Art in science | Paul Sereno | TEDxUChicago

Paul Sereno is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and the president and co-founder of Project Exploration. Paul Sereno teaches the world about its evolutionary past through what he calls "adventure with a purpose." His travels have brought him to discover important links in the evolution of life on earth, such as his discovery of the world's largest crocodile.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

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We think about things that are incomplete.

We think about the improbable,

maybe even the singular event,

and try to defend it
as having great importance,

potentially overriding importance.

We think about transitions.

We need to bridge the gap, as it were,
to understand what happened in the past.

We think about limits, extremes.

I try to define what I do,

and one phrase that I
come up with continually for -

especially when talking to younger kids -

is "adventure with a purpose."

That's what I felt when I walked
in that museum I told you I did.

I felt a sense of excitement.

The feeling of discovery was palpable.

It was wrapped up
with so many different things:

travel, science, art.

One thing that is a constant
in good science is hard work.

First, there's adventure -

this is someone crossing the Sahara
for the first time in their life -

and there's a sense
of playfulness about science.

This is your emcee

at a more arduous moment in her career.

There's hard work.

I don't care if you're
in a white lab coat in the Sahara -

a lot of hard work goes into science.

We didn't know how hot it was
because our thermometers only went to 125.

(Laughter)

And it may not be temperature.

It may be a jealous colleague.

It may be inadequate equipment.

There's all sorts of hurdles.

One thing it's likely
going to involve is teamwork.

And I couldn't have moved
the millions of pounds of earth

around here and there

without a lot of the eyes
and a lot of teamwork.

Where does it begin, my field?

Go to a place like this - Sahara.

Look at that.

There's a camp, if you've got
really good eyes, over there.

How do you find something?

How do you make a discovery
in paleontology?

You've got to see it,

but you can never see the whole thing.

If you see the whole thing,

then time has seen that whole thing
a lot before, long before you have

and it's fragmentary and eroded.

The best way to make a discovery
is to see the corner of something.

But then you have to visualize
what you can't see,

and these encyclopedic images
are passing through our head

time and time again.

Here we are, the early dinosaur beds.

And we're wondering
what it takes to make a discovery.

This one was made -

just a tooth or two
showing at the surface

before we realized
what we'd actually found.

I'm going to give you two examples of -

I'm going to take it this clock is off.

I'm going to go with my own wristwatch.

Okay.

I'm going to give you two examples -

one I just announced
and one we're working on -

to give you an idea
of what we're involved with.

We found this thing,
this early dinosaur, Eodromaeus.

Badlands - the middle
of absolutely nowhere.

Months, years it took to visualize
what this animal was about,

casting, molding
to properly communicate it,

to put it together,

to see it in three dimensions,

and ultimately,

to reconstruct it for the public.

This not purely whim,

but rather built on top of a cast
of the actual material,

following all the traces we could

to understand whether it was scaled,
feathered, bristled, whatever.

Here's another example -
what I'm going to come out with soon.

Here's the moment of discovery.

We couldn't see anywhere near
the whole skeleton,

but we felt we had something important.

And if we could turn these lights down -

you can see out there
better than I can see up here.

It's a little raptor of some kind.

Hind limbs like an emu,

forelimbs - and you see it,
they're twisting around -

like an armadillo or something that digs.

It's an "emorillo."

We don't have anything
like this living today.

How could you convince a scientist

that you've got something
that runs at lightning speed

and digs like an armadillo?

You really have to visualize it

to see what these things do and look like.

Now, my art began in high school.

I drew this, and psychologists
would call it "monocular depth cues."

I was good at shadow,
atmospheric effect, contrast -

all these things I didn't even know -

I was good at it.

This is my grandfather.

It turned me around.

I got into college not far from here.

This transition was difficult for me.

Understanding that art
could be something more,

that there was a meaning
beyond what was in front of your nose,

that imitating three dimensions
and two dimensions

was not the only thing,

that you could look at a life model
and see through to something inside,

to express something beyond
just what was in front of your nose

but at the essence of something.

I eventually gave up brushes

and decided that since art
is 30,000 years old as a record,

the first paintings,

these people didn't have canvas:

"I'm just going to try to get
to the essence of human form."

These people weren't doing
monocular depth cues

in what they were symbolizing.

It was something more important,

something essential about their lives
and the animals around them.

Eventually, tried to create
rock surfaces - carve into it, literally.

Gave up on brushes.

Now, this comes from a journal.

Niels Bohr was known to have said -

I see the time's going backwards -

Niels Bohr's known to have said

that cubism really influenced,

or it certainly helped him to understand

the particle, the wave - whatever
was going on, deep atomic structure.

This was written in a journal
very sympathetic:

"The Future of Science is Art?"

