033 · The Cleanroom and the Darkroom

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Cleanroom and the Darkroom

A few weeks ago, in the mountains above Trento, someone I'd met briefly at an event in London pulled me aside between sessions. “I've been thinking about what you said at NPL,” he told me. “About the duality of science and art, and that scientists should lean into their creativity.” He's a metrologist. His world is standards, uncertainty budgets, the kind of rigour that literally defines time and the fundamental constants — not someone you'd expect to be moved by a conversation about art. But something in that panel had landed, and the thought had stayed with him for months.

At the National Physical Laboratory last November, I sat on a panel called Quantum meets creativity: art, music and the quantum imagination. It was the final session of a day otherwise given to SI units, quantum sensing, and measurement infrastructure. I was there as a quantum physicist who also spends a significant part of their life in a darkroom, working with silver halide emulsions, nineteenth-century chemistry, and light. The other panellists were Ruth Jarmen and Joseph Gerhardt of Semiconductor Films, artists whose work engages directly with scientific data and natural phenomena. Ilana Wisby moderated. The room was still full at five o'clock — which, in conference terms, is a minor miracle.

What I keep trying to articulate — and what this essay is my attempt to finally set down — is that the creative practice I have in the darkroom and the experimental practice I was trained in as a physicist are not analogous. They are not metaphors for each other. They are the same practice.

Making

I can't stop making things. I have to make things. This has been true for as long as I can remember — maybe it was nurtured into me as a child.

After primary school, my grandparents would take me to art class at the local library — somehow I even managed to earn a Blue Peter badge. Sometime during secondary school, the town was generous enough to sponsor music lessons, and as a teenager, I'd go to the practice rooms before school started. At the same time, I played leading roles in the town theatre, won singing competitions, and even tried to (unsuccessfully) take dancing lessons. At the school talent show, I hosted, handled the technical lighting, and performed — all on the same night. I wasn't spreading myself thin. I just couldn't not do it.

Some of my closest friends during my PhD were game developers — a community I still try to stay in touch with, despite most of us now busier with professional and family lives. What united us wasn't a discipline. It was the compulsion to build.

When it came to physics, the cleanroom was where that compulsion met rigour. Depositing thin films of aluminium and niobium. Patterning Josephson junctions through electron-beam lithography. Etching, oxidising, measuring. Fabricating superconducting circuits is manual, iterative, and deeply physical. You learn the materials through sustained engagement — through thousands of observations, most of which never make it into a lab notebook. You learn to read the colour of a thin film by eye and know, before any instrument confirms it, whether the deposition went well. Looking at the data as it comes in, even before fitting and modelling — you have a gut feeling what it's telling you. This isn't mystical. It's pattern recognition trained over years, operating below the threshold of conscious reasoning.

This is the part of science that non-scientists rarely hear about. The public narrative favours theory, equations, breakthroughs — the clinical, cerebral version. But experimental physics is craft. You wrestle with matter. You coax it into doing something that requires extraordinary precision. You fail often. In my case, very often. You learn to diagnose failure quickly. And the skill of the experimentalist lies not in avoiding the unexpected, but in recognising when something unexpected is worth pursuing — while maintaining the rigour to distinguish a finding from noise.

As my career progressed, I moved from the bench to management. I lead a research team now, working on quantum computing hardware at VTT in Finland. It is important work, and I believe in it — but I am no longer the one in the cleanroom, no longer the one with my hands on the materials. I felt that loss acutely.

The darkroom, for me, filled the gap. Not as a hobby, not as relaxation — as a practice. The same practice, in a different medium. And the parallel holds at the level of process.

At the edge of control

In lith printing, you overexpose a sheet of paper and develop it in extremely dilute chemistry. At these dilutions, an autocatalytic cascade takes hold: the developing agent passes through a transient intermediate — the semiquinone radical — that is itself a far more aggressive reducer than what produced it. Shadows accelerate exponentially while highlights creep forward linearly. You snatch the print at exactly the right moment on that curve, just as you'd execute a measurement on a qubit near a transition: deep understanding of the system, then a precise intervention in a narrow window. Every lith print differs from the last — not a loss of control, but evidence of one. Small variations in initial conditions propagate through a nonlinear system. The chemistry is legible if you've done the work to learn its language.

The Sabattier effect demands a different skill: the irreversible commitment. You re-expose a print to light mid-development; the remaining unexposed halides develop, producing partial tone reversal. The moment you choose to flash determines the balance of positive and negative in the final image, and you cannot undo it. Every measurement in physics is the same kind of commitment — every choice of when to read out a qubit, when to apply a pulse, when to terminate a sequence. The skill lies in knowing the system well enough to commit at the right moment. I use a second enlarger for the re-exposure, for precise control over timing and intensity — the same instinct as the cleanroom: understand the physics well enough to design your intervention deliberately.

Mordançage is controlled destruction. You bleach a finished print in copper chloride and peroxide; the chemistry attacks the densest silver, the gelatin swells and lifts, and the shadows peel away from the paper. You redevelop, and what was light becomes dark. You can plan a mordançage print — concentrations, timing, temperature — and predict which areas will lift based on silver density. But the process retains an irreducible variability at the molecular level, producing prints that are unrepeatable in their specifics even when your method is disciplined. The same is true in cleanroom fabrication: an etch that undercuts in a way your model didn't predict isn't a lucky break — it's a signal that only someone who understands the model can read.

