At Solvay, de Broglie lost, but did physics win?

You’ve probably heard of string theory, standard quantum mechanics, and general relativity. But pilot wave? No, never heard of that. The reason why goes back to the theory’s history. Antony Valentini wrote about this (and other things) in the book he coauthored, Quantum Theory at the Crossroads: Reconsidering the 1927 Solvay Conference.

In 1927, the giants of physics gathered at the Solvay Conference in Brussels, where Niels Bohr (second row, first on right) and Werner Heisenberg (back row, third from right) won a victory for standard quan­tum mechanics, rendering the theory of de Broglie (second row, third from right) “wrong.” Image courtesy of Benjamin Couprie.

This story begins in the early twentieth century, a time of revolutionary advancements in physics, at the Solvay Confer­ences in Brussels, Belgium. Some of the best and brightest minds attended these conferences: Einstein, Marie Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Planck, to name a few.

Louis de Broglie was also there. He was from Paris, then something of a backwater in theoretical physics. His theory, pre­sented at the 1927 conference, was well regarded by figures like Einstein and Schrödinger (who adapted it but threw out the particle aspect in his famous equation).

But de Broglie’s theory wasn’t widely read. That’s because it was in French. Louis de Broglie was an isolated francophone in a world of high-powered Germanic physicists. In the end, Bohr and Heisenberg won the day. At the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927, physicists met and debated quan­tum theory. It wasn’t exactly a popularity contest.

But what ended up happening was a “victory” for standard quantum mechanics, also known as Copenhagen quantum mechanics. After that, all other approaches were just seen as, well, wrong.

For all that, de Broglie went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1929.

Sparking new thought

Louis de Broglie, an isolated francophone in a world of high-powered Germanic physicists, won the Nobel Prize, but his theory was not widely read. Image courtesy of the Leopoldina National Academy.

Now, fast forward. It was after World War II and de Broglie’s work had fallen into obscurity. A young assistant professor named David Bohm started employment at Princeton Univer­sity’s Institute of Advanced Study. Coincidentally, that was also where Albert Einstein worked. So, when Bohm published a book in 1951 defending standard quantum mechanics, Einstein criticized it. Apparently that sparked a new line of thought in Bohm, because he ended up developing de Broglie’s partial proof and demonstrating that pilot-wave theory was completely equivalent to standard quantum mechanics. But the story doesn’t end here.

Around this time, McCarthyism was burning across the country. And David Bohm, when working on his Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley under Oppenheimer, had dabbled in communism. He was recommended for and then denied access to the Manhattan Project. He was brought up to hearings again and again. When he received an invitation to work at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, he took it and got out of the country. His work was further discredited when he later turned to mysticism. For years, most physicists didn’t know about the theory or thought, vaguely, that it had been proven wrong. The few scien­tific papers that were written about pilot-wave theory dismissed de Broglie’s approach as just plain wrong and Bohm as a kooky communist.

But in the ‘80s, many physicists began to question standard quantum mechanics. The theory had problems, unanswerable questions, and just didn’t make sense. In those days, Valentini says, people were defending quantum mechanics by saying things like: “It’s meaningless to ask such questions,” and “I don’t believe any other theory can be true.” But in the last fifteen years, major­ity opinion began to change as pilot-wave theory became accepted as a legitimate theory. The criticism changed to: “Well, if it is equivalent experimentally, what’s the point in studying it then?” John Bell, after spending a year’s leave from CERN at Stanford, wrote a paper that arguably came out in favor of the de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory. This paper was what prompted Antony Valentini to look for real answers to the big questions in physics.

Todd McDonald, associate professor of art, is a painter who finds extraordinary visual ideas in ordinary settings. The painting above, Bloom (oil on panel, 48 by 72 inches), is based on an image of a shopping-cart corral at a Bloom grocery store. “Through the elevation of everyday visual scenarios I draw comparisons to the history of visual spectacle to provoke discourse about how humanity finds meaning in everyday life,” McDonald says. The work of one of his students, Carly Drew, is featured here.

John Ballato’s lab in COMSET created this ribbon of polypropylene film with light-emitting nanoparticles carefully dispersed within to maintain clarity and supply a brilliant green. Read more about COMSET.

Jemma Everyhope-Roser

Jillian Weise gets some of her best ideas when she’s driving her car.
No wonder her poetry and fiction cover so much ground.

Until she took a college course about the Holocaust, Jillian Weise thought she wanted to be a broadcast journalist. Disabled people, she learned, had been the first to be exterminated by the Nazis using the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B.

“This came as a shock to me,” she says, “and it also felt a little like hidden history.” She started thinking: Where is disability history? Where does it reside? Why isn’t it taught? What does disability history even mean? Who would write it? These were the questions that would eventually lead her to write her first novel, The Colony.

“Then I went to New York for six months,” she says, “and realized that in order to be a broadcast journalist you have to always tell a story on someone else’s schedule. You have to be where the story is. And I would rather the story come to me.”

When she came back to college at Florida State University, she took courses in fiction and poetry. She loved it. She knew what she wanted to do: write. She was ready to go anywhere. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, she found a small family of writers. She says, “I really love the idea of being in conversation with other writers, other artists, finding ways to propel a conversation forward, so that it’s not the same old thing, so that it’s something no one’s ever considered before.”

She also found attention, direction, mentorship, and honesty.

“It’s difficult to find teachers who can be brutally honest with you about your work,” Weise explains. “Your family will never be that for you. Your friends will never be that for you. They’ll never be that honest, because there’s too much at stake.”

The Amputee’s Guide to Sex

In graduate school, she realized, “The people who write disabled characters for the most part are not themselves disabled. So we see disability in film and literature and culture, but these representations are inauthentic.”
When The Amputee’s Guide to Sex was published, she was twenty-five and working on her Ph.D. She was also as a part-time editorial assistant at The Paris Review and had written several one-act plays that went on to be produced.

“I had no intent to write about being disabled,” she says. “I had no intent to write from an autobiographical viewpoint. But once I realized that there really wasn’t a model of how to do it, it was liberating. I could start anywhere then. It didn’t have a canon. It was brand new.”

Although critics received The Amputee’s Guide to Sex very well, Weise found having her poetry published difficult on a personal level. “When I would read from the book, people would want to know if it’s true, or which parts are true, what really happened.”

Fiction, on the other hand, operates under different param­eters. The expectations that the content will relate to personal experience are gone. It’s safe. So that’s when she decided to really take some of the research she’d done, dive into fiction, and pursue something else—a Fulbright.

The Fulbright

The application process was rigorous. Weise planned her writ­ing and her travels, then was selected for an interview. She also needed a mentor located in the country she was visiting.

Weise’s mentor was a woman named Delfina Muschietti, a poet, critic, professor, and director of translation at the University of Buenos Aires. Weise had previously worked with her on a translation of Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. “Because she really loves Bob Dylan,” Weise says, “and she wanted to bring it into Spanish in an updated, contemporary vernacular. Anyway, she was lovely. And it was great fun to work with her on Bob Dylan’s first novel, deliberate with her over a word he used in English and what it would mean in Spanish.”

Dylan’s novel Tarantula has speed, spontaneity, and snippets of poetry that informed her work, Weise says. She also admired how his “sentences were alive with spirit and syntax,” and she wanted that to be present in her own writing.

Jillian Weise received her Fulbright and went off to Argentina to follow in Darwin’s footsteps.

Before the HMS Beagle sailed to the Galapagos, Darwin’s ship first landed in Argentina at Tierra del Fuego. Darwin observed local cultures, examined the geology, and collected specimens to send off to Cambridge. At the time he was writing The Red Notebook, which contained his theoretical writings.

Weise read The Red Notebook and lived for seven months at the end of the world in the southernmost city, Ushuaia. Darwin’s image was everywhere, from buildings to bars and beers. The work Weise did in Argentina inspired her interest in genetics and engineered the premise behind her novel.

The Colony

This novel had been a long time in the making. What finally gave her both the impetus and the time to complete it was a breakup. “The world does not want you to write a novel,” she says, laughing. “The world would rather you buy something or drink something or go out with your friends. But, after that breakup I really didn’t want to see anyone or do anything, so I really had time to dig in. It was very helpful, actually.”

She says she also stopped reading during that time. She says, “It can feel almost suffocating, having all these things you ought to be reading, but to say, ‘I’m not going to read anyone’s recom­mendations or any books right now’ allows another kind of freedom.”

This also helped her turn off the insidious, editorial side of her brain. Apparently it worked, because, she says, “Before, when I had written prose, it always seemed laborious and too difficult. But then, when I had that emotional gravity, it seemed easy and carefree. That’s what I want to achieve anytime I go back to prose.”

