Space is where my curiosity began, and nothing has ever stretched that feeling wider than the night sky. Long before dentistry, I was the kid who wanted to know how everything worked, and the universe is the biggest version of that question there is.

Carl Sagan is the reason it stuck. He taught me that wonder and rigor belong together, he never once talked down to anyone, and he believed the kindest thing you can do for a person is help them find their place in something vast. Stephen Hawking and Jared Isaacman share this room with him: one refused to keep the hardest questions in the universe among physicists, and the other proved you don’t have to be a professional astronaut to go to orbit. I want the kid in this chair to grow up assuming they could go.

I’m a builder at heart. Detroit is a city that makes things, and I’ve always been drawn to engineers who look at a hard problem and decide it’s worth doing anyway. What I admire in Elon Musk’s companies is the method: start from what physics allows, throw out what everyone assumes a thing has to cost, and rebuild from there. That’s how a rocket stopped being something you throw away after one flight and became something you land and fly again.

MIT is the other reason this room exists. Its motto is mens et manus, mind and hand: understanding isn’t finished until you’ve made something that has to work in the real world. That’s how this building was designed. I sketched every room by hand, down to where each fixture sits, and asked what every inch was for, instead of how a dental office usually does it. If you never notice a single one of those decisions and simply feel taken care of, it worked.

Physics is the layer underneath everything: the invisible rules that make a tooth, a heartbeat, and a galaxy all answer to the same math. I find that thrilling.

This room has two heroes. Nikola Tesla saw electricity as a raw force waiting to be harnessed for people, and pushed it until the world ran on it. Richard Feynman made the deepest ideas in the universe feel playful and clear to anyone who asked. He’s the reason I believe explaining well is a form of respect, not a favor. Understanding how reality is put together shouldn’t be intimidating. It’s a gift.

This is the fastest changing science, and the one that most shaped how I built Molar Town. The idea that runs through all of it: use computers to extend what people can do, never to replace them.

Alan Turing started it by asking, seriously and before anyone else, what it would even mean for a machine to think. Demis Hassabis is where I watch it land. His team built AlphaFold, which solved a problem biologists had wrestled with for fifty years (predicting the shape a protein folds into) and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. That’s the version I care about. Not a machine that talks. A machine that hands biology back to biologists.

The more I learned about biology, the more I believed people deserve to understand their own bodies, not just be told about them.

Two scientists share this room, decades apart. Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray images revealed the shape of DNA itself, often without the credit she was owed. Jennifer Doudna picked up where she left off and helped turn CRISPR into a precise tool for editing the code of life, work that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the recognition Franklin never got. First we learned to see the code of life. Then to read it. Now, to change it. That’s the lineage DentalDNA is named for. In this room, what I find doesn’t stay in my chart. It goes home in yours.

Dentistry is applied chemistry. Everything I put in your mouth is a biomaterial, chosen to live inside a human body for years and behave itself: bonding to tooth, surviving heat and cold and acid and the full force of your bite, and staying kind to the tissue around it. Choosing well is quiet, unglamorous work, and it’s the difference between something that lasts five years and something that lasts twenty.

Dmitri Mendeleev found the hidden order behind the elements and left blanks in his table for the ones nobody had discovered yet. I love that idea, that behind something that looks complicated there’s an elegant pattern quietly waiting to be seen. Marie Curie added two elements of her own, gave radioactivity its name, and is still the only person who’s won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.