Oral History Interview with Peter Palffy by Matthew Crawford

October 11, 2022
October 17, 2022
Location of Interview: Matthew Crawford’s office at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science in the Department of History at Kent State University. I am interviewing Dr. Peter Palffy-Muhoray, Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Materials Science at Kent State University. Today is October 11th, 2022. We are conducting this interview in my office on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Dr. Palffy, thanks for agreeing to speak with me today.

PETER PALFFY: My pleasure. Happy to be here.

CRAWFORD: Great. I wanted to start off just talking a little bit about your early life. Would you mind telling us what year you were born, where you grew up, and what your early childhood was like?

PALFFY: I was born in 1944, so towards the end of the Second World War. My father was in the Hungarian military. This—maybe it’s worth mentioning—his father was a kind and wonderful man who was a judge, and he liked to gamble, and he gambled their money away, and the only educational option for my father was a military academy. So he was lieutenant colonel of general staff in the Hungarian Army. Just to set the record straight, he used his Panzer division—and this is well-documented—to protect the Jews in Budapest and try to prevent their being taken out to Germany. Basically because of this, he was badly looked on by the existing Hungarian authorities. He escaped and he fought on the side of the Russians to come back into Hungary. After the liberation of Hungary by the Russians—again, there were political reasons—my father was put in prison. I remember seeing him while we were also in prison a few times. Basically he was imprisoned until 1953, when he was released from prison, so I grew up essentially without my father. Our whole family—my grandfather, uncle—were all in prison for political reasons.

We basically escaped Hungary in 1956. There was the October Revolution then, but we were undecided about leaving because we loved Hungary, but the situation was very difficult. We escaped to Austria in December of 1956 and we were accepted as refugees by Canada. We went to Canada, Halifax, went by train to Vancouver. My parents eventually got employment in a little town called Kitimat on the West Coast. My sister and I were in boarding school during these years of 1957 and 1958. By that time, my parents established sort of a home in this little Kitimat, and we went there, and I finished high school there. I was thoroughly miserable in the Vancouver boarding school, which was Vancouver College, run by Irish Catholic brothers who used to carry straps on their habits, specially constructed for the beating of children. It’s an amazing thing. Anyway, but of course it wasn’t that bad; we survived.

Kitimat was great. I spent most of my time when not in school climbing mountains and skiing and essentially just living in the wonderful West Coast. I was put ahead—I don’t really understand why; everything was kind of mysterious in a new country—but I went to the University of British Columbia [UBC] when I was 16 years old, and I studied electrical engineering. Now, to do that, you first had to take a year of arts and science and then engineering. Of course, like many young boys of that age, I was blinded by all the exciting things that one could do. I played guitar, did a lot of skiing. And I did really badly in school. In my first year of engineering, I was expelled from the university at Christmas because my grades were so abysmally low.

Then with my good friend from Kitimat, another [laughs] similar character, we wrote a letter to our parents, saying, “We failed at this.” We went hitchhiking, and he ended up joining the Canadian Air Force. I worked in a logging camp, being a chokerman and so on. Eventually I went back to school the following year and I buckled down enough that I completed my engineering degree. So I studied engineering. To tell the truth, I liked the math and physics of it, but I didn’t like engineering that much in general. I just didn’t feel at home in that department. Still, I got a master’s degree in electrical engineering. I had a tentative job teaching with that.
This was, I think, in the late spring, and so I had nothing to do during the summer. Then I ran into a physics professor who asked me what I was doing. I said, “Waiting for teaching to start.” He said, “We have a new professor here from Columbia and he is looking for somebody to do computer programming for him.” I used to work in the computing center debugging people’s code. I went to see this guy, and to me, going in the Physics Department was like suddenly being at home. There were all these eccentric people who were crazy enthusiastic about what they were doing. I just felt that this was my academic home, and so I took to it like a duck to water. Although my background was really bad, because I spent too much time partying and skiing and things. But just the same, physics was clearly the thing I wanted to do.

CRAWFORD: You said you went to university initially at age 16?

PALFFY: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Was that unusual at that time?

PALFFY: Yes. But like I said, they advanced me, and I didn’t really understand why or how.

CRAWFORD: Did you know you were interested in science at that time? When did you first become interested in pursuing science?

PALFFY: You see, we went to Kitimat as immigrants, and Kitimat was an aluminum town. It was run by Alcan, Aluminum Company of Canada. The reason it existed was because there's a beautiful lake up in the mountains, and they used the water from that lake to run the turbines down at sea level to produce the electricity for the smelting of the aluminum. In this little town, nice people and all, the hierarchy had the engineers on top, so everybody was thinking that this is the pinnacle of human achievement, at least in this little community. I think that that was it.

And I liked electrical stuff. When I was a kid back in Hungary, underneath us in the apartment lived a young guy who used to fix things and make model airplanes, and so I was really intrigued by the ability to fix things. It even goes a little beyond that, because—I don’t know if I should be saying this, but we were extremely poor—I'm going to rethink this, but let me say it anyway—what we used to do is we used to run both the electric meter and the gas meter backwards at night. We would disconnect things, and I was somehow involved in this, and reconnect so the thing would run backwards. We had a vacuum cleaner attached to the gas mater. I think this would have gotten incredible penalties if we were caught, but we weren’t. But somehow I was interested in knowing how things worked and fixing things. I guess that was the first thing. So there was this idea that engineering was just a really good profession. But as I said, the atmosphere, I just didn’t resonate very well with it. It seemed to me at the time that there was more emphasis on making things work than understanding the details of how they worked. So physics was wonderful for me.

My advisor, David Balzarini, he was a wonderful man, and we got along famously, probably better than—well, I don’t know. Anyway, we got along famously, and I spent a long time with him because I was just so happy. It was probably the happiest period in my life. In those days, electrical computer equipment hardly existed, certainly not laptops and things. I worked on liquid crystals. Liquid crystals became really fashionable. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes came to Vancouver and he wrote part of his book in Vancouver, at the other university. Nonetheless, liquid crystals were the hot new thing. So we got some samples, and my advisor was an experimentalist, and we did some simple but new measurements at the time.

Because you had to change temperature slowly, I used to sleep in the lab. There was a big counter with cupboards under it, and I made myself a little bed there and used to sleep, and get up, stagger around, take some measurements, and go back under there. The other grad students—there were two, I think—were really inspiring people. Again, they were eccentric. Mind you, these were sort of, I don’t know, hippie times, so being non-conservative was not particularly difficult. But they were really interesting people, full of life, at least in my memory, and with good humor. We used to go down to Chinatown with my advisor at 2:00 in the morning, eat strange foods. Really, it was a wonderful time.

Eventually I got my PhD. I wasn’t in a hurry, but I got my PhD in 1977. Now my advisor didn’t have any money, didn’t have any grants, so I always had a job somehow, in addition to being a graduate student, doing various things. I got interested in karate back in those years, and then I was hired with another friend to be a bouncer at this enormous nightclub called The Breakers. Because it was open on Sundays, a lot of people from the U.S. would come across the border. It opened at noon, closed at midnight, held 1,000 people. So that was an interesting period. Anyway, I always had a job and then I drove a truck for a while as well. I managed to pick up an old large flat-deck truck, and I used to spend half my day carrying whatever needed to be carried. Often it was plates of steel. It was fascinating because you saw all sorts of industries, and you could see what went on in this part of the world.

CRAWFORD: You've juxtaposed your experience in engineering as maybe being a little more practically oriented, less about, as you said, understanding how things work, more about fixing things. You characterized physics as perhaps more of those sorts of questions, but you also mentioned the people were more eccentric and enthusiastic. Do you have a sense or could you say something about what was it about physics at the time that seemed to attract those sorts of people? Do you have a sense of that?

PALFFY: I think that they were just different kinds of people. Electrical engineering is probably one of the more theoretical areas; I remember working with complex numbers and complex analysis, but the emphasis always seemed to be to make the thing work and get the answer, rather than to try to understand why the value of some integral was the pole of some complex function. I liked the people I worked with in engineering. Well, except my advisor there was a very devout Christian, and our lifestyles [laughs] weren’t all that compatible.[1]

Power and communication were the two extremes in EE, and power was dominating the department I was in. People were nice and kind but they tended to be conservative, shirt and tie types, and they were interested in making things that worked, whereas the physics people—to me, this was the big attraction—were interested in the more obscure things that I was also trying to learn. In electrical engineering, I had these math questions that I felt I didn’t understand well enough although I could use the techniques. These people in physics were interested in similar things.

But what maybe really appealed to me, although it may sound crazy, was the aesthetics of these things. I mean, I remember the visiting physicist Shlomo Alexander from the Technion in Israel, and I remember running into him in the hallway, and he’s wearing shorts and he’s suntanned, and I thought he was some beach drifter who got lost. [laughs] He asked me what I was doing, and I tried to explain to him. I was pretty full of myself in those days. He said, “Well, no, but you should try this.” And I was— “How can this guy say this? He doesn't even know the topic!” Then he put down this sort of two-sentence symmetry argument that I remember to this day that just blew my socks off. How is it possible to just look at something and to be able to make such a deep statement? Then I realized that there was really a lot of beauty in the sort of invisible structure of physics. Also, I don’t know, it’s not power exactly, but it was possible, with very simple arguments, to make very far-reaching conclusions and predictions. There was a lot of exciting things going on in the world of physics then, about phase transitions, critical phenomena, things like that. I remember going to physics meetings where there was not even standing room; people were in the hallway craning their necks.

CRAWFORD: You finished your PhD in 1977, as you said, so this would have been the early 1970s?

PALFFY: That's right. The other thing was good humor. There were a lot of jokes around. And that was just marvelous, to be able to laugh. We had some really outstanding people at UBC. How they came to be there is another story. But there was a coffee room, kind of a fairly large room, and often the professors would be sitting there. Eventually, when one got close enough to a PhD, we would hang out in there as well. It was just great to talk to these people with wonderful historical stories, and they had contributed to many areas of physics things. There was a general feeling of being part of a group where people formed a community just because they were the same kind of people with common interests. Anyway, those were really happy times. At the end of my PhD, maybe the last three years or so, I got a job teaching at a college called Capilano College—now it’s Capilano University—and there I taught physics. There was a wonderful colleague there. Anyway, so I spent my daytime teaching, and then back in the lab at night doing experiments.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more, before we get too far into your post-graduate experiences, what your dissertation research focused on. You mentioned that with your advisor, Dr. Balzarini, you took some new measurements of liquid crystals. I'd just be curious to hear more about—you said liquid crystals were popular at the time, but how did you get onto liquid crystals, and what sorts of things were you looking at in your dissertation research?

PALFFY: My advisor worked on critical phenomena, and this is looking very carefully at what happens when you have a phase transition from a liquid to a vapor, for example. There are critical exponents that are quantities whose time-dependence can be described by some [some power law]. That was a really active area, and it involved optical measurements of basically a liquid and a vapor in a cell, and then study the density difference between them and how the density difference disappeared when you got to the critical point. So optics was the thing that was primarily going on in the lab, because he was continuing his work. I was really interested in E&M[2] and light in and understanding light matter interactions.

Now the materials that most people were working with, including my advisor, were isotropic. That means all directions are equivalent in the material. But liquid crystals had this new facet— that they are anisotropic. You've got long molecules, say, lining up more or less parallel to each other, so you had a unique direction and two sort of perpendicular directions which are different. I got really intrigued by how this broken symmetry changes the interaction of this stuff with light and how it’s different from what it is for isotropic materials. I got interested in refractive index measurements, which basically describe how light and the material interact. And so my thesis involved both experimental measurements and developing molecular theories for these measurements. I published a number of papers on this. It’s a pretty challenging problem. To this day, I would say that not all of the questions have been answered. An electric field changes a molecule, and then that molecule makes its own electric field and that of course influences all of the other molecules and vice versa. Things depend on shape, shapes of molecules, polarizability. It’s complicated but a really intriguing thing. And, we had experimental data. So that's what it was—refractive indices of liquid crystal.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say a little bit more about why these sorts of questions were interesting, these critical phenomena that you're talking about, phase transitions, your optical work with liquid crystals. What drove the interest in those questions at the time, either for you personally or the community of researchers at large?

PALFFY: I think people realized very early on that this anisotropy was really potentially valuable. Because of course solid crystals are typically anisotropic but liquid crystal anisotropy could be changed. It could be changed by temperature. It could be changed by an electric field. It could be changed by shear flow, the presence of impurities, all manner of things. So to have something like that which was soft, so that you could easily influence it, obviously suggested the possibility of applications of various kinds. But ultimately, to try to model something, like to calculate the refractive index, say, from first principles, is sort of like solving a puzzle. That's satisfying if there's a nice solution. But then to be able to compare with experiment, that was a real thing. If you could make a model of something which at least crudely agreed with experiment, that's enormously satisfying. Better yet to be able to predict something— “If I do this, that will happen”—and then do it. And well, often it doesn't happen, but if it does, that's marvelously satisfying. I don’t know the real reason for it; just something about simple arguments producing some new result and then to see that really coincides with the way the world works, that is just very satisfying somehow.

CRAWFORD: How important would you say is modeling and predictive statements to doing science? Would you say that's the essence of doing science for you, or—?

PALFFY: No. I think that you really need this parallel. Of course mathematicians, number theorists could care less about experiment. But for me, somehow I'm a pretty down-to-earth, tactile kind of a person. We live in this real universe. And there's just something both amazing and really satisfying if one can make a mathematical model which is kind of a parallel to what seems to be happening. We don’t really ever know what is really happening, right? But to be able to construct a mathematical model which somehow has this coincidence with a physical phenomenon; that somehow is very satisfying. Just, I don’t know, the universe somehow seems comprehensible, or at least in a very small narrow area. That just makes one feel comfortable somehow.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

PALFFY: I've always liked puzzles, and there are puzzles whose solution is just beautiful. There's no other way to put it. Of course there are many really bad puzzles, a lot of donkey work and you don’t get much in the end. But there are some which are just astonishingly beautiful. And there are mathematical procedures which are like that. So there is this aesthetic component in models as well. After a while you learn that if you look at people like de Gennes, who have a simple idea and they put two things together and a kind of magic happens—it was always there for the asking, as it were. But mind you, that's a hallmark, in my opinion, of really good scientists, who do something and you think, “Why didn’t everybody do this ten years ago? It's so obvious.” People have produced really magnificent models which are simple but they somewhat capture the essence of something and they describe it. This goes on with everything, superconductivity and—

CRAWFORD: You've mentioned Pierre-Gilles de Gennes a couple of times. I was going to ask you if you could give an example of a model or a puzzle that has been solved where you thought the solution was particularly beautiful. I don’t know if de Gennes’ work would be a good example of that, and if you would be willing to discuss what is so striking to you about his work, and what kind of work he did.

PALFFY: He was certainly a person like that. He did many, many things.

CRAWFORD: Did you meet him?

PALFFY: Yes, yes, and I wish I could have spent more time with him. I don’t know if it’s worth even saying, but he wrote to me once, rather surprisingly, saying, “I am in New York. Why don’t you come and we'll have coffee and talk?” I wrote to him, “I'm sorry, I'm really busy with teaching and other stuff I'm doing.” That was probably a year before he died, and I've been kicking myself ever since then.

So, he did many things. I would say that his biggest contribution was really to recognize what the right order parameter is for nematic liquid crystals. Because to describe the essential relevant part of a system is to define some order parameters. In magnetisms, that may be the magnetization. It seems obvious. But in the case of liquid crystals, there was this idea of a director, which is just a vector, like an arrow, with one end different from the other. So there's that model. Then there's a scalar model, Maier-Saupe model, that just talks about a number basically, how ordered it is. If it’s one, it’s completely ordered, if it’s zero it's disordered, and things like that.

And de Gennes recognized that there's no unique end of that line where to put the arrow head, so it’s not a vector; it’s really a tensor. Then he combined that direction with this number which gives the extent to which the molecules align. That's called a tensor order parameter. Just recognizing that that was the right description made all the difference. That was the de Gennes model. So, just simple-sounding things, like recognizing the right symmetry of the thing that you will use to characterize the system, that was key. That's what he did.

But to me, one of the most beautiful things that he did, and he did many, was he predicted the existence of these liquid crystal elastomers. The argument is—well, so liquid crystals were liquid. I mean, that's what they were, liquid. Elastomers are just rubbers. They are just stretchy polymers, soft polymers, and they are rubber. What de Gennes did—and again, it is so simple, looking backwards—is he said, “Well, liquid crystals have a tensor order parameter.” It’s a second rank tensor; this means something. And rubbers, they have stress and strain, and stress and strain are second-rank tensors. So he said, “Well, we can combine these things.” Because they’re the same kind of animal, we could make—if you write down the energy, you have the energy of the rubber, which just has to do with stress and strain; you have the energy of the liquid crystal, which just has to do with this order parameter. If we somehow combine them together, you can get a new term, which would be a coupling of the strain of the rubber, and the liquid crystal order parameter. You can make just an ordinary number from these two tensors, - (which the energy has to be!) therefore this new material is allowed by symmetry.[3] That's all.

Then, I don’t know the numbers now, but years later, a German chemist, Heino Finkelmann, made these materials. Essentially, he made a rubber where the parts of the cross-linked chain were liquid crystal molecules. What happened now is he got something which had both of these aspects. It wasn’t the liquid anymore. But you could take this rubber band, you could hang a weight on it, and you could heat it up, and it would shrink by a factor of four and lift up the weight.. By stretching it, you could change the optical properties. So, you had both properties all of a sudden. That was from just a little page-and-a-half paper that de Gennes scribbled down somewhere. So, it’s a marvelous thing! That's what I'm working on now. I'm working on elastomers, liquid crystal elastomers and so on and so forth.

CRAWFORD: When de Gennes published that paper predicting liquid crystal elastomers, was it noticed at the time or did it take a while for people to pick up on it?

PALFFY: He published in 1975—I don’t think it was noticed, particularly at the time. Likely it just seemed like, okay, a curious thing. Finkelmann first made these materials in 1981. But you could see everybody would be enthusiastic about such a thing when realized. It’s so simple and obvious, and you make it, and there it is, and it does all these magical things.

CRAWFORD: Right. It sounds like, from what you're saying, part of what makes these sorts of results beautiful is their simplicity but also their profound impact, that simultaneous quality.

PALFFY: Shlomo Alexander, whom I mentioned earlier, his argument was a symmetry argument. I was plotting refractive indices versus magnetic field. He said, “No, it should be the square of the magnetic field.” He said, well, energy is a scalar; magnetic field is a vector. The magnetic field can only enter the energy that you're minimizing if it’s quadratic. So it should be H squared. Sure enough, it went—the thing, it was measuring to like H squared. That was the first sort of hint I had of symmetry arguments. The de Gennes argument is just that, too—second-rank tensor, second-rank tensor, you can make a scalar; it’s an allowed term in the energy. So to me, symmetry arguments are really powerful. Of course, particle physicists, they live and die by symmetry arguments, much more sophisticated than the examples I mentioned.

CRAWFORD: Is there something from your own work that you would say is a particularly beautiful solution to a problem?

PALFFY: Well, there is. Later on, I was working in the Institute, and Bill Doane hired a postdoc called Bahman Taheri. He’s [laughs] also a crazy guy. We became really good friends, Bahman and I. While working with him—and I really have to give him almost all of the credit—but the idea basically—I'm not sure where to start. Lasers are basically just a resonant cavity. You have two mirrors, and if light is emitted between them, then light is going to bounce back and forth. If you can get energy into the system, typically by having some kind of a flash to excite some molecules which then emit light, then the light bounces back and forth, and because the bouncing is periodic, you have a dominant resonant frequency and you get this beautiful pure laser light coming out. Bahman said, “But these cholesteric liquid crystals are periodic.”