At the same time she was writing The Colony, she was also very aware of two movies that had won Oscars: Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside. The former was American and the latter was an international film, but both have a similar message. Weise says, “The answer at the end of both is, if you’re disabled, eutha­nasia is the only option for you. They’re both endorsing this narrative, that is, if you’re different, you should die. And that’s a really quite terrifying prospect.”

The Colony was published when she was twenty-eight.

“Cathedral by Raymond Carver”

Her next project took a new turn. Initially, she was afraid no one would take her eight-page poem, “Cathedral by Raymond Carver,” because she’s stealing Carver’s story and characters. The original “Cathedral” is a short story about a blind man who comes to visit a married couple. The husband is jealous of the blind man, because of a decade-long audiotape correspondence between the blind man and his wife.

Weise loves the short story but hates how it’s taught. The blind man is usually seen as this noble character and his friend­ship with the wife is interpreted as being platonic, she says. So Weise formed a hypothesis: “It’s because we can’t imagine a disabled person being anything other than noble or platonic. This is what led to me to write the poem.”

Carver, known for his minimalism, didn’t provide the con­tents of the audiotapes. This is what gave Jillian Weise the in that she needed to get started. “It’s a great prop,” she says, “just to imagine what these two people are sending each other through the mail for a decade.”

The poem will appear in The Literary Review, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University.

The Book of Goodbyes

Her other current project, The Book of Goodbyes, is nearly finished. Weise’s manuscript was solicited by BOA Editions and judged along twenty-five other semi-finalists before it was awarded the Isabella Gardner Prize. Isabella Gardner (1840–1942) was a great patron of the arts. In addition to leaving her money to many charities, she left an endowment for her museum with strict orders that her permanent collection should never be altered and all the main exhibits should remain as she left them.

The Book of Goodbyes contains poems Weise wrote when she was writing The Colony. “I like having multiple projects happening at once,” she explains, “so you can never get discouraged about one project because you always have something else to go to.”

The collection is structured like a play with four sections: Act I, Intermission, Act II, and the Curtain Call. As for content, it traces the arc of a relationship with a character named Big Logos. “He functions as a sort of Johnny Depp, John Keats charac­ter,” Weise says. “But also, metaphorically, he’s the word—he’s the word of classically male canon, the medical establishment, and so on. He has many connotative values.”

The obvious connotative value is religious. Her family was, she says, “extremely Christian,” but her relationship with her faith is more comfortable now. She self-describes as an Augustinian Chris­tian: “Let’s challenge everything. Let’s question. Let’s have lots of doubts. I guess, the term for what I am is an apologist. I bring that to my work too, a belief in a God, a belief that science and religion are not irreconcilable, that they can be in conversation.”

But for all those big concepts, Weise says, “At its heart I hope The Book of Goodbyes is a great love story told in poems with the structure of a play.”

The Book of Goodbyes, her third book, will be coming out in 2013. Jillian Weise will be thirty-one.

What’s next?

Weise has a new novel, she says, “But I don’t know anything about it yet. Except that I’m some pages into it and it has momen­tum. But I’m really superstitious. So I won’t tell you anything about it, because as soon as I tell you something, it will annihilate itself.” She laughs. “Or that’s my fear, at least.”

Jillian Weise is an assistant professor of creative writing in the Depart­ment of English in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities. Her poetry collection, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. The Colony was published by Soft Skull Press in 2010. Her newest collection, The Book of Goodbyes, won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and will be available from BOA Editions in fall of 2013.

Michael Meng traces the material legacy of the Holocaust.

Fist-sized chunks of lime­stone and cracked brick. Crumbled masonry and leveled columns. Shattered buttresses and pots, toys, and tools. Unfathomable mountains of the stuff in city after city. Shredded books and ash. An occasional charred bicycle.

In many European and Polish cities after World War II, rubble defined the postwar landscape, says Michael Meng in his recently published book, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Harvard University Press, 2011).

And in focusing on these blasted artifacts of war, Meng admits that he writes from a slightly unusual niche as a histo­rian. “Historians devote their careers to studying what happens through time,” says Meng, an assistant professor of history at Clemson University. “I’m interested in exploring the relationship between space and time, how time permeates the spaces around us.”

Shattered Spaces examines the material traces of Jewish life in five cities—Berlin, Warsaw, Potsdam, Essen, and Wroclaw—from 1945 to the present. Meng says he focused on Germany and Poland because they have received international scrutiny like no other European countries for how well or how poorly they have dealt with the legacies of the Holocaust.

His goal in this book was to answer two questions: What hap­pened to Jewish sites after the Holocaust? And how have Germans, Poles, and Jews dealt with these sites since 1945?

“These five cities,” Meng says, “were reduced to debris from aerial bombs, street fighting, and also deliberate acts of violence, especially against Jewish property. The Nazis demolished Jewish sites across Europe, targeting in particular sacred spaces such as synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.” Because they symbolized an enormous genocide, Jewish ruins and spaces in postwar Europe were distinct from other postwar ruins, he adds.

Confronting the rubble

After the war, German and Polish Jewish leaders in what had been reduced to tiny communities began to deal with the issue of what should be done with all these ruins, clearly realizing the enormity of the problem. “Berlin, the epicenter of Hitler’s empire, which caused much of the damage, had seventy-five mil­lion cubic meters of rubble after fifty-two thousand tons of aerial bombs and street-by-street fighting in the last throes of the war,” Meng states.

Despite the scale of the work ahead, Jewish leaders knew what ideally should happen: Jewish sites should be preserved. In 1951, a group of American and German rabbis demanded the preserva­tion of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). In the Communist East, Jewish leaders made similar appeals to officials in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Polish People’s Republic.

But Jewish organizations could do only so much, Meng explains. Local Jewish leaders had little control over what hap­pened to Jewish sites. In West Germany, East Germany, and Poland, municipal officials owned and controlled most com­munal property. Despite the similarity of this political reality, Western and Eastern leaders handled the issue of Jewish property very differently.

Across Germany, small memorials mark places where Jews once lived. The squares are called “stumbling blocks” because people stumble on them in everyday life. Photo by Michael Meng.

“Though it’s true Jewish leaders in West Germany thought the ideal solution was to preserve religious ruins, the word ‘ideal’ is key here,” Meng explains. “The amount of property and scale of the problem was so large that widespread preservation simply wasn’t a real option.” And though most Jewish communal prop­erty was returned to newly created Jewish successor organizations in West Germany, they often ended up selling it to local govern­ments in order to distribute the profits as quickly as possible to Holocaust survivors.

A distinctly different political solution unfolded in East Ger­many and Poland, where both Communist parties rejected restitu­tion altogether and seized all Jewish property. This happened for three reasons, Meng says.

“Seizure of Jewish property fell right in line with the Com­munist parties’ general nationalization of property rights under Communism. These systems also viewed restitution—and this was especially true in East Germany—as a Western, American solution and therefore untenable as the Cold War began. Thirdly, prop­erty seizure stemmed from anti-Semitism that not only hadn’t dis­sipated after the Holocaust but shaped the Communist regimes.”

Meng says that when he started the project, he thought that the main framing of the book would be about a “divided memory,” about differences in postwar handling of Jewish sites rather than similarities. This turned out not to be the case.

“For example, in both East and West, local officials were almost always the ones with the power to decide what to do with Jewish sites, and decisions by local officials often proved disastrous,” Meng says. In the 1950s and 1960s, urban planners, historical preservationists, and local political leaders demolished numerous damaged Jewish sites or allowed them to fall into ruin. In some cases, such as in Warsaw, almost every last fragment of the Jewish past—its streets, shops, and prayer houses—vanished from the urban landscape.

“As Poles and Germans rebuilt their bombed-out cities, towns, and villages, they expelled the traces of the Jewish past,” Meng says. “The few Jewish sites that escaped the wrecking ball gradually decayed by neglect or were turned into movie theaters, storage houses, swimming pools, libraries, and exhibition halls.”

Local officials in Poland, East Germany, and West Germany made deliberate choices about what to rebuild and preserve from the rubble of the war. In his book, Meng points out that when selecting what was culturally valuable, the officials were also making choices about what was not.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, they rarely perceived Jewish sites to be part of the national or local heritage worthy of being main­tained. Jewish sites also reflected a deeply discomforting past that few Germans and Poles wanted to deal with in the early postwar decades.”

A Renaissance for Jewish ruins

Not all Jewish sites in the cities Meng researched were destroyed during the war or by the postwar wrecking ball. Cem­eteries were the main Jewish spaces that survived urban recon­struction, and two main synagogues in Essen and Wroclaw also survived.

