Kate Marvel: Physicist, Climate Scientist Part II

The California drought: does the climate change 'signal' stand out above the 

weather 'noise'? [Figure credit: Jeff Master's Wunderblog]

In the second half of this interview with Dr. Kate Marvel of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, we discuss her field of climate science. We cover uncertainty, the hunt for signal in noisy data, and the joy of seeing physics work. In her case that joy is a mixed blessing because her data are backing up models that can, at times, make somewhat depressing predictions. All views expressed here are her own.

LK: You’ve been in the thick of comparing different climate models, and seeing how well these models agree with each other, seeing how they’re doing in various tests. What would you want to say about the state of the art here, and the description of our uncertainty? 

KM: There is an incredible amount of uncertainty, and for me that is the scariest thing. It’s not true, but I think you could make an argument that wasn't that wrong if you were to say “We don’t know that much more than we did back in the 1800s.” We know that there’s a greenhouse effect; we know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. And just from looking at that we know that if you put a bunch of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Earth is probably going to warm.

And then you see it empirically, in the historical record?

I do a lot of what’s called detection and attribution -- basically trying to figure out what climate change looks like. You might say this is easy: “Duh, it’s global warming.” But what does climate change look like in terms of changes to rainfall patterns or cloud cover, for example? And so we try to understand from basic physics what would happen, what is supposed to happen under climate change. And then looking at observational records; looking at the satellites or ground-based gauges or whatever and saying, “Okay, this thing that we expect to be happening; is it happening?” It’s this weird cognitive dissonance, because you get really excited when you can show when it’s happening, because it’s very elegant. You’re like, “This is what physics tells me to expect; this is what the models are saying; ooh look it’s happening!” Then you kind of realize, “Oh my god, it’s happening!” And that’s a little depressing.

The earth is super complicated, and there are a lot of things that could happen to either speed up or slow down the warming. For example, you melt the ice caps, and that’s a positive feedback – it speeds up the warming. Because you used to have things that were reflecting incident short-wave radiation and now it’s absorbing and re-radiating long wave. So that’s a positive feedback. Warmer air holds more water vapor, and water vapor’s a greenhouse gas, so you make the earth warmer, you get more water vapor, and that accelerates the warming.

But then there are possible negative feedbacks. So if you increase cloud cover down low, then that can kind of reflect more incoming solar radiation and slow down the warming. And it turns out we just don’t understand clouds. We’re making progress, but if you think about how to model cloud formation, that is something that’s really affected by very small scales. Like you put bits of dust up in the atmosphere and you can seed clouds. And that’s really hard to incorporate in a global climate model, because global climate models happen on really big scales, and these processes happen on really small scales. You can’t explicitly resolve them; you have to parameterize them. And it turns out that as a result, we just don’t understand the net effect of cloud changes in the future. And you know, I think we’re making some progress on narrowing that down, but it’s kind of the biggest source of uncertainty right now.

Well people must also be thinking then of seeding clouds; intentionally creating clouds.

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of work being done on what’s called Solar Radiation Management, which is either like “Let’s try to increase cloud cover,” or just like “Let’s put a bunch of junk up in the stratosphere so that we decrease the amount of solar radiation coming to the lower atmosphere and hitting the Earth.” People have done a lot of modeling studies, but I think there’s kind of a general consensus that nobody wants to do this. There are so many uncertainties and it would be so much better if we didn’t have to do this. But it doesn’t benefit anybody to be completely clueless about it.

I did a carbon audit on myself a few months ago; just on one of these sites where you can enter some simple information. And not surprisingly, my footprint is dominated by flying. And it’s something I’ve wrestled with: what do I do about that? And I’m wondering, so certainly you’re doing science; you benefit greatly from being able to talk to other people and there’s benefits to actually being there in person. How do you think about your own carbon footprint, your own contribution to this problem given the work you’re doing, what you’re focused on?

I try to draw a very firm line between what I do scientifically and what I do personally. Because I do know that there is a science of communication, like “What is the best way to talk to people about these things?” And telling people to stop having fun is not ever going to work. And so I would be thrilled if we had a conversation about what’s the best way to mitigate climate change. And I don’t know, I feel like there are a lot of really smart people thinking about this, people who have training in economics and sociology, etc. It’s not that I feel that it’s not my place, because I have my personal beliefs, but I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re still arguing about whether climate change is a thing and I would just be so thrilled if we stopped having that argument.

We’re still arguing about whether climate change is a thing? What do you mean by that?

I feel like a lot of the political discourse is talking about “Is this happening?” And I find that so frustrating because what should be arguing about it is “What should we do?” And to even be having the discussion would make me so happy. So I’m kind of trying to work on trying to shift the conversation from “Is climate change happening?” And my answer is yes. And “Are we responsible?” And the answer is almost definitely yes. And then trying to move that to “What should we do?”

“I’m kind of trying to work on trying to shift the conversation from “Is climate change happening?” And my answer is yes. And “Are we responsible?” And the answer is almost definitely yes. And then trying to move that to “What should we do?”

