Professor Peter Littlewood is the chair of the University of Chicago's Department of Physics. He was formerly the Associate Lab Director and then Lab Director at Argonne National Lab. Professor Littlewood also serves on the advisory boards of several institutes, including the Faraday Institution, the Simons Foundation, the Paul Scherer Institute, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and the Max Planck Institutes at Halle and Hamburg. In this episode, he shares his journey to creating and teaching as a scholar and his aspirations for the future.
Professor Peter Littlewood is the chair of the University of Chicago's Department of Physics. He was formerly the Associate Lab Director and then Lab Director at Argonne National Lab. Professor Littlewood also serves on the advisory boards of several institutes, including the Faraday Institution, the Simons Foundation, the Paul Scherer Institute, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and the Max Planck Institutes at Halle and Hamburg. In this episode, he shares his journey to creating and teaching as a scholar and his aspirations for the future.
Lee 00:01
Hello, and welcome to the course. I'm your host today, Lee, and I'm speaking with Professor Peter Littlewood from the Department of. Physics. Professor Littlewood is the chair of the physics department, and he was formerly the associate lab director and then lab director at Argonne National Lab.
Professor Littlewood also serves on the advisory boards of several institutes, including the Faraday Institution, the Simons Foundation, the Paul Scheer Institute, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and the Max Thank you. Plank Institutes at Holla and Hamburg. Professor Littlewood is here to talk to us about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
So, Peter, can you give me a general overview of your career path? Let's begin in your college years all the way to you becoming a professor at the University of Chicago.
Peter Littlewood 00:56
So, I travel around a lot. So, I was at college in Cambridge, England, where I studied natural sciences. At the end of that, I actually spent a year at MIT on a fellowship. And then I went back to Cambridge to do a PhD, again in physics. Following that, I moved to New Jersey and I worked for the phone company, Bell Laboratories, as it was, became AT& T Bell Laboratories, and then Lucent Bell Laboratories, and that was in New Jersey. And I went there as a postdoc, and then I stayed for a number of years, and finished my time there as head of the theoretical physics research group.
So, you know, given that this was an industrial company, it's interesting that they had a research group doing theoretical physics. From there, I moved back to Cambridge, and I was a, professor of physics in Cambridge from 1997 and I became Chair of the physics department in Cambridge as well.
Now, I left Cambridge in 2011 to come to Chicago, but not so much to the university. I came to Argonne National Laboratory and at Argonne I was Associate Laboratory Director, which is basically Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and then for a few years, Lab Director at Argonne.
I mean, Argonne is a large national lab, which is managed by the University of Chicago, and I was for all of that time also on the faculty in physics, and I came full time over to the physics faculty in 2017, and I've been there ever since. So, as you can see, I have trouble holding down a job.
Lee 02:26
Well, tell me about what you research in physics, and if you could explain it to me, like, I don't know, like, I'm in 9th or 10th grade. I'm a smart 9th or 10th grader, but if you could explain what it is that you that has held your interest for so long in this field.
Peter Littlewood 02:45
I'm a theoretical physicist that, you know, I'm not a particularly abstruse kind of a theoretical physicist. I think most of what I've worked on is trying to understand how patterns form in nature. So, you know, there are simple rules about how everything operates in the world around us, and they're really very simple, but actually all kinds of interesting structure emerges just because of the way those rules intersect.
And so how matter makes things, that has got me involved with thinking about superconductivity and superconductivity is an interesting phenomenon where electrical resistance vanishes. And so you have a wire that has no resistance to electrical flow with different kinds of magnetism, and then seemingly unrelated, but actually to my mind, properties which occur in more complex physical systems like neuroscience and I'm a wannabe neuroscientist trying again to make models about how spontaneous thought evolves actually in a system, which again is just operating according to simple rules.
Lee 03:49
Fascinating. Peter, tell me a little bit about what you thought you were going to be when you were a child, and did you grow up in the UK?
Peter Littlewood 03:58
I did. I grew up in England. So actually, I grew up on a farm, a little bit south of London, not very far away. And I think because I was an only child growing up on a farm, I spend a lot of time, A) by myself, and B) contemplating nature. So I think I knew from a kind of early age that I was going to be some kind of scientist, because I was sort of fixated on how stuff worked.
And I had plenty of time to think about it. I mean, if you've ever been plowing, you know, it's a sort of an interesting activity. you know, it's something which on the one hand is completely monotonous. You're doing the same thing over and over again, you're just going up and down the field.
But also, it becomes routine and then your mind is watching things. So, it's a very interesting, you know, contemplative thing that you do. So, I think I knew at some point that I wanted to be a scientist without quite knowing what that was really from a very early age. And I didn't, I'm not sure I knew that I wanted to be a physicist, but I just sort of got pushed that way in school.
