NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We all know the popular image of artists: painters, writers, performers,
they're creative but undisciplined; and then there's the scientist: analytical, methodical,
obsessed with accuracy. But whether these clichés are right or wrong, sometimes the
artist and the scientist are more alike than you think. Check out this guy.
KARL IAGNEMMA (Artist/Scientist): "At the sound of Marya's name, a shiver began in Henderson's
chest that scurried over every inch of his skin. He felt as though he had been heated
over glowing coals, then dunked into an ocean-sized bath of ice water."
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Meet Karl...
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Iagnemma?
KARL IAGNEMMA: Iagnemma, yup. It's Italian.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He's a successful writer of fiction, but he's also the same person
who's been called one of the top 10 innovative scientists of America. How can he be both?
His father was Emidio Iagnemma. Born in Italy, he came to Detroit, and he raised his son
to be just like him, an engineer.
KARL IAGNEMMA: I ended up following pretty closely in his footsteps. We shared, definitely,
an interest and a love for physics and math.
CATHERINE IAGNEMMA (Karl's Sister): I always knew he had a mind like my, like my father.
They used to go to computer clubs together, you know, exchange software, and he took drafting
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And Karl did some experimenting when his father wasn't looking.
KARL IAGNEMMA: Friends and I would do various experiments with combustion, but nothing too
KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: He would, like, light tennis balls on fire and throw them down the
KARL IAGNEMMA: Uh oh. I knew I shouldn't have given you her name.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But all those experiments clearly paid off because Karl went to MIT,
where he stayed on to earn his PhD in mechanical engineering and is now a principal research
scientist. And today, he's a top member of a team of researchers who are designing robots
smart enough to understand their environment. Their algorithms will make it easier for robots
to navigate through truly difficult terrain, and enable NASA to explore parts of Mars scientists
can only dream of reaching today.
KARL IAGNEMMA: Robots right now are pretty dumb. They have a hard time understanding
if something is a bush compared to a stone. For wheeled robots, the danger is always that
you're going to drive somewhere, think it's a safe place to drive, and you end up getting
stuck. And on Mars, you know, you can't call AAA to tow you out.
PAUL SCHENKER (NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory): As a researcher, I think Karl brings some
of the best qualities you look for.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Paul Schenker manages the Robotics Space Exploration Technology
Program, for NASA, at the Jet Propulsion Labs, in Pasadena. NASA awarded Team MIT more than
a million dollars for research overseen, day to day, by Karl.
PAUL SCHENKER: He's very objective, patient, thoughtful in framing his problems. He also
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But which work? Let's go back.
KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: Iagnemma; it rhymes with dilemma.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: His mother, Patricia Iagnemma, was an English major.
KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: My mother loved literature, so we had books in every room—in the laundry
room, in the family room. Karl would lock himself in his room and just read and read
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Karl could also write. In fact, his minor at MIT was in writing,
fiction writing, which confused one of his advisors.
KARL IAGNEMMA: He said, "Oh, I thought you were studying friction."
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Hard to believe, but true. Also true is that Karl's short story
won a contest for fiction writing—not friction writing—held by Playboy magazine, in 1998.
And while he was writing his PhD thesis, he started to write his first book.
KARL IAGNEMMA: And I finished it the week after I finished my PhD thesis.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction is meant to sound like
a thesis, but don't be fooled. It's an award winning collection of short stories about
characters—many of them scientists, by the way—who fall in and out of love. Karl proves
wrong the old assumption that science guys can only write science fiction.
KATHERINE IAGNEMMA: I always refer to him as being whole-brained, using the totality
of his brain. I see the dedication that he uses in science applied to his writing.
STEVE ALMOND (Author, My Life in Heavy Metal, Candyfreak): I just...I don't think I know
anybody who's, certainly, at that high a level in both those areas. It's rare.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Now, it would be easy to congratulate Karl for using more of his
brain than most of us, which he clearly does. And it would be a little too easy to marvel
at how Karl has managed to succeed at two professions that would seem to be complete
opposites: science and fiction writing. But, as it turns out, some of the very same skills
Karl uses in scientific exploration come to his aid in, well, making stuff up.
KARL IAGNEMMA: In each discipline, you start with a blank page. You start with an idea.
There are so many parallels between writing and research. I mean, I view each process
as one of increasingly structured creativity.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so both a writer and a researcher have to be creative, but
just ask any writer or any scientist, and they'll tell you creativity is meaningless
without discipline. Before you can stare at a blank page or screen, you must get your
butt to the chair, and Karl does it day in, day out.