Now, cholesteric liquid crystals are like the nematic ones, but they have some chiral molecules added. Chiral means it’s handed, like righthanded or lefthanded. So they're chiral. If you make a chiral nematic, then this unique direction of molecular orientation rotates in space, and you have a periodic structure. Bahman says that, “These cholesterics are really periodic. The periodicity acts like little mirrors distributed in the material.” There is a beautiful theorem by a French guy called Floquet—F-L-O-Q-U-E-T—that goes way back. I forget the year; maybe 1930 or something. He said, if you have a differential equation, second order ordinary differential equation, where any one of the coefficients is periodic—space or time, whatever—then there will be regimes where there are no stable solutions. It turns out that cholesterics are exactly like that, and this “no stable solution” means that there is a photonic band gap, that there's some range of wavelengths where light cannot propagate. It turns out that if you put light into these systems somehow, and the light is in this range of wavelengths, it cannot propagate. It means it cannot come out. So it’s emitted, it’s absorbed, it’s emitted, it’s absorbed, and its frequency changes, and when it gets to the edge of this band, then boom, it can come out, and you have a laser.

So we made what we thought was the first cholesteric laser, by simply taking a cholesteric liquid crystal with some dye in it, and then pumping it, and found we had laser light coming out. This was really one of the most satisfying experiments that we did. As I say, most of the credit has to go to Bahman, because it was his idea to begin with. I was rather skeptical. I think we had the first result very shortly after we moved into the new building in 1996. But unfortunately, there was an unfortunate episode with a student who had some mental issues, cast a pall on things. But nonetheless, we published a number of papers on this.

It turned out that about the same time, there was another researcher in New York, Azriel Genack, who also showed the same result. But it doesn't matter. I mean, the fact that we predicted this unlikely thing and it happened; that was an example that was breathtaking. Nobody would have expected a liquid, when you shine light on it, to lase, and that's what it did. Subsequently, we made a liquid crystal elastomer which was cholesteric. In fact, Heino Finkelmann, whom I mentioned before, made the sample for us. I asked him in Japan if he would do that. He did, and it lased. It was a rubber band that emitted laser light, and if you stretched it, the wavelength changed, so it was kind of a tunable rubber laser.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

PALFFY: So that was really a lot of fun. [sigh] Yeah, a lot of really happy experiences.

CRAWFORD: I know we've jumped around a little bit, but you had left off in your biography talking about your first job at Capilano College. I wonder if you would like to say a little bit more about your time there?

PALFFY: I really enjoyed that, too. I liked teaching. I liked explaining simple things. I believed, and I guess I still believe, that anybody can be made to understand things, if the person explaining it really understands it. Because most things are ultimately simple; it’s just hard to communicate the idea. I enjoyed teaching. Maybe marking lab books—I remember taking cardboard boxes full of lab books home to grade; that wasn’t so much fun. But I enjoyed the teaching.

I had this wonderful colleague, Mike Freeman, whom I mentioned. We published a number of papers in the American Journal of Physics just on crazy things like if you have a ladder leaning against the wall at some angle, and then it starts to slip, then we showed that eventually the ladder will leave the wall. It doesn't keep touching it all the way down. Simple things like that. But then some of them turned out to be cited quite a number of times. Problems like if you drive into a large parking lot on one side, and you want to go out the other side, and if the parking lot is slippery, what is your best strategy to do that in the least amount of time? If you have lots of friction, well, then you just go straight to the other exit. But if the thing is slippery, it turns out that it’s better to turn away from that exit and make a loop and go out like that. So we published that paper with William G. Unruh who is one of the leading black hole cosmologists today.

We just had a good time. I was happy at the college, and it was good, and I managed to go to some meetings. Now, I got my degree in 1977, and I was working at the college, and in 1980—well, actually 1979, I guess—I got an invitation to go and do some research work at the University of Sheffield, from David Dunmur who was a physical chemist and a very good man—from Oxford, I think, originally.

CRAWFORD: You said David Dunmur?

PALFFY: Yeah. D-U-N-M-U-R. We went there with my girlfriend at the time. I was an avid motorcyclist. When I got my PhD, I bought myself a Harley. When I was a little kid, we went to Halifax on the boat, refugees, took a train across, and ended up in Vancouver, and I remember seeing this motorcycle with these really thick tires, and I fell in love with it. The truth is that my father had at one point an old—well, not an old—a Puch—P-U-C-H—motorcycle as part of his military equipment. There's a picture of me and my sister sitting on it when we were tiny. But somehow, in Vancouver, I saw this bike, and it was fantastic, and it turned out to be a Harley. I've always kind of liked them, and then when I got my PhD, I said, “Okay, as a present, you can buy yourself a used old Harley.” And I did. Then I bought a new Harley when I went to England, and we could put it on the airplane and take it with us, as personal luggage. We spent two summers driving the Harley all around Europe and sleeping in a little pup tent. Well, not all summer, of course, but we spent two summers there. Anyway, I worked with David Dunmur and again had a wonderful time, experimental physics, essentially liquid crystal optics related projects. I owe David a lot, because I think that opportunity somehow opened the door for me to somehow move ahead in academia. If it wasn’t for his invitation, I don’t think that I would be here at Kent State.

CRAWFORD: Why do you think that?

PALFFY: It’s hard to say. I met people in England, and I met my other hero, who became a very good friend, Mark Warner, who was a physicist in Cambridge. Mark and I spent a lot of time together, working together and being good friends.

CRAWFORD: You said Mark Warner was your other hero. Why do you describe him in that way?

PALFFY: Well, because he could explain things to me wonderfully well. We somehow spoke the same language. When I was working in Sheffield with David Dunmur, I had a problem, some phase separation in liquid crystals problem I couldn't understand. David couldn't sort it out, and he said, “Well, why don’t you go down and see Mark at Cambridge?” That was back in 1980 or 1981. Then we became pretty good friends. Since then. I met a lot of people who were working in liquid crystals in the U.K., and we published some papers, and I think that that maybe gave me a little more visibility. Then I went back, after this time in Sheffield and Europe, to Capilano College. I had hoped to get a job at UBC, but I think that my image at UBC was too, I don’t know, blemished, maybe, by my earlier [laughs] experiences there. There was certainly kind of an unstated promise—no, not unstated—an uncertain promise of a faculty job at UBC. They gave me an adjunct appointment and they gave me a lab in one of the adjoining programs, and so I was working at Capilano, and I was working in this lab. Again, I was happy as a lark, by and large. I wrote a big proposal to the NSERC, which is the main Canadian funding agency.

CRAWFORD: The National Research Council, or something like that; is that what it is?

PALFFY: NRC is the National Research Council. NSERC is National Science and Engineering Research Council, I think. It was a big grant, and it was big enough, and I guess they saw the proposal positively enough, that they had a committee come out and look at my lab and interview me. One of the people was Bill Doane. That's basically I think how eventually I ended up coming here.

CRAWFORD: This was around 1985 or so?

PALFFY: That's right.

CRAWFORD: Bill Doane, at the time, was the director of the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State?

PALFFY: I think Bill Doane had just succeeded Glenn Brown. And so he was on this committee. Of course I knew who he was from conferences that we had. There was another fellow, Mike Lee, who also talked to me at a conference, saying, “You really should come to the new Liquid Crystal Institute, because Bill Doane is building it up, and it’s going to be an outstanding thing.” Then I got an invitation from Bill to come. That's how I ended up coming here. My daughter was born, and we came here when she was six months old, and my wife, who was my girlfriend in the Sheffield days.

CRAWFORD: You started at the LCI in 1987, around that time?

PALFFY: Yep. And I had an invitation to go to Hungary, and so I think we came—it’s a little vague, but I think we came in the spring and then we went to Hungary, my wife and daughter and I. The first summer, I was really in Hungary working at the KFKI[4], which is the central research institute in Budapest. Then after I came back, I just buckled down here. Now, a couple of things that may be interesting. Bill said to me that although research positions in the Institute don’t have tenure, he was optimistic that with my track record I could get tenure in the Physics Department. That was certainly attractive —it looked like UBC was not going to come across in the short term, and so I thought that that was a good reason to—well, that was an additional reason for me to come.

CRAWFORD: I think you've already touched on this question to a certain extent. Were there other things that attracted you about the Liquid Crystal Institute? Just for example, in a 2015 essay that you wrote on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Institute, you noted that at the time that you came to the LCI in the late 1980s, quote, “The Institute was legendary among liquid crystal researchers.” I wonder if you could say more about what the Institute meant at that time, or were there other aspects of it that attracted you to the Institute, aside from these connections with Bill Doane and Mike Lee.

PALFFY: Well, 1987—or, well, I guess 1985 is when I decided to come—the Institute wasn’t as legendary as it had later become. But I was really impressed with the quality of work coming from here, most specifically by the work of Alfred Saupe. Saupe was one of the absolute giants in the field. Maier-Saupe theory to this day is still a cornerstone of liquid crystal theory. I admired him from afar. I remember seeing him at conferences, and he was kind of a demigod in my eyes. Because he was here, that made the Institute even more attractive. So, generally the quality of work coming from here to me seemed to be outstanding, and having Saupe here was definitely a major factor in my coming here. These things together indicated that the prospects of what would be coming from here were really great.

CRAWFORD: Also in that 50th anniversary essay that I mentioned, you actually talked quite a bit about your relationship with Dr. Saupe, who had joined the Liquid Crystal Institute in 1968 and retired in 1992. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about him and his work, and your relationship with him.

PALFFY: Yeah. I have said to friends that I came here primarily because of Alfred. I was fortunate enough to be able to buy the house next to his.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

PALFFY: So, we were neighbors, and we used to spend an inordinate amount of time together. I would go to his place, he would come to my place, we would go to movies together, and so on. We spent a lot of time talking. Again, somehow there was a kind of resonance, that we spoke the same language. He was of course very knowledgeable about—he always impressed me with his deep, deep understanding of physics, not just liquid crystal physics but physics overall. He too was really enamored of these symmetry arguments, which seemed to play such a key role. Although we never published any papers together—no, we did; we did publish I think one paper together—we did a huge amount of calculations, back of envelope kinds of things, calculating things and figuring out how certain things depended on various other things. We were I think close personal friends. We would look after the kids if they were away, and things like that. Alfred’s grandson is now a student here at the Institute.