So how do you go about that? That sounds to me a) fundamentally important and b) really difficult, and fundamentally ripe with the possibility of tremendous frustration.

I think it is. I mean, there are some really smart people thinking about the best ways to communicate this. And I think that so far there is a consensus: the consensus is “You can’t just tell people more facts.” Like there’s this thing called the Deficit Model, which says “Well, people don’t believe science because they don’t understand it. So if you just tell them more facts, they’ll accept it.” And I think the consensus is that this approach is just not going to work. And part of it is, you have to restrain yourself. So when somebody says something like “There is no climate change,” or “Vaccines don’t work,” or “Evolution is clearly not happening,” then your first impulse as a scientist is to be like, “Well you’re wrong. You’re wrong and I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong.” And I think that’s just a human impulse – we don’t like it when other people are wrong. But you have to kind of suppress that impulse. It’s kind of like eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts: it’s going to make you feel really good in the short term, but you’re really going to regret it in the long term and it’s probably not worth that short term pleasure.

And a lot of it is tribal. A lot of it is, “I want to be the kind of person who believes in and does something about climate change, because it’s bound up with all of these other things that I accept politically.” Or “I don’t want to be the kind of person that does something about climate change because then I’ll have to accept all these things that I just don’t.” And I think it’s trying to come up with ways to say to people who don’t accept a lot of things which they associate with left-wing political ideologies, and to say, “No, there is room for you here. It is possible to create a narrative that includes you.” And I think that is more productive.

There’s a woman called Katharine Hayhoe who’s at Texas Tech. She’s an amazing climate scientist, but she’s also an evangelical Christian. So she is very good at bridging that gap and telling people that it’s okay; there’s room for people like us here. And I think a lot of what she does can then be undermined by a shouty atheist coming along and saying “No, accepting science immediately means that you have to give up all of your beliefs.” There’s nothing wrong with being an atheist; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a believer. And I think that there is room for everybody here, but that means that those of us who are scientists kind of have to suppress that urge to tell people that they’re being stupid when we think they’re being stupid.

I choose not to eat meat, because honestly I don't care for it, and I don't drive because I live in a dense city with decent subway service.  But I don't think my personal choices should necessarily be universal, and I don't think it helps to tell other people to give up things that make them happy.

“. . . When somebody says something like “There is no climate change,” or “Vaccines don’t work,” or “Evolution is clearly not happening,” then your first impulse as a scientist is to be like, “Well you’re wrong. You’re wrong and I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong.” And I think that’s just a human impulse – we don’t like it when other people are wrong. But you have to kind of suppress that impulse.”

There’s a book by Naomi Klein in which she argues that conservatives are scared of this for the right reasons, because meeting this challenge means we have to rethink fundamental things about the free market system. Do you care to comment?

I have no idea if that narrative is correct because I’m not an economist. I know that some people are saying, “Okay, we have to completely overhaul capitalism,” and some people are saying, “No, we just need to price externalities right and there’s a free market way to do that.” And I know which position I’m sympathetic to because of my own personal politics, but I think me talking about that would be like me talking about criminal justice or reproductive rights in the sense that I have my beliefs about this, but I don’t claim expertise on that, you know what I mean?

Yes, and I respect your reticence very much. 

Is there anything from the science you’re working on now that you want to tell me about? Questions that you’re digging into that are really fascinating you? You said you’re working on basically figuring out what the predictions are for things like rain patterns and then going and trying to verify those in the historical record, or see what you learned from what we know. Anything that was surprising in this process or really cool?

I just think it’s great. I think one of the great things about climate is that there are so many Big Questions to answer. So you can do these things like, “Okay, how much wind power can we extract from the atmosphere?” Or “What is happening to rainfall patterns?” You can ask these very big questions and I really like that. I’ve gotten really obsessed with clouds, which is ironic because I hate bad weather and I’m only happy when it’s sunny outside, but know your enemy, right? So I’ve been doing a lot of work on clouds. Because I think this is a really interesting question, and we’ve been able to show that you can actually see things happening in the observations in clouds. At least in a couple data sets, you can see clouds rising, which is what’s predicted under global warming conditions.

What do you mean, you can see them rising?

So we’ve got cloud satellites dating back to the early 80’s, and in the satellite data, you can basically see the fingerprint of human-caused climate change in the cloud records, which is really surprising, because they’re so noisy, and so difficult to get anything out of. But you can really start to see all of these patterns emerging and it’s amazing how coherent everything is.

So you mean the typical height of the clouds above the land is changing?

Yeah. So I mean the height of high clouds is changing. So these big thunderheads that you would see, like convective clouds in the tropics, those are rising, those are going higher in ways that are predicted very robustly by a lot of the climate models and some of the physics underlying them, which is incredible. If you look at what climate change is supposed to do to rainfall, there are two basic underlying physical concepts. One, warmer air holds more water vapor, so all else being equal, wet areas will get wetter and dry areas will get drier. Two, all else is not equal, and we expect changes to atmospheric dynamics, which means the locations of those wet and dry areas are moving. And if you look at the satellite records you can see that the wet areas are getting wetter and the dry areas are getting drier and the entire pattern is moving poleward in basically exactly the way that you think it should. So that’s kind of amazing to see theory go to models, go to observations, in quite such a straightforward way.

