By Stephanie
Chase
Guest
Columnist
New
York, NY, USA
Dr. Chung-Pei Ma is the Judy Chandler Webb Professor of
Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Among the
topics she has studied are the properties of dark matter and dark energy, the
cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, galaxy formation and
evolution, supermassive black holes, and the large-scale structure of the
universe.
She is also an avid violinist and studied with me while an
undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many years
later, we reconnected while she was in New York recently to give a talk at New
York University.
STEPHANIE CHASE: What was your childhood like in Taiwan?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I had a very peaceful and protected
childhood in Taipei. My parents are both writers and journalists and had busy
careers. They provided my older brother and me with as nurturing a learning
environment as they could, while leaving us with a lot of freedom to explore
what we liked. Our home was filled with books, music, conversations, and the
smell of coffee.
The fact my mother had a serious career in journalism and was
later a senator in Taiwan set a positive example for me. I was not aware of
gender inequality until I left home.
STEPHANIE CHASE: When did you first develop an interest
in classical music and the violin?
CHUNG-PEI MA: My brother, who was five years older,
was taking violin lessons with David Liao and I often tagged along to the
lesson. My parents at first planned to start me on the piano with Mr. Liao’s
wife, but she said to wait another year when I was physically bigger. Mr. Liao
kind of took pity on me and started to teach me the violin after my brother’s
lesson. I was around five then.
Mr. Liao also ran and conducted a very successful youth
orchestra called the Taipei Century Symphony. When I was around 8, he asked me
to join the second violin section. All the other kids were teenagers and much
taller, so he had to put me in the front stand for me to see and be seen. I
still remember showing up for the first rehearsal without any preparation, seeing
many dark notes on the first page of Mozart Symphony No. 29 in A major and
having to sight read it. This piece still brings out very special feelings in
me whenever I hear it, and I have since developed very good sight-reading
skills.
I played in the orchestra until I left Taiwan for the US when
I was about 17. We toured the US once and Europe twice. I had many fond
memories of the hundreds of concerts we played over the years.
STEPHANIE CHASE: That’s a lot of concerts!
CHUNG-PEI MA: Yes, and even though almost all my
childhood Sundays were spent at rehearsals, these 10 years of exposures to a wide range of
repertoire made classical music an indispensable part of my life.
STEPHANIE CHASE: You were so engrossed in music as a
child, what led you to study astrophysics?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I was always fascinated by the night
sky and often fantasized about space travel even though Taipei had a lot of
light pollution and was often cloudy.
At school, I excelled at math and was particularly drawn to
physics in middle school. I enjoyed how we could describe and predict the
rhythm of the universe using math as a language.
STEPHANIE CHASE: It’s fascinating that you describe
the universe as having a rhythm, but then again, Kepler created scales to
demonstrate what he perceived to be the orbits of the planets, which is known
as the music of the spheres.
Why did you choose MIT, and how did this come about? You
essentially made this move on your own.
CHUNG-PEI MA: I left Taipei for Houston at the
start of 12th grade. I went to Houston since my uncle and aunt were there and
they were our closest relatives in the US.
It was my own idea to leave Taipei. I had to convince my
parents to let me go. I had found the educational system in Taiwan stifling for
a while and thought the US would be the best place to explore further my two passions: physics and music.
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| Chung-Pei Ma |
STEPHANIE CHASE: It’s clear that you are strong-willed!
CHUNG-PEI MA: One challenge I faced was it was
already September when I arrived in Houston. This was the pre-internet and web
era, and I knew nothing about how to apply for colleges in the US.
STEPHANIE CHASE: Were you fluent in English before you
arrived?
CHUNG-PEI MA: Back then, we started English
classes in 7th grade, but English is so important these days that
kids there now start to learn it much earlier. I had excellent teachers in
school who laid solid foundations, but I didn’t get to use it much until I came
to the States.
Since I arrived so late in Houston, I had to scramble to
register – and study – for the SAT and various subject tests. Fortunately, I
did well enough to have several choices. It’s amusing now to think I turned
down UC Berkeley and Caltech, where I would become a postdoctoral fellow later,
because I thought the East Coast had more culture. MIT and the rich music scene
in Boston seemed to offer exactly what I was yearning for.
STEPHANIE CHASE: Boston and Cambridge, especially, are
very special places, and I really enjoyed the period that I lived in the area.
Many students go from being at the top of their class to just
average at these very competitive institutions, but you clearly excelled there
despite studying in a foreign language – in fact, you struck me as downright
relaxed in your violin lessons. To what do you ascribe this, in addition to your
immense intelligence?
