Interview with Nobel Laureate Rudolph Marcus(2)
Xing Zong: Of course, we're all unique and have our own paths, but kids sometimes get so confused and feel they've got to be like somebody else. How would you encourage young people to find their own way?
Marcus: First of all, you have decide what you would like to do, and then just do it, even if, in the case of a post-doctoral position, you decide to apply to people who are in other fields who maybe who won’t accept you. For example, for the post doctoral in theory, I wrote to six professors, all theoretical chemists in the U.S. Five of them didn’t accept me, but one did. So such applications are a gamble. Ultimately, I received so much positive benefit out of doing it that it turned out to be worth the gamble. If you want to do something, try it. Do your best to get to your immediate goal, but your wish might not be possible. If that one person didn’t accept me, that might have been the end of my new career in theory.
Xing Zong: The road to Nobel Prize is often a winding one. There are always setbacks along the way. Could you talk about some of the highs and lows?
Marcus: That road was extremely winding for me. Up and down hill. (laugh) There were two big setbacks. One -- that only one out of six people I wrote to accepted me, and that one said if he could get a grant to support me, he’ll accept me. So even that wasn’t a certain thing. It was a setback for a while. Fortunately, he received the grant.
The second was when I later applied for an academic position after being a postdoc for about 2 years. I applied to 35 universities. As I’ve often said, I didn’t receive 35 rejections because not everybody replied! There wasn’t a single yes. There was an accidental quality to it. At any turn, it could have been the end of my career -- certainly it would have been a different career. In my theoretical postdoc position all turned out extremely well as a post doc. As a postdoc I developed the theory celebrated in this article you showed me, a theory of unimolecular reactions. The theory turned out to have wide applications and is still the standard theory in that field today.
After doing that research, I didn’t know what to do. I continued to do experiments, but didn’t know what to do theoretically. Eventually, I heard of a problem that was very interesting. I read some articles on electron transfer reactions and I was very excited about it. Before that, I was wandering in the theoretical desert for several years. That’s a gamble. In that case I was willing to wander around, but only because I could fall back on experiments. It was a gamble because there was no assurance that another theoretical problem exciting to me would arise.
One problem was if I continued working on the first problem – the theory of unimolecular reactions – and do some minor variations, try to find a lot of areas to apply it – I probably wouldn’t have had the openness and freshness to think intensively about the electron transfer problem that arose in 1955. There is always a temptation to continue what we’ve started. In some situations, it is probably useful to do so, but it is desirable to be open to new challenging tasks. Spending some time on the ideas you already more or less understand can reduce the chance of your recognizing something new. That was the situation in my case. Not consciously, but that’s the way it was.
Xing Zong: General Relativity developed by Einstein was one of the greatest breakthroughs in natural science in last century. This is a hindsight that everything turns to be perfect. But it would be so different if you look at it in the time frame of one century ago. My question is, did there exist some other competing theories? Put it in another way, were you aware, when you were close to the theory as a young man, that there could be any kind of dichotomy or conflict between the seminary and the theory of it, the work that you were starting to do?
