Burning Man… what a controversial topic these days. The annual festival received quite a bit of media attention this year, with a particular emphasis on how the ‘tech elite’ do burning man. Now that we are no longer in the early September Black Rock City news deluge I wanted to forever out myself as a raging hippie and describe why I keep going back to the festival: for the science of course!

This is a view of my camp, the Phage, as viewed from the main street in Black Rock City. I have no idea why the CH-47 is doing a flyover… everything else is completely standard for Burning Man. Notice the 3 million Volt Tesla coil which my roommates built.

I suspect that at this point, this motivation may seem counter-intuitive or even implausible, but let me elaborate. First, we should start with a question: what is Burning Man? Answer: this question is impossible to answer. The difficulty of answering this question is why I’m writing this post. Most people oversimplify and describe the event as a ‘bunch of hippies doing drugs in the desert’ or as ‘a music festival with a dash of art’ or as ‘my favorite time of the year’ and on and on. There are nuggets of truth in all of these answers but none of them convey the diversity of the event. With upwards of 65,000 people gathered for a week, my friends and I like to describe it as a “choose your own adventure” sort of experience. I choose science.

My goal for this post is to give you a sense of the sciency activities which take place in my camp. Coupling this with the fact that science is a tiny subset of the Burning Man ethos, you should come away convinced that there’s much more to the festival than just ‘a bunch of hippies doing drugs in the desert and listening to music.’

I camp with The Phage, as in bacteriophage, the incredibly abundant virus which afflicts bacteria. There are about 200 people in our camp, most of whom are scientists, with a median age of over 30. Only about 100 people camp with the Phage in any given year. The camp also houses some hackers, entrepreneurs and artists but scientific passion is unequivocally our unifying trait. Some of the things we assembled this year include:

Dr. F and Dr. B’s 3 million Volt musical Tesla coil. Humans were inserted for scale.

Musical Tesla coil: two of my roommates built a 3 million Volt musical Tesla coil. Think about this… it’s insane. The project started while they were writing their Caltech PhD theses (EE and Applied Physics) and in my opinion, the Tesla coil’s scale is a testament to the power of procrastination! Thankfully, they both finished their PhDs. After doing so, they spent the months between their defenses and Burning Man building the coil in earnest. Not only was the coil massive–with the entire structure standing well over 20 feet tall–but it was connected through MIDI to a keyboard. Sound is just pressure waves moving through air, and lightning moves lots of air, so this was one of the loudest platforms on the playa. I manned the coil one evening and one professional musician told me it was “by far the coolest instrument he has ever played.” Take a brief break from reading this and watch this video!

Dr. Brainlove getting ready for a midnight stroll and then getting a brainlift.

Dr. Brainlove: we built a colossal climbable “art car” in the shape of a brain which was covered in LEDs and controlled from a wireless EEG device. Our previous art car (Dr. Strangelove) died at the 2013 festival, so last winter our community rallied and ‘brainstormed’ the theme for this vehicle. After settling on a neuroscience theme, one of my campmates in Berkeley scanned her brain and sent a CAD file to Arcology Now in Austin, TX who created an anatomically correct steel frame. We procured a yellow school bus which had been converted to bio diesel. We raised over $30k (there were donations beyond indiegogo.) About 20 of my campmates volunteered their weekends to work at the Nimby in Oakland: hacking apart the bus, building additional structures, covering the bus with LEDs, installing a sound system, etc. One of the finishing touches was that one of my campmates who is a neurosurgeon at UCSD procured some wireless EEG devices and then he and some friends wrote software to control Dr. Brainlove’s LEDs–thus displaying someone’s live brain activity on a 30′ long by 20′ tall climbable musical art car for the entire playa to see! We already have plans to increase the LED density and therefore put on a more impressive interactive neural light show next year.

Sugarcubes: in 2013, some campmates built an epic LED sculpture dubbed “the sugarcubes”. Just watch this video and you’ll be blown away. The cubes weren’t close to operational when they arrived so there was 48 hours of hacking madness by Dan Kaminsky, Alexander Green and many brilliant others before our “Tuesday night” party. The ethos is similar to the Caltech undergrad’s party culture–the fun is in the building–don’t tell my friends but I slept through the actual party.

Ask a scientist on the left (I’m in there somewhere and so is one of my current roommates– another Caltech PhD ’13.) Science class on the right. Science everywhere!

Ask a scientist: there’s no question that this is my favorite on playa activity. This photo doesn’t do the act justice. Imagine a rotating cast of 7-8 phagelings braving dust storms and donning lab coats all FOR SCIENCE! The diversity of questions is incredible and I always learn a tremendous amount (evidenced by losing my voice three years running.) For example, this year, a senior executive at Autodesk approached and asked me a trick question related to the Sun’s magnetic field. Fear not–I was prepared! This has happened before.. and he was wearing a “space” t-shirt so my guard was up. A nuclear physicist from UCLA asked me to explain Bell test experiments (and he didn’t even know my background.) Someone asked how swamp coolers work? To be honest, I didn’t have a clear answer off the top of my head so I called over one of my friends (who was one of the earliest pioneers of optogenetics) and he nailed it immediately. Not having a clear answer to this question was particularly embarrassing because I’ve spent most of the past year thinking about something akin to quantum thermodynamics… if you can call black hole physics and holographic entanglement that.

Make/hack sessions: I didn’t participate in any of these this year but some of my campmates teach soldering/microscopy/LED programming/etc classes straight out of our camp. See photo above.

EEG and LED hacking.

