Mats Selen

The Loomis Confessions: Mats Selen

If you couldn’t be a physicist, what career would you choose?

If I have to pick something that I know I can actually do then I would probably be some sort of engineer, likely aerospace or marine. If I had to pick something totally different and be granted the luck and talent to make a living doing it, then this becomes a much harder question. When I was younger I wanted to be a photographer (still a hobby), and then a pilot (settled for RC planes), and then a farmer (which I was for several years when my family owned a sheep farm). I have worked as a machinist (loved it) and a truck driver (loved it). Like most people, in my youth I had had some jobs that I didn’t exactly love but basically just liked enough to do for a while (bartender, pizza delivery, landscaping, newspaper delivery). To be honest, I think I could be happy doing just about anything so long as I liked the people I worked with.

What is your favorite place?

I love traveling but nothing beats coming home.

What is the greatest scientific blunder in history?

Hubris. The tendency of scientists to underestimate the intelligence of non-scientists. This is not a single catastrophic event but a continuing mistake, which slowly erodes the trust that society has given us. We need to understand that we aren’t smarter than everyone else, just luckier, and we need to do a better job engaging with the people whose taxes pay our salaries. I am extremely fortunate that communicating science has been encouraged and rewarded by the Department of Physics during my entire career at UIUC.

Who is/are your favorite artist(s) in any medium—painters, composers, authors, filmmakers?

This is a really hard question. I love all art though I spend more time with books than with visual art and music, so I will focus this answer on literature. I think I could be totally content if I had the works of the following writers to keep me company (in each case I list a great example of their work, though I love almost all of their books): Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide series), Frans Bengtsson (Röde Orm), Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), Charles Dickens (David Copperfield), Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot), Umberto Eco (Baudolino), Astrid Lindgren (Emil i Lönneberga), Patrick O’Brian (the Aubrey–Maturin series), Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon), John Steinbeck (Cannery Row), J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes).