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Kent State History: Digital Archive
Liquid Crystal Oral History: Lavrentovich, Oleg
Kent State History: Digital Archive
Liquid Crystal Oral History: Lavrentovich, Oleg
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Oral History Interview with Oleg Lavrentovich by Matthew Crawford November 18, 2022 Liquid Crystal Oral History Project Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. Today, I am interviewing Dr. Oleg Lavrentovich. Today is November 18th, 2022, and we are conducting this interview in Dr. Lavrentovich’s office in the LCI Building on the campus at Kent State University. Dr. Lavrentovich, thanks for agreeing to speak with me today. OLEG LAVRENTOVICH: Thank you, Matt. CRAWFORD: First, could you tell us your current institutional affiliation and titles, and discuss how you fit into the broader organization of the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute? LAVRENTOVICH: Since 2011, I am a Trustees Research Professor. That is a university-wide position. But my job affiliation is with two units. It’s Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, formerly known as the Liquid Crystal Institute, and the Department of Physics, since about 2017. CRAWFORD: How would you identify your field of research and what kind of scientist you are? LAVRENTOVICH: In my field of science, we refer to ourselves as being trained in physics. Because saying, “I am a physicist,” it’s like being a little bit hoity-toityish. I was trained as a physicist at the Department of Physics of Kyiv State University in Ukraine. My research revolves around physical properties of mostly soft materials. We primarily do experimental studies, and whenever we could, we apply some theoretical models, but I cannot say that I am a theorist, or I am mostly experimental physicist. CRAWFORD: I want to ask a quick question about this phrase “being trained in physics” as opposed to identifying yourself as a physicist. Could you say a little bit more about why? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s just a perception. Being trained as a physicist, you don’t take this responsibility to be all things physicist. So you are trying to be modest. That’s the only thing. [laughs] But I think it’s the feature that comes from the former Soviet Union perception of things. I recall that all my colleagues from my youth background would say approximately the same thing, and people I meet here in the United States would simply say, “I’m a physicist.” CRAWFORD: Interesting. Is there any particular connection, with the Soviet context? It’s just a kind of disposition to modesty, you think? Is that what you're saying? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, it’s just a modesty thing. That you pretend to be of a low level, but when it comes to engaging in the discussion, you show your power as a physicist. [laughs] But you don’t want, at the offset, to be the giant figure like Einstein, who are physicists. You would like to present yourself as something lesser, so that people later on can judge you as something of higher value. CRAWFORD: I see. I feel compelled to say that, just for the audio recording, I’m currently talking to a scientist that has a 96-page CV with hundreds of publications— LAVRENTOVICH: [laughs] CRAWFORD: —and presentations, and so forth. And so [laughs]—just to make that clear. We will get into talking about your work on physical properties of soft materials and so forth, but I wanted to start with your early life. I wonder if you could tell us when you were born, where you grew up, and what your early childhood was like. LAVRENTOVICH: On the 25th of May, 1958, I was born in a tiny village in the middle of Ukraine. The village is called Lelitka, and the district is Khmilnyk, and the oblast—this is the region that is approximately as a small state in the United States—was Vinnytsia. So it’s right in the center of Ukraine, heart of Ukraine. I was born in the family of young graduates of university who started to work as secondary school teachers. My mom was teaching chemistry and sometimes biology, and my father was teaching the same. At that time, they got a distribution to this small village, also because the parents of my mother lived there. Essentially, we lived with my grandparents and my mother and my father. It was a small village. Later on, when I started to attend the school, it was a peculiar school because of the lack of teachers. It was the school that taught the grades from one to four, and there were only two teachers. The school had two rooms, and in one room you would have a row of first graders and the third graders, and the next room was second graders and the fourth graders. I was lucky that I went through this school when I was in the first grade, because I would do my assignment and then have some free time and listen what the teacher tells to the third graders. That way, I was well prepared for [laughs] life in the future years, so that I knew what was coming. That was a very interesting experience. The school classes were very small. As a first grader, I had only six teammates, or classmates. It was good, because the teacher, when she was not with the third graders, would kind of devote her attention to us. CRAWFORD: At what age did you become interested in science? I know you said both your parents were science teachers. LAVRENTOVICH: Well, even before I came to the first grade, what happened was that my dad left for the graduate studies. He became a graduate student in Kyiv. I was living with my mom, and my mom would go to teach chemistry. I had nothing else to do but to wander around, and then I decided that it’s not a good thing, so I asked my mom to bring me to the class and put me on the last row so that I could simply sit and listen. That was a very good experience. I was listening to all this chemistry, and she was teaching grades that are before graduation, like eighth, ninth, and tenth. So, I got interested in science. This environment meant that my entire life was surrounded by some kind of science, and so projecting myself into the future, I thought that my future should be somehow revolving around science, be in that atmosphere. CRAWFORD: Did you ever consider anything other than science? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, in the third grade, the teacher asked me what I would like to be, and I said a pilot, but that was simply because everyone was dreaming to be a pilot at that time. But somewhere at the background of my conscience, since the atmosphere was always some science, I think that was a very natural thing to pay attention to, to excel in, and eventually to make it my profession. CRAWFORD: I’m curious, too, just given that you were born in 1958, and so we're talking about you growing up in the 1960s, when of course the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States is full-blown, did you have any consciousness of that larger motivation for science? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah. Of course there was a great deal of excitement in the former Soviet Union about Yuri Gagarin, for example, and the Space Race. I also remember the tragedies of the Soviet crew being killed. I think the last name of one of the crew members was Komarov. Their spaceship destroyed on the landing and all of them were killed. That outscored the importance of science and technology but also that it touches the very global and important values, that it might end in the loss of people that are super professionals. It was like the science and technology were connected to also the most important political ideas of the time. Yes, there was the Space Race with the United States, and here the Soviet Union showed something advanced, but then it ends in the disaster. It was clear that the science makes not just some little advances, but the science defines the political atmosphere of the entire world. That also maybe was serving as some attractive thing to be associated with. CRAWFORD: I know that you attended and graduated in 1975 from Kyiv Physical and Mathematical High School. LAVRENTOVICH: Right, right. CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your high school experience. What kind of training did you get in science? What was the science education like? LAVRENTOVICH: I have to say that it happens that since my father got his PhD degree in Kyiv and got a job in Kyiv, we have to move. We moved from one village first to another village where my mother was teaching, and then from that village to Kyiv, where I first went to the school where my mom was a teacher, but then this school was reorganized into something different from the normal school. I had to change many schools, and I changed maybe seven schools before I graduated from the specialized physics and math school. CRAWFORD: Wow. LAVRENTOVICH: That actually helped me, because when you come to a new environment, you have to adapt. The difference between the little village school and the large city—Kyiv was at the time maybe two million people—is huge. You coming in, being kind of a village boy, to the environment where everyone is so well educated, so well informed, was a very steep experience, and I think it helped me a lot to adapt to whatever environment. When I moved from one continent to another, I also think that it was a helpful skill that I acquired. Then this adaptability also make me not being afraid of changing the regular school to something more challenging, which at the time was allowed by the Soviet system to have specialized schools that would train specifically in certain disciplines. I know that there were kind of art-oriented schools—maybe not that many—but there were also STEM-oriented schools, so math and physics were the leading courses in this secondary school. You have to pass the [entry] exam. The exam was not that challenging. Once you pass it, you are accepted, and you are surrounded by kids that have the same values, that love physics, love mathematics, and your teachers are a little bit better prepared and more enthusiastic in those subjects than in an ordinary school. [My mathematics teacher, Vera Markovna Rosenberg, contributed much to my fascination with these subjects.] I also remember that some of the physics courses were taught by a professor, Leonid Gretchko, who was a theorist at the Department of Physics at Kyiv State University. So you have the person coming from much higher level of educational ladder, telling you about harmonic vibrations and things like that. He was very skillful in shaping it up in mathematical formulas, and so we loved those things from him. That was a great atmosphere. Of course, since the environment was your peers that are thinking about similar things, it was very enjoyable, and a great experience. CRAWFORD: At what point did you transfer or get admitted to this physical and mathematical high school? Was it in your second-to-last year, or—? LAVRENTOVICH: It was the last three years. I actually came there a year before, and I wanted to pass the exam, and then when they learned that I am a year too young, they turned me around. [laughs] I was upset. [laughs] I think it was like the three last years, so it’s grades tenth, ninth, and eighth. CRAWFORD: You said your father got a job in Kyiv after finishing his graduate studies. Was he still working in education or did he—? LAVRENTOVICH: Yes. He was first kind of a professor of the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy. In Ukrainian, to translate it more precisely, it was Ukrainian Academy of—yeah, Agricultural Sciences. He was teaching and also later he became dean of his department, or chair of his department, if I translate it into the American system. CRAWFORD: Did you have any siblings growing up? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, I had. Unfortunately—I had a brother that was a year older, and then a brother that was nine years younger. Both of them died approaching their fifth year of life. A similar disease, and unfortunately they have some genetic predisposition, and I was the blessed one, the lucky one, to move through, and didn’t get the same type of disease. CRAWFORD: You graduate from high school in 1975 and start attending Kyiv State University, studying physics? LAVRENTOVICH: Right. At the time, some people wanted to go to Moscow, for example, to get education at MPTI. It’s Moscow Physical Technical Institute. I was thinking that I’d better stay in Kyiv. I didn’t think that the education would be of a lesser quality. Maybe less demanding than in Moscow, but I just didn’t want to go live in some dormitory when I can live with my parents and have my friends around. So I decided to go to physics. Another thing, I was always thinking that I’m not going to do physics as my professional field. I was thinking that it will be biology. But I would need to acquire the necessary research skills to advance in biology, and while talking to my friends, we realized that, in my friend’s words, “You can learn biology by reading books at night, but you cannot learn physics by reading books at night.” You really need to prepare this more serious background, and for that you need professional help. You need to go to the department of physics. And once you graduate, once you know physics, you can apply to whatever biology problems are there, and you will be fine, but it wouldn't work the other way around. This was why I came to the Physics Department at Kyiv State University. CRAWFORD: It sounds like you're saying that you felt like if you studied physics and then decided you wanted to do biology you could make that switch, as opposed to the other way around. LAVRENTOVICH: As opposed to studying biology and trying to do biology, I might not be prepared well enough. CRAWFORD: Right. Were you attracted by the challenge of physics or the subject matter? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, I tried to develop the common sense approach, and it helped me in the later years. Because in physics, if you are doing research in physics, you are supposed to uncover new things, something that yesterday was not known to happen to anyone in this world. You are always solving some problems that no one knows the solution yet. How do you do that? Some people develop what we call intuition. If you deal with similar problems in the past, you kind of have an impression of what might happen in this new problem. You put forward a hypothesis which is based on this intuition, and then you look how this hypothesis compares to real state of events. I think that I realized that I already developed some sense of intuition, and when I face a new problem, even I have no clue about the underpinning mechanisms, I might put forward the first hypothesis that would make sense, and later on, most of the time, would turn into the correct understanding of the phenomena. That gave me confidence. Then I thought that even if I don’t know some Fourier transform or something, I can always figure out the mechanisms of the things. CRAWFORD: This idea of having an intuition about, say, physics or science, do you think that is a skill that someone learns, or is it an innate quality? LAVRENTOVICH: I think it’s both, because it’s like machine learning. What is machine learning? It’s essentially the number of simple tasks with solutions that the machine is kind of connecting together, and then once this basic knowledge is there, the machine can predict the outcome of something new. But of course now the question is, “Which machine?” If my machine is my watch, then it’s not going to [laughs] do that. It just shows the time, and that’s it. But if my machine is a complex computer, then it probably could do it. So, the same with people. Some people are wired already by mother nature to be capable of solving some complex intellectual challenges. But then they need to apply this ability to the real exercises, and learn from those exercises, and then at the end, they will be able to do something interesting. So it’s both. It’s experience and natural ability. CRAWFORD: Great. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the science curriculum at Kyiv State University. I know you graduate from there in 1980 with a Master of Science in Physics, so you kind of did a combined BA/MS program, I guess, if you translate it into the American system. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your coursework, did you have research experiences, did you write a thesis, that sort of thing. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. The first thing that comes to mind is that we had a lot of things that didn’t help us in physics— CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: —but helped us in life, probably. One thing was of course we had to have these courses in history of not just the country but also party, philosophy, and even in the studies of different religions. There were courses that would teach us all that. Again, it wasn’t about physics or math, but especially philosophy, it helped us in the perception of the world. It also helped us, even the courses like the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also helped us, because we saw the disconnect between what is officially taught and what was our perception of reality. I remember the exam, the teacher would ask me, “So, what’s the difference between the socialistic way of life, and life in a socialistic country?” And so [laughs] that was already by itself a clear illustration that [laughs] those are very different things. That taught us to be realistic, and to look at the core of the things including political life. It’s not a secret that during what in the West people call Perestroika, it was mostly physicists who led the way to demand the changes, who kind of were at the forefront, like Nemtsov in Russia, and many colleagues of mine in Ukraine. One of my physics colleagues who was like two years older became the first mayor of the city of Kyiv, after the Perestroika ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated. So, that is the first recollection from the university years. The second was that the economy of the Soviet Union was starting to collapse. We were sent to collective farm to help the [laughs] people there to do the agricultural job. We would come late August, early September, to the university, and people, our administration, would tell us, “Here are the buses. Get your things, and you are going to some village, three hours of driving by buses from Kyiv, and you will be living there for five weeks, and you will gather”—whatever, potato, it was beets, all sorts of things. Depends on the year. So it was also not training as much in physics, but it was the training in real life, and [laughs] you would see what the life is about in the villages, how people worked hard to make their livings. It was also a time to socialize because you are surrounded by your classmates, and you work together, you drink together in the evening, you tell stories or you play games. That was interesting. Because of that, I have the opportunity—and of course there were professors who would kind of supervise us, but not in the science, but in this agricultural work, and we would have more time to communicate. One of the professors asked me whether I would be interested to work with him. I was in the third year of my studies. We had five years altogether. I said, “Yes, of course.” After we came back from this collective farm, we worked for about six months, and wrote a paper, a theoretical paper, on elasticity of polymers. I am still very grateful to that period, because that introduced me to the real science, although I was only in the third year of my studies. CRAWFORD: Since you've mentioned Perestroika and physicists leading the way, do you have a sense of why physicists played such a prominent role in that? LAVRENTOVICH: Because, you see, you cannot do physics by lying. CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: You just—you know. You cannot succeed. If you lie, what does it mean? You put out a paper in which you state something that is not true. It’s out in the public domain, and your peers, who are very competitive guys—because everyone wants to be the best physicist there will ever be—and so they would see what you have written and would immediately write their opinion that you are totally wrong, you are a moron. So, the profession of a physicist is just such that it prevents people from lying. You cannot succeed in physics if you are lying. That can be compared to other branches of human activity, in which you often succeed just by lying, or twisting the facts, or making alternative facts. I think when it came to the Perestroika, many people—I, in my youth, when I was like six, seven, eight years old, of course I was totally brainwashed. I didn’t know what was the reason that my grandfather spent some time in jail, in Soviet jail. Later I was told that he was thrown there because he was enemy of people and he was a Polish nationalist at the time when he was only five years old. They brought the charges like 20 years later, accused him of something he allegedly did in 1910, when he was like five years old, and put him in jail. It was only the Second World War that liberated him, because he was pulled from jail to go to fight Germans. And so, that brainwashedness of me eventually reduced when I started to learn physics and to separate fiction from the truth, and when I started to read some forbidden literature, and started to see things not how they are presented in newspapers like Pravda and Izvestia, but what they are in real life. For example, going to this collective farm to help the peasants to collect the crops—“Why am I doing this? What is the economic reason for things like that?” But you read this in the newspapers like, “Oh, the Soviet economy is the best in the world.” But you know that it’s not true. People with physics background were the most prepared to realize it quickly and to tell the truth, and I think this is why many of them led the grassroots movement of Perestroika. CRAWFORD: I have to ask a follow-up question about forbidden literature. What sort of material was that, and how did you get access to it? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s so-called samizdat. It’s the Russian word that means—“izdat,” it’s “publishing”; “sam,” it’s “yourself.” People like—the works by Solzhenitsyn, they were prohibited in the Soviet Union for public dissemination, but they existed as handwritten manuscripts or maybe copies, Xerox copies of the printed books that were printed in the West. And so they were kind of going around people. If I have such a book, then if I have the friend whom I trust, and if that friend asks me for this book, I can give it to him, and he would read, and return it to me. This is how this “sam-izdat” was going around. You don’t buy this book; you just share it with your friends. I didn’t have access to be the prime source of those books, but I have friends who did have the books, and they would give it to me. The condition was, “You don’t read it in front of your parents,” for example. You don’t read in the public transportations. [laughs] Things like that. Although everyone in public transportation at that time was reading something, and I am guilty of that. I was sometimes so excited to read this particular samizdat that I would put it in the other book that is innocent [laughs] and read it in public transportation. So just [laughs] doing some protection so that people couldn't clearly see what I am reading. So it was—yeah. And remember, for a little bit more educated people, this samizdat was important. But if you take the entire Soviet populous, then everyone, like 90% of people, would realize that the reality and the propaganda are two different things. One of the examples is the enormous amount of Soviet anecdotes, the jokes, mostly about the party leaders and the Soviet state, that I would imagine that every day would bring one or two new anecdotes. And everyone would enjoy them. Everyone would laugh. That meant that the entire society, from the point of view of the government, is rotten, because they are laughing behind their backs, about the official political statements. CRAWFORD: I don’t suppose you could give us an example of one of those jokes? LAVRENTOVICH: Oh, I can—it should come. [laughs] Maybe later, I will— CRAWFORD: Yeah, if something comes to you. Again, on this theme of knowledge that’s available, that’s not available, literature and so forth—in the sciences, was it generally pretty easy to get access? Could you access the things you needed to learn? Was there anything that was restricted in the sciences at all at the time, or was it pretty open? LAVRENTOVICH: In sciences like physics and math, we would have all the information we needed. Except for one; I will come to that in a moment. Books. We had books of Western authors translated into Russian. Martin Gardner, the series of books on mathematical problems—it’s like entertainment problems; I don’t even know how to call them—but I loved reading those books. Then Feynman Lectures in Physics, it was translated into Russian. So the books were available, and they were cheap. I could buy a solid book on physics, like thermodynamics, for about one dollar 20 kopecks, which was almost nothing, because the salaries—for a student, the stipend was like 40 rubles per months, so one dollar and 50 cents was kind of not exactly nothing, but you still can afford it, if you really need this book. What was lacking, and I realized it when I left the university and started to work in the Institute of Physics, was the copies of journal papers. We did have journals subscribed, and they were in the library. But if you want to make a concrete piece of that journal, the article that you need, you need a copy of it, and a copy means that you need to have a Xerox machine, and the access to Xerox machines was strictly forbidden for normal people. There were only trained technicians that could use the Xerox machines. You have to write a kind of request, an order that “I want this page and that page to be Xeroxed and returned to me.” So that was the only kind of thing that we were lacking. Now, regarding the instrumentation, I think that it was not that much of problem. We did have the instrumentation we needed. Some of that was Soviet-produced, and some was produced by countries like German Democratic Republic, at that time part of the Soviet bloc. So I used the German-made microscope, polarizing microscope, in my research, when I was at the last year of the university, and then I came to the Institute of Physics to work for my research. So, it was kind of available. Of course, retrospectively, when I compare what was available to me at that time, I could compare it to France, to where I moved first, and then to the United States. The difference with France was minimal. It was practically the same. The difference between Kent Liquid Crystal Institute and the Institute of Physics was extraordinary, overwhelming. Here, the facilities was much, much, much better than what we used to have at the time in the former Soviet Union. CRAWFORD: By better, do you mean the range of instrumentation available, the quality? LAVRENTOVICH: All of that. The range, yes. For example, here, we had the so-called cleanroom. It’s the room where you have a very little number of dust particles, which is important when you are dealing with samples in which the liquid crystal layer has the thickness of 5 micrometer. And 5 micrometer, it’s the average diameter of these dust particles, that we don’t see, but they are around us. In the cleanroom, you get rid of them. If you want to make a nice cell so that you don’t trap any dust particles between the glass plates, that’s the environment you would like to work with. But it’s expensive. It’s expensive to build. It’s expensive to maintain because you need the circulation of air so the dust is being removed constantly. You have to wear special clothes to get into the cleanroom. We didn’t have that on the regular basis in the Soviet academic institutions, not at least in the Institute of Physics in Kyiv, Ukraine. So, that was the big difference in the sense of what was available. Another thing is quality of some instruments. In there, I might have had the small magnet to do things, but here it was a huge electric magnet that would produce much higher magnetic field, and things like that. CRAWFORD: You mentioned you had access to journals and everything, but the challenge was access to Xerox machines. Presumably, access to Xerox machines was limited because the Soviet government wanted to limit the amount of people reproducing things? Is that what it was about? LAVRENTOVICH: Exactly. It was limited because the Soviet government didn’t want people to reproduce in mass quantities something negative like these samizdat books. Or some proclamations that people can put on the streets, on the buildings. So, no, they were afraid of that. CRAWFORD: It wasn’t like, say, here in Kent, where every office has a Xerox machine that people can more or less use, and there’s a FedEx that you could go to if you wanted to. Going back to your educational experience at Kyiv State and your master’s degree, you mentioned this professor that asked you to work with him, in your third year. What was the name of that professor? LAVRENTOVICH: Yuri Zabashta. CRAWFORD: Did he become your advisor or mentor? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, that was the third year, and he was my coauthor, but then when I finished this work and it was time for me to decide where to do my master thesis, which was kind of based on research you do during the entire year, and then produce a text, like a small thesis, and defend it. I decided to go outside, to go into the Academy of Sciences system. I asked my mom and my uncle who do they know in the Academy of Sciences that I might work on my fifth-year research. It was first my mom, she was working with another teacher of chemistry, and that teacher had a husband who worked at the Institute of Physics. She talked to her husband. He said, “Oh, yeah”—I was the guy with very good grades in the Physics Department, so—"If the guy with such good grades would like to come to do research, I will find a place for him.” Then my mom told me that I would be welcome to come. Then it happened that this husband also kind of knew my uncle, because my uncle was working in the Institute for Nuclear Physics and Institute for Physical Chemistry across the street. So my uncle actually brought me to the Institute of Physics to this person, who became my PhD advisor, and was also the advisor of my thesis for the master degree at the Institute of Physics. CRAWFORD: What was their name? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s Mikhailo Kurik. CRAWFORD: You said that with the previous professor, you wrote a theoretical paper on the elasticity of polymers— LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: —coauthored paper. When you first described that, you mentioned that you were doing “real science.” That was your first opportunity to do “real science.” What did you mean by that? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s not like you have a problem in your textbook that you need to solve. That is not real science. Why? Because people that put the problem in there already knew the answer. So the answer is no. When you do science, you don’t know the answer. If I remember correctly, the problem was to calculate how the elastic moduli of a polymer would change as the function of temperature. If I pose the question like that—how the elastic moduli of polymer depend on temperature—I would answer, “I don’t know.” “You don’t know? Go and figure how.” Okay, develop a model. Assume that your polymer is this and this, and then assume that there is this and this dependence of some material properties on the temperature. Specify all your assumption, and then work out from these initial assumptions to answer the question. And of course, people won’t understand that it’s only a theoretical prediction. You use some initial ideas, some initial assumptions, then you work out the model, without making errors, so that the model represents what the initial assumptions are, and you get the answer. And, you have the plot—“This is my modulus, this is the temperature, and this is how it depends on temperature.” That’s the science. Because this plot did not exist before you produced it, and this is the novel piece of knowledge, and now other people can verify it. Some people can do the actual measurements of moduli as a function of temperature and see whether their results correspond to my theoretical model. Some other people will say, “No, no, no, this assumption, this is very simplifying. A polymer cannot be assumed to be totally random. There is some order in the polymer. Let’s add another ingredient, and see how this new model will modify your prediction on temperature dependencies. This is your dependency. This is mine. It’s higher or lower.” But again, this is also a new science, because no one knew how this temperature-dependence would look like if I changed the original assumptions. CRAWFORD: For your master’s thesis, what was the focus of that research? Was it still on polymers and these sort of questions about elasticity? LAVRENTOVICH: No. I started to look at the microscope. There was this German-made microscope, and I looked at the organic crystals, and I would put it in the hot stage, and I would raise the temperature. I saw that before the material melts, it starts like sweating. So, in different points, there were different apparently droplets of isotropic fluid. But it wasn’t like one side starts to melt and the process goes like a well-defined boundary between fluid and crystal. No. It was that the fluid appeared in different spots. I noticed that these spots were to some extent defectous, that there was something strange, maybe dust particles, maybe cracks, maybe. And so I started to read the literature and I found models that explained that phase transitions such as melting are facilitated by topological defects, dislocations. That fascinated me, and I decided that, okay, people developed these models for translationally ordered crystals when the building units are like spheres. There is no orientation. I thought that maybe I can expand this theory to include melting of crystals in which the building units are not just spheres but elongated rods. Then the fluid means that you not only make the distances between units random, but you also make their mutual orientations random. So, in the existing models that dealt with the so-called dislocations, which are defects of translational order, I decided to add disclinations, which are the defects in orientational order. So I basically made the model slightly more difficult but in my opinion it was more correct when it came to the melting of so-called organic crystals in which the molecules are not like atoms. They are not spherical, they are really elongated rods. It was a very simple model, and I really borrowed a lot from the existing models, but I was happy with that. I could explain what I did, why I did it, what it means, what kind of differences with the previously known models my model makes. I successfully defended my Master of Science, and that was it. CRAWFORD: Was this then the work that went into I think what may have been one of your first publications in 1981, “Topological Defects in Cholesteric Liquid Crystals”? LAVRENTOVICH: That was my Master, which I kind of used to get my diploma with distinction from the Kyiv State University, and then I moved full-time to be a researcher at the Institute of Physics. That started a new chapter. I started to be more interested in the liquid crystals. CRAWFORD: So you got interested in liquid crystals once you started your PhD work at the Institute of Physics? LAVRENTOVICH: Right. In liquid crystals, the issue of topological defects was frontline. There were papers by people—in the United States, Phil Anderson, who was already the Nobel Prize winner, and his colleagues published a paper that if you take a droplet of the so-called cholesteric liquid crystal, then you should have a defect at the surface, topological defect. You see, my interest in these dislocations and disclinations naturally led me to focus on defects essentially for the rest of my scientific life. It’s imperfections of the otherwise ideal order that are kind of most interesting. Because in many situations, it’s the imperfections that define the fate of the material, its response to the external factors, and many things. You might think about cracks in the wings of the aircraft. It’s not the entire wing that is interesting; it’s what would happen if this crack expands. You need to know how to prevent cracks from expanding and things like that. This is why topological defects were originally of interest to me, but later on, it turned out that there are many other important and interesting facets of this science of topological defects that I capitalized on. The paper by Anderson in Physical Review Letters stated that if you have a sphere of a cholesteric, then you should have a point defect. It relates to a very simple mathematical theorem. If you have a sphere with hair, and you try to comb the hair, it’s the theorem that is called sometimes combing a hedgehog. If you try to put the hair or needles of the hedgehog parallel to this surface, turns out that you cannot have the hair being smoothly covered in the sphere. You would have the north pole and the south pole with topological defects. If you don’t mind, I can use the— CRAWFORD: Sure. So just for the audio, you're drawing on a whiteboard now. LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, so this is the sphere, the three-dimensional sphere, and I have the hair that I try to comb, trying to be as parallel to the neighbors as possible. Then what do I have here? If you look from the top, you would see the point defect. This is nothing else but a topological defect. It’s like the system of parallels on the globe. I can change the rules of game and I can go with meridional lines. Still, the south and north poles, I have these points where the orientation is not specified. I don’t know whether it’s north, west, or east. These are topological defects. Anderson predicted that if we have the sphere of a cholesteric liquid crystal, then we would have something like this, something like a defect, but it’s like these two poles are together. So I just take north and south pole and bring them together, and this would be the thing. Then inside, since this is not a shell—it’s the full solid sphere—inside you would have different layers of the material in which this structure would turn. But then, the point was that he placed—and now I show you the shells. It’s not the molecular orientations; it’s the shells. Imagine that you have it’s like Russian dolls, placed inside of each other, but they are all sharing this common point. That was his prediction. He called this boojums defect, and that was very kind of field that was very exciting. Because prior to his paper, there was another scientist, David Mermin, who predicted these boojums in superfluid helium-3, which was an interesting material. This is a superfluid liquid that has the properties of liquid crystals. It’s like a superfluid liquid crystal. So you can imagine how exciting it was for me to see that in liquid crystals, you can have boojums that were previously described for the superfluid helium-3. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 001] And so, I decided to somehow do the experiment. My advisor said, “Look, we have the glassblowing specialist in the Institute. He can blow a little spherical glass with a tube attached so that you can try to fill the sphere with the liquid crystal and maybe you would see your boojum.” I went to the guy [laughs], and he promised me something in three months, especially if I buy him a bottle of vodka. [laughs] No, I remember I paid with a bottle of vodka for the stand on which I can put my generator of electric field and amplifier. He actually built it from metal, but the payment he requested was the bottle of vodka. It was a very popular currency sometimes. Anyway, while I was waiting, I read the book that was—you need to take photographs of those liquid crystals under the microscope. I went to the shop where people kept old books, and I suddenly found a book by some German author translated into Russian that was specifically about making photographs under the microscope. I learned that in order to eliminate optical aberrations in the images of crystals, you place the crystal in glycerin. Glycerin is the fluid that has refractive index that is higher than that of air, and when you put a crystal, then the refractive indices of glycerin and the crystal match each other, and when light goes through, it does not distort. There is no deflection of light beams. When I read that, it came to me immediately that I can use the glycerin not just to make a better quality of photograph; I can use glycerin to produce spheres of liquid crystals. Because glycerin is a polar fluid—it’s like water—and liquid crystals are oil-like. If you ever ate soup—which I did; it was called borscht—and I always saw these huge, round pieces of oil floating in [laughs] water—I realized that if I take glycerin and put liquid crystal, it would form spheres, and I don’t need any glass blown for me and then I don’t even know how I will put the liquid crystal in. I realized that this would be the simplest thing. That was the beginning of a wonderful PhD experience. I used this approach to different liquid crystals and produced some papers that I am still proud of and are still cited. Because in those spheres, you see without any complications the beauty of the spherical shape and how the shape arranges molecular orientations, how these boojums or hedgehogs or Dirac monopoles appear, and you can study them in greater detail, because they are ideal experimental objects. CRAWFORD: Awhile back, when you first started talking about these theorems from Phil Anderson and so forth, you said that topological defects were a frontline issue in the study of liquid crystals. Could you explain why? What was the particular interest? Or what made it a frontline issue? LAVRENTOVICH: Maybe it’s just my personal perception, because I already was oriented to topological defects. But what happens in the years when I graduated from the university—in 1977 and 1978, there was a beautiful number of papers that explain that you can classify all topological defects in a manner that is similar to classification of elementary particles, and even the astronomical objects due to some cosmology, like cosmic strings. For example, prior to this development in the physics of condensed matter, there was the beautiful work of Kibble—he was a professor of physics in England—who developed a model of the universe. So, after the Big Bang, the energy was dispersing everywhere, and there were so-called fields of phase representing bubbles of something ordered. It’s like the needles of the comb that represent something like that. Then the next bubble has the same phase, but this phase is realigned with respect to the first phase, and then there is the third bubble that is oriented yet in some other way. These bubbles grow with time, and then they start to collide with each other. When they expand and collide with each other, they should somehow find a consensus about what the orientation of this phase would be. If I draw something like this, you might see that it’s impossible to find a consensus. This junction will forever be of this type. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 002 and 003] That is a topological defect, and you cannot get rid of it, no matter how you are trying to rearrange things smoothly. He said that, “Guys, those defects are cosmic strings.” And these cosmic strings are so heavy—I remember it was like 11 ton per linear centimeter or meter; I don’t remember. But it’s a heavy thing, and it moves with almost the speed of light, through the universe, and then it breaks into little pieces, and from these little pieces, we have the matter emerging, like galaxies and stuff. So that was your topological defect, as the cosmic string. Then many people stated that, “Wait a moment, but this type of cosmic strings is nothing else but the so-called disclinations in a nematic liquid crystal.” [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 004] Because in the nematic liquid crystal, you have molecules that are aligned parallel to each other, and they locally try to be really parallel to each other. But if you have three pieces that expand, for example during cooling the isotropic fluid, they might form something like that, and that would be your topological defect. Not a cosmic string moving with the speed of light, like some were during the Big Bang; you can see it under the microscope, in your lab! And so, that was really fascinating. This is why I paid attention to all these works. Then in 1977, 1978, two groups of theorists, one in Moscow and one near Paris, wrote theoretical papers that put classifications of topological defects in liquid crystals on very solid mathematical grounds. This classification used the so-called homotopy branch of topology. Topology is a branch of mathematics that at first sight is useless and stupid, because it doesn't distinguish between a cup and a torus. All transformations of the shape that preserve the topology are not making any difference to them. But this branch of useless math turned out to be precisely what was needed to solve the following problem. I am telling you that my condensed matter or whatever—the field of universe, or magnetization of this magnet—has the following type of order. For example, it has this so-called order parameter which is the orientation of the molecules. So I give you this information, and you use this classification of defects, you tell me back, “Oleg, in this material, you would have the following topological defect. You would have linear defects, disclinations that would look like this.” If I go around, the orientation of the molecules changes by pi. You would also tell me that if I have the similar thing but for example this, which looks very similar, but the reorientation is 2-pi, this will be stable, and this will be not stable. This is powerful, right? It’s just the same similar object, but here, if I go around the center, I see molecules reoriented by 180 degrees. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 005] Here, it’s 360. And these would not be stable, and this would be stable forever. So that is a very powerful classification. And all I gave you was that the molecules like to be parallel to each other. That’s it. And I asked what would be the topological defects, and you came with this answer? Wow! Then of course I was very intrigued by these works, and I decided that my PhD should be about defects, and in particular what would happen if I will put this media in spheres, that we studied before. Now I explained what would happen if the hair is tangential to the surface, but now my question was, imagine that somehow I go from a sphere in which the molecules are parallel to the surface, to the sphere in which they are forced to be perpendicular. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 006 and 007] In the first case, I can imagine something like two poles. In the second case, I can imagine that it might be something like this. Why not? I just simply extend this vertical hedgehog-like to the center. But now, what would be in the in-between situation? When the sphere has the orientation of molecules at the surface that is conical, that is not perpendicular…not this, not this, but conical—how this would manifest itself, and how to describe it. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 008] You see, it’s a very simple object. You cannot produce anything simpler than a sphere. The only complication is that this sphere has orientational order. And we are asking, what would be the change in this orientational order when the boundary conditions are changing? And so I figured out how to do this experimentally, again with the help of glycerin. I would use glycerin as the medium, and I would put a little bit of shampoo. [laughs] Shampoo is a so-called surfactant. It not only cleans the hair, but what it does, it attaches its molecules that attach to any interface that they find. This is why they pick up the dirt particles and remove them from our bodies. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 009] So if I have a little bit of those guys, these guys would try to make this orientation. But then I figured that, if I change the temperature, the aligning ability of these surfactants and glycerin should not necessarily be the same. At some temperature, these guys would win, and I would have this orientation. At some other temperature, glycerin would win, and I would have this orientation. It turned out that it was exactly the case. I created the droplets, and I changed the temperature, and by some magic, this structure transformed into this. And all I needed to do is to describe what was in between. [laughs] CRAWFORD: Forgive me for probably a very novice question, but would that count as a phase transition? LAVRENTOVICH: No, it’s not a phase transition. Phase transition would be if I simply raised the temperature so high that this order disappeared, and all I have is the droplet with isotropic oil inside, and isotropic glycerin outside, so there’s no structure to it except for the shell. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 010] So, no, it’s a structural transition. Phase transitions were studied very extensively before I was doing anything. This was interesting, because no one did it before, in the sense of the structural transformations when the surface anchoring, as we call it, changes. That is the novelty. CRAWFORD: You mentioned this series of papers in 1977, 1978. Was it Kibble’s work, the British scientist? LAVRENTOVICH: Kibble’s work was I think 1976. CRAWFORD: You referred to these papers as beautiful, and I was wondering why you chose that particular adjective. Is it because you're seeing these connections from the cosmological level down to the microscopic? LAVRENTOVICH: That is a part of the beauty, but by itself, saying that this person is similar to that person doesn't tell you they are both beautiful. CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: [laughs] What makes them beautiful is their inner quality, and that was the inner quality of these models. I would like to come back to what we discussed. Imagine again the power of this model. I am telling you that the molecules would like to be parallel to each other. Nothing else. And back—and this is the beauty—you're telling me much more. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 011] You're telling me the disclinations with molecular rotation by pi would be stable, would be so-called topologically stable defects. You can assign some quantum number to them, like pi. And then you add also that if you double this pi and make it two pis, then these are not topologically stable defects; they would transform into the uniform state. And to me, this is the beauty. This is the beauty of this model. A similar beauty existed in the Kibble. When he described these cosmic strings, he also stated that there is no way you can smoothly get rid of those cosmic strings. Once they form, they would exist forever and then maybe break into the universe that we know of now. That’s the inner beauty of the subject itself. Yes, and it is also similar to another beautiful subject. CRAWFORD: Right. LAVRENTOVICH: I recall one of the jokes, if you are interested. CRAWFORD: Sure! LAVRENTOVICH: It’s about the Soviet state and the relationship with different other social activities. As you know, the Communist Party and the state were kind of the same thing. So the joke goes as a priest and the Communist Party functionary are in a train in the same car, and they are drinking vodka and just discussing things, the Party leader asks, “Look, priest, it amazes me that we are trying to convince the masses that our way of life is the best, and still, they are kind of reluctant to support us. On the other hand, when I come to church, I see each and every Sunday enthusiastic people coming to the church. It’s not clear. We are trying to emulate what you are doing there. You have your Bible; we have the History of the Communist Party. You have your kind of churches beautifully adorned with this and that, and we are trying to do the Party halls. But we still don’t have this level of success, so what can you advise us? What can we do better?” And the priest was thinking hard, and thinking hard, and then he said—and the punchline here, you might not understood it; I will explain it—“So tell me, Communist leader, did you try to separate state from the Party?” CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: And in the Soviet Union, it was official, a well-proclaimed thing, that the church and the state are separate. [laughs] And that separation made the church successful, and the Communist Party—so that was—so if people joke about things like that, that means that they are not going to die for the Party, right? CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah. I wanted to ask a little bit more about your work on your PhD, and thank you for that very nice explanation of the kinds of problems that you're working on. I’m curious what drew you to liquid crystals. Were they just a particular type of material that were useful for exploring these sorts of problems? Was there other work on liquid crystals happening at the Institute of Physics or in Ukraine or in Kyiv at the time? LAVRENTOVICH: Yes. Liquid crystals appeared there, and there was actually a pre-history of liquid crystal science in the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was a laboratory in Leningrad—or Saint Petersburg at the time—where a scientist called Vsevolod Frederiks, was working. He was a very famous scientist for his time. He did things in astrophysics, and he also started to explore the liquid crystals. He was the guy that discovered the so-called Frederiks transition which is at the heart of all the modern display applications of liquid crystals. I told you that the molecules of liquid crystals are tending to align parallel to each other. But if you apply electric field or magnetic field, you can change this orientation. So, if it was horizontal, you apply the electric field, it goes vertical. He observed this effect. He understood it. He found how the voltage that you need to apply to the cell depends on the thickness of the cell. In fact, this effect of reorientation of molecular order by external field is what is used in liquid crystal displays. Why? Because when you change the molecular orientation from this to this, you change the refractive indices of the material. So the refractive index for this orientation, when you look at it, is different from this orientation. Then, the optical appearance, especially if you put the liquid crystal slab between two cross-polarizers, will be totally different. You can engineer the cell in such a way that when there is no field, the light doesn't go through the cell. If there is a field, it goes through. And things like that. That was what later was used in liquid crystal displays. But we already knew that this effect exists. By the way, Frederiks got a tragic life. He was killed by the Stalin regime. He was from the wealthy family. His father was a minister of the Tsar’s government in Russia. He was forever kind of marked as enemy of people, and he was thrown into jail, and spent maybe ten years in Siberia, and died. Or was assassinated; I don’t remember the exact. But he was the victim of Stalin’s regime. When I came to the library—this is another detail of the Soviet regime—to find his original papers in 1929, I found the journal, I opened the journal, and there were two authors. One author is his lab assistant, a lady named Repiewa—last name—and Frederiks. And so. I see Repiewa, but the other author is not visible. There is only a black rectangle, stamped on top of the actual name. I know the name because I know the references to the work, but I cannot physically see it, because it was blanked out in the library. That was through the entire libraries of the entire Soviet Union, [laughs] so you can imagine. It’s like 1984, you know? The history was really—and people were removed from the photographs. That was also a very common thing in the Soviet history. So we knew about this technological importance. And because of that, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet Union was economically very solid, because of the price of energy, so we had the opportunities to be hired by the Academy of Sciences and do our research. Different departments at the Institute of Physics, which were dealing with nonlinear optics, lasers, molecular crystals, like in my case, started to think about new research areas. Liquid crystals came as an interesting field because it was really new, and it was having this promise of possible