Argonne's new director wants lab to boost Chicago as innovation hub

Argonne National Laboratory's newly appointed director, Peter Littlewood, is attached to three things: coffee, his hairdresser in his native England and theoretical physics.

A Chicago resident and professor of physics, Littlewood took the helm April 1 and succeeds Eric Isaacs, who became provost at the University of Chicago. Holding his cup of coffee, Littlewood mentioned last week that he could use a haircut, saying he will go only to his stylist across the Atlantic.

Littlewood, 58, sat down with the Tribune to discuss science, his goals for the lab near Lemont and how he views Argonne's role in the Chicago region.

The interview has been edited for clarity.

Q: What is the role of a national laboratory in this day and age versus what it was when this whole concept first started?

A: Wow. Big question. I can tell you what we do now.

We have huge computers, the Advanced Photon Source — the biggest X-ray source on the planet, more or less — 5,000 users come here every year, a big data science center. These are all tools that are used by the science community across the nation, and we run them.

We're also a (U.S.) Department of Energy lab. The Department of Energy has a mission, and we do mission science. So we're trying to work with renewable energy.

So what's the genesis of the national lab system? Like all large-scale research, it began as a military research project; we're a descendant of the Manhattan Project.

One has to get used to the fact that as physicists, we grow up with original sin.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: In the case of nuclear power, of course, it's the bomb. We can atone for that by using all of these things for good purposes as well as for bad.

Q: When you're looking at Argonne's projects, what geeks you? What makes you think — wow, long after I'm gone, here's what could come out of this?

A: You never know what the impact is really going to be, but it's a reminder that you should be very bold. Always be bold. Try and go after things that look — not exactly impossible — but very, very, very odd. You shouldn't do things which you know to be impossible because that's kind of stupid, but you should set bold science goals and bold technology goals.

Q: Argonne has so many projects going on, and some are at a very small level and some are at a very big level. If you were to try to describe three or four projects that you're really excited about and tell someone, what will this mean for you?

A: Sitting out there is a synchrotron; a synchrotron generates high-energy X-rays. What comes out of a synchrotron is not so very much different from what you get in a dentist chair, except that it's much more intense. It's also a huge machine; it's a kilometer in circumference. We're doing hundreds of experiments at any one time, but fundamentally, it's a microscope on the inner workings of materials.

What are we doing with that machine over the next few years? We're actually going to make it 1,000 times better. We now have technology to do that. We will use that in biology, in medicine, in design of combustion for better cars, for better fuels, for materials for a whole class of things.

Q. What's with this computer that can do a million trillion computations a second?

A: Yeah, that's right. That computer we will get around 2020 or 2022.

Q: What do you get when you have a computer that's doing a million trillion computations a second?

A: I've even lost how many zeros. It's a lot. It's the ability to simulate on an amazing scale. As an example, we can take a model of the universe from just after the age of inflation, when you're beginning to see all these cosmic ripples, and propagate that forward for 13.5 billion years to try to predict what the structure of the universe should look like now. The reason we do that is we know what the structure of the universe looks like now; we don't quite know what it looked like then. So you go back to then, and you say, "Well, OK, these were the initial conditions — let's see what it would look like now" … until you eventually get to the answer.

Q: Have you thought at all about what your goals are for this position? Five years is the contract?

A: That's right. Five years. Well, I actually, I think, serve at the pleasure of the board of governors, so it doesn't mean that I can't get thrown out.

Throughout the rest of the lab, there are lots of projects going on, vast numbers of them. It's my goal that some of those things turn into very big ones.

I'd also like to see much greater engagement with the region. Chicago is developing as quite an innovation hub in real manufacturing. Chicago is a manufacturing town. We make stuff.

The way that energy prices have come down in the U.S. makes it a real opportunity now to innovate in manufacturing in the United States that wasn't possible before. We have big tools, and making those available and helping grow that Chicago ecosystem is a big goal for me.

The federal government has already paid for these things, so we need to be getting real value out of them as part of the economy.

Sometimes people view ... some kind of dichotomy between big science and innovation. But if you look in practice, they are so tightly linked that you never get one without the other. If you do it right, you build in both directions at once.

Q: If I had met you when you were 12 years old, where would you be and what would you have thought you would be doing now?

A: By the time I was 12, I was clear in my mind that I was going to be a theoretical physicist.

Q: That's a pretty specific goal for a 12-year-old. Were there certain books or was there a TV show or was there a certain figure that you were following?

A: It's sort of weird that I thought I'd want to be a theoretical physicist because I'm the first person in my family to go to university.

Even as a school kid in the '60s, there were discoveries being made in astronomy that were opening our view of the universe in a way which was just spectacular and have continued. … I grew up watching the mission to the moon. All of that. It wasn't just 1969, it was all of the way through that. That kind of thing is very inspiring to a kid. That probably changed my view of science as a goal.

Q: I remember when I found out that Pluto wasn't a planet. I was absolutely devastated.

A: It's kind of unfair. But then what you discover is there are more things out there the size of Pluto. The real reason for demoting Pluto as a planet is because we've discovered that there's a lot of things that size out there, so they kind of get uncountable. But it does seem kind of unfair to Pluto.

Q: The eureka moment in science — does it exist?

A: It's usually a process of exhaustion actually. Because finally when you manage to make it work, you say, "How could I have been so dumb to not see it this way? Why did I try all of these wrong things for about six months?"

Experiments have become more collaborative, more team-oriented, and that changes things. It's not entirely the case, there are many disciplines where still the lonely grad student late at night in the chemistry lab can really discover something that's important. But it is true that a lot of our disciplines have become more collaborative and require bigger teams of people to put it together. It's actually much more fun to work as a team than to work as some loner late at night.