Iranian-Americans You Should Know: Cumrun Vafa

Cumrun Vafa tries hard not to use English words when he speaks Persian. He adorns the walls of his office with Persian calligraphy and the poems of Saadi and Hafez. His floor is covered with a Bijar-design rug. The big windows of his office look out onto Harvard’s vast, green yard.

Vafa is a Harvard professor and researcher in physics who, in the past 40 years, has received numerous distinguished awards for his research: a junior fellowship from Harvard when he received his Ph.D. in 1985; the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989; the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2017, which honors his years of research in string theory. The list of his honors and awards is so long that he cannot always remember them all.

Vafa left Iran for the US after graduating from an elite high school in Iran at age 17. “I studied at Alborz High School, which played an important role in encouraging my interest in science and mathematics,” he says. “My father had studied in the US and he talked approvingly about American universities. I thought that I, too, should go to America to continue my education.”

But at the time, Vafa had no inkling of the difficulties of living by himself as a student. “When I arrived in America,” he remembers, “I noticed that my English was not as good as I had imagined. I could not easily understand what my classmates and teachers were talking about. It took me around two months to get used to it and to understand them. Also, I had no experience of living by myself and I had to think about everything from food to laundry. But at last, after a year, everything fell into place.”

The Challenge of Cultural Differences

Vafa also had to adapt to cultural differences. “It was not easy for me to adapt to the culture here,” he says. “When you make somebody’s acquaintance [in Iran], you greet him warmly any time that you run into him afterward. But here it is different. You might get acquainted with somebody, but if you meet him the next day he might treat you as though he does not know you. This does not mean that he does not like you, but they express their friendship in a different way. I found their behavior odd.”

“The other thing was that, in Iran, they chose our courses for us. But here, when I was to select courses, I had no idea which ones to pick. I needed a teacher to decide for me and tell me what to do to improve myself. Then I would do it. Little by little, it dawned on me that here, we have to decide for ourselves and everybody is responsible for his own decisions.”

I ask him why he chose physics. He immediately reminisces about his childhood. “I have no idea where this interest, this curiosity, came from,” he says. But since childhood, I have always had questions that were related to physics. For example, I always asked what keeps the moon hanging in the sky and why it does not fall. And why we have only three dimensions for physical objects, meaning length, width, and height. These questions indicated that I was curious about physics and mathematics.”

Early on, Vafa chose to study electrical engineering and economics. “I was more interested in physics and the sciences,” he says. “But originally, I did not think of doing science as a profession because I felt the society I had grown up in did not view that as a viable option. It had never occurred to me that I could become a scientist. So I decided to study both electrical engineering and economics.”

Vafa enrolled at MIT to study engineering but found that he could not forget his scientific passions. “I decided to follow what I was interested in. Fortunately, my parents supported me and I got my degree in mathematics and physics from MIT.”

Vafa then pursued his PhD in physics from Princeton University. But since he loves Persian poetry, he also took a course on Persian literature, which was where he met his future wife, Afarin Sadrolhoffazi, who was then studying electrical engineering. Vafa later pursued his post-doctoral studies at Harvard where, since 1985, he has taught and done research.

Today, Vafa’s main area of research is string theory, a field that tries to reach a unified fundamental theory of nature. Its not an easy subject to understand, but he tries to explain it: “String theory says that if, instead of imagining particles as dots with only one dimension, you think of them as being arranged around a curve like a circle, then the contradiction between the force of gravity and the quantum mechanics is resolved, and this shows that the world is made up of strings. Later, we discovered that not only can particles be one-dimensional, but they can be multi-dimensional as well. One thing that this theory proves is that the world has more than three dimensions and that the extra dimensions lie within a compressed space. String theory answers the puzzles resulting from quantum mechanics vis-à-vis gravitation.”

Stephen Hawking Likes Iranian Food

The 1990s saw a milestone in the development of string theory, thanks in part to one of Vafa’s contributions. He still gets excited when he talks about it: “In the 1970s, [Cambridge theoretical physicist] Stephen Hawking proved that black holes possess thermodynamic attributes. But he could not say what these attributes were. Twenty years later, my colleagues and I proved his theory through string theory. We identified the thermodynamic attributes of black holes after conducting a series of precise mathematical calculations.”

And this led to a meeting with Hawking himself. “He was our guest at Harvard University for a while,” Vafa says. Vafa and his wife invited Hawking for “a combination of Iranian dinner and Iranian music.” Then, while having dinner, an interesting piece of information came to light. “My wife asked Mr. Hawking if he had tried Iranian food before. His answer surprised us. ‘Not only have I had Iranian food, but I have visited Iran as well,’ he said. ‘Exactly when I was 21.’ His visit to Iran was his last trip before [he began to suffer from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS] so he had good memories of it.”

Asked about the Iranian objects in his office, Vafa says, “They show my nostalgia for Iranian culture. The rug with the Bijar design reminds me of Persian rugs.”

Vafa usually travels to Iran once a year, visits his relatives, and gives speeches at Iranian universities. “What has made me happiest in the past few years,” he says, “is the dynamic minds of Iranian students and their scientific questions.”

I ask him about his reaction when people call him a genius. He laughs. “I think everybody is a genius in his own way. Yes, there are people like me who are talented in science and are more capable in this regard than the rest. But they might be much less capable in other areas. What helped me was my eagerness, my perseverance, and the support of my family. I have always enjoyed the support of my parents, my wife, and my children. Whatever I have achieved has been because of my quest to satisfy my curiosity. My aim is to connect our mortal selves to the immortal universe. It is important to me to understand more about this universe.”