miconductor—in small magnets for memory in computers, for example. What they might not know is that they’re also studying Picasso paint at the same time. It’s the same material.
Your work helped settle a long-standing question about the kind of paint Picasso used. Do you think there are other controversies you might be able to resolve?
I think we can help support other kinds of research by art historians. We have to be careful, though. All the science we do will always be just one building block. We cannot expect to put a painting into a machine and out comes a paper that tells me who the artist was.
Has your perspective of art changed after you started these projects?
Absolutely. I have gained the ability to read a little bit more, so even with my eyes I try to look below the surface. I see paintings differently now. I ask myself more questions; I try to form a closer relationship to art.
What kinds of questions do you ask yourself?
That depends on the painting. As scientists we are trained to think and operate in a certain way. It would be wrong to say science can’t touch your feelings—like when you get a result after hundreds of hours of trying. I can get very emotional about science, in a good and bad sense. But in science, we want effects in terms of numbers and graphs. When you stand in front of a painting, that’s exactly what you don’t want. You don’t want to analyze. You want to receive it without filtering. This is about two different aspects of life.
"We cannot expect to put a painting into a machine and out comes a paper that tells me who the artist was."
Was there a particular moment during this work when your perspectives about art changed?
One of the first times I visited the Art Institute, I had an experience few other visitors get. I went to the back, where I saw a painting that was not in its frame. You could see the artist had scribbled on the back of the canvas. When I saw that, I felt much more connected and closer to the artist, as though I was standing next to him as he was painting and scribbling.
Is there a particular historical piece or artwork you want to study?
Maybe the back of the Constitution, to see if there’s something written there! It is hard to pick a dream project. I wouldn’t necessarily pick the Mona Lisa or something just because it’s cool. It’s not so much about a particular painting, but about learning and generalizing information. If we learn what’s going on in one daguerreotype, we can perhaps save hundreds or thousands of them.
After the Picasso analysis, you moved on to study daguerreotypes with the Smithsonian. Do you see yourself becoming a “cultural heritage scientist?”
It’s only a small part of what I do. As a scientist, I enjoy doing some stuff that is out of the normal. I try to apply what I know to different spheres. One of those spheres is cultural heritage, and I fell in love with it. Now I’m even contacted by people who have a Picasso at home and want us to work on it.
Will I be a cultural heritage scientist at some point? No, I will not be. I also have other interests. The underlying drive for me is to push the boundaries of X-ray microscopy—[whether it is] in cultural heritage, biology, magnets, or to shrink your cellphone and make it faster.
Have you applied the information from these projects to other studies?
Yes, absolutely. For example, in this daguerreotype work we studied corrosion by sulfide particles from the atmosphere. It has direct implications for other materials, like the circuitry in cell phones, or [metals in] oil pipelines. Pipelines can get destroyed by the same kind of sulfur corrosion that goes on in the daguerreotype.
So when we study how sulfur diffuses into voids beneath the surface in this daguerreotype, we are seeing the same processes happening in an oil pipeline. Since the daguerreotype is 150 years old, it allows us to fast-forward what we would usually have to simulate.
And if you know the chemistry, you can apply this data from art to nanotechnology?
That’s something we can do. With the zinc oxide, we can learn to make better displays. 