When Dr. Charles M. Vest delivered his 1995 presidential address to students and faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he made a startling admission: “I began to realize,” he said, “that in the rush to explain the importance of what we in universities know, we avoided explaining that what we don’t know is more important.”

Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus of MIT addresses LSU on March 31, 2008, in the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship Series. Vest stressed the importance of technological innovation and of blurring the lines between science and engineering.

Vest visited LSU in March of 2008 as the latest speaker in the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship Series. During his visit, Vest recalled his remarks at MIT on the limits of science and human understanding, later published in his book, Pursuing the Endless Frontier: Essays on MIT and the Role of Research Universities (2005, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press).

Vest’s essay, “What We Don’t Know,” emerged from an informal survey of leading MIT faculty asked to sketch the outer boundaries of their respective fields. Their responses revealed both a vast landscape of future research and a great eagerness to enter it.

All science, Vest said, “accrues ultimately from our enthusiasm for mysteries.”

At any given time at LSU, over 6000 faculty and graduate students are engaged in thousands of independent research projects, all pushing at the edges of what we know and what is possible to know. Four university researchers recently accepted Charles Vest’s challenge to contemplate the question, “What don’t we know?”

Their answers suggest big mysteries remain.

A Question of Foresight

Arjen Boin, US editor of Public Administration, Public Administration Institute

On the night of May 10, 1940, the German army invaded Holland, taking the country by surprise. The Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Major Sas, had warned his government several times when and where the invasion would take place. His warnings were ignored.

Failures of foresight precede many disasters. The CIA and the FBI had all the information needed to prevent 9/11. NASA knew about the space shuttle Challenger’s foam problems. Louisiana officials were intimately familiar with consequences of breaking levees. The current housing crisis came announced. So why did these disasters happen?

Most disasters appear painfully self-evident in hindsight. Commissions of inquiry, in breathtaking prose, trace each disaster back to a familiar combination of political pressure, organizational failures, and operator error. They list the signals of impending doom that remained unheard.

But it is not so much failure as human incapacity that allows seemingly clear warnings to go unheeded. Research has taught us why politicians, managers and operators do not hear these warning signals. People have developed many ways to ignore or downplay indicators of possible failure (we know how to fool ourselves). Moreover, it is hard to imagine how supposedly unbreakable things can and often do break down. Organizations do not compensate for these individual failures. In fact, they often exacerbate them. Human capacity to “read” warnings is, in other words, inherently limited.

Intriguingly, some organizations and individuals do foresee and act upon the first signals of trouble (while managing to ignore the daily plethora of false warnings). They intervene in time and prevent disasters from occurring. How they accomplish this amazing feat remains unknown.

Why do some organizations and individuals recognize what others do not see? Research should be aimed to answer that question. We must learn to recognize disasters in their earliest stages of development. We need to understand the causes, conditions and characteristics that give rise to a disaster. Research should identify the “tipping points” in this process, and develop indicators for these critical thresholds. If we know what to look for, we just might see the next one coming.

Why is the Universe Made Out of Matter Rather Than Anti-matter?

Thomas Kutter, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy

Immediately after the big bang, the starting point of our universe, matter and anti-matter are thought to have existed in equal amounts. Models predict that over the course of time, matter and anti-matter will interact and annihilate one another. If the universe began with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, some mechanism must have caused an asymmetry between these constituents to allow the formation of the universe we know today. What is that mechanism, and why did it favor matter? We don’t know.

Recently, models linking the dominance of matter in today’s observable universe to the characteristics of the fundamental particles are regaining momentum from new measurements in the field of neutrino physics.

Neutrinos are the lightest and most abundant of all known fundamental particles. And since they interact very rarely with other particles, they are also the least studied of the known particles representing the building blocks of our universe. Today’s neutrinos are relics of the Big Bang, or are produced in stars like our Sun and in supernovae. Neutrinos can also be produced in terrestrial laboratories, and it is neutrinos from the Sun and man-made sources that we study for answers to our questions.