Without understanding the semiquinone cascade, you can't ride it. Without understanding junction physics, you can't tune a qubit. Understanding and unpredictability aren't in tension — they're inseparable.

Expression

During my PhD at Aalto University, I sat on a committee representing the physics department to the university. At one meeting, someone raised the idea that the arts school was fundamentally more creative, whereas the school of science was more technical. I didn't understand it then, and I don't now. Find me a single metric that shows science is less creative than art. Every experiment is a creative act — the choice of what to measure, how to isolate variables, what to leave uncontrolled. A fabrication process that doesn't exist yet has to be imagined before it can be built. Creativity is not decoration on top of science. It is its engine.

Richard Feynman had a well-known exchange with his friend, the artist Jirayr Zorthian. Zorthian held up a flower and argued that he, as an artist, could appreciate its beauty, whereas Feynman, as a scientist, would only take it apart and make it dull. Feynman disagreed: he could see the same beauty, and beyond it, deeper layers — the structure of the cells, the evolutionary relationships, the fact that flowers co-evolved with insects. Science, he argued, only adds to the wonder.

I agree with Feynman, but I think he concedes too much. His argument accepts the premise that beauty begins with artistic perception and then makes the case that science doesn't diminish it. He's playing defence. I want to push further. How is a physicist working to understand the behaviour of a material at millikelvin temperatures fundamentally different from a performance artist pushing themselves to their limit to understand what it is to be human? Both are acts of investigation. Both demand sustained, disciplined attention. Both produce knowledge that didn't exist before. Both require creativity — not as ornament, but as method.

What Feynman didn't say — but what his life demonstrated — is that the boundary isn't real. After that exchange, he and Zorthian began trading lessons: physics for drawing. Feynman started painting in 1962 and continued for the rest of his life. He didn't just argue that science can appreciate beauty. He crossed the line and made things.

Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, approaches the same territory from the opposite direction. Where Feynman argued from within science, Rubin argues from within creative practice — and arrives at a more radical claim: that creativity is not a rare ability, not a calling for a gifted few, but “a fundamental aspect of being human.” If Rubin is right — and I believe he is — then the question isn't whether scientists can be creative. Creativity is already there, in everyone, always. The question is what we do with it, and whether the institutions we work in make room for it or wall it off.

Perhaps, then, the perceived difference between science and art lies not in creativity but in expression. Art expresses; science discovers. I'm not sure that distinction survives contact with practice. A well-designed experiment expresses a question with extraordinary precision — the choice of variables, the architecture of the apparatus, the decision of what to leave uncontrolled are all compositional acts. A graph of qubit coherence over time has an aesthetic: you learn to see when a curve is right, the same way a printer learns to see when a tone is right. And the darkroom processes I work with are expressive by any measure — they make visible something about the relationship between intention, material, and emergence that exists nowhere else.

During my postdoc in Vienna, I was based at a research institute in Maria Gugging — coincidentally one of the founding locations of Art Brut. I was also lucky enough to attend the orchestra at the Musikverein two or three times a week. I was a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde der bildenden Künste, and — ironically — not a member of any scientific association beyond my workplace. I visited the Gugging art centre regularly; I currently have art from the residents on my office wall. Nobody found this strange. The scientists I knew were all doing something similar — making, performing, building, looking. The divide between “creative” and “technical” existed on the university's organisational chart. Nowhere else.

Science and art are not separated in practice. They are separated by institutional naming. My life — and the lives of most scientists I know — is evidence of that.

The community

I don't have to look far. I often meet colleagues from the cleanroom at Lindy Hop dances. Several members of my team play instruments, from baroque ensembles to contemporary. There's a group of us who keep running into each other at the orchestra. Others are accomplished painters, graphic artists, electronics tinkerers, or spend their evenings experimenting with the latest AI models. Scientists, and art.

The convergence works from the other direction, too. In the analogue photography and alternative process communities, I've met artists who are — whether or not they'd use the word — scientists. They may lack formal training in chemistry or optics, but their practice is investigative at its core. How do I express this? How do I make the viewer feel this? What happens if I push this process past its intended limits? What if I try something nobody has tried? They ask questions, design experiments, observe results, and share their findings through their work. The methods differ from a laboratory. The structure of inquiry is the same.

This is what made the NPL panel work. Ruth and Joseph approach scientific data as raw material for artistic investigation. I approach artistic processes as extensions of scientific practice. We arrived at the same place from opposite directions, and the room — full of metrologists, at five o'clock on a Monday — recognised it immediately. The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology created space for this kind of conversation. The appetite is real.

I don't think we need to justify art to scientists by proving it makes them better problem-solvers. And I don't think artists need to invoke science to legitimise their investigations. Both framings diminish both practices. What I want to say is simpler: the skills are the same — patience, material intuition, comfort with failure, the trained eye for when something unexpected is actually something important. Experimentalists and artists exercise these daily. The question is whether we recognise it in each other.