 on Think Tech Hawaii of The Creative Life, a show of the American Creativity Association, whose mission is to promote a more creative society. And to that end, today's show is called A Life of Risk-Taking Superheroes, Physics, and Creativity. And co-host with me today is Darlene Boyd. Darlene is the chair of the board of the American Creativity Association. She will be joining me as co-host of The Creative Life from time to time throughout our series. Darlene is recognized for her research in critical and creative problem thinking, and has worked with our guest today at the University of California, Irvine. She will be introducing him. So, Darlene, Aloha, and welcome to The Creative Life. Thank you. Aloha to you, Phyllis, and Aloha to our viewers, and Aloha to our guest. It gives me great pleasure to have this opportunity to introduce to you a very special person from the University of California, Irvine. Michael Denin, known as Mike to many of us. Professor Denin is a professor of physics and astronomy. He's also dean of students and vice provost for teaching and learning. And this has been, I think, very easy to say, this has been a very interesting year for Michael, given the responsibilities that he holds and the pandemic problems associated with that. I think for our viewers, I believe you'll find Michael to be yet another guest that lives and practices The Creative Life, and that will emerge and be verified as we go through our conversation. So, my first thought that I have for you, Professor Denin, is why superheroes? What's that show on that path? You were pretty much in a very secure position, I would think, an admirable position, being a full professor of physics. And I know that's your passion. And then yet you've gone and discerned and diverted to a number of different paths. So, let's start there. Sounds great. Well, first, I'll say Aloha as well, just to everyone, to you all into the audience. And thank you so much for having me. You know, Darlene, it's really one of those key moments in my life. And it often comes back to the students. You know, you go into becoming a professor and doing the research. But I also always loved the teaching and the students. And I was very involved in our honors program at the time. And the students who work in the dorms have to run joint social academic events. And one of them reached out to me and said, we want to show the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. And we'd like you to come and talk about the physics of Superman. And I was like, okay. And I said yes, purely because it was students. And that was the point where then to just, you know, overuse the word, I had to get creative because I had never done the physics of Superman and asked myself, well, what physics would I want to do? And for those of you who do not remember the movie, there was a lot of things I did. But one of the famous things he does is he flies around the earth stops it and turns it backwards. And so I actually did a fluid dynamics calculation of how fast you would have to go, assuming normal friction with the air to stop the earth and spin it backwards. It turns out to be incredibly fast. I'll just leave it at that. But that started me on this career. I realized that there was just a lot of physics and science embedded in pop culture. And everybody knows superheroes and the comic people at some level, right? Even people who have no interest in it have heard of them or know something about it. So I thought, what the heck? And to thank me, the students gave me a book, The Physics of Superheroes, that had 10 chapters. And we ran freshman seminars at the time. And I said, oh, this will be a great freshman seminar because there's 10 chapters. And as you know, darling, we have 10 weeks, a chapter a week. That's a little bit of role reversal. This is getting you the book. Exactly. No, I know. And then from there, you know, it got noticed by the newspaper. And things just kind of snowballed. And a lot of what it came down to is just saying, yes, the interesting opportunities throughout that journey in ways like you said, you know, that wouldn't necessarily be normal for a traditional academic to do. And one thing I learned in that moment as I went down this path is that people have this weird idea that academic and rigorous courses need to have boring titles. And if you have an interesting title, it's just for fun and fluff. Very quickly, people learned how hard my science of superhero courses work. And that was the other interesting piece that really engaged people and got them interested. So there was a lot of fun. There was rigor in your course, a rigorous approach. I find it intriguing. I find many things that you do are on the edge. And clearly, as you moved into administration and a very strong and a very highly responsible position, that you seem to like to take a risk. Well, you know, I think risk, calculated risk is one of the hardest things to learn to be willing to do. But it is part of being creative, right? We most often learn from our failures. And I actually credit a lot of that to being an experimental physicist in many ways. And we can show picture five of me working in my lab just so people can get a sense of what that looks like. There's a lot of stuff behind me, most of which we build sort of on the fly, a lot of which will often break at various times and not work through many iterations. And it's risk taking that moves us forward in science. And so you're right, Darlene. I think I immediately, when I first went into this position, I gave the staff a big warning that I really only know how to do things the way I ran my lab. And that is by willing to try things, you have to be willing to stop doing them when they're not working, which is not necessarily a common feature at the university. So you have to be willing to recognize the mistake and stop and change. But it's also through those risks that you get some of your greatest successes. And so that connection back to the lab was always there in everything I went into. I will say the thing that made me most nervous was going into the science of superhero stuff. Because you have to when you are in versions like this and interviews, right, you