Episode 6: Mike Blanton - Managing Change, In Science And In Life

In this episode I caught up with astronomer Mike Blanton in his office in Pasadena California, where he is the new director of Carnegie Observatories. I found Mike at a moment when he, his wife and their two high schoolers are all facing exciting life changes, and navigating them well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Andover Alumni Now, the class of 1991. I'm your classmate and host, Mike Miners. In this episode, I caught up with Mike Plant in his office in Pasadena, California, where he is the new director of Carnegie Observatory. I couldn't begin without letting him know that every time I hear the term dark matter, I remember a conversation we had at the 25th reunion where he explained to me that no one knows for sure where a full 80% of the mass of the universe is coming from. A fact that continues to astound and delight me. As we settled into what's going on now, I heard him say his living situation was complicated. And it quickly became apparent I had found Mike in a moment when he, his wife, and their two high schoolers are all facing exciting life changes and navigating them well. What's making your living situation complicated?

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Uh, well, so so I was a professor at NYU for a long time. Yeah. Over 20 years, something like that. Uh, but now I've taken a job in Pasadena as the director of Carnegie Observatories, which is a center here, which does a lot of astronomy. Okay. So I'm I've moved, but my family's still in New York.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

And so wow, yeah, that is complicated.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Yeah. So the kids are in high school, and you know, one's a senior and one's a sophomore. Okay. You know, it's like we can't move in the middle of school year, especially for the senior, because it's like, what, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

How would that work? Totally.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

So my wife and the kids and the dog are still out there, and I'm going back and forth.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

And yeah, that is a complicated situation. So your uh your 18-year-old, I assume, is getting ready for college.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Yeah, he um he we drove around Pennsylvania looking at colleges and we went to Lehigh. He applied early to that to Lehigh and got in and is in a business and engineering thing, and that's what he wants to do.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Great. Is your influence as a physicist uh have something to do with that he's interested in engineering? Were you is that something you did together when he was young?

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Um I don't know the answer to that question. I mean, I think I think I've certainly tried. But um, but and and to some extent it it is like, yeah, when he started doing AP physics, it was or was planning on doing it. I we did like specifically do like stuff on the the board and like during COVID, you know, we did a lot of stuff like that. But I don't know, my general experience with kids is that they're pretty much can't change them.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Like my experience too.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

But you know, you can do stuff on the edges and you can sort of see something and encourage it, yeah, right? Or discourage it. Yep, and that can be good or bad. Totally. But um, but I think they're pretty much on their trajectory. Like that's you know, both my kids had a pretty clear personality at four months.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Which, you know, we which is really weird to say because when I see a four month old, I have but somehow when you see them every day, you kind of see the like my daughter is really just really fast at understanding things, just got the thing that they that she's supposed to do, you know, very, very quickly. Uh, whether she does it or not is a different thing, but she understands what she is supposed to be doing.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Um, whereas my son was um my son's much more like no knows what he wants to do and is gonna do that thing. And you know, I just remember him on these, like these little mats he put the kid on. And as soon as he could crawl, if there was something he wanted to get to, it was just like he was gonna get to that thing. There was no stopping.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

And both those aspects of their personalities and other aspects were just evident, you know, so soon. And you don't, I don't know. I think there are a lot of things like that where you can play around the edges, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Totally my experience too. I got um I was confused about that when my first son was born, thinking, oh, this is kind of an engineering project, you know. I'm gonna I'm gonna create a human being to my own specifications, you know. I'm gonna do my best to make sure that they're you know, have all these traits, and I'm gonna create an environment that will inspire those uh thoughts and so on, yeah. And parented him that way. Uh, luckily, his little brother was born 17 months later, so I didn't I couldn't do too much damage. Uh but that um when his little brother was born, it became apparent immediately. It's like, oh, these guys are very different, and they just come with a whole different setup, and I'm doing the same things and getting completely different results from one to the other. And it it was it smacked me in the head. It was like, Mike, you're not making these kids what they are, and from that point on, I was like, okay, I think what it is, it's more like each kid is born a certain kind of ocean going vessel. Like some are princess cruise ships, some are like fishing skiffs, canoes, river boats. You get all these different kinds of ocean-going vessels, and my job is to help navigate, right? The boat is what it is, but now it's like, oh, we've got shallow water coming up, right? Let me help point that out. And oh, we've run aground. How do we get out of here? Uh, and it's kind of there to help that out, but I'm not I'm not making the boat, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, it feels too bad, but on the other hand, it's it's it's definitely for the best.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Yeah, totally, right? Because 100%.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Yeah, they certainly can surprise you.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Yeah, mind you, all the time. How's your wife with the move?