Because the, you know, you're typically made by the educational system that you go through and it was something that I enjoyed and I was good at it. And so I, you know, I went, so I took the decision to go to college, which was actually, you know, since I'm fairly old, I'm of a generation where, you know, none of the rest of my family had been to college.
And so even knowing what that meant, was something that was completely unclear to me, and I always viewed it, I think, within, you know, a very sort of narrow sense of bookish learning, but, I'm not unhappy with the fact that I made that choice.
Lee 05:38
Yeah, were there any challenges that you had to overcome during your career? And if so, how did you overcome those challenges?
Peter Littlewood 05:47
I mean, indirectly, yes. I think, you know, one of the things I always wanted, actually, I think one of the things that I would have liked to have done was in fact to be a musician. It turns out, really, I'm not a great musician. So, one of the things I had to learn is that, you know, as much as I enjoyed that, and I still enjoy music a great deal, that, you know, life as a, life as a physicist is a much easier track career than it is if you want to become a concert pianist or, for example, a baseball player. You know, the standards are so much higher in those. And so, one of the things that I learned about is that it's how to get away with things.
And I think, you know, the other time, which was sort of an interesting for me was when I first went to college. So, then I was really changing environment., you know, from high school to college, this happens to everyone. But of course I had no idea what to expect when I turned up in Cambridge. And when I turned up in Cambridge, this was, you know, in the early 1970s, it was a very different institution from the one that it is now, you know, it was sort of 7 to 1 male to female ratio.
It was an extremely competitive environment, and it was full of people who had a very different kind and style of education from me. So, people always think that, you know, if you go to Cambridge University, you must have gone to some very fancy school and speak in a fancy accent and come from a rich family.
And actually there were many people like that and I had to learn how to live with them. The other side of that is that all of a sudden I met people who were smarter than I am, and if you've been living in an environment that many of us have, if you were a top academic performer when you're a student, you know, you're probably a, you know, valedictorian of your class or very often, so you, so you're used to being at the top of things.
And all of a sudden I realized I actually had to survive when I was surrounded with people who were quite clearly much smarter than me and trying to make a living that way, figuring out what you can do, what your real skills are rather than just, you know, brute force ability to do things to broaden your palate, to be successful, by using all of the skills that you have rather than just focusing on some single thing. So that's something that I really did have to learn how to do.
Lee 07:56
And I know you worked at Bell Laboratories. Why did you choose to go into academia as, you know, as opposed to working in private industry?
Peter Littlewood 08:07
Well, of course, you know, Bell Labs was private industry. So the thing, so certainly at the time when I was thinking about what to do, when you go into graduate school, you're really, you know, choosing a subdiscipline of your field. And I wanted to work on things and always have actually, which I thought would have some kind of societal impact, if you like applied in some sense.
And Bell Labs was a natural extension of this. So, you know, Bell Labs is, was, you know, the phone company, and it was doing lots of advanced research because it was basically a national monopoly and therefore the company could believe that it was going to be around for a century or so.
And so consequently, even though all of the research was being done on communications broadly, it could be hearing aids, it could be a satellite. It's where I first learned about neuroscience, because, you know, that was a topic that was actually of interest to AT&T at the time.
So, that was a sort of a very deliberate thing to go into an environment where the problems you are working on have, you know, serious societal or technological relevance and impact.
But however, our long term so that you're not trying to build some widget, which we'll get to market next year. I'm not saying one shouldn't do that. I think it's really important to be able to do that. That's not really my skillset.
It's to think about things that might be important in 10 years or 20 years or 50 years, but to be quite conscious of the environment that you're in and trying to do that.
So that really provoked me to go to Bell Labs. And you know, interestingly, you know, at that time it was also a very high profile place. It's hard to imagine that, well, maybe it's actually happening a bit now, people always say that, well, why didn't you go to a university department, to an academic department?
And to a great extent, actually, it turns out the Bell Labs was just much more prestigious. It was the place to be. So, that was an environment that I enjoyed immensely. But, it was tough, very competitive, but nonetheless really fulfilling in terms of the problems we were working on.
Lee 10:14
And Peter, at what point did you discover that theoretical physics was what you wanted to devote your life to and, and why?
Peter Littlewood 10:23
There are several odd reasons to that. So firstly, even though, I mean, theoretical physics is a tool, you know, so it's the kind of things that I do. I do algebra, I do math, I do computers, I do things like this. The problems that I'm trying to solve are not abstract, they're about real things. So, I interact a lot with experimenter, with experimentalists.