CRAWFORD: Oh, really! Wow.

PALFFY: Yeah. So that's a nice thing as well.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I didn’t know that. Have you worked with him, or does he work in another—?

PALFFY: He’s just taking courses now.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the Institute was like when you arrived in 1987. The research environment or the culture, was it similar to your experience in the Physics Department at UBC, the kind of eccentricity and enthusiasm? Or was there a different tone?

PALFFY: It was different, actually. Bill Doane was more conservative than the crazy people I hung around with at UBC, but he was a very clever and a very well-focused person, and he was an outstanding leader. I have to say that he created an atmosphere which I think was just about optimal in getting work done from a group of people in the right direction to advance the Institute. I think it was a really challenging thing. I mean, the Institute was I think a rather quiet place until Bill took over. Then he was able to generate a lot of enthusiasm and produce great results, and he was able to bring people together.

Now, when I came, the people that I remember—well, John West was here; he came before me. Of course Mike Lee was here, and Dave Allender. Then there were other people from the Physics Department who participated. Dave Johnson, I think, was one of the dominant figures from that group. They were all really well-known and well-respected people in the liquid crystal community. But there was a difference between us in the Institute, and even Alfred and Mike Lee, and Dave Johnson, which is that they had tenure in the Physics Department, and so their participation in the Institute was somewhat different. Bill Doane also had tenure in Physics. So these people had a different relationship to the Institute and to Bill Doane than the rest of us—John West, myself.

Slowly, this group of people—we were research associates; that was our title—slowly grew. Deng-Ke Yang came. I'm not sure the chronology. Oleg Lavrentovich came. Jack Kelly. So the group grew. I have to say that in some way we, the non-tenured people in the Institute, were people with rather unusual backgrounds. We all didn’t get tenure somewhere else. I think this needs to be said. And so we had followed somewhat unusual trajectories. We reported to Bill, and Bill was our leader. I don’t remember again the dates on this. And I was disappointed with the tenure situation. Okay, maybe what I'm going to say now, I will ask to be removed later on—

CRAWFORD: Okay.

PALFFY: But let me say it anyway. Bill Doane essentially promised me that he would get me tenure in the Department. But that was difficult. There was some hostility in the Department, not against me personally, but against I would say the Institute, and I'll come back to this point as well. But basically what happened is that one of the people in the Physics Department came to me and said, “Look, I know you want tenure, and it’s a challenging thing, but I can get you tenure, so long as you agree to vote with me at faculty meetings.” I of course couldn't do that, and that essentially meant that I would not get tenure in Physics, at least not in the foreseeable future. Then I had to make a decision as to whether to stay or go, given that. But by that time, I was really committed to the Institute. I really felt that this was a good place to be and I've already kind of committed myself to doing whatever I could to further the advance of the Institute. I said, “Okay, no tenure; I'll stay just the same.” That was a big decision for me, and for my wife, because it kind of set the stage for what was to come.

CRAWFORD: Right. Yeah. Maybe we should stop here. It seems like a good—

PALFFY: Look, I really enjoy saying this stuff. Probably most of it is useless, but—

CRAWFORD: No, it’s—. [laughs]

PALFFY: It’s just nice to think back on all these things.

CRAWFORD: It’s all great, so I really appreciate it.

PALFFY: There are a few more things to say, I think, about how the Institute evolved over time, and how we got here, so I'd be happy to have another meeting sometime, whatever schedule you recommend. If you send me email again what might be open spots, I can respond.

CRAWFORD: Sure, I will do that. Okay, great.

[End of Part 1]

[Start of Part 2]

CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford and I am an Associate Professor and Historian of Science in the Department of History at Kent State University. I am interviewing Dr. Peter Palffy-Muhoray, Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Materials Science at Kent State. Today is October 17th, 2022. This is our second interview session. We are conducting this interview in the offices of the Department of History at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Dr. Palffy, thanks again for your time.

PALFFY: My pleasure. I can perhaps begin by saying that when I left UBC, I was given some equipment that I bought there, on grants that I had, and also the Department was generous. So I arrived with a graduate student, James Gleeson, and a green van full of voltmeters and various gadgets, lenses, and things, that I was happy to bring. One of the first things I did was to set up shop when I arrived and start to get to know people here both in the Institute and also in the Physics Department. It was a really exciting time because there was a lot of enthusiasm. People were very friendly and very welcoming. There were senior research fellows in the Institute already. John West, then I came, and then others came as time went on. But it was a really exciting time. We had regular meetings throughout. I think it was on Monday mornings, if memory serves, where we sat around a long table. I can’t remember the numbers. So there were people such as myself and John West, in the Institute, and then there were people from Physics—Bill Doane, Dave Allender. Mike Lee, Dave Johnson, Nathan Spielberg, various people. We discussed the challenges ahead of us, mainly to identify topics that seemed worth pursuing, and to develop strategies for collaborations, and partitioning the work. So it was a great time. I was very happy to be here. I had my young daughter; I think she was six months old when we arrived from Vancouver. The community both in the Institute and outside as well was really welcoming. Leo Holmberg I think was there; he was the computer person. Merrill Groom joined us at some point to provide technical assistance. So it was a really exciting and very productive environment.

Basically, I carried on with research that I started in Vancouver. For example one thing was pattern formation in liquid crystals. One of the exciting new things that we found was that if you take two parallel pieces of glass and you put a liquid crystal in between and you drill a hole and you inject air, rather than getting a circular bubble like you would expect with water, it instead formed a structure very reminiscent of snowflakes. It was a multi-armed centro-symmetric structure, more or less, with dendrites. Understanding the physics leading up to this was really challenging and exciting. These were the kinds of problems that we were working on. I was very interested in phase separation, in phase separation involving liquid crystals and polymers.

I don’t know the exact time, but it was in this early period where Bill Doane had discovered polymer dispersed liquid crystals [PDLC]. I don’t know if he told the story, but let me mention it. It turned out that he filled a small glass sample vial with a liquid crystal. As I remember him telling me, he couldn't find the appropriate Teflon stopper for it, but he had to seal it. He had some two-part epoxy, and he mixed the epoxy to coat the opening, and as he applied the epoxy, somehow some liquid crystal got mixed in with the epoxy, and Bill—well, of course, mixing some strange compound with liquid crystal is not a good idea, so Bill just left it as a bad outcome, and he just left it on his desk. But then he came in the next morning, which may have been a Saturday but I can’t remember, and he said he picked it up and he was about to throw it in the garbage, but he looked at it and he noticed that the epoxy instead of being clear looked foggy. When he looked more clearly, he saw that there were little droplets of liquid crystal dispersed in the now-hardened polymer. This was really interesting, because by aligning the liquid crystal in these droplets with an electric field, the material would become transparent. This was the birth of the PDLC technology which ended up being used for then a variety of applications, such as privacy windows that you could turn and off with a switch. In fact those have been installed in the current new Liquid Crystal Institute building. The truth is that there were other serendipitous discoveries, and I think these are frequent in science. It is to Bill Doane’s credit that he took the trouble to look carefully at what he saw and to take the time to consider it and realize what it was, and then realize the implications. That was just a prime example of exciting developments that grew out of the Institute.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that when you came to the Institute, you were working on phase separation in polymers or with polymers?

PALFFY: First it was just with liquid crystals, so liquid crystal mixtures would phase-separate. Phase separation of course is well-known with systems like water and oil. At low temperatures, they form two distinct phases with a meniscus in between and a well-defined interface. If you heat them up, it becomes a homogeneous mixture. The question was, what do liquid crystals do, and do they behave similarly? Then of course after coming here, I was very interested in phase separation of liquid crystals and polymers as well. That was one of my areas of interest for quite a long time.

CRAWFORD: Is that something you were working on before you came to the LCI or something you started after you got here?

PALFFY: The phase separation before I came, but liquid crystals and polymers I think started here. So did pattern formation. Pattern formation was a really interesting topic for me—how these complicated structures can emerge from a seemingly structureless fluid or a mist like water. Another serendipitous discovery was the formation of what appears like a filament in a liquid crystal. It was a mixture of a liquid crystal which has a smectic A phase and some isotropic solvents, and it turned out that when you cool such a system, the high temperature phase is isotropic, a low temperature phase forms, and in the case of smectics, it often forms in these little sticklike islands, as it were, which is the smectic phase surrounded by the isotropic phase. But this material, instead of doing that, formed a filament, which just looked like sort of a sausage. The remarkable thing was that it grew not by getting thicker, so it didn’t increase radially; it simply got longer. So it was absorbing material all along its length, and it was lengthening everywhere, forming these really intricate structures. This too was a marvelous and surprising thing. I don’t think it had any applications, but certainly it was a novel and most unusual phenomena. Understanding and modeling that was really exciting.

CRAWFORD: Why do you call that a serendipitous discovery?

PALFFY: It’s just luck. It wasn’t that we had some idea that we were trying, that we had a mental expectation of that. We just stumbled onto it. I think things like this happen frequently. I don’t know what the statistics is, but I think a lot of discoveries have been made that way. Or, you see something that just doesn't fit the existing perspective, and then if one tries to understand it better, one can find new phenomena.

CRAWFORD: Did you continue working with these filaments? Was there more to be done with them?

PALFFY: Mainly we just wanted to understand the dynamics, and so we did, and we have some publications. We were very pleased with it, and I think our model was very simple. I like simple models. But it replicated what we observed, well enough, to suggest that the fundamental aspects of the model probably coincided with reality.

CRAWFORD: When you say understanding the dynamics of the filament, does that primarily mean developing a model that describes what you're seeing experimentally?

