Reflections

This section collects the essays from Reflections from the Frontiers (Explorations for the Future: Gordon Research Conferences 1931-2006), GRC's 75th anniversary commemorative publication.

Physical Visions
Mark Ratner
Mark Ratner
Northwestern University
Inspiration for the Working-Stiff Scientist

Where are the frontiers of science? Are they on a sandy bank on the Merrimack River not far from Proctor Academy? Do I hear them in the train whistle of the California coastal mountains? Do I feel them scrambling along hiking trails at Les Diablerets or Mount Sunapee? Do I sense them in a late-night poster session in an elegant Newport mansion or during a late-lunch discussion at Colby-Sawyer College that goes on as long as the topics fascinate? Or do they hide in a civilized glass of sherry at Queens College?

What keeps the frontiers real? What makes them visible, penetrable, and approachable by scientists old and young? Clearly, it is a devotion to science, to its ideas and ideals, its hot topics and burning questions, its leaders and learners, its excitements and frustrations, and its endless challenge and enchantment.

As a working-stiff scientist I find GRC the place to recharge my batteries, to get the juices flowing. This makes some sense: the first GRC I chaired was the Solid State Ionics Conference, which was devoted largely to batteries, and the first GRC I attended was Electron Donor Acceptor (EDA) Interactions, which is all about charge flow.

Charge transfer, energy transfer, and their structural determinants in molecularly organized matter lie at the heart of the science I do, and much of it has been inspired, directed, shaped, and challenged by the EDA Gordon Conference. The openness, the schedule, the size, the informality, the exclusiveness without cliquishness, and the humor make each GRC special and unique. In the timeless words of Walt Whitman, “It avails not, time nor place–distance avails not.”

Over the week of the conference new friendships are born and older ones are cemented. New and significant questions shape themselves, and agreements are forged to collaborate on answers to questions formed. I furiously write illegible notes to myself and learn from scientists whose names run from Abru–a to Zimmt, hailing from places ranging from Aarhus to Zagreb.

EDA Gordon Conferences are among the oldest, and their shifting focus over the years has illuminated topics from electron transfer in multimetallic systems to light harvesting in photosynthetic structures, from ultraslow corrosion to ultrafast polarization, from molecular and organic electronics to molecular photoionization and photoisomerization, as well as topics like electron charge transfer through peptides, proteins, liquids, solids, and DNA. The GRC has posed, shaped, and focused scientific suggestions: it is critical to the discovery phase of a research program.

Gordon Conferences also shape the community of science. Their origins are in chemistry, physics, and biology, but now GRC topics run seamlessly over the science of objects and processes. The shaping of scientists, however, remains unchanged; as in the past GRC continues to bring together veterans and rookies to play exciting mental games, take part in sport, and foster the personal relationships that are so much a part of the joy of science. I have been at this for three decades, and I look forward to continuing to relish, and to be uniquely rewarded by, Gordon Conferences far into the future.

Change–sometimes radical change–against a background of conceptual continuity and development characterizes the sciences. Gordon Research Conferences are the place where that vibrancy can be felt–the creative tension between what we think we know and what new experiments, models, and understandings hold in the way of future challenge. Because the EDA Gordon Conference meets every other year, my students and I spend about twenty-three-and-a-half months thinking about what we will learn at the next GRC, what questions we will ask, how our understandings will change, and how our appreciation of the fundamental science will be modified.

Science works by self-renewal, which involves realizing the many mistakes we make and reveling in the understandings that the fields achieve. So many of the breakthrough topics, areas, and concepts in my own field would simply not have happened without the GRC evening discussions–punctuated by sugar, ethanol, and occasional ranting–and the impossibly jarring questions that those sessions engender.

Some conferences are far more luxurious than Gordon Conferences, and some are closer to major airports. Most conferences are enormously large and enormously dull in contrast. But Gordon Research Conferences make it more satisfying and more important to do and understand science. They energize, challenge, and reward scientists who attend them, and they crucially aid the ongoing conceptual flow of science in its shaky but steady progress and its intrinsic wonder.