“Your brain consumes about the power of a refrigerator light bulb,” says Balasubramanian. “With such a small amount of power, we do enormously many things, right? And a computer can’t do art appreciation.” light on color processing. “I knew the content facts about color vision and how the retina would respond, and Vijay had ideas about what principles might be decisive or governing in terms of the architecture, and how to do the calculations,” says Brainard. “Collaborations emerge when you talk to people, when you run into them. And you run into them if the daily features of your academic life cause that to happen, and the institution doesn’t create any artificial impediments to that happening.” Balasubramanian is making the most of his freedom to roam. “I think that one of the hottest areas of physics right now is the physics of the living world,” he says. “If people don’t know anything, well, that’s exactly what you should be working on. It’s the Columbus syndrome, right? There’s an uncharted land, so you should go there. You’ll surely find wonderful new things that no one ever saw before.” He’s equally excited to
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share these new lands with his students, to communicate the great things that have been and that are being discovered, whether or not they plan to be scientists. “Part of being a citizen in a democracy involves being fully informed about all the kinds of developments that are going on so you can make informed judgments about the world,” says Balasubramanian, who has received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award from SAS. “And I think it enriches one’s life, to be able to have a conception of how the universe came to be, and where it’s going. Being broadly trained, in the liberal arts sense, is hugely important because you don’t know what’s going to be important to you in the long run. The world changes.” He brings another kind of interdisciplinarity to his classroom when he reads students the passage from Remembrance of Things Past in which Proust describes how the smell and taste of a
madeleine pulls out an entire memory from his childhood. “I read that out in my classes when I’m describing olfaction because it’s almost like reading out the pathways in the brain that lead from smell to memory to emotion. Very often it is literature, even more than neuroscience and psychology, that teaches us about ourselves.” “Without strong economies you can’t do anything, so you have to have that economic basis for learning,” he says. “But I think the pursuit of knowledge should not necessarily be based on what you think the immediate gain is going to be. There has to be this vision of, well, of all human learning.” Challenged to sum up “The Knowable Universe” in under a minute for the School’s 60-Second Lectures series, Balasubramanian said, “The most amazing thing about this world of wonders is that we can understand it. If you think about it, there’s no a priori reason we should be able to explain anything about the world. It’s an amazing gift.” ◆
Penn Arts & Sciences Magazine