only have a limited amount of time. And that was one of the hardest things for me to learn as someone who was used to the 50 minute academic talk to go on, be interviewed by TV or radio. And it really varies. But you get anywhere from, you know, 15 seconds, you know, to a minute or two, and a minute or two is nothing in academic time to kind of get your point across. And so you have to find new and creative ways to say things. And it's actually played out really well, because I'll just jump to something that's been really fun, the tail end. And we can talk about the journey from starting with the student asked me to where I am now, but getting to be on this podcast with the brain trust that I've done, which we have image number two for has really allowed me to achieve a major lifelong dream, which was to appear in the San Diego Comic Con on a panel. And for anyone who's into superheroes and nerds, you know, that's a huge, a huge thing. But that the brain trust in the podcast, working with the two other gentlemen on that, you know, Ben Siepzer and Dan Glenn has just been a lot of fun and really allowed me to push the boundaries of how we use pop culture to explain science of all types. I know Phyllis is on the edge of her chair with a question for you. But before I do that, just let me mention, especially for our viewers that might be looking at you and thinking they've seen you somewhere before, you also appear on the history channel with ancient aliens. At some point, I'd like to know the difference between ancient aliens and present day aliens. But that might be another show. Let's back to you. I love that you brought that up because I knew I'd seen you somewhere. And what's really a burning question for me is, is with this show, we're trying to introduce different ways to be more creative in your personal and professional life and getting tips from you. And we are risk taking and being open to new opportunities are two things that have been making their way through your stories. And one of the things that we didn't talk about getting ready for this show at all was how that form of risk taking and opportunity grabbing that you engage in inculcates or sparks creativity in your students. So do you have a pre superheroes teaching life and a post superheroes teaching life? And can you talk about the dynamism in the classroom around you because you're doing that? Yeah. And I think it comes down to recognizing the need to go beyond just what I would call the standard problem solving approach of particularly physics, math, those classes. Now I will say pre getting into superhero stuff. I always was pushing the boundaries of creativity in that space. And so one of the very technical things, intro physics major first part about it is what we call kinematics, which is just studying how things move up and down ramps, swing on ropes, all of those sort of basic situations. And there's a very standard way to teach it. And I was at a talk once where I heard a totally different approach that involves actually drawing diagrams in a very clever way. And I always like getting students to think about problems in a new way, right? Part of an interesting piece of creativity is the risk taking the flexibility, but also being very aware of what you do know, right? And what I really tried always to get students to think about right from the beginning was in physics, what makes it so creative is that we only have about five rules, but they can be used to solve thousands of problems. So the creativity comes not in making up a new rule, but in getting the correct or not the correct, the most useful or different combination of the rules you already know. So it's kind of like a training ground because you know that you're going to start with five tools and then you get to mix and match them however you want. It's sort of like the piano and music, right? The notes are fixed for you. It happens to be 88, not five, but you know you're just using those notes where some other instruments, you can get more creative with the notes you reach. So you can start with the piano, be highly creative and then go beyond it. Now post superheroes, a whole new world opened up because suddenly I realized that there was things you can do that don't rely just on equation, getting students to write about the physics, perhaps into a different area of their creativity, showing them videos that have both good and bad physics in it. So everybody now at least knows of the Marvel universe and all the Marvel movies with the Avengers and Iron Man and Spider-Man and everything. Those movies have been awesome for me because you can have students watch almost any scene in the movie and there is stuff that's good physics and there's stuff that's bad physics, but it's subtle at times. And to force yourself to take these abstract rules that before you just use as equations and convert them into the language uses aspects of creativity that are very different. And I'll say one other final thing in this space, in my superhero courses, the last assignment is always to design your own superhero with its own backstory, its own superpower, and then critique the superpower you designed on the basis of science. And that just again takes it in this third other alternate creativity channel that I just find really, really engaging for the students, but it's teaching them also how to think creatively and how to think out of the box about things. That's awesome. And Michael, is Spider-Man tech and Batman tech and Star Wars tech are those available on YouTube that people can tune in and go back and hear what you did or is that proprietary? They come on and off YouTube. The history channel shows, I think now with all the streaming services, they're probably harder to get unless you're streaming an old history channel show, but they are on YouTube. Now my science of superhero course is an open courseware course and a MOOC and you can go to the UCI open courseware site and find it there. And there are just various videos. My favorite, it's just on my web page. For UCI, I did the science of Santa Claus. I consider some of my most groundbreaking work where I actually explain how Santa Claus works from a physics point of view. Now