Interview with Prof. Stephen Mojzsis

Q: What is your research focus?

A. I have many research foci, but there's a common theme that unites them all, and that is, how do we get the kind of world like Earth that is life sustaining? What we've started to understand now after detailing, documenting more than 7000 exoplanets in our catalogue of what's out there, is that there's this enormous diversity of planet types.

So my research focus is to try to make sense of that diversity by using chemical, physical principles from our own solar system, including geochemical, planetary and nuclear astrophysical principles, to create models that we can test against data from observation of these exoplanets. And the ultimate goal of these combined research foci is to answer the question: what is our context in the universe? We've thought of ourselves in a kind of Copernican way that we're not that special and we're just like every other star and planet. But I think we don't really know that. Not yet.

Q: What sparked your journey into this field?

A. Well, I credit my parents very much for this because they were extremely supportive of me and my curiosity of the natural world. For instance, when I showed interest in rocks, minerals, fossils, dinosaurs, planets, and so on, they made sure to feed my interest and encourage me by getting books and other publication materials, by watching television programs on nature and science topics, and so forth. Then as I progressed in my studies through to the time I reached college, they were, again, very supportive, and this in turn translated into the kind of friendships that I made with people of like mind who took their studies seriously, but also enjoyed themselves and enjoyed the spirit of inquiry - of asking questions and not being afraid of asking questions.

Q: What is the most awe-inspiring moment you've had in your scientific journey?

A. I've had a number of awe-inspiring professional experiences. And these experiences are all the same, but they are for different instances. It is when I discovered something for the first time when nobody else has been there. And in this discipline that I'm in - in this natural science discipline - this is a rare event, and we try to make it not-so-rare. But for a moment, or for a short time, I have the exhilarating feeling that I'm alone in the universe with this knowledge.

Q: Is there something you wish that more people understood about your field?

A. I'm going to answer that question more broadly by saying that I wish people were more tolerant. That they were more tolerant of ideas that challenge their own preconceptions of how the world works. Much like we ask for tolerance in religious or non-religious convictions, in political preference, and so forth, I ask for tolerance in the intellectual realm.

The ability to be able to say: my mind can be changed if you convince me with the weight of the data. There is an instinctual fear, I think, for most of us to abandon a precious idea. But I would like to say that part of being tolerant is the willingness to let go of an idea that is no longer valid.

Q: What do you think are the ingredients for success in research?

A. I think that in the scientific field, the first item in the ingredients list is patience, that one must have the patience to take time to learn the nuts and bolts necessary for you to understand a problem. To do that takes work.

That's the second part- focus. The intention of understanding something is not going to come to you necessarily naturally. It takes training, much like logical thinking. We are trained as scientists to be logical thinkers and come to the conclusion based on evidence and observation and tests. But this is not natural thinking. Natural thinking is to explain what you see based on an answer somebody's already given you or based on a hunch or a guess or your imagination. That's not how we work.

The next item on the ingredients list is stubbornness. If you have a good idea, don't give up on it. Work on it, and if you are unable to make progress with it, but you still hold the opinion that this is a good idea, then seek assistance, seek help with a collaborator who you get along with. That really helps. It may be the most brilliant person, but you can't make any progress with them because something is in the way.

So then finally, you come to the realization that if you achieve success in research, a lot of it is on you, on your ability to pull yourself together, to have the patience, to do the work, to be stubborn, to not give up.

And in the end, share what you know. So success in research is not keeping the information to yourself, but making it available and therefore useful to others.

Q: What advice would you give to young scientists?

A. The first thing I would request is that young scientists consider, as they're embarking on their journey in research, to question themselves now - if this is really what they want to do. Many, many, many times I've come across friends, colleagues, associates, et cetera, who discover that somehow, by accident, while they were not noticing, they're doing a PhD in something. And I bring this up because if you're a good student and you know the system and you know how to do the work, but you don't really have a plan to where you're going to go with all of this, you may have a personal crisis that causes you to leave the field, switch gears, go from a PhD in astrophysics to an MBA, or maybe go to medical school or something like that.

So the sole purpose of obtaining a PhD is to have the credentials to do research, original research. And if that is what motivates you, then by all means do that. But it's not for everybody, and I think we should also understand that.

Q: What is your take on the field of geoastronomy?

A. Geoastronomy is a new idea that has grown on old foundations. The new idea is the blending of principles of Earth science, geoscience sensu stricto (strictly speaking), with astronomy and astrophysical science, to achieve what I said in my answer to your first question. It's fragile because it is new, and we have a great responsibility in geoastronomy to develop it as a truly more than an interdisciplinary science. It is a transdisciplinary science, because it takes everything from nuclear physics and experiments to mineralogy, to atmospheric chemistry, and then in the background, there's biology.

As biological entities, we cannot deny our curiosity and interest in learning whether or not the conditions on our planet here that gave rise to life may have a parallel in some of the planets either already documented to exist around other stars, or will be documented in the coming century.

So that is the new part of geoastronomy, but the ancient foundations of it go back to inquiry by people even from ancient times of what is our place in the universe and why are we here and how did we get here. And these are the kinds of questions that I think geoastronomy can help provide answers to.

Q: Why is geoastronomy interesting? Why should it be interesting for geoscientists?

A. As geoscientists, we have this privilege of living on a planet that we can sample to our heart's content. The spacecraft that we use to sample our planet are things like Toyota Land Cruisers or ships and planes and even bare feet. But as we travel to other worlds and investigate them remotely, such as Mars and asteroids and other planets, and even bring samples back from such places or analyze samples that have fallen to the Earth from these other worlds, we see many similarities and many differences with our own planet.

One thing is clear, that the chemistry of our solar system is coherent to our solar system. But what geoastronomy points out is that the coherence of our solar system ought not to be translated to a coherent chemistry of another solar system that may be very different from our own. And owing to that difference, we have to understand what that difference means for process and for the outcomes. We're in the process of doing that as geoastronomers, by performing experiments, running models that are not Earth-centric but indeed match the characteristics of that target exo-system.

That is what makes geoastronomy, I think, useful for Earth scientists because it extends our parameter space to plausible areas where compositions may be wildly different from our own.