CHUNG-PEI MA: Haha, thanks for the compliment. I
think I learned how to compartmentalize and how to be efficient at an early
age. It was born out of necessity since I had to juggle the intense school work
in Taiwan and all the violin practice and youth orchestra activities.
I am the type of person who enjoys being in the moment. I
have always tried not to let the million other things distract the task in
front of me. Take our violin lessons as an example. I often walked in with math
symbols and physics equations swimming over my head. But the second I
heard music, I would instantly transform into this other universe. I loved
every minute of our lessons.
Of course, another reason I was relaxed was because you were
such a perceptive and supportive teacher. You were brilliant at
identifying trouble spots in my playing, yet you never made me feel discouraged
or belittled, and each lesson propelled me to want to get better.
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| Chung-Pei Ma |
STEPHANIE CHASE: Now it’s time for me to thank you for
the immense compliment! I really enjoyed teaching the MIT students, but you
were extra special – not only did you play very well, but you’d come in often wearing
a Peanuts tee shirt, which was very endearing, and I still recall the time you
were studying Paganini’s first Violin Concerto and you asked me if I knew how
many notes were in the first movement’s cadenza. I took a pretty good guess,
but you had actually counted them up, just because you found it interesting!
You've been a professor at Berkeley since 2001, and you
specialize in the study of black holes. Could you please describe these to us
ordinary people?
CHUNG-PEI MA: Black holes are spectacular end
products of the fatal attraction of gravity. They are the graveyards of massive
stars, those more massive than our sun. My research team is discovering and
studying the most massive black holes in the universe, weighing more than 10
billion suns. These monsters live at the centers of very massive galaxies. Some
questions we ask are: How did these black holes form in the early universe? How
have these black holes been fed to become so massive? How do they impact the
evolution of their host galaxies, including our own galaxy? Can we detect the
gravitational waves emitted from a binary of massive black holes as they
coalesce and merge to form a bigger black hole?
STEPHANIE CHASE: You’ve told me that, in essence, time
can stand still in a black hole, depending on the location of the observer. Why
is this?
CHUNG-PEI MA: The immense gravity around a black
hole distorts space as well as time – it warps space and slows down clocks. Imagine
you in a spaceship hovering – safely – above a black hole, and me falling
towards it, while shining, say, a green-color laser beam at you. You would see
the light beacon becoming redder and redder as the wavelength of the light is
stretched due to both my moving away from you – the conventional Doppler
redshift – and the strong gravitational distortion around the hole, the
so-called gravitational redshift. But don’t try this at home, for many reasons!
[An example of the Doppler effect in daily life is when a
car is honking its horn or an ambulance has a siren screaming as it moves away,
in that the pitch frequency goes down.]
STEPHANIE CHASE: Many years
ago, while on a concert tour, I visited a national observatory – I think it
might have been Kitt Peak – which was fascinating. Where
are the principal telescopes used by Berkeley?
CHUNG-PEI MA: At Berkeley, as part of the
University of California system, I have the privilege to use the two Keck
Telescopes and the sophisticated instruments, such as spectrographs and CCD
cameras, atop the volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The photo of me in front of a bunch
of monitors was taken in June 2018 in the control room of the Keck Observatory
in Waimei, which is on the Big Island of Hawaii. My team was using a new
spectrograph on Keck for the first time here. In this picture, we were getting
ready to point the telescope at the very center of a massive galaxy about 450
million light years away, where we think a giant black hole is lurking. Even
with the world's largest optical telescope, we needed to open the shutter of
the fancy camera and gather light from this galaxy for several hours so we can
get sufficient data to study the motions the stars around the black hole.
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| Chung-Pei Ma at the Keck Observatory (Waimea, Hawaii) |
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Unfortunately, here on Earth the telescopes must be placed in
increasingly remote areas due to the amount of light emitted in populated areas.
CHUNG-PEI MA: These are the largest optical telescopes on Earth. Each mirror is about
30 feet in diameter. I also use other national and international ground-based
and space-based facilities, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini
Observatory. We need multiple datasets of very high quality from several
telescopes to discover a single black hole – and they are black after all! Many
exciting new facilities are also being built, such as the Thirty-Meter Telescope
and the James Webb, which is the next Hubble Telescope.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: What discovery has surprised you the most?