I can see why you would get excited.

Yeah, maybe like, “Oh man!” <laughs>

So wet areas getting wetter, dry areas getting drier, and then everything moving around, that final statement – there’s no meaning in it then, unless the predictions are quite specific on how things are moving around. And they are?

Yeah.

So we’re in what looks like the fourth year now of a drought in California. What does this work actually say about particulars like that? Is this likely associated with climate change? Is it just consistent with what we expect? How do I think about this drought in the context of climate change?

The smaller the scales you’re looking at, the more complicated the picture becomes. So if you’re just looking at the California drought: I think the story that’s emerging is that it’s consistent with things that have happened before naturally, so the California drought looks like natural variability. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not influenced by climate change. So I think the tricky thing to try to understand, and the tricky thing to communicate, is that there’s no such thing as weather independent of climate. It’s like personality and mood; weather is mood and climate is personality. But obviously your moods are affected by your personality. And so the California drought – things like that have happened before, things like that would probably happen even if we weren’t doing anything to change the climate, but the California drought is happening in the context of climate change. And so just because it’s consistent with natural variability, that doesn’t rule out a role for climate change. It’s just that the role of climate change is really difficult to disentangle, if that makes sense. There are some things that are more clear-cut; the extreme heat events they're experiencing in Australia are very unlikely to happen without systemic climate change. And so there are things that are more clear-cut than others, and the California drought is kind of in that non-clear-cut category.

“. . . It’s like personality and mood; weather is mood and climate is personality. But obviously your moods are affected by your personality. And so the California drought – things like that have happened before, things like that would probably happen even if we weren’t doing anything to change the climate, but the California drought is happening in the context of climate change.”

Well, it’s like that in cosmology, where there are certain signals we can only dig out of the noise by stacking, so I guess that’s the case here with climate in California: you look at the patterns globally and I guess that’s what you’re saying about dry areas getting drier, wet areas getting wetter. In particular areas you can’t separate out that signal from the weather variability noise. But more globally you’re seeing the signals emerge.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s even how we use that language. We talk about things as a signal to noise problem. Just because there’s a lot of noise and you can’t pick out the signal, it doesn’t mean that the signal doesn't exist. But the signal of climate change is getting louder and louder, and we're starting to pick it up in more places.

Kate Marvel, Physicist and Climate Scientist

Kate Marvel hated science and math in high school. Then she took an astronomy for non-majors class at UC Berkeley, fell in love with the subject and boldly pursued it. Here Kate describes how she met the challenges faced by a former math/science-hater turned Physics and Astronomy double major. We follow her through the prestigious Cambridge Part III Mathematics program, teaching in Africa, a PhD in superstring cosmology, and her transition to climate science. We will discuss her work in climate science in a subsequent post. 

Dr. Marvel works at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, NY and blogs at Kate Has Things To Say. All views expressed here are her own. 

I mentioned on Twitter and Facebook that I was looking for someone with a physics degree, working in climate science, and got a lot of suggestions. Why do you think there are so many of you?

When you do the physics degree, you have numerical skills, you have problem solving skills, and I think that just makes you really flexible. And for a long time there it was hard to study climate science, in particular, in graduate school. You had to do meteorology, or some schools had atmospheric science departments, but it wasn’t a big thing, and so a lot of people in the field just kind of drifted in from physics. But there’s a huge overlap between the skill sets, I think.

 “When you do the physics degree, you have numerical skills, you have problem solving skills, and I think that just makes you really flexible.”

Backing up some, what drew you into physics in the first place?

I feel like I’m a little weird in that respect; a little weird in a lot of respects. But I hated science and math when I was in high school. I was like, “This is so boring; I’m never going to use it; I can’t wait to not ever do it again.” And I still do not get excited about inclined planes. I feel like the way it was taught just kind of didn’t resonate with me and I was just like, “I cannot wait to not do this anymore.”

So I was going to be an actress. I was going to be a movie star, obviously, because that’s a great career choice. And I went to Berkeley and I took just Astro 10, Astro for non-majors, in my first semester. And I was like, "This is so cool. This is so amazing. And the only reason I’m not majoring in this is because I’m scared of math and I’m scared of physics. But if I can get over that fear, I can learn all this amazing stuff.” It was really scary, but I decided to do it. I was just like, “Well, I don’t really know what I want to do with my life, like probably being a movie star’s just not going to work out, so I’ll just see where this leads me.”

Well that’s really interesting. I was interested in science really early on, and then in second grade when science started being taught in school I became totally disinterested.

It’s such a shame, isn’t it?

Yes! How was that for you then? All of a sudden you’ve got to take calculus – how was it going into a physics class, with other people majoring in physics?

I mean, it was hard. I feel like there were a lot of people there who always knew that they wanted to do technical things – wanted to be engineers or physicists. And they just knew more than I did, and I was really intimidated. And I was like, “I’m never going to catch up.” But then I realized that I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I was the worst person in the class because I wanted to know this stuff.

I didn’t learn physics quickly, but I learned how to take exams quickly. I kind of learned that, okay, there’s only so many problems that show up on the exam, and if you just get good at pattern recognition, then you can kind of fake it. And so I faked it for a while. And then it finally started to sink in. I finally started to learn stuff. But no, it was rough. It was hard. I felt really out of place. I felt like I didn’t belong. But then I found a group of other people who also felt out of place, and that was really helpful.

"I didn’t care that I was the worst person in the class because I wanted to know this stuff."

Yeah, I was just going to ask about what resources you found to help with that. So just a group of others?

Yeah. So I double majored in the end, in Astronomy and Physics, and Berkeley’s just this giant school, but the Astronomy major is really small, and so it’s really tight-knit. And there’s this amazing lab class where they basically just throw you in a lab, with all this old telescope equipment, and tell you like, “Prove that the galaxy is a spiral,” and you have to teach yourself electronics; you have to teach yourself – I didn’t know how to program – you have to teach yourself programming – and it’s so much work but it’s so amazing, and you get so much help from the TA’s and the professors. And all the famous professors know you because you’re in the department all the time, because you’re working so hard. And that that was just an amazing educational experience, I think. I’m super grateful for that.

All that time in astronomy, and then you went to do very theoretical work at Cambridge.

Yeah. So again, I kind of didn’t know what I wanted to do after college but I applied for this scholarship never thinking I would get it and I guess they made the questionable decision to give it to me. So I had a scholarship to go to Cambridge for a year to do this crazy thing called Part III in Mathematics, which is basically like a really intense master’s program. And so you take classes, whatever you want, but I chose quantum field theory and general relativity and then you just take a bunch of exams at the very end. And so that was super intense but I had fun; I liked it; I was kind of burned out by the end of it, but I learned a lot, I think.

So you did that master’s degree in Part III, and then onto a PhD in physics?

Mmm-hmm.

Can you tell me more about that transition?

So after Part III I was kind of burned out, and I went to South Africa for a year to this place called the African Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). So I taught there for a year, which was unbelievable. I met the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life. The students there, just incredible. I guess it makes sense. You get the smartest people on literally an entire continent all in the same building, and it’s phenomenal. So I was there for a year, and then – there’s a bit of a pattern – didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And then a professor at Cambridge I knew said, “I’ve got some funding. You can come back to Cambridge and do a PhD with me." So I did. And I think UK PhDs have the advantage that they’re done in only about three years. So that was an appeal as well.

I also didn’t 100% know what I wanted to do. I kind of suspected that I didn’t want to go the typical academic, theoretical physics route, but I did kind of feel like, at the very least, “I’ll learn a lot, I’ll get great mathematical skills, and there are worse ways to spend three years and you can call yourself ‘doctor’ afterwards.”

So how were those three years for you?

There were ups and downs, for sure. I struggled a lot, because I think in the UK it’s very much – you’re just kind of told, “Go away for three years and come back when you’ve figured something out.” And I think everybody’s experience varies, like some people get more mentorship; some people don’t, but I did kind of struggle a little bit. But I met great friends, and I feel like I did learn a lot. But there were definitely ups and downs. I wouldn’t say it was easy by any stretch of the imagination.

And then how did you make the switch into climate science? Were there other things you were considering as well?

So I was really lucky and I got a postdoc at Stanford in the Center for International Security and Cooperation, which has this great science fellowship program. And they basically said, “You can do whatever you want, as long as you’re doing something which is relating science and policy.” And that was just great for me. So I did a little bit of work on mathematical modeling of the electricity grid. So I published a physics paper on applying random matrix theory to understanding the network of the grid. And I did a little bit of work on nuclear energy; basically trying to figure out “How should I feel about nuclear energy? Is it a net good? Or is it a net bad?”

I did a little bit of work on that and then I realized – I was there for three years – and I realized in my third year that I really like doing science, I really like doing physics, and I’m just really interested in how the Earth works. I think of all the places in the universe, this is my favorite. And I just got really interested in it. So I started just talking to people. I was on the Stanford campus, just reaching out to people, and saying like “Hey, I don’t know anything, but can I come pick your brain?” And some people never replied, and some people said “No, I’m busy,” but a really large number of people said “No, come talk to me.”

So just by making contact, I ended up meeting somebody who works at the Carnegie Institute, which is an independent research center, but it’s on the Stanford campus. I ended up talking him into giving me a try, letting me be a postdoc for a little bit. And in that job, it was learning on the feet, learning how to use a climate model, learning how to modify it, and we ended up writing this crazy paper on basically how many wind turbines can you put in the atmosphere, before you either run out of wind or seriously alter the atmospheric circulation And the answer turned out to be, a lot. You go to crazy town here. But it’s a really interesting way to kind of look at the parameters of the atmospheric circulation. And that was just an amazing experience because I learned how to use a climate model and I learned the basics of atmospheric dynamics, and I got this very high-profile paper out of it. So that was amazing.

“I realized in my third year that I really like doing science, I really like doing physics, and I’m just really interested in how the Earth works. I think of all the places in the universe, this is my favorite. And I just got really interested in it.”

Can you back up a little bit? You said you were really lucky to get the postdoc at Stanford. How did that happen? 

In graduate school, I got really involved with an organization called Pugwash, which is kind of a silly name, but it’s actually a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization. During the Cold War, they did a lot of bilateral negotiations between scientists in the US and in the Eastern Bloc. And now it’s kind of this general science and society organization devoted to trying to do good things through science. And so I ran the Cambridge chapter of that and I got to go to a couple of conferences and met people there. And so I met people who worked at Stanford through these conferences, which was great, yeah.

Basically, through an extracurricular activity that you really cared about.

Yeah.

Then you got this opportunity at the Carnegie Institute. You were actually working, you were learning how to use a climate model. Where did you go from there?

I went from there to Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which has a really good climate group and I did a postdoc there. So I was at Carnegie for like two months before this opportunity came up at Livermore. I’m still really blown away by how much help and mentoring and advice I got through the whole process. I showed up at Carnegie and then at Livermore being kind of clueless. But people were just so patient and really generous with their time. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

But at Livermore there’s this place called the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, which I don’t think is a word, but basically it’s a bit of a clearinghouse. So there are about thirty different independent climate modeling groups in the world, and in order to see the similarities and differences they all have to run the same set of experiments, so they all have to run like – “Okay, run your model with no external forcing whatsoever. Like no greenhouse gasses, no volcanoes, nothing. And then, okay, everybody run your model where you all of a sudden abruptly quadruple carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” And so everybody has to do these same sets of experiments, and then send all of their results to the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Livermore. And so it’s just kind of like being in a playground because you have all of these data to play with. And there are so many interesting questions you can ask. So yeah, that was great.

You said something in the beginning about the value of your physics degree and your training in physics. You also taught at AIMS for a year. Do you want to add anything now about the value of that training for what you’re doing now?

I personally think it was super-valuable. I’m really grateful that I kind of learned how to approach problems in kind of a systematic mathematical way. I’m really glad I have those skills. I never took a course on programming and I really wish I had, but at AIMS I had to teach programming and there’s nothing that makes you learn faster than having to teach. So I’ve had quite a few people talk to me about wanting to make the switch from physics into climate science, and I always say, “That’s the number one thing you need, on top of what you already have: solid programming skills.” And I don’t think I would have had those if I hadn’t taught.

Damian Handzy: Physicist and Co-founder of Investor Analytics, Part II

"I am thrilled that I studied physics, absolutely thrilled. Thinking statistically, thinking about how systems work, thinking about interactions, figuring out what is actually meaningful and what’s not, what questions are worth asking, that’s awesome." -- Damian Handzy

Damian not only loves all that thinking and figuring things out, he is very much a "people person." This may explain why someone once said of him, "I don’t know of anyone who gets so excited about helping someone else have an ‘aha!’ moment." It also helps to explain his eagerness to provide advice, advice from the accumulated wisdom of his transition to Wall Street from physics, and his twenty years of experience on "the Street." Given Damian's interest in people, and his tendency toward analysis, that wisdom is considerable. He approaches life in a very conscious manner, eager to figure out what there is to learn from his experiences and from other people. To capture more of what Damian has learned I interviewed him a second time.

DH:  In my first interview I gave a lot of info about how Wall Street works, what my personal experiences were, things like that, but what I didn’t do was convey any advice that I’ve collected over the last twenty years. I think there’s quite a bit of positive stuff, but there is negative stuff as well. I just wanted to share some of those thoughts. If I were in grad school or an undergrad today, knowing what I know now, what would I tell my younger self?

There are a variety of things that pull in anyone who’s attracted to studying physics. Typically, we’re good at math, we like challenging problems, maybe we don’t know what else to do. I think it’s applicable to anyone who goes into engineering, chemistry, biology, physics, math, any of those fields. There’s a bunch of stuff that pulls us into that and, while we’re educated, there’s a culture within the sciences that is unique to the sciences. It’s a very good culture for the sciences, but leaving that culture and moving to any other business or endeavor is a little bit of a culture shock because there are things that we’re simply not taught, either as undergrads or as grad students, that really matter when you’re not in physics or the sciences.

I talked a little bit about how I was almost fired a couple of times my first year at Deloitte. Part of that was the culture. The culture in the sciences is if you find something that’s wrong, you’re not only willing to challenge it, you’re encouraged to challenge it, even if it’s presented by someone twice your age or someone who’s renowned in the science community. Because everyone makes mistakes, we all recognize that and talk about that openly. That’s part of the culture of physics. And that almost got me fired on Wall Street, because you just don’t do that. Physics gives us a lot of very good training in some aspects, but it doesn’t train us at all on other things. And those, I think, if you’re going to leave physics, whether after undergrad or grad school, you need to start thinking about.

One of those things is learning the lingo of the field that you’re thinking about going into so you can be more conversant. It has to do with being more diplomatic than what passes for diplomacy in physics. Learn how to speak to non-physicists. The more time you spend with physicists, the more comfortable you get in that type of mode. Part of that is physicists like to be challenged. We like that little bit of confrontation because we’re going to learn something from it. The rest of the world doesn’t like learning from their own mistakes, and they really hate their mistakes being pointed out to them. Think about how you felt before you started studying physics when you were a sophomore or junior in high school and someone pointed out a flaw that you had. You know, your first reaction was, I might belt the person. On Wall Street, you really need to be careful about how you say what you say to whom.

My first year out of grad school, there was a paper that was published on a growth curve of some business, the revenue over time or something. The speaker was presenting this is in a room of about thirty people, and I’m the junior person in the room. The speaker said, “As we can see, this is exponential growth. It’s extremely important to invest in this because this is going to grow like crazy,” and it looks like a logarithmic curve to me. I just say, “I’m sorry, that’s actually slowing down. That’s a logarithmic curve. That’s not exponential.” That’s one of those places where I almost got fired.

That kind of mistake was a painful lesson. Outside of math and physics, the word exponential does not mean what physicists think it means. The word exponential means “growing fast.” I use it correctly, but I don’t correct people when they use it incorrectly, because that would be arrogance. Now, I might take them aside and explain, “Hey look, that curve is slowing down its growth.” In economic speak, that’s marginal contribution to return, or marginal improvement. The margin is getting smaller and smaller. That’s how they convey that concept. But if you come out and say, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, that’s clearly logarithmic-like not exponential-like,” that’s how you get fired.

And there are a lot of examples like that, where they make incorrect conclusions when analyzing data, or they make assumptions without data that some business process is true. They’re going to pursue some strategy to grow the company, and when you ask for data, you’re challenging their authority and their knowledge of the industry. Experience passes for correctness on Wall Street. Someone who’s been on the street for twenty, thirty years is revered whether or not they have data to back up their claims. That’s a real challenge. More and more so, that is decreasing in its prevalence, but it still is how the street works. The street respects people who made an awful lot of money. Now, whether they did that through skill or through luck is not a question that is ever asked. And when you do a serious statistical analysis of Wall Street traders and who is lucky and who is skillful, you find that 98% of the returns are generated through luck, through random process. And the Wall Street Journal does this typical thing where they take darts and they throw it at the journal’s stock pages, and they compare it to what mutual fund managers did, and 98% of mutual fund managers are within the tolerance of error of statistical sampling. So, it’s luck. If you can generate higher than average returns for five, six years in a row, you’re revered, even if you’re well within the statistical error bars of the expected number of funds or managers who would have that type of return. They don’t do that analysis, and they don’t get that. You got to tolerate that if you want to play this game.

It’s somewhat eye opening, and I want to go back to some of these points of advice.

One of the things I loved about my progress in physics was that I was less and less frequently the smartest person in the room. When I was in high school, quite often I was the smartest person in the room, including the teacher. When I got to college, sometimes that was true, but quite often it wasn’t. Well, if the professor was in the room, clearly I wasn’t, but if it was just the other students, sometimes I was and sometimes I wasn’t. And, in grad school, it was almost never the case. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed being in a room where I’m midway through the intelligence spectrum. I’m going to learn from half the room, and I can teach half the room, if you will. So I like that. 

On Wall Street, I will be perfectly blunt and I will say 95% of the time I know I’m the smartest person in the room and I only behave that way 5% of the time, because it is incredibly important not to project the image that you’re the smartest person in the room. Let them figure that out, but be humble about it so they respect you rather than be pissed off at you. Physicists have a knack for pissing people off just because of that culture that we carry with us. Like I said, it works in physics, and it helps physics get better at its own game. But that game is not how the rest of the world plays its game.

Another part of this is respecting other types of knowledge. Physicists certainly have a type of knowledge which I have a lot of respect for, and a lot of people have a lot of respect for. That doesn’t mean it’s the only type of knowledge. There is expertise in, for example, management. Managing people is a skill that you can learn, the same way that physics is a skill that you can learn. Not everybody can be a physicist, and not everybody can be a manager. And it’s not just that you’re smart enough to be a manager. Emotional intelligence is a real thing. Understanding how to coach and manage other smart people is hard, and it’s something that, at least when I was in grad school, was poo-pooed as some kind of soft-skilled management skill, as if they don’t know what they’re talking about. Well, they do. And they get results, and you can measure those results. Some people are better at it, and some people aren’t as good at it. Respecting a manager’s skill set, which is different from your, the physicist’s skill set, is important when you leave physics. That arrogance? It can bite you in a couple of ways, and one of those is dismissing other types of knowledge and other skill sets.

I started talking about being the smartest person in the room, and that goes along with the other types of knowledge. As I’ve progressed in my career, I have lost skill sets that I had earlier in my career. I can’t type a LaTeX document today. I haven’t done it in a long, long time. I actually can’t pick up MATLAB and use it all that quickly. I haven’t done it in ten or twelve years. But I’ve also picked up other skill sets along the way that allow me to respect other people who are running companies who have also lost their skill sets because they can’t do the thing that they started out doing anymore. But you pick up other stuff, and that’s important to recognize. There’s a wealth of other types of skills that you need to pick up as your career goes through, unless you want to stay doing exactly the same thing. 

I’m not a computer scientist, and I learned how to program the way most physicists did in the 80s. That is, my professor threw a Fortran book at me and said, “Hey, any monkey can learn this.” That’s bullshit. That is not true. Computer science is a science, and good programming is, too. You got to work at it. I now hire people with computer science degrees to do the programming because I know I’m not good at that. They’re better at it. Now, if they want to progress in their careers, they have to obviously demonstrate skill at that function, But as they progress, they have to demonstrate communication skills, managerial skills, presentation skills.

That brings me to one of the most important things that physicists really, really need to improve, and that’s communication skills. Whether that’s written or verbal, whether that’s a handshake in the corridor, that communication is so much more important than I was led to believe in grad school. It’s the one thing that I really regret not teaching myself more of when I was in grad school. There’s the typical thing of the elevator pitch: taking a complex subject and simplifying it down, not simpler than it should be, but simple enough that you can convey the executive summary to the person. You’ve got thirty seconds, what are you going to convey? You should practice that in advance. You should know the two or three most important points in seven words or less, what those are, how do you get someone’s attention, how do you get someone to want to poke one level deeper. And that’s a learned skill set. I think grad students in particular, but undergrads as well, would do well for themselves to learn it.  
 

LK: That’s a recurring theme from our alumni. And even staying in academic physics, it’s an extraordinarily valuable skill. That doesn’t come naturally.

I’m going to say it comes naturally to a lot of people, but it’s an anti-filter among physicists. Math comes naturally to many physicists. Statistics comes naturally to no human being on the planet. That’s a learned skill, and it’s hard. We misinterpret things all the time. But I really do think that communication and math, based on what I’ve read about different types of learning and different types of thinking, is that those two are largely uncorrelated. Physicists have a natural tendency to dismiss the topic and not think about it or work on it. Physics, even if you’re working in a group, is still a solo achievement type field. You’re not going to get promoted, your career’s not going to advance if the group wins but you’ve only kept pace. You have to sell yourself. And that’s part of the benefit. In physics, to have a real career, you’ve got to be damn good. And that means that the field is always advancing.

So, it’s the right think for physics. But for the Wall Street team, if the team makes money, everybody gets rewarded. They filter out the bad, the people who don’t deserve to be there, but not nearly as stringently as physics does. The approach that physics has is if I achieve my results – and I’m using I, not we – I increase my probability of getting tenure, accolades and other things. It’s more of a solo endeavor, and therefore communication isn’t as critical for success. I mean, on Wall Street I have to convince clients to use my services, I have to convince partners to partner with me, I am honing my communication skills constantly.

I’ll give you an example. Yesterday I met with someone who reports to the CEO of one of the largest banks in the world. In the same room was his direct report, who runs a division of the bank, and his direct report, who runs a project within the division of the bank, and his two direct reports, who are analysts on the project. We’re trying to work on something all together, and we are strategizing how to present to the most senior person’s boss, who runs the bank; we’re thinking about partnering with his bank. How do you communicate with them all at the same time, all different levels? How detailed do you get, how sundry do you get, how much respect do you show? It was a fascinating question. The senior-most person asked me, because we’re a little less formal than a large bank, “Describe the culture of your firm. We’re all in suits and ties today. Do your people know how to tie a tie?”

That’s important. He can’t take my people into meetings if they can’t behave appropriately in the meeting. A lot of the people, they probably don’t know how to tie a tie, because I don’t need them to know how. But my senior people all know how to put on ties because we do it pretty frequently. Not making fun of that is just step one: recognizing that what you wear and how you conduct yourself is part of your communication. It’s not to be dismissed. And that’s something that physics just doesn’t convey.