PALFFY: Yes, that's exactly what it is. As I said, typically low temperature phases grow by aggregating matter in the same phase at the surface. I am unaware of any other system where the incoming material doesn't aggregate at the surface but penetrates into the bulk, causing a change in one of the other dimensions. That was pretty surprising. It’s still surprising. That led to some other people following up on the research. A colleague from the Chinese Academy of Science, he published based on our work originally.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if I could ask you a somewhat more conceptual question, but I think maybe speaks to your work as a scientist and so forth. Many people are probably aware that modeling is incredibly important in all kinds of sciences. I think about climate science, for example; there's a lot of discussion about the models there and what they tell us, especially since they are making predictions about the future and so forth. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the role of modeling in science, and how do you decide when a model is a good description of something.

PALFFY: You mentioned climate science. There are systems, such as our climate, which are extremely complicated, and it is very difficult to identify—one can make a list of the various parameters that could alter and determine the behavior of the system, but to select the relevant ones among those I think is extremely difficult. Then there is the notion of the wing of a butterfly that I am sure you're familiar with, that there are systems where very slight perturbations alter the evolving dynamics enormously. Fortunately, for us, this is not usually the case. Our systems are much simpler, with much fewer parameters that I think are easier to identify. I think modeling is extremely important, both because if the model is correct, then it can be used to predict future events. And if you want to develop a system to do something, you need to be able to understand the details of the underlying aspect.

Now, I was fortunate enough to meet and collaborate with a young person in the Math Dept., Xiaoyu Zheng. When she came, we started working together. We somehow spoke the same language. She has been enormously helpful to me. I think that somehow with my background in physics, really, experimental physics, and her applied math background, we came together in a very happy and productive way. Let me give you one example of modeling. When I was back in Vancouver—maybe this is too long; you can delete it if you want—but when I was in Vancouver, liquid crystals became really fashionable. De Gennes was there. It was a really hot area, as I mentioned earlier. I was thinking, “Well, I'm an idiot, I don’t know anything, but liquid crystals are somehow elongated molecules, and so they must be kind of like ellipsoids.” I mean, ellipsoids are the first really simple elongated geometrical objects. I was thinking, “Well, if I take two ellipsoids, identical ellipsoids, thinking that they're molecules, and I want to bring them together, how close can they come, if I define their orientation? What is the closest distance that they can reach when I put the centers on a line and bring them together?”

Well, I couldn't solve this problem and I thought, “Well, I'm a real idiot.” I thought, “I'll do it in 2D. I'll just do an ellipse here and an ellipse there.” I still couldn't do it! This was back in Vancouver. I thought—I mean, my confidence was pretty badly shaken. I talked to other students. I had a few that tried it and couldn't solve the problem. Then I went to meetings and talked to more senior people in the liquid crystal community, and I offered an extremely good bottle of scotch for the first person who solved it. A couple of people tried it but nobody came up with it. So I came here, and when Xiaoyu came, I said, “Look, I have this simple-minded problem. Can we do something?” And we managed to solve it. It took some doing, but we had the answer for the first time, and we were really pleased with it. Well, it didn’t result in any immediate anything; it was just a really tough problem, and we solved it.

Some time later, I got a message from Chesapeake Energy - an energy company that was the biggest driller of horizontally drilled wells. Some wells, they start to drill downwards, and then they go horizontally, and they were very concerned about collisions of the wellbores. Of course they don’t know the position of the wellbores exactly, but they know that it is within an area which turns out to be an ellipse. And so to them, knowing how close two ellipses with a certain orientation can come is really important. This company didn’t give us any money, but they sent us jackets, and pens, and all kinds of little things. In any case, they were really, really happy with our result, and this got written up in various outlets. So, this result that came from this liquid crystal problem ended up being really valuable in this completely unanticipated application. Then subsequently game theorists, who were building computer game graphics, also used this result.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

PALFFY: Incidentally, we had a really hard time publishing it, because it looks like a really elementary problem. Phrasing it is elementary; the solution turns out—is not. So that was just one example. If I can give another example of the importance of modeling, my more recent work involves these photomechanical materials, which are essentially liquid crystalline polymers. When you shine light on them, for a variety of reasons the shape of the object changes. There is tremendous interest in getting mechanical work done by light. The typical conventional method is to have an electric motor and you send power electrically. You send current. But this is not so simple if you need a lot of power because you need heavy conductors, and on aircraft and ships, heavy copper is not what you want. It corrodes; all kinds of things happen. So the idea is that now it’s possible to send an enormous amount of power through an optical fiber, just a little bigger than a hair. And so the transmission of energy and the availability of light, with sources with that much power is there, but the question of how to best get mechanical work out of it remains.

The idea is to have materials which can, instead of converting light energy, just absorb it, and by shape change do mechanical work. That's what many groups are working on. Here, it turns out that a real question is a question of impedance matching. Impedance matching comes up in all sorts of areas. If you want to send light from material A, air, into material B, glass, it turns out that a lot of the energy is reflected. It’s reflected because the material properties of glass, the refractive index and so on, is very different from that of air. If you put an intermediate material in between, then much more of the energy, or in principle all of the energy, can be transmitted. This situation also comes up with the transmission of stress in these photomechanical materials. This was another case when Xiaoyu and I worked together to investigate the problem of how best to match impedance in elastic materials and how to essentially have an impedance matching element that made two dissimilar materials--one which is providing the work, and another one which is the load—to make them compatible. That's another area where modeling was key. I could go on, but I think this is enough.

CRAWFORD: I have a couple specific questions about the first example that you mentioned about the two ellipses. Do you have any idea how the energy company got in touch with you? How did they find out about your work, or that you had worked on this problem?

PALFFY: I think that they have analysts who are working on this problem, of looking at safety issues, the statistical definition of where the wellbore is liable to be, and then how to estimate the probability of a collision. I think because the shape is elliptical, I suspect somebody there was looking at papers about approach of ellipsoids and things like that. That's how I think it came. Interestingly, now, our paper is actually incorporated into a number of patents. Not the company that approached us, but British Petroleum—and if you look at the patent, our paper is in there. We never even got an acknowledgement from them. Of course they say we are the authors, but they never even said, “Here, we’ll give you a pen.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

PALFFY: But that's fine. We were just really happy that it turned out to be useful. But I think there are many things like that.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned you had a hard time publishing that work on the two ellipses. I wonder if you could say a little bit about why you think that was.

PALFFY: Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak about the perspective of the editor who handled our paper at Physical Review E. I have to say that the problem seemed so simple that on the face of it, you would think a good high school student should be able to solve it. So I can’t blame him too much because the problem looks deceptively simple, but as it turned out, it’s not, and it had not been done before. This will sound incredible: we have a closed-form solution, but if I were to write it down in detail, even if I made, I don’t know, centimeter-high symbols, that equation would be longer than the length of this building. Even if the symbols were a centimeter long. It’s a curious thing, but that's how it is. The problem looked simple, and I think that was the big obstacle. But we had quite a lengthy back and forth until it finally got accepted.

CRAWFORD: A closed-form solution, would you be willing to explain what that is?

PALFFY: It’s an equation that has a finite length. Well, you can write equations that have a sum in them and that sum may have an infinite number of terms. But we didn’t have that. We could write down every term, but it was enormously long.

CRAWFORD: But it was this huge, long equation. I wanted to then ask a bigger question. Please correct me if I'm mischaracterizing the spirit of this research that you were doing, but it sounds like you were working on some pretty fundamental questions about describing the pattern formation, these questions about two ellipses that are deceptively simple at first glance but obviously much more complicated. I wonder how that work fits with the Liquid Crystal Institute at the time that you joined in the late 1980s. The reason why I ask that is because the narrative that I have heard for the most part, in different things I've read and people I've talked to, is under Bill Doane’s directorship, the Liquid Crystal Institute takes a much more applied approach than it had before, and it’s very much focused on displays and applications and so forth. I wonder, how did what you were doing fit into that larger thrust of the Institute? Or am I misunderstanding the history of the Institute in that period?

PALFFY: I think it depends on who you talk to. As I mentioned earlier, Bill Doane came to evaluate a proposal that I had written, which was a really fundamental proposal. Bill told me at the beginning that he wanted me to continue my work on basic research. The Institute I think right from the beginning placed what I felt was essentially equal importance on fundamental science and applied research. When associate directors were chosen, and I was one of the two associate directors, my job was to be in charge of basic research and education outreach. The other associate director’s role was to focus on applied research and industrial outreach. I thought that this—it’s not a dichotomy; it’s a duality—there was very good interchange among us. People on applied problems would come and try to get some help on some basic issues, and we often learned a lot from the applied people because they saw phenomena that we may not have known. So I think it was a pretty happy structure and I think it worked extremely well.

About the education outreach, I haven't said anything, but it was felt that because we were a strong scientific outfit that we should participate in local educational efforts. I was the person heading that effort. We had interactions with science teachers in all manner of schools, and we had, in retrospect, innumerable weekend workshops where teachers would bring students or teachers would come alone and we would develop educational materials with and for them. We worked with Akron schools as well. We had students come and visit the labs. We went and we visited schools. It really was a big effort, and I think a rather successful one. Teachers were very pleased with us, and we got funding in recognition of this effort and also in material support of this effort.

One of the things that I think we really pioneered was remote experiments. We realized that there were experiments which simply weren’t feasible in schools, partly because of cost, partly because of lack of local expertise. So, with Leo Holmberg, we developed—which must be at least one of the first remote experiments—where remote users could—this was back in the 1990s—where remote users could access experiments and control them. This was really unusual. At first, they would observe things, but later they had some degree of control. For a long time, we had an experiment set up where we had a wine glass, and an efficient loudspeaker, and remote users could view—we had a camera that could view the wine glass, and we had a signal generator and a big amplifier driving the speaker, and they could tune the signal generator frequency and hear the sound, and eventually they could find the resonant frequency, turn up the power, and shatter the wine glass.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Wow!

PALFFY: Yeah, so we had that set up. We even took it over and we had it running in the new building. At that time, there was nothing like that. There were fewer regulations on the internet. But Leo Holmberg—now I don’t know if you came across his name.

CRAWFORD: No.

