omenti

2 december 1942 - a half watt

4:00 PM 2-Dec-1942

Compton: The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.

Conant: How were the natives?

Compton: Very friendly

 

Almost exactly 80 years ago the first human-made self sustaining nuclear reaction took place under the stands of a vacant football field at the University of Chicago.  It's a remarkable story and something of a race with Nazi Germany.  Fortunately so many competent physicists had fled Germany that the Nazi bomb project was a failure.  It turns out the wikipedia article on the subject is an accurate and readable summary of the dawn of the pre-manhattan project effort to get a handle on nuclear fission.  The piece  gets a bit technical here and there, but you can skip over those parts if you like.  I'll try and give a high level view of what a sustained reaction is without going into the quantum mechanics of the process.

__________

 

Nuclear fission is the process where the nucleus of an atom breaks apart into smaller pieces releasing energy (often quite a bit) in the process.  The nucleus of an atom is a tight cluster made up of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons.

All of those positive changes packed together - you might ask why don't they fly apart? After all, electromagnetism causes like charges repel.  It turns out a very strong force, cleverly called the strong force, acts on neutrons and protons binding them together.  A difference between the two forces becomes important.  Electromagnetism is a long range force while the strong force only acts over short subatomic distances. To first order you can think of the strong force acting only between immediate neighbors while the electromagnetic force acts on all of the protons.

If the nucleus gets big enough the total repulsive electromagnetic force of all of the protons overcomes the closest-neighbor strong force and breaks the nucleus up in to smaller pieces releasing energy in the process (nuclear fission)

Most of the elements we're used to have nuclei that are too small to break up on their own.  A few are on the borderline. In the case of uranium the addition of a single neutron is enough to undergo fission and in the process it releases energy and, on average somewhat more than two extra neutrons along with a couple of nuclei that are smaller than uranium.¹

In nature uranium usually isn't concentrated and the neutrons from fission are absorbed by other materials.² But if you concentrate uranium you get to a point where each fission has a high probability of striking another uranium nucleus and so on - creating a sustained reaction. Unchecked, with enough purity, and you get an atomic bomb. At lower concentrations and with the ability control the amount of neutron absorption you get a controlled nuclear reactor that liberates a useful amount of energy.

 

A number of interesting characters were involved in these early experiments.  Enrico Fermi was the key player in the first sustained reaction.  Physics was getting specialized and he was probably the last physicist who was both a great theorist and experimentalist. 

__________

¹ I've left out a lot.  I haven't mentioned which isotope of uranium for example.  Also - you may have noticed that adding an extra neutron shouldn't increase the electromagnetic force as the neutron is neutral.  It turns out the uranium nuclei is so close to breaking up that the kinetic energy of the addition neutron adds just enough to break things up.  A nice example is adding a neutron to U-235.  One possible fission chain  n + U-235 → Rb-92 + Cs-140 + 3n + 200 MeV of energy. 

Also details of the strong force weren't known at the time..  A clear hypothesis didn't arrive until about 30 years later and deeper details of the mechanism took almost thirty more..

² A natural formations of uranium t pure enough to initiate sustained nuclear reactions was discovered in Gabon.  It operated for a few hundred thousand years producing less than a megawatt of power.  

 

 

a delightful word

Mr Gross was my high school German teacher.   He was big on learning language through song and would regularly point out a German word or phrase that might be more appropriate than American English. I wasn't a good student of the language, but he made an impact on me.  I still remember and use some of his offerings.  Today I saw one of my favorites used in the New York Times - the first time I've seen it used in America.  

freudenfreude

Mr Gross described it as the opposite of schadenfreude. It's the joy and delight we feel when someone else finds success - even when, particularly when,  their success doesn't involve us.  He used to describe the joy he felt when a blind student from our school won a state piano competition.   It's an important social glue - a gift to be aware of and take delight in.  Mr Gross has been gone for a long time, but thinking about this word turned out to be one of the best things I learned in high school.

 

28 years!

This is the original holiday card I sketched back in 1994 along with a bit of midi. I borrowed a Wacom tablet and made a few strokes with the pen - a minute's worth of work.  The music took longer.  The web was new so I posted it on a server under my desk at work.  I didn’t have enough time or imagination to make some new the next year so it returned unchanged.  The third year rolled about and I would have forgotten about it, but there were a few dozen requests.  From then on it went up every year on or soon after Thanksgiving in honor of the Winter Solstice holidays.  It’s a survivor having been hosted on five different servers over the years.  For the silver anniversary I though about drawing something new and held a vote.  The old card stays - it was unanimous.

Now it’s 28 years old.

the original holiday card

Autoplay didn’t exist then so you’ll have to start the music yourself.

Happy Holidays! - peace, friendship, and health to all.

Steve

 

 

finding what works

 

It’s a clear winter night as I write these last words. I’ve stepped out to look at the sky. With the stars up above and the blackness of space, I can’t avoid feeling awe.

How could we, Homo sapiens, an insignificant species on an insignificant planet adrift in a middleweight galaxy, have managed to predict how space and time would tremble after two black holes collided in the vastness of the universe a billion light-years away? We knew what that wave should sound like before it got here. And, courtesy of calculus, computers, and Einstein, we were right.

That gravitational wave was the faintest whisper ever heard. That soft little wave had been headed our way from before we were primates, before we were mammals, from a time in our microbial past. When it arrived that day in 2015, because we were listening—and because we knew calculus—we understood what the soft whisper meant.

                 Steve Strogatz 

 

Chatting with a friend the subject of gravity came up.  It isn't a conventional force, but we perceive it as one.  Rather it's connected with the curvature of a four-dimensional object called space-time that we happen to live in.  The fundamental concepts aren't intuitive and the math that describes it is beyond what you might get in an engineering degree.  So how to describe it?  There are very high level books and videos that speak in terms of balls on rubber sheets and then jump to oddities like clocks running faster on mountain tops and blackholes.  I usually find them a bit fluffy and disappointing.  They're bound by assumptions about their audience, so it's not a major criticism. It's just that I was talking with one person and something a bit deeper seemed appropriate.  Just how do you find the right level and where do you go from there?

 

A few years ago Wired produced the 5 Levels series.  An expert would try to explain something about a complex subject to five people:  a child, a teenager, an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student and, finally, a colleague.   My favorite is Donna Strickland on lasers - give it a watch, she's excellent:

I went through something like this just before my Ph.D. thesis defense.  I was to explain my thesis work to a group of high school students. At first I thought it would be easy, but that notion quickly evaporated.  It turned out to be one of the most difficult and embarrassing things I've done.  My advisor stepped in near the end of the talk and summed everything up beautifully.  Afterwards he told me if you understand something deeply, you can explain the gist of it to a high school student.  That's high on the list of the most important things I've learned. 

 

My friend has a BA in biochemistry and knows about differential equations so I figured I should aim for something between the vague videos and what a senior level general relativity course offers.  The more I thought about it I realized it would be best to talk about the history and use a bit of calculus and geometry.  I had the advantage of knowing her well and she can stop and ask questions or give a blank look along the way.  And afterwards she was going to talk about something where she has serious expertise. 

 

Steve Strogatz is an applied math professor at Cornell. He's written several books including the one the opening quote is taken from: Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe.   It's an excellent read that makes no assumption on your mathematical background.¹  Thinking about it gave me some hints of how I might proceed.

 

First why do I have to use math?  Why won't words work?  The laws of nature obey logic that we can make predictions from.  Math, calculus in particular, is a logical calculating tool.  In a way it's a prothesis. Math lets us take a bit of logic, write down and perform logical manipulations that far exceed what we can do in our head, and then interpret the results. The logic can be crafted to represent something about the science.   Every once and awhile the results can make predictions that can lead to new discoveries, but more often they're used to to solve an enormous range of problems.   And why calculus?  Much of the  underlying structure of nature has been successfully expressed with the corner of calculus known as differential equations.  "Why?' is a deeper question.  If one encountered an intelligent alien who understood some aspects of how the Universe worked, I suspect they'd use math.  I suspect, but it's only my suspicion, that it's deeper than an artifact of how we think about things. 

 

I spent a couple of hours writing.  How general relativity came about, a bit on the structure of space-time, what goes into the main equation and how a simple prediction could be calculated.  Then about an hour of chatting that left me with two delightful philosophical questions that will probably lead to more discussions as well as her turn to teach me something. 

 

Whatever your expertise, it can be fun to try and explain the gist and maybe even the beauty of it (those can be he same thing) to someone with a very different background.   If you're like me you'll fail at first, but eventually you'll get to a point where you can find the right grounding, the right words and perhaps the right drawings or even music (some of you are artists and musicians).

__________

¹ By all accounts he's a wonderful teacher and has become a popularizer of math.  Among other things he's created a college course at Cornell for people who think they're afraid of math and have generally put it off until their senior year. 

 

 

 

 

teaching and technological change

On Saturday my niece sent a few photos from her son's robotics competition.  While standardized components and a simple scripting language are used, there's a lot of room for learning and creativity.  Winning teams spend much of their time modifying the basic design along with moving to more sophisticated programming languages.  The basic hardware is quite expensive so many of the groups are sponsored by their schools and sometimes local businesses.  It seems like a great way for kids who like to build things and play computer games to learn a bit of engineering and programming.  My niece's son isn't interested in math or science at school, but loves to build things.  It's a path that has him learning.  Given the right advisor there could be a lot of learning.  It's also a nice example of using technology as a teaching vehicle.

 

Sometimes new technologies are seen as a way to cheat.  I've read that some teachers worry that language models like GPT-3 will give students easy access to ghost-written essays.  Of course there's still the problem of students buying essays from human, but this may be cheaper and easier to get.  One can imagine a number of ways to deal with this.  A teacher might ask something like "based on the debate Adam and Sally were having last Tuesday, how would you.."   Indexicality - pointing to something in the context in which it occurs - is something these language models can't address.  Better still may be to focus on critical thinking in the class and test on something that isn't a simple regurgitation. Essays seem like a very uncreative way to teach writing and critical thinking skills.   And there will probably be teachers who figure out how to involve language models as a tool to teach creative thinking.  That would be a leap similar to using robotics competitions to teach shop, basic engineering and programming skills.

 

I'd like to see changes in how science and math are taught in high school.  Currently there's a push to eliminate areas most students will rarely use.  I'd counter that by teaching the subjects in a way to improve critical thinking.  Pure math may be a way forward, not the "new math" that crashed and burned in the 60s, but big ideas.  It doesn't have to be about formal proofs and calculations (although tools like Mathematica and Maple can be useful experimentation and visualization tools).  I've probably belabored it before, but simple topology, infinity, the continuum, maps, abstraction, inference and model building. None of this has to be taught with rigor, but playing with them can open pathways students have never thought about.   Sure teach some of the regular math, but it doesn't have to be so repetitive. I'd add probability and risk analysis as well as personal finance. The same with science - do away with memorization and focus on the concepts and how we arrived at them.  Of course extra points for making it playful like the robotics competition.

 

But I'm not a k-12 educator so all of this may be silly.

 

And for college here's something by the wonderful Woodie Flowers of MIT on changes he'd made to university engineering curriculum and beyond.  (Woodie was one of the most innovative teachers at MIT)

 

preview season

As many of you know I like to celebrate major accomplishments of friends.  This time I'll offer previews from two good friends as well as another that could have an impact on education.

 

The first is  Juliette Powell's second book.  The A.I. Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is the working title and it's a further development of her dissertation at Columbia.  I've been fortunate enough to have read the nearly-final draft.  Well balanced and accessible to non-specialists, it's going to be an excellent resource for people trying to sort out promises and pitfalls that can impact much of the future.  One person who had an advance look will be using it as required reading for a college course.  Be on the lookout!

 

The second is from Sarah Pavan.  One of the best beach volleyball players in the world, she's also a clear and deep thinker.  As I've aged I've learned to learn from those outside my area.  She's  been a source of ideas. At the elite level women's beach volleyball is a mental game with communication being one of the defining aspects.  A few months ago her teammate of five years decided to quit the team.  Sarah was faced with finding someone with the necessary complementary skill set as well as the drive, passion, ability to communicate and chemistry.  Canada only has a few candidates, but Sarah found the right one in Sophie Bukovec.  I expect to see them developing as a team over the next year as they focus on the Paris Olympics in 2024.

 

 

And finally potential news from what I consider the most important college course in the country. Sense & Sensibility & Science is a course at Berkeley developed and taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments.   Here's an overview:

 

This is a course on the ideas from science that are most widely useful for everyone. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for all kinds of reasoning, from reading the news critically to making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.

Every day we make decisions that can and should be informed by science. We make decisions as individuals, as voters, and as members of our various communities. We make decisions as students and parents and policy makers. The problem is, we don’t do it so well—a fact sadly apparent in political debates. It’s easy to blame poor decision-making on the greed, irresponsibility, ignorance, or incompetence of other people. But the problem seems to be more basic than that. It seems we face a paradox. Living in a democracy means that everyone’s view counts the same as everyone else’s. But to make decisions informed by science, we often need to defer to those with relevant expertise. Therefore, we shouldn't rely on a democratic system to make the best decisions. Or should we? This basic tension between science and democratic decision-making serves as a unifying theme for Sense & Sensibility & Science (SSS), a course that aims to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers. We will explore key aspects of scientific thinking that everyone should know, especially the many ways that we humans tend to fool ourselves, and how to avoid them—including how to differentiate signal from noise, evaluate causal claims, and avoid reasoning biases. We’ll then look at the best models for using science to guide decisions, since the rational and arational (e.g., values, fears, and goals) then have to be combined. We will explore these themes experientially, often with in-class activities and discussions, and we will culminate in two open-ended projects to design better methods of deliberation and decision making, first as groups, and then as individuals. Co-taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology, S&S&S fosters intellectual advancement for interdisciplinary knowledge seekers.

 

Browse through the topics and resources section.  You'll get something reading the recommended materials and thinking about the topics.  It's one of the few places outside the community where I've seen scientific optimism discussed. A book is being developed aimed at college students, although it should be widely applicable.  There's a serious need to put together something like this at the high school level even though many states would probably label thinking about the process of science as 'woke'..

feel free to comment!

fairness, inclusivity, safety and social convention

There's so much that isn't fair in this world, but most competitive sports make an attempt to provide a reasonably level playing field through the establishment and enforcement of rules and categories.  Rules vary from sport to sport but some constants are the elimination of performance enhancing drugs, a degree of safety for participants, and the creation of categories.  Some sports allow a certain amount of violence or danger balancing what the fans and athletes want vs modifications to the rules that might make the sport less desirable.  In other words there's a social convention.  Sometimes that social convention changes after serious injuries or deaths.  Positive change has come in world rugby in the past few years, but other sports are more resistant to change.

 

More recently fairness and inclusivity have come into play.  Categories exist to prevent grossly unfair contests.  You don't want a wrestler up against someone half their weight.   Twenty year olds don't compete with ten year olds or seventy year olds. Men and women usually are have categories of their own in most sports.  And para-athletes generally have separate competitions with a dizzying set of subcategories to allow fairness given a wide range of capabilities.  Fairness comes first in these, but it allows inclusivity to play and potentially succeed in a given sport.   But like so much else in the world there's change.

 

South African Oscar Pistorius became a below-the-knee amputee in both legs as a child due to a congenital defect.  Using racing blades, he became a good sprinter - an Olympic class sprinter.  There was controversy about how much of his performance came from him and how much from the blades?  Are blades as good as or better than real lower legs?    He was charismatic and there was a large amount of social pressure that running should be inclusive.   A few calculations were done early on followed by a few real tests with this unusual subject.  Some of the early results indicated the energy return from the carbon-fibre blades was the same as the achilles tendon - in other words no advantage.  That was the message the public received. The more careful work that followed has shown he had a significant advantage from lower contact time with the ground and added leg length - enough that 'he was probably a good, but not elite runner turning in performances well beyond his athleticism.  The blades are performance enhancing prosthetics.  

 

Performance-enhancing blades raise an interesting question.  What if a world class runner adopted them?  Would a 9.30s 100 meter dash be fair?  How about a 1hr 50m marathon?  Would elite runners have to get amputations to compete?  Fortunately the really elite runners are staying away from this, but now we have another very good runner trying to compete.  Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has a great interview with Peter Weyand - one of the best biomechanics physiologists on the science and pseudoscience involved.  If you're interested in these things start at about 26 minutes in this episode. 

 

There will be innovation.  What happens in field sports that demand good court vision with augmented reality glasses?  Will they be banned and in what sports?  Will performance enhancing prosthetics for stick and racket sports come about?  What is pure and fair and where does inclusion fit in?

 

And now to a socially charged issue: transwomen and female sports.  To first order biological sex has two categories while gender is a continuum.  I think that gender should not be a category for discrimination, but that biological sex should be used to establish categories for fairness and, in some sports, safety.  There's a good deal of solid science that shows male puberty results in advantages in size, muscle mass, VO₂ max and a few other metrics.  These advantages are important in most sports and would exclude biological women from the elite and next to elite categories in most sports where men compete.¹ Testosterone is cited as the advantage, but suppressing it later in life only results in a small drop in performance (there are a few poorly done studies that claim otherwise).   This has become a social issue with a rightwing party calling for blanket bans in many activities including sports.  There's been pushback by allies.  In some cases female athletes have been threatened by sponsors to not speak out and go along with inclusion rather than fairness.   Should transathletes compete with men, females, or have their own category?  That seems to be a social decision that only a few sports bodies have addressed at this point. 

