Podcast with Kenna Hughes-Castleberry and Brian Lenahan

Transcript

Yuva Boger: Hello, Kenna. Hello, Brian. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: Thank you so much, Yuval.

Brian Lenahan: Hi Yuval, and thanks so much for this opportunity.

Yuval: So, who are you and what do you do?

Brian: Well, maybe I can start first, Yuval, if that’s okay. My name is Brian Lenahan and I happen to be the founder and chair of the Quantum Strategy Institute. But really today we have a very exciting message that we want to share with you and your audience around a group of unsung heroes in the world of quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and mathematics. And we’ve been able to shape that into a book that we’re very proud of and that we think will inspire a new generation of people in the quantum realm. Kenna, how would you characterize it?

Kenna: Thank you, Brian. So, yes, I am Kenna Hughes-Castleberry. I’m one of the writers in this space and a science journalist. I write for Inside Quantum Technology. But my nine-to-five job is at JILA, a government/half University of Physics Research Institute in Colorado. And like Brian said, we’ve come out with this great new book, which highlights 10 unknown or relatively unknown heroes within quantum physics, computing, engineering, and mathematics. And we’ve really tried to pick people who are from all over the world and who come from all different backgrounds. We’re really excited because a majority of the people we cover are not from the traditional white male background. So we’ll be introducing a new cast of characters and we’re really hoping that people get excited and find some new role models within this space.

Yuval: So these are all relatively unknown. So this book is not about Feynman, Schrödinger, Einstein, and so on. So who would be the first? Give me the first name on your list.

Brian: Well, don’t get us wrong, those individuals do appear in our book as a side reference, but we’re taking people all the way back from 800 common era, so 1200 years ago. All of the 10 giants of the past are deceased. When we thought about the grouping of individual characters, we’ve made a conscious decision here to focus on the past. There are plenty of exciting pioneers and giants present in the quantum industry, but we were very focused on the giants of the past. Kenna?

Kenna: I think to add to Brian’s point, Einstein features very heavily in our book. He’s actually almost in every single chapter in some interesting and fun unique ways that people may not know him for, which is really fascinating. But our first giant of the book is Al-Khwarizmi, as Brian mentioned 1200 years ago, was the founder of algebra and where we get the word algorithm from and things like that. So his contribution was monumental to pushing us into the modern era. And so it’s quite fascinating that we start from that position and move forward quite rapidly into the modern century and the 20th century of course, and talk about how this work is being built off of today and how we are continuing to advance this previous history into hopefully the future and to better our future because of it.

Yuval: How did this project get started, and what criteria did you use to choose these giants?

Brian: Being able to use platforms like LinkedIn and Substack, I really enjoy the opportunity to discover new people and share small snippets of their stories. And so I started doing that just about a year ago, and as I did more and more of these characters, it came clear to me that there may be a new creative opportunity here in the form of a book. But I’ll be honest with you, I have my limitations as a science communicator and science writer. I’m very focused on the intersection of science and business and how those two things can work together.

I have a very practical approach. I focus on the results and the accomplishments of each of these individuals. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this should be about the personal story, if not as much or as more. And I knew that I wasn’t the kind of writer that would do the best job in that respect. So I knew I needed to go out and find somebody. And I was blessed and fortunate to find one of the best science communicators who also endeavors in the space of the personal story. And that was Kenna.

Kenna: Yeah, I remember getting a message from Brian on LinkedIn and he said, “I have this upcoming project I want to do and I’m really excited, and do you want to do it with me?” And I had really no idea what he was talking about for this project, but I said, “Of course, absolutely. I’m really interested, you know, you are one of the top voices in our LinkedIn community, and you obviously have some expertise that I do not as far as the science and business piece, so I would love to learn more.” And so we just kind of got started from there and picked up and it was a whirlwind of an adventure and we’re really, really excited that it’s resulted in this wonderful book.

Yuval: And how did you select the people, and why stop at ten? Could it have been 18, or is that the sequel?

Kenna: Brian, do you want me to go first?

Brian: Yeah, why don’t you start with that, Kenna, because we had a very interesting process?

Kenna: We did. So it was really nice because Brian brought a few names to our list. I brought a few names to our list. Obviously our main criteria was that everyone was deceased because we didn’t want somebody to come back to us after we had covered them and say, “Well, I actually didn’t like this,” or they did something later that maybe we didn’t agree with. So we’d rather have somebody who’s already passed. And that’s of course, the whole focus of the book is to look into the past. So it made sense.

I know we also, one of our criteria was looking around the world, so we tried to find scientists in Africa or South America, Australia, people who we could pull from all over the globe who again, hadn’t really been discussed and talk about their influences in this field. Now, unfortunately, we couldn’t really find anybody on those different continents because either there aren’t a lot of sources on individuals and they just haven’t really been discovered yet, or there just isn’t anybody who has that position yet. And that might be something in the future. But yeah, I think that was kind of the main focus for picking giants. But I’ll turn it over to Brian.