In Wroclaw, Poland, a Jewish community has been restoring the White Stork, the only synagogue in the city to survive the war. Plans call for a Jewish culture center and museum in the building. Photo by Michael Meng.

“By the late 1970s, a dramatic change started to unfold across this diverse region,” Meng says. “In one of the more remarkable shifts in postwar European history, Germans and Poles went from seeing Jewish sites as worthless rubble to perceiving them as evocative ruins that had to be preserved.” This transformation came about in large part, he says, as younger generations of Poles and Germans grew up in societies with much less hostility toward Jews.

In East Germany and Poland, Jewish sites became national and international issues, as the two Communist parties experi­enced growing pressure at home and from abroad, primarily from the United States and Israel, to rethink their earlier anti-Jewish policies.

“Preserving Jewish sites became important as both East Germany and Poland started to shift their foreign policy, gradually, to build better relations with the West toward the end of the Cold War,” Meng says, adding that since the collapse of Communism in 1989, interest in Jewish sites has increased at a dizzying rate. Tens of thousands of tourists from the United States, Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom have traveled to Poland and, increasingly, Germany, in search of the Jewish past.

“People have become drawn to Jewish spaces for a variety of reasons—heritage, growing discussions about the Holocaust, nos­talgia for a lost past, and quests for new meaning and identity,” Meng points out. “Jewish sites have become historical monu­ments, valuable ruins of the past.”

Some archival globe-trotting

Meng says that when he first began thinking of doing research for this book, he knew it would be a time-intensive project.

“I spent three years researching the book and three years writ­ing it, and during that time not a day went by when I didn’t think about Jewish spaces in Germany and Poland—it was constantly on my mind.”

His research was also travel intensive because the documents and histories he needed to read were so spread out. Meng worked in over thirty archives in Germany, Poland, the United States, and Israel.

“One of the things I most enjoy about being a historian is working in archives, those depositories of letters, diaries, mem­oirs, reports, and memos,” Meng wrote in an email from Ger­many, where he’s doing archival work for another book. “His­torians have only what has been conserved in the archives, and multiple threats exist to conservation—politics, time, war, and water. So historians reconstruct what they can from fragments.”

A number of fellowships, from the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Graham Foundation, and the Charles H. Revson Foundation, among others, supported his work and travel.

“While my book deals with many differences, it is ultimately about a shared history of Germans and Poles encountering Jewish ruins in quite strikingly similar ways across both sides of the Iron Curtain. The absence of a clear divide along national and political lines surprised me the most. This book complicates the traditional wisdom that Western democracies got things generally right, while the Communist East failed to do so,” Meng says.

Another major point, he says, is how the meanings of space shift over time.

“Contemporary historians typically think of time in linear or circular terms. But in following the thinking of scholars such as Reinhart Koselleck, an intellectual historian, and Stephen Jay Gould, I’m attracted to the notion of geological, layered time as a different way of considering the depth and complexity of the past. Just as geologists study the history of the earth preserved through the strata of its sedimentary rocks, scholars can examine the past through its layers in all their variety of shape, size, den­sity, length, texture, and color.

“This book is one measure of such historical depth, an exploration of the movement from destruction to gradual preservation.”

Michael Meng is an assistant professor of history in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities.

In much of the Southeast, the landscape’s native vocation is forest. But when European settlers arrived here, they did not find a forest primeval, wild and pristine. For centuries, native people had managed the forest, extracting its resources for shelter, fiber, fuel, and food. Deer and other game thrived in understories cleared with fire. Hunters traveled shady, park-like woodlands on broad, open paths. And in clearings, native farmers sowed their crops in the fertilizing ash of trees.

When Europeans claimed the land, forests swiftly changed. Planters cleared the coastal swamps, ditching and draining them for rice. As settlers pushed inland, great tracts of timber fell to pasture and crops such as cotton, tobacco, and corn. By the end of the nineteenth century, even steep, rocky slopes of the mountains were stripped to their bones.

The soils of South Carolina did not fare well, laid open to weather as hungry crops mined their nutrients. By the early twentieth century, once-fertile topsoil was depleted or eroded, and the land, like most of the people who tried to farm it, was impoverished. From its inception as a land-grant college, Clemson’s mission included a mandate to rebuild the vitality of the land and the economy that depended on it. Science-based farming and forestry were the tools of choice. With time, newly planted forests healed the gullied wastelands, attracting wildlife and supplying timber to the mills.

Today, the job is not finished, and the science of forests is urgent as ever. Development, pests and diseases, and a warmer climate threaten forest ecosystems and complicate the job of using resources without exhausting them again. In these pages, you will find a few examples of research that is helping to write the next chapters on how to manage a forest.

chestnut dreams | the forest’s winged enigma | battling invasives & pine killer | the question of value |built to take the heat |salt and the cypress

Chestnut dreams

In 1905, American chestnut trees in the Bronx Zoo began to die. The zookeepers, with the help of a mycologist, discovered that chestnut blight was to blame. Chestnut blight is a fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, thought to have originated in Asia. It had already cast its spores to the wind.

Now there is hope for the American chestnut. Image courtesy of Paul Wray, Iowa State University.

At that time, the American chestnut dominated the forests directly west of the Appalachians. Geoff Wang, a forest ecologist, estimates that the American chestnut accounted for one in four mature trees. The chestnuts fruited prolifically, and in addition to their commercial value, must have fed many wildlife species. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what role the American chestnut played in this ecosystem. That’s because he American chestnut was gone by the 1950s. Today, Wang says, it is “functionally extinct.” The root survives the blight and sprouts a sapling. But as soon as the sapling is old enough, the fungus kills it.

Now there is hope for the American chestnut. The American Chestnut Foundation has produced a hybrid that is 96 percent American chestnut and 4 percent Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to the blight. The tree looks like an American chestnut, but Wang and his former graduate student, Ben Knapp, now at the University of Missouri, want to learn whether it will act like one, too, physiologically and ecologically. Wang’s study is a part of the effort, led by USDA Forest Service, to find the best way to reintroduce chestnut trees so that they thrive and propagate themselves.

“It’s a dream that, one day, the Appalachian landscape may look more like it did in the past than it does today,” Wang says.

Geoff Wang is professor of silviculture and ecology in the Depart­ment of Forestry and Natural Resources, College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life Sciences.

The forest’s winged enigma

Before the microchip, it was almost impossible to study bats. Scientists chased bats with nets or studied them in caves, where some but not all of them hibernate. It’s no wonder then that bats are still very much an enigma.

“They’re tiny. They fly at night. And that made it difficult to track them,” says Susan Loeb, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist and an adjunct professor at Clemson.

In the 1990s, the Forest Service began investigating claims that deforestation was cutting into the endangered Indiana bat’s maternity habitat. The problem was, no one knew exactly where the Indiana bats went to raise their young. For the first time, radio transmitters were small enough for tracking bats. Loeb, who’d previously studied how the endangered red-cock­aded woodpecker and flying squirrel use longleaf pine habitats, joined the project. She fell in love with bats.

“They’re fascinating animals,” she says. “Bats are really impor­tant for ecosystems, for agriculture and for forestry.” Bats, she says, control insects, pollinate crops, and spread seeds.

The little brown bat weighs only about as much as two teaspoons of sugar but can catch 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour. Photo by Ralph Eldridge.

Loeb tracked the Indiana bats using radio-telemetry, following them to their maternity roosts. “We found them roosting in deeply forested habitats, in the southern Appalachians, although they roost in woodlots in the Midwest, and even in the Indianapolis airport,” she says.

She also discovered, in the Great Smoky Mountains, the first southern maternity roosts. Oddly, the bats migrated to more northerly sites to breed. Young mammals need to be kept warm; everyone knows that. So why were the female bats going to the sunny sides of trees in cooler areas? Do bat pups also have difficulty keeping cool?

Some maternity roosts are in areas where climate models predict increasingly hot summers. Loeb wants to learn whether the bats will migrate farther north or just move to shadier trees. Figuring this out will help forest managers protect potential roosting sites.

Meanwhile, Loeb also studies a more immediate threat to bats of all cave-hibernating species: white-nose syndrome. The syndrome, caused by a cave fungus, Geomyces destructans, shows up as white fuzz around the bat’s muzzle and distinctive mildewy spots on the bat’s wings. Infected bats wake from hibernation, flying during bitter winter days in search of food they’ll never find. They die emaciated. In northern states where the syndrome first struck, 72 percent of Indiana bats and 95 percent of little brown bats died. Unlike most small mammals, bats can live to be more than thirty years old and have only one pup a year, so their populations take a long time to recover.