PALFFY: He was our computer expert. At that stage, there was no LabView. There was no National Instruments anything. I think the early primitive—I don’t know if you know what LabView is, but—

CRAWFORD: Merrill Groom explained somewhat, but I wonder if you could explain as well.

PALFFY: The idea is that once computers came into the picture, it was clear that they were wonderful for storing and processing information, but how to get it there? There were many different ways of trying to connect equipment—and often not equipment; you just had some experiment which produced some voltage, and you had to get that into the computer somehow. So, there were different things. There was something called LabWindows/CVI from National Instruments, which I think was a precursor of LabView. I don’t know when that came into existence. But certainly there was nothing back in the early 1990s when we started this effort with Leo Holmberg. I want to mention this, because Leo, given that things were in a really experimental stage, Leo contributed enormously to the success of the Institute, with his help in hooking up various things to computers as well as writing software, developing code. I did some of that, and Leo did quite a lot of it. He was a really wonderfully productive and proficient IT person.

CRAWFORD: To be clear, these early remote experiments that you and others at the LCI developed and were being viewed in schools, the people who are remotely viewing the experiments, they're doing it over the internet in the 1990s?

PALFFY: Yes. That was sort of dial-up connections and things. It was really slow. That was one issue. But we did that. Then we got interested in this idea of being able to transmit live pictures. We even—I got some money—I was mainly doing most of this at the time, and we even got some money to buy monitors that we took to old-age homes, where there were people who were in some simple ordinary buildings, and we had big colored monitors showing, for example, that the birds—if you go down Summit towards where the supply area of the university is, behind there, there is a really lovely wetland. We had cameras set up there so people could watch the sunrise and sunset and the birds and things, just as a, I don’t know, community outreach kind of effort.

CRAWFORD: You became associate director in 1990, fairly soon?

PALFFY: I think it was before that, but I could be wrong. I don’t recall that. I could go back. But no, 1990—I'm sorry—yeah, 1996 is when we moved. No, I think that's right, 1990.

CRAWFORD: That's fairly soon after you've arrived at the LCI, just a few years after. Why did you decide to become associate director? Was it a choice?

PALFFY: Well, Bill Doane asked me, is why I did it, of course. I have to say that I really came to put all my abilities, meager as they are, to the benefit of the Institute, who kind of—how can I say it—who had enough confidence in me [laughs] to invite me to come here. I thought it was a great opportunity for me to be able to contribute. I also wanted to teach. Because I taught for many years in Vancouver at this college, primarily. I really enjoyed teaching and I thought I was successful at it. I taught a number of courses in the Physics Department, and that was really satisfying. I enjoyed teaching.

At some point it became clear that we needed to establish our own graduate program. I think this was because, understandably, the Physics Department faculty were not too happy when—some of us were given graduate faculty status in Physics, based on our background and teaching experience and so on, so we could supervise graduate students, and a number of graduate students came and asked to work with us. I think that the Physics Department would have preferred to keep those students. I think Dean [Eugene] Wenninger was the Arts and Science dean then, and I think that discussing the problem, the idea came up to develop a graduate program within the Institute, which could be more specialized than Physics. This is how the Chemical Physics program was born. I took a big role in developing that program, which turned out to be enormously successful. This is not my credit; this is the credit of everyone who taught in the program and of the wonderful students we had. We had really outstanding students who are today working for Apple and Facebook and Snapchat and Google and Microsoft. These people are still calling us today, asking for recommendations of students and so on.

CRAWFORD: When was the Chemical Physics program established, roughly?

PALFFY: That was in the 1990s, too, but I think that we really started in a bigger way when we moved into the new building, in 1996. And really, we had wonderful students coming from the best universities in China, for example, from all over the world, and of course the U.S. The program, we defined it as things went, but I think it was an extremely good program, not only in liquid crystals, but generally in soft matter. A number of our students are professors at good universities now, and they do both experiment and theory. The program had an extremely good reputation.

CRAWFORD: Was chemical physics an established field at that time? By that I mean were there other programs in chemical physics at the time that you established the program?

PALFFY: Not at this time at Kent State. There had been such a program in the past, but it was defunct. Chemical physics is a recognized part of chemistry, but we wanted something that was not already present here so we could make a program that best met what we saw were the challenges and the opportunities. It really provided extremely good liquid crystal background to people who took that course.

CRAWFORD: You've been talking about your work as associate director and some of the activities that you did. What would you say were your most important achievements as associate director? I know you were associate director for quite a long time.

PALFFY: Yes. I think that establishing the curriculum for the Chemical Physics program—of course together with my colleagues—I think was really valuable, helped by the quality of our students and the subsequent contributions. I would think that my research, of course, is a separate thing, but as associate director, I think that was one. I think our contribution to local education, the middle school, high school level, was also valuable, at the time. We haven't done that for quite a long time. Also, I worked hard in maintaining relationships in the liquid crystal community, not only in the U.S. but globally.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if we could maybe shift gears a little bit and talk about your interactions with industry. I saw from your resume that you were a consultant for AT&T Bell Labs in 1989 and 1990.

PALFFY: Yes. That was wonderful.

CRAWFORD: I also know that you, with Bahman Taheri and Tamas Kosa, established AlphaMicron in 1996.

PALFFY: Yes.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about either or both of those experiences.

PALFFY: As I said, Bahman was working with us in the Institute. He came as a postdoc and then later he got involved in industrial outreach. We had a lot of common interests, and we were looking for opportunities to do purely curiosity-driven research. Crazy as we were, and young—the idea of forming a company that could do things that we thought were interesting, and yet somehow generate enough funds to enable us to satisfy our curiosity-based research appetite. So that's what we did. We had a good idea, which I think is still a good idea. It has to do with light control. So, not displays at all, but it’s just controlling light in various applications. Sensor protection would be one example. Today, light control I think is a big challenge for companies building virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality devices.

So, we just thought, “Well, let’s try it.” We went and formed this little company; just went to a lawyer from a little company and rented what was basically an unused garage down on Martinel Drive, I think. [laughs] We scrubbed the floors, and we bought plywood, and I made tables, and that's how we got started. Of course I fulfilled all my responsibilities; this was stuff we did on the weekends and nights. Although we did research on weekends and nights, too. That's how the company got started. Then we had a couple of ideas that we thought might be useful for industry, and we went to visit some companies and tried to—but we were babes in the woods, as it were. I think these large company people are a little wilier. But it was a valuable learning experience, and the ideas were really good. That's how the company got started.

And now, fast-forward, it became clear to me that I just didn’t have—I was president of the company initially, and it became clear to me soon that I just didn’t have the time to do what needed to be done, and I really didn’t have either the enthusiasm or the ability that business negotiations call for. Bahman and I talked the situation over and we decided that I would step down as president of the company, and he would essentially run AlphaMicron, and I would stay at the university, but of course we would still stay in touch and collaborate and everything. I think that that was a good decision all around. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but the key point of the company—that it has no investor funds in the company, which means it is still autonomous. To manage that, on the other hand, you have to be able to perform miracles, and Bahman was able to do that, at considerable personal cost, I think. It must have been extremely difficult at various times in the company’s history to be able to do that, to be able to meet the payroll and to pay the bills.

CRAWFORD: Why was that? Could you explain what your sense of the challenge is there?

PALFFY: Well, it’s really difficult to get contracts that are sufficiently large and last for a long enough period, and you have to pay salaries of people who have families to support. So I think that the pressure to meet all the expenses are enormous. Even if a company has investor money, for a small company, the mortality rate is phenomenally high. So it’s really difficult. But, it’s also very satisfying. I have to say that to be able to manufacture and provide to customers devices that they want and devices that work is marvelous.

CRAWFORD: Did the company have devices that it developed and then tried to market, or does it do the kind of work where somebody comes to the company and says, “We're looking for this sort of thing; can you make it for us?” Or design it for us.

PALFFY: It was primarily the former. Primarily the idea was to come up with eye protection for certain situations, and make the devices, and talk to military, for example, and then learn their specific requirements, and then try to meet those, then eventually develop and provide the devices or at least elements of the devices.

CRAWFORD: How does the collaboration work between, say, you and AlphaMicron? Or just if you want to talk in general about collaborations between people at the LCI and—because I know there's other companies in the area. I mean, are there any difficulties in those collaborations or challenges?

PALFFY: No, not at all. There were no intellectual property issues. Things that were developed here were patented in the university. The university likes AlphaMicron. But maybe most importantly—well, first of all, I stepped down from the company. I have no position in the company. I'm a friend of the company today. But it has been really valuable for students. Because the company had internships, and students really benefited from these, and they really provided valuable service to the company. These still go on. There have been in the past students who couldn't find a research advisor perhaps, and Bahman would, because he has adjunct status, he would be part of the advisory group. So yeah, the company supported graduate students at times in various ways. But it has been I think a very healthy and open relationship. AlphaMicron is on very good terms with KDI [Kent Displays, Incorporated] as well. In fact, the president—CEO now, I guess—is one of the students who went through there.

CRAWFORD: Right, Asad Khan.

PALFFY: Yeah, a great guy. So, there's a very good relationship between both companies and the university, also between the companies and the university in all ways.

CRAWFORD: What does that collaboration look like in practice? Does, say, Bahman come to you, or did Bahman come to you and say, “Hey, we're working on this problem”? Or would you come to him and talk to him about things that were happening in your lab?

PALFFY: One of the big events in my research life was together with Bahman, when we made these liquid crystal lasers that I mentioned earlier. There, Bahman just came as a colleague, and we did that research in my lab. The company has no patents on it or anything; it was just a research collaboration. I perhaps have done less of that. I go to the company sometimes and chat with people, and Bahman, but I don’t think I contributed as much there as Bahman has here.

Today, we have a grant which is an OFRN[5] grant. This is from the State—a currently well-respected state grant. This is a grant to AlphaMicron, with a subcontract to Kent State University. The way it works is the goal of the project is to be able to develop and characterize liquid crystal devices for light control. Central mission of the company. This succeeds a previous grant which came from the AFOSR, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, with different but related goals. They had a very specific device they needed but they also were happy to see that this research continued. This research then supports two graduate students, one in my group the other one in Xiaoyu’s group in the Math Department. We do experimental characterization of certain liquid crystal and optical element combinations, and then we do modeling with Xiaoyu.

