bbling.
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. For the daguerreotypes, we could help save oil pipelines, nano-electronics, or anything that corrodes due to sulfur.
Although the investigation of that particular paint chip is done, extending this work into other fields will go on for years. This is not a project that starts and ends. It branches like a tree. Along the way you encounter other projects where you can use this knowledge.
For instance, the people who study zinc oxide for magnetic data storage might learn something about why their spectra look the way they do if they read our paper. They could learn about the role of impurities in zinc oxide in their samples. Many scientists try to minimize the complexity of what they’re studying, so they might disregard such impurities. But with this data, we can tell if there’s something inside the impurities that might influence their calculations. We can put [that knowledge] into designing better materials.
So it is taking the knowledge of what is, and applying it to what we want to make.
Yes, the same way people might say that when we design airplanes, we learn from nature. When we design nanomaterials, we can learn from the past to design smarter materials.
You said, “If they read the paper, they might learn about this.” Do you feel scientists working on new materials are unlikely to read these papers?
One of the problems with cultural heritage and science is that they don’t usually publish in the same journals. So the information might be out there, but people are not reading it. There’s not a particular area where work at this intersection is published. It’s either A or B, and it makes some results invisible.
Is this a barrier between scientists and art historians?
There’s certainly a part of that, and it goes in both directions. If you want an interface of science and art, it requires communication and willingness to learn about the other side. The really difficult part of science and art is creativity. So in that sense, there’s a lot of art in science, and science in the arts.
Do you see the need for a new 