CHUNG-PEI MA: A running theme of my research is I use things that emit light to infer
the existence of things we can’t see – black holes, dark matter, dark energy. What is most surprising to me is
the universe is mostly dark.
STEPHANIE CHASE: The photograph recently taken of a
black hole, through the Event Horizon Telescope used by the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, was astonishing, mainly because of the “ring of fire”
around it from gas on the so-called accretion side of the hole that clearly
defines the black hole within. From
your comments, I understand that telescopes from around the world are
sometimes united to make this kind of observation possible, which makes these
discoveries a collaborative effort. Is there ever competition between the
various research entities that study black holes?
 |
| Chung-Pei Ma |
CHUNG-PEI MA: Funny you mentioned it. I was just
in Boston last week to attend a black hole meeting at Harvard, where I gave the
opening talk. The EHT result for the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87
is indeed extremely exciting. It’s particularly meaningful for me because the
size of the “ring” you mentioned enabled them to measure the black hole’s mass,
and the number they got – 6 billion suns – agreed beautifully with the mass
determined from the method my team has been using to discover other black
holes. Our method uses the motions of stars that are orbiting very close to a black
hole to measure the hole’s gravitational pull on the stars, and hence its mass.
This method is applicable to many systems and has been used to find about a
hundred black holes. The technique of direct imaging gets more precise
measurements but is more limited – the EHT currently can only target two black
holes, the one in M87, and the one at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky
Way. But scientists love, and need, confirmation from independent methods. So
we are complementing rather than competing with each other. The EHT result
boosts everyone’s confidence in the existence of black holes and in our results
for other black holes. Now I am more excited than ever to hunt for more black
holes out there in the universe and decipher their curious past.
STEPHANIE CHASE: You mentioned that black holes can
merge and enlarge. Is the Earth at risk for encountering a black hole?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I know black holes really seem scary
sometimes. Luckily there is vast space between stars in a galaxy. In addition,
the monster at the center of the Milky Way is about 25,000 light years away. At
this distance, the solar system is simply happily orbiting about the Galactic center
– like how the Earth orbits about the Sun – and are not in danger of falling
in. But who knows, some evil aliens may have hurled a black hole at us, which
we wouldn’t know until it gets pretty close. Would you like to join my A-list
of close friends to whom I would send out astrophysical impending-doom warning
messages? There are many ways we the earthlings can be doomed, and past violin
teachers certainly deserve a first-class seat on the escape vehicle.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Listen, I’ll
be happy in economy class, and I appreciate the offer!
Earlier, you mentioned encountering
gender inequality, presumably in the United States, although I imagine it’s an
issue nearly worldwide. Did this affect your career trajectory?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I have not encountered blatant
unequal treatments, but we all know gender inequality is everywhere. Science
endeavors can be cut throat, and you would want all the help you can get when
things become competitive. Often it seems to be the cumulation of many subtler
disadvantages that turn off women from pursuing a STEM career. Do orchestras
still conduct earlier rounds of auditions behind curtains? It would be hard for
us to interview faculty or other academic job candidates this way. I try to
have a positive attitude, participating in committees and initiatives to help
improve climate and equity in my community.
STEPHANIE CHASE: In regard to orchestras; I do think
that some of them have made an effort to hire younger, attractive musicians,
because the concert is viewed by many as a form of entertainment. However, I
feel confident that they are also excellent players.
Is your work always observational or are you and your
colleagues attempting to prove a theory, such as the Grand Unification Theory?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I actually started as a theorist and
did my Ph.D. studying a particular version of the Grand Unified Theory. I began
serious observational work about a decade ago when I wanted to check if some of
our theoretical predictions about black holes and galaxies bore any resemblance
in nature. I still enjoy theoretical work, and part of my black hole research requires
extensive calculations on supercomputers. [A supercomputer can process many
more operations per second than a regular computer.] In fact, my graduate
students are burning many CPU hours computing stellar orbits around black holes
in the San Diego Supercomputing Center as we speak. Having experience with both
theory and data really helps me appreciate the power as well as limitations of
each side.
STEPHANIE CHASE: You still play the violin on a
regular basis – is there a composer whose music especially resonates with you?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I go through phases, like most
people. And thanks to four years of lessons with you, I learned to interpret
pieces of differing genre. One thing hasn’t changed though, and this is on my
bucket list: learn and perform all 16 Beethoven string quartets. I have
sight-read each one, some many times. But I would like to work on it, get
coached, and play it for my friends and anyone enjoying classical music. By the
way, the audio was an attempt at the first movement of Op. 59, No. 1 two years
ago.
