Science Friday - The Story Of Sand, Science And Dance. August 10, 2018, Part 2.

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

When you think of sand, thoughts of the ocean and sand castles probably come to mind. But sand can be found in much more than beachfronts. Sand is a key ingredient in concrete for skyscrapers, silicon for computer chips, and the glass for your smartphone. Vince Beiser, journalist and author of the book The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization, tells Ira more. How would you choreograph the heft of the Higgs boson, the plight of an endangered species, or the battle between the body and tumors? For marine conservationist Lekelia Jenkins, dance has been as important a part of her life as a scientist; she’s created dances about the success of devices that can keep sea turtles out of fishing nets, and is working on researching the ways dance can enhance learning. And a Yale University duo, dancer Emily Coates and particle physicist Sarah Demers, are working beyond interpretive dance to create works where dance informs physics just as much as physics can inform dance.  They all join Ira to discuss the intersection of science and dance. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, beach season is in full swing and no trip to the seaside is complete without the sand. But that is just the beginning of the wonders of sand. Sand is all around us and tall concrete skyscrapers, computer chips, and your smartphones. If you feel the earth move under your feet, it might be sand. Did you know that not all sand is created equally? The highest quality sand, the kind used to make computer chips, comes. from a special mine in North Carolina. And our need for sand has created sand cartels, black markets for the grain. Sand thieves in Jamaica stole part of a beach right off the island. My next guest says that sand is the most important solid substance on earth and is at the core of our daily lives. He's here to talk about these tiny grains. Vince Beiser is a journalist and author of the book The World in a Grain.

The story of sand and how it transformed civilization and you can read an excerpt from this book on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash beach. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks. It's great to be here. A fascinating book. You know, I thought we know about sand, but we didn't. I mean, we know about the sand on the beach. There's sand in sandbags and deserts.

What is the definition of sand? So the word itself just means any little bits. of any hard substance. It's anything, if you really want to get technical, since this is Science Friday, it's anything with a diameter of between 2 millimeters and 0.0625 millimeters. So it means that sand can be, it can be crushed up shells, it can be crushed up volcanic rock. It can be lots of things, but most sand in the world, and the sand that we use so much of is mostly quartz sand, silicon dioxide.

So it's not like the white clips of Dover. They're not made from the quartz sand, right? I don't think so. I'm not an expert on those, but they sure don't look like it. So not all sand is equal. There are different grades of sand. Tell us about that. What makes the mine in North Carolina so special for making computer chips?

So there's a lot of, there are indeed a lot of different kinds of sand that can be used for different applications. So the stuff that we use the most, like I said, is quartz sand, which is, very abundant. You find it all over the world. In fact, it's the most abundant thing on the planet's surface. And that stuff, we can use that stuff for concrete, which is the number one thing that we use sand for by far is concrete. For concrete, you don't need sand that's especially pure. In other words, that has a super high quartz content. The next step up is sand that you use for glass making. And for that, you need sand that's much higher purity. Glass is basically nothing but quartz sand that's been melted down. But to get nice clear glass, you need to start with quartz sand that's 95,

upwards of 95% pure. And the very top of the heap, as you mentioned, is what's called spruce pine quartz. And this is the purest quartz that's ever been found on earth. It all comes from this rural, this small county in rural North Carolina. And it's 98, 99% pure. Why is that so different? What was going on in the earth that made it so pure? It's basically sort of a series of geological accidents. The plates, you know, back when the tectonic plates were moving around to form North America, you had a plate under the Atlantic Ocean coming into contact with the one that sort of underlies the American continent.

And at this particular spot, they run into each other at a particular district. depth, about 9 to 15 miles below the ground. They grind against each other and creating enormous, enormous heat. And between that heat and the fact that in this particular spot, there was very, very little moisture, it created this incredibly, incredibly pure quartz, which over millennia got lifted up much closer to the surface and is now close enough where we can mine it. 844724-8255. If you'd like to talk about sand, with the sandman, Vince Beiser, author of the world, in a grain. Now, let's talk about desert sand, the iconic stuff we see in Lawrence of Arabia, you know, in the Sahara.

