Rob Phillips, professor of biophysics and biology at the California Institute of Technology, came to Hopkins last Thursday to give the third Robert Resnick lecture on his groundbreaking work in physical biology.
The conference honors Robert Resnick of “Halliday and Resnick” physics textbook fame, who passed away in January of 2014. Both of his daughters were present to give short anecdotes about their father’s notable spirit, intelligence and far-reaching legacy in the field of physics education.
Rob Phillips’s lecture, too, contained multifarious nods to Resnick’s legacy. Phillips, whose innovative work was in the field of materials science and quantitative modeling of physical systems, opened his lecture with the words, “I am a hater of French King Science” — that is, science preoccupied with facts and genealogy rather than genuine discovery of the far-ranging connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Phillips’s entire talk then elaborated on this model of a departure from “bad” science into good.
Phillips began the lecture by telling the audience about his own journey in physics, tracing his love for the sciences to a single date, April 30, 1977, when he went to a friend’s house and chanced upon a lecture on how Eratosthenes discovered the radius of the Earth. Having decided to become a physicist, Phillips then undertook a rigorous, unconventional self-education, journeying on boat for three thousand miles and teaching himself to use a sextant and the stars to navigate the earth, as well as embarking upon a 15,000-mile road trip in a van. This was done all while studying physics and mathematics, including a book from the local Bargain Bookstore by — you guessed it — Resnick.
A particularly significant section that stunned Phillips was a diagram comparing a spring to a harmonic oscillator. That was when he realized that the purpose of science was to make exciting connections between seemingly unrelated subjects. This chart served as a prelude to Resnick’s own research into finding insights in biological mechanisms by sorting them based on particular characteristics. In Phillips’ case, this was allostery.
Phillips then segued into a discussion of his own research in modeling biological systems, covering a wide range of subjects from bacterial chemotaxis to cell membrane permeability and focusing on minutiae such as a single-celled organism in the shape of the star of David and marveling at the beauty of the biology of a majestic blue whale.
Phillips concluded with an impacting thought, “Everything is a harmonic oscillator,” he said. That is, everything is related to one other; one needs to only find the equation that relates the two.
At the end of the lecture, Phillips opened the floor to questions from the audience. Most of the questions he answered centered on the current state of science education, the berth between science-educated people and the public and the politics of evolution and denial. Phillips seemed to recoil when asked to offer political judgments on the state of science in politics and he gravitated more towards answering questions on the nature of science education and the importance of teaching.
Phillips ended his question-and-answer session with a story about how his teaching has influenced his research. He brought in several students from a class he taught at the California Institute of Technology to the Galapagos Islands and embarked on a project in which he wrote a paper on every chapter of a book he taught with his students. The Robert Resnick lecture was fittingly centered on a theme of education and discovery; Phillips and his educational philosophy centered around the fact that science could be engaging, dynamic and rewarding.
And as to the importance of teaching in his own life?
Phillips smiled, pacing across the stage while pointing, thinking, gesturing with his hands and speaking tales of Enrico Fermi, his own physics mentor Ed Stone and Richard Feynman. “Teaching and research are intimately linked,” he said. “Teaching is my chance to have an adventure.”
And what an adventure the Robert Resnick lecture was.
