Few venues at the U can match the magical aura at night of the Canyons atrium at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Overlooking the Salt Lake Valley the vaulted walls have a cathedral-esque loft to them. Accented by the three-story glass curio of backlit curated museum items on the north wall, little wonder that it’s a favorite for wedding receptions and fundraisers.

Credit: Todd Anderson

It's also a resonant place for Frontiers of Science, the U’s longest running lecture series sponsored by the College of Science with, on February 18, Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu at the podium.

Professor of physics, molecular and cellular physiology and energy science and engineering at Stanford University, Chu held the audience of nearly 500 captive with the central trope of his presentation that scientific trajectories — as with the course of one’s life — seldom follow a predictable path. The diminutive, bespectacled Chu with his self-deprecating, intrepid manner was there as exhibit A.

Chu's opening salvo was a retrospective of family photos of his unusually bright and accomplished family of birth, beginning with his father, mother and his father’s oldest sister who came to the U.S. from China, his father to attend MIT before graduate school during World War II. With two brothers, one Harvard-educated and another who, despite never earning a high school diploma, was accepted to UCLA and eventually snared five degrees, including a Ph.D at the age of 22, Chu describes himself as the “black sheep of the family.”

“How do you compete with that?” he quipped.

Following his bachelor’s at the University of Rochester, Chu found himself in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. After earning his Ph.D. he remained at Berkeley as a post-doctoral researcher for two years before joining Bell Labs. It was there that he and his co-workers developed a way to cool atoms by employing six laser beams opposed in pairs and arranged in three directions at right angles to each other. Trapping atoms with this method allows scientists to study individual atoms with great accuracy. Additionally, the technique can be used to construct an atomic clock with great precision. This work led to his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.

While it may seem a straight line between his graduate work to stints at national laboratories, including as director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of physics at Stanford, Chu’s tour through academic and high-level lab work was hit-and-miss, serendipitous and otherwise indirect. Even so, he managed to traverse multiple research interests, expanding into biological physics and polymer physics at the single-molecule level. He studied enzyme activity and protein and RNA folding using techniques like fluorescence resonance energy transfer, atomic force microscopy and optical tweezers. His polymer physics research used individual DNA molecules to study polymer dynamics and their phase transitions. He has continued researching atomic physics, as well, developing new methods of laser cooling and trapping.

Deepwater Horizon Explosion

But it is Chu’s work to help mitigate climate change and his advocacy for a greener economy that he is, perhaps, most celebrated for. During his four years as Secretary of Energy under Obama, the president praised Chu for moving the U.S. toward “real energy independence … doubling the use of renewable energy” and putting “our country on a path to win the global race for clean energy jobs.”

Ironically, the most dramatic moment of his tenure as secretary was not with renewables and the technologies for carbon sequestration but with oil. Three weeks after British Petroleum’s (BP’s) Horizon Deepwater offshore oil rig exploded in April, 2010, killing eleven and sending crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, Chu was in a cabinet meeting. He recounts the story this way: “President Obama says, ‘Chu, go down there and help them clean it up.’ He didn’t say form a committee. He said, you go down there and help them because he knew I was a practicing scientist, or used to be, which is kind of amazing.”

Initially, Chu and his team were there only to assist BP as it struggled to regain control of its well on the seafloor. Getting accurate data from BP scientists and engineers proved to be a challenge. Chu’s own back-of-the-envelope math quickly determined that at least 40,000 barrels of oil per day were surging from the well head, and during his lecture at the museum, Chu admitted that he threw a “temper tantrum,” at one point to ensure that the scientific process he was accustomed to of “making a plan and following the plan” actually happened.

The government team found themselves intervening in various ways. They required BP to provide more accurate, even truthful measurements of the well’s pressure. In late May, they rejected BP's attempted “top kill” procedure. Once they secured the necessary data from BP, they approved  the "top hat" approach to capping the well, a strategy of circulating methanol to prevent methane-filled ice from forming.

It was complicated, technical work that required many physicists who Chu helped assemble from his vast network, including important scientists from Los Alamos National Lab. What finally worked on July 12, according to a story in Scientific American, was the installation of a smaller blowout preventer installed atop the failed blowout preventer at the well's head on the seafloor, replacing the failed “top hat” approach.

Even so the risks to this “capping stack” were great, with concerns that the procedure might create a subsurface “blowout” that would end up draining all the estimated 110 million barrels of oil in the entire formation. Chu’s calculations, along with those of other government scientists, determined that the flow would have to be twice what it was for that to happen. Still, before deployment of the successful solution to the problem, they required BP to monitor the well's pressure continuously for 48 hours.

On July 15 at 2:25 P.M. Houston time, the test began. An ROV arm turned the handle on the capping stack 10 times, cranking it closed. For the first time since April 20, no oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Titanic Oil Age

Credit: Todd Anderson

Before being faced with what seemed like an unstoppable crude oil gusher, Chu had established a group called ARPA-E and its energy innovations hubs. With funding from the American Recovery Act — the more than $800 billion economic stimulus legislation Obama signed in early 2009 — ARPA-E funded a number of cutting-edge technologies. Its competitive grants were meant to kick-start promising projects that would attract the interest of private investors like those working with microbes engineered to turn hydrogen and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel.

Chu’s tenure at DOE ended in 2013 and he returned to Stanford where he helped establish Bio-X which linked the physical and biological sciences with engineering and medicine. Now the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, he is still known as an advocate for conservation and the development of new renewable energy to save the planet and sequestration of carbon dioxide.

First attributed to Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi Arabian Oil Minister, is a quote that Chu is most famous for using:  "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end, but not for lack of oil." At the Natural History Museum of Utah, Chu echoed these words to an enraptured crowd overlooking the valley and its vaulted sky, arguing that the Oil Age will come to an end not because we will run out of oil, but because new, more efficient energy sources will replace it. 

At the end of his lecture Steven Chu, a self-proclaimed optimist, ominously screened the moment-before-striking-the-iceberg scene from the James Cameron film “Titanic” as an analogue to where civilization is today vis-à-vis a warming globe.

“That doesn't mean you shouldn't <turn> harder, right?” Chu announced referring to the decision by the captain and crew to turn the giant ocean liner even if it would take too long to avoid impact. “Okay, but it's going to take a long time,” he continued, “and so with that, I'm hoping that a little support in science in science technology grows.”