Is that the same kind of sand that we get over here? Is it a different kind of sand? What makes it unique? So it is, again, it is mostly quartz. I mean, sand all over the world is, you know, it differs depending on what the local geology is. because basically it's just it's all bits of ground-down mountains ultimately it's bits of rock that have been worn away by by wind and rain over the millennia and and then wash down deserts you know are usually once upon a time where sea-beds or lake beds a long time ago so again most of the sand that you find in there is quartz but it's a mix of of whatever else might be in the local geology feldspar this that but the key thing that's different about desert sand is the shape right so desert sand unfortunately unfortunately, is completely useless to us as human beings for construction. And the reason for that is it's been eroded by wind rather than water.

So in the desert, those grains tumble and tumble and tumble over thousands of years, getting smashed into just banging full force into each other, which rounds off their corners and their angles and makes it quite a bit rounder and smoother than the sand that you find in the bottom of rivers or the bottom of lakes, which tends to be sort of sharper and more angular. So that desert sand ultimately is, it's too round to stick together to build something out of. It's like the difference between trying to build something out of a stack of marbles as opposed to a stack of little bricks. You mentioned all the things that you sand, and one of my favorite topics of discussion about these things is, I'm glad you share it in your book, is concrete.

I could talk about concrete forever, as my listeners know, as they yawn, as I talk about it. And sand is a major part of concrete, right? Ira, I am so glad to be talking to, like, one of the only other concrete fans in the world. This stuff is so underappreciated. I mean, you know, like most people, I never even thought about it before I started doing the research for this book. But, I mean, concrete is literally the foundation of our modern civilization. and it's really, it's nothing but sand and gravel glued together with cement. A lot of people mix up concrete and cement.

Cement is just this fine, powdery stuff that's basically a glue. You mix up cement plus a whole lot of sand and gravel and let it dry, let it cure, and that gives you concrete. For all these uses of sand, I noticed from reading in your book that people steal it. I had no idea that people steal sand right off a beach. Yeah, well, so this is the amazing thing is we need sand. I mean, like I said, concrete is the thing that our modern civilization is really made out of, right? Every building, every shopping mall, apartment block being built anywhere around the world is made at least partly out of concrete.

So that's just huge piles of sand. I mean, thousands of tons of sand go into your average building. Also, all the roads. highways that connect all those buildings also made of thousands and thousands of tons of sand. So what's happening is as the world's population grows and as more and more people move into cities, there's a huge demand for sand, way beyond anything that we've ever seen before in human history. And as a result, there's a black market for the stuff such that, indeed, people are stealing sand from beaches, stripping it out of riverbeds, stripping it out of riverbeds,

stripping it from lake bottoms, tearing it up from land sources, and causing a lot of environmental damage in the process. So it's like a resource, like oil and gas. There's only so much of it out there. Absolutely. It's the least appreciated natural resource out there. I mean, people think of sand as being infinite. And of course, there's a lot of it. Like I said, it's the most abundant thing in the world. But at the end of the day, there's only a finite amount, right? There's only so much of it. And we are using it at an unbelievable pace. It's the resource that we consume the most. most of after air and water. We use about 50 billion tons of the stuff every year. That's enough to blanket the entire state of California every single year. And you said you started out your

sand journey because you were investigating the illegal sand trade in India, a sand cartel. Yeah, they call them the sand mafia in India, believe it or not, which sounds kind of ridiculous, but in fact it's it is deadly, serious business in India. And I mean, literally, literally, deadly. These are groups of organized criminals who are stealing sand from villages, from fishing areas, and or just mining sand illegally, you know, digging it up from places that are environmentally protected or that are coastal regions where there's, you're not allowed to mine it because of all the environmental damage. But because there's so much money involved, these criminal gangs have gotten really involved. They're making a lot of money, and they get away

with it by doing the same thing organized crime does everywhere. They pay off judges, they pay off police to leave them alone. And if you really get in their way, they will kill you. Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years, mostly in India, but also in other countries around the world. In Kenya, in Indonesia, a bunch of other places, tremendous violence connected with the sand trade. How come we don't hear more about that? It doesn't get a lot of press. It doesn't. I mean, I think there's two reasons for that. One is that most of the really dramatic stuff that's happening with the black market in sand, I mean, the killings and kidnappings and really severe environmental damage,

it's mostly happening in the developing world. There is considerable environmental damage that happens here in the U.S., but really the worst stuff is happening in the developing world. And unfortunately, these days in particular, the media just doesn't have a lot of time, for stuff that's happening overseas. That's number one. Number two is that it's a relatively recent thing. I mean, it's really only in about the last 20 years or so