I've updated my theories of Santa Claus in a recent episode of the F triple GPT podcast we did. I realized that I had sort of missed the key element of the physics. So this is the kind of fun thing I get to do. We've also on the podcast created the unified physics of cartoon worlds. We just completed recording one on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which brings all the different cartoon physics together. So that's kind of the fun stuff I get to do in this space of being creative. Oh, thank you so much for sharing that world. And I want to do a little shapeshifting to another very different world for you because you came out with a book that does a mashup at the intersection of physics and faith, doesn't it? Yes, exactly. Well, you know, one of the things that's always been important to me is public outreach on science. I think it's critical for the public to engage with science and I thought very carefully about it. And I do think we've been highly non creative, if I can say that, in the scientific world in most of our science outreach. Most of our science outreach, for lack of a better word, we take science and we try to simplify it for the non science audience instead of taking science and being creative about how it impacts people's lives. So if you look at the three main areas I now do public outreach and science on science and superheroes we've talked about, that has a clear connection. Darlene's mentioned ancient aliens. So I've engaged a lot with the history channel and other places on that. But then I think one of the most powerful ones is the book I wrote, Divine Science, Finding Reason at the Heart of Faith. Because what it does is I look at the fact that the most loudest voices out there in the world are on one side of the faith that argues against science and one side of science that argues against faith. And the bulk of the people in the middle therefore only hear that these two things contradict each other. And what I realized a lot of times the presentation of science and faith is kind of about making the science okay if you're a person of faith. What I realized is that my life through science, my understanding of physics and science has only enhanced my faith. It's actually been an active benefit in a very, very specific way that I hadn't really heard or seen presented before. And that's the space I wanted to engage in. And to just give a kind of practical example at the very most basic level, I think everybody agrees reality exists. I think there are a few extreme philosophers who think reality may not exist. But for the most part we agree it exists. We may not know what it is but we agree it exists. And this goes to consciously being creative. I think the mistake we make is think creativity is in answers when most of the time creativity isn't asking the right question. So people for centuries have asked does God exist? When what they're really asking is what is the nature of reality? And if you take the question from does God exist to the question what is the nature of reality, you change it from a charged debate to an interesting conversation between people with different experiences of reality. And reality is much broader than just what we experience with our senses. And now you've opened up the conversation and actually you've come up with a better scientific question than the question does God exist? And so that's what I hope to do with my book is sort of creatively approach the question. So I'm coming at it from just a completely different direction that changes the nature of the discussion. Thank you so much. There's a lot I want to ask about scale of science. I'm thinking about Albert Einstein and knowing the mind of God. And if creativity isn't right in the middle of that, I don't know what else there would be. So I appreciate that you have taken leadership in the modern day way of connecting science and faith because I'm not hearing a lot of people doing it since we had David Ballman and Albert Einstein and others that really took a lead on that. There's been a pullback. So thank you for that. Oh, you're welcome. How do you deal with the inherent dialectical tension and in the public? Well, you know, I think in the public, the way I dealt with it was my own approach, Darlene, which is probably why I'm not making a lot of sales off the book because I'm not sufficiently aggressive and controversial. But I think that that's, for me, my goal is to change that dialectic tension because it really is a much more interesting question. What is the nature of what I would call the fullness of reality, right? And we know there's physical reality. That's what science is really good at. We know there's non-physical reality. If nothing else, that's mathematics, right? You don't learn about mathematics as real, but we don't understand it through our five senses. We understand it through thinking about it. So right there sort of as a scientist, it seems to me the natural hypothesis is reality is somehow bigger than physical reality. And the interesting question is science is really good at exploring physical reality. What are our tools for exploring the larger reality? And I recognize this is a space where unfortunately, there is a lot of fraud of people out there trying to use pseudoscience words to do things. So navigating that space is very challenging, but there's also a lot of genuine, really good thought both from philosophy and lots of other areas in this space. And so we need to harness the good work that's out there and kind of normalize that in a more public way. The other piece I approach it with Darlene, again, I'm an experimental physicist. Science is fundamentally experimental. What does that mean? Well, it's simply about experiences that are reproducible and can be controlled over and over. Not all experience falls into that category. So what does it mean to extend the ideas we've learned about an experiment to better understand our full range of experiences, which are still fundamentally connected to experiments, hence the word sounding so similar? I think you said something very important and probably something that Phyllis and I at times remind ourselves and also those that we work with. You