White-nose syndrome has been sighted at the same latitude as one of Susan Loeb’s favorite bat colonies, a group of little brown bats that roost in a fish hatchery’s shed. Loeb hopes that even if these bats wake from hibernation, the southern winter will be so mild and short that they won’t deplete their fat stores and starve.

To help bats survive, Loeb studies their habitat. She knows that they prefer to hunt in open spaces such as meadows. Prescribed fires can burn out forest clutter and restore the pine forests bats love. Loeb is part of an interdisciplinary project in the Nantahala Forest looking at how clear cutting small patches affects bats, other animals, and people who use the forest. She hopes to learn whether bats will use these clear-cut areas to hunt insects, and what size and arrangement of spaces work best.

As disease, pesticides, habitat loss, wind turbines, and other threats keep the pressure on, Loeb will be looking for ways to keep the bats alive. “We’re only starting to learn about them and getting the tools we need to manage their habitats,” she says.

Chinese privet, a semi-evergreen shrub, is an aggressive invader in Southeastern forests.

Battling invasives

Dozens of invasive species vie with natives for sunlight and nutrients. There are three simple methods to control an invasive plant species: cut it out, burn it, or poison it. Geoff Wang and graduate student Lauren Pile are exploring combinations of all three on Paris Island, trying to keep the Chinese tallow tree from taking over.

In an ideal world, you’d use a manual method, weeding out the invasive species. But with huge populations to control, the manual method is impossible. Fire is the cheapest. But it doesn’t kill invasive species—it only limits how tall they grow between burnings. Herbicides, the most expensive option, do eradicate unwanted plants. But most herbicides don’t discriminate; they can kill desirable plants too.

Wang and graduate student Karen Vaughn are working in Congaree National Park with Chinese privet, an invasive shrub that strangles young trees. The researchers have chosen an herbicide that is absorbed through leaves, and they’re applying it in the dormant season, when most native species are leafless and the semi-evergreen Chinese privet is not.

“When an invasive species becomes abandoned in a native ecosystem, we want to know how it impacts the regeneration of native species,” Wang says. “We want to be able to bring the original ecosystem back.”

The southern pine beetle, tiny as a grain of rice. Image courtesy of the USDA Forest Service.

Pine killer

Tiny as a grain of rice, the southern pine beetle has caused several hundred million dollars in timber losses in the U.S. The beetle bores into trees and chews serpentine galleries into the innermost bark, stopping nutrient flow. It also spreads a fun­gus deadly to pines.

Especially vulnerable are the loblolly pine trees, planted for their quick growth. Unlike longleaf pines, loblollies don’t cope well with drought, which lowers their resistance to beetle attacks.

Geoff Wang’s research is aimed at helping forest managers restore beetle-damaged forests.

The question of value

How can you measure a tree’s economic worth? It’s a question people ask Thomas Straka, an expert in forest economics. Trees, he says, are one of the few goods that accrue value as they age. But it takes complex calculations—using wood yield and valuation functions—to determine when it’s best to harvest. And the equa­tion has to take into account more than money.

How do we value a tree if its use isn't lumber or pulp?

Conservation typically means using forests wisely, and a forest manager’s job is to make sure the lands serve public interests, Straka says. That means, before a manager can make decisions, he or she has to know the value of the trees in terms saleable wood, wildlife habitat, aesthetics, recreation, socioeconomics, and more. One of Straka’s recent projects uses socioeconomic data with GIS to predict wood arson, a major cause of wildfires.

Socioeconomic factors also apply in the new field of sustain­able forestry. Straka works with everyone, from paper mills to private citizens, to help them attach a monetary value to sus­tainability. Conservation easements that compensate property owners for losses in the transition from loblolly forests to longleaf forests are one example of this approach, he says.

Straka also works on systems that will help city officials and private owners assess the value of urban trees, taking into account air-quality improvement, carbon sequestration, and storm-water reduction. If a tree shades a building, it can reduce electricity costs. Straka also accounts for the value of the tree itself, its girth, type, region, and even aesthetic value.

But a huge amount of a tree’s value comes from people’s perceptions, he says. A tree-shaded shopping district may attract customers and generate revenue. People especially like oak trees, Straka says, because we view them as a long-term investment. “If you have a beautiful live oak in your front yard that’s two hundred years old,” Straka says, “how do you put a value on it?”

Thomas Straka is a professor in the Division of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Built to take the heat

When young, the longleaf pine protects its terminal bud from fire with a spray of water-dense needles. When its root is long enough, the tree armors itself in thick fire-resistant bark and shoots upward, elevating vulnerable branches above the flames. Image courtesy of the USDA Forest Service.

Usually, setting something on fire creates more prob­lems than it solves. The longleaf pine is a notable exception.

Before European colonization, longleaf pine savanna stretched across the Southeastern coastal plains from Virginia to Mississippi. Tall pines and broad meadows composed a unique park-like vista that housed the high­est biodiversity seen outside the tropics.

There were 92 million acres. Today, only 5 percent of the savanna survives. Fortunately, that’s enough to give researchers like Geoff Wang an understanding of how this ecosystem works. The keystone species is the longleaf pine, which provided both sustenance and shelter to many species, including the red-cockaded woodpecker, that are now endangered because of the longleaf pine’s decline.

The longleaf pine is uniquely adapted to regenerate after fires. As Wang says simply, “No other tree can do that.”

Native tribes burned the pine savanna every two to five years. Fire would wash through the forest, clearing the midstory and searing through normal saplings. The resulting open spaces and fertile ash gave rise to the region’s diversity.

Wang has already studied the tree’s special adapta­tions and the best methods to restore this ecosystem. Now he’s learning how Southeastern forests may adapt to climate change and increased drought. Using an exten­sive data set taken from the USDA’s Forest Service Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA) program, he’s trying to deter­mine which species are drought resistant, which will grow more abundant, which will decrease, and what kind of stand density and conditions will help a tree flourish.

Longleaf pines grow in the driest and sandiest sites, tolerate nutrient-poor soils, and are very drought-resistant. So the longleaf pine, a survivor from the past, may come to stand for the future.

Salt and the cypress

Cypress trees, with their roots in dark mud and their leaves in the sunlight, have quietly outlived empires. With their neighboring maples, ashes, and gums, they form the basis of a complex ecosystem that once stretched along many Southeastern waterways.

William Conner has been studying these ecosystems, called freshwater forested wetlands, for about forty years. He measures tree growth and leaf production, comparing his findings against twenty-five years of data, but he can tell by observation alone: The trees are under stress.

Look at the ground. If you see dapples of sunlight, above is an unhealthy cypress. Sunlight reaching the ground means a thinning canopy and reduced leaf formation. When there aren’t enough leaves breaking down, you get fewer nutrients in the soil and more carbon in the atmosphere.

Conner wants to get an idea of what these trees need to flourish. Photo provided by Jemma EveryHope-Roser.

Conner, along with a team that stretches from Virginia to Louisiana, has been researching environmental causes for the stress. The trees have two main problems: dams and climate change. Nearly all Southeastern rivers have been harnessed by dams and hemmed in by dikes. The dikes prevent sediment from entering the streams, and the little sediment that does enter gets trapped behind the dams instead of fertilizing the wetlands downstream.

Conner is studying sedimentation in the Congaree National Park, home to one of the last and largest intact forests of its kind it the United States: an old-growth, bottomland, hardwood, floodplain forest. Conner and his colleagues compare soil layers to a tree’s age to get a historical perspective on how sedimentation affected growth. He updates this picture by tracking current tree growth and sediment deposits. Using the data, he can get an idea of what these trees need to flourish.

He’s also looking at coastal freshwater forested wetlands influenced by tides. Over the course of Conner’s career, he’s seen the health of these forests decline, mostly because of rising water levels and increasing salinity. Sometimes salinity rises after dredging, which allows salt to intrude upstream, and locks can draw seawater into a river.

Other factors are related to climate change. Droughts concentrate the water’s salt. Hurricanes do immense damage to forested wetlands—not because of the winds but because of the slugs of salt water they push inland. Topographies simplified for farming and commerce now provide fast-track channels for a hurricane’s inland attack; roads, dikes, and other man-made structures detain the water on land.

But one of the biggest culprits is the rising sea level. In South Carolina, it’s approximately two millimeters per year. That’s nothing compared to the ten millimeters in Louisiana. There you have what Conner calls ghost forests—white dead trunks jut up like bones from dark waters that were once the forest’s lifeblood but are now its poison.

