ICAM Workshop White Paper
J. D. Thompson
Los Alamos National Laboratory
MST-10, MS K764
Los Alamos, NM 87545
(505) 667-6416
(505) 665-7652
Everyone at this Workshop has his or her favorite materials problem(s) that can be cast more or less in the terminology of complex adaptive matter. These problems span the gammit from understanding the origin of life itself to correlated electron materials (my favorite that others have covered and that I support). Each traditional discipline of science represented by these problems brings its own perspective on what CAM is and what methodologies are most appropriate for approaching the problems. It seems that a real advantage in forming an Institute for CAM would come from bringing these diverse perspectives together so that we could learn from and build on each otherís experiences and approaches to problems. For example, physicists tend to be analytical, often at the expense of ignoring or simplifying other parts of a problem, like chemical and metallurgical realities. Consequently, even here there are ranges of views on whatís important and whatís not. Biology, on the other hand, has long realized that biomatter is so dauntingly complex that it is often difficult to even guess what approximations might be valid, and consequently, more attention is given to controlling and manipulating functional responses. Both approaches are equally relevant, but as the materials physicists care about become more complex and as new tools become available to reveal the analytically ìmodelableî microscopics of biological matter, both should asymptotically merge. This is not to say that biologists, chemists, metallurgists and physicists should be forced to work together, on the contrary; but if there were a forum, such as an ICAM, with a well-defined vision that united disciplines, collaborations would spontaneously fuse and the rate of merger should be substantially faster. This should be a scientific goal of an ICAM.
What might an ICAM look like? There are several possibilities, one of which might be called the "distributed model". In this model, a small number of ICAM Centers, established at campuses/labs where there was a critical mass of interested participants, would collectively define the Institute. Each Center would have a specialty, e.g., biomolecular matter, self-assembling matter, hard matter, etc., that was a recognized strength of that institution. There should be a regular interchange of personnel (students as well as senior staff) among the Centers, e.g., for seminars, short visits, assignment of Ph.D. students to work at a Lab., etc., and among other campuses/labs with interest in CAM issues. ICAM collectively should host an interdisciplinary summer school each year that emphasized participation by graduate students. Eventually, it might be reasonable to think of developing one or more graduate courses on CAM that would be telecast among the campuses. There also should be broader participation, e.g., through an annual international conference organized by ICAM.