Do you consider yourself a scientist or an artist? From early on in our lives, we’re taught to distinguish between these two fields – and the people who pursue them. But what if we are all actually a bit of both? What if science and art have more in common than we realize, both requiring a partnership of analytical and imaginative thinking?

As a quantum physicist and professional ballet dancer, Merritt Moore has resisted pressure to categorize herself as one or the other. Indeed, she is walking, talking, dancing proof that you can build a career in both science and art. She has a PhD in quantum optics from the University of Oxford in the UK, and has also danced professionally with numerous world-class ballet companies.

“It’s definitely my north star to prove that science and art aren’t just compatible – which is often already a debate,” she says, “but that it’s actually essential to have a combination of the two.” Moore has faced scepticism towards this idea, but she takes an experimental approach to proving her point, preferring to demonstrate it with actions rather than convince people in theory.

Right now, she is adjunct professor and artist in residence at NYU Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Her job involves teaching a course on robotics while exploring dancing with robots. She also dances professionally with the Boston Ballet in the US, despite it being on the other side of the world.

Alternating activities

As a child growing up in Los Angeles, California, Moore loved puzzles, and she credits her parents with presenting maths as a fun game, rather than a chore. She also says they nurtured her curiosity, encouraging her to ask questions about the world around her, and sparking her interest in science. “I gravitated towards physics because it felt like a puzzle and had to do with the real world,” she recalls.

Later, at the age of 13, Moore took her first dance class and discovered a second passion. “It was just so natural moving to music and I loved it,” she says. “It felt so raw and authentic.” From then on, she spent every moment of her free time either dancing or studying. Moore found it helpful to bounce back and forth between them; if she couldn’t sit still, she would dance, and if she got tired moving, she could sit and study.

Yet Moore herself did not always believe that she could continue doing both. When she embarked on a physics degree in 2006 at Harvard University in the US, she assumed that she would have to quit dancing. However, during her first year of university she kept it up as an extracurricular activity, and had second thoughts about her decision to put dance aside. Assuming that if she wanted to have a shot at dancing professionally, it was now or never, Moore started auditioning for ballet companies. In 2008 she was accepted at the Ballett Zürich – the largest professional ballet company in Switzerland – and took a year off university to dance with them.

When she returned to Harvard in 2009 to continue with her undergraduate studies, Moore once again assumed she would quit dance. “I thought ‘okay, I’ve now danced professionally, I’m going to be a good physicist and just do physics’,” she says. But another unmissable opportunity arose in 2010 – this time with the Boston Ballet, performing La Bayadère and The Nutcracker. Moore took a semester off university, but while training, she also did a research project back at Harvard on Majorana fermions with condensed-matter physicist Charles Marcus.

Pursuing a career as either a physicist or a professional dancer is demanding enough alone; achieving both is an even greater challenge. Yet Moore found that, in some ways, they were complementary.

Knowing the actual physics, I could visualize exactly what was going on

She did not have the same hours to train that dancers attending ballet schools full time have, but her knowledge of physics helped her to enhance her practice and make it more effective. After all, dance obeys Newton’s laws of motion. Concepts such as torque, moment of inertia and centre of mass allowed Moore to understand at an analytical level how she could achieve certain types of movement with her body, helping her to perfect dance moves more quickly.

She also found that being able to accurately visualize projectile motion was invaluable for optimizing her leaps. “Knowing the actual physics, I could visualize exactly what was going on, so that was huge.”

The quantum element

After graduating from Harvard in 2011, Moore joined Ian Walmsley’s ultrafast optics group at the University of Oxford to pursue a PhD in quantum optics. Many applications in quantum information processing and quantum metrology require the ability to generate bright, correlated pairs of light beams. Moore worked on single photon sources and explore multi-photon states for quantum information experiments. Moore’s experimental project involved creating a single-photon source at the telecom wavelength of 1550 nm. Developing and refining tools like this is essential for carrying information securely in potential future networks of quantum computers.

The system Moore worked with involved a high-powered laser propagating through a nonlinear crystal. This is a material in which the interactions with light do not scale linearly with the light intensity, but exhibit more complex effects, particularly at high intensities. Crucially for Moore’s work, under the right conditions nonlinear crystals can absorb photons of one energy, and then emit two entangled photons of lower energy – and longer wavelength – than the original one. This process is called spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), and the pairs of photons it generates can then be separated, for example with a polarizing beam splitter, to isolate a single photon. Moore’s work is not only of interest in quantum computing, but also in quantum metrology, where high-precision measurements of physical quantities often rely on precise measurements of the interference between photons.

