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 — that you never have to choose between being moved by something and understanding it. He also 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. That is the entire job, as far as I’m concerned. It’s certainly the job in this room.

Stephen Hawking asked the hardest questions we know how to ask — what happens at the edge of a black hole, whether time had a beginning — and then refused to keep the answers among physicists, putting them in a book that millions of people who’d never taken a physics class actually read. He did that work from a wheelchair, and from 1986 through a speech synthesizer, which is part of why I insist a room accommodate the person in it rather than the other way around. And Jared Isaacman commanded the first crew to orbit Earth with no professional astronauts aboard — a flight that raised more than $240 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital — then went back up and became the first private citizen to step outside the capsule. Space isn’t only something to look at anymore, and this room isn’t a poster of somewhere you’ll never go. I want the kid in this chair to grow up assuming they could go.

Earthrise · Bill Anders, Apollo 8 · December 24, 1968

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 simply decide it’s worth doing anyway. Great engineering is about serving a purpose so clearly that every detail lines up behind it.

What I admire in Elon Musk’s companies is the method: start from what physics actually 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 — an entire institution built on the motto mens et manus: mind and hand, the conviction that understanding isn’t finished until you’ve made something that has to work in the real world. That one idea steered astronauts to the Moon and taught machines to walk, and it’s the closest thing I have to a design philosophy.

Both ideas live in this building. I asked what every inch of it was actually for instead of how a dental office usually does it — which is why you’ll control the lighting from your own chair, why every suite was designed around the person sitting in it rather than the equipment, and why I sketched every room by hand, down to where each fixture sits, before asking AI to sharpen my ideas or show me a different way. Good engineering should disappear into the experience. If you never notice a single one of those decisions and simply feel taken care of, then 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 genuinely 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 did something I care about just as much: he made the deepest ideas in the universe feel playful and clear, to anyone who asked. He is the reason I believe explaining well is a form of respect, not a favor.

And physics isn’t abstract in here — it’s most of what happens to you. The blue light that hardens a filling is a chemical reaction triggered by a specific wavelength. The image that finds a cavity is a controlled burst of X-rays reading density. The tool that cleans a tooth works by vibrating faster than you can hear. Ask me about any of it while you’re in the chair and I will happily tell you, because understanding how reality is put together shouldn’t be intimidating. It should feel like what it really is: an incredible gift — the chance to learn how the universe itself works.

This is the fastest changing science, and the one that most shaped how I built Molar Town. The thread running through all of it is the same: using computation to extend what human minds can do — never to replace them.

Alan Turing started it by asking, seriously and first, what it would even mean for a machine to think. Demis Hassabis is where I watch it land. In 2020 his team presented AlphaFold, which solved a problem biologists had wrestled with for fifty years — predicting the shape a protein folds into — and it has now done it for essentially every protein we know about. He and John Jumper shared half the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. That’s the version of AI I care about: not a machine that talks, a machine that hands biology back to biologists.

In here, it means intelligent tools do the quiet work in the background — flagging what deserves a second look, keeping records straight, turning findings into plain language — so I can spend more of my attention where it belongs. Not on a screen. On you.

Your mouth is biology you can watch changing in real time — and the more I learned, the more I believed people deserve to understand their own bodies, not just be told about them.

Two scientists sit on the same remarkable thread. Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray work revealed the very shape of life, often without the credit she was owed. In our own time, Jennifer Doudna picked that thread up and helped turn CRISPR into a precise tool for editing the code of life itself — work that is already changing what medicine can do, and that earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the recognition Franklin herself never received.

First we learned to see the code of life. Then to read it. Now, to change it. That lineage is what DentalDNA is named for — the conviction that the code of your own biology should be something you can read, understand, and truly own. In this room, what I find doesn’t stay in my chart. It goes home in yours.

Dentistry is applied chemistry. Everything I place in your mouth is a biomaterial — something 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 new elements to that table. She and Pierre discovered polonium and radium, she isolated radium as a pure metal, and she gave the whole phenomenon its name: radioactivity. She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and a second in Chemistry in 1911, and she is still the only person who has ever won in two different sciences.

Here’s why Curie belongs in a dental office. During the First World War she built X-ray equipment into cars, learned to drive so she could run them herself, and took them to the front — twenty mobile units, two hundred more radiology posts, over a million wounded men imaged where they lay instead of being carried to a machine. Bring the imaging to the person: that is exactly how this room works, and why the X-ray comes to your chair. She also paid for it, working years around radiation before anyone understood what it did. Every safeguard here exists because of what she didn’t have — digital sensors that need a fraction of the radiation film once did, proper shielding, and one simple rule: the smallest dose that will answer the question, and you’ll know what the question is before we take the image.