Brian: And Yuval, what was interesting for us is that sometimes we take a North American and European focus, and there are giants who are in other environments who are as popular as an Einstein or a Feynman in those environments. If you think about the Middle East and Al-Khwarizmi, a large number of schools & institutions bear his name; very well known for his work in mapping stars and geography and philosophy and mathematics and so on, equally with Satyendra Nath Bose in India. We both shared their stories via LinkedIn. And by far those were the two most popular responses from people who identified the fact that we were bringing their stories to light. And so it was very interesting for us to see the different reactions to the different giants, even in small scale.

Yuval: Men, women, a mix of both?

Brian: Absolutely. We wanted to ensure that truly the quantum giants of the past were both men and women. My favorite story that Kenna brought to light was Betty Holberton, who worked with the ENIAC team, and she was in fact one of the first group of six computer programmers, if you will, and her story, jumping over barriers that women had at the time back in the forties and fifties, Kenna brought to life. Kenna also has a more personal story with one of our female giants. 

Kenna: Yeah. Just to add to Brian’s point, we really did try to get some gender balance in the book. And it’s very difficult again, because a lot of these stories have yet to come to light. So it’s hard to pick out those names, to pick out the research and to make sure that you can fully tell these people’s stories to the extent that they are a person and not just fill in the gaps where you can. But yeah, as Brian mentioned, there’s more of a personal story at the end of the book, a researcher here in Colorado who was here named Debbie Jin, who worked on the Bose-Einstein condensate and propelled that into the future. So I think those two stories within our book really highlight some of the true inspiring female figures that need to continue to be adopted as role models in our society.

Yuval: Sometimes it’s said that alongside the development of quantum in the western world, there was a lot of work sort of behind the Iron Curtain and maybe even in China that was not as exposed or intermingled with the sort of European and US scientists. Do you have one or more of those in the book?

Kenna: I guess I’ll answer this question. We do actually. We have a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1965, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and he worked on QED, quantum electrodynamics, and he actually won the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman. But you don’t really hear his story because again, Feynman usually takes up most of the spotlight for that. But it’s really interesting because we were able to, again, get more of that eastern perspective on how science is done, but we were also able to cover how Japan kind of recovered after World War II and what that looked like, and as far as scientists and working on policies with the nuclear bomb, and how do you regain public opinion and public trust in your scientific institutions when they have this power. So it was really quite fascinating to cover that angle as well. And I know Brian and I both wish that we had more kind of Cold War eastern scientists maybe in there as well. But again, it’s hard to find some good stories and cover that. And so maybe that’ll be more of a sequel.

Brian: And being the researcher that Kenna is, she was able to, in the conclusion of the book, include a lady named Elena Mikhailova‬, who worked during the 1960s with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. I won’t give away the story, but suffice to say that the book ends off with a bang in terms of the activities that happened in the kind of environment that you described and the wonderful work that both genders can do.‬

Yuval: So Brian, you started with this idea and approached Kenna, and you had a notion of what you wanted to have in the book, how it would turn out. What’s the thing that most surprised you or both of you during this process?

Brian: Well, I think the thing that most surprised me was the diversity of interests of each one of these quantum giants. And I like to think of myself as somebody who has a broad level of interests, whether that be quantum, sports, songwriting, you name it. Each one of these giants had interests in so many different areas. Debbie Jin created things that were never been created before, but she was also a softball player. Gottfried Leibniz, famous for the calculating machine and for a number of other things, but he was also a politician. So many of these individual characters where I initially thought ‘what is their contribution to quantum?’, had so much more diversity in terms of their background.

Kenna: I would just add maybe more from a writing perspective. I think what surprised me the most is how well Brian and I worked together. A lot of times I think people when they start a book like this, or maybe they have a big project like this, they have different ideas of how they want it to go and maybe different goals or impacts. But Brian and I were kind of on the same page from day one. We both were like, “We have this idea and we really want to make sure that we give people a way that they can read about the early years of quantum physics, some of the key theories and how they’ve evolved over time, how we’ve gotten to where we are today with quantum computing, but most importantly, the people who have taken us there.” Right? So I think that was what was maybe most surprising to me in a pleasant way, was having somebody like Brian as a co-writer to get us to being the successful book release launch on April 14th that we’re going to be holding.

Brian: Yuval, if you don’t mind, I’d love to just simply add to that, that when we first started this project, we were very specific about our roles. The last thing I wanted was Brian writes a chapter, Kenna writes a chapter and so on, and the reader having two very different styles because we do have very different styles, and we wanted that fluidity all the way throughout. So Kenna was kind enough to pick up a pen, in the old way of saying it, and did a fantastic job.

Yuval: As the name of the book implies, these are giants in their field, but you chose the lesser-known people. Why do you think they’re lesser known? Is it because they worked in a different country? Is it that they didn’t have a big PR machine or a very outgoing personality? What was the reason that they’re sort of second tier in terms of how much people know about them?

Brian: You can tell we’re excited about this project. You take somebody like Pantur Silaban from Indonesia, a renowned scientist in his own country, an incredible forward thinker, but very little written about him individually or about science from an Indonesian perspective, and in terms of our access to that information. So I’d say that’s one example maybe where lesser known and lesser placed in the media based on where their origin was and what has been written about them. Kenna?

