Dr. Florian Carle

Stewart Smith: You’re literally a rocket scientist. Tell me a little about your PhD thesis—droplet evaporation under microgravity?

Florian Carle: Indeed, I am! I was studying the evaporation of alcohol droplets in microgravity. When you are in space, you don’t have gravity, and therefore no convection. Instead of “hot air rises”, you get “hot air stays around your heating element, creates an insulating layer of hot air, and catastrophically melts down your heater!” My PhD thesis resulted in the creation of large empirical tables tracking the evaporation rates of different alcohols and alcanes at different temperatures and gravity levels (Moon, Mars, Earth and hypergravity). Flying in the CNES (the French equivalent of NASA) ZeroG plane in France was an amazing experience! I experienced weightlessness and it turns out I am really good at doing somersaults when this pesky gravity is not there!

So how does a French rocket scientist end up in New Haven, Connecticut?

During my PhD studies, I presented my work in Pittsburgh PA at a conference. (Fun fact: I have randomly visited PA more than any other state in the US—likely 30+ times now!) Eric Brown, a Yale faculty member, posted an ad on the conference bulletin board looking for postdocs to join his lab and work on material science. The topic was interesting, and I chatted with him at the conference. I was hired and moved to New Haven in 2014, only knowing Yale as the school Rory Gilmore was going to. There, I worked on creating suspensions of iron nanoparticles in gallium (a metal that is liquid at room temperature), to create a dynamo effect and better understand the influence of fluid dynamics on the magnetic field generation. The idea was to create a table top mini-Earth liquid iron core to see if we could reproduce the fluctuations of Earth’s magnetic fields.

It was a fun project. (Claim to EHS fame: My experiment caught on fire in a fume hood!) But I also realized I was more interested in helping scientists do great science than doing scientific research myself. And that’s why I founded the Yale Postdoctoral Association with a couple postdoc friends.

Wait—Did you just say you created the Yale Postdoc Association?!

Yes! When I arrived here in 2014, Yale did not have a postdoc association. With a friend of mine, Athena Hadjixenofontos, we borrowed the Hopkins University model to create the association. This is when I realized I was actually good at building scientific communities, helping scientists to do their job by freeing them from as much red tape and other administrative tasks as possible. Nowadays, the YPA (Yale Postdoc Association) is a huge association, helping 2000+ postdocs at Yale! I am amazed to see how the association grew in the last decade! Building and running YPA was a really formative experience for the job I’m doing now.

You’re the Managing Director of the Yale Quantum Institute. Fill in the missing pieces for me; you were a postdoc, but dropped microgravity for quantum physics? (And herding artists?!)

In 2016, I applied to a job posting for the role of manager of the Yale Quantum Institute. I knew NOTHING about quantum physics. (I was a filthy engineer!) But the job seemed interesting. The previous manager, Stephanie Hessing, did an amazing job building the space, and I was offered a brand new institute, with carte blanche to create any programming I wanted to. I learned quantum physics, organized scientists, started developing science outreach programs, and soon enough “herding artists” as you say! We started small, but now YQI has 30 research groups, and 450+ students and researchers interested in quantum topics on campus!

I realized early enough that doing science outreach events is great, but all the attendees are already interested in science. It’s not science outreach, but science lectures. The people who I wanted to reach out to were not coming to pure science events. I needed to meet them where they were at.

In 2017, we were lucky enough to host scientist Sir Michael Berry for a quantum talk, and he kindly offered to do a public lecture, showing how quantum physics democratized music. Indeed, fundamental quantum physics led to the invention of laser Compact Discs! And during this talk, the audience was not just scientists, we had finally reached out to people outside the field! This talk was the spark! And since then, I’ve hosted 21 nontechnical talks like this one, mixing humanities and science. (And perspicacious readers will notice you were a speaker in this series!)

You’ve had a long running passion for combining art and science. You studied science; sometimes describing yourself as an “engineer with a background in theater.” What drew you into the art world?

I was a very shy child. When I was 10, my mum encouraged me to sign up for the theater play. My English (ESL) teacher put on a presentation of “A Midsummer Nights’ Dream” (in French!) and I fell in love with theater. I did theater for 12 years, wanting to become an actor. I joined a theater company, “Le Théâtre de l’entre-texte”, (“The In Between the Line Theater”) and we performed at the Festival d’Avignon, one of the biggest theater festivals in the world, lasting a month and featuring 1,500 plays a day! And with such an offering, you can imagine not everyone can make a living from theater. The starving artist life was not really for me. (I was not talented enough to make it as an actor!) I moved to Marseille to continue my studies in engineering, first through a vocational school to work in renewable energy (go windmills!), then school of engineering, and a PhD, far from the art field I love so much. When I took the job at YQI, I knew I wanted to bring some art and science programming, and maybe even some quantum theater somehow!

So tell me about creating the Yale Quantum Institute Artist in Residence (AiR) program. Was there some resistance to the idea at first?

For me, it was obvious that art and science had their place together. I was really fortunate to grow up in France and experience a culture that often mixes these two fields together. The US sees these two more separately, and it was a challenge to create a program mixing these two—and especially to pay for it! I was lucky that Michel Devoret (who, on top of being an incredible scientist is also passionate about art) was very supportive of this project, and helped me to convince the Yale administration to trust this, at the time, very young French man!

