Evan Pugh Professor and National
Academy of Sciences member Moses Chan is as
much a student of human interaction as he is a student of physics.
“Physicists find out how things seem to work according to
some sort of rule, probing for new rules for how things interact,
how things work,” he explains. “On the other hand, human
interaction, human emotions anyway, are much more interesting.”
Chan’s professional research is aimed at answering, or raising,
fundamental questions about matter in its various phases or states
such as liquid, solid, and gas. He is particularly interested in
phase transitions —the conditions under which material changes
from one phase to another—in quantum fluids, reduced dimensions,
and in the presence of disorder.
“When there are many particles put together, there are surprises.
Sometimes we can predict them, sometimes we cannot,” he says.
“So doing experiments to manipulate the environment so those
ideas can be confirmed or proved to be wrong are interesting.”
While this Chinese-American has been able to manipulate environments
in the lab, he hasn’t always been able to do so in life. As
an undergraduate at Bridgewater College in Virginia in the 1960s,
Chan suspects he was the only Chinese person within a 50-mile radius,
and the first that many of those Americans had ever met.
“Everything I did, I represented at that time, 800 million
Chinese,” he says. “I was forced to behave well all
the time. Looking back, it was a big burden for a 17-year-old boy.”
Then he smiles mischievously and adds, “Fast forward forty
years —as a senior member of the faculty of physics, again
I have to be well-behaved!”
This affable man in blue jeans at first claims no time for a personal
life, but eventually confesses to reading Chinese history and the
New Yorker
magazine and recently, attending opera performances in New York
on a regular basis.
“It’s fun to see how, just like novels, it’s
expressing human relations, human emotion, and passion with voice
rather than words alone,” he says. “Sometimes it reminds
you of your own life experiences.”
Of course, Chan’s primary focus is his work, where, as he
says, he is “being paid to play games in the lab.” He
and his students are currently working on experiments he hopes can
provide a new way of looking at some problems in macroscopic quantum
phenomena. He also is busy running the new Center
for Nanoscale Science, for which he received a National
Science Foundation grant.
He says he hopes to make this center a model for how interdisciplinary
research should work. His study of human interaction is bound to
help. “I’m continuing to try to figure out what it’s
all about. What’s the meaning of life? I’m trying to
see how each one of us fits into this whole scheme of interesting
human relations.”
Suzan Erem
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