This slow and encroaching death seems almost impossible to stop. The cypresses, being more salt-tolerant than their neighboring maples and gums, are usually the last to go. Sometimes, Conner says, you’ll see regions of dead forest with only a few hardy cypress survivors. Conner and his fellow researchers want to plant seedlings of these salt-tolerant trees to help regenerate the forest. His work in the Southeast will help him understand what the trees need to flourish.

Conner says the seas have risen before. He explains that there’s a cycle of sea level changes that happens slowly over the course of approximately one hundred thousand years. In the past, as the seas rose millimeter by millimeter, the trees migrated away from the threat, casting their seeds and growing their way to safety over the course of centuries.

But the cypresses can’t save themselves anymore because we’re in the way. Over 50 percent of the region’s population lives within a mile of a coast or a waterway. Conner works with landowners and developers to preserve as much as possible, but it can be difficult to balance the landowners’ goals with the complexities of ecosystems. As Conner says, “It’s all connected.”

William Conner is professor of forestry and natural resources in the College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life Sciences. For more about Clemson’s efforts to protect cypress forests, see “Of Seeds and the River,” Spring 2012 issue of Glimpse.

Bottomland forest in the Congaree National Park: Where sunlight reaches the ground you'll find unhealthy forest. Photo provided by Jemma EveryHope-Roser.

Architect Dina Battisto and her team reshape health care’s spaces.

Say it’s the year 2020. You wake to find yourself in a hospital bed and take a look around. Here’s what you see:

Battisto conceived this virtual prototype, Patient Room 2020, in collaboration with Clemson alumnus David Ruthven and the nonprofit firm NXT.

• a room with sleek curves and seamless microbe-resistant surfaces,

 

• a digital flat-screen monitoring your vital signs,

 

• sliding entry doors made from smart-glass technology with digital alerts for patient allergies or special conditions,

 

• a foot-of-the-bed media center for information exchange between caregivers and visitors

 

• trash containers with sensors that alert maintenance robots for pickup, and

 

• a cantilevered nook projecting from the wall that contains a pull-down bed, workstation, and drink chiller for family members.

Welcome to Patient Room 2020, a virtual prototype envi­sioned and created by Clemson University’s Dina Battisto, associ­ate professor in the School of Architecture, along with Clemson alumnus David Ruthven and the healthcare innovation nonprofit firm NXT. (To learn more about the design itself, please visit NXT’s website). Their prototype received the 2010 Professional Con­ceptual Design Excellence Award in a competition cosponsored by the interior design industry magazine Contract and the Center for Health Design. And though the prototype looks a little like the sick bay of the Starship Enterprise, there is nothing science fiction about the principles grounding its design features.

“We had five goals that guided the prototype’s creation,” says Battisto, whose voice rises with enthusiasm when she discusses the project. “They were humanization, sustainability, efficiency, empowerment, and adaptability. Efficiency and adaptability are primarily aimed at helping healthcare professionals do their work better, so the process of healthcare delivery is no longer about the wait and the waste.”

While all of these goals were important in the 2020 vision, it’s the goal of humanization that drove Battisto the most. “The Patient Room 2020 mock-up is very high tech, but it’s not about that,” she says. “It’s about restoring hope and comfort and control to patients and their families.”

‘It comes from deep inside’

Battisto: My passion is a result of my experience with my parents, that's why I committed my professional life to healthcare design.

Battisto knows what it’s like to sit hopeless beside the hospital bed of a gravely ill loved one. She’s been there, twice.

When the MVP-athlete Battisto graduated from her Alabama high school, she had more than ten basketball scholarship offers for college. Her father’s health was not good, though, and Battisto worried. She was the oldest child of her Italian-immigrant father and American mother, and a first-generation college student. She felt responsible, she says, to “make sure that I had a profession that would allow me to care for my parents if I needed to.”

So Battisto gave up on all those scholarships and turned her­self to the study of architecture at the University of Tennessee. In her junior year, her father had a massive stroke. Her parents were divorced by then, and Battisto decided to leave school to take care of him. Battisto’s mother intervened to enable her daughter to stay enrolled. But at every summer break, Battisto returned home to help care for her father, who eventually moved to a nursing home. “In summers, I waitressed in the early morning, took care of him at the nursing home during the day, and waitressed again at night,” she says.

By 1991, with a B.A. in architecture, Battisto knew she wanted to specialize in healthcare architecture: “That’s what brought me to Clemson the first time—my experience with my father and Clemson’s unique focus on healthcare design,” she says.

In 1996, Battisto’s father died. (“That was tough,” she says simply.) In 2007, her mother developed stomach cancer and died not long after. Once again confronted with the healthcare system and its environments, Battisto says her mother’s illness and death “re-upped” her motivation. “The one thing we all have in common is that, when we are sick, we are dependent on our environment,” she says. “It’s our human ‘common denominator,’ but we don’t realize it until we experience it firsthand. “I think motivation comes from deep inside,” she contin­ues. “That’s what happened to me. My passion is a result of my experience with my parents, that’s why I committed my profes­sional life to healthcare design.”

An art and a science

Many of us consider architecture an art—we might think of the nested shells of the Sydney Opera House or the floating planes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Battisto, who holds four degrees in architecture including a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees, one of them from Clemson, takes a different point of view.

She begins with research, which is not typically part of the plan. To Battisto, though, architecture is just as much science as art, and she doesn’t mean simply the technical calculations it takes to make a building stand up.

Most of us consider architecture an art. Battisto takes a different point of view.

Battisto is a firm believer in the tools of the scientific method­—observations, hypotheses, predictions, experiments, and analyses. She believes these tools are essential to creating efficient, healthy, and beautiful buildings. This is especially true in the field of healthcare architecture, which deals primarily with designing hos­pitals, clinics, nursing homes, and other such facilities. Because of strict codes and federal regulations, sophisticated medical technol­ogy needs, and the urgency of life-and-death situations, healthcare design is complex and constrained. It is also expensive, making a huge economic impact on the United States.

“Healthcare clients are getting smarter and starting to demand evidence to demonstrate why a certain design is proposed,” Battisto says. “They want to know how the design has an impact on out­comes. Does it make patients more satisfied? Does it reduce stress and strain on nurses? Does it reduce bottom-line costs? What’s the value design offers?”

These are questions research can answer, according to Battisto, who has been building a research program within the School of Architecture at Clemson over the last decade or so. One of the strengths of the program is the unusual Architecture 821, a research and design methods seminar now required for students in Clemson’s master’s of architecture program . Battisto admits that, when she first returned to Clemson as a professor, she felt a little like an outsider. “Architecture embraces the designer, not the researcher,” she says. “I’m surprised at how long it takes for some people in the field to recognize the value of research.”

She does see architecture’s culture shifting, but to Battisto, a self-described perfectionist who likes to “get things done correctly and quickly,” the slow pace of change has been frustrating.

“To me, the value of research is obvious,” she says. “A project can be creative and pretty, but does it work? You have to ask that question. Architecture becomes transformational when it brings together design and research.”

Designing what comes next

In her work, Battisto conducts research and feeds the results into new conceptual designs and architectural prototypes that can be evaluated under simulated conditions. It’s this approach that led to Patient Room 2020.

Battisto (center) reviews design concepts with her graduate students, Deborah Franqui and Mason Couvillion.

In 2005, collaborating with David Allison, professor of archi­tecture at Clemson, as well as with Clemson students, Battisto designed an inpatient room prototype with support and sponsor­ship provided by the Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System. Various suppliers and contractors volunteered time and supplies to help build a mock-up of the prototype in NXT’s research lab near Greer, South Carolina. There, under simulated conditions, Battisto and her research team studied things like the head wall (where outlets for electricity and medical gases are located), the lighting, and the location and functionality of the bathroom. (The lab near Greer is one of two architecture research labs she uses; the other is on the Clemson campus in the School of Nursing.)

Battisto and her team used the prototype test results to inform the next iteration. The patient room was actually built in the Village Hospital at Pelham, South Carolina. Battisto and her students conducted a post-occupancy evaluation, using surveys, observation, and interviews.

“The majority of the staff listed the patient rooms as the best feature of the hospital,” Battisto says. Encouraged by the success of the patient room at Pelham, Battisto went “blue sky.” What, she wondered, would the patient room of the future look like? “I thought, ‘Let’s take it further, let’s figure out how to translate a design into a futuristic room.”

For two years, she did just that. Collaborating with David Ruthven, a Clemson alumnus, as well as NXT, Battiso created a patient room design prototype as part of the Department of Defense’s Hospital of the Future initiative. That design became the award-winning Patient Room 2020 prototype.

