INNOVATIONS FROM THE EDGE - KPIT

Dr.Akhlesh Lakhtakia
The Charles Godfrey Binder
(Endowed)
Professor of
Engineering Science &
Mechanics,
Pennsylvania State University
axl4@psu.edu
Guest Editorial
Cross Fertilization
Taxonomy aims to bring order to chaos. Initial taxonomic success often is later enhanced but never brought to
completion. Just look at various lists of breeds of the common dog. Distinctions between breeds made by the
American Kennel Club are not always recognized by the Australian National Kennel Council, and apparently neither
organization has bothered to classify the Indian breeds Rampur Greyhound and Rajapalayam. Every year,
zoological taxonomists reclassify many species and subspecies in the wild, as more information about anatomical
features and molecular genetics becomes available; several distinct species are combined into one, some genera
disappear while new genera are formed, and so on. Ask several particle physicists the number of particles in the
Standard Model zoo, and be prepared to receive several different answers. While essential, sustained practice of
taxonomy does not always lead to pure taxons.
And so it is with academic disciplines. Disciplinary purity was taken for granted when I was in grade school. My
teachers, all armed with university degrees, ensured that physics and chemistry were as different from each other
as chalk from cheese, algebra was algebra and geometry was geometry, and there could be no confusion between
history and geography. In college, I learnt that we engineers must wait at the table of physicists (and, occasionally,
chemists) for crumbs that we could transmute into mass-produced objects to be sold for the highest profit that the
market would bear.
Imagine my surprise when, during the first year of graduate school, I had to derive closed-form expressions for
several integrals involving products of associated Legendre functions for a research paper, and I found out that
certain types of chemists specialized in similar activities. How delightful! Soon I had opportunities to discuss
microwave-assisted tomography with geophysicists and computer scientists. I met graduate students from
molecular biology, chemical physics, and algebraic geometry. Occasionally, I attended seminars in the departments
of geophysics, mechanical engineering, and radiology. Most importantly, I learnt that, motivated by desires to
produce revolutionary devices, researchers in engineering departments themselves undertake deep research in
mathematics and physics. For me, disciplinary boundaries began to crumble––not perhaps with the intensity of
the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but even so.
th
th
Disciplinary purity did not exist prior to the 20 century. Ibn Khaldoun, the 14 -century Tunisian historiographer,
th
wrote a muqaddimah on history, sociology, demography, economics, biology, and chemistry. In the 18 century,
Denis Diderot single-handedly compiled an encyclopédie after personally verifying the truth of every entry. Not
only was Benjamin Franklin an author, publisher, diplomat, postmaster, political theorist, and one of the founding
fathers of USA, but he was also a first-rate technoscientific researcher with contributions to electrical and thermal
sciences. One of my heroes, Jagadish Chandra Bose invented both artificial chiral composite materials and artificial
structurally chiral materials, devised semiconductor hetero junctions to detect radio signals, and invented the
cresco graph to identify the similarities of plant and animal tissue.
th
The disciplinary purity of much of the 20 century is breaking down at the technoscientific forefront. If you can
deposit tiny amounts of matter in tiny spaces, you can work on implanting electrodes in the brains of patients
suffering from Parkinson's disease, you can devise resorbable drug-eluting stents, you can construct an entire
laboratory on a chip smaller than a 1-paisa coin, you can reduce the channel thickness in MOSFETs to a nanometer,
you can visualize faint fingerprints of criminals, and so on. If you have mastered the Stürm-Liouville equation and
the algebra of tensors, you can solve boundary-value problems in acoustics, electromagnetics, and
elastodynamics, all of which have numerous applications in different “disciplines”. Cross-fertilization of ideas from
different disciplines makes the world your oyster.
While disciplinary boundaries are still needed for administration and guidance, many leading universities are hard
at work to foster cross-fertilization. My own university, which pioneered in the mid-1950s an academic major
called engineering science, has just finished construction of a building with two wings, one devoted to materials
sciences and the other to life sciences, meeting in a common area to promote cross-fertilization. At MIT, a
department of biological engineering has been set up. SPIE now organizes conferences on engineered biomimicry
to draw in participants from more than a dozen different academic disciplines.
Engineered biomimicry was the theme of this magazine's previous issue, which shows that leading industrial
research laboratories too perceive benefits from cross-fertilization. Indeed, to design and manufacture as
commonplace a device as a simple automobile, a team of mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, materials
scientists, electrical engineers, civil engineers, fluid mechanicians, ergonomists, artists, stylists, and market
researchers has to be assembled first. No wonder, fostering cross-disciplinarity is essential for any progressive
company.
Dr. Akhlesh Lakhtakia is the Charles Godfrey Binder (Endowed) Professor in the Department of Engineering Science
and Mechanics, Pennsylvania State University, where he is also a professor in graduate programs in Materials and
Forensic Science. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nanophotonics, published by SPIE.
2
TechTalk@KPITCummins, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2012