Range - David Epstein Page 0,82

thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does. “This is a hazardous situation,” he warned, “for the young people and also for the future of science.”

Fortunately, it is possible, even today, even at the cutting edge, even in the most hyperspecialized specialties, to cultivate land where both birds and frogs can thrive.

* * *

• • •

Andy Ouderkirk laughed as he recalled the story. “It was with three gentlemen who owned the company, and I’ll just forever remember them holding up a vial and just looking at me and saying, ‘This is a breakthrough in glitter.’”

Standard glitter sparkles; this glitter blazed, as if the vial held a colony of magical prismatic fireflies. Ouderkirk envisioned a lot of applications for multilayer optical film, but glitter was a pleasant surprise. “Here I am, a physical chemist,” he told me. “I usually think of breakthroughs as being very sophisticated advanced technologies.”

Ouderkirk was an inventor at Minnesota-based 3M, one of twenty-eight “corporate scientists,” the highest title among the company’s sixty-five hundred scientists and engineers. The road to breakthrough glitter began when he endeavored to challenge the conception of a two-hundred-year-old principle of physics known as Brewster’s law, which had been interpreted to mean that no surface could reflect light near perfectly at every angle.

Ouderkirk wondered if layering many thin plastic surfaces on top of one another, each with distinct optical qualities, could create a film that custom-reflected and -refracted various wavelengths of light in all directions. A group of optics specialists he consulted assured him it could not be done, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. “If they say, ‘It’s a great idea, go for it, makes sense,’ what is the chance you’re the first person to come up with it? Precisely zero,” he told me.

In fact, he was certain it was physically possible. Mother Nature offered proof of concept. The iridescent blue morpho butterfly has no blue pigment whatsoever; its wings glow azure and sapphire from thin layers of scales that refract and reflect particular wavelengths of blue light. There were more pedestrian examples too. The plastic of a water bottle refracts light differently depending on the light’s angle. “Everybody knows this, that knows anything about polymers,” Ouderkirk said. “It’s in front of you literally every day. But nobody ever thought of making optical films out of this.”

He formed and led the small team that accomplished just that. In less than the width of a human hair, the film comprises hundreds of polymer layers exquisitely tailored to reflect, refract, or let pass specific wavelengths of light. Unlike typical optical films, or even mirrors, multilayer optical film can reflect light nearly perfectly, and no matter the angle at which it arrives. It can even enhance the light as it bounces around the layers before returning to the viewer. Hence the glitter. Normal glitter doesn’t reflect light well in every direction, but the breakthrough glitter dazzled in all directions at once.

The applications of the invention that was supposed to be impossible reached a tad beyond glitter. Inside cell phones and laptops, multilayer optical film reflects and “recycles” light that would normally be absorbed as it travels from a backlight to the screen, thus transmitting more light to the viewer, and drastically reducing the power needed to keep screens bright. It improves efficiency in LED light bulbs, solar panels, and fiber optics. It enhanced the energy efficiency of a projector so dramatically that it only needed a tiny battery for bright video. When a 2010 cave-in trapped thirty-three Chilean gold-and-copper miners a half mile underground for sixty-nine days, pocket-sized projectors with multilayer optical film were lowered through a 4.5-inch hole so that the men could receive messages from their families, safety instructions, and, naturally, a Chile-Ukraine soccer match.

Multilayer optical film is relatively cheap and can be made in large volume. Sitting on