Sue Soong (2nd violin), Derek Katz (viola) and Angus Davol (cello))
STEPHANIE CHASE: I’m working on his Opus 59, No. 3 for
the Newport Festival – what a nice ride!
CHUNG-PEI MA: I would love to get your tips on this
one! We tried to perform it a few years ago and managed not to fall apart. That
last movement is a killer. Even violists, and my partner is one, who never
understand why violinists bother to practice their parts before a concert,
freak out when they start this movement.
Even though I was in a youth symphony for many years, I
discovered chamber music was my true love during the first week of my freshman
year at MIT. This sounds corny, but I fell into this black hole and there has
been no return. I have lost count of the number of times I attended your Boston
Chamber Music Society concerts. I still remember you breaking a string – E string
I think? – near the end of the first movement of the Shostakovich E minor piano
trio and magically playing to the end without interruption.
For me, the blend of four string voices in a quartet is
simply irresistible. But string quartets are also most frustrating to play
since they are so unforgiving. It is really impossible for us amateurs to play
in tune individually, let alone together. I guess I like challenges.
STEPHANIE CHASE: This is why it’s also rare for most
music festivals to program string quartets with an ad hoc ensemble – the
writing exposes intonation issues more than string trios or quintets. But they
are often masterpieces, and so fulfilling as a musical experience.
You have a ten-year-old son who plays the violin.
CHUNG-PEI MA: Yes, one of the photos is of us from four years ago – our son was seven then and played in a
string quartet for the first time. We read a minuet movement from an early
Haydn. He was super serious, sat down, and announced to the quartet that we
were taking all the repeats.
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| Chung-Pei Ma and her son |
STEPHANIE CHASE: Is he also interested in becoming a
scientist?
CHUNG-PEI MA: It is truly fascinating to watch a
child grow and develop. He was barely four when our discovery of the extremely
massive black hole in the galaxy NGC 4889 was announced – this black hole in
fact broke the 30-year-old mass record held by the M87 black hole we talked
about just now. Sometimes when he tried to get my attention and I didn’t
respond, he would first try: “Earth to Mommy!” When that didn’t work, he knew “NGC
4889 to Mommy” would make me jump immediately.
He has many other interests though, the latest being playing
chess. Passion about music and physics is what has fueled and sustained me over
the years. He is exploring his own. I watch, guide, and find nurturing teachers
and schools to help him discover and fulfill his own dreams. I tell him the sky
is not the limit since current data suggest the universe has infinite
volume.
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| Chung-Pei Ma and her son in Death Valley (California) |
STEPHANIE CHASE: I love that, and he sounds like an
extraordinary child.
In your work, you exemplify the possibilities of expanding
the mind to encompass things that are beyond measure and limit. In an era in
which partisanship and cultural tribalism are dividing nations, not just the
United States but well beyond, what is a lesson for us all – in other words,
humanity – to learn from your work?
CHUNG-PEI MA: I would speak for all my fellow
scientists who are studying things beyond the confines of Earth. Through
decades of astrophysical research, we now know that atoms – what we are made
of, and everything in the Periodic Table – constitute only about 4% of the stuff
in the universe. The rest 96% is made of bizarre things called dark matter and
dark energy. Who ordered them? I, and many of my astro friends, have been
studying these fascinating entities for some years. We also know our Sun is a
very ordinary star, the Milky Way is a run-of-the-mill galaxy, and there are
trillions of galaxies like this, each containing billions of stars like the Sun.
We are at some random location in the universe and definitely not at the center
of anything as ancient cultures had surmised.
All of this suggests we earthlings are a real minor player in
the grand symphony of the cosmos. These thoughts humble me and make me feel
insignificant. But on sunnier days, I would be struck by how magical Earth is. We
are the rare 4% of the universe. Yet we can sit here, contemplate the origin
and fate of the universe, and importantly to me, use math and physics to predict
the rhythm of heavenly bodies that can be either verified or falsified. Similar
physical principles are being used to invent all the technologies affecting
every minute of our lives. This is the power of science. Are we alone or are
other intelligent lives already watching us? None of us knows. But I think it
would take an alien invasion to stop all the fighting on Earth and to unify the
nations.
STEPHANIE CHASE: That is a sobering thought, and it
makes the reasons behind many of these battles seem extremely petty.
Chung-Pei, I am delighted that we have reunited after many
years and thank you for so vividly expanding our horizons.
Links:
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