Kenna: Yeah, just to expand on Brian’s point is a lot of our scientists come from minority backgrounds, as we said before. So we have Elmer Imes, who’s the second African-American to earn a PhD in physics. And because these people come from minority backgrounds, a lot of times their stories just weren’t recorded as thoroughly or as properly. So somebody like Bose, too, as we mentioned earlier from India, he was living during British colonization. So while he’s become a major figure for Indian scientists or universities or institutions, his story really wasn’t that well documented or was told by people from more of the majority demographic. And so that in and of itself, historically has unfortunately made these people less well known because they haven’t been documented or recorded as easily because again, they come from maybe the colonized countries or minority countries that have been historically underrepresented.

Yuval: It is sometimes said that you want to know the art, but you don’t want to know the artist. Some of the great impressionist painters or composers were horrible, horrible people, but they made great art. To what extent do you cover the personality, the personal side, the behavior of these giants?

Brian: I would say we didn’t shy away from that at all. Kenna, I mean, Elmer’s a great example, how would you respond?

Kenna: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we are seeing this still today, right? With a bunch of scientists that we’re going through, somebody like maybe Elizabeth Holmes or Andrew Wakefield, they have done some very negative things to science, but we didn’t want to brush that over when it came to the people we were discussing. We wanted the good and the bad. And so Elmer Imes, as Brian mentioned, is a good example because not only did he push forward the field of spectroscopy and help us to understand the discreet energies of quantum physics, which hadn’t really been discovered before, but he also had some major, major personal complications where he was having an affair with a white woman, even though he was African-American. And that led to a whole university scandal and whatnot.

And so again, we cover the good and the bad with these scientists and talk about, “Well, why did they do that or what was going on at the time?” And we’re definitely not trying to justify their actions at all. We are just telling it as it happened. But as Brian and I both agree, we don’t want to just sugarcoat things. We’d like to present these figures as people, right?

Brian: Yeah. Maybe I can give another example, Yuval. Gottfried Leibniz was a peer of Isaac Newton and both were working on calculus at the same time. It just so happened that Newton published before Gottfried Leibniz did and became well known for it. So Leibniz who had a series of lifelong challenges, was just as intelligent, but maybe a victim of timing or scheduling or purpose or whatever, but we see the challenges that each one of these giants have gone through, and Kenna’s done a wonderful job of portraying that because scientists are humans too.

Yuval: As we get closer to the end of our conversation, I wanted to ask you, Brian, in the previous discussion we had, I think we spoke about In Search of Excellence and sort of finding common traits and companies that were in relation to your quantum excellence book. Do you see a common thread across these giants, something that you believe unites them other than sort of their interest in quantum-related items?

Brian: Yeah, I’d say one of those things is the passion to continue despite being told no. They have been told that their ideas don’t work or won’t work, and yet they continue to pursue them. Things like the work that Debbie Jin did at JILA, she just continued and continued working and mentoring and helping others while she continued to try to advance this technology around the fermion. And she is so well known throughout the industry, but it took years to get to that point. And so we see all sorts of people, Tomonaga for example, who was actively impacted by the Second World War, to the point where they had to work out of caves just to be able to continue educating others. It’s these people who had that passion, despite all the barriers and all the rejections and being told no, that they continue on towards their goal. 

Yuval: I usually like to end my podcast by asking my guests about a hypothetical dinner that they want to have with quantum greats, dead or alive. Now, let’s assume that you’re not going to have a 12-person dinner party. Who would you invite to dinner from your book? Who are you most interested to meet and speak with?

Brian: For me, it’ll be Claude Shannon and I’ll tell you why. Because he was such an interesting tinkerer. Constantly creating new machines yet he was the same person who would get on a unicycle and juggle in the office or at a party. And he’s well known for how we think about information science today. The diversity of interests that somebody like Claude Shannon had, by the way his wife was just as interesting, that having those two at a dinner party, I think it would compellingly  go on until the early hours of the evening.

Kenna: I was actually going to pick Claude Shannon too, for the exact same reasons. So now I can’t. Thanks a lot, Brian. So I will actually pick one of our giants we haven’t talked about, which is Mark Reid who passed away recently. He was a professor at Yale and he studied quantum dots. He actually coined the term quantum dots, but he was a remarkable individual because he mentored students throughout his whole life. He oversaw the undergraduate studies for physics at Yale, so he had to interact with every single undergraduate that came in. He was extremely active. He loved free diving, he did golf, but he also helped to invent some of the key nanotechnology pieces that we are relying on today, and that researchers are still trying to use for things like identifying COVID if you have COVID in your lungs or looking at different sorts of biotechnology aspects. So it’s quite fascinating. So I think he would also be quite interesting to discuss just some of the key things that are happening right now. So I would invite him to my dinner.

Yuval: So Kenna, Brian, thank you so much for bringing these giants back to life, and thank you for joining me today.

Kenna: Thank you so much, Yuval.

Brian: Thank you. Take care.

Preorder the book here

Yuval Boger is the chief marketing officer for QuEra, a leader in neutral atom quantum computers. Known as the “Superposition Guy” as well as the original “Qubit Guy,” he can be reached on LinkedIn or at this email.

April 17, 2023