Neutrinos exist in three different types and can change from one type to another as they travel from their source to our detector, a phenomenon called neutrino mixing or neutrino oscillations. A major goal of our new generation neutrino experiments is to search for a difference in the oscillation behavior of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, where the latter is the antimatter partner of the former. Since this measurement requires a more complete understanding of the neutrino mixing itself, we are now entering a phase of precision measurements of neutrino mixing parameters.

Working with a team of international experts, the neutrino research group at LSU hopes to learn more about the role neutrinos may have played during the earliest moments of the universe and how matter—namely, you and I—came to be.

We Don’t Know How to Fold Proteins

Vince LiCata, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences

More than a decade ago, I was seated next to a prominent biophysicist who announced to a room full of other biophysicists that the “protein folding problem” would be solved within five years. Some of those present nodded in agreement, but those who scoffed in disbelief remain, unfortunately, correct as the protein folding field prepares to enter its second half-century.

We know that proteins do fold into complicated shapes that allow them to perform their specific functions. We know that most of them do this spontaneously, based only on the information contained in their amino acid sequence, while some require the help of other proteins, poetically called chaperones. But we cannot look at the sequence of amino acids in a protein and predict how it will fold.

The “genetic code” (the cipher that allows us to translate a DNA sequence into the amino acid sequence of the resulting protein) took nearly 10 years to unravel after the discovery of the structure of DNA. Ten years! Yet the matching of three-letter RNA codons to amino acids is so straightforward, today it is taught in junior high school science.

In contrast, we’ve been working on the “protein folding problem” for nearly 50 years and are only beginning to occasionally come close to solving it. Our best efforts come via tremendous amounts of computation (one recent study used 140,000 linked CPUs), and even these predictions are often so off the mark as to be hilarious. One thing we can do with some success is determine the folding of a new protein if we already know the structure of a related one. This is a very useful advance, but it’s a bit like painting by numbers: we still don’t know how either protein folded in the first place.

Granted, solving the “genetic code” and the “protein folding code” are problems of different dimensionality. The genetic code is a translation of one-dimensional (1-D) information (the DNA sequence) into another 1-D language (the protein sequence). To solve the folding problem, we must accurately predict the shape of a three-dimensional object (the folded protein) from the 1-D protein sequence; this type of translation is not well understood.

Who knows, maybe in the next five years we’ll crack it—but you might want to hedge your bets.

Wherefore Atlantic Studies: Do We Yet Know This Place?

William Boelhower, Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Thomas Professor of Atlantic Studies, Department of English

What we are trying to do in Atlantic studies is to create a new object. We know it is an inter- and multidisciplinary object, yet we don’t know what kind, precisely. We find ourselves having to undo – or jump - some disciplinary university fences in order to study it; we have to take them down before we can find space for a new dialogue across the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences. It is from this dialogue that the new object of Atlantic studies will emerge.

Part of our effort must be nurturing a multidisciplinary atmosphere for this space. We must draw from our existing strengths in related fields, our local talents, southern culture, southern history and literature: LSU, like Louisiana, is a site of engagement, an ideal space for generating the kind of research atmosphere we are trying to create.

What we want to do is to pull together a notion of Louisiana as the site and intersection of a wide-ranging circulation of historical and cultural trajectories, to place it in context of the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds. Louisiana has always been rich in its peoples, architectural forms, landscapes and in its languages, music, cuisine, and literature. It is rich precisely because of its varied cultural strata and its diasporic cultures. These strata cannot be understood unless we follow their trajectories into the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, to Africa and Europe.

As we know, Louisiana is in the South, yet is not the South; it is Louisiana, a specific place. So what we are looking for – what we don’t really know at all - is precisely what is under our noses, this place.

Our first step toward discovery will be simply allowing Louisiana to speak in all its richness. We need to see it as a total social fact, as a form of 'total history' - not as reduced and filtered by one discipline or another but as an object that requires a convergence of forms of inquiry that arise from the site itself. It is the site that demands a team approach!

In this context we no longer have separate worlds - southern history, southern literature, or 'Louisiana.' What we have is a site in which many worlds intersect and a collaborative exchange across disciplines and languages. When we let Louisiana speak as a site in all its complexity, we see that it has always been part of a larger world, both Caribbean and Atlantic. This is new.

This is the aura of the new research rising in our midst.

...from the Autumn 2008 Issue