Surprise–You Won a Nobel!

Very few calls that come in the middle of the night are good news, says Saul Perlmutter ’81—except for the one where you learn that you won the Nobel Prize in Physics.  

The astrophysicist already had one life-changing surprise. He led a breakthrough in cosmology: the universe’s expansion was not decelerating as previously thought. It instead was expanding at an accelerated rate. This discovery led to his 2011 win, a prize he shared with two other scientists who uncovered the same phenomenon (Harvard alumni Brian Schmidt PhD ’93 and Adam Riess PhD ’96, coincidentally).  

But after a fun week celebrating, Perlmutter went right back to trying to crack the mystery of “dark energy,” the force powering this expansion, and thinking about how science can help us be better problem solvers. Read how he thinks we should be using the tools of science to listen to each other more and what role Harvard plays in these discussions.  

What’s it like to win the Nobel Prize? 

There’s something a bit odd about the lead-up to the Nobel Prize. By the time they’re considering giving one, the work has been visible for a while, and institutions like Harvard and Berkeley will call up the five or 10 likely people for several years ahead of time, saying, "If you happen to win a prize this coming week, where are you going to be?" And just to be sane, you just ignore it, since of course you are most likely to go your whole life and never win a Nobel Prize.  

How did you find out you won?  

California is the right place to win one because you get the full drama. You get a phone call at quarter to three in the morning, when you've been asleep. I got a call from someone saying, “Is this Professor Perlmutter? How do you feel?” And I said, “Well, fine, but why are you asking?” It turned out that the Nobel Committee had been trying to reach me using an old cell phone number. The person who was calling me was a reporter, and I think I may have been on live radio in Sweden. My wife then got on our iPad and found my name on the list.  

What was it like to be recognized this way?  

You get emails, calls, and messages from people all over the world—Africa, India, and Europe—to tell you how delighted they are to hear about your prize. It’s a moment where the world can feel positive together. I wouldn’t have known that. And one of the great things about the Nobel Prize is that you get to be famous for a week and then nobody has to know you again, so you don’t have to put up with the problems of fame.  

Let’s go back to Harvard. You were a physics concentrator, living in Canaday and Leverett. What comes to mind when you think of those days? 

I was lucky that I had great roommates whom I’ve stayed friends with ever since. I also have snapshot memories of taking courses in philosophy, literature, economics, and cognitive science. I remember taking a great course taught by David Layzer  called “Chance, Necessity, and Change.” I was also doing a lot of music with Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players. 

After Harvard, you did your research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, where you also teach. Tell us about your course on using science in our everyday lives.  

I worked with colleagues, students, and professors in social psychology and philosophy to figure out what set of scientific thinking tools might be the bare minimum we should know to solve problems and make better decisions. We ended up with 23 concepts that went on to become a course called “Sense and Sensibility and Science.”  

Almost every university has an expository writing requirement. And it's not that everybody's going to become a writer. It's because expository writing is really a great way to teach a bunch of tools of thinking. These days, in a similar way, I think we could be using concepts from the methodology of science as a whole new set of thinking tools to make better decisions. Science is really designed to help us think, often based on trying to figure out where we're making our mistakes.  

How do you think science helps us make better decisions?  

Science is this gigantic machine where we are in contact with people who will disagree with us, so that we can figure out where we are going wrong. Sometimes, in order to figure out what your mistakes are, you have to have somebody else point them out. It’s uncomfortable, and nobody loves it. But this is how science works. We need to listen to each other and see what we’re missing. We want to be responding to the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be. 

Science has really developed this strong culture that lets people stay with problems much longer than anybody else ordinarily would and helps them take on the idea that if you understand the problem, you can often solve it. Having partial, probabilistic information is much better than having no information. It’s a superpower to be comfortable with the ambiguities of the world, to recognize the probabilities, and to be able to change your mind as new information comes in. That’s not a weakness, that’s a strength.   

You’ve coauthored a book that explores the same concepts called: Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense. What’s next for this project?  

The “Sense and Sensibility and Science” course has counterparts at universities all over the country—including a great version at Harvard taught by Ned Hall and Doug Finkbeiner. I think it should also be taught at much younger ages. We’ve been working with the Nobel Prize Foundation to develop a full set of high school curriculum material that could be used globally.  

You came back for your 25th and your 35th Reunions. Will we see you at your 45th this spring?  

I hope to! What I really liked about these Reunions is this activity where people give presentations on something that they were thinking about. People gave some beautiful and very moving ones. I happened to do one on polarization and how the fact that people aren’t talking to each other across divides was going to be a real problem. We ended up having a collection of classmates get together via teleconferencing—this was before Zoom was so big—every month for years. It’s been a heartening source of optimism.