That's not always the case, but that also it turns out I was really bad at experiment as an undergraduate, I used to make mistakes and things would blow up and they wouldn't work. And after a while I was basically told that, look, you're really not cut out for this experimental stuff why don’t you go and be a theorist. You know, it's some level it's finding out we could do. It's not that I dislike experiment. I don't care about it. I'm not patient enough to sit down and work hard on something for hours and hours and hours and get it completely right. I'm just not good at that actually, so I'm better off being a theorist.
Lee 11:14
Who in your field has inspired you? This could be folks who are currently living and also those who are no longer with us.
Peter Littlewood 11:23
Yeah, well, I mean, so there are people that I've known, who I've found to be amazingly insightful. I mean, somebody I interacted with a lot for a long period of time was Phil Anderson at Princeton. He's very famously known for, I would say more or less, founding the field of research that I'm in.
So, I understand that I work in what's sometimes called solid state physics. And for a long time, this wasn't really viewed as an honorable subject for a proper physicist to work in. So, you know, it's not kind of a gentleman's field at the time when everybody was male, of course, you know. It's much more applied science and that was kind of looked down on, and Phil was somebody who established that discipline in a way that it really owns a level of intellectual content that it wasn't given credit for.
So, as I say, you know, there's really two ways of thinking about physics. Often, you're taught physics and you're thought about, well, you know, we have to understand the rules by which the universe operates. And so, we look sharper and sharper and we discover the proton and the electron and then we split the proton up and then we discover the various fundamental fields. And the goal is eventually to write down one equation, which will rule them all.
And that's how many people do physics, of course, aspects of fundamental physics. And I think it's how many people think about what it is that what we do. But as I said, right at the start, there's another branch of physics, which is how do I take rules that I think I understand and build up complexity from that and build up complexity with structure, not as something which is random, but that it has its own theory built on top of that.
So there are many layers. So famously, Phil Anderson said, more is different. And so people like Phil, who I knew for very many years exemplified that. John Bardeen, who I knew less well, but again, came out of the same cohort, and to a great extent back in Cambridge, and I knew him later in his life, was Nevill Mott, so these are people who were sort of, embedded in making the discipline what it is now.
And if you look at people, you look at people like that and say, well, how did they do it? What was their secret sauce? And, you know, and often it was a level of understanding that was sort of much deeper than the algebra. So, you know, it's possible as a theorist to just spend all of your time trying to solve complicated equations. But you can only ever solve those equations if you already have some intuition for what the answer is. And so building an intuition for these things is something that we all struggle to do.
And that's, again, you know, being part of my career to try and do that. And I think copying myself on, you know, a number of people of this ilk, but I say that. Phil Anderson, John Bardeen, Nevill Mott, I think are three of the greats.
Lee 14:15
And Peter, tell me about what you find to be the most fun aspects of your job.
Peter Littlewood 14:22
Well, that's, a little bit variable. I mean, look, the most fun, the most fun thing is when one of your students or postdocs discover something, So, you know, broadly, I mean, Richard Feynman, I think, was once quoted as saying, I'm talking about the joy of finding things out. And so there is this point where you understand something or one of your students understand something and you realize that it's a new idea. You've come across this for the first time. Nobody has seen this before. And it's nice to do it yourself, but it's even nicer, actually if you have proteges doing it, and I think the other thing I should also say that we've not talked about it is that I've spent quite a lot of my time not just in research or teaching roles as a physicist, but actually in managerial one.
So, particularly at Argonne, and I went there very deliberately because I wanted to learn about energy technologies and wanted to try and make a difference actually in that. And so there that gives you a sort of a different style of these things where you're working on a big project, if you like, I mean, you know, at some level, a kind of an Oppenheimer sized project where you're trying to watch and help things happen on a big scale.
I mean, remember, for example, that Argonne was founded following the war to commercialize the peaceful uses of nuclear power. That's the purpose of Argonne National Lab. And so, it's always been an energy lab, and it maintains its push there, not just in nuclear power, but actually in more broadly renewable energies of all kinds.
So being involved in that endeavor is also something that I found tremendously rewarding because it goes back to, I think, what originally motivated me. I mean, I really enjoy doing this stuff because I get excited about it and like discovering things. But I do want to be grounded in an area where you feel that, well, maybe this actually might do some good.
Lee 16:21
So Peter, what advice would you have for a young person, maybe they're nearing the end of their high school career, or maybe they're just starting their undergraduate career, who's interested in physics and theoretical physics and maybe also interested in becoming a professor someday.
Peter Littlewood 16:40
Yeah, well, I mean, I think the main thing I advise, of course, is to really get some experience about what it's like. So, you know, you have an opportunity is at that stage now that was really not available when I was coming up to actually be in people's labs to find out what really goes on to do internships, to figure out how everything works. So, you know, so you don't have to do all of this sight unseen. So that's one thing.