 

I'll admit to a bias.²   I believe in solid science and fairness. I think transwomen need to compete with men or have their own category. Politically I'm on the left on most issues and think transpeople should work and live how they want, but that doesn't extend into sport where categories exist for reasons of fairness.  Fairness to women overrides scientifically unsupported inclusion in my mind.

 

__________

¹ A chart showing the performance difference between biological male and female elite athletes. Longitudinal studies show a drop in male advantage from 5 to 30% after three years of testosterone suppression and a non-longitudinal study showed a similarly small drop after about 15 years. 

 

 

In the real world this means a transwoman swimmer who was poorly ranked as a male was able to easily defeat all of his NCAA female competitors even with a few years of testosterone suppression.  In sprinting it has been shown that biological Olympic gold medal females don't even make it into the top 2,000 for men.  It has been posited man ranked 1,000 could easily beat any women even if he had testosterone suppression that dropped his advantage by 30%.

² I have an involvement with beach volleyball and love both the men's and women's game.  I know a few Olympians on the women's side who sometimes train with amateur men who easily outpower them.  The fact the women are less athletic doesn't make their game less interesting..  it's just that the two styles of play are very different.

 

chindōgu flavored technologies

Chindōgu is the curious Japanese art form of inventing gadgets that seem to a clever solutions to  problems, but which end up causing more problems than they solve.  You may have seen examples like:

toilet paper dispenser hats: you never run out of tissue when you have to sneeze

baby mops: a baby outfit that also mops the floor

umbrella ties

many more .. search the Internet

 

To keep the art form pure you're not supposed to make money - almost guaranteed as the public will see the gadget as useless and won't buy it.  (there was a tragic mistake - the selfie stick started as chindōgu)  I know of an engineering professor who taught a course on creative engineering using it as a vehicle for student projects.

 

For a few years I've found it useful to extend the term to cover technical and social technical inventions that are seen as solving problems by the maker, but are clearly clueless.  A few examples from the past month:

Flat panel displays in cars are a bit of automotive chindōgu.

Blockchains are an example of computational chindōgu.

Meta's Horizon Worlds is pure techno-social chindōgu.

 

Perhaps you might find hunting for this kind of chindōgu useful.  I find it to be a nice way of thinking about what might represent meaningful and useful longterm change.  And of course sometimes you label things incorrectly and have to come back and rethink.  That may be even more useful.

 

And then there are potlatches..  the destruction of wealth to impress and gain status.  Fully autonomous (class five) vehicles, NFTs, Facebook's version of the meta verse, hydrogen powered cars ...  

 

 

 

 

 

an almost lost word from the dictionary

Reading an obscure paper from the 1880s a word stopped me - apricity.  It seemed like I had come across it before and there were hints from the context, but it was time for the OED.¹  I pulled out the first volume of my old compact edition - the one with the magnifying glass - and found it.  An obscure word dating to 1623 meaning the warmth of the Sun in the Winter.

 

The warmth of a bright Sun in on a clear cold Winter day.  That's something that captures most of us know - the radiant heat of the Sun isn't isn't perturbed by the cold air and can be quite comfortable.  Then it hit me I heard the word in a John McPhee lecture in Princeton.² A few decades had passed since he wrote Coming into the Country, but it was about three Alaskas including a look at the Winter.  A perfect word for some of the days.

 

A day of apricity can make snow melt in subzero air temperatures on  Southern-facing roofs only to freeze into beautifully clear long icicles at the edge.  This type of ice formation is often free of bubbles producing beautifully clear ice.  If you have wide enough icicles you might try making an ice lens and starting a fire.

 

Such days are made for outdoor recreation if there isn't any wind.  Perhaps more importantly the basic principle - heat transfer by radiation - can keep heating expenses down.  Heating and moving air to fill rooms is enormously inefficient. If you aren't moving around much you might try a small radiant heater and point it at the area where you are. Heat what you need to heat with infrared light. Direct sunlight is the same...  sit in the Sun.  These measures, plus wearing warm indoor clothing and being somewhat active lets you get away with low thermostat settings.  And be on the lookout for aprocity as that can give a big psychological boost!

