Breaking Engineering Barriers By Breaking Personal Barriers

With names like CERN, Cornell, SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) National Accelerator Laboratory, Agilent, and hundreds of published pieces on his resume, Ransom Stephens isn’t one to sit still and wait for inspiration to strike.

Both well-known and highly regarded in the engineering space for his many contributions over the course of his career, as a pioneer in jitter analysis, he invented new methods for extracting signals from noise and has served on several high data rate standards.

Stephens was also on the team that discovered the top quark and he discovered a new type of matter, the R(1525), a quark-anti-quark resonance including a “valence gluon.”

Stephens soon-to-be released book, The Left Brain Speaks, but the Right Brain Laughs inspired the topic for a December ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) Silicon Valley keynote presentation.

The keynote, The Keys to Innovation: Priming your Brain to Percolate Brilliant Ideas, will examine the neural processes that percolate insights into consciousness: the physics of lateral thought, the power of perspective, the value of novelty, and how your brain selects and rejects ideas before you’re even aware of them.

Ahead of that ESC discussion, Stephens spoke with Design News about his extensive science and engineering background, the serious yet funny study of neuroscience, and how one primes their brain for innovation. What follows is an excerpt of that conversation.

Are You Ready to Prime Your Brain? Whether you're designing a circuit, debugging a SerDes, or painting a lily pad, you call on your innovative powers every day. In this presentation, Ransom Stephens will examine the neural processes that percolate insights into consciousness: the physics of lateral thought, the power of perspective, the value of novelty, and how your brain selects and rejects ideas before you're even aware of them. Learn more at ESC Silicon Valley, December 6-8, 2016 in San Jose, Calif. Register here for the event, hosted by Design News’ parent company, UBM.

Your work as a physicist is extensive and lead to some major accomplishments for science. Did you start out planning to go into physics?

I went to the University of California in San Diego, the only university I applied to, because I always wanted to go there because it was in San Diego. How hard was that? And I originally started out as a biology major. I switched to physics because biology only applied to one planet and I didn’t want to limit myself. I wanted to understand everything. So I majored in physics and followed the well trotted path to physics research.

So you went along that career path, working at places like SLAC, CERN, Cornell, and was on the team that discovered the top quark, the heaviest subatomic particle ever observed. This was huge and helped lead to the Higgs Boson, aka the God Particle.

The bottom quark was discovered in the late 1970s and so they started looking for the top quark. They didn’t find it through the 1980s and early 1990s. Through experiments, we saw evidence of the top quark. The way this relates to the Higgs is really much more like climbing a ladder. The mass of the top quark came out to be much higher than anyone had expected. That indicated that the Higgs probably had a higher mass, too.

The top [quark] was discovered in 1994 and confirmed in 1995/1996. While we were working on that, we started working on the Atlas Experiment at CERN, which ultimately discovered the Higgs much later. If the SSC [Superconducting Super Collider] had continued even close to its schedule, the Higgs would have been discovered 10 years sooner.

Top quark was major. Why move to high tech, eventually becoming a highly regarded expert in jitter, the deviation in the signal pulses in a high-frequency digital signal?

So we were working on the Atlas experiment while we are working on the top quark, and all the technology that goes into these experiments keeps leapfrogging, the same as the technology being worked on in high tech. There was certainly a close relationship between them.

The only difference is that in high tech we kind of build things in pursuit of commoditization. We build toward chips that are then mass produced and become really cheap. For these [physics] experiments, it’s all one offs. You build this for this purpose.

… I started working on the Atlas experiment in 1995 and about 20 years later Higgs was discovered. It was almost 20 years later that the data started taking off. That’s one of the reasons I went into high tech. In particle physics, the time that it takes from conceiving the experiment to the time data is actually taken has gotten longer and longer. When I was a graduate student, that [turnaround] was about five years. By the time I left [particle physics], it was 20. So it seemed like you would only get to work on two or three experiments in your entire career.