that goes on, but also I think that we actually get to see physics happening in front of our eyes. And to me, that's the most exciting part of it, is that we just get to see things happening. When I think back and I have lowered spirits, maybe I think about Galileo. And he was such a, just an amazing writer as well as a scientist, obviously. And he would say things like measure what is measurable. and make measurable what is not yet so. And I wonder when you're devising this new, you know, here to for unknown technique, was it done, you know,

with a teleological purpose in mind that you wanted to solve a specific problem that would lead to, you know, Lysink and all sorts of other things, or the technological breakthroughs that you've enabled or your technology is enabled? Or was it just, you know, playing around? Like, what was it driven from a fundamental or with an ultimate goal of a technological application? There was an actual goal to do fundamental physics exploration. We were trying to do a high-order non-linear optical experiment, whereas with regular lasers, they were able to simultaneously absorb the energy of two or three photons.

We were going to try to jump to nine photons. And so that was not going to require just a regular laser. It had to be an intense laser in order to have that photon density. And so we had the actual practical goal of needing the intense laser, but it was to just study how does light and matter interact when the intensity gets that high. That was, you know, so we were not thinking how to cut glass. We were not thinking how this could be used for medicine.

There was none of that at all. It was a fundamental pursuit of optics, but we needed the tool to do it. So you had to invent the measurement tool to do something. Yeah, I would say when I have on, you know, someone of very high caliber and I'm blessed to have on many guests of just great, great accomplishment, But I always say, you know, I have to ask you about the actual Nobel Prize. I have to ask you. It would be like if I had Rush here, the rock band Rush, and I didn't ask them to play, you know, limelight.

It's just, it's not a good skill for a podcaster to have to neglect a description from the creator of this. So can you explain what is a chirp? What does this have to? What was the actual breakthrough discovery that ended up being that object of recognition that resulted in your Nobel Prize? So first, the word chirp, we could have just called it stretched. to pulse amplification because that's really what it is. But a bird's chirp is the fact that its audio frequency changes in time, which is, you know, the sound you make, right? There are the notes they play. And it turns out that to stretch our pulse, we use dispersion, and we use

it in a fiber, and that's just that the red colors travel faster than the blue colors. So although they all start together by the end, the red is out ahead of the blue and less a chirp. So we called a chirped pulse amplification. And the point is, is that, like, I said we were already in the range where you could have a second order or third order non-linearity just with lasers. And this is what was stopping people from pushing the laser power even higher. When you tried to amplify a short pulse, it got too powerful. And the non-linear interactions actually caused damage in the rods.

Okay. And I like to say that for the experiment, what we're trying to build was a laser hammer. Because sometimes it's energy, which is the total number of photons, because each photon, carries some energy. Laser fusion, which has just worked a year or so ago, finally, at least got scientific break even, is an energy in, gives an energy out. But like pushing a nail into a piece of wood, you can push it all you might, it doesn't go in, but you wrap it in, and then it goes. So nonlinear optics is like that, it's the photon density, not the total number of photons. So when you put the short pulse in and got it amplified, it was just the density

photons so high, not that your optics happened, and it caused damage to the rod. And so we couldn't do that. And so then we had to work around that, and it's a very simple workaround. You take your short pulse. You make it very long, bring the photon density. Then what the amplification does is just multiplies how many photons are and gives total number of photons, but they're still stressed far apart. And then when you're safely out of the amplifier, you can press them all back together. So you have your photon density high for the experiment of the application, but you've not damaged your amplifier. I don't know.

I see. Okay. Does the polarization state of the photons play any role whatsoever in it, or can it be done unpolarized or is there dichroic or birefringen of X? You can do it all of those ways. One of the few problems that we had when we were first developing it is we were the first people. A short pulse necessarily has all the colors, right?

Because one, a single color has to go on forever, and then you start adding those colors, They cancel each other, and that's how you make a short pulse. So we were really one of the first to then even try to amplify a broadband color into these amplifiers, and we ended up finding out this oscillation through our colors. And that's because we were using polarization switches to switch the pulse in and out of the amplifier, and there's a thin plate, and that thin plate's in etalon, and that was causing the problem. So we had to work around that. We had to get the plate out of there, or we couldn't have made it work.

So we can get back to some of the technical details and nerd out maybe in a little bit in the remaining minutes that we have. But I want to talk about lasers. So lasers reportedly have been, as a category, have garnered the largest sheer Nobel Prize. Oh, that's good to know. I don't know that. As they should, they just didn't go. That's right. So first of all, I wanted to get a comment on that.

And then second of all, comment on you were at Lawrence Berkney National Latter. Lord's Nest. Florida's Livermore, Nush. LLNL, yeah, up north here in sunny California. And I want to get some thoughts on some of the projects that folks like Charlie Towns were working on, including communicating with aliens or looking for signals from short pulses of laser energy. First, could you please comment on this most recent Nobel Prize won by three physicists? Of course, just a few weeks ago, that was Agostini, Krause, and Lujan.

So how did you read? react to that. I always said you said it was a good choice. I was very happy about it. I actually worked, did my postdoc with Paul Corcombe notes, and we kind of did think he might win if out of seconds won. But I mean, I don't want to take it away from the other three because they all deserve the Nobel Prize too. And so obviously we're happy when I am an ultrafrust laser person and that's the ultimate ultrafrost right now is out of seconds. Also most out of second work is done with CPA lasers. And so it was our laser that helped push it. It helped push it, but it's when I say that what I was trying to do for my PhD is 9-30 harmonics,

Anne A. Ye saw the 33rd harmonic before I even got to it and blew my thesis right out. So she actually saw higher harmonics without CPA, but now it's, yes, yes, yes. But it was done with more energy and longer pulses. That would be dead with less energy and shorter pulses. And I think she probably was CPA to get up to the 90s or hundreds of whatever harmonics stuff. But yeah, we're all, you know, the short pulse people know each other. And so it's always fun when your colleagues are the ones that win and that your field is recognized. So one thing that, again, going back to Galileo, he was fascinating with time.

As you know, he measured pendulums and he tied his pulse to because it were clocks back then. So question often comes up. How do you know these pulses are at it? I mean, what clock do you use at Bill Phillips from NIST on last early this year, maybe late last year? and we talked about lattices and trapping and measurement of time and the standards and technology used for that. How do you know these pulses are really at a second or, you know, femtose, how do you actually? Well, actually, this is why Pierre Agostini won his is that he came up with this rabbit and I'm not going to explain it at a seconds. But I'll tell you the simpler one because back in the femtosecond time, and these will be just fancier versions of the same,

is that optical pulses are the shortest pulses that get to be created. So you can't just use a regular detector, which uses electrons, because they move slower. They have a mass. They simply move slower. And so we use some kind, all of these things are some type of autocorrelation, which means that you really are taking one short pulse to measure another short pulse. And the correlation is really just if you take the one short pulse with the other and, you know, what's the overlap? What's the overlap? What's the overlap?

And that's how you do it. And so as long as you have a short enough pulse, then of course we have this thing where space, because speed of light, speed of light, you know, you can just delay with a delay arm and know exactly how much you're moving the spy. Hey there, fellow explorers of the Impossible. It is I, your fearless host, Professor Brian Keene. How are you enjoying this riveting conversation with yet another Nobel Prize winner? She's the 17th on our show, but who's counting?

Now, here's a little secret. You can help me help you by subscribing, liking, and leaving a review on either the audio podcast or on YouTube. These reviews and thumbs up and interactions as they're called give us a huge boost in different algorithms that seem to dictate our lives in all things that are related to creative content like this podcast. So by hitting the subscribe or follow button, giving us a thumbs up and leaving a five-star review where you can, you'll enable me to bring more of these incredible minds to the show. So please do that. Do it now before you forget. Now, back to the episode.

So fellow Canadian Katie Mack, who is now at Permanor Institute, she's the Hawking Chair there. I had her on many years ago, and I asked her about what can we do to increase the enrichment of women? And I'm author of many daughters. I'm not in debt quite happy with that. She didn't want to talk about it. She felt like she gets asked it too much. And, you know, what are you want to do? What is she going to do?

