Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically. 

In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which are relatively small, are related to weather systems that are much larger, and which is controlling which, how and to what degree. He took issue with the (then-)predominant idea in the field that turbulent convection and clouds are merely a passive response to the large-scale forcing.

“They’re just chiseled from marble, these Midwestern summer clouds. It’s like landscapes, you could imagine romping and playing on them. Except they change every three minutes… It’s like a time evolving landscape. I was just in love with it. And I felt that it had a great amount of life force or something. […] Vigor, agency, life force. I felt like it was a thing that had some heart to it. And then you come, and so you go into that field of science and you come along and you discover the people running the show have decided that it’s a too-complicated-to-care-about response to some forcing. And it drove me batty.”

Before becoming an atmospheric scientist, Brian studied chemistry at Caltech and spent his free time experimenting with explosives of all kind in the Mojave Desert. But he eventually decided to look for a less hazardous field and discovered his fascination with the atmosphere after moving back to his home state of Colorado.

Over the course of his career, which has led him to become professor at the University of Miami, Brian has worked on a lot of different topics, but to him they are all manifestations of the one problem that interests him most, which is the problem of scale.

“[…] it was just echoes and echoes of a philosophical question which is, what’s the relationship between the individual and the collective? That’s the one thing that interests me, and I play it out over here in meteorology, and I’m also fascinated with the social sciences and ecology and stuff, where… It’s everywhere!”

In this interview, you will also hear Brian talk about language and poetry in science, improv, and the role of the appendix in “body politics.”

The interview with Brian Mapes was recorded in January 2020.