mentioned how important it is to be able to identify or frame a question and solve it. And so so often people just jump try to solve a problem without really clarifying the concept. I don't know how I assume Phyllis that you would agree. I do. Okay. I do want to I do want to call out though for the panellas in the audience on the Big Island of Hawaii, they will recognize you and with your cowboy hat. There's a strong cowboy cowgirl tradition in Hawaii and has been for years. We have one of the largest branches in the United States on the Big Island and seeing your hat and you might want to speak about that. And it reminds me of sports part of your life and how that you might elucidate us about exactly. You might want to talk a little about sports, panellas, cowboys, maybe that's a football. Is that is there a soccer ball? No, that's a football and I have to tell you. Okay, thank you. I've got my my I picked that picture even though most of my recent sports life was coaching my kids, which was both soccer and softball. The football picture I had to throw up in memory of UCI was home for the summer training for a while of the Rams when they were changing location. And in honor of the Rams coming to UCI, I filmed an entire physics of football sequence. And the media team made me put eye black on and wear a lab coat and pretend to throw a football. So I just had to bring that out for historical reasons. I think it's great. Yeah, so we've got six minutes or so I think and I really want to work in the intersection of your coaching right activity and and bring that out as well. So real quickly in that, you know, one of the things I think that we often miss kind of in in coaching teaching students and I learned very early on in my coaching career is an interesting feature. People generally know when they made a mistake, what they don't often know is when they did something right. And if we want to continue to encourage and build creativity in our students, we have to focus on pointing out the things they did right. And a great example is in soccer, you know, it's a team sport. I always told the team, if we're not making mistakes, we're not pushing our limits, we're not, you know, learning and growing mistakes come from learning and growing. But also our successes aren't always obvious. And the easy one is, you know, a player has the ball recognizes that the right move at this moment in time is a particular pass. And they expect their teammate to make a particular run. Well, they make the pass and their teammate doesn't make the run. It looks like they made a mistake, right? They kicked the ball and no one was there. But as as the people who are more maybe expert or experienced, that's the moment where I immediately have to point out to that player, the great thing they did, they were creative in the moment. They saw something that should happen. We're all learning together as a team, keep that creativity going. Or otherwise, you know, we do these great creative things and it's not recognized. And then we stop doing it. And so that was one of the first lessons I learned coaching sports is the importance of actually letting people know when they've done the right thing, as opposed to the wrong thing. And that happens in our physics problem solving all the time. I went right to my teaching where I suddenly realized, you know, students try a problem if they don't get the actual right answer at the end, they know they did something wrong. What they don't know is what parts of the problem that they do right that they want to repeat and take with them. Where was the creativity they showed for them to keep using? And so I think that was one of the biggest lessons I learned in coaching sports was to increase and leverage the creativity that's happening through positive feedback to the players and students. And do you think that that creativity on the field is contagious? In group things, you know, we can we can infect other people with creativity? I think I think that's completely true. As you know, as you watch your teammates do fun and creative things, and you see them rewarded for it, then you try and do fun and creative thing. And it just builds on itself. Oh, thank you. I have a burning kind of interest in hearing about this new building at UC Irvine. That is is the greatest thing since what life spread, superheroes, what it is. What did you do at UC Irvine? And Darlene's been telling me about so real quickly, because I know we're almost out of time, we basically made a classroom building that's all active learning classrooms, which means it supports students working in groups, actively engaging the material classrooms ranging from 30 to 400 students can do this the way the classroom is designed. And the key to this was actually convincing people to think forward. And I think that's part of the creativity is to try and ask the right question. The question that was being asked is what do faculty use now and they almost built rooms that weren't there. And I actually was one of the few times I was very forceful and said no, you know, if you build it, they will use it to change their teaching. If you don't build it, we don't have a space to change our teaching. So build the active learning rooms. And that's what we did. And that's what we have. And it's been a great success for the last three or four years. So it's been really fun to watch faculty use it and to have this aspect of teaching takeoff. Oh, thank you. We'll have to come to use the Irvine after the pandemic and try it out and and and join you. And I and it just reminds me I really want the audience to know what we were thinking about a takeaway you have for this show is you have very much embodied and that's an openness to opportunities and to risk is being at the core in your opinion of creativity. I want to want to leave that thought and Darlene, is there any final thoughts that we want to share? No, I'm just very grateful that Michael had the time to join us today. We know he's very busy and also hope our viewers have enjoyed and and have made the leap for some value to themselves also from the words of wisdom that have been shared with us all. Oh, thank you. Thank Mahalo for both of you and aloha