Propose you have a pink circuit board for the girls to use and a blue one for the book. Speculations on, you know, kind of the role that, you know, You know, how things have changed, what they need to change, and what I call the Nobel tax, which is that you're often asked probably to comment on that. What are your feelings on how the status of women that's changed over your career and where you see it go? Well, it's changed, but I don't think that's the point. I think the point is that physics itself is not GEPRIC society highly. And so if you look at medicine, all these other issues that they will say this is why women don't want to do physics

would have been true in medicine as well. And yet now more women go to medicine than men. And so of society, right, parents still sell children that are good on science, become doctors if they're good on the arts to become lawyers. Maybe now there's some computer size because there's so much money in that. But, and this is how society values things. It's with money. If you get paid really well, the society is really saying we value this.

Physics is not one of those valued things. So it's a rare thing. Doesn't matter if you're an aunt or a woman. And so this is where I sort of stand until society says it's a society. something to do, I find it very strange to say, why don't women want to do it? Well, they just don't want to do it. So overall, lift all boats and there will be some fraction of women that get involved. I've noticed many more women, just in my 20-year career here, that have gotten involved with it and excelled and starting to worry is there a pendulum effect,

and I have to worry about my male students, because, you know, it's 60% of all college graduates are women. It's gone out to sense. At some point, we have to worry about it. And there's certain fields. I mean, we have a school of optometry is the only English school of optometry and handling it. And it's mostly women. And I never hear anybody say, wow, what happened? It used to be mostly men. And now it's mostly women. And when do we start asking, where are the men? And that doesn't seem to be a concern. And yet the lack of women seem to be a big concern in physics. So I think we have to always be concerned about it. And I think they're the real problem. And the problem in the 70s in my time is that women were told we could do anything.

But the men were told you also have to do your share. And this comes even back to, if you think about Maria Gopold. When she won her Nobel Prize, the newspaper here wrote, San Diego Housewife wins a Nobel Prize. And that's because everybody had to say, it's okay that she's doing science because she's also doing all of her women's jobs too.

Well, this is not possible. It's not possible for us to be twice as much, right? So you will have around the world gender equity when we also let men look after the children and the elderly. It bothered me during COVID That it was like, well, all the women have to lose their jobs Because they're the ones who have to look after the kids Or look after elder night.

Why? I don't think women are more caring than men. I think that's just as offensive As saying that, you know, women aren't as smart as men, right? There's none of this, you know, if everything was equal and everybody took their share Then everybody, you know, could have an equal shot at it. And so this idea that men should even be allowed to warn you today

And that women will just look after it is wrong. that everybody has to take. You share or, you know, or you hire nannies and housekeepers and everything else. And so that's fine. It's a different way to go. Blastair on. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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I put the image. I got the image from the Union Tribune, which is the San Diego newspaper that printed that headline. And I put it on my Twitter account. And I said, and I shared a screenshot from JPL when you're co-Lorette in chemistry, Francis Arnold, who's a friend of mine, I'm the widow of my post-doctoral advisor, Interlining, at Caltech. And it said, JPL mom wins. It said Caltech mom wins Nobel Prize. Son is JPL flight tech.

And it was the same thing. It's like completely defined. But then just two weeks ago when I can't pronounce it, Carolina, the Hungarian woman who won for MRI, she won. She was like, yes, I'm a mother of a swimmer. So it, you know, it kind of attitudinal. And Francis took it all.

She was like, well, they corrected it. But, you know, you wonder, yeah, how much. how much how things change and how much do we put, you know, just men and women at a disadvantage by kind of antagonizing this, this, you know, relationship, which, as you said, should be mutual. It shouldn't be. And now many of us, you know, unsung, and not just that you're taking care of kids, is that at our age, I'll take care of my parents. Exactly.

And we're kind of sandwiched in and we have way too much stuff going on. That brings up something. You've done some heroic videos that will get probably more than this one, unfortunately, views on YouTube with a Wired magazine, I think it was, and in billions of views explaining different lays it. But I want to ask you more generally, do scientists have an obligation to communicate with lay people? Or should, you know, should we have more, you know, just specialization, people in their alarms or in their, you know, cubicles and chalkboard and so forth? What do you view as an obligation of a scientist to communicate his or her research to the public that pays their

salary at some model? Well, not everybody's meant to be a communicator. But I would like universities to start paying more attention and that makes sure that every, area of physics, there's at least one person that gets coaching and gets the opportunity to go out and explain it. I think it's important. I'm co-director, but I was sort of the instigator for this new network on trust in science. And we start, scientists have to have conversations with other people so that they understand the scientific process. I don't know that people have to know each area of science. I don't think that's really critical.