I started working on this in 2016 and YQI launched its artist in residence program in 2017, bringing to our quantum laboratories artists for year-long residencies. I had the pleasure of working with seven extremely talented artists, resulting in amazing quantum artworks! I helped each artist to learn more about quantum physics, discover our labs, and collaborate with our scientists. Artists bring their practice, scientists bring their ideas, and we all work together to create new artworks. In a little less than 10 years, with them, I produced art installations and exhibitions, live shows, a music album and light show, music videos, a touring museum show, a live radio show, a Web-based educational game, and most recently a theater production! Each artwork touches a different quantum physics topic or theory, each time we change art medium and quantum concept.

Yale Quantum Institute artists

Here’s a quick list of Yale Quantum Institute’s Artists in Residence (AiR) program roster—past and present.

• Martha Lewis. Installation/Drawings/Museum exhibition—Observer effect and portraits of superconductive devices. (YQI AiR link: Martha Lewis.)
• Spencer Topel. Live performance/Album—Data sonification of qubit state changes. (YQI AiR link: Spencer Topel.)
• Stewart Smith. Light installation, Web app—Quantum error correction. (YQI AiR link: Stewart Smith.)
• Monica Ong. Visual poetry planetarium show—Women in science/astronomy. (YQI AiR mini residency.)
• Serena Scapagini. Installation—Quantum memory and entanglement. (YQI AiR link: Serena Scapagini.)
• Vince Tycer. Stage play—Ethics of quantum mechanics. (YQI AiR link: Copenhagen.)
• Toni Dove. Interactive cinema—Not sure yet! But likely ​​quantum-enabled searches for physics beyond the standard model.

If you had all of the time, space, and funding you could dream of, where would you take the YQI Artist in Residence program next?

If I had unlimited resources, I would make art & science my full time job. While the YQI AiR program gets most of the media coverage of the public’s interest, it is a tiny part of my job, at most 5%.

I would love to extend this program to other topics. Don’t get me wrong—quantum science is fascinating and we have so much more to do with this, but I would love to welcome other STEM topics in the AiR program. The work we did with Yue Wu’s Fusion Blossom in computer science was so interesting, I wonder what other fields like bio-engineering could bring in.

I think I want to do more events or happenings/performances. With this kind of work, communicating complex topics with art, the audience gets more out of it with a little guidance. When I go to a museum, I love having the curators or docents telling me the story behind the art, or pointing out details to better understand what the artists wanted to express, that I would have missed otherwise. I think with all the artworks done for YQI AiR, having a helping hand makes you appreciate the art and the science. Of course, exhibitions can stay on display longer and require less work once they are up, but I guess I am not in the business of simple things!

You recently staged a performance of “Copenhagen”—both at Yale University and at the University of Connecticut (UConn). What inspired you to do that?

This was such a treat! I have wanted to combine theater and quantum ever since I started the YQI AiR program. But I needed to do it right! I met Vince Tycer, an actor and director, faculty at UConn, during a quantum workforce development meeting from QuantumCT. This program is a Yale/UConn NSF engine to bring quantum technology to Connecticut. As you know, I switched from theater to science, and Vince switched from science to theater. Together we worked on a production of Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen”—a drama on the ethics of quantum physics.

It was so impressive to see the public fascinated by these two hours of heavy drama, telling the story about Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and his wife, Margrethe Bohr, and discussing the ethics of creating new technologies. For this play, it was the atomic bomb, but it has an uncanny relevance for today: quantum computers can be used for good, but also, can have dangerous consequences. This play was presented at Yale in the Dome Room, and at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre, with a creative team spanning both institutions—not unlike what we are trying to create with QuantumCT!

Can we expect to see more stage performances down the road?

For that, we need to write more science plays! But yes, I think performances are something people are craving. With the rise of unlimited entertainment on our screen, there is a demand to go offline and experience something! We did a live concerts with Spencer Topel in New Haven, Brooklyn, and Spain; we did a quantum error correction choir with you in New Haven; two planetarium shows, the play sold out, … yes there will be more!

I know there’s more to quantum physics than quantum computing. What exciting things are we missing out on when we over-focus on the “computing” part?

Recently, I got really excited about the work done in Charles Brown’s lab [at Yale] on quasicrystals. They cool down quantum gasses to the point where they can force atoms on a 2D level and create these beautiful patterns, similar to Penrose tiling. I think scientists discover the beauty of an unknown system, get fascinated about it, and want to know more. It’s what I am trying to convey with this YQI AiR. Showcasing the beauty of a quantum phenomena, and I hope it will give the spark for a whole new generation of young students to want to become scientists!

You’ve facilitated a lot of creativity for others! Your program has been patiently growing a rich history of science outreach; interweaving art and technology. Can you reflect on that a bit for us?

It’s always a little hard to reflect on your own things. Scientists are trained to publish science by removing themselves completely from the article. I think I have a little of this problem here. But talking to you about this decade of work, and seeing what our YQI artists have accomplished in collaboration with our researchers (with a little producing help from my end!), it is quite special. It attracted the interest of people outside the field, new students, the general public, the media… Any excuse is great to talk about science! I think my proudest moment is when two prospective students were touring YQI a few years back, and told me the reason they were considering coming to Yale to study quantum science was my YQI AiR program.

Who should Parq interview next? (And I’ll add the caveat that it cannot be a Yale / YQI-related person.)

I think it could be interesting to interview Nancy Kawalek, who is running the exciting STAGE Center—Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration—at the University of Chicago. They are doing very interesting things in the quantum space and you would have a great conversation with her!