Learning on the Way

Student-faculty Collaborations

When you ask astrophysics and mathematics double major Rebecca Sobel '08 about changing space and time, she grins, as if readying herself for a joke that she's heard many times before. And since her independent study collaboration with Professor Andrea Lommen, she likely has.

"I found out how not to do it!" she says.

Lommen laughs. Then, after a reflective pause, turns serious. "Becky's research has become very valuable - though not in the way we thought," the Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy says. "But isn't that what research is all about?"

In the summer of 2006, Sobel was in a unique situation to answer that question. Working alongside Lommen and other scholars at the Telescope National Facility in Australia, she was part of a team trying to answer a mind-bending question: Do bursts of gravitational radiation cause perturbations in the space-time continuum? Lommen lifts a simple instrument to demonstrate. "If a gravitational wave were moving through this highlighter, it would become longer and shorter because the space inside it is changing." Sobel's charge, however, demanded a more sophisticated tool - the specific algorithm that would perceive this effect.

Finding it involved a lot of computer programming, something Sobel didn't know how to do. "Throw me in the water; I'll learn how to swim," she remembers thinking when Lommen handed her several pages and said: "Program this. I'm here for questions." Lommen usually does this to students, she explains, because that's how she learned. "When it's hard to get somewhere, and you finally do, you realize you have power."

Sometimes, of course, you also realize you should have done it some other way. This turned out to be true for Sobel, but within a year, her "mistake" led Lommen to the answer - and ultimately to another question. "Isn't it on the way to doing it that all the learning happens?" Sobel, who has just been accepted to a Ph.D. program at MIT, definitely thinks so.