display applications, maybe something else. And so physicists started to add this to their regular studies. Some people would just shine the laser beam on, instead of the solid crystal, on the liquid crystal, and see what happens. They would see, “Wow, there is such a strong response.” The liquid crystal realigns, and this realignment makes the laser beam to expand, or to collapse. So, many different nonlinear optics things. There were like three or four different groups at the Institute of Physics that started to look into liquid crystals, and I was one of those people. CRAWFORD: How much of that work was driven by interest in displays? The reason why I ask is I think it was around 1980 at one of the liquid crystal conferences that scientists in Japan really first revealed that they had made some really important steps forward, I guess, with liquid crystal displays. Was application a concern, or was it mostly theoretical, fundamental? LAVRENTOVICH: No, it was curiosity driven. At that time, I really didn’t have—since I was studying these topological defects, it occupied me, and I didn’t even think about using an electric field for whatever reason. This glycerin thing kept me busy for five years or so. So, no. And the beauty of that time in the Soviet science was that your research could be purely curiosity-driven. You don’t need to write proposals. You just have your salary, you have some minimum amount of money to buy instruments, materials, or simply ask colleagues to give you the materials, because chemists were synthesizing things. So it was really a golden time. Without proposals and writing, you have everything you need just to focus on research. There was also a very open atmosphere of discussing and publishing. Each week, we had group meetings at which we discussed what we did, sometimes what the new literature is about. And before you submit a paper to publication, you have to report it to your peers, and then not only within your department but also to the general public of the Institute. There, you have these liquid crystal people from other groups that typically are not sitting in on the weekly group meetings, they come, and their expertise helps you, because they might spot the weaknesses in your presentation that you might miss. That was very interesting. When I came here, and I became the director of the Institute, I tried to introduce something like that, so that the paper, before it is being submitted—voluntarily, but still—be presented to the Institute in our wonderful Samsung Auditorium, so all the people in here are experts in liquid crystals, and that might improve the quality of publication a lot. Unfortunately that lasted while I was, but then right now, we don’t have this. So, we produce something, we send it out, it is being published, end of story. I often don’t know what the latest development in Tony Jákli’s group, or Phil Bos, or something like that. CRAWFORD: Just for the record, which group at the Institute of Physics were you part of? LAVRENTOVICH: The department that was led by Mikhailo Kurik. His department was called Photonics of Molecular Crystals. CRAWFORD: You finish your PhD at the Institute of Physics in 1984, but you stay at the Institute of Physics upon finishing, and then in 1990 you earn your Doctorate of Sciences, also from the Institute of Physics. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could first explain this additional degree, and perhaps your decision to stay on at the Institute of Physics, and so forth. LAVRENTOVICH: The system in the Soviet Union was such that you have two levels of dissertations. One is “kandidat nauk,” PhD equivalent. It’s very similar in all senses to the PhD degree here. You have your advisor. Typically your advisor tells you which field to explore, or you might find something interesting, but he is your kind of superior, discussing with you. Then you defend in front of your peers and also a committee that is slightly different from the committees here. On that committee, you must have official opponents from other academic institutions. You cannot have them from the Institute of Physics. These guys must come, for example in my case, from Leningrad and Moscow, to avoid any kind of hush-hush between ourselves, decisions. That, I think, was a good feature. And sometimes, in Western Europe, people still do it. I sometimes travel to France, for example, to be an opponent on the thesis defense there. But then, okay, you are done with your PhD, you have your PhD diploma; now what? Now you are trying to establish your own scientific school, your own scientific group. Now you are coming in a position to maybe have your own graduate students to supervise. And if you have this opportunity, then you might develop something that looks like a new scientific direction, and you can then have two, three, or four PhD students of your own that would graduate. And if this forms a cohesive pattern, then maybe you can call it a new thesis of a Doctor of Science, which tells that you not only are capable of doing research with someone advising you; you can do it on your own, while advising other people and having these people to contribute to your science. It’s like I’m using my graduate students to produce results essentially for me. We write together the papers, but I tell them what I am intrigued by, and then they spend nights in lab to try to show me that what intrigues me is really interesting. [laughs] Then, this is the level at which you defend your Doctor of Sciences, and after that, you have the right to become a kind of administrator—the chair of the department, or the research department. It’s different here. CRAWFORD: Were there people in the system at that time that would choose not to do a Doctor of Sciences? Like would they stop with a PhD? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, they simply stop. They do not do much of the new, exciting things. Another problem was that unlike in the United States and many other countries, there is very limited mobility of people. If you defend your PhD, there is really nowhere else to go. You are stuck with the same Institute. So, I cannot go suddenly to, let’s say, Moscow, because they have already their Candidates of Science PhDs, who just defended there. There’s no exchange, that these guys go to Kyiv, and us go to—and you see, the structure of the Soviet Union was such that the quality of life was different in different cities. If you’re in Kyiv, Moscow, Leningrad, it’s the highest level of everything. If you go to—now we know the cities like Kharkiv and Kherson, the quality of everything is not as good, and if you go to even smaller cities, it’s even less. So if I defended my PhD in Kyiv, I have my family in Kyiv, I would be very reluctant to go to Kherson, because the quality of institution there would be not as good, and the quality of life for my family would not be as good. So we were stuck in those silos for the rest of our lives. That was it. The system was not sustainable, and this is why, 30 years later, you see so many Soviet products in American universities. One of the jokes of, [told in 2005 by a friend, originally from Moscow, now a professor in Great Britain:] Give me a definition of the American university. It’s when a bunch of ex-Soviet professors teaches a bunch of Chinese students. CRAWFORD: [laughs] CRAWFORD: Why do you say that system wasn’t sustainable? LAVRENTOVICH: Because imagine that it continues for like 50 years. I produce more and more graduate students. I have maybe two dozen by now. If they are all staying in Kyiv, working under me, this pyramid becomes higher and higher. If there is no lateral freedom to move, then people—maybe me, at the top, I will be still happy, because I command so many people, but those people under me, they also would like to maybe command someone else [laughs]. This is unsustainable, in my opinion. CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah. One thing that I know from this period when you were working on your Doctorate of Science and advising PhD students and so forth—in 1987, you were awarded a Gold Medal Award for Young Researchers from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences for your work on Dirac monopole types in liquid crystals. I wonder if you could discuss that award? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, that was a simple thing. Remember I said that I was fascinated by Phil Anderson’s paper, his boojum. And then when I actually came to see these cholesteric liquid crystal droplets in glycerin, I realized that he was wrong. It’s not these Russian dolls that are hooked at the same point. The structure is different, but no less beautiful. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 012 and 013] So, this is the sphere. And then, instead of driving things like this, the cholesteric did totally different. It was simply concentric, concentric layers, like this. So they don’t touch each other. But now, if you remember, and I will show it in a different color, on each sphere of this shell I have this defect in which kind of two poles are glued together. Imagine that I have this here, and then where would be the defect of the next shell. Probably here, because they kind of would—messy things would like to clump together. [laughs] Then, you realize that you would have the sphere with concentric layers of this liquid crystal, and there must be a line that is a defect line that connects all these points. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 014, 015, and 016] And if you look at this, if you also draw the normals—these are the normals to the layers, [or lineas that are perpendicular to the layers]—in the liquid crystal, they have the meaning that molecules turn around these radial lines. If you create the picture like that, and then you forget that this picture illustrates liquid crystal, if you call a physicist and show him this picture, he would say, “Oh, this is"—Dirac—maybe—let’s see—monopole. A magnetic—elementary magnetic charge.” [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 017] So, if I remove this line, this picture would remind you an electron, right, with the hedgehog in the electric lines. That is fine. That is correct. But in the magnetic field, you don’t have these hedgehogs. You have magnetic south and north pole, and you know from maybe high school that they cannot be separated from each other. Each time you divide the magnet into two, it’s still south and north. Why? Because of this line. So if I have the—it’s the so-called Dirac line, or Dirac string, this thing is the elementary magnetic charge. The magnetic field is radial, and there is all similarity with the electric field. But, in magnetic case, there is also another vector quantity that is defined perpendicularly to the magnetic field [and creates an additional Dirac string emanating from the core of the magnetic charge.] [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 018] It’s the so-called vector potential. Which is the vector that you try to comb, and you cannot comb, so you create these lines. And so Dirac I think in 1931 produced this beautiful paper that explained the structure of the magnetic charges and essentially explained why you cannot separate south from north. Because you need to cut this line. And if you cut, there is, again, another charge here, and another charge here. Because of this defect line, you cannot separate the south and north pole from each other. You can imagine why you cannot separate, because you can imagine this as the elastic band. If you try to separate the ends, you create more and more stretching, and the thing would try to pull back together. So, that was my demonstration, that the theoretical prediction by Anderson was wrong, essentially. Instead of that, I see this. But this is beautiful, because you can say, “Oh, I discovered the Dirac monopole in the cholesteric liquid crystal.” No one ever seen these things. But now you can create a photograph of it in the liquid crystal. Structural analog of these things. So, yeah, that brought me my PhD degree. [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: And many other recognitions followed. In the popular journal of chemistry in the Soviet Union, they often—it’s like in the journal TIME. They put some small bits of information, and one of those bits was that, “A Dirac monopole has been discovered in the cholesteric liquid crystal.” [laughs] CRAWFORD: Oh, wow. What was the name of that journal? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s Khimiya i Zhizn. It’s Chemistry and Life. It was a very popular journal. Also because it was one of those things that created Perestroika. It started to publish things that were not that welcome by the official party line, like life of scientists in the Western countries and things like that. CRAWFORD: Did you ever meet Phil Anderson? LAVRENTOVICH: No, but I met all these people behind the topological classification of defects. In fact, I consider them as my lifelong advisors. With Grigory Volovik, we actually wrote the paper on this change in boundary conditions. He was a theorist. He is still there in the Landau Institute in Moscow. This is the premier theoretical physics institution definitely in the former Soviet Union, but also probably on par with any other institution in the world. Communicating with him taught me something very important—that if you're discussing with a person of that high caliber, half-hour discussion is worth approximately one year of you reading the specialized papers, [laughs] because simple phrases kind of open your eyes. So, we were discussing, “What is the width of this singularity?” For example, here. He’s simply telling you, “Well, you have only one length parameter in your problem. It’s the periodicity of the ordering. It's the distance between the shells.” So this thickness cannot be anything much different from this single length scale in your problem. It cannot be 25 of those. It cannot be 0.1 of those. It must be one, two, maybe one half, of this underlying length scale. And so although you only kind of feel that you know that, but when you hear this with an authority, you’re sighing with relief that, oh yeah, this establishes the way of thinking. It develops your intuition. Whenever you see a similar problem, you always ask yourself, “Okay, what’s the underlying period of this structure? Aha!” You know it. Now you know what the other lengths should look like. So, that was extremely important. [Refers to picture, see photo 019] There were some other things, like—so we would write this paper together, and I brought my printed-on-the-typing-machine draft, and then he pulls out his pencil and starts to add something. I, being young, and already a PhD, I pull my expensive pen and give it to him and say, “Grigory Efimovich, this is much better to write than the pencil. You don’t see the pencil.” And he looks at me and said, “But I can erase what I have written with my pencil.” [laughs] And change it! [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: And so, that was another lesson [laughs] that became obsolete after the—[laughs] computers came around. [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] In this time that you're at the Institute of Physics, when you're working on your PhD and your Doctor of Sciences, what about going to conferences and presenting your work and interacting with the scientific community? Could you talk a little bit about how that happened? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah. We had a fairly active conference schedule in the former Soviet Union. We had even something that was called the Conference of Socialistic Countries, on liquid crystals. It was in the winter—you see, at that time, traveling abroad to Western countries was difficult, because of the party lines. [Before] the late 1990s, we could not go there. But, going to socialistic countries like Bulgaria, Poland, was possible, and the community of liquid crystal people decided to organize these conferences of the socialistic countries. We would have some people from Bulgaria, Poland, present, so at least some near neighborhood. It was interesting. There was once this conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Mitterrand has won in France, and a bunch of French scientists came, and we were joking, “Oh, now France is a socialistic country [laughs] so they’re rightfully here!” CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: There were also All-Union—that was the name—All-Union Conferences on Liquid Crystals—so that was fine. What else? When Chernobyl happened, that was a big changing moment in my personal life. I needed to evacuate my family to someplace safe. We had relatives of my wife’s family in Moscow, and we went there. Since the son was very young, I needed to be around for a while, and I cannot just be there around. I wanted to continue doing research. And so I wrote to Lev Blinov, the main liquid crystal scientist in the former Soviet Union, whether I can join the Institute of Crystallography. It was possible. I worked there—“work,” yeah, is probably a very strong term. Also I traveled to the Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow. They were working on DNA-based liquid crystals, and I was really interested in that, because it’s DNA, and it’s liquid crystals. So I came there. We published the work on kind of some defects in DNA type of liquid crystals. So, I cannot say that I was restricted. CRAWFORD: Open, available, yeah. I want to shift to talking about your career beyond the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and so forth, but I have a small question I want to ask you, just thinking about what you said about your early education at Kyiv State University, and how you were talking about studying history, and the history of the country, and the history of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, and learning about the disjuncture between, say, what the government or the party is saying, and what the reality is. I’m thinking about what you then said about how you got interested in topological defects, and you talked about an interest in the imperfections of the ideal order. I certainly now understand the scientific merit of those interests, but I wonder, is there a connection between seeing the disjuncture between the reality of socialist life and the ideal of socialist life, and then translating this into a scientific interest in imperfections of ideal order? Am I reading too much in there? LAVRENTOVICH: Maybe. But maybe. Maybe there is some connection. But you see, there is also a kind of distinction. When we are talking about topological defects, they cannot exist without this ideal order that the material possesses in the places free of the defects. If I change this uniform order, then the entire set of topological defects would be different. To us, it was becoming evident that this entire order must be changed. I am not interested in defects of the existing order, because these defects are ugly, because these defects mean that my grandpa served like, I don’t remember, maybe six or seven years, in prison, for nothing. I would rather see this entire—with all its defects going on. I am not interested in exploring why my dad was thrown into jail—this particular defect—because it makes no sense. Because the core problem here is not this particular instance; it’s the entire structure that needs to be replaced. That’s my perception. CRAWFORD: Right, whereas in the case of these defects in science, they are actually part of the system. They are a product of the ideal order, in a sense, or they relate, connected. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. Yeah. And by studying them, I learn a lot about the order, and many other things like this. Dirac strings. It’s not just the imperfection, but it explains you why the magnetic charges are so different from electric charges. CRAWFORD: You are awarded your Doctor of Sciences in 1990, and then in 1991, you take a position as a Visiting Researcher at—and my French pronunciations are not good, so I’m not going to try—CNRS at University of Paris-South in Orsay. LAVRENTOVICH: Yes. CRAWFORD: Why did you pursue this particular opportunity? LAVRENTOVICH: Two things. First, because finally we could. Finally we could travel. I keep this poster in my office. You see, it says “Third Meeting, Italy, URSS, on Physics of Liquid Crystals and Langmuir-Blodgett.” The year, as you see, is 1990. That was my first conference going to the Western country, to Italy. Then, as I told you, the most fascinating things that occupied me were these topological classifications of defects. It was produced simultaneously by Volovik and Mineev [in Moscow and by Kleman in Paris]. With Volovik, I later wrote a paper, so I knew him very well personally. On the other side, there was a group of Maurice Kleman in Paris and his colleagues, who simultaneously wrote the same thing. So it was like the invention that came in two independent places. I briefly met Maurice Kleman in maybe 1988 in Bulgaria. I mentioned that the French scientists during the Mitterrand years were kind of visiting these conferences of socialistic countries. One of those was in Bulgaria. I think it was 1988, maybe 1987, something like that. So, I briefly met Maurice Kleman, and I was presenting my work on topological defects, and he was interested in this, and we briefly exchanged some discussion. Then when it was possible to come to Western countries, he passed to me the information that he has an open position. Since the Soviet Union started to disintegrate, the Western world was trying to help the scientists in the Soviet Union by providing them with temporary positions. In France, their kind of analog of the Academy of Sciences introduced the so-called “position russe” for Soviet scientists, and he passed the information to me, that he will be happy to host me for a year. Of course, that was an exciting thing. I asked what should I do. He said, “Nothing. Just you agree and I will write the proposal.” Then he wrote to me that the proposal was funded, and I can spend a year in Orsay—it’s a suburb of Paris—working with him. I would go to Moscow to get my foreign visa, and then I just take the plane, and land in Charles de Gaulle, I think, and he would pick me up, and that was the beginning of my Western life. [laughs] My wife was still doing her PhD in Kyiv. She would defend in two months. At that time, we had two young children, a son and a daughter. She would join me in March of that year, 1991, and we spent a year there, before I went to the United States. CRAWFORD: The position that you had, it was one of these “position rouge”? LAVRENTOVICH: Yes. CRAWFORD: That’s what they were officially called? LAVRENTOVICH: I think. Yeah, I think it was official. CRAWFORD: Just curious. That first conference that you went to in Italy in the Western world, in 1990, what was that like? LAVRENTOVICH: Oh, [laughs]. You see, maybe we were so young, or maybe—but it was kind of the, to some extent, exuberant atmosphere. Why? Because the Iron Curtain was not just some mathematic thing; it was real thing that divided people. People could not communicate. People could not see each other, could not discuss. That created an impression that it’s us against them. Suddenly, you finally meet these people in mostly informal atmosphere, you are free to discuss, you trade jokes—like the one that I told you—and you see that people have similar views, similar values, and in fact that you are closer to those people than many people back home who are not scientists, who are not sharing your interests in life. That was really the atmosphere of exuberant kind of friendship. So, that’s the answer. CRAWFORD: When you took the position in France, did you feel like you needed to leave Ukraine? LAVRENTOVICH: Yes. As I told you, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the economy was booming. Soviet Union was selling oil, gas, whatever. Students like me, I would go to the collective farms, but there were also some summer possibilities to go and build all these pipes—Druzhba and what’s now Nord Stream, like those. So, the Soviet Union got a lot of money, and everything was fine in the research. The 1990s started; it was very dramatic decline. In funding. We were told suddenly that some of the salaries could not be paid anymore. I told you that I was already a new Doctor of Sciences; I wanted to have the graduate students, and suddenly I am told that, “No, no, no, you cannot have one. You can have one half.” “What do I do?” “Oh, you write maybe some proposals to some industry; maybe they have money, and you can solve their problems.” No, I was not interested in things like this. No industry is producing the [laughs] Dirac monopole. It’s not my thing. So what do I do? I wrote to people in Moscow, to the director of the Landau Institute—“Do you have any problems for me, that maybe you have money, I can solve for you?” The answer was always, “No, no, no, no.” [laughs] Then I realized what to do. Another thing was that Chernobyl happened in 1986, and that was a serious thing, because I was actually one of the first who knew about this accident. What happened is my wife was expecting our firstborn, so she finally gets to the point when we need to go to the hospital, and I call a taxi. The taxi driver arrives at 4:00 in the morning, and on the way to the hospital, he tells me, “Look, guys, I don’t know, I was leaving to pick you up, and I saw my neighbor, who works at the Chernobyl”—and he said, “hydroelectric station,” but I knew better because I knew this area; I was there visiting my other relatives who worked there—and he said, “And he came and he said that there is some explosion at the station.” I was thinking, “Oh my god, it’s an atomic station. This is bad.” Then things came down from that point on. But I was one of the first who knew, three hours after the thing happened. It happened around 1:00 a.m.; he was picking up at 4:00 a.m. And we were worried about the health of our child, and then the second child. It’s also that my father-in-law, he was actually a radiobiologist. He was studying the influence of x-ray and everything on everything that is alive. He was a very prominent scientist in that field. And so, first leaving to Moscow for like four months, was absolutely clear, and then coming back and seeing that the economic situation is not better, I decided that, “Yeah, maybe I can spend some time in France, if there is an opportunity. Then I will come back, the radiation will be decayed probably a little bit more, so everything will be fine.” But then while we were in France, the putsch happened. The putsch was in the late summer of 1991. [laughs] At that time, we invited my in-laws to spend some time with us in France. Suddenly, there is this putsch, and we were afraid that they could not return back to the Soviet Union, because the—not to the So…to Ukraine—because it will be a totally different country. And so [laughs] that was a very stressful situation for me. I started to think maybe I should extend my Western trip somehow. CRAWFORD: What was the name of your father-in-law, just to have it? LAVRENTOVICH: Dmitry Grodzinsky. CRAWFORD: And you said he worked in radiobiology? LAVRENTOVICH: Radiobiology, yeah. He was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. CRAWFORD: Wow. LAVRENTOVICH: He wrote books, textbooks, on the subject. The government created a commission that would oversee the Chernobyl disaster and how to fight the consequences of those things, and he was one of the advisors to the government on biochemical issues. CRAWFORD: So, you're in France for a year, a little more than a year, maybe. Then in 1992, you take a position as a Senior Research Fellow at the Liquid Crystal Institute here in Kent. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: I think we already know part of the answer to this question, but why did you decide to come to the LCI? LAVRENTOVICH: Oh, the LCI was always up there in my mind [laughs] as the—the Nobel Prize winner from France, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, called the Liquid Crystal Institute in Kent “the Mecca of liquid crystals.” So. Although I am not a Muslim, but I can [laughs] kind of connect to the importance of the Liquid Crystal Institute. There was also the development that I think enabled me being invited to the LCI. So, Dr. Doane here, he invented the so-called polymer-dispersed liquid crystals. He published a paper I think in 1990, or maybe 1989, in which he described the structure of the droplets of the nematic, and he cited our paper, this paper that I am talking about. If there is no field, electric field, what is the organization of those droplets? What he did was that he would apply the electric field and these droplets would reorient, and this would change the optical appearance of the film. He did the electric part, and reorientation, but he needed to use some background information on what the structure of these droplets, and my paper was available, so I guess that he obviously was reading the paper since he cited it, and so he knew me as the person behind this paper. So, it wasn’t that somehow I built my way to the LCI. It was the mutual kind of decision to make it happen, if I understand it correctly. What happened in reality—my staying in France was coming to an end, the end of the year, and so Maurice Kleman told me that he will apply for a permanent position for me in the French Academy of Sciences, CNRS. I said, “Okay, fine.” But they had these decision-making events at the end of May, and I was thinking, “Well, I have to live with something between January and May.” And so I wrote to Dr. Doane that I have a few months of free time between my appointments in France, whether I can come to visit temporarily for a few months the Liquid Crystal Institute. He said, “Yes, of course. Yeah. Just write me when are you going to come.” I was writing this in August. With the family and in-laws being around, we took a tour by car to the South of France, where my wife’s distant relatives were living since the Bolshevik Revolution— CRAWFORD: Oh, wow. LAVRENTOVICH: —and neither side would admit to that, and suddenly they would see each other, and so I was part of this event. So, I had forgotten to reply to Dr. Doane’s—not forgotten; I wasn’t simply around the fax machine when his fax came. Three weeks later, I replied to him that, “Yeah, I would like to come between January and May.” He wrote to me, “You know, these temporary money are gone. We spent them on something else. We committed them. But we have an open position of the Senior Research Fellow. Would you like to apply for it?” [laughs] I didn’t know what it means. I said, “Why not?” I think he wrote that it’s a permanent position. I discussed with my wife, and we decided that we can always make a permanent position a temporary one and just come back. I replied to him, “Yeah, okay, I would like to apply.” Then there was a conference in October of 1991, I think, in Florida, to which I went from Paris. They brought me from the conference in Florida. They brought me from Florida to interview here in Kent. I had no idea about the concept of interview. It never existed—in the Soviet Union, you don’t do any [laughs] interviewing. If you are hired, you are hired. It’s just that’s it. In France, it was I submitted the—I got an invitation, “Please come to be this position rouge guy.” “Okay, I will come.” And here is some interview. So. I didn’t know what to do. I would go from one office to another, to vice president for research. He would ask me about my mom and dad. I would brush these things [laughs] aside and tell him about my science. So, it was an interesting thing, that I went through the interview without having an idea of what am I doing. [laughs] Then I went back to the Institute in France, and I think they sent me an offer; beginning August 1992, I am a Senior Research Fellow. CRAWFORD: Did anything ever come of the effort to try to get you a position with CNRS? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah. As I said, I came in April, as I was invited. It was a memorable thing, because we flew Pan Am, Pan American. That was the last flight that Pan American [laughs] did from Europe to the States. I read with fascination how they explained that to improve their business, they are relocating some of the Western Europe flights to South America, and blah blah blah. [Refers to pictures, see photos 020 and 021] [laughs] Another thing I remember, I bought the—it was an eventful day, this departure—I bought the USA Today, and they had a story, with the centerfold, on football teams in the United States colleges. I know that I am going to Kent State, so I’m trying—they put the table of all-times, you know, the best records. And I’m looking for, you know, my university! [laughs] I find it the dead last! [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: Finally, when we were boarding—so these two little kids of ours are running about, and two or three old ladies from the United States are curious—“So, where, guys, are you going?” We start talking and, “Are you going to work there?” and I say, “Yeah.” “Where?” “Kent State.” “Oh, this is the place where they shoot students.” [laughs] CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah. Yeah. LAVRENTOVICH: [laughs] CRAWFORD: Did you know about that? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, I knew, but it was very superficial. I probably knew it from the Soviet times, because you know, the Soviet propaganda could not miss reminding people about this event. So I slightly knew, but not much. CRAWFORD: Had you had any interactions with members of the LCI prior to applying for this position? LAVRENTOVICH: No, that except that in the same Bulgaria conference, I briefly met Dr. Doane, and I saw his presentation on these droplets. He actually approached me and said that he used the knowledge from my previous study. I was excited that—feeling that your work means something important to other people is very gratifying. So I had some very warm feelings towards him. That was the only thing. Then you asked me, and I didn’t answer, about how did I handle this. So, I applied for the position in France, CNRS, but then I felt not that comfortable. Because a lady that was running for the same position came to my office and said, “Look, why do you need to keep your application? You are probably leaving, and if you are gone, I will get this position for sure.” [laughs] CRAWFORD: Wow. LAVRENTOVICH: So it was very strange. I don’t think this lady ended up in a good scientific career—I lost track of her—but that was not very pleasant. Another thing—again, in France, you feel like you are a foreigner. Your French would never be good enough. That was the feeling that I felt, that being a foreign national in France is not as good, probably not as good, as being a foreign national in the United States. When I came here, I immediately felt this difference. It’s just the first few weeks, going around, communicating within the Institute over there, kind of brought me slightly more level of comfort than in Paris. I wrote to Maurice that I think that I am withdrawing my application I will pursue my career there. After that, he twice offered me similar career advancement back in France. Those were at high level, but both sides, after talking to my wife, we decided that, no, we really felt a little bit more comfortable social-wise, in the United States, than in France. CRAWFORD: Staying here. Thinking about that transition, I want to ask you a question. In 2015, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the LCI, Kent State University put together a little booklet, to which you contributed a short essay. In that essay, you spoke about your career in science, in part. One of the things you said, and I’m quoting from your essay now, you said, “One would think that crossing the continents and moving the family from one type of democracy to another would be quite a dramatic change or a cultural shock. Actually it is not, if you are a scientist, at least a scientist in the field of liquid crystals.” LAVRENTOVICH: Yes. Of course, what I told you was the social things. Dealing with the permanent residency documents, with kind of a perception in the grocery stores, it was different, and I felt it. But scientifically, I loved my colleagues over here, I loved my colleagues over here, and I did the same thing, essentially, there and here. I slightly changed the direction of my research, obviously, because I cannot just simply continue what I did in France, because there were other people that continued to do this. We still collaborated with Maurice. We wrote many papers after I left. So that refers more to the scientific content of life, not to everything that is around. CRAWFORD: What was the LCI like in 1992 when you arrived? LAVRENTOVICH: It was a very closely knit bunch of enthusiastic people. When I arrived, we started the explosive growth. When I was named the Senior Research Fellow, I think there were Bill Doane, two deputy directors—Peter Palffy and John West. Phil Bos was not there. There were people associated from the Department of Physics—Dave Allender, Michael Lee. There was probably the oldest member of the LCI, Mary Neubert, who started since the times of Glenn Brown. And, Jack Kelly. Those were the core people. My future colleagues like Deng-Ke Yang, and Tony Jákli, they were postdocs, so they were not the permanent staff of the LCI. It was a very enthusiastic time, because Bill Doane just secured the ALCOM grant, which actually brought the money to have me as the Senior Research Fellow. Alfred Saupe was just leaving, and I remember of the French scientists, Jacques Prost, said, “Do you realize that you are replacing Alfred Saupe at Kent State?” [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: A young guy, coming to the soccer field, and “Do you realize that Pelé is going out and you—?” [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: Just—wow. So, that just happened that Alfred Saupe was leaving the Institute to Germany. But that was the time when this grant