Making a difference

Along the way to her career in architecture, Battisto spent several years working as a senior management consultant for a healthcare planning company in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Although Battisto enjoyed helping healthcare clients as a consultant, she found the work limiting.

“I didn’t see a lot of opportunity for really being creative,” she says, “and I really wanted to help make a bigger impact.”

After twelve years at Clemson, she’s certainly accomplished that goal. Selected as one of Twenty Who Are Making a Differ­ence in 2008 by Healthcare Design magazine, Battisto is widely recognized in the field for her evidence-based design expertise. That expertise has drawn the attention of the U.S. Military Health System.

Battisto explains that, in the wake of the 2007 scandal over derelict conditions and neglect at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Military Health System received sizable federal fund­ing to renovate existing facilities and build new ones.

“People were horrified by the sight of this very old, outdated facility where wounded soldiers were being cared for,” Battisto says. “That exposure spurred quite an investment.”

But investment in what, where, and how? The MHS mandate was to “create world-class facilities,” Battisto says, “but they didn’t know what they needed to do.” So they turned to Battisto, along with her longtime co-investigator David Allison, to figure it out. “Our charge was to develop the guiding principles and values that define what the MHS should do,” she says.

Over time, working with Allison, collaborators at Georgia Tech, NXT, and the Noblis consulting firm in Virginia, Battisto and her team developed nine principles that defined a world-class facility, such as safe, patient-centered care, operationally efficient settings, and a positive work environment. Those nine principles became the basis for evaluating how well a military health facility is performing.

Next, her team developed a facility-evaluation toolkit. The toolkit includes an eight-step implementation methodology plus a set of tools including surveys, interview techniques, and other instruments designed to collect data systematically from facilities about what’s working and what’s not.

For example, what is the most effective, patient-centered layout for helping people find their way in a clinic or hospital? What is an acceptable distance for a staff member to travel between the medication room and a patient unit, or an accept­able distance for a patient to travel from the facility’s entrance to within the ambulatory surgery department? What’s the optimal size and layout for a patient room?

“We don’t know these things,” Battisto says. “We don’t have a knowledge base to go on, like medicine does. If we don’t have a knowledge base, if we don’t make changes based on lessons learned, then we continuously repeat the same mistakes.”

A $49 billion organization that provides health services to 9.6 million patients in close to 50 hospitals, the Military Health System is motivated to know what does and doesn’t work, Battisto notes. “Obviously, it’s in their best interest to learn from their existing facilities, so when they build new or renovate, it can be better. The data that our toolkit collects can be used to build a database for benchmarking, to provide guidance on how to make changes and improvements.”

Battisto and her research team initially tested their facil­ity evaluation toolkit at Bassett Army Community Hospital in Fairbanks, Alaska. Impressed with the potential of the toolkit, the MHS made a commitment to continue building the program. Battisto and her colleagues are currently conducting a second pilot test in the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital just outside of Washington, D.C. The goal is to refine the instruments and processes offered in the toolkit, and eventually, for the MHS to use the findings from the evaluations to reform space-planning criteria, guidelines, and room templates.

“The toolkit is the beginning. The evaluations it produces should feed forward into facility planning,” Battisto says. By constructing a facility evaluation program, she says, “the MHS will learn how to build a facility that is ultimately world class.”

For too long, Battisto says, healthcare architecture has been treating the symptoms, not the cause, of problems in healthcare facilities. She hopes the MHS toolkit and the knowledge base it is beginning to yield will someday influence all hospital design.

“In the end, it all comes down to research and the knowledge that comes from it,” she says. “Research makes for better designs, and better designs make for better environments. That’s why I do it—I really want to make a difference.”

Dina Battisto is associate professor in the School of Architecture and leads the Built Environment and Health Concentration in the interdisci­plinary Planning, Design, and Built Environment Ph.D. Program in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities.

Jemma Everyhope-Roser

Antony Valentini to quantum physics: Get real.

In the warm winter sunshine, a distinguished man stands on the curb outside a local bank, wearing a casual jacket, his dark, curly hair stranded with silver. He watches with fascination as a taxi driver demonstrates how to fling a poison­ous snake off into the grass using a stick. Antony Valentini shakes his head a little and wonders, aloud, if anyone would believe him back home. Poisonous snakes are foreign to him—as foreign as the big black king snake he found sunbathing in his back yard.

Antony Valentini at Starbucks.

Valentini was raised in London, where his Italian parents still live. He has lived and worked in Italy, Austria, France, and Canada, among others. Accustomed to public transportation, he doesn’t drive, and he’s struck up a friendship with the taxi driver who drops him off every morning in town. After breakfast at the Pot Belly Deli, Valentini usu­ally ambles across the street to Starbucks.

“I’m addicted to their tea,” he explains.

With a mug of Earl Grey in hand, Valentini sits down at a small table with his back to the windows. He removes a pencil and a notepad from his Italian leather briefcase. He carries this hardbound notebook everywhere, in case an idea strikes him.

But this morning, he isn’t jotting down new ideas. He has a stack of printouts from his book with him so that he can review it a page at a time.

“I like having a buzz around me,” he says. That’s why he works here at Starbucks, reviewing his final draft. About eight hundred pages long, the book is a summation of his work—a systematic rejection of the foundations of one of the longest and strongest-held theories in all of science. At Cambridge, he started out studying standard quantum mechanics; it’s what physicists are taught. But to him, it just didn’t make any sense. He remembers thinking, “But how can we understand this?”

A strange conspiracy

In standard quantum mechanics, one particle’s motion can be correlated to another’s, even if they’re distant and unrelated. So it seems like the particles are “communicating” at faster-than-­light speeds.

Valentini shakes his head and says, “This looked like some kind of strange conspiracy. It’s as if there’s something going on, faster than light, beneath the surface, but you can’t get your hands on it directly and use it to send signals. If there really are faster-than-light influences, why can’t we use them? It’s as if the laws of physics are conspiring to hide something.”

One of the reasons “quantum” sounds so mysterious to non-physicists is that, according to standard quantum mechanics, any given particle may or may not exist, or may be anywhere in a sliding scale of existence. But that makes no sense on the macro­scopic level, in the world we observe every day.

If atoms don’t have definite physical states, then how can this cup exist?

“If you’re holding a cup,” Valentini says, hefting up his white ceramic mug of tea, “it’s not going to vanish. It’s there. If atoms don’t have definite physical states, then how can this cup exist?”

In standard quantum mechanics, Antony explains, “On the microscopic realm, there’s no definite reality, and in the mac­roscopic realm, there is.” He taps the brown-varnished table, demonstrating its physical reality. “So standard quantum mechan­ics is ultimately ambiguous, because there’s no precise boundary between these two realms.”

This is a part of what’s known as the measurement problem because it usually comes up during experiments, when physicists are attempting to measure particles. The question always becomes, “Did that particle exist in this way before we observed and measured it?” The term is actually a misnomer, Valentini explains, for what should really be called the reality problem.

Standard quantum mechanics is what Valentini calls “a dirty theory” because you can use it and get accurate results, but you can’t understand it. “Why should the world be like that?” he remembers thinking. “There had to be an explanation.”

When Valentini encountered the de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory, he says, “It gave a beautiful explanation for this conspiracy.”

The basis of pilot-wave theory is particles are guided (or piloted) by a wave. You can imagine this by picturing driftwood riding a wave. If you have a bottle on the same wave, the debris would wash toward the shore together, almost as if it were one.

Of course, this metaphor only goes so far. According to pilot-wave theory, this debris would actually be a single higher-dimen­sional object. When you get what looks like multiple particles riding the wave as one object, there are faster-than-light effects. But you don’t have to explain them away with that state of “indefinite reality” like in quantum mechanics. There’s a definite reality here. Essentially, in pilot-wave theory, the measurement problem isn’t even a problem at all.

“It gave a precise hypothetical account of the world,” Valentini says.

A law that isn’t

Pilot-wave theory has three axioms. The first is de Broglie’s law of motion, which specifies exactly how particles are guided by the wave. The second is Schrödinger’s wave equation, telling us how the wave itself changes over time. The third is that particles have to start off with a certain probability distribution.

“In any given experiment, each particle is accompanied by a wave. The particle starts off somewhere inside the wave. If I repeat the experiment, the particles sometimes start here, or there, or there, or there,” he says, indicating points in the air with his pen. “If I repeat the experiment many times, they start out with a distribution that is proportional to the square of the height of the wave.”

In order to give results that can be verified with an experi­ment, all three axioms have to be used. But the third axiom gave Valentini pause. It didn’t sound like a law describing how things work. It sounded like an input, like data.

Shake a box of pennies long enough, heads and tails will come up even. The universe has been shaking for a long time.

