It was a chilly day in early Spring and I had only been with Bell Labs for a few months when I came across Alan in Lord Stirling Park. It's a lovely place and I was near the end of an eight point something mile loop. I'd seen him going on the way out as he crouched by his homemade four by five inch view camera. It was beautifully made with a very expensive German lens. He showed me the controls and went back to looking at a tree stump as I walked on. Three hours later he was still in the same spot when I came by . Naïvely I asked how many exposures he'd made:
"Oh just one - but it was so beautiful! In an hour the light could be right for another."
Years later I learned he was a physicist at another Bell Labs location. We worked on a few projects together. His patience and out-of-the-box creativity are remarkable
One of my undergrad physics professors suggested walking in the woods, not thinking of anything in particular before working on a difficult problem. You'd regularly see him just watching something on a tree or bush on campus. He was also a big fan of art museums and was taking by "finding beauty in simple forms. " He also told us not to study for exams in classes that meant something to us. Just keep up and think and let the tests flow by as nothing other than mileposts. Some of the best suggestions I've had. When I've interviewed people for positions that demand a degree of cleverness I always ask about their hobbies. It turns out that was a good idea.
The trigger for this is new work from a group of Cambridge psychologists that, for the first time, offers empirical evidence that engaging in artistic beauty helps you escape the "mental trappings of daily life" and induce "psychological distancing" - the zooming out on your thoughts to form connections and gain clarity.
The tests asked people to study simple ceramics as well as line drawings of them. Their simplicity demanded focus - something that might be difficult with a complex piece of art. All of the subjects in the ceramic group tested higher on abstract thinking tests compared to those who looked at the drawings for short time. The later group saw no improvement over their scores before the tests. More startling were the results of those who regularly engaged in an artistic hobby. Their abstract thinking scores were even higher than the non-hobbyist group.
Physics and math are the only areas I know with any depth. Both are driven by beauty and curiosity. Perhaps it's not surprising that many in these fields engage in artistic hobbies like art, music and even poetry as well as spending some time every day being alone with nature in some way.
Go to your local museum and look at a few things deeply, wander in a park or the woods and loose yourself. Try drawing something. Not only is it a good break, but your ability to think abstractly may improve!
comments on innovation
A few weeks ago my friend Om began a piece on innovation with the torpedo bat. As with anything Om writes, it's a recommended read. I have an interest in innovation in sport, but will start with some more general comments.
I tend to see innovation as a step in a chain: discovery → invention → development → innovation. These usually don't come from the same organizations and can span a large amount of time. There's also a great non-linear mixing. Discoveries can lead to other discoveries, inventions can lead to discoveries and so on. I've been involved in the first three areas at different times. In my mind innovation is a successful change that embeds itself in some area. I've never been directly involved in that process, although things I've worked on have led to it.
It isn't an efficient process and efforts to make it more efficient usually fail. Research, the leading edge, is often broken into three areas: curiosity driven research, high impact research and applied research. Various labels are used, but curiosity driven research is where major change often comes from. In the US it's much rarer than it once was as funders expect progress on a time schedule. High impact is more common - research that is likely to achieve a stated goal. And finally applied research can be thought of as the leading edge of development.
In many disciplines innovation is the only segment recognized and richly rewarded by the public, but they're all difficult and necessary,
Witnessing the current US regime's attack on science and education is beyond disturbing. I'll stick with the research side as that's what I know best, but the attacks on intellectual freedom, students, faculty and funding will lead to medium term programs and long term disaster for the country and beyond. As an example very little basic research on drugs is done in pharmaceuticals. They take research from universities and the NIH and apply it. An important step, but the pipeline is being destroyed as I write. And the attach on education in general will dry up human resources at all stages. The price the nation will pay for acting on grievance will be enormous.
With that off my chest I'll go back to sports. The International Olympic Committee talks about three principles: fairness, safety and inclusion. I've written about the importance of the ordering of these and the interpretation from science, so I won't expand on that here, but I'll add that entertainment is part of the picture. Some sports are big business as is betting on them. That can and does drive the ordering of the three basic principles.
The quest to win and safety create a desire for innovation. About ten years ago I became interested in the fluid dynamics of a volleyball in flight. Princeton has a rich collection of sports science papers. There are hundreds of papers on baseball, cricket, soccer, rugby, American football, hockey, tennis and the so-called Olympic sports. There are dozens of papers on baseball ranging from the fluid dynamics of the ball in flight, neurology and vision (odd fact - of all occupations and spots, major league baseball players have the highest vision acuity by a good margin. They also have slower than average reaction times), kinesiology, and so on. The physics of bat design and sweet spots goes back to the 1950s. Innovation like the torpedo bat is the results of successful design and testing as the fundamental work has been around for a while.
Running shoes, bicycle design and swimsuits are more controversial areas. All are now regulated for fairness although it raises the question of what a record means. Track bikes from before 1995 were much faster than current designs so how do you compare records. Innovation in shoe design over the past five years has rendered records many track events obsolete. Some innovations are less controversial, although their impact has been great. And there are flexible bars and floors in gymnastics, a steady progression of tennis racket design and so on.
And then there's innovation in technique. The Fosbury flop in the high jump is often considered the single most revolutionary innovation in sport. There's a good deal of innovation in coaching that comes from just trying things to the application of kinesiology. a better understanding of physiology, psychology and even sociology.
With all of this innovation and change there's something more fundamental. The passion, focus and drive of elite athletes. Knowing a few Olympians has taught me a lot about that. At the highest level of sport I suspect that's a constant that remains unchanged. That fierce passion exists in many other endeavors, but sport offers a simple language most of us can understand giving us a way to celebrate excellence.
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With all of the political craziness in the US, I've been listening to music and doing math as a diversion. Here's a wonderful performance of the "Pa-pa-ge-na! Pa-pa-ge-no!" duet from Die Zauberflöte. . It's not often you see a coloratura soprano in the role and there's serious musical chemistry in play.
Posted at 10:18 AM in friends, general comments, music, sports | Permalink | Comments (0)
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