It's hard to believe
that a work of abstract art

might have actually affected
the history of science.

Cubism seems to have
nothing in common with modern physics.

When we think about
the scientific process,

a specific vocabulary comes to mind:

objectivity, experiments, facts.

In the passive tense
of the scientific paper,

we imagine a perfect reflection
of the real world.

And I put this in italics:

paintings can be profound,
but they are always pretend.

This, to me, fundamentally misunderstands
not only what science is about

but also what art is about.

Let me take you on a journey
of some of the discoveries I've made.

This site - I raised hundreds of thousands
of dollars and risked my career

to bring a team back to this spot
in the middle of the desert,

and all I could see at the surface

was that.

But I had an intuition,

and I had some facts

that led me to believe
much more was under the ground.

Students couldn't believe it:
"You came all the way back for this?"

When we dug, we came out
with tons and tons of bones.

That is not a single object;
that's a composite.

In reality, it doesn't exist.

It belongs to three or four skeletons.

This - no one had ever seen
a Spinosaur before.

We had to put together his skull
with the proportions of a crocodile.

It was so long it didn't look
like it belonged,

but we had to follow the bones,
follow our clues, and put it together.

This thing, this gigantic skull,

found - this is my wife -
on the cliffside of Morocco

at the edge of the Sahara desert,

came in hundreds of pieces.

We didn't even know
they belonged to the skull.

We certainly didn't imagine we had found -
even after taking it off the continent -

a gigantic, T-Rex-sized beast

until we put it all together.

This I had to visualize
with CAT scanning preparation

until I could ultimately understand

how the jaws of this animal
actually worked -

it came with a whole new way of chewing
for this dinosaurean nutcracker.

It wasn't chewing when I saw it.

How about this animal? A Mesozoic cow.

This reconstruction
really captures the notion

that this animal was, in fact,
with its muzzle, close to the ground.

It was so fragile.

We found the skull pulled apart.

We couldn't actually cast the pieces;

we had to CAT scan it, reflect it,
put it back together

until we could see the mug
of this thing for the first time.

And was it a shocker.

The endocast, the brain,
that doesn't exist either.

That's from the hollow inside the skull.

The ear region - reconstructed painfully
from slice after slice of CT scan.

How about this?

A giant crocodile -
its jaws on the ground.

Can you imagine the whole thing?

We didn't have the body; we had parts.

We went to modern crocodilians

to see how they scaled
when they got larger.

We had to capture the very largest ones

to realize what this animal
looked like 40 feet long.

This is supercroc.

What about its relatives?

This is more recent work, just out.

They had limbs that were upright.

I felt, likely, they were gallopers,

gallopers like this recent crocodile -
coming into the picture on the left -

Northern Australia, Darwin.

You have to watch your fingers
when you let these guys go.

But when they go, they go.

This is slow-speed film
of a galloping crocodile.

There was only one species
that gallops today - this is it -

under certain conditions.

And what shocked me to no end -

it was wonderful seeing this thing gallop.

It was the closest
I could get to my fossil.

But what it did when it hit the water

shocked me:

it turned into a fish, side to side.

And I realized what I was looking at.

What I was looking at
was an evolutionary transition

that I was going to pin down
when I got back to my office.

200 million years ago,
they adopted - readopted -

a fish-like style of swimming
when they hit the water.

And this one species -

this is the only one where you can see

both modes of progression,
in operation, alive today.

Because other animals
that walk upright, ourselves included,

do not walk and run like primitive fish,
like swimming like them.

But they have a very unbelievable system,
the mammalian system.

Here we see it in a cheetah.

It's like a 4-wheel drive,
independent system.

The shoulder's all loosened up.

Unlike the crocodile, it is completely
the body, the momentum -

in prey and predator alike -

at high speeds,

at turning corners is absolutely level.

They can do that with a loose shoulder.

When did this appear? I wondered,
and I'm working on right now.

Well, I enter the story in the middle
of the Gobi Desert, Mongolia,

where I saw a white speck

but imagined that, maybe,
with that suture, it was a small mammal.

That's where this change occurred
100 million years ago,

but nobody had found the shoulder girdle.

But our specimen - see how small it is?
That's my thumb there -

preserved it.

And I reconstructed it upright,

but the gurus of the day
said, "No, no, no."

Now, it walked like a frog.

And so I thought how could I convey ...

Words, long papers -
nothing would convince them,

and then I thought of a way.

I CAT scanned it.

I segmented it.

I printed it the size of a big cat.

And I put it together physically -
at the bottom of your screen -

visualizing our hypothesis,

profoundly showing
the difference between them.

That is science.

How about this? Human site.

This I saw dimly out in the field,

what might be a triple burial.