 

Another Winter word I like is tingilinde. It's a constructed word based on J.R.R. Tolkien's elfin language Quenya meaning the sparkle of the starlight reflecting on the snow on a dark moonless Winter night.  Such sights could be spectacular in Montana away from town when it was really cold and a bit of new snow had fallen as tiny ice crystals. Another great spot is Yellowstone .. super cold air forms the right kind of ice crystal snow near the hot springs and geysers.   Once it was magical - the cold starlight reflecting from millions of tiny diamonds along with the greens and reds of a bright aurora dancing overhead.   On such nights you don't notice that it's really cold.

__________

¹ The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is the 1928 edition.  Devilishly small print that requires a magnifying glass, but the real OED and only about $80 (still a lot back then!) rather than the fortune the full dictionary went for.  There's a lovely bit of historical fiction on the dictionary and the people who made it happen:  The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.  It's set in the time and place with many of the characters, but focuses on what was left out..  those who weren't white, male and of a certain class.  Recommended!

² McPhee is a great writer - a master of the creative non-fiction genre.   

 

 

 

the oscillating mind and the default mode network

666/(6 + 6 + 6) = 37

and

333/(3 + 3 + 3) = 37

37 and 73 are reversible primes , 37 is the 12^th prime and 73 is the 21^st - another reversible pair

and ....

and ....

and ....

 

It arrived in a lovely wooden box with polished brass hinges and was written in a nearly calligraphic hand. Skipping about fifty pages was the conclusion that said its author had found the number 37 was key to gravity and electromagnetism and was being unfairly ignored.

I thought about the first two statements for a few seconds  - they were of the form (100x + 10x + x)/3x  or 111x/3x = 37 for the integers x = 1 through 9.  No surprise.  

__________

 

Universities with famous physics professors get a lot of mail from people out to prove something.  The amount of effort is often as astonishing as how wrong the work is.  Some universities farm out this mail to upperclass undergrads and grad students as a filter as well as an education.  It's true that every once and awhile there's an unknown genius - Ramanujan's letter to Hardy being the most dramatic example in history - but those days are probably gone and Ramanujan was already known in India. 

 

Creativity isn't terribly useful without background and a level of competence. But where does it come from?  I'm certainly no neuroscientist, but talk to a few and there's quite a bit of new work going on these days.  Some of it is from fMRI imaging..  a technique that can map active areas in the brain while a person is thinking.  It seems most early work would have subjects were told to rest between tasks while new trials were prepared.  The machines are quite noisy and produced enough data that it only made sense to run them during the active trial.  Finally someone decided to look at what was going on when minds were just wandering.

 

Your brain accounts for about a fifth of your resting energy demand.  Surprisingly focusing and thinking deeply about something uses about the same energy as an unfocused wandering mind.   When fMRIs were finally used to look at the unfocused wandering state it was found the brain was lit up, often with widely separated areas firing at the same time.  It's known as the default mode network.  Mind wandering - like when you suddenly realize you can't remember anything about the past six miles you've driven - accounts for nearly half your waking mental state.  

 

Some cognitive neuroscientists - Moshe Bar for example - believe these ramblings may be associated with mood - ruminating ramblings and their connections can lead to worrisome states while creative wanderings can lead to happy moods (this is speculation and there are many other states). It's also noted that your more conscious states can range from exploratory to exploitatory.  You seem to be able to know when you should focus and get something done or be open to new things.  

 

Much of what Moshe says squares with how I think about creativity. That doesn't mean it's right, but it strikes this non-specialist as being on the right track.    I try to leave the day open and certain times and remove distractions to allow for small creative moments and put myself in the mood by drawing.   More important is building a supply of seemingly unrelated potential connections through reading, hobbies, travel, friends and so on.  In my case a curious set of friends is central.

 

The most creative organizations I know tend to have a number of foci and unrelated specialists.  I have a relation with one that has almost no overlap with what I do, but pre-pandemic they'd fly me out for a couple of days every year to wander around and drop in on their folks as well as give a little talk.  They seem to value it, but I'm the one who probably benefits the most.   In a few of these companies internal measures of creativity dropped during the pandemic.  Perhaps those semi-random face to face interactions are very important.  It's possible, but difficult, to recreate some of that online despite what Meta would try and tell you:-)

 

Of course there's a bit of speculation here and what works for one person may not for someone else. Major creative moments are rare, but at least we can make the smaller ones more likely.  And hopefully blending these moments of creativity with a background of expertise can be useful. 

 

I wish I could have kept the wooden box.  It was beautifully made. But its content made a big impression.