Valentini pondered this. Then he posed his own explanation: This input is like a law because all of the particles we use in experiments always start out with that probability distribution.

But maybe, he says, the particles don’t always have to start out like that. Think of shaking a box of pennies. If you shake it enough, you’ll get an even heads-to-­tails distribution. That’s sort of what’s happened to the universe. It’s been around for a while. It’s been shaken up. The particles have reached an even distribution, or close enough.

But what if those starting conditions changed? What if the dis­tribution wasn’t always like that? If you go back far enough, right back to the beginning of the universe, then you might get really different conditions. You could be talking about a physics that describes the early convulsions of the universe, the big bang itself. This would also answer a question that other physicists ask Valentini a lot, which is: “If standard quantum mechanics and pilot-wave theory provide the same experimental results, then why study pilot wave at all?”

Because these two theories may not describe the same physics. Because, if the conditions were different in the beginning of the universe, maybe only pilot-wave theory can describe the big bang.

“Now,” Valentini says, “how can we test that?”

The universe as a lab

The experimental lab is all around us—it’s the universe itself. The universe started out as homogenous, a smooth and even dis­tribution. But now, clumps of galaxies are divided by vast swathes of nothingness. How did that happen?

An extract from the Digitized Sky Survey of a region of the Perseus constellation. Image from the ESA /STScI DSS.

Cosmology actually does have a good understanding of that. In the very beginning, the universe was smooth—but it wasn’t perfectly, uniformly smooth. There were tiny lumps. Each region of space that was slightly lumpier, slightly thicker, exerted more gravitational pull. It attracted other matter to itself, and the more matter it attracted, the more it could attract. And eventually you got galaxies, nebulas, solar systems, suns, and planets.

What’s not understood about this process is this: Why didn’t the matter start out as perfectly, evenly distributed? What seeded the formation of galaxies, of structure in the universe?

“In the nineteen-eighties, there was a theory developed called inflationary cosmology,” Valentini explains. “It is by now the leading candidate for what happened in the beginning of the universe. The reason why it’s called ‘inflation’ is because, in this theory, the universe went through a period of exponential expan­sion very early on.”

People began to calculate, using quantum mechanics, what would happen on an exponentially expanding space—and they found fluctuations that could explain the non-uniformity of the universe. “Basically,” Valentini says, “these fluctuations in turn trace back to the third axiom.”

It seems impossible to gather data about what happened four­teen billion years ago, in the universe’s first fraction of a second, but Valentini says, confidently, “There is a way.”

Data from space

It’s called the cosmic microwave background. A relic of the big bang, this is background radiation that provides a snapshot of the past. It shows what cosmology knows must have been true: small ripples, the slight non-uniformities that led to what we see in the skies today.

As we point more satellites at deep space, we get more infor­mation on what cosmic radiation actually looks like. Valentini believes he may be able to use this information to show some­thing: that the third axiom is wrong, that particles don’t always have to have this starting point distribution. If that’s the case, then we should see anomalies in this cosmic background radiation.

This artist's impression depicts Planck against a background image of the Milky Way. Image from the ESA.

And anomalies have been reported.

But these anomalies are controversial and they may not even be statistically significant. The data we have are from the old WMAP satellite, which is not as precise as it could be.

Valentini needs the new data coming from the Planck satellite. With its next-generation instruments, the Planck will provide data that are more precise than ever before.

But before the Planck satellite’s data can be released, the data must be “cleaned.” Starting with the satellite’s readings, scientists will use complex calculations to subtract our galaxy’s background noise, instrumental noise, and instrumental errors. Only then will they release the cleaned data—and this should happen within the year.

“There are some hints in the data on large scales,” Valentini says. “I hope this will be clarified by the new data from the Planck satellite. But in the meantime there is some work that needs to be done to make my predictions more precise.”

Valentini wants to use the Palmetto Cluster—the university’s supercomputer—to run complex computer simulations of the early universe.

If he can accurately predict anomalies shown in the Planck satellite’s data, he’ll have solid evidence supporting pilot-wave theory. If pilot wave could describe what standard quantum mechanics cannot, that would have huge ramifications in the physics world.

Antony Valentini sips his tea from a mug that is as undeniably real as the busy coffee shop around him. If he’s right, then we may have a whole new way to understand how the universe works.

Antony Valentini is a professor of theoretical quantum physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the College of Engineering and Science. His work is funded jointly by Clemson University and the John Templeton Foundation.

an underdog theory

You’ve probably heard of string theory, standard quantum mechanics, and general relativity. But pilot wave? No, never heard of that.

The reason why goes back to the theory’s history.

Read more in an underdog theory.

Leigh Anne Clark helps dog breeders avoid some pitfalls of breeding for beauty.

The blue merle walks into the room, her long, luxurious coat following the geography of her body like contour lines on a hiking map. Everyone gazes at her, reaches to touch her, wants to be her friend. Her bright eyes, attentive ears, and slender snout are all part of the perfectly portioned package that confirms you are looking at a rough-coated collie. The splashes of grey on black present the distinctive and desirable blue merle coat pattern.

Leigh Anne Clark appreciates Daisy’s looks, but Clark knows beauty is more than skin deep. It is coded in DNA, chromosomes, genes dominant and recessive, and expressed by the crosses that occur from sexual reproduction—the offspring of meiosis. Clark is a geneticist. If dogs are our BFFs, she is theirs, researching genetic waypoints that can improve canine health and also our own.

“I began learning about dog genetics when I got my first dog, Lucky—a male Shetland sheepdog—from a breeder, who became a friend and teacher,” Clark says. “I thought about becoming a vet but realized that I didn’t like treating animals as much as I liked figuring out what was wrong with them.” Clark builds relationships between scientists doing genetics research in labs and breeders doing fieldwork by breeding dogs.

“My laboratory studies canine inherited diseases to improve the health and quality of life for dogs and uses the dog as a model to understand the genetics underlying mammalian hereditary diseases,” Clark says. “A major goal for us is to develop commercially available tests for early detection of disease, helping breeders eliminate affected and carrier dogs from breeding programs.”

Clark specializes in canine coat pigmentation patterns, the colors and markings of dog coats. “I am interested in merle, which is a coat pattern, not a color,” she says. “It is characterized by patches of full pigment on a dilute background.”

As a teenager working for her friend the Shetland sheepdog breeder, Clark had learned about breeding for coat color—bi­color, tri-color, and merles. As a researcher she wondered if anyone had found the gene that causes merles. “At least one researcher had looked, but nobody had found it,” Clark says. Nobody, that is, until Clark and her colleagues did.

Merle as beauty mark

Imagine a solid color dog—usually black or brown—splashed with bleach. The result would be lighter color patches, often called blue by dog fanciers, on the base coat. Many popular breeds have merle patterning—Australian shepherds, coolies, Shetland sheepdogs, collies, Cardigan Welsh corgis (the ones with tails), Pyrenean shepherds, and Catahoula leopard dogs. Dachshund breeders call merle patterning “dappling.” And the merle gene, Clark says, is involved in creating the harlequin pattern on Great Danes.

Geneticists use Punnett squares (named for Reginald Punnett) to determine the probability of offspring having a particular genotype. In the Punnett squares above, a capital M denotes merle as the dominant allele, and a lowercase m denotes the recessive non-merle allele. Non-merle dogs are depicted in black, but they could have any coat color or pattern other than merle. The squares above show the expected outcomes from a merle-to-non-merle mating (left) and merle-to-merle mating (right). The latter may result in white progeny with sensory defects.

Many dog owners see merle as a beauty mark, distinctive and random, and they are willing to pay more for merle dogs. Uneducated or unscrupulous breeders mistakenly think that crossing merles with merles will increase the likelihood of a litter of merles. This approach may cause more pain than profit.

Responsible dog breeders certainly want to sell pups, but not at the price of a dog’s health. They avoid merle-to-merle matings, which can produce double merles—those receiving the dominant variation from both parents. Double merles are mostly white and can have defects in hearing and vision.

Unfortunately some merles are hard to detect.

“A dog can be a ‘cryptic’ merle, which shows only small merle patches or no pattern at all and looks like a non-merle,” Clark says. “If a cryptic merle is mated with an another merle, one in four of the puppies will be a double merle and at risk for deafness and blindness.”

Double merles have been compared with humans who have Waardenburg Syndrome 2. Both groups have a genetic disorder that hampers the growth of pigment cells, which play a role in development of eye shape and color and the nerve endings in the inner ear. The results often are distinctive soft blue eyes and deafness. In humans, a stark white forelock also can be the calling card of the syndrome.