Other advice that I think is just as relevant today is if someone’s going to leave physics, recognize that your network of connections in the business world and whatever industry you’re looking for is much, much wider than you think it is. What do I mean? The informational interview is a time-honored technique. It is nonthreatening; you’re not asking for a job, you’re asking for ten minutes of someone’s time for them to talk about their career or their advice to you about what you might want to do to get into their industry. I remember very clearly talking to a friend of a friend of a friend of a – it was six levels of connection – and I’m talking to this guy who had a career on Wall Street. Every time you have one of these conversations, you want to ask the person to introduce you to two more people, right? And your network is exponentially growing, literally exponentially, and when I went through this route, I was spending an hour a day on the phone with people I didn’t know, but who were introduced to me by people I didn’t know who were introduced to me by people, dot dot dot, I knew. And in this conversation, the guy says, “You know, were you a camp counselor back in ’84 at such and such camp? My son was there and he remembered you.” That’s what I’m talking about. You have no idea how big your network is and how widespread that net is. Your alumni network from your undergraduate institution, your parents’ friends, teachers from high school and college who also have families and friends that they know. So, one of the best ways to get a job outside of the field you’re in is let everyone you know know that you’re looking for a job in such-and-such a field. And they will know someone who knows someone who knows someone who will talk to you and maybe pass on your resume or make an introduction.

LK: That’s another recurring theme, about networking and encouraging students to actually engage in that way. It’s one of these things that I think can be surprising to undergraduates or graduates coming from the culture of physics.

My single biggest piece of advice is the following: every human being you interact with is going to teach you something, either positive or negative. They may teach you many positive things or many negative things. Do more of the things that result in success that you observe in others every day, and do less of the things that you see resulting in failure every day. If I learn from these interactions and adopt behaviors that I see in the most successful people and drop behaviors that I can recognize in myself that are harmful to a career or to relationships or to what have you, and do less and less of those, I’m bound to increase my performance in whatever it is I’m trying to do.

Concrete example: I looked at professors who I saw were successful despite themselves. Intelligence matters, and skill matters, and in physics, that will trump rudeness and interaction. So I saw that as a quality that I obviously want to improve in myself: my ability and my technical skills. But, I also saw that the most successful professors were the ones who could interact with the dean, or the provost, or with members of Congress when they came to examine the lab, or with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or what have you. I looked for how they conduct themselves. When I got to Wall Street, I was with Deloitte and Touche, which is a partnership, so there were various levels. Senior-most is partner, meaning they share in the profits of the business. Now, of course, there was a distribution among partners. I saw the more successful partners and the less successful partners. The most successful partners spent two minutes talking to each group that they were at when they walked into a room. They’d say, “Hello, I’m Ken Horner, how are you? Oh, you’re new? I haven’t met you yet. And you’re John, nice to see you again. Guys, great chatting with you, I’ll see you later on,” and went to the next group. And this guy made sure, every time he was in a room, that he said hello to every single person in the room. He was a butterfly. And when he did that with clients, he made sure he then put clients in touch with other clients, people in touch with other people, making those human connections. It was one of his ways of success because he was valued as a facilitator of people’s networks. That took chutzpah, that took communication skills. He’s a very intelligent guy, an MIT engineer by training, and he would always compliment people, but he’d also introduce some new piece of information into the conversation. I was like, “Wow. That works. Okay, let me try doing some of that.” It was terrifying to go up to a group of people I didn’t know, say “Hey, I’m Damian Handzy, let me introduce myself.” It took a year or two for me to get comfortable with that, but that’s really important to be able to do. Observe traits that have causal relationship to success or to failure and do more of the first and less of the second.

LK: It was really fun knowing you twenty-five years ago in our U program. I remember you as full of enthusiasm for science, but you were enjoying the social aspect of it and the interactions as well. I see you as somebody who’s keenly aware of other people. I’m not surprised now to hear about you actively studying people and learning from them. It’s kind of fun to see how valuable that’s been for you. I’m sure it’s valuable for everybody, too.

Others have accused me of having studied physics despite the fact that I’m a people person. I’ve always been a people person. That was one of the hardest things in grad school: not being able to exercise a lot of that because I like non-physicists as well as physicists. I’ll be perfectly frank. I’ve got friends who are dumb as a doorknob, but I still hang out with them because we have a shared history and we’ve done stuff together. I don’t have really meaningful conversations with them, but I do enjoy people, and there’s a lot you can learn from other people, both pro and kind of con.

You also mentioned I was excited about science. I have not dropped that. Two years ago, we were going to do a partnership with a large firm, and the senior person from the other firm was describing me as a science and risk evangelist, that I’m trying to help people understand how this stuff works. They said, “I don’t know of anyone who gets so excited about helping someone else have an ‘aha!’ moment.” That, I think, is what ultimately pulled me into physics. For the record, I’ll say unequivocally, I am thrilled that I studied physics, absolutely thrilled. I cannot imagine not thinking like a physicist. Thinking statistically, thinking about how systems work, thinking about interactions, figuring out what is actually meaningful and what’s not, what questions are worth asking. That’s awesome. I wouldn’t have had that if I had studied medicine or any other field. 

All that said, there’s an enthusiasm that I think I’ve brought to a lot of stuff I’ve worked on or studied, whether that’s humans or systems or interactions. That has also played a part in my ability to transition from one field to another. That’s a personality trait, not necessarily a learned trait that my physics training taught me.

LK: Thanks for taking the time to share all that with us. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you again.