meant a lot of possibilities. We would collaborate with Case Western, with University of Akron. We would have regular meetings with them because ALCOM wanted it to be the collaborative effort. Somewhat later, we started to think about the Chemical Physics graduate program, and with Peter Palffy and Jack Kelly, we produced the first three members of the graduate faculty at Chemical Physics. The issue of which courses to teach and how many students and how to advertise was working, and we spent a lot of time doing that. So the time was very productive, I think. CRAWFORD: How involved were you in the design of the Chemical Physics program? And was that challenging at all, given that you came from a very different educational system? LAVRENTOVICH: No, it’s the same thing as with my interview. When you have no clue what are you doing [laughs], it’s easy, because you do whatever [laughs] comes to mind. Peter Palffy was the driving force behind Chemical Physics. He did the things with the state. Of course, he would consult with Bill Doane, but if I understand correctly, Bill Doane said, “Okay, it’s your child. You just do it, and I will help you if needed.” But it was all his doing. Originally, the first year, we were supposed to have three lecturers—Peter Palffy, Jack Kelly, and Mary Neubert. But Mary Neubert—for whatever reason, she was supposed to teach the textures of liquid crystals. Textures of liquid crystals is what you see under the microscope, when you put a liquid crystal under the objective. And she probably either demanded something or didn’t want to be involved as the lecturer. So she refused, somehow, or probably she did not come to some agreement with Peter Palffy. Then instead of her, I was asked to teach this part. I came to her and say, “Look, I am going to teach textures of liquid crystals. Do you have any [laughs] materials like pictures?” She was doing kind of art with liquid crystal textures. For a while our Institute had her photographs on the walls. She said, “Look, this is a complicated thing, and only few people in the world can teach it.” And I understood that I am not one of those. [laughs] I thought, “Well, textures are just formed by defects.” Because if there are no defects, you have no texture. It’s just [laughs] uniform field of view. It might be bright or less bright, but that’s it; it’s not a texture. I decided, “Okay, if I have to teach it, I will teach it using my basic research, what I do.” I would teach them these things. I would teach them how structure is connected to topological defects. Yes, I will show them the textures, because I have them. Not in this office, but I—yeah, these textures are kind of textures that I would use, I would produce them under the microscope, or this—by the way, those are droplets that I showed to you before. And that was so easy, and that was probably the most successful [laughs] lecture course that I ever had, because I just taught from scratch. I would interrupt the lecture and bring them to my lab and switch on the microscope and show them something like this under the microscope. The first crop of students was small, I think maybe five people? It was a very small group, and I think that they were happy, judging by the evaluation forms, and I was happy, so that was it. CRAWFORD: You mentioned that you changed the focus of your research a little bit. I wonder if you could talk about, what was the major focus of your research when you first came to the LCI? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s hard to say, because I never have a single focus. [laughs] The first thing is that from some point in life, you stop doing research on your own. You have responsibilities. You have your students, or postdocs. When you deal with the students, then there are many unknowns. You see this person for like one, two days, at the beginning; you don’t know what this person is good for, what is the strengths of this person, whether it’s in the theory or in the experiment, and if it’s in the experiment, which one. You don’t know. I noticed that if I give a person just one task, then it might happen that this task and this person do not match. This task cannot be carried by this person. So, I give a task, and then I monitor what’s going on, but then I have to be ready—and I always—regardless of the success or no success with it, I give the second problem to solve. And then the third. And then at the end of their experience, they might have went through five or six projects; three of them were working. Three of them produced three chapters of their thesis. Sometimes, these chapters are logically connected. Sometimes, they are not. But they are good scientific advances. So, because I need to constantly generate these new sub-sections, I really cannot say what is my current research topic. [Refers to picture, see photo 022] Of course it’s all about liquid crystals, sometimes polymerized, sometimes in confinement, sometimes associated with bio, things like living tissues or swimming bacteria, but it’s all around liquid crystals. These topics that I have to generate, they depend on random things. I go to a conference, I listen to someone, or I read—like the book about photography under the microscope. Someone wrote that to make a better contrast, put glycerin around your crystal, and I realized that surface tension should make my liquid crystal a sphere. And the same thing with everything else—I read something, and I think what might be the new facet of this physics that the liquid crystals can bring. Because all the other people, they don’t care about liquid crystals. They do their solids, their isotropic fluids, but very often making the replacement of normal fluid with the liquid crystal fluid changes totally everything. One of our recent works was that if you have a droplet with swimming bacteria—a water droplet, so it can be someone is sneezing, and in the droplet you might have bacteria—so this bacteria, if you place it in air, or in other isotropic fluid, would experience some Brownian motion, but it’s not going anywhere. The center of mass would stay at the same location. But it turns out that if you take this droplet and place it in the liquid crystal, suddenly this jiggling inside the droplet is being rectified by the liquid crystal environment, and it will move like that, forever, to the infinity, to the end of the universe, if you have the liquid crystal that way. That is fascinating, because you have the way of converting energy of random swimming into propulsive, deterministic motion, and all you did is replace the environment, made it liquid crystal instead of the isotropic air or water. That’s how I came to little things that formed the current research. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 023, 024, and 025] CRAWFORD: Would it be fair to say that essentially what you were doing when you came to the Liquid Crystal Institute as a Senior Research Fellow is managing the research of your graduate students and postdocs, and you're looking for interesting topics or problems to give to them to work on, things that seem—new frontiers and interesting problems and so forth? LAVRENTOVICH: Yes, that’s correct. But, you see, the students, they see what is going on. Very often, they do not have the knowledge or experience to tell why, or how to explain. That is the most intriguing part of their research. So, you can simply repeat the experiments. You can go to the Pisa Tower and drop the balls. They would fall. One hundred times, they would fall. The question is why. Why do they fall? What this has to do with gravity? How can you just devise the forces of gravity dropping the balls from the Pisa tower? Basically, I am telling the students, “Go and drop those balls. Do it like 50 times. And then we will think why the balls go down rather than going up.” That is the issue, too. So, I am relieving myself of dropping the balls but I still feel the responsibility to explain why these guys don’t go up. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 026 and 027] CRAWFORD: Did you miss doing the experimental work yourself at all? LAVRENTOVICH: No, I often do. I often do. These textures that you see are the textures that I personally took. When there is a new instrument, I often use it for myself for some period of time so that I have some feeling what this instrument brings, where might be the questionable thing about this instrument. Because I need to have a feeling of those things so that when the student brings me some result, I can tell, “Look, this cannot be true, because probably you didn’t put the polarizers correctly, or the intensity of light was too high or too low, so why don’t you decrease or increase it?” I need to be able to say this. But then, once this instrument becomes like a ten-years-old innovation, I stop doing this, because I already know this instrument. [Refers to whiteboard, see photos 028 and 029] CRAWFORD: Right, so getting that experience with the instruments and the materials, so that you understand and can advise the students and help them explain. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. [Refers to whiteboard, see photo 030] CRAWFORD: I’m curious about ALCOM. The ALCOM Center was one of these NSF-funded Science and Technology Centers. The program is explicitly designed to promote technology transfer from academic labs into industry. A big part of the ALCOM program here at Kent State or this collaborative work between Kent State, Case Western, and Akron, was its industrial partnership program, emphasis on applications, things that can be moved into industry, and so forth. Up until this point, you have characterized yourself as a largely curiosity-driven, what’s often called basic research, kind of oriented researcher. How then did you fit into this ALCOM context that has this explicit applied dimension to it? LAVRENTOVICH: Well, the answer is very easy. There is no need in some specific efforts to position yourself like, “Oh, I am going to do applied science from next Monday.” You see, there is a saying that goes like, “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” That was said by one of the great physicists. I don’t remember who that might be. If you look at my track record, I have a relatively heavy number of grants from industry, from 3M—that was one of the first, in the early 1990s—to Oculus, which is the Meta, Facebook company. That just ended last summer. I have a current renegotiation with the continuation of work with an Italian company that develops surgery instruments for surgery on eyes. All these things didn’t come from the idea, “Oh, I will start doing something applicable from tomorrow.” No, they came from our curiosity-driven research. For example, with 3M, it started in the following manner. We started to explore. You see these beautiful pictures, stripes, they're really beautiful. What they represent is you put glycerin, and instead of dispersing droplet in them, you put the film on top of the glycerin, and it spreads like a uniform film, very thin. In cross-polarizers, these things look very colorful. because of the interference. These colors are not coming from dyes. There are no dyes there. They are coming from interference of white light with itself. I had a picture like that in my office, and a gentleman from 3M was giving a seminar on a new type of liquid crystals that represent dispersion of organic dyes in water. They were thinking that since these are dyes, they absorb light, and since they are liquid crystals, they can be aligned. So 3M had this idea that if you shear-align, this liquid crystal, these dye molecules will align themselves, and then water is evaporated, and what you have, you have a solid film with dye molecules oriented in one direction, and this is a polarizer. This is the polarizer that each and every screen is using. That means that if you have the polarizer with dye molecules oriented one way, if the polarization of light is parallel, it’s absorbed. If it’s perpendicular, it’s transmitted. He was complaining that when they shear, they cannot get the uniform alignment. Instead, they have stripes. They have some zig-zaggy wavy things. In my office, it just happened that one of textures was exactly what they have in their experiments. I was getting these stripes from the curiosity point of view and from the physics point of view. I realized at some point in one of the experiments that I did myself that in this thing that you have glycerin like this, and the liquid crystal, and air here, if you have the system relax, if you look at the top, you don’t see the liquid crystal molecules being in one direction. You see them forming these stripes. And it’s just beautiful texture. It’s periodic stripes. Where does it come from? This thickness is like .5 micrometers. Human hair is, what, between 20 and 100 micrometers, so this is way, way, way thinner. And this period is 100 micrometers, so totally different. As I told you, if you know the scale in the system, you know some of the—not this property. It’s like many—200 times different. So, where does it come from? Then, we realized—and that was with the help of my theorist colleague and friend, Victor Pergamenshchik, that you have this interesting feature, that the molecules at the surface at the glycerin are tangentially oriented, parallel to it, but at the surface with air, they stick perpendicularly. And you have this deformation, and it’s like elastic strain. The simple analogy that helps to explain—imagine that you have an elastic rod and you push on it. If you push it slightly, it remains a rod, but if you push it sufficiently strong, you would buckle it. Or break it. Buckle. And this buckling means that there is some in-plane preferred orientation. Basically, these things are nothing else but the buckling. If the thickness of the film is large enough, then you have all these “L” letters of distorted director looking in one direction. But if it’s small enough, then they kind of buckle like this. They just go—like splay—and that creates these things. That was, as you see, nothing practical, only curiosity and trying to understand why, what’s the physics. With Victor, we kind of understood the physics. We published Physical Review Letters, a nice journal. Then I have this picture in my office, the guy from 3M comes, and says, “Oh, this is exactly what we see! So can you help us to solve why these guys appear?” The material is different. As I told you, they are just water dispersions of some dye molecules. We never worked with them. But I said, “Sure.” Because I saw that if I know the mechanics of this, I would probably be able to understand the mechanics of that. Of course 3M didn’t only ask me to understand the mechanics, but also to eliminate the stripes. They said, “So make something different.” I wasn’t sure about that [laughs]. But since he is paying me money for exactly this thing, I said, “Okay, I will try.” And so we did the little project with them. They gave us the material, and we figured out the reason, and since the reason was this, the solution was simple, also, and it worked. It worked, because—so if this deformation is the reason, you have to eliminate the hybrid alignment, as we called it. You have to have the top also providing the horizontal, so that your film is uniform like this. For that, you need some molecules that would aggregate at the air-liquid crystal interface, and we found some block copolymers that apparently did just that. The alignment was much, much more uniform. The quality of polarizers was much better. And that was the end of the story. But, only for 3M. For us, these water-soluble molecules turned out to be a golden mine. Because it turned out that, see, they are water-based, right? And water means life. Everything that is alive has some relationship with water. We found that these water-based liquid crystals are perfectly interfaceable with biological things. For example, you can place a bacterium in this liquid crystal, and it wouldn't know that it’s not a simple water. It would think that it’s water with some structure, with some fences, that force me to swim like that, [laughs] not to this direction. That opened the entire new field of exploration for us, liquid crystals that can be interfaced with biological entities—swimming bacteria, then living cells, tissues, and you name it. Again, it was fundamental, now, but some of the things that I think in the future might be—actually, yeah, with these things, we developed this sensor for harmful bacteria. When the COVID came, I even collaborated briefly with people that produced these COVID viruses from animals, to see whether our detection scheme can identify them. There is a company here, Crystal Diagnostics, that uses these water-based liquid crystals that we developed to detect harmful bacteria. They are using it to develop food spoilage and things like that. They started maybe ten years ago. I am not sure I know what they are doing right now, but Crystal Diagnostics is based on one of our patents, that again started from curiosity, went to 3M, passed 3M, had again curiosity, and now that curiosity produced the company. CRAWFORD: So there’s a kind of relationship between—? LAVRENTOVICH: There is, yeah. This latest Facebook Oculus thing is also curiosity. We found new liquid crystals that form new type of ordering, and we realized that this type of ordering, when you apply electric field, your cell will change color, from red to blue, and then into ultraviolet or into the infrared. So it’s like a filter, the color of which changes simply by applying a different voltage. This tunability by electric field was not known before. That was of course a fundamental thing, but it brought us interest from Oculus, because they needed these electrically changing colors for augmented reality. I don’t know whether they are still interested after recent layoffs. [laughs] CRAWFORD: Right. [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: But we just ended the project last July. [laughs] CRAWFORD: You mentioned how in the Soviet system you didn’t have to write any grants or anything. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: Grant writing is a big part of being a scientist in the U.S. and other places. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: Was that a difficult adjustment? LAVRENTOVICH: No. It was just the understanding that maybe you have [laughs] to do it. I remember it was just two months after I came, NASA scientists wanted to have their liquid crystal polymers characterized, to develop the techniques of aligning it. They asked me as the new guy who doesn't have any other big projects yet whether I can do it, and I said, “Yes.” And they said, “Okay, we have $20,000, but you need to write a two-page proposal.” I went to Dr. Doane to show the writeup, and he looked at me—“Are you serious?