To Make an Omelet You Have to Break a Few Eggs - It’s all relative
I was more actively interested in physics after I learned about ether in my high school physics class. It seemed like a silly concept to me, yet at the time it was our best guess and I found that fascinating…admittedly, physics and the science of energy was not my forte then. In retrospect, I’m happy to have been introduced to concepts that would later help frame the way I look at the world. I send a shout out and thanks to all the under appreciated high school science teachers out there! For a long time we believed we were surrounded by this mystical substance, ether or aether, until the turn of the century when our mechanical abilities to build sophisticated instruments to test our theories was realized. In college, I took my passing fascination with physics a step further when I took a theoretic physics class at Carnegie Mellon, and went deeper into particle physics and quantum mechanics…where science and philosophy can meet at a subatomic level…Einsteinian special and general relativity to super string theory and some really mind bending lessons. I don’t pretend to understand any of it at a deeper level…but connections are there to be made in everyday life. To me, it’s all science and art.
I wanted to be a diplomat and an artist, and travel the world learning new languages, and living in different cultures…I’ve always thought we had more in common than we thought…we just needed to learn more, and look at each other from new lenses. It’s the duality of nature that I later came to appreciate…light is both a wave and particle and that really threw the ether people for a loop…in physics and so many other disciplines… How could we be both common and different at the same time? How we could look at a problem from several different scientific or cultural lenses, and come to new conclusions…allowing us to sometimes radically change not only our opinions but also our factual precepts…if we kept our minds open for the lessons, and learning opportunities.
Scientific inquiry is both art and science. Today I have the benefit of still being a sort of diplomat and artist I once dreamed of…and in many projects we get to see the intersection between science and art…and get to share this journey with so many interesting people. I saw some powerful pictures at a friend’s desk (thanks Ivan!), and just had to know where they came from… NASA? Nature? It turns out that they are one means of scientific inquiry from an engineer that is developing some of the most advanced methods of growing silicon crystals in the world… Hopefully all of you will recognize silicon as our building block for photovoltaic cells, which we put up on monumental poles and rooftops around the country. Eric is also an accomplished photographer as you’ll see, and here is his perspective.
Story submitted by Eric B.
In my experience, when researching and developing a new process, there are many victories and set backs. But for me, a set back wasn’t exactly what it seemed. I work for a solar company. We have developed a process that will reduce the cost of growing silicon for the solar photovoltaic industry. The road traveled to achieve this, has been at times, a long and difficult one. Sometimes however, in the face of difficulty, you can find artistic beauty in places you never would’ve thought. I submit to you a few pictures as a representation of a conflict in me, between journey and destination. I have found that in business, the goal or destination is the main focus. In art or artistic expression, it is seemingly more about the journey, or that which is learned or experienced on the way to achieving a goal or arriving at a destination. I however have been lucky enough, to have found a place where I can experience wonders of both. The pictures submitted, were all take during times when there were complications with the development of the process of growing silicon crystals.
This is a picture of a silicon crystal, actually being grown. This is being shot through a gold plated glass filter, to protect the grower’s eyes. Silicon is grown at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Unlike other silicon growing processes, we will run the grower for a week or more at a time. The materials and gases inside the grower, at these high temperatures, react together and cause a waste by product of silicon oxide. This silicon oxide can create some amazing colors and formations. The following pictures are but a few of the pictures that I have taken of something that I think is very beautiful.
In the highly textured images above, these strange formations grow on some of the graphite parts in the grower during process. As for the ones that look more like paintings, these are some of the colors and patterns that develop on the walls of the grower during a run process.