As of perhaps six months ago, software developed here was developed and delivered under this grant to AlphaMicron so they can predict the optical response of certain combinations of materials and their specifications. So, if anybody wants to develop a certain kind of light control element, they could use this software. They could input that they're going to use this liquid crystal and maybe this dye, and the software will tell them what the transmittance is at a certain angle, things like that. This is I think a really good kind of collaboration, because it has a lot of fundamental science in it. It is absolutely Maxwell equation, optics, and in the end it’s a user-friendly front-end software that uses the modeling to enable device development. Because to do an experiment is pretty complicated, whereas here, you can just vary your parameters and have a very good expectation of what the experiment will give. Incidentally this involves not just us; it involves two other universities as well Miami University of Ohio and Bowling Green State.

CRAWFORD: I see. You said this was a good collaboration. I'm curious what you think an effective collaboration between academic science and industry looks like. Is this kind of the ideal, you would say?

PALFFY: To me, pretty much. I've spent some time talking with KDI. The KDI device is basically predicated on materials which are formed by phase separation. KDI was interested in what phase separation theory and modeling can tell about their device. We didn’t have extensive collaboration but we spent time discussing it and discussing various things. That was useful. I think this current collaboration is really very effective, and I think this is pretty much as good as it comes.

Now, you mentioned Bell Labs. Of course, Bell Labs research was not at all applied, at least not where I was. Most of the people there were basic scientists, mind you with legendary abilities in many cases. But they worked on completely abstract problems involving, I don’t know, phase separation and strange behavior and quantum materials and things.

CRAWFORD: You said that consultation experience was enjoyable, or I forget exactly what you said. Why did you say that?

PALFFY: Because that's really what it was. It was for me such a pleasure to go there. My main collaborator there was Patricia Cladis, who got quite a lot of her training in France, in the group of de Gennes and the other people who were in that milieu. Just discussing physics with her and planning experiments was marvelous. It was just being in the environment where you could learn what really frontline people were doing. But more importantly I think is to see what perspective they have that led them to the problems they were working on and how to move forward. Really they were absolutely world-renowned people. So, yes, it was marvelous.
I have to say I just came back not so long ago from Cambridge, and again I felt the same thing, that the perspective that people have and convey to students is maybe more important than the actual elements of science that they transmit. Extremely good people are able to explain things very simply. I remember coming out of a talk that de Gennes gave at Case Western. When you're sitting in that talk, you think, “Why is this man saying all these obvious things?” It’s only on reflection that it becomes clear that it seems obvious [laughs] because he made it that way but it was all brand-new. Somehow, I think that that has a big effect on students, and I wish we had more of that.

CRAWFORD: This kind of perspective that you're talking about?

PALFFY: Yeah. I think that the perspective is really important. Now of course, I've been teaching for a long time, and I have a lot of ideas, but I think that it is better to know a few things deeply than to know many things superficially. Because that gives you a solid ground on which to build. That's really apparent with the very good people. As I said, de Gennes’ paper on liquid crystal elastomers, you read that and you think, “Obvious.” You know? Once you see it clearly.

CRAWFORD: I'd like to talk a little bit more about teaching, but I just have a couple questions. I think a lot of times, there's a perception that industrial research and academic research are two different enterprises. I think that has to do with popular perceptions about what motivates industry versus what motivates academic research. It sounds like from what you're talking about from your experiences with AlphaMicron and also with AT&T Bell Labs, that perhaps that division between the two, at least in your experience, didn’t really exist. These worlds seem very similar in a lot of ways. Does that sound like a fair characterization?

PALFFY: I wish it was as simple as that. The truth is that in industry, a company will have a contract to make a certain number of devices that do certain things, and there will be problems along the way in meeting specifications. Then those problems need to be solved. In industry, there's a lot of fascinating research, but it is often directed at—unless you are as big as AT&T, they are directed at solving specific problems. That can be just as challenging or even more challenging than just basic research, and they often can be absolutely basic. But they are sort of curtailed; they must address the problem at hand. You can’t go off on some tangent just because it looks fascinating. That's a real difference, I think.

On the other hand, there's a pro to that, and the pro is that you have very strong motivation to solve the problem, whereas in curiosity-directed research, if you hit a wall, you may choose not to drill through it. [laughs] You may just choose to look at another problem. So they are different in that regard. At the same time, I have to say that the depth of the knowledge you need to solve both kinds of problems are really comparable. I know that in the U.K., the people who were involved in the early days of liquid crystal research when I was there in 1981, 1982, for applications were people who were theorists from Oxford, for example. So it takes the best minds to solve the applied problems as well.

CRAWFORD: I wanted to ask you about teaching. You've mentioned it a couple of times. How important was teaching in your career? What role did it play in your career as a scientist?

PALFFY: I had to learn stuff. The first thing you realize when you start to teach is that to teach, you have to really understand the stuff. The stuff that you think you understand, when you try to teach it, you realize that there's a chasm there, or there can be. So it was wonderful for me, because to be able to teach, especially at a lower level—graduate students, the really good ones, are no problem, but there are graduate students who accept things as they hear it. But to really be able to give compelling lectures explaining on how things really work, the teacher must know the material deeply. I basically had to go back and relearn everything when I came from Engineering into Physics, and it took a long time. Teaching at Capilano College enabled me to do that, and so I was fortunate in that way.

CRAWFORD: Do you have a favorite course that you taught or still teach?

PALFFY: I taught a course here called Liquid Crystal Materials, which was really a statistical mechanics course. Then when Jonathan Selinger came to us from Naval Research Lab, we gave him that course. That was a course that I really loved, and I would still love to teach, but he’s covering much of that material, so that's fine.

CRAWFORD: What about work with graduate students and mentorship of graduate students?

PALFFY: Well, it’s wonderful. Working with graduate students can be enormously rewarding. They become your friends. The delight really comes from accomplishing things, I think, both in calculation—you solve a problem; that's a great thing—and if you get something working in the lab, even simple things. You have to make some gadget that does something, or you have to go to the machine shop and machine something, and the thing works; that's enormously satisfying, so you rejoice together with your graduate students. That's how it should be, and that's how it has been, by and large, for me. Often, of course, you're disappointed, that’s part of the rich tapestry, as they say. We had excellent students, and now I think with the new structure, we get students from widely different areas and so it’s not quite the same. I'd like to say a few things about how things evolved in time at the Institute.

CRAWFORD: I was going to ask you some more general questions about the Institute and how you see it has changed and so forth.

PALFFY: I don’t know how much detail to give here. Bill Doane I think was a conservative person, I think—his perspective was that way—but he was an outstanding leader. He had a vision and he had dedication and he knew how to share his vision and involve all of us in it. So in the early days, under Bill Doane, the Institute was an extremely efficient team of really gifted people. I think I mentioned that nobody knew at the time, of course, but looking back, a huge fraction of the people were part of this top 2% of the world’s most influential scientists, something like eight out of eleven. That's how it was. I'm not saying that Bill was always the most gentle and accommodating person, but he had a vision, and he knew how to implement it. He was well-respected scientifically, worldwide, and we as senior research scientists, we were responsible to him. I think that the team worked extremely well.

I think that [Michael] Schwartz was the president when I came. He and Gene Wenninger were strong supporters of the Institute, and the Institute grew really marvelously under Bill. It was Bill who made this two-armed structure of applied and basic research, and it was Bill that recognized the need for this graduate Chemical Physics program, and it started under him. He was responsible for these things. And it took some doing, I think, to get the university to agree to this, but it worked well. Then it came time for Bill to retire. The Institute was really respected and admired in the scientific community the world over, and we had many, many excellent applicants. I'm just thinking back to those days. Chuck Gartland—I don’t know, did you ever talk to Chuck? He’s another person that would be interesting perhaps to chat with. He’s an applied mathematician. He’s now retired but he’s still around. Chuck spent a lot of time working with us in the Institute. He has published many papers on liquid crystals and is well known.

CRAWFORD: His last name was—?

PALFFY: Gartland. Anyway, there were many applicants, and some of them were really, really outstanding. But there were also internal applicants. I don’t know, somehow there were rumors that the university was leaning towards internal applicants. Bill may have had reason to prefer that for reasons that I don’t really want to speculate on. But I then made one of the very few political moves in my career; I went to see the president, who was Carol Cartwright, and I pleaded with her, with the full force of whatever I had, to choose an outside applicant, because they were really representing the tremendous leadership potential. In the end, it was an internal candidate that was chosen, John West, and I think that that was not optimal for the Institute. Of course I told John that I am going to tell the president that I think that she should choose an external candidate.

So it was John, and then of course the Institute changed under John, because the personality of the leader, of course, translates into changes in various things. Then after John, it was Oleg Lavrentovich, who became director and after that, Hiroshi Yokoyama. Now, my sense—and I'm sure that not everyone will agree with me—but Bill represented I think really near ideal leadership for the team that the Institute was. I think that after Bill, this sense of effective leadership really diminished, and—I think that it must happen in other organizations—I think this led to people devoting their effort not so much towards what is best for the team, but personal interests start to come into the fore. I think this is probably classical dynamics of organizations. But this kind of persisted. There were many instances where we missed a very big grant by a hair, difficult to explain to you. But I think overall the Institute had become less focused, less efficient and the sense of working as a group has diminished with time.

Then Hiroshi Yokoyama came and—well, one really important thing about the Chemical Physics program—the Chemical Physics program reported to the director of the Institute. This was perhaps unusual but the director of the Institute also played the role of departmental chairman. There were certain policies of the Chemical Physics program that were arrived at consensually and were consistent with the vision of the Institute and how they should go. But then as time went on, this close relationship changed—John West was not interested in chemical physics. In the beginning he said, “Leave me out of this. I want no part of it.” He wasn’t really interested in the program.