Dancing with robots

While working on her PhD, Moore also danced with the English National Ballet, and as she approached the end of her studies, she started exploring other interests too. She was even selected as one of 12 candidates to appear in the 2017 BBC programme Astronauts: Do You Have What it Takes? In the show, participants tackled various stages of the astronaut selection process, assessed by experts including astronaut Chris Hadfield.

After submitting her thesis in 2017, however, Moore decided to dedicate a few years to ballet, noting that a dancer’s career is typically shorter than that of a scientist. Then, while she was with the Norwegian National Ballet, a novel idea for merging her two worlds arose when she met Silje Gabrielsen – chief design officer and co-founder of Hiro Futures, which is working on creating artificial social skills for robots.

This serendipitous encounter inspired Moore to experiment with robot movement. The idea led to an artist residency at Harvard ArtLab in January 2020 – in collaboration with artist Alice Williamson – to investigate choreographing a dance duet between a robot and a human. Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. “All my dance performances got cancelled,” she recalls, “and I thought: ‘well I can still dance with a robot – robots don’t get COVID!’”

Moore initially thought the work would be a fun, short-term project, but to her surprise, three years later, it is her main job. As adjunct professor and artist in residence at NYU Abu Dhabi, she is continuing to choreograph robot dances and collaborate with robotics researchers. She hopes the work will provide a new creative output and tool for human expression, help improve robotics research, and, ultimately, give her the expertise in robotics that will help her become an astronaut.

Her dance partner for now though is an industrial robotic arm made by the Danish company Universal Robots, and she finds that the work taps into her childhood love of problem-solving. “The robot is quite elegant in the way it moves,” she says, “but it doesn’t have arms or legs, so it’s been interesting, puzzling through how I am going to make it create the hip movement or the knee movement, and how to have it mimic or parallel the human.”

There are multiple ways Moore interacts with her robot dance partner. For a performance, she tends to pre-programme its moves – she likes to know where it will be so they don’t collide mid-routine. Back in the dance studio come research lab, she makes it more interactive. Here she can use devices that track her movement – either motion capture or a virtual-reality tracking system – which allows the robot to react to her moves. There’s also the AI option, where motion capture is used as data to feed to AI, and it comes up with a new routine that can be mapped to a robot.

My dances with this very sterile-looking thing end up being the most personal pieces I’ve ever done

Moore has made some unexpected discoveries through this project, notably that dancing with robots is often more emotional for her than dancing with other humans. She didn’t anticipate this, but she now thinks it makes sense. When dancing with a human, she can see their emotions and personality, and it’s hard to imagine anyone or anything else, whereas the robot is like a blank canvas on to which she can project more personal feelings.

“It can be a different memory of someone special to me who has passed away or a moment in time that I’m remembering, or a fear or excitement about the future,” she explains. “So in a weird way my dances with this very sterile-looking thing end up being the most personal pieces I’ve ever done.”

Leaps of imagination

As a scientist and dancer using technology in art, Moore has a unique perspective of the impact of technology – particularly AI – on creative endeavours. But she is not convinced that robots will replace humans – instead, she thinks they can be new tools of expression.

Moore believes that the rise of AI also highlights the importance of learning how to ask the right questions. After all, we can use technology to help us find answers, but those answers will only be useful if we have the creativity to come up with interesting questions in the first place.

“I think that the freedom to be creative is sometimes lost in the science world these days,” Moore says. “I feel like [in scientific education] we’re given a textbook and told: ‘here’s this equation. Learn this and memorize that.’ But if we look back at the major breakthroughs it was when [people] were being really creative and imaginative and had the freedom to ask outside-the-box questions.”

In this vein, one of Moore’s favourite mottos is “play is the highest form of research”. And while she is still enjoying dancing with robots, she has plenty of other ideas for combining her passions.

Inspired by her experience on Astronauts: Do You Have What it Takes?, Moore even has dreams of dancing on the Moon one day. As Moore advises her students, “I really do believe that if you play and if you’re passionate, then the rest will follow.”