omenti

befrending the imposter syndrome

[A minipost from my reply to Pip Coburn on his recent piece on student-mindedness]

 

The lesson came as I prepared for my thesis defense.  The Stony Brook physics department has three examiners:  two physicists - a theorist and an experimentalist (one is your advisor)  - and someone external to the department who is outside your field.  How I found mine is a long story, but the choice made a huge difference. He was a surgery professor and an accomplished violinist, which seemed reasonably remote from the semileptonic decay mode of charmed particles. The committee members get a draft of the thesis a few months before the defense. Ideally that's when major issues generally uncovered. I thought the surgeon wouldn’t have much to say, but he *really* wanted to understand what it was about.  He was a serious and intensely curious student, with a range far beyond medicine. His particle physics was about on par with my surgical skills, so I had to describe my work to extremely bright student who had a very different background. Spread over two months we spent at least twenty hours together.  His "dumb" (the label he chose) questions gifted me with a deeper insight into what I'd done.  There was so much I hadn’t thought deeply enough about.  

 

Over a good meal one night he said he used to be intimidated by experts outside his field until he discovered they were often intimidated by him. If you feel intimidated it’s a sign there's something to learn and perhaps you can learn something.  Over those two months I learned a bit about surgery and Bach violin sonatas, but the real learning was to to welcome and appreciate the imposter syndrome (I didn’t know to term until much later). Also I learned something about communication.  What I didn’t learn was how to effectively communicate the work to high school students - but that’s another story.

 

Since then I’ve been on a number of defense committees. Only one was physics. The rest have been all over the place and have been fantastic opportunities to learn and get a bit of insight from a developing expert. Hopefully some of my dumb questions help them as much as my surgeon friend's dumb questions helped me. 

 

invention

This morning I remembered a quote that would be perfect for a friend as well as many of you.  I'll get to it later, but it made me think about something that I've spent time thinking about for at least a decade.  As an introduction there's a question we like to ask others. 

What's the most important human invention?

Agriculture, towns, fire, cooking, clothing, etc.. tend to come up.   All  are important, but I like turning the question a bit.  Consider a central invention we all do - something that makes us very human.

 We invent tomorrow.  

Our minds create mental models - visions of the future - and give us a kind of time travel.  We run through potential scenarios we might encounter and can plan for.  They're usually in an episodic form and we imagine ourselves and others, often in some other place, experiencing a variety of options.  This time travel can flip and reach into the past.  We call it episodic memory.  These memories aren't perfectly accurate. They're more like screenplays we use to recreate the past with whatever bits of memory and shards of content we can access.  We can also create "what if" scenarios and use them to plan for the future.  It's a fluid time machine that can operate almost simultaneously in the past and future creating past and future episodic memories.  And critically, we separate past and future from each other and the present.

 

People are really good at copying.  Compared to other primates we're supercopiers. But we also experiment doing things like sticking our hands into fire, eating a plant we shouldn't have ..  and we, or those who watched us tempt the Darwin Award, remember and let others know.  We innovate and teach moving this information into our culture - a cultural evolution of sorts.   There's a lot to unpack here.  It's a beautiful subject to think and ask others about, but I want to keep this short and eventually get to the quote.

 

Keeping track of things quickly gets out of hand for our very limited memories.  It appears the first mechanisms were appeared over 20,000 years ago to deal with the information overload of keeping track of herd animals,  seasons.. important things like that.  It was the dawn of humanity creating an external memory system.   Moving forward the Sumerians are usually credited with creating a formal writing system.  At first accounting, but eventually our stories became readable.  And that takes us to a beautiful description by Carl Sagan.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.

 