with the tremendous economic growth that's happened in China, in India, and Indonesia, all these places around the world. It's only recently that there's been such a spike in the demand for sand that all these problems have really started to become serious. But I do think that's changing. I mean, I can tell you I get calls all the time now from reporters around. around the world who are starting to become aware of this issue and starting to look into it. Is there any way to, a lot of tweets are coming in, any way to recycle concrete, take the sand out,

use it again? So, yes, there is, is the good news. The bad news is that it's not happening very much. And there's three main reasons for that. One is, yeah, you can smash down concrete, crush it up, and reuse it to a certain extent. But you can't use it for everything because the grains of sand, the time you, by the time they've been reused from concrete, they also have other stuff on them. They're mixed in.

They've been mixed in with cement and maybe other chemicals, and that makes them unfit for certain purposes. Vince, I'm going to have to ask, hold on for reasons two and three, okay? We have to take a break. Vince Beiser is author of The World and a Grain of Sand and a World and a Grain, the Story of Sand and How It Transforms Civilization. It's a great book here on Science Friday. We'll take a break. We'll come back and take your questions and get back to the other two reasons with Vince. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking all about sand, where it comes from how we've become dependent on and how much of it we use with journalist Vince Beiser, author of the book, The World in a Grain, the story of sand, and how it transformed civilization. And when I rudely interrupted Vince, he was telling us about recycling sand, recycling concrete to bring this sand out of it. Yeah. So, as I was saying, three reasons. We can recycle it, but A, recycled concrete sand isn't, you can't use it for everything because of all the chemicals that it's been mixed with. Number two, it's quite a bit more expensive to do that than to just harvest fresh natural sand because you imagine all the power, all the energy that it takes to run a machine that can smash concrete down into grains. But the number three problem with the whole idea of recycling is we don't actually want to recycle most of our concrete structures. because it's not like newspaper or a bottle where it's designed to be a product that you use once and then throw it away.

If you build something out of concrete, you build a hospital or a highway or whatever, it's meant to stay there for 50, 60, 100 years. So really, that sand most of the time is taken permanently out of circulation. On number 844724-825, lots of folks with calls. Let's see if we can take a few. Mike and Mount Vernon in Washington. Hi, Mike. Hello. Hey there.

Yeah, I just had a question real quick. How does the sand vary from that, like in outer space or in Mars, you know, like asteroids? Is it the same thing? Can you use that huge stuff on Earth or is it just the same or is there a difference if you know? Good question. Wow, that's a great question. You know what? I wish I knew.

I'm going to have to look into that. Sand mining, you know, if sand is so scarce, we go out and pull on an asteroid and get the sand off the litter. Or something like that, yeah. What, are we in danger then of losing glass? I mean, you said that the second most common use of sand is for making glass. Or is different kinds, let me change that to say, is different kind of glass made with different kinds of sand, or is it all the same sand? It's basically a question of purity. Like I said, you need upwards of 95% pure silica sand to make glass.

and then for really fine glass you need stuff, you need to start with stuff that's even more pure. Like the Fontainebleau region in France is the sand there is very, very pure. It's, I think, like 97, 98% pure. And that's why some of the finest crystal, European crystal, is made with sand from that region, has been for over 100 years. As far as I know we're not really running short of that stuff, there's a fair bit of it out there.

problem is just your garden variety everyday construction sand because that is the stuff that we are using just in unbelievable quantities. Let's go to John in Iowa. Hi, John. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. I have a question from Mr. Beiser. Here in Iowa, of northwestern Iowa, it was real pretty up in there called those Switzerland

controversy over extensive mining of sand for fracking. And I was wondering what was unusual about the sand that they would need of a fracking. and I'll take my hands on the air. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That's a really interesting sort of subspecies. So for fracking, I assume all your listeners know what fracking is.

