The chunks of plastic held the ghosts of magnetic fields produced by some of our gadgets and appliances. Shuli's pieces were quite beautiful and had me thinking about visualization on the train ride back home.
We only see fragments of the real world, but our brain stitches what it can find together into a fleeting proxy for reality. It's turned out to be good enough of what we do, but I recommend An Immense World by Ed Yong for a look at how evolution has equipped other lifeforms. (It's a wonderful science for a general audience book - my favorite for 2022) Science tries to sort out what is real and physics often seems foreign to what we're used to. On the train ride home I was thinking about how we visualize electromagnetic radiation - specifically a question someone had asked a few years back.
What would wifi look like if we could see it?
It seems relevant if you're trying to figure out how walls, refrigerators and other objects in a house or office interact so we know what the signal strength might be. People who do this either just measure and plot signal strength or have simple models to give them a heat map that hopefully approximates what they would measure. None of these gets at the real question.. what do wifi signals .. and all the other electromagnetic radiation that surrounds us look like?
The equations are straightforward and I suspect many imagine what it might look like when doing calculations - at least the parts we're looking at. But these representations aren't rich enough. The real appreciation is in the mathematics. Feynman commented on it back in the 60s:
I have asked you to imagine these electric and magnetic fields. What do you do? Do you know how? How do I imagine the electric and magnetic field? What do I actually see? What are the demands of scientific imagination? Is it any different from trying to imagine that the room is full of invisible angels? No, it is not like imagining invisible angels. It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. Why? Because to make invisible angels understandable, all I have to do is to alter their properties a little bit-I make them slightly visible, and then I can see the shapes of their wings, and bodies, and halos. Once I succeed in imagining a visible angel, the abstraction required-which is to take almost invisible angels and imagine them completely invisible- is relatively easy. So you say, "Professor, please give me an approximate description of the electromagnetic waves, even though it may be slightly inaccurate, so that I too can see them as well as I can see almost invisible angels. Then I will modify the picture to the necessary abstraction."
I'm sorry I can't do that for you. I don't know how. I have no picture of this electromagnetic field that is in any sense accurate. I have known about the electromagnetic field a long time I was in the same position 25 years ago that you are now, and I have had 25 years more of experience thinking about these wiggling waves. When I start describing the magnetic field moving through space, I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them. I'lI tell you what I see. I see some kind of vague shadow, wiggling lines-here and there is an E and B written on them somehow, and perhaps some of the lines have arrows on them -an arrow here or there which disappears when I look too closely at it. When I talk about the fields swishing through space, I have a terrible confusion between the symbols I use to describe the objects and the objects themselves. I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves. So if you have some difficulty in making such a picture, you should not be worried that your difficulty is unusual.
Our science makes terrific demands on the imagination. The degree of imagination that is required is much more extreme than that required for some of the ancient ideas. The modern ideas are much harder to imagine. We use a lot of tools, though. We use mathematical equations and rules, and make a lot of pictures. What I realize now is that when I talk about the electromagnetic field in space, I see some kind of a superposition of all of the diagrams which I've ever seen drawn about them. I don't see little bundles of field lines running about because it worries me that if I ran at a different speed the bundles would disappear, I don't even always see the electric and magnetic fields because sometimes I think I should have made a picture with the vector potential and the scalar potential, for those were perhaps the more physically significant things that were wiggling.
That said I find myself using my mind to fly through through these abstractions of reality that experience and imagination provides. I suspect people do this differently. It isn't something that lends itself to drawing as it's often dynamic and, even though I consider myself extremely visual, not entirely visual. While I find many computer visualizations useful, they don't keep up with the imagination. I suspect no two people imagine quite the same.
A few nights ago Sukie and I were startled to learn something about her visualization. I was listening to The Case of the Blind Mind's Eye - an episode of an excellent BBC science and math podcast. I strongly recommend listening to the episode. They were talking about the mind's eye .. how we conjure up images in our mind. If I ask you to think about an orange giraffe with purple spots, an image appears in your mind. Or at least it does for most people. Aphantasia is a semi-rare condition of people who are unable to generate these images. It's completely fascinating and you need to listen to the show. Sukie heard a few comments and had me go back to the beginning. It turned out she has aphantasia - she's unable to form mental images and is startled that others can. She's suspected comments about the ability are just a figure of speech.
Aphantasia is more of a difference than a defect. Sukie is extremely clever and has done impactful work in a few areas. It turns out there are benefits.. it's another way the brain can imagine. Ed Catmul (Pixar) has it and managed to create a revolution in how computers create images. The same for Glen Keane - the Disney character artist who created Rapunzel, Ariel and a score of other important characters. He describes his process as "thinking with a pencil". The shapes and forms come as he draws in a very fluid and gestural motion.
It may be a spark, perhaps a necessary one, for very out of the box thinking. In the meantime artists and the process of doing art can unlock the imagination. It's not a full representation and perhaps that's what makes it so powerful. It raises so many questions!
types of stupidity
Recently Pip Coburn circulated a note on the importance of finding the right balance of challenge for your skill level to avoid boredom and frustration. He noted the linkage to Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow, something that's fascinated me for some time as finding states of flow is important to me.1
The note made me think about levels of frustration and feelings of 'stupidity' one can have. For some time I've identified types of stupidity with one being very useful and perhaps necessary in science. Here's my response:
It’s fascinating to think about these things. Your comment on loving the work - “absolutely loving” it - is so important.
I think it’s important finding a field that no one can possibly master but, at the same time, know parts of it well enough to find where you may have a bit of success in if you apply yourself. As a beginning grad student I had no idea how hard it is to do research. It’s much more difficult than the most demanding courses as it’s an immersion into the unknown. Some people just give up and find easier paths. I find it useful to think about how to be productively stupid.
’Stupid’ is an unfortunate word, but I haven’t found anything better. Productive stupidity isn’t the relative stupidity you may feel in a a class where the other students are doing very well. It’s also not where someone who happens to be very bright is working in an area that doesn’t use their talents. (Stephen Hawking would have been a terrible point guard in the NBA even though the position demands strategic and tactical thinking.) Rather it’s a kind of existential fact .. an absolute stupidity. It puts you in the position of being ignorant by choice (here I use 'ignorant' in the 19th century sense - realizing there's an area you don't know much about and choosing to pursue it). So it’s fine to have failures here and there as you try to find your way. And sometimes, something wonderful is found. The process can generate serendipity. Of course you end up doing many less challenging things as part of the process. They’re often rewarding, but it’s amazing when you find something totally new. It’s what drives a lot of people.
I’ve had some great conversations with people who push their fields and hear the same thing with different words. Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Pavan (beach volleyball Olympian), a number of physicists and mathematicians as well as several artists.2 The words were different, but the paths were very familiar.
There’s another piece to this. Bringing together a very diverse set of people who excel at productive stupidity is something of an amplifier. Often there are interesting hints and even keys that you never would have thought of. That and it’s often a lot of fun.
__________
1 Years ago I attended a talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Afterwards I had a few questions including "how do you pronounce your name? He said this is good enough for Americans:
Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high
2 There are many others who probably do something like this .. these are just the people I've talked about it with.
Posted at 09:17 AM in building insight, change, critical thinking, education, general comments | Permalink | Comments (0)
| Reblog (0)