“There’s no cure for Waardenburg syndrome, but the work will help researchers identify the genetics guiding it, which can alert genetic counselors and dog breeders to look for the problem during DNA screening,” Clark says.

Merle figures into another topic of Clark’s research, the harlequin pattern found on Great Danes. The pattern is the bold black-and-white look that is accepted as part of the breed standard, which includes black, brown, and brindle coloring as well. The Great Dane Charitable Trust has funded her work to identify genetic mechanisms that produce the harlequin pattern. She has worked on the harlequin genetic factor since 2005.

“All harlequins are merles, but they are more than merle,” says Clark. “There’s a separate gene for harlequin. It is a dominant modifier of merle that removes the dilute pigment, leaving the background white.”

In other words, the harlequin gene acts as a stronger bleaching agent, eliminating the merle’s light bleach spots on the base coat, resulting in white base-coat spots.

A genetic test

Clark is the only researcher doing this work, which involves finding the gene or group of genes that result in the black-and­-white pattern. It’s important because, like producing merles in a litter, careful breeding is vital. If done without knowing the DNA portrait of the breeding dogs, the result can be lethal; puppies inheriting the harlequin gene from both parents die in the womb. Clark’s research has given breeders a genetic test to identify dogs carrying the harlequin factor.

“It’s a complicated pathway,” Clark says, adding that the research may have a human link, too, because the responsible gene is part of a biological process involved in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

Other dog breeds have found places in Clark’s lab.

She is working on a skin and muscle inflammatory disease— dermatomyositis—that affects collies and Shetland sheepdogs. It is also a painful and disfiguring autoimmune disorder in humans, mostly children. Clark, who came to Clemson in 2009, has a longtime relationship with German shepherds going back to her days at Texas A&M, where she studied a pancreatic disorder prominent in the dog breed.

Markers for a deadly disorder

“We are looking for genetic markers for pancreatic acinar atrophy, which causes a lack of digestive enzymes made in the pancreas,” Clark says. “The dog literally starves, even if it is eating well, because it cannot digest and absorb food.”

Dogs with the pancreatic disorder are bags of bones, ravenously hungry and malnourished, startlingly thin, their coat dull, dry, and brittle. There is no cure, but the lack of digestive enzymes can be managed over the dog’s lifetime by adding enzyme powder supplements directly to food or in pills and capsules.

The condition affects more than German shepherds. Chow chows and collies also are at high risk, but researchers say all dog breeds are vulnerable. The condition can occur at any time during a dog’s life and may not be evident until much of the pancreas is damaged or destroyed. Every year about 8,000 dogs worldwide are diagnosed with the disorder.

The research indicates that the condition is inherited in German shepherds. Clark is examining the genetic variations between healthy German shepherds and those with the disorder. If she can identify the genes or group of genes harboring the mutation, researchers could develop a genetic test for it.

“Breeders would have a test to find out which dogs are at risk,” Clark says. “The information could be used to make breeding decisions. Right now, controlled breeding is the only way to reduce the number of dogs with the condition.”

Clark’s pancreatic research has been funded by the American Kennel Club Canine Health Foundation. In support of the more than 140 breeds recognized by the AKC, the foundation has spent more than $22 million on studies in nearly all of the major diseases in dogs, including cancer, epilepsy, thyroid disease, hip dysplasia, allergies, heart disease, progressive retinal atrophy, and cataracts. It is the largest foundation in the world to fund exclusively canine health studies.

Man’s best friend has millions of best friends in return; one happens to be a geneticist using her career to help dogs live healthier and longer lives.

“I am not a cat person,” says Leigh Anne Clark.

Leigh Anne Clark is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry, College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life Sciences. Her laboratory is currently funded by the Collie Health Foundation for
dermatomyositis research.

stories by Neil Caudle

Arming particles for precision strikes against cancer.

His was not the usual path to a job fighting cancer. Stephen Foulger was a California dude, a surfer and gear head who built motorcycles. He went to college at Santa Barbara to surf, studied English (it bored him), worked in a machine shop, and wandered into engineering (it didn’t bore him). That led to MIT for grad school, polymer physics, and an R&D job with Pirelli, the Italian tire maker and European leader in fiber optics. He came to Clemson because his wife was disin­clined to pack two babies off to Italy.

The story of Foulger’s improbable ride from motorcycle mechanics to optics to cancer research is, in some ways, a fable for how science works these days. Say goodbye to pigeonholed specialists laboring in isolation. Solving big problems in science generally requires teams with many working parts. And, as any good surfer knows, you can’t ride the same wave forever. Why would you want to? The wave Foulger rides at the moment pushes his limits.

Nanofishing: Work in Stephen Foulger’s lab, in collaboration with Michael Sehorn, was featured on the cover of the journal Small in July. The article describes a method for fishing a single type of enzyme out of a complex mixture by “baiting” a nanoparticle, the metaphor behind the cover illustration. An ability to iso­late and manage proteins is a key step in using nanoparticles to diagnose and treat disease.

For one thing, he has to learn the alien nomenclature of cancer genetics. And while he’s a darn good mechanic when it comes to tuning up a polymer, his new line of work involves human biology. Don’t tell the bio guys, but Foulger wraps his head around proteins by thinking of them as polymers, which over­simplifies but captures the gist: Polymers and proteins are both large molecules whose parts are connected by chemical bonds. As medical science drills down to the fundamental business of human cells, what it finds is a lot of basic physics, chemistry, and math. And that’s the common ground on which Foulger meets people like Michael Sehorn, his collaborator from genetics and biochemistry at Clemson.

With help from Sehorn and others, Foulger figures out how to arm nanoparticles for seek-and-destroy missions deep inside the human body. He is concocting stealthy particles that can elude the body’s efforts to expel them, so they can roam around long enough to connect with receptors or proteins common in cancer cells. With his knowledge of optics and chromophores (the parts of molecules responsible for color), Foulger can equip those particles to find their targets and switch on a tiny, biochem­ical light that means cancer.

“Take pancreatic cancer, for instance,” Foulger says. “If you don’t catch it right away, it has a huge death rate. So if you could do periodic imaging of the body, and you could see small speckles of light around the pancreas, you’d say, okay, this person has cancer. That’s the approach we’re taking.”

Meanwhile, he’s working on survivin.

It sounds like the title for a Grateful Dead song, but survivin is actually the name of a protein that helps keep cancer cells alive by defeating the normal process of apoptosis, which tells cells when to die. Stop survivin, and chemotherapy drugs will work better. And if you can deliver those drugs directly to the cancer by loading them onto particles, you’ll have a lot less collateral damage, because the drugs won’t slaughter the good cells along with the bad.

“Chemotherapy is a brutal, medieval way of killing some­thing,” Foulger says. “It basically just kills cells. And cancer cells have developed ways to prevent that. So if you get a chemother­apy drug that starts killing the cells, anti-apoptosis proteins like survivin can go in there and actually undo or slow the damage to the cell you’ve tried to kill with the drug. The idea is to make a particle that binds up survivin and then releases a chemotherapy drug. You’d get a synergy going on that would be really effective when it comes to killing cancer cells.”

Foulger came to cancer research via work on colloids, sub­stances microscopically dispersed in other substances (acrylic polymers in paint are one example). Because some kinds of colloids showed promise in imaging systems for cancer detection, the National Institutes of Health began asking Foulger to review medical research involving colloids. In the process, he realized that his work with chromophores could have an anti-cancer appli­cation—for both diagnosis and treatment.

“So I thought, okay, I’ll give it a whirl,” he says. And he did.

how to stop an atom

To make his cool tools, Lin Zhu thinks small as an atom and big as the reaches of space.

Read more.

aiming plasmas at cancer

Sung-O Kim came to COMSET to work on displays and wound up taking aim at cancer. Not that cancer is the lab’s only target.

Read more.

well-dressed particles

As any teenager might guess, what a particle wears affects its game. Thompson Mefford’s lab turns out designer wardrobes for nanoparticles.

Read more.

No, we don’t make eyeglasses.

This is what Eric Johnson has to explain, outside of work. But what he does make, with his team of savvy students, takes vision.

Read more.

Material advantage and the power of light

Fiber optics spread the Internet around the globe, but the science of light is just warming up. Go back to Material advantage and the power of light.

For more than a glimpse…

For now, we can introduce you to only a few of the people at COMSET, and we’ll have to save a number of researchers for is­sues to come. Or visit the COMSET website.

Stephen Foulger is the Gregg-Graniteville Endowed Chair and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering and Science. Funding for his work is primarily from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Founda­tion. Michael Sehorn is an assistant professor of genetics and biochemis­try in the College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life Sciences.