[Image: S. Spangenberg]
In March, Optica’s leadership came together in Washington, DC, in the society’s annual conference to discuss strategy and to brainstorm the road ahead. Charting Optica’s future is both a necessary and interesting exercise—but, needless to say, it’s not as much fun as a dive into science. Therefore, talks from two high-level invited plenary speakers typically form a highlight of each year’s Optica Leadership Conference.
This year’s plenary speakers were the Nobel Prize–winning physicist William D. (Bill) Phillips of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram Research. And both talks offered an opportunity to reflect on the role of the right tools in the advancement of science and the well-being of humanity at large.
The development of ever more powerful tools is, of course, a hallmark of human evolution. Likewise, innovation in modern science has been closely linked to better and better tools and methods. Scientific advances often come from the constructive interplay of theory and experiment; new experimental tools allow for more in-depth observations that provide an incentive to improve on theoretical models—which, in turn, often requires novel theoretical tools.
In his plenary talk at the Optica Leadership Conference, Bill Phillips offered a look at one experimental tool that has had a huge impact, the laser cooling of atoms, and summarized how the cold-atom community got started. Phillips, a pioneer in the field who invented one of the first laser cooling tools, shared his take on how the field is progressing and where it might go.
Stephen Wolfram, in contrast, has pioneered innovative theoretical tools. His company developed what is perhaps the most successful algebraic problem solver ever, Mathematica. When I was a student, computers could only be programmed to do numerical simulations of physical problems. By enabling both numerical modeling and many analytical solutions and packaging them with strong graphic and data visualization capabilities, Mathematica revolutionized the work of mathematicians and physicists.
In an inspiring panel discussion with Optica Fellow Luis L. Sánchez-Soto at the Leadership Conference, Wolfram explained that until recently, scientists tried to improve our understanding of the world using mathematical models. He went on to share his vision that in the future, we will progress instead using computational models—that is, models that explain the world not in terms of mathematical expressions, but as a series of simple programs that lead to complex behaviors.
Another intriguing suggestion Wolfram brought forward relates to a novel scientific publication format, Wolfram Notebooks, that his company already supports for books. The format, intended to add interactivity to documents and to allow readers to engage with data and drive new results, seems potentially revolutionary if it were generally adopted and caught on in scientific journals.
Taken together, the talks by Phillips and Wolfram offered a “short course” in how a vision focused on expanding the tools for science—whether in the realm of theory or in the lab—can also broaden the universe of possibilities in unprecedented ways. I am still dreaming about what I heard!
—Gerd Leuchs,
Optica President
View German, Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish translations of this message: