University of Cincinnati, United States
I play guitar, mostly because they’re pretty easy to travel with. My grandmother’s guitar was up in our attic gathering dust, and I picked it up one day and never really put it down. On one level, music is just math. It’s frequencies. And there’s a clear structure to how you assemble those frequencies to get something that sounds good. It’s not that you write down equations to figure out something that sounds good – it’s the other way around. It’s something fundamental that we can understand instinctively, and then describe mathematically. It says something about what we do in science. The world does have this intrinsic structure that we’re trying to understand.
Music I can sit down and do, but science requires a more structured approach. It strikes me that neutrino research is a field that is in motion. In the ‘90s, our understanding of how neutrinos behave exploded. We saw oscillations we didn’t expect to see, and we’re still working through the implications of that. The fact that we have so many unanswered questions draws me to neutrinos and to DUNE – because DUNE is going to tell us the answers.