I think they have to understand the scientific process. things take so long. Why, you know, so masking was one of these things that people started to get really frustrated about. And yet it was really a science experiment happening in front of them. And scientists would, oh, okay, they now tested this and found that. So this is why it has to change. And to a scientist, that made sense. But to other people, they don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're doing. And so this is where I think we have to get out and start really just explaining the process, explaining the time scales, explaining all of these things. there are certain areas of science and in physics it's astro.

You can usually get people out for public talks. But along with that, my daughter's in astrophysics, she's already given a couple of public talks as a graduate student. So they also, because the public is willing to come, they also get the experience of learning how to give public talks. And most science students do not get that training. So I think the university has to start having better communication teams, working with the scientists,

and giving us also more opportunities to get out there. But certainly a Permanent Institute in Waterloo transformed it. I mean, it was hard to get a seat at their Wednesday talks once a month, right? They brought in fabulous speakers, and they just sold out right away. So there is an appetite for it, and we have to tap into it. Absolutely. Okay, well, we've reached the end of the scheduled questions that I had, except for the spinal four existential questions.

You're free not to answer them. You're free to answer as long or short as... Do you let me put my name? I want to ask you first about your name. Yes, indeed. Donna, Theo Strickland. So tell me about Theo. Is there any relationship, theology, theodicy, a theodalite? No. My older sister was named Anne after my mother's mother. Okay.

And my father's mother's name was Theodosia. And so my mother said there's no way I'm giving my daughter a name Theodosia. But she said, I'll put it in the middle name, and we're going to cut it to Theo. And that's her her counsel. But really, I mean, I used to not use the middle name much. Most people don't use the middle name, right? But now it's sort of a different kind of name. Very few women.

Some men go back from Theodore. And so why don't I even use it? Most people have the two initials on their papers. But my very first paper, I was very interested in making sure that they understood that I was a woman, you know, because it was rare to be a woman in the laser business. And so the paper was in Optus Communications, and it let you put your full name. So I just wrote Donna Struthan. And I didn't, you know, so I was long enough.

I didn't need the, you. And then, so all of my papers from my grads time, it's just D. Strickland. And then I go to work with Paul Corkum, and I see that he's P.B. Corcom. And I go, well, if you're P.B. Corcom, I should be D.T. Strickland. So I switch, which of course is wrong, because now to find somebody, you have to pick, and I didn't really catch onto that. And then it's funny, I go to Livermore, and I work with this brand-new grad student. Todd Dittmire, who's now well-known professor at Texas, Austin.

But he said, no, I don't want to publish the DPT. He goes, I don't want to publish with D.T. Strickland, I want to publish with D. Strickland. That's what I want to publish with. And I let this grad student convince me, all right, let's go back. So from that on, I've always just been D. Strickland. I think things worked out, so what's for the best. So the first thing I do is harken to the Nobel Prize itself. So part of what Alfred Nobel did, as you know, probably better than anybody and me, certainly, was that he wanted to do kind of imbues the Nobel Prize with a social aim. And that was to improve for the betterment of all mankind. So in Judaism, we have this concept of this thing called an ethical will, which is not monetary,

not what you're going to do with your fraction of the Nobel Prize winning, the gold medal, but what wisdom or knowledge that you most want to transmit to your biological, but also your ideological errors of which there's many. I think, you know, and this has come up in this study, where the stand professor and some of the professors looked at the fact that our research productivity goes down. I think the one thing that once you win the Nobel Prize, I think because people listen to us

and they don't listen to other scientists, the honest is on us to start talking about the importance of science. I think I'm a big believer that it's an economic driver. Obviously, you can help things with medicine, and all these other things, I also think it's important for people to understand that you can be working on something like studying nuclear magnetic resonance and not realizing that it's going to end up being a magnetic resonance imaging machine in a hospital 50 years later, right? And so you have to flat scientists have that time and that, you know, just area to explore whatever they want to explore

because you don't know what's going to lead down there. So I think that's the one thing I would say is that we do have to get out there and play our role as ambassadors for science. I got it. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. The next question. So this podcast originated as part of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, which I'm associate director of here at UCSD. And I like to address the next three questions, final three questions, to different aspects of his career, but we'll tailor it to your take on it.