Science talks: we had 4-5 science talks in a carpeted 40ft geodesic dome every evening. This is pretty self explanatory and by this point in my post, the Phage may have enough credibility that you’d believe the caliber is exceptional.

Impromptu conversations: this is another indescribable aspect. I’ll risk undermining the beauty of these conversations by using a cheap word: the ‘networking’ at Burning Man is unrivaled. I don’t mean in the for-dollar-profit sense, I mean in the intellectual and social sense. For example, one of my campmates’ brother is a string theory postdoc at Stanford. He came by our camp one evening, we were introduced, and then we met up again in the default world when I visited Stanford the following week. Burning Man is the type of place where you’ll start talking about MPEG/EFF/optogenetics/companyX/etc and then someone will say: “you know that the inventor/spokesperson/pioneer/founder/etc is at the next table over right?”

Yup, Burning Man is just a bunch of hippies doing drugs in the desert. You shouldn’t come. You definitely wouldn’t enjoy it. No fun is had and no ideas are shared. Or in other words, Burning Man: where exceptionally capable people prepare themselves for the zombie apocalypse.

Check out my friend Peretz Partensky’s Flickr feed if you want to see more photos (and credit goes to him for the photos in this post.)

At 9:10 AM, the lab next door was blasting “Born to Be Wild.”

I was at Oxford, moonlighting as a visiting researcher during fall 2013. My hosts included quantum theorists in Townsend Laboratory, a craggy great-uncle of a building. Poke your head out of the theory office, and Experiment would flood your vision. Our neighbors included laser wielders, ion trappers, atom freezers, and yellow signs that warned, “DANGER OF DEATH.”

Down the corridor in Townsend Laboratory.

Hardly the neighborhood Mr. Rogers had in mind.

The lab that shared a wall with our office blasted music. To clear my head of calculations and of Steppenwolf, I would roam the halls. Some of the halls, that is. Other halls had hazmat warnings instead of welcome mats. I ran into “RADIATION,” “FIRE HAZARD,” “STRONG MAGNETIC FIELDS,” “HIGH VOLTAGE,” and “KEEP THIS TOILET NEAT AND TIDY.” Repelled from half a dozen doors, I would retreat to the office. Kelly Clarkson would be cooing through the wall.

“We can hear them,” a theorist observed about the experimentalists, “but they can’t hear us.”

Dangers lurked even in the bathroom.

Experiment should test, disprove, and motivate theories; and theory should galvanize and (according to some thinkers) explain experiments. But some theorists stray from experiment like North America from Pangaea.

The theoretical physics I’ve enjoyed is abstract. I rarely address platforms, particular physical systems in which theory might incarnate. Quantum-information platforms include electrons in magnetic fields, photons (particles of light), ion traps, quantum dots, and nuclei such as the ones that image internal organs in MRI machines.

Instead of addressing electrons and photons, I address mathematics and abstract physical concepts. Each of these concepts can incarnate in different forms in different platforms. Examples of such concepts include preparation procedures, evolutions, measurements, and memories. One preparation procedure defined by one piece of math can result from a constant magnetic field in one platform and from a laser in another. Abstractness has power, enabling one idea to describe diverse systems.

I’ve enjoyed wandering the hills and sampling the vistas of Theory Land. Yet the experimentalist next door cranked up the radio of reality in my mind. “We can hear them,” a theorist said. In Townsend Laboratory, I began listening. My Oxford collaborators and I interwove two theoretical frameworks that describe heat transferred and work performed on small scales. One framework, one-shot statistical mechanics, has guest-starred on this blog.

The other framework consists of fluctuation relations, which describe deviations from average behaviors by small physical systems. A quantum particle on one side of a wall has a tiny probability of tunneling through without boring any hole. Since the probability is tiny, the average particle doesn’t tunnel (during any reasonably short amount of time). When analyzing macroscopic systems—say, the roughly 10²⁴ atoms that form your left thumbnail—we assume that every particle behaves like the average particle. We can’t when analyzing minuscule systems such as one short strand of DNA. Deviations from average behaviors appear in experimental data about small systems as they do not appear in data about large systems. Fluctuation relations help us understand those deviations.

My colleagues and I addressed “information,” “systems,” and “interactions.” We deployed abstract ideas, referencing platforms only when motivating our work. Then a collaborator challenged me to listen through the wall.

Experimentalists have tested fluctuation relations. Why not check whether their data supports our theory? At my friend’s urging, I contacted experimentalists who’d shown that DNA obeys a fluctuation relation. The experimentalists had unzipped and re-zipped single DNA molecules using optical tweezers, which resemble ordinary tweezers but involve lasers. Whenever the experimentalists pulled the DNA, they measured the force they applied. They concluded that their platform obeyed an abstract fluctuation theorem. The experimentalists generously shared their data, which supported our results.

Experimentalists unzipped and rezipped DNA to test fluctuation relations. This depiction of the set-up comes from this article.

My colleagues and I didn’t propose experiments. We didn’t explain why platforms had behaved in unexpected ways. We checked calculations with recycled data. But we ventured outside Theory Land. We learned that one-shot theory models systems modeled also by fluctuation relations, which govern experiments. This link from one-shot theory to experiment, like the forbidden corridors in Townsend Laboratory, invite exploration.

In Townsend, I didn’t suffer the electric shocks or the explosions advertised on the doors (though the hot water in the bathroom nearly burned me). I turned out not to need those shocks. Blasting rock music at 9:10 AM can wake even a theorist up to reality.