KARL IAGNEMMA: A lot of writing is just passing the time until something good comes along,
and you don't know when that'll be. So, to be safe, you should be in that chair as much
as you can, on the off chance that, you know, a miracle will happen and the story will be
born.
ANKI IAGNEMMA (Karl's Wife): For Karl, it's a lot about patience and discipline. That's
an important part of his process, I think. He does his hours whether he gets 10 pages
KARL IAGNEMMA: A lot of times, I'm in the chair, in the evening or in the early morning,
with my earplugs in, so that I can hear all the characters' voices, and just typing either
nonsense, or typing an outline of a story, or typing dialogue that may be good, may be
not any good. But when the story comes along, and when you get that germ, that little spark,
and you feel it, and you know it, that's when the actual story writing process truly starts.
STEVE ALMOND: He's really efficient. He believes he's inefficient. "Oh, it's takes me so long
to write." You write so quickly. And I'm like, "Dude, I'm not going to a lab trying to figure
out how to get the machine to go over the big rock on mars, okay? I'm not even...I'm
having difficulty unloading the dishwasher, okay?"
ALAN LIGHTMAN (Author, Einstein's Dreams, Good Benito and Physicist): Both writing fiction
and doing scientific research are pretty much fulltime jobs. They're jobs that occupy you
24 hours a day. You're not a very good friend, lover, husband, wife during this period of
months that you're consumed by a scientific problem. You're not very much fun to be around.
ANKI IAGNEMMA: I definitely feel that Karl is with me when he's with me, but I do think
that he thinks about his work all the time. Since we moved in together, and definitely
since Sofia came, he has to be more structured in his work, and he has to set aside hours
more. And I think he does that really well, and that's...and he does that in a very focused
way.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But that structure, those hours, that's a lot of time spent alone.
KARL IAGNEMMA: Solitude is something, as a writer and a researcher, you have to be comfortable
with. Writing is, you know, really solitary, and research is, kind of, its little brother.
ALAN LIGHTMAN: When you're solving the equations, you're usually alone weeks and months. I mean,
you will, you'll stop to eat meals.
STEVE ALMOND: The great untold secret about writing is that it's incredibly lonely. You
cannot do it—I can't do it, anyway—with other people around.
KARL IAGNEMMA: And you have to be okay with that. Some people could never be okay with
that. They just wouldn't enjoy the work, because they would miss the human contact, or they
would miss various aspects of being out in the world.
STEVE ALMOND: If I show up at my poker game, and I've spent the day writing, or trying
to write, immediately my poker buddies are like...'cause I'm like, "Hey, how are you
doing, guys? All right, what are we...?" And they're like, "Have you spoken to anyone today?
You know, have you talked with anybody?" They know that like, "Uh oh, crazy, lonely guy...here
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's hardly a rational way to live.
ALAN LIGHTMAN: Scientists are passionate about their work. They do it because they cannot
KARL IAGNEMMA: You get this little rush. You enter into this state where the time just
seems to pass. It's just the best feeling. And that's why you want to go back the next
day and do it again, because of that feeling.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But can that feeling carry Karl through two intense careers? Alan
Lightman chose to give up his research career in physics to become a successful novelist.
ALAN LIGHTMAN: Both the science and the fiction writing are addictions. At some point, if
he wants to be a scientist and he wants to be a novelist, one of those powerful forces
is going to conquer the other one.
KARL IAGNEMMA: "They met as first year graduate students at the Michigan Engineering Institute,
two aggressive young theorists who disagreed about Marx and Irish beer, but agreed that
mathematics was a game, the most elaborate, wonderful game, like puzzling out riddles
Right now, I'm happy doing both. It's, it's tiring. It's fairly exhausting, but it's satisfying.
It's kind of the feeling after, I imagine, after a runner has completed a long run. It's
that pleasant satisfied exhaustion. That's kind of my constant state.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Exhausted and passionate, disciplined and humble, Karl Iagnemma will
continue to write and calculate using his entire brain. But to his friends, he's just
plain old Karl, the walking algorithm for success.
STEVE ALMOND: If it were me, if I was doing this stuff, I would be like, "Dude, I've got
a robot going to mars. What did you do yesterday? And that was before lunch. Then I wrote a
great short story in the afternoon. Then I hung out with my beautiful Swedish wife. What'd
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If that's not enough: the movie rights to one of Karl's short stories
have been optioned by Hollywood to be produced by Brad Pitt.