Yeah, we can assume. Basically, yeah, to do it, as you all probably know, you shoot a high-pressure mix of water, chemicals, and sand down to shatter, to fracture the rock where the oil is that you're trying to get out. Now, you need a lot of very specific kind of. of sand to do that. It has to be very hard. So again, very high purity because quartz is extremely, extremely hard because it needs to keep

those cracks open against the huge geologic pressure that's trying to close them back up again. And it also needs to be round. If you remember, I said most quartz sand is angular, but for fracking, you want it to be round so that those droplets of oil and gas can flow around them easily and get into your well. Now, it just so happens that there's a lot of that sand in Western Wisconsin and in Minnesota, and I guess in Iowa, too. I wasn't actually aware of that. But I did go to Western Wisconsin while I was reporting the book, and there's a big controversy because the fracking boom in North Dakota and in Texas has created a frack sand mining boom there. And they are ripping up hundreds of acres of forests and farmlands to get at that frack sand, which a lot of people,

that region are very unhappy about. Sand's also becoming a geopolitical issue, too. You talk about this a little bit. There are countries using it to actually build islands, extend their boundaries, aren't there? Absolutely. Where is the sand coming from? That takes a lot of sand, doesn't it?

It does take a lot of sand, and most of it comes from the bottom of the ocean. So what's going on is, I mean, the idea of using sand to create new land is actually very old. I mean, the Romans did the same thing. A lot of the riverfront in Manhattan is made from sand and silt dredged up from the bottom of the Hudson River. There are artificial islands like we have Balboa Island in Los Angeles, Treasure Island and San Francisco, also totally artificial. What's new is, what's changed is just in the last 10, 20 years, technology has moved ahead so much that we now have much bigger, more powerful dredging ships that can pull up way more sand much faster than ever before. So lots and lots of countries are getting into the land building business for two reasons. One is to make money.

You've probably seen pictures of those famous, those crazy palm tree-shaped islands off of Dubai. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. So those are nothing but sand, millions of tons of sand that were sucked up from the bottom of the Persian Gulf and put into place to form beachfront real estate. So where there used to be nothing but open water, now there is billions and billions of dollars of worth of land where they've built hotels and resorts and luxury housing. So that's one use.

The much more disturbing use is where countries are using it to literally change their borders to create new national territory. And the number one spot to worry about with this is what's called the Spratly Islands. These are just a bunch of rocks and reefs way out in the middle of the South China Sea in this very hotly contested strategic shipping lane. And what's happened there is China seized control of a bunch of these rocks. And just in the last few years, built up, they've built up this enormous dredging fleet, the most powerful dredging fleet in the world,

and used it to suck up sand from the bottom of the ocean, pile it up on these rocks, and create new islands, which they have turned into military bases. So China is now able to land bombers and fighter aircraft and port nuclear submarines in these places. that used to be just rocks way out in the middle of the ocean. And that's creating a lot of tension between China and all of its neighbors and also between China and the U.S. Are they ripping up all the life that lives down in the ocean by sucking up all the sand?

Yeah. So when you do this kind of thing, it damages the environment in two ways. One is, you know, whatever was living in that sand before is now obviously dead and gone. Also, when you suck up that much sand, you stir up a lot of sand and stuff. silt and muck which clouds up the water which can suffocate fish and coral reefs all around second thing is what you do with that sand so these spratly islands many of them were active very vibrant very rich coral reefs those coral reefs have literally been buried they have just been crushed under the weight of all this sand and it's been called there was it's it was apparently

the most rapid rate of coral reef destruction ever in history when they built these things You can read a lot more about sand in his Jonathan's, Vince's book, The World in a Grain, the story of sand and how it transformed civilization. Vince Beiser is author, and if you want to read first a little bit about it, you can get an excerpt from it on our website, Science Friday.com slash beach. Thank you, Vince, for its fascinating book, one of my favorite topics, you know, sand and concrete. Thanks for that. Thanks for having me, Iro.

I'll see at the Concrete Fan Club Convention. You know, we are always looking for new ways to communicate science. Some of us make videos, others talk about it on the radio and podcasts. Reaching people through the arts and entertainment, that's another approach, as my next guess have done with dance. For example, the Higgs boson, the source of mass, and the standard model of physics, can be explored in dance. As can the plight of endangered sea turtles so often caught in fishing nets,

they too can be set to dance. But there's more going on than just interpreting research findings using body movements. Dancers will tell you that movement is its own research discipline, that dance makes its own contributions to the way we understand both scientists' work and even our relationship to it. So here to talk about dancing their way through scientific concepts. We have a dancer, Emily Coates, director of dance studies. at Yale University's Theater Studies Program.

Welcome, Emily. Thank you, Ira. You're welcome. Also a particle physicist, Sarah Demers, also at Yale. Welcome, Dr. Demers. Hello. And a dancer and marine conservationist Kiki Jenkins at Arizona State University.

Welcome, Dr. Jenkins. Good afternoon. And if you need a visual at any time, you can see the videos of all their work on our website, dancing at ScienceFrily.com slash dance. Let me begin with you, Kiki. One of your major projects was this dance about saving sea turtles from fishing nets. Please describe it visually for us, you know, for those of us who can't see it now.

Okay, begin with two dancers who are locked in this very graceful struggle. They're turning. They're twisting. They're stretching. One dancer is dressed in green. That's the sea turtle. One dancer is dressed in gray. And that dancer embodies all the threats to survival that sea turtles.

have to face. Eventually, the turtle dancer ends crumbled on the floor dead. And next what we see is a group of dancers dressed in blue, and they're rolling back and forth on the stage like ocean waves. And one by one, they pick up these turtle dancers on their bodies and roll them to the front of the stage and drop them there. And it's like turtle carcasses washing up on a beach. And then next we see a dancer in white, and she represents the Endangered Species Act. And she comes in and she sees this tragedy and she begins to look for answers. And that's when we notice that there's this large metal device on the stage. And that device is a turtle excluder device, which is an escape hatch that turtles can use to get out of fishing nets so they don't drown. And there's four dancers with

very unique movements and they're representing the four critical things that we need to invent a turtle excluder device. Eventually they bring their movements together and they lift this turtle excluded device over their heads. And then finally, we see another turtle dancer coming into the space. And again, she's locked into this struggle, this graceful struggle with the dancer in gray, the threats to survival. But this time she survived. She overcomes because the TED is there. And those four unique dancers actually lift her away. And then she swims slash dances to freedom. Well, as a marine conservationist, how did you get involved with this dance? I started dancing in undergraduate, and all throughout graduate school, I would literally daydream about what my research would look like on stage.

I had this crazy idea that I was going to do a one-person show, defend my dissertation all in the same week. That didn't happen, but the next year, AAAS launched their Dance Your Ph.D competition, which I entered, and I took second place. That opened a lot of doors for me, and that's what got me started, although I'd say the same. time, there were a lot of obstacles because a lot of people still ridiculed the idea, the concept, that there can be a science dance or a scientist who dances, and that's something that we really still need to change. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about science and dance and turning them into steam.

Sarah, you weren't a dancer, but you started working with Emily as a new approach to teaching physics at Yale. How did this course approach physics concepts? So it's interesting. We actually, I would say, tackle it on a couple of different levels. In one way, there are a lot of direct connections between physics and dance, so you can look at the forces involved, the masses moving. We have a lot of equations.

It's exciting from the physics perspective, because often in introductory physics, you deal with simplified systems. There are pulleys and inclined planes and all kinds of abstract objects that are far away from you. It's, I think, more engaging when people are actually embodying these forces. And it also is more complicated from the physics perspective. You can't make assumptions like, oh, it's a massless pulley. You have to actually deal with gravity and friction all the time. So on that level, there's a pretty direct dialogue between the two disciplines.

And then we also found, as Emily and I were starting to develop the class, that we share a lot of the same vocabulary. So dance and physics, we both care deeply about energy and momentum, but we mean different things by those words. And so just exploring what I mean in the physics context and what Emily means in the dance context and putting those things next to each other, I think we can learn more about each and even some new things. Emily, as a professional dancer, how easy is it for you to integrate your ideas with? the physicists and the scientists here? Let me start by saying I am a science dance skeptic who dove into this with the desire to kind of change the terms of engagement. I and so in the class that Sarah and I teach we deal a lot with choreographic complexity. We look at the works of great choreographers of the

20th century and the ways that they have messed with our conceptualizations of energy, space, and time, and then kind of set that on par with the ways that physicists have produced advances and paradigm shifts within modern physics. So we do a lot of kind of comparative looks back and forth at dance aesthetics and scientific ideas in order to understand really how to keep these two disciplines at their most complex when in dialogue. I think the danger is reduction, both that the science gets watered down and the dance also isn't allowed to kind of fully operate. And so in the work that Sarah and I do, we're always pushing the degree to which the disciplines can remain in dialogue and in their greatest complexity

while also shining light on the other. So did you convince you. any of your scientist colleagues that there is value to this? I absolutely see value. And let me backtrack a bit on that bold claim that I'm a science dance skeptic. I think that there are tremendous benefits to be had in processes like those that Kiki is engaged in. So embodying scientific concepts and in that process having to understand something more about how the mechanisms actually operate. It undeniably enhances understanding of the science to get up and move those ideas. And then on the other hand, as I said, we also want to keep in our minds the tremendous advances

and paradigm shifts put forward by artists in the 20th century and 21st. And that to me is the most generative aspect of the dialogue between the disciplines, looking at compositional complexity, and how, in fact, without even trying to engage with physics, an artist directly with the science of physics, an artist like Trisha Brown in 1970, tipped someone over the side of a building, put them on ropes, and had them walk down that building, and the ways that this caused us to understand gravity and the very basic action of walking anew. We'll talk about gravity and dancing and science. After the break, stay with us.

