S8E1: How Conversation Can Fuel Computational Research

So talk about this project then.

I mean, what was the idea and how has it developed?

The original idea was to look at broadly liquid systems and try to understand the physics that describe their thermal properties.

There aren't really great models or understanding for liquid systems just in general, and we were hoping to kind of elucidate some of that and then demonstrate it with molecular simulation tools.

So a big question at the heart of this, at the heart of what Ethan's been studying throughout his PhD, is how you can predict on a computer just how much heat you could store in a solid, in a liquid, in various kinds of materials.

How much heat could you possibly store in that? How can you move heat through these materials? On some level, these are really simple questions and we think about them every day when You try to cool something in your fridge or freezer, or you put a cube of ice in something, or you run a fan over something.

These are things that we think about all the time.

But the fundamental physics of what's going on, storing heat in a material, it's actually really like crazy subtle and unintuitive stuff.

And Ethan's really shed a lot of light on some of these challenging problems during his PhD.

Once you got the fellowship, how did that change the kinds of things you were working on, the kinds of questions you were thinking about?

So the project was already kind of moving in a different direction because we had some very solid results, but they were actually for solid materials, which of course is not a liquid.

So the first paper I wrote ended up being about these solid materials and the things that I had discovered about them.

And with the newfound funding from the CSGF, there was a lot more questions that I was interested in tackling there.

And the liquids, well, it didn't feel like an actual dead end.

It was a much more challenging direction.

There wasn't much precedence there.

There wasn't a lot to build off of.