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Well, you know, she is yeah, she is different than me about change. Aside from two years living in Chicago, I more or less lived within three or four hours of New York City. Yeah, but my wife was born in Connecticut, moved to England, her family moved to Luxembourg and then Switzerland, and she went, you know, she went to boarding school in England at 11. Oh, wow. Yeah. So she's like, and her response was, uh, yeah, why not? Wow. And weirdly, like two days before I was offered this job, she was contacted by a company that's about a mile away. Like really randomly, like completely randomly. Yes. And so she started remotely. So she also has a job in Pasadena sort of worked out.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Sounds like it totally worked out. So this opportunity came across your email or something like that. Were you headhunted? I don't, I don't think they had a search firm.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Maybe they did have a search firm for this. Okay. The fact is, is that for the field of astronomy, you kind of know the list of people who you know, you know who to contact. The it's a small field. There's not many professional astronomers in the world. Like there are more, there might be more Jesuits in the world than professional astronomers.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Like Jesuit priests.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's sometimes I compare it to being in high school, but for 40 years.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Like it's everybody, you know, you just know everybody.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Everybody knows each other. The people, you know, the the or it's not quite like everybody knows each other, but it's it's you know who all the people are. And in a field like this, you you know, you have to remember that whoever you're interacting with, there's gonna be another interaction that might be 30 years from now, or maybe you're on the same side side of the argument or different side, or you know, it's it's it's more like having, I mean, d departments where like you have tenure and stuff is a is a lot like this, where it's a little bit more like siblings than colleagues, right? Yeah, in the sense that you know, there's gonna have to be a long-term relationship here, whether you like it or not, right? And it's I don't want you, mostly I liked it, but it's still um, it's still sort of a weird thing.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Yeah, like siblings, there's a familiarity and a closeness and uh shared experience, and maybe that closeness breeds uh some fun and and cool things, but then also could cause some friction because you can keep running into the same differences over and over again or something.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Yeah, well, you know, like like with siblings, it's um, I'm sure you experience this. Everything's pretty high stakes. Oh, yeah, right? Because it's not just right now, it's forever.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

We're gonna have to deal with each other going down the road. So this thing that we're dealing with that neither of us are happy about needs to be resolved now or yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

It's sort of everything is is this thing which has very long-term consequences, but also you have to find a way to work because like you don't have a choice, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

There's still gonna be siblings, we're still gonna have to deal with each other, so we better figure it out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

And so academic departments, for better or worse, are a little bit like that, where the arguments are a bit heightened because it's not just today, it's not like you know, who knows where you're gonna be five years from now. It's it's a long-term thing. And yet, you know, on the flip side of that, it's a long-term thing. So you're gonna have to find a way to work it out.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

What's a kind of generic example of something? So I'm not I'm not saying you necessarily to reveal some uh actual thing, although I invite you to do so if you feel comfortable doing it. Um, but like what's an example of a type of a thing that you'd have to navigate that way?

SPEAKER_01 10:34

I mean, the big things always are who do you hire? Who's the next person you introduce in this group? Every department has its own vision of what its mission is. And generally speaking, when you hire a new faculty member, the hope is that they get tenure. Like, well, that's why you're hiring them. Um, and if they are, they are gonna change the nature of the organization. And people will have different visions of whether that is uh the right direction or that sort of thing. And that's usually the stakes of the argument, yeah. Uh, is about who the who the people are.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

In my amateur fandom around physics, I hear stories of people uh researching topics that are not by the establishment considered the right things to study. Right. Yes, maybe even a waste of time and resources. Is that something that comes up in your world?

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yes. I'm speaking as a a firmly established member of the establishment.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Uh uh. But it definitely does, and it's like a real tension in the system because that's what I understand. The the intent of a system where you eventually get tenure is that at least at that point you can be like, I don't care what the rest of y'all think I'm yeah, you know, I'm doing this thing.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Um isn't that the idea around tenure?

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Yeah, academic freedom is part of the motivation and part of part of that is, you know, there's parts of academia where that that it that has a more political tent, but in the realm of physics, it is more purely, you know, you want to study this thing. I nobody has a right to say that that's the wrong direction to go. Yeah, if you're a department chair, you can make it harder or easier for the person to do that thing in terms of allocating resources. And and when that person applies for grants, you know, panels can be like, that's a ridiculous thing to be doing, and decide they're not going to give you money. Part of the design is is that you can do it, it's not a thing that can be shut down, but you know, it is true that you know, to get to that point, you have to make it through a whole bunch of hoops, and those hoops are, you know, and and the people who get through the hoops are people that are good at going through hoops, right? Uh that is a fact. And so whether the system is really, you know, you just need a certain number of iconoclasts, like people who will just do things in a totally different way. Like that is that is a necessary part of any sort of ecosystem like this, and yet they have to be banging their head against something. Yeah. Right? Like, like somehow you can't be an iconoclast unless someone's like making these icons.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Um point. Nothing, no icon to clash against. There's no iconoclasm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah, it it's um, you know, I I don't mean that just as a metaphor. I I I mean, I mean it as a metaphor in the sense that people shouldn't be literally breaking things. Uh, but I do I think it really is the case that it should be a smaller part of the community, right? Like that I think that in the main, the mainstream is doing pretty well in science and has the right sort of sort of criteria and the right is pushing things in the right direction. And I think that if you're not exploring the fringes, then there is a space that you're not filling. But I think if everybody was exploring the fringes, it would stall science.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

It sounds like what you're saying is that everyone benefits from a fringe player when there is a hole that has a fringe.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah, I think that's right. At least that's how I see the balance. I mean, I think there have definitely been cases historically where people have, you know, explored areas where it turned out, oh, that that really changed, you know, we're talking, you know, we started this conversation talking about dark matter, and it is definitely the case that at the beginning that was seen as like a pretty unusual thing. And some of the people who were sort of exploring the evidence for it, it was considered like, you know, those people didn't suffer in their careers, but it was a bit of a wild idea. And those people were people who who had lots of different wild ideas, and this was one of them. Uh, and this is one of the ones that turned out to be right. But um, on the other hand, what people consider the strongest evidence at the time for the existence of dark matter came out of work that was in many respects very much a like a mainstream sort of like so, so I I'm gonna I literally have a Carnegie hat back there, but um, but but I will metaphorically put on my Carnegie hat was an astronomer at Carnegie Observatories, Vera Rubin, very famous astronomer who was doing like like her, she was not an iconoclast. She was not, and she was very, very well respected. She wasn't on the fringes, but she was very much like, I'm gonna go, I'm going to take these very, very careful observations of galaxies and study them that way. And and the reason that that became the underpinning of the evidence for dark matter when it became accepted was that you know, she was so well respected in terms of her observations and her technique and the amount of data that she accumulated, it just became incontrovertible. You just, it was like, well, Rubin and Ford are not wrong about what they're observing, and they're not in this business to you know to show something really weird is happening. They are just trying to do their measurements. They're just like, we're measuring galaxies. Here's what we're seeing. And I think that in that case, you really needed both. You need you needed some people who were exploring this possibility in theoretical and more indirect ways. And at the same time, Rubin was gathering these observations and just gathered enough of them that people were like, well, this has to be going on. There's there's no other explanation for for all of these observations. And it's required both of those approaches, one of which was very, you know, very standard astronomy, like we're gonna gather a bunch of data on a bunch of objects to to look at this specific question, and and other approaches which were more speculative and more um theoretically based.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

So it's this symbiotic relationship. Yeah. You need the people out on the fringes looking for new stuff, and then you need people in the establishment to sort of culturally vet what's going on using the standard methods, or you or or at least the recognize. Yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah. And it all every uh it all looks different. The history of science is is not a cookie-cutter thing, right? There's no one story for for all the different stories, but um, but a lot of it has that element of uh, you know, it has that dichotomy there.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Yeah. Um, so and so you in your position as a director of the Carnegie Observatories, am I getting that right?

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

You're managing, I imagine, this family. So this because you because you called them siblings, right? Or it that's a metaphor. So this metaphorical family, these siblings, what's that work like for you?

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Well, I mean, you know, right now I started in January. And so right now it feels like, well, I don't know. I yeah, I don't know if I'm a parent or a sibling in this situation and this metaphor, yeah, but whatever I am, it's all adoptive.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Um great extension of the metaphor. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

So right now it feels very much like I'm figuring out the dynamics of this uh of this group. It's a whole bunch of existing relationships. So right now it's very funny because like almost everything that crosses my desk right now is a little investigation. So, for example, one thing I was looking into yesterday led to me reading the, you know, Carnegie has these yearbooks that go back to 1902. And I was reading the yearbook from 1902. I was like, really? Is that true? And from back then they're amazing because um it's just an amazing insight to the way that scientists were working back then, and and and we're a reminder that they really were, it's all very familiar sounding. I was reading a report, and it's still like, oh yeah, we're still dealing with the same issues.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

The meaning those interpersonal issues? Well, I mean, I mean the scientific science issues, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Yeah, yeah. Like it was very contemporary sounding in terms of in America, we have all this, all these facilities, but we don't have enough people to run to do science with the facilities. And like literally, that is a major point that you know, the last decadal survey of astronomy in 2020 made exactly the same point. We have all these facilities, but we don't have enough people doing science with the facilities. And it was like the same assessment from 1902. God, over a hundred years ago. Uh, but anyway, I've got sidetracked. My point is that every every conversation involves something going back decades and people's relationships over a long period of time and figuring it out because everything you do, you want to make sure it resonates correctly with the set of people that are involved, right? So, which is you know, whether I'm hitting resonance right now, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Your position at NYU was it very similar to what you're doing now or very different?

SPEAKER_01 21:08

My position at NYU is pretty different as a position. So I was I was a professor, so teaching research, it's a research university. So I mean the usual joke is it's half teaching, half research, and and half service, right? So I love the math of that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that was pretty different. You have graduate students, they're you know, you're advising them, their PhDs, you have undergraduates are doing research. Uh so you're really doing you know that stuff, but then a lot of it really is the teaching. That really is a large part of the job and the focus of the organization.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Will there be any teaching now?

SPEAKER_01 21:48

No, no coursework or or things like that. Okay. I mean, for me, I found teaching really, really rewarding. And there's there's certainly examples of course. I've taught where I look at the kids who are in that class and where they are now, and it's just like it gives me chills. Like it's just, it's amazing. And and I always found even like the day-to-day quite rewarding. But if you asked me every like rewarding afterwards, uh, if you asked me every morning, do you want to teach today? Or maybe you could teach tomorrow, I would have been like, tomorrow would be fine. Like I could do tomorrow. Um, but yeah, but so I I mean I think I will miss it, but in a in an overtime sort of way. I don't I don't actually miss the rigor of teaching. A few times a week, you've got to get up in front of people for 75 minutes, and you have to mostly some by you know what you're talking about. Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

And uh Yeah, it's a difference between liking to do something and liking to have done something. Yeah, yeah. Uh so speaking of tomorrow, what does tomorrow look like? Where are you headed? What are you working on?

SPEAKER_01 23:03

One of the things that's very special here is just the enormous amount of observing resources we have. One of the main things we have to decide is what are we gonna do with that resource? You know, one of the things I'm just a particular thing is is there's a new wide-field instrument called VIA that's gonna be put on. It's gonna observe big patches of the Milky Way. It's gonna be looking at streams of stars that go through the Milky Way. One of the things that that group hopes to do is to see the effects of very some very small dark matter halos on those streams. Maybe they'll find them, maybe they won't. Who knows? Uh, they'll do a lot of interesting things regardless. Uh I'm excited about that because a lot of my career has been about what we call wide field spectroscopy. So I a lot of my work has involved the Solo Digital Sky Survey, which it used a telescope in New Mexico for many years, but also uses a different telescope at Las Campanas, which is Carnegie's Observatory. So one of the things that makes it easier for me to like step into this role is that I knew a lot of these people. I had I knew a lot of these people because I'm an astronomer, but but I knew I sort of had relationships with a lot of these people because we had been using their telescope and still are for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

What is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? What are they looking for? What's the goal?

SPEAKER_01 24:35

So it started out doing maps of the universe and uh doing what we call redshift surveys, basically big three-dimensional maps of the universe. You look at a galaxy, you know what direction it's in, then if you know how far away it is, you know where it is in three dimensions. And so then you make these big maps. You can do lots of things with those. Um, the information we gather is mostly about how fast the stars are moving, how old is each star. That's one of the things that STSS really revolutionized, I think, is developing ways to determine for individual stars how old they are, which turns out to be a really subtle thing to do. It's not so easy to figure out how old an individual star is. Like, like I say we can determine that, but like we determine that to within like 10%, usually more like 20%, and we're really happy about it and really excited. Um, that's what makes it fun, actually. Is like every time you pull that thread, you get to something where people are like, yeah, actually, don't really know.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

That's what I love about science, is that aspect of it is that we're is it's the exploration of the unknown in a very literal way. We're trying to find something out that we don't know, and so much about that exploration is imbued with uncertainties subject. So we had to build structures of of thought in order to even consider some of the questions.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

And yeah, it's I mean for me, it's one of the big arguments for basic science. Basic science meaning there's no reason to study astronomy, at least not anymore. Like, there's no not saving anybody's life. We're not, you know, we don't have to understand how fluid flows so that we can pump oil or water or any useful thing. Like, there's not there's no there's no real reason to do it other than the interest in it. But um, but I do think that that somehow like getting together all the pieces of understanding that we have is somehow valuable to humans. It's an instinct we have to understand things, which has been mostly good for us. Yes, I think. Yeah. It's like a culmination of our purpose is to understand the world around us somehow. Yeah, like I don't really know why we exist, but like I feel like it's some something we do in a way that other animals don't. Yeah, I think. At least if studying my dog revealed anything about the animal world to me, it's that he is not building as a very accurate model of the world around him.

unknown 27:26

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

It it does seem to be that way that like we're imbued with this consciousness, this self-consciousness. The the comedian uh Pete Holmes has this routine who's like, So wait a minute, so we're everything is molecules, so like what are we? Like, we're molecules who know we're molecules, you know. And it's like that's crazy, but it's like it seems like that's what we're doing here. We're here, we're here to have this consciousness and we're exploring it, and it's and it's amazing. And yeah, it's it's been great catching up.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Yeah, I feel like we could have had this conversation in in Rockwell in ninth grade, or 100%. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for doing. I guess you're doing this with tons of people.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Yeah, but I think that at the end of the day there will be 11 or so, 10 or 11 episodes.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

Uh, it's been a blast. Thank you so much for doing it.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah, I'm glad Amy suggested it. Really good catching up, man. Yeah, thanks. Take care of yourself, you too. See you later. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Alumni and loved ones, join us June 5th through 7th for our 35th reunion. We'll see you on campus.