We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking about dance and science and how to translate the rigorous work of biology and physics and other research to dance. A medium equally rigorous built on the motion of bodies through space with my guest,

scientists who dance and a dancer who works with scientists. Kiki Jenkins, Associate Professor in Marine Conservation at ASU, Sarah DeMurz, Associate Professor of Physics at Yale and Emily Coates, Director of Dance Studies in Yale's Theater Studies program. If you'd like to talk about it, please do. Our number, 844-724-8255. You could also tweet us at SciFRI. Let me take a concrete example of a really interesting composition. Sarah, Emily, you two created an evening-length performance, at least somewhat inspired by the Higgs boson in particle physics.

How do you work those two together? Sarah, you want to begin? Sure, yeah. I mean, it really was Emily's creation. It was based in part on collaborative work that we've done, so I can tell you some of the beginnings of it. When Emily and I were teaching this course together, in part, it was so productive.

We were having so much fun. We were looking for other opportunities. And there was a recent discovery in my own field of the Higgs boson in 2012. If you haven't heard about it, go look it up. It's pretty, it's exciting physics. And Emily and I thought, okay, we need to tackle this in our collaboration. And one of the first things she did was come, hear me give a public lecture on it. And at the end, she came up to me and she said, do you have any idea what you're doing while you're talking about the Higgs up there? And she started making some motions. And she said,

you're just moving around. It's incredible. And I, of course, had no idea what I was doing with my body while I was talking. That was not what was on my mind. And she asked me, do your colleagues do this? And I, of course, had no idea. So we did a little bit of research, went to CERN together, and it turns out that, yes, physicists do use our bodies when we're talking about the work that we're doing. And I'm going to hand it over to Emily because this is really her expertise.

But it's, you know, some of the gestures that we're using are connected to things in our brains. We're thinking through some of these ideas with our bodies in ways that it's nice to know that some dancers find interesting. We turned that research that Sarah is describing into a short science art video, which we call three views of the Higgs and Dance. In that video, we used choreographic strategies through the editing to kind of pressure the scientist's explanation of the Higgs to call into relief the fact that they were using these really intricate and beautiful and diverse gestures to imagine these particle physics. When we showed that film to audiences

and across many different contexts, the scientists in the room inevitably said, but where is the dance of the Higgs? And one of the spins in the film without giving it too much away is that the physicists themselves are engaged in a kind of dance with their kinesthetic imaginations. So having this complaint from the scientists in the room made me want to think about how to pull these ideas into live performance.

But again, because I'm most interested in kind of preserving the complexity between the disciplines and drawing on compositional strategies that are going to come at these ideas and kind of layer our disciplines in new ways, I ended up going, I think, in a direction that the scientists would not have anticipated or imagined, which is I used collage and juxtaposition and layering. I created a series of vignettes that each had some degree of dance and some degree of science present. For example, in one vignette, I performed a fragment of George Balanchine's choreography, and for your listeners, George Balanchine is an incredibly important balance. LA choreographer of the 20th century.

And while I did that, I had Sarah physics cast my movement. So she called out every classical physics principle that she could see at play. And in a microphone, it was very exciting. It was terribly exciting. Very exciting for me. And then in another vignette, I had her describe her research at a clip while I called out the gestures that she was using to imagine that research. The piece also contained a good deal of dance and science history. sometimes engage playfully.

For example, I created a love duet between Isaac Newton and the god Apollo, using the music for the signature patida and the Stravinsky Balencien Ballet-Ballet, Apollo, which was created in 1928. I was basically interested in pitting paradigm shifts and shifters in dance aesthetics up against paradigm shifts and shifters in science. Wow. That's interesting concepts to be able to tackle and dance. Kiki, were you able to go from a scientific concept

to a series of movements easily? Was this a real challenge? Is there a certain logic in the creativity here? With the process I use, it's fairly easy because I allow the performers to do some election for themselves. So if I'm working with experience movers, I have them read a scientific paper, one that's very excessively written, and it's color-coded according to the different findings. And so the dancers will read it.