So, one, have you seen the movie 2001, a space odyssey? No, because I don't like science fiction. You don't like science fiction? Okay. Well, then I'll phrase it in the form of Richard Feynman. So Richard Feynman was once asked, what is the shortest sentence that contains the densest amount of information

that human beings have learned about the universe? And I usually say, what kind of thing would you put on a time capsule that would last a billion years? What do you think is the most impressive aspect? As Arthur C. Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So what is the most magical form of technology? You're allowed to say, see, but it's up to you. What is the most... Well, I was going to say, I thought it was an expression because I think F-E-Qaeda is still the most, the strongest thing. It's just such a small equation and just has been used for all these hundreds of years. F-Equels M-A.

Newton got that one right, and, you know, can't be beat. Can't be. Yeah, Feynman had the, I would he called the atomic hypothesis is that everything is made of these little adabs that are continually whirling around electrons around the nucleus. So then the next question has to do with advice to a younger daughter. And it goes like this. The name of this podcast is Into the Impossible. And the statement that Arthur C. Clark made was the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. So I want to ask you, what aspect of life mystified you that if you got to spend 30 adoscent? Now 30 seconds with a 20-year-old

Donna Strickland, what would you tell her, if anything? No, I'm not that deeper thinker. I just keep going and just keep walking down my path. I don't think too deeply about it. Is that because you wouldn't trade the experiences that you've had and anything you do to the past will necessarily modify it? You know, I've just been such an incredibly lucky human being through my whole life. You know, obviously I wouldn't really want to change it.

Other people could look at it and, you know, I was unbelievably shy as a kid, and that maybe held me back. on the other hand, it directed where I wanted to go because I, at one point, decided that I would go to a university where I didn't know anybody to walk myself out of that. And that's what led me to go to lasers, so wasn't that lucky. To follow my husband, I took a job as a member of technical staff at Princeton, and I thought I was giving up the academic thing. I chose that time to have my two children, where I was quite sick through all the pregnancies, couldn't have done it as an academic. So wasn't that lucky that somehow I just said, fine, I give up on. my career, I got to have my two children, and then I still got back and had an academic career

and two children who thought that was possible, but it was. And so I've just walked through life without a clear plant. And life just kept working out. Right. You as my grandmother, it's a dance between the raindrops. Well, I think Kierkegaard said that you could, life must be lived going forward, but it only makes sense when you look back. Okay, the final question with your delightful forbearance. has to do with things that you maybe have you changed your mind about, and it goes like this. Again, Arthur St. Clark had all these quips. One was, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert.

But his favorite thing in this way to wrap up this conversation is the following statement. He said, when an elderly, I'm not calling you elderly, but an elderly and distinguished scientist says something is possible, he or she is very likely to be correct. But when he or she says something is impossible, they are very likely to be wrong. And I want to ask you, what did you change your mind about? What have you been wrong about? Do you agree with that sentiment? I don't know that I would ever say anything's impossible.

My husband kids made about how I always, you know, used to say I would never do this, that, or everything, and I've gone. I told my husband I would never get married, but I did. I would never have children, but I did. So, you know, I never, you know, you don't know where life's taking you, so there's no point putting limits on it. But I hope nothing's impossible. I still am waiting for something to be better than quantum mechanics. I think we will get there someday. I just don't know if it's going to be in my lunchtime.

Fantastic. Dona Strickland, thank you so much for sharing so much your time with us today, visiting us in San Diego, and I hope you have many happy returns here back to San Diego. Thank you. Thank you. Hey there, it's me. You're our beloved host, Professor Brian Keating. Are you enjoying my conversation with this newest Nobel Prize winner to be featured

on The Into the Impossible podcast, Donna Strickland? Well, what if I told you there's more of the good stuff that you can have access? to. All you have to do to get it is go to my mailing list, which you can join at Brian Keating.com. By joining, you also enter a giveaway for a piece of a $4 billion-year-old space dust. How cool is that? And if you have a .edu email address, you're guaranteed to win. So, go to Briankeating.com, and you can enter in the pop-up splash screen that you'll see there, and I will see you in the next episode with my utmost thanks. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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