Now, Hiroshi Yokoyama was a really widely respected—and is respected—scientist, and he came—in 2011 and he was the next director. But I think by the time that he came, the Institute kind of ceased functioning in the original spirit of a team working together for common goals.

CRAWFORD: That collaborative environment, team environment, had kind of broken down, and people were more pursuing their own individual research?

PALFFY: That is my sense of it. Again, others may see it differently but that's how I saw it. I think Hiroshi, maybe partly due to his cultural background or his perspective on things and the state of the Insitute, he was unable to restore what I was hoping for, the kind of leadership that Bill Doane had provided, and bring the Institute together as a single unit. But it was a close call. In 1996, I was of course still associate director, and I worked closely with Hiroshi. Jim Blank asked us to—he said that there would be some new positions coming for the Institute and he asked us to identify key frontline players that we could attract.

CRAWFORD: Was this in 1996?

PALFFY: Yes. No, no, no; I'm talking nonsense.

CRAWFORD: This was two-thousand…?

PALFFY: This was 2016. I'm sorry. I'm talking crazy stuff.

CRAWFORD: That's okay. That's why I asked. [laughs]

PALFFY: He asked us to organize a meeting where we invited a handful of the top players, and Hiroshi and I did that.

CRAWFORD: Top players in the field at large, or here at Kent State?

PALFFY: Oh, in the field at large, yeah. And we did that. We organized this meeting. That meeting took place in December of 2016. At the meeting, I knew that somehow things have turned, a different decision had been reached, because Jim Blank didn’t come to the meeting, and the few people that did—Doug Delahanty, I remember—you don’t need to write that down, probably—but from their attitude, it was clear that there was a change of plans. I later learned that there had been an ad hoc committee who had been working with Jim Blank to restructure the Institute.

CRAWFORD: I see.

PALFFY: But I think that the turning point was then. At that December meeting, we knew that things weren’t going to go that way. I think that really marked the end of the Liquid Crystal Institute as I know it. Eventually, we got news from the Dean’s Office that there will be a restructuring. A number of us were strongly worried, concerned about that, because we didn’t like the new direction, as were some of our colleagues in the international community. People like John Ball at Oxford and other colleagues were curious. We provided what information we could. And when it became clear that people’s tenures in the Chemical Physics Program were to be put back into departments, that essentially meant that the director of the Institute no longer had any kind of responsibility towards the members and the other way around as well. It seemed like it would be a fundamental change which would not be conducive to the kind of work the Institute had been doing. So John Ball sent a letter that had 15 signatories questioning the change. I have a copy of the letter, which I give you, but don't circulate it yet.[6]

CRAWFORD: Sure. Of course.

PALFFY: That's a letter that John wrote. The president then was Beverly Warren. I think that was near the end of her tenure. This was 1998, already, and I think she left in—

CRAWFORD: 2018.

PALFFY: ’18. I'm saying the wrong things here. But she left in ’19. In response to this letter—I have the subsequent correspondence, but the letter was by Todd Diacon, and the board member never replied. In any case, the reply from Todd was, essentially, “Oh, this is nonsense, really things will be even greater than before.” Anyway, so but to me, this is the end of the Liquid Crystal Institute as it was, and I think that the current Institute is really completely different. The academic program has been changed. It doesn't report to the director. Tony Jákli is the director of the program, and I don’t know who he reports to. God, as far as I know.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

PALFFY: I mean, I don’t think he meets with any of the upper administration.

CRAWFORD: I just want to be clear about your concern about the change. This organizational structure change where faculty who had been senior research scientists and reporting to the director are now moved into the academic departments, are you saying that further erodes the team spirit of the Liquid Crystal Institute? Is that your concern?

PALFFY: Absolutely. The new Institute doesn't have regular meetings. Although my office physically is the same as I had before, I have no direct formal relationship with the director of the new Institute. I don’t report to him. He doesn't have anything to tell me. I'm in space that he has oversight over, but that's it. Now, I chose to go to Math, because I love math, and I really like mathematicians. I could have gone to Physics, but somehow I thought I would benefit more by going to Math. The other people, the physics people—Lavrentovich and Jákli and Phil Bos and Yang and Hiroshi—went to Physics. They report to the chairman of Physics, and the chairman of Physics has nothing to do with the Institute. The teaching is a little bizarre, because I am teaching a course which is primarily for the current graduate students in the new academic program, which is called Materials Science, but this is because the Math Department graciously allows me to do that rather than teach math. The same is true of physics. But as I said, the physics people report to the chairman of Physics, who has no special interest in liquid crystal anything. I report to Math, and that's how it works. We don’t get together. The Materials Science program maybe meets once a year or so. So the whole vision for both the content of the material and the policies on how to implement it is all gone, and I think that this erosion of the team spirit towards more individual interests has really gone extremely far.

CRAWFORD: I have a couple more questions. I want to be mindful of the time. I know you said a meeting at 4:00. What time would you like to be done?

PALFFY: I'd like to leave in about ten minutes. I have to prepare a little bit. I'm happy to get together again if you think it’s useful.

CRAWFORD: I want to flip things around a little bit from what we've been discussing. I think you've already implicitly answered this question, but from your experience at the LCI and your other experiences working in science and consulting and so forth, what are the characteristics of an effective scientific research institute? What does that look like? In other words, if you could remake the LCI in any way that you wanted, what would it look like? What are the conditions that create an effective scientific culture in your view?

PALFFY: I think the organization has to be such that the members of the Institute somehow are reporting to the director of the Institute, to provide some common direction and goal. Under the circumstances, I think the graduate program must also report to that person to keep the educational mission and the research mission coordinated. To tell the truth, I found the old structure really attractive. I think that what is missing would have been a more charismatic leader along the way. Maybe it was just fortuitous, but the structure that we had, with the Chemical Physics program and a good leader like Bill at the helm, was extremely effective.

Bell Labs is a marvelous place, but it was kind of a wild and crazy place. I mean, being a visiting person, I wasn’t deeply involved in the structure and the politics, but there wasn’t a lot of direction, or at least far less direction than we had here. But they had many more people, so that was just a different thing. I have wondered about the Brain Health Institute, because that again, as far as I know, that structure is the one that we are following, that people don’t report to the director. The director calls the odd meeting to meet some grant proposal opportunity, but that's not enough to make an effective streamlined team. Working together is just a pleasure, and I think that a lot of what happened, people did because they enjoyed the interactions and they enjoyed the results of that interaction. That, as far as I can see, is largely gone.

CRAWFORD: We've talked largely about institutional changes here at Kent State and so forth, but I'm wondering how specific this is to Kent State. In other words, has the enterprise of science at large become more individualistic, whereby scientists are encouraged to pursue more of their own individual research agenda versus collaborative ones?

PALFFY: It’s hard for me to respond to that. I don’t know. Certainly there are many very effective individual scientists working. Bell Labs is gone. But if you look at the record of Bell Labs, and if you look at the record of the Liquid Crystal Institute, it’s really impressive. Now the one comment that I heard that I really liked from the world of business is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And I don’t think that this has been done, had been done, nor have the changes been measured since the end of the original Liquid Crystal Institute. I would have thought that the administration would now after, I don’t know, four years or something, assess the current situation and ask whether this was a good move or not. But this doesn't seem to happen in the current administration, so—

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Well, speaking of assessment, in 2019, a study at Stanford University identified you as one of the top 2% of scientists in the world.

PALFFY: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: What did that mean for you, to get that kind of recognition?

PALFFY: Big surprise, actually. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Really? Why is that?

PALFFY: I never thought of myself being in that category. I just thought I was kind of a reasonably okay guy.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

PALFFY: I certainly didn’t expect this. But of course I was thrilled. I mean, I was happy that this is how things worked out. And also that we had so many people in the Institute who all came from non-standard backgrounds, low-profile people—Deng-Ke Yang—and it’s marvelous that we have achieved that. I think that to have scattered us around, I don’t know if that was such a good strategy. Of course at the time it wasn’t clear. But I think again it may have to do with not measuring things carefully. The other thing is our students have done extremely well in the world, and that's another metric, I think, so there's a recognition of the 2% and the success of the students from the Chemical Physics program. I'm not certain that students in the new curriculum would fare as well, but who is to say?

CRAWFORD: Time will tell, I guess. Just a final question—what advice might you give to someone who was going to pursue a career in science or liquid crystal science today?

PALFFY: You have to follow your heart,. You have to follow what is interesting. That's hard advice to give to people who have to follow a tenuous process with tenure and so on. But my advice is to find the thing that you really love. That may be different from what you expect. Find the thing that really makes you happy and then pursue that as well as you can. The other thing is to—don’t do things halfheartedly. Commit to things and do the best you can.

CRAWFORD: I'm certainly very grateful for your time, Dr. Palffy, and for you sharing your story. Thanks for such a great interview. I really appreciate it.

PALFFY: I really enjoyed it, I have to say, much more than I anticipated.

CRAWFORD: Glad to hear it.

PALFFY: So, thank you, for going through it, and I hope that I'll have a chance to—well, you said I'll have a chance to go through it.

CRAWFORD: Yes.

PALFFY: I'll try to correct any omissions and things. I will furnish the remainder of the correspondence. I'm very happy that it will have a home where it becomes accessible to historians who may be interested in the history of the LCI.

CRAWFORD: Definitely. Thank you.

PALFFY: Very good. Thank you!

[End]

________________
[1] Here, Dr. Palffy is talking about his advisor for his master’s degree in electrical engineering.
[2] Electromagnetism
[3] Dr. Palffy clarifies, “There is an unwritten law in physics, which says that what is not forbidden, will occur. Since this new material is not forbidden by symmetry, it is expected to be realizable - which it evidently was and is.”
[4] Kozponti Fizikai Kutato Intezet - Central Physics Research Institute
[5] Ohio Federal Research Network
[6] Palffy has provided a physical copy of the letter signed by Sir John Ball to be included in the file with their interview materials. Anyone interested in this document should consult the physical copy in the Liquid Crystal Oral History Project Records at Kent State University Special Collections and University Archives.