Now, we're only 6, 7,
8, 9,10 thousand years ago.

This turned out to be
6 thousand years old.

I couldn't lift it because I didn't know
what was under it,

and yet I had to collect it somehow,

complete,

so that I could discover that in the lab.

And sure enough,
when we got back to the lab,

put this back together
like nobody has before -

this is the most posed burial
in prehistory.

You're awestruck when you see
something like that in the desert.

And when we prepared it from both sides

and reconstructed it vertically,
so you can walk around it,

we found points on the other side.

They were never used, it turned out.

They were salted as offerings in a grave
with a woman and her two children,

arms and legs intertwined.

It was a symbolic burial.

We found evidence of pollen clusters.

This is visualization - my life's work.

The evolution of dinosaurs,
some might say, is built on a tree.

The tree summarizes
thousands of characters

in worlds that are changing
and migrating millions of years ago.

It's sort of like this.

It's based on finding
the common characters

that link images together.

You have sort of built in your brain

the ability to look
at human faces like that.

It takes us years to figure that out
with dinosaur bones,

to figure two species

over two other species
that might be linked,

but it's all the same - we're trying
to figure out with words what happened.

This is a way to visualize
in three dimensions

the evolution of the dinosaurs -

that tree -

as the continents broke apart.

It's a three-dimensional problem,
not a two-dimensional problem,

to visualize that.

And ultimately, for a computer
program to work that out.

How about this?

This isn't a program.
This isn't a screen grab.

This is a program I would like
a programmer to build.

I published it because I knew
it would stimulate that

if they could understand
what it was that we wanted.

How about this?

Perhaps the most fundamental thing
I will give the systematics

is a grammatical understanding

of the words we use to put together
those evolutionary trees.

And it, visualized as a tree -

like a Chomskyan grammar tree -

I think is the easiest way
for people to understand

what it is I'm talking about:

the lines of text that make art.

Well, visualization -

we are primates.

We have 50 million years
of visualization behind us.

Our eyes aren't separate organs
like a kidney or a liver.

They're actually part of our brain

that's pinched down, made clear,
to see the world.

It projects back and then it projects
here and there and everywhere.

A huge part of our brain
is devoted to visualizing things.

Here's another quote
from that same journal

in an article on the meaning
of observation:

"STEM" - science, technology,
engineering, mathematics -

"needs something to give it some steam,

an "A" for art between the engineering."

It goes on:

"What if America approached innovation
with more than just technology?

What if,

just like STEM is made up of science,
technology, engineering and math -

what if we had something like IDEA,

made up of intuition, design,
emotion and art?"

Somehow, these are not disconnected.

Because if I go back
to the slide at the top -

I just spent a lot of time
talking about visualization,

that science, a good part of it,
is about visualization.

But I thought that's what art was too.

So, could it go the other way?

Could we look at art, sort of,
from a more scientific perspective?

I'm just going to give you
one small example, a humorous one,

to say yes, it can go in reverse.

Giacometti - one of my favorite artists.

I was curious -

he did a lot of weird things
in his day as a surrealist,

but the one we have at the art museum
looks like this, his mature style,

the long-gait statuette forms.

I was sort of curious
what he was doing to the human body,

being a professor of human anatomy
at the university here.

And it turns out,

if we got down measuring,

very simple global transformation -

two times lengthening.

It wasn't that he took the legs
and stretched them out. No.

He stretched everything out:

two times this way
or minus two times this way.

It was a global transformation.

I don't know what he was taking,
but he got this image in his head,

and it's global.

There's other things - texture and so on -

but I thought, "Did anybody notice this?"

No. Not a word about it.

But that really is what
he was doing with human form.

So I thought I would take a dinosaur

with the human proportions
like this Eoraptor -

got a tail; we don't have
as much of a tail -

and do the same thing.

After all, it's a biped, like humans.

So I lengthened all the limbs twice,

put it together

and brought people to see it -

"Giacomettisaurus" I call it -

an interesting way
to look at my animal artistically.

I had a lot of fun doing that.

But seriously,

what I realize after 20 years
of discovery and realization of discovery:

it's a long process

which is really heavy on visualization.

I walked out of one studio 20 years ago,
and I walked into another one.

And I really feel quite at home
in this studio that we call science,

but it really is, in large measure,
involving many of the same things.

I think about this

when we think and work with kids
who don't know what they want to be -

including some undergraduates here,

but especially those kids
in neighborhoods around Chicago -

because the idea of science
is something very dry,

sometimes technical,

forbidding in many ways.

What if you described
science as adventure?

That's the way I feel about science.

What if you described science
as visualization, at its core?

Which is what I think it is -
a lot of science is.

Then, maybe, we'd have a lot more
scientists in the next generation

because we certainly need them.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)