The second one I would say is don't assume that that your career will be a continuation of what you're doing now. So, there are whole fields of research that you might not even spot when you're in high school and certainly may not even spot when you're in, when you're an undergraduate, because you'll be taught if you like the classics. You're not necessarily going to get taught the equivalent of modern literature. So find ways of getting some experience about what that is really like as distinct from, you know, assuming that, well, you know, the continuation of research is just getting better at solving homework problems.
It's certainly not.
Lee 17:50
I appreciate that advice, and I think a lot of people listening to this podcast will also appreciate that advice. Peter, what are your personal goals for yourself? Like, what do you aspire to moving ahead?
Peter Littlewood 18:02
Yeah. I mean, so the one, so one thing I really do want to do personally for myself is, to try and finish a book. So, one of the things I do actually in Chicago, which I enjoy enormously is I teach a course on climate and energy, and this course is taught for non-scientists. So it's for non-science majors, very deliberately. So, I mean, it requires some physics, but I try and teach that. And, you know, that more or less is morphing into a book. So that's something that I really want to do,
I'd like to pass on some things. So, you know, one of the things that I'm buying and one of the reasons I'm actually spending time in the UK at the moment is to lobby here for, you know, the building of a national energy lab. The UK is unusual in that it doesn't really have a national energy lab. It did, it did once before and it devastatingly needs one. So, you know, I was involved a little bit actually with setting up an institution to do battery research in the UK.
So, you know, so I would like us to think about the structures of how we do research on make sure that they're fit for purpose. And because we have a gulf, I will say, there's, you know, we talked about this earlier. There's academic research, which is done in which is done in academia, which is designed to fulfill a particular series of goals. And of course, there's research which is happening in industry, which is designed to fulfill another series of goals, usually much too short term.
There's very little in between and in particular, when we're dealing with the challenges of climate change. There's actually a lot of technologies that need to be properly invented. I've become very familiar with batteries, but, you know, people talk about the hydrogen economy and that's all well and good, but actually we're missing most of the energy technologies necessary for hydrogen.
There's many other things which actually need to be invented and because there's not a market for them already, this is something which will have to be done by government, but equally it needs to be done with the speed and the pressure to get the problem solved faster. And so there are many people thinking about those kinds of ideas and I'm trying to be part of that debate and discussion to get us moved on the climate and energy trajectory much faster than we need, than we are at the moment where we're way behind.
My view of these things is that, you know, we have to solve these global problems globally. So, particularly at the time, when I was, when I was working at Argonne, that was actually a time when the US government was working very hard to establish connections with China over energy technologies. So actually we were working very hard with joint programs, you know, with China on energy technologies.
And of course, most of them have come to a kind of a dead end over the last few years. But I did feel actually that for a period of time, we were making real strides, which we're now undoing because fundamentally what I always say about what's happened with where we've got to an energy technologies now, is that we've used, science and technology, mostly from the West to invent stuff.
We use regulations and laws coming from Western Europe and California to make sure it goes to market and we use China to build it and to drive the price down so that everybody could afford it. And that, for me, for a long time felt like a very good positive spiral and I think we have broken it.
And I think the consequences in many ways, I think of our present rupture with China, you know, is problematic. But, you know, as for myself, you know, I've travel extensively in China, spent long periods actually in Hong Kong, not particularly continuous and a lot of time in India.
So, you know, particularly being English, India has a kind of a certain natural connection as does Hong Kong. So, you know, what I, so as an Englishman, I can travel to Hong Kong, and it feels like somewhere that I recognize.
Lee 22:09
Oh, that's very interesting. And Peter, finally, what do you find most fulfilling about the work that you do?
Peter Littlewood 22:17
The big thing actually is that this elemental joy of finding things out, it really is a high, you know, you can be slogging on a problem for years and then at some point it all comes together and you realize, aha, I do understand that. So I say, you know, that’s elementary creative joy.
And so, you know, it sometimes it feels like finishing a symphony, not all symphonies are great symphonies and not all of my work has been great work, but each one of those things, to wrap something up and to be proud of it, that's the most elementally fulfilling thing.
And then the other one is people. So, I do enjoy teaching. you know, I enjoy lecturing. you know, I enjoy trying to inspire other people to solve problems not necessarily to be inspired by what I'm doing, but to point out places where they can go, where it could be attractive and of course, these are, you know, all of the reasons why you end up being a professor, because those are the two things that professors do, you teach and you create, so you'd better enjoy both of those things.
Otherwise, you shouldn't be a professor.
Lee 23:23
Thank you, professor Peter Littlewood for your time today and course takers. If you enjoyed listening to today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.