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Are you going to work for $20,000? It’s like peanuts!” [laughs] “Well, compared to nothing, it’s a huge amount of money, so you better tell me whether I should improve this text or it's fine.” He said, “It’s fine.” He mentioned to me, “Let me just check your list of references.” I understood why, but for you, I can explain. When you submit a proposal, you don’t want to miss the papers of people who might be potential reviewers. [laughs] So he was checking that. I said, “Oh, I see, you know the drill. You know the drill, so that’s fine.” Since that time, I realized that there is no way to get funding but to write proposals, and I actually enjoy writing proposals. My colleague Robin Selinger says that she likes to write proposals more than writing the papers. Because when you write the paper, it’s about things that happened in the past; when you write a proposal, it’s all this fantastic view of what might happen in the future. So, it’s very interesting. CRAWFORD: I just want to be mindful of the time. It is 5:00 now. I would like to talk about your time as director, and I’m curious to hear your reflections on what the ALCOM Center meant for the LCI. We could pause now and pick up later, if you want. LAVRENTOVICH: We can continue. I think I told my wife that I will be free before 7:00. CRAWFORD: Then, we'll continue. Again, having been part of the LCI, coming in when ALCOM was starting, and that was a ten-year enterprise for the Center, and a major source of funding and promoting these kind of industry-academic interactions, as you were mentioning with the case of 3M, what is the significance of ALCOM in your view? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s huge. It created a huge impact on not just academic advancements in Kent State, but also in the economy of the Northeastern Ohio. You look at all these companies, and some of them are well-known because they are Kent. Kent Displays, AlphaMicron, Crystal Diagnostics. There was CoAdna that moved to China, unfortunately. There was and still is Kent Displays that moved to New York City, or New York. There are also companies in Akron that are on polymer stabilized liquid crystals. I think that those are even maybe more successful financially than the other companies. This is the economic impact. The research impact was great, because many of the things that we did during ALCOM are still flourishing in current research. The infrastructure that was established there, all these cleanroom facilities and instruments that were brought during that time that was easy for us to acquire, just because we were the Center, they are still in place. They are still doing their work. The collaboration, the idea that you do not need to focus on people just on the Kent campus, you can talk to people in Akron or Case Western, is still alive. I have current grants—actually, two—with people from Akron. So it’s a very positive impact on the work that we do. CRAWFORD: You mentioned about these water-soluble liquid crystals and how there’s the company that is using them. One of the things on your CV is you have over 30 patents— LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: —that span a period from I think 1985 to 2022. [laughs] I wonder if you could talk about patents and their role in your career, and their importance to what you're doing. LAVRENTOVICH: That was also an influence, big positive influence of Bill Doane. When I came—again, in the former Soviet Union, we didn’t have the patent system. We have the so-called “rational suggestions.” [laughs] CRAWFORD: Rational suggestions, okay. [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: [laughs] So, you develop something that is improving something. And if it’s accepted as a legitimate improvement, you get a small monetary award, like maybe 100. In U.S. current dollars, maybe $1,000; it’s not that small. Then some of those can be transformed into patents, but that’s kind of something that would belong to your institution. The monetary reward would be this first step, when you file the thing and say that, “Okay, this can be improved.” I remember one of my first “rational suggestions” was to have the droplets of liquid crystals, look at them to identify which phases. Because there are many different types of liquid crystals—cholesterics, nematics, smectics. But I realized that droplets will tell you all. You look at the droplet, you don’t need x-ray, you don’t need NMR. You can immediately tell, “This is a nematic. This is a cholesteric.” I got something like 100 rubles; I was very happy about that. Now, when I came here, Bill Doane explained to me that, “Look, you might have some new finding that might be a patent. Here, we are mindful of the technology transfer, so you need to file for patents if you think it’s worth it.” I remember one of the first things that I did was optical diodes, that we called. That the liquid crystal changes its appearance when the voltage is up or down. Typically, the liquid crystals are not sensitive to up or down; they respond the same. But in this case, it was a different response. I showed it to Dr. Doane, and he said, “Yeah, it’s patentable.” You have to sign the witness in your laboratory notebook, and I have him sign. So I filed for one of my first patents. From that point on, I simply followed his advice. Whenever I see a new phenomenon that might or might not be immediately translated into practice, I think about patenting it. Very often, I prepare a paper for publication; in parallel vein, I submit it as the patent application to our RASP office. I would say that this approach is probably different and suffers from me being a fundamental scientist, because I would maybe try to over-patent. Because in my mind, if this is a new physics, then it’s worthy of patenting. There is one interesting historical thing. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who is kind of the father of liquid crystal science, he did a lot. He wrote the book that introduced the language and the framework of all the liquid crystal science. He was bitter that after some years, when the new liquid crystal displays started to emerge as the great economic success story, people like him were left behind. They didn’t have any monetary rewards for their part, which was much, much more significant than the impact of many people who simply filed the patents to improve this or that practical thing. So, he introduced the entire science. Why, for example, the fluctuations of the director create light scattering, and how to avoid it. In patents, people don’t defend these things. But the system is such that Nobel Prize winner physicists get nothing out of their intellectual efforts, while people who do incremental improvements grounded into something that is already practical, already being produced by some company, get all the rewards. Maybe not all, but a significant portion of the rewards. So, in my mind, I am not trying this on purpose, but following the advice of Bill Doane, I am trying to patent each new phenomenon or effect that I know that was never, ever brought up before. Then whether a company will start to produces these things or not, I am really not interested in this. I mentioned one company that started doing these sensors. That’s fine. They have maybe five or six patents of ours that form the basis of their intellectual property. I hope that Oculus and this Italian company might also materialize in some tangible outcomes. But maybe I have too many patents, too. Because they are really not necessarily focused on, “Okay, we know that this device is already there, and now we would like to make it not just talk but sing.” No, we don’t do that. CRAWFORD: You mentioned that Dr. Doane had encouraged you to be—and this is your phrase—mindful of technology transfer. What did he mean by that? Just for you individually, as a scientist, or for the Institute? LAVRENTOVICH: No, that was his approach, in general, I think. So like these polymer dispersed liquid crystals, they observed it by accident. It was just they were mixing liquid crystal with the glue, and suddenly the droplets got into the glue, and when they apply electric field, they saw that this region changes the light scattering, becomes opaque or transparent. So, they patented it. So, he was mindful that the error in sample preparation might be of practical utility, if you use it for a smart window. So that I think he meant not only for myself; that was for any scientific research, that when you do something, something happen, you have to think that this something, which if it’s new, might be of practical utility. CRAWFORD: I’m interested in understanding, what is the motivation for patenting? Is it primarily making sure you get financial rewards, or is it a way of indicating an application of a new discovery? LAVRENTOVICH: It’s sort of putting a fence around your intellectual property, in my view. “I did it. It was my idea or my understanding of the physical effect. I want this physical effect being associated with my name, because I figured it out, or I did it.” CRAWFORD: It sounds like it’s more about getting the recognition for your contribution. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. The monetary things are so far in the future and so little that there is no—it’s like writing a book. [laughs] You spend a lot of time, but it—yeah. CRAWFORD: Right. Again, I’m just asking because I’m trying to understand this—you mentioned that you publish a paper; you also file a patent. But doesn't the paper also give you the credit for the discovery? LAVRENTOVICH: It does, but then again, suppose that—what happened with de Gennes. He published the paper. He never filed a patent. That means that his papers are just open for unlimited use. If you also have a patent, if someone wants to start the industry based on your published paper, at that moment might come the concept that, “Wait a moment, I also have a patent on the same thing as the paper, so you have to buy the rights to this invention from my university.” CRAWFORD: Right. Maybe we should shift gears a little bit and talk about your experience as director of the Institute. You become director in 2003, I believe, which is a year after the ALCOM grant concludes, so a transitional moment for the Institute in some ways. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could first tell us a little bit about why and how you became director. Why did you decide to take that on? LAVRENTOVICH: You see, by nature I prefer to lead, rather than to be led. [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] LAVRENTOVICH: Maybe one of the reasons. But since I didn’t know still the American system beyond my concrete research activities, I was reluctant to engage into the search of positions here or there, or maybe at a different Institute. I came here, and as you might notice, I stay here. Then, I was kind of sad when Bill Doane decided that he would step down. I was curious—why would he do that? The Institute was at the peak, and there were still like four years of ALCOM. The companies were starting to grow around. He came to me, as he did to other people, and said there is not that much that this work would bring to him. He took the early retirement package, something like that, and he said, “90% of my salary will come anyway, and I will enjoy my life in developing the new company.” But I was really sad, because I thought that the success of the Institute at that time came because of his unique style of directorship. He was warm to people, at least from what I know, and was giving us the freedom we needed in the research. So he was supportive in many initiatives from Chemical Physics to everything else. Because of that, I was sad. I simply wasn’t sure that the new leadership would be the same successful, in writing the new proposal, for example. Then after a few years of some kind of small downfall, and the organizational kind of unwilling to invest further in the Institute, it became obvious, so I was in this state that I thought maybe I can help, but I don’t want to do anything about it on my own initiative. Then John West came to my office and said that he thinks that I should apply for the directorship. I like John as well. If John thinks that [laughs] I should apply, why not? I applied, and eventually I got the job. Then I started to solve the problems that I saw. I thought that we need manpower. We need to increase the number of faculty. The faculty work was here also an issue because some of us were faculty, like Peter Palffy, Jack Kelly, and myself, but some, like Tony Jákli or Mary Neubert, were not faculty. So I spent a lot of time trying to convince the dean that people like Tony Jákli must be made faculty, tenured to stay. Fortunately for me, at that time, were opportunities to bring new positions to the Institute. That was Ohio Eminence Scholars and similar things, funded by tobacco settlement. Then there was a wave of, “Let’s help our technology-advanced institutions in the state of Ohio to enhance their positions.” We capitalized on all these things. We were writing proposals, like RC-SAM, Research Cluster for Surfaces in Advanced Materials. That funded two positions, Hiroshi Yokoyama and Torsten Hegmann. With him came Elda Hegmann. With that came the funding for the Transmission Electron Microscopy Facility. So, I was thinking about doing all these things, and writing these proposals to the state of Ohio, in order to bring the positions that are not the expenditures of the university. This money comes from something else. It’s not that I am asking Dr. Lefton to help me. I considered it my responsibility as the leader, so I wrote these proposals. I was going to the deans to talk about the faculty position for Tony Jákli. After a few years, I think I succeeded. We had replaced Mary Neubert with Quan Li. We have the person, Qi-Huo Wei, doing mostly nonlinear optics, but who invented the great technology of patterned alignment of liquid crystals after he came here. He is now in China, because China could provide him with even better conditions for his research. We brought Jonathan Selinger, and since he was married to Robin Selinger, another excellent researcher, I had to make sure that both of them are hired. So, in short time, I think we managed to double the population of the Institute, and also bring the new facilities, like this Transmission Electron Microscope, and then other microscopes and things. CRAWFORD: Again, going back to this essay that you wrote in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of the LCI, you wrote that when you took over as director, “It was clear that the Institute’s research needed to be diversified, to expand to new potential applications while keeping the core strength in the core theme of electro-optics.” I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. LAVRENTOVICH: The manpower at that time was diminished. Bill Doane was gone. Jack Kelly started his company. He was kind of balancing between coming back and not coming back, and finally he didn’t come back. Besides Peter Palffy, Deng-Ke Yang, myself, Tony Jákli, and Phil Bos, who joined right before the ALCOM ceased to exist—that was it. All five of us were doing electro-optics, more or less, with different variations, but there were so many new opportunities. Like nanotechnology that Clinton announced at the end of his presidency was still a buzzword. We needed theory because Dave Allender was about to retire. So, we needed new directions. And not just any theory, but we needed the theory of new materials, like the theory of maybe polymer liquid crystals, or biology liquid crystals. We needed someone who can do numerical simulations. It’s different from everything else. It’s different from lab, and it’s different from pure analytical theory. It’s the computer that simulates things for you. That was a wonderful opportunity, because we identified Jonathan Selinger as a new theorist who wrote papers of DNA of polymers. That was a new direction. It was obvious that he is married and his wife is doing exactly what we also needed, and we can get her “for free,” so it was a no-brainer. I remember I was courting Jonathan at the conference in Ljubljana. [laughs] We were going to the conference dinner, and I told him how wonderful the place is, and how great it would be if he would join us from Naval Research Lab. He essentially agreed during that 25 minutes’ walk to the top of the hill. Then, the issue with RC-SAM and with Ohio Eminence Scholars, or Ohio Research Scholars, we got the two positions that we tried to fill with something different from pure electro-optics. Unfortunately, retrospectively, the announcement didn’t attract that much of high-level scientists. I remember with Peter Palffy, we would call to some scientists in Cambridge, UK, whether they would like to use the opportunity, and they said, “Well, we are fine where we are.” We ended up with having excellent scientists of Hiroshi and Torsten Hegmann, and, again, the marriage issue, Elda Hegmann, that we I think played nicely with the administration, saying that, “We must hire both.” By the way, I learned recently that it wasn’t the automatic thing. I learned about the unfortunate fate of some of my colleagues who had their wives working in New York City, and they are working here, like Björn Lüssem, that resulted in him leaving the university. And he was one of the best scientists on campus. That is a great loss. There are some other examples when things like that happened, and I think that the university should do a better job of keeping the families around and happy. But in our case, miraculously, it worked with the two families. Their expertise, in my mind, was complementary. Torsten does organic chemistry of chiral materials, also biology related. He is now happily involved in the Brain Institute. Then Elda is a biology person, so she brings cross-sectional expertise in liquid crystal elastomers in biology. I am happy that these things happened. For ourselves, I decided to collaborate with Chris Woolverton in Biology in the development of the sensor, then Min-Ho Kim, again in Biology, to develop the tissues. I think that was the result of that thinking, that we need to expand into new directions, not just electro-optics. CRAWFORD: Was it the case that—and I have heard this suggested in other things that I’ve read, and other people that I’ve talked to—that around that time, in the early 2000s, around the time that you, say, applied for the RC-SAM grant and were making these moves to bring in people and diversity the LCI, that work on displays in particular—and I guess that falls under electro-optics—had kind of reached a saturation point? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, that’s true. After ALCOM, there was a brief but very fruitful time for us, of cooperation with Samsung Electronics. They became the world’s largest producer of displays. For a while, we were getting support from them, very generous support for graduate students, for research, to invent the next mode of displays. If it were there, you would probably find it. The point is that mother nature decided that [laughs] it’s probably not there. It may be there, but not ready for commercialization. That’s always a difficult thing. Because something might be there, but it’s really not ready for commercialization. Yeah, because the industry had such a tremendous success, there was simply no place for new research in the electro-optic devices. I often use the analogy with chopsticks. Chopsticks took the stage in China, and the culinary art developed around chopsticks. Now you have the forks. Maybe, well, they are later inventions, but they are not replacing chopsticks; you still use chopsticks. So, the same with displays. These displays will stay—for probably another 20 years, they will use the liquid crystal existing art, and there’s nothing we could do. Because of that, we need to move into totally different things. Life demonstrated to us that the currently hot topic of so-called “active matter”—it’s everything that moves, consuming energy and dissipating energy, like the school of fish, or the bunch of animals, or human crowd—these things are described by the theories that were developed first for liquid crystals. That’s an amazing thing. And these disclinations, the cosmic strings or disclinations, they are playing a decisive role in the dynamics of active matter. So, it’s an illustration that displays are not the only claim to fame for liquid crystals. CRAWFORD: What is your sense of where the Institute is now? Is it in a good position? What do you see for its future? LAVRENTOVICH: I think that the Institute is in a very good position. I think that if it continues to be at the same level as it is now, then it’s up to the probability of finding something unique, something tremendously impacting, or not. That’s the only question. You might have excellent research facilities, but it might just happen that the discoveries are dispersed in time and space in such a way that it’s not your time to discover something. Or maybe it is. So, I don’t know, but I think that this Institute is ready. If something is brewing, this Institute might discover it. The ground is ready. CRAWFORD: Again, going back to your 2015 essay, you wrote, “Arriving in Kent in 1992, I found it [the Institute] in many respects similar to other academic centers, and yet profoundly different. Kent was already a complete microcosm of liquid crystals. You do not do it alone. You have access to all the expertise and instruments you wish. Everybody and everything was within a 40-second walk.” LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: Would you say that that sort of spirit, that sort of structure, is still here at the LCI, 30 years later? LAVRENTOVICH: [laughs] Yes, and no. For example, I cannot say that it is within 40 seconds’ walk [laughs] because I am now at the Department at Physics, and it takes me maybe two minutes to go there. This is not just a joke, but it’s a reality of life. If I need to talk to Sam Sprunt, my collaborator, in the past I just walked a short distance and here he is. Now, I need to call him to arrange for a meeting, so it makes some little barriers. Then this new annex over there at the Chemistry Department for new, biology-something, I was there once, or twice actually, but I don’t feel like it’s my habit to go there and to talk to people doing things. So, these geography changes slightly diminish the possibility of collaboration. Here, yeah, I think that we still have the opportunity, but it’s hard to give an immediate judgment because of the COVID. COVID changed a lot of things. When you have to make shifts in the labs for your students so that they don’t overlap, it’s sad, but it changed a lot. This impact, I think that prevents me from accurately judging the situation. The troubling things are departures are some of my colleagues, Qi-Huo Wei and Quan Li. Qi-Huo Wei, I kind of know. Quan Li, I am still in the dark about—relatively dark; I have my information what happened. But I think that those departures might have been better advertised, better brought to light, so that people don’t speculate about the reasons. That’s a concern. CRAWFORD: Right, for sure. I wanted to ask just a few more questions, and then we'll be done. We've talked a little bit about your work with students, particularly graduate students and so forth. I wonder, how important was teaching, advising, and mentoring students to you during your career? LAVRENTOVICH: Oh, very important. [laughs] I would say right now it’s the entire fabric of my existence. It’s a very interesting activity, because really, you have your science, you have your scientific ideas and problems, and then you have a person, and it’s very interesting to observe how to produce the best match between the person and scientific tasks, the thesis. I openly tell students, “Don’t be worried, because I will throw many different things at you. It doesn't mean that you need to succeed in each and every one. It’s just to make it possible for you and me to find that thing that you could excel at.” This is very interesting, because it’s beyond the droplets of liquid crystals, or which structures are there. It’s more of the human—studying the humans around you. CRAWFORD: Would you say that’s an important component of what you are doing in educating students, is kind of finding this right match between the individual—? LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, because if I don’t find, I will fail. The student might get depressed that nothing that the professor tells him or her to do works, and then it’s either I am a moron [laughs] or the student is not capable of doing it. But I know that each and every of us, especially at the level when they are admitted to graduate school, can do something successfully. So the only problem is to find, what is this? CRAWFORD: [laughs] I noticed, looking at your CV, you have a number of your PhD students listed on your CV and their current locations. I would say roughly an equal number went into academia, and an equal number went into industry, working for places like Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and so forth. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. CRAWFORD: Is there any particular challenge or consideration in training students that are either going into academia or industry, or is it the same kind of approach? LAVRENTOVICH: No, it’s the same type of approach. Sometimes I ask the students at the beginning, “So, how do you see your future careers?” Sometimes they would say something, and sometimes they would say, “I don’t know.” But what I realized, that within this PhD training period, it becomes more or less clear who is more inclined of doing what. And it’s kind of too late to change my approach to the student because I suddenly see, “Oh, he would become a professor.” No, I still continue to do science with him, and this science helps him to become a professor or helps him to become a more practical problem solver. So, no, I don’t change my approach as the function of where that person will end up. CRAWFORD: What advice would you give to a student, let’s say it’s an undergraduate—somebody really still at the beginning of their career, or it could be an early career graduate student—what advice would you give to someone considering pursuing a career in science today? LAVRENTOVICH: Find some exciting topic. Find some topic that would absorb you, that would force you to read literature or to browse the internet to find some information. Get yourself drowned in this information about this topic that excites you, and sooner or later, you will find things that you could do yourself to advance this field. But find a topic that excites you. CRAWFORD: Looking back over your career, which is still ongoing, what do you see as the key developments as liquid crystal research, either in the field at large or in your own career? LAVRENTOVICH: The discovery of the Frederiks effect in 1929 was a huge thing that found its practical application only some 50 years later. That was a huge thing. Still, these devices use this fundamental discovery in the physics of liquid crystals. Then homotropy, classification of defects, was a huge thing. Then, understanding that you can combine polymers and liquid crystals, and polymer dispersed liquid crystals that was done here by Bill Doane, was a great thing. Then the discovery of water-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals, these things that are compatible with biological things, to me was a great advancement. The discovery of the modes of dynamics that the liquid crystals can bring to otherwise mundane things like Brownian motion was also a biology advancement. Finally, it remains still to be seen, but there is a very exciting development of only a few years’ old, the so-called ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals, in which—I drew you the ellipsis of molecules; I didn’t show any arrows. But now imagine that the molecules have the dipole moments and they are all looking in the same direction. Not like this, like normal nematic liquid crystal, but in a polar fashion. Those liquid crystals are totally new. They were predicted. Imagine this—the theory predicted them in 1916, more than 100 years ago, and only now, we had the material confirmation. It makes you humble in front of the science, and how science develops, and why, if you put the Institute here, it might not discover something for 100 years—not necessarily—just because of this example, this gap in theoretical prediction and experimental. But these materials, since they show huge sensitivity to the external electric field, they might bring us very new implications in the future. CRAWFORD: It seems to suggest something about the importance of thinking both about applications and fundamental research. LAVRENTOVICH: Right. People do not need to be reminded about the importance of applications. Why? Because it’s an integral part of the economy. Businesspeople develop new technologies, and so they have to produce some knowledge that is applicable to those developments. What we need is the often-forgotten need to encourage fundamental sciences. Because they are not driven by economy. There is no immediate monetary reward for you to get some fundamental advance. But without this fundamental advance today, 50 years from now, there will be no applications to think or to reward. So, it’s important to keep this balance. I think that applicable directions will take care of themselves. It’s people that do fundamental things that need encouragement. CRAWFORD: Well, I have two additional questions, not necessarily related to liquid crystals, but just coming out of this historical moment that we're living in. The first one, you mentioned a little bit about, but we're still dealing with the ongoing effects of the COVID pandemic, which has started to subside, thankfully, but disrupted all of our lives fairly significantly in the last couple of years. So I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to just talk a little bit about your experience professionally or personally or both during the pandemic and what impact it had on you. LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah. This was really a profound effect, because science is often born in discussions. You discuss with a student apparently mundane things, and suddenly there is this spark in understanding for both of us. If you just exchange emails, this aha moment might never come. So, when we were deprived of the group meetings for such a long time, I think that was keeping our advancement back significantly. On the formal level, when I look at my stream of publications, it’s probably hardly noticeable. I published a lot. But I think that this negative impact will probably show itself in the few years that are still coming. It will be visible. CRAWFORD: I agree. I think we're going to see— LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, it’s not over yet. Even when it’s over, the impact will be long-lasting. CRAWFORD: Still long-term effects. LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah. CRAWFORD: Finally, again I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you as someone who comes from Ukraine, in February of this year the Russian military invaded Ukraine, and the war with Russia is still ongoing. I wonder if you’d be willing to share your thoughts or feelings about that conflict. LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah, I will be glad to. I already express openly—my colleagues from the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics in Lviv, they had the webpage where they asked foreign-based scientists to express their opinions about the war, and I prepared a PowerPoint presentation and I uploaded it there. First of all, it’s an incredible tragedy. It’s unthinkable that such a tragedy might happen in the 21st century. It’s also unthinkable how the parallel set of information and fake news can overwhelm the huge population of a huge country, relatively well-educated, all 140 millions of them. How the fake news can transform this population into a not-thinking but just feeling revenge or something towards other people. It shows you the danger of this fake news culture, for other societies. Not just for Russia—Russia is unfortunately already a victim of it—but there might be other countries that do not realize the danger of the fictitious propaganda that is not based on fact, that is not based on open information. How this might lead to disastrous outcomes, that one country is already a victim of, and another country, Ukraine, is becoming a victim of. Because there is no factual reason for Russian Federation to invade Ukraine. There is no—if you put the propagandistic mantra of Putin and look at the facts, this is an independent country. The borders were established in 1991. So how can you claim that this piece is not Ukrainian and this land which is just a variation of Russian, when it’s not factually true. But even if it were true, so what? There are international rules. How can you break all of that and start the war in the center of Ukraine in the 21st century? It just shows you the danger and the importance of political life, being engaged in political life, and not just saying, “Oh, I don’t follow the politics. It’s not mine.” No, you have to follow, and you have to see and prevent things like that. No one is better prepared but the scientists, especially those that are dealing not with the history but with the development of new knowledge—not the analysis of the old knowledge—that are most prepared to see the danger in the political shifts. So, this is one lesson. Another lesson is that you cannot let it go. You cannot make a face that, “Oh, I understand. I understand where it comes from. But that’s fine. Let it play its course.” Because if you let that happen, then no one is safe. It just—Ukraine falls, then maybe some other countries will select a leader like Putin, and we know from the recent past in some well-developed countries, things like that happened. You never know, given a few years of activities, how that leader or pseudo-leader might turn the minds around, and then suddenly you will wake up in the country that you don’t know, that becomes a victim of its own shortsightedness. CRAWFORD: Yes. Thank you for sharing that. Do you have any final remarks or reflections? I know we've covered a lot of ground. LAVRENTOVICH: No, if you have any questions or clarifications, I will be happy to address. I am actually—next week is short, and then at the end of the week, I am traveling to Kyiv, Ukraine, and I will be back only in December. I hope to see my mother and mother-in-law, see what I can do about electricity and heat. CRAWFORD: Well, I certainly wish you safe travels. LAVRENTOVICH: Thank you. CRAWFORD: I express my thanks for your time and sharing your story. Thank you so much. LAVRENTOVICH: Thank you for your interest. It was enjoyable, because I never [laughs] went back so deeply into my past. Some things maybe were not that accurate, but—. [laughs] CRAWFORD: [laughs] Great. LAVRENTOVICH: Yeah. [End] × |
| Title |
Liquid Crystal Oral History: Lavrentovich, Oleg |
| Author/Photographer |
Crawford, Matthew James Lavrentovich, Oleg |
| Description |
An oral history interview with Oleg Lavrentovich, Trustees Research Professor (2011-present) at Kent State University. This interview is part of the Liquid Crystal Oral History Project. Lavrentovich recounts the progression of his educational and professional careers. He was born in 1958 in a village called Lelitka in Ukraine. Lavrentovich took an interest in science early in his life as both of his parents taught chemistry in secondary schools.He received a B.S. and an M.S. in physics from Kyiv State University in 1980. Later, Lavrentovich began his research on liquid crystals as a doctoral student at the Ukrainian Academy of Science where he obtained his PhD in 1984 and his Doctor of Sciences in 1990. He then took a position as a visiting researcher in 1991 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris-Sud where he would remain for a year until he was hired as a Senior Research Fellow (1992-2004) at the Liquid Crystal Institute. Lavrentovich explains how his main job as a research fellow was managing the research of his graduate students and postdocs in addition to creating new research projects for them. He also talks about his time as the director of the LCI (2004-2011) and elaborates on the significance of the Center for Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials (ALCOM) for both the LCI and Northeast Ohio. This being partly due to the various spinoff companies from ALCOM’s Industrial Partnership Program (IPP). Lavrentovich also provides insight on what it was like to become a physicist and conduct research in the final years that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Sponsor: The Liquid Crystal Oral History Project is funded in part by the Ohio History Fund, a grant program of the Ohio History Connection. Your donations to the Ohio History Fund make this program possible. |
| Decade |
2020-29 |
| Subject(s) |
Audio Recording Institutes and Centers |
| Format of Original |
audio digital file |
| Repository |
Special Collections and Archives |
| Finding aid title | Finding Aid for the Liquid Crystal Oral History Project records |
| Access Rights |
This digital object is owned by Kent State University and may be protected by U.S. Copyright law (Title 17, USC). Please include proper citation and credit for use of this item. Use in publications or productions is prohibited without written permission from Kent State University. Please contact the Department of Special Collections and Archives for more information. |
| Duplication Policy |
http://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/duplication-policy |
| Publisher |
Kent State University |
| Duration |
3:42:10 hours |
| DPLA Rights Statement |
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Interviewee |
Lavrentovich, Oleg |
| Narrator's Role |
LCI Director |
| Date of Interview |
2022-11-18 |
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Citation
“Liquid Crystal Oral History: Lavrentovich, Oleg,” Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives, accessed November 23, 2024, http://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/items/show/11161.
