My family is preparing our big move to ELSI in Tokyo, where my wife Christine Houser and I will be working full-time beginning in August. Yet even amidst all the trials and tribulations of moving house internationally, as the time for our departure grows near we are feeling more excitement with every day. Indeed, packing for a move gives us ample opportunity to mull our thoughts about ELSI, and what it means to us personally. As my first ELSI blog post, I thought I would share one such stream of thought while preparing for the big move, and hopefully convey one of the many reasons why I think ELSI is very special...

Like many others in my generation, I was fascinated with music as a teenager. I was especially inspired by independent bands of musicians who broke through barriers and transported their listeners to new places, expanding the frontiers of the mind and unleashing new powers of imagination that literally changed the world. Having learned brass instruments in primary school, I eventually took up the bass guitar and joined with other musically inclined friends to "jam out" on a regular basis. The most special experience I had in these bands was what many musicians call a "groove," a special moment when all members of a musical ensemble find a synergy in their exploration of a song or theme, when the "planets seem to become aligned" and a certain magic is released from a hidden reservoir. In such a moment, even basic arithmetic is violated, as the ensemble becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and the music is taken to an entirely new dimension. The groove cannot be manufactured. It cannot be forced. It cannot be managed. It cannot even be measured, even though it is the very thing that makes music most special.

As I became a serious student in college, I set aside my pursuit of musical fame, but I was delighted to find that the same kind of groove also exists in many other facets of life. In fact, a groove can arise from any collaboration among people, such as falling in love, finding your best friends, forming a successful institution...and most relevant to the present blog: in doing collaborative scientific research. One of the most special groove-like moments in my scientific career came in graduate school, after reading about a newly discovered "post-perovskite" phase transition in the deep mantle that came from ELSI director Kei Hirose's research laboratory. I recognized that this phase change could manifest in very different ways in the context of a slowly convecting deep mantle, depending upon whether the phase transition occurred at temperatures higher or lower than those at the core-mantle boundary. The different scenarios carried different predictions for the kinds of seismological structures that would be produced by the post-perovskite phase transition, and in either scenario would yield important insights into temperature profiles and heat transfer between the Earth's metallic core and rocky mantle: essentially the holy grail of deep Earth geophysics. A few months later I attended a young researcher's workshop in which a seismologist colleague Christine Thomas presented results that appeared to clearly discriminate these scenarios, and I literally fell out of my chair in excitement. The collaborative groove that followed yielded my most cited paper to date, and launched a new research direction that has altered the course of deep Earth research around the globe. This was a fortunate moment in which mineral physics, seismology, and geodynamics was combined in a way that yielded a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

In my view, the recent historical trends in many facets of our global culture have not usually recognized the importance of achieving a groove, adversely affecting the greatness of our achievements in fields ranging from music to science. Have you ever wondered why there hasn't been any truly great music brought to the mass media market in recent years? The music industry has gradually abandoned independent bands of musicians as being too difficult to work with (and less profitable, since they want to be paid a fair share). Instead, the industry relies more and more upon hired contractors, specialists who simply "perform" songs written by marketing analysts using cliché components, all designed to spoon feed an unsophisticated customer base. The performers are themselves often amazing talents and very technically skilled in their areas of expertise, but in such a micro-managed environment they lack the freedom to connect with other musicians in a way that unleashes the full potential of their art. It is now a well-known classic dichotomy (e.g., Beatles vs. Monkees, punk vs. pop, etc.), with a clear shift toward the increasingly "produced" end of the spectrum over time. The popular music stars of today are thrust into the spotlight by winning television song-and-dance game shows, rather than by earning gradual recognition by making inspired and independently composed music in collaboration with other great talents. Thus the possibility of achieving a groove in popular music has been greatly diminished, and the music industry has floundered owing to their inability to bring great music to market, while their executives point the blame instead at internet file sharing.

Analogous dichotomies have also played out in many other facets of life in recent decades, and even extend into areas as far reaching as the pure arts and sciences. Financial stresses play an important role, such as stronger (penny-pinching) profit motives in entertainment, or diminished budgets for public funding of the pure sciences. In the sciences, such pressures force research scientists into niche specialties that help ensure continuity of financial support, since funding for scientific research is relatively easy to secure in the case of straightforward, incremental, tool-based research projects. There has also been a sort of ambient political pressure exerted upon a wide variety of institutions, both public and private, to adopt a "corporate-like" model which is believed by some ideologues to be more efficient than the alternatives. A correlated focus on "metrics" and quantification of outcomes for scientific research also contributes to this kind of "incrementalization" of science, and in many academic institutions it now predominantly drives hiring and promotion decisions for scientists. What has been lost in this shift of priorities is the inter-connectivity of the particular research tools and their practitioners to the over-arching big picture questions that should really be the primary driving force that impels the sciences forward. And, most importantly, it greatly diminishes the possibilities for scientists to come together as free thinkers and produce the kind of non-linear interactions (i.e., the grooves) that really move a science forward far more rapidly than they could ever achieve on their own.

What does all of this have to do with ELSI? In my view, ELSI is inherently built to foster a scientific groove, and its success depends upon achieving the kinds of synergy I discussed above. Bucking the trend toward "incrementalization" and over-specialization which prevails at many other academic institutions in the world, ELSI is instead aiming to address some of the greatest and most important scientific questions ever posed, and is elevating such questions to primary importance. ELSI's plan is to achieve such a groove by bringing together a special group of scientists from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, add the right catalysts to the mixture, and then produce a strongly exothermic reaction among all ELSI members. As such, ELSI is a crucible for making large forward advances in our science. We are very excited to be a part of this great endeavor, and I know that I will personally derive a great deal of satisfaction by finding a groove at ELSI. See you in August!