They'll choose which of those findings really appeals to them, and they'll choose that as a role that they want to embody. And then based on that, they will develop about 30 seconds of movement before they even come to the choreography session. Once they are there, we start talking about why you chose that role. And it's fascinating to see the connections that they find to their own work as dancers, what they're doing. And then from there we go through a process of editing, borrowing, sharing, reduction to get to the final piece. If I'm working with less experienced dancers, then I will give them a short mini lecture about the science topic once they're in the choreographic session. And then we use some predetermined dance structures.

So what I mean by that is if you can imagine the hokey-pokey. When I say that, we all imagine stick your arm out and shake it all about. I don't actually use a hokey pokey, but macarena, electric slide, all those things are what I call dance structures. Within it, though, there are opportunities for artistic. choice. And what I found is for the less experienced movers, using some form of structure, helps give them self-confidence in their movement. They're more secure in the movement. And then they can also focus on the science behind the movement.

You've given it a lot of thought and you've done a lot of work. Do you feel that dance informs your scientific research? It does. And what way? Tell us about that. I've seen it happen. So, for example, I will present a science dance to some of my colleagues who know my research on sea turtles very well. And they've heard my talks at lots of conferences. They've asked me all the questions. Then they see a dance.

And suddenly they're asking me new questions. And so performing in a science dance, watching a science dance changes your perspective on the science problem. And in my mind, that can lead to new solutions. It puts your brain in a different place for problem solving. But it also, I would think, crystallizes a way of communicating better by watching it. I say, you know, I could do this better or, gee, we haven't been getting this concept out. And having scientists look at it, they might realize that themselves that they're lacking in communication abilities. Absolutely.

I think that's especially true for the environmental sciences, because so many people who are not scientists, connect to environment, connect to nature through art. So they are photographing nature. They're painting it. They're writing songs and poems about it. They're doing place-based dances in it. And that can often drive them to have an interest to the science behind it. The animals they're seeing, the habitats they're in.

As scientists, we should take advantage of this readily existing conduit for communication. Use something other than the written word in which to give information back to these people who are already interested. in these environmental areas. Do physicists feel like they're learning something from watching the dance themselves? What do you think, Sarah? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think, yeah, there's been some research done on that. I think in some national labs that have had experiments with having visiting artists come in

and then seeing what's actually translated in terms of, you know, the final product. what are people actually getting from that? I think that the process that Kiki is describing is very powerful for everyone who's participating. In terms of changing that perspective, you know, as she says and giving you different access, I think for me as a physicist collaborating with a dancer, I've certainly seen my own impact on my own research. Humans, people are complicated. Dancing is very complicated, the forces that are involved.

You have to be really careful. Early in the class, when people would ask me a question, I would come right out with something, and now I know better than that. I've got to think about it because it's complex what's actually going on. You have multiple people interacting in a space with each other. And then also, it's made me question some of my own assumptions. So in my own field of particle physics right now, we're at a very challenging point, I would say. It's an exciting point, but we're at a place where we believe we understand about 4% of the math.

energy content of the universe. And we've had some incredible luck. The Higgs is an excellent example of a theorists having an idea that's based in some ways on the aesthetics of the model that we're working with and on some gaps and making a hypothesis that then turns out to be correct. But something that I think can happen if we're not careful is that we can mix this aesthetic reasoning that we like to do. When we look at the mysteries that we have in the field, I'll give just one example. We have a model that has different generations of particles. So we have particle like the electron, but we have heavier copies like the muon and the tau.

And this question of why are there three of these copies? In some ways, that's an aesthetic question. It's a scientific question, but it also comes at, could this be simpler, right? We have other kinds of challenges in the field that aren't really aesthetic questions. There are more, I predicted this, I see that. and that's a difference. So I think that being sharper about where I'm applying aesthetic reasoning and where I'm not, I think it's an excellent, you know, I think that's linked to the work that I've done with Emily

and has made me a better physicist. Let's go to the phone. So Kathleen and Lawrence, Kansas. Hi, Kathleen. Hi, this is great. One of my favorite shows, and then I'm a dance fanatic. I just wonder if you ladies had ever heard of or had communication. with Carol Armitage.

He has a company called Carol Armitage Dance in New York City. And when I was hearing the promos about the program, I thought that Ira was going to have her on because she has done numerous performances. But two of those that I was thinking that relate to your topic is called three theories. And that series of dances that was one performance was based on the elegant universe,

And another work that she created was based on animals and creatures and insects of nature. And they were both phenomenal. And if you haven't had communication with her, I would highly encourage you to check her out. All right, Kathleen. Thanks for those suggestions. Hi. Yes. Quick, let me jump in because we have to pay for the lights.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I just wanted to respond. Yes, of course. I know Carol Armitage I've actually performed in one of her works before when I was dancing with

Mikhail Beryshnikov's company in New York. And certainly she's a prominent example of a choreographer out there who's working with science. What's very interesting for me is a particular set of questions in those examples, which is what kind of knowledge gets passed through, what kind of translation is possible,

in what new forms does that knowledge end up? And then the vice versa. We see the dances that are an outcome that get put forward on the concert dance stage and that tour internationally, but it's so rarely conceptualized as a two-way street. So in turn, the physics that the physicist that she was in conversation with, how is it impacting them? How is it altering their paradigms and their way of understanding their own research? So yes, she is one among a number of examples of artists who are out there working with science. And I think these questions of knowledge and translation and transformation are key in understanding these examples.

More and more we're seeing, you know, that extra A in STEM, the arts and science, do a lot of scientists see the importance of creativity. Or is this still kind of in the margins and, you know, have to be dished out with them? I think it's very much still in the margins. I think if you look at the media around it, it's still treated as a novelty when we mix science and art. When I was at my previous university, I worked with some students to start a group around science and art. We had 100 pre-members. People who said they wanted to be part of this group, and we had our first meeting. It was almost like an AA meeting.

People kind of talking about their experiences being a scientist who also had an art form that they did, wanting to bring. bring them together, not being sure that they would be accepted. I know scientists who had active gallery exhibits and their colleagues didn't know about it. They were afraid to share it. If they did share it, they were told they were being distracted. They weren't focused. I've been told that I can't possibly be a serious scientist if I'm also a dancer. So we need to change those things. It's not a novelty. It is a powerful tool that we're still learning a lot about. We need to remember that in our scientific pasts in the Renaissance, great scientists were also great artists. These are not conflicting things. And so we need to welcome the scientists among

us who have talents in both or are talents and be able to collaborate across those lines and bring that back into what science was and still can be today. Do you have a student interest at Yale? Now, Sarah, you work in a professor of physics and Emily, your director of the dance studies at Yale? Are there students who say, hey, this is a new area I might want to be interested in exploring? Absolutely. Yes, and actually, yeah, our class has gotten a really positive response from the students. A lot of people are really excited about, I think, interdisciplinary work in general is intriguing to students, but there's something about that combination of physics and dance that people have latched on to. Something that's been really fun

for me is to see how many scientists, dancers actually do come out of the woodwork. So our teaching fellow for the course is a particle physicist, Mariel Petit, but she's also an accomplished dancer. So as Kiki pointed out, yeah, we have, there are quite a few scientists who are already engaged in this discipline. It's neat to see, you know, evidence of that. But I think students, we've had philosophy majors, history majors, and all engaged in the class, and I think learning quite a bit in both disciplines.

It's also worth pointing out just how much these disciplines share in common, and I mean between science and dance. So both science and dance cultivate skills of observation, informed decision-making, an attention to relationships and proportion, the patience to study processes of change unfolding over time. So studying both at once, you start to cultivate simultaneously that overlap, while also recognizing how dramatically the fields can be different. And it's exciting.

I have to bring down the curtain on this discussion because we've run out of time. I want to thank Kiki Jenkins, Sarah Demers, and Emily Coates for talking about science and the arts and dance. Thank you both for taking time to be with us on our website, Science Friday.com. We have all these dance videos. One last thing before we go, SciFri is headed to Salt Lake City. We want you to join us next month, Saturday, September 15th, at the Eccles Theater, where we'll talk about exploring new frontiers from the unusual life hiding in forest canopies

to the outer reaches of space. We've got a great evening of science plan for you. Tickets at science friday.com slash salt lake city. That is Saturday, September 15th, a lot of fun in games. That's September 15th, Echols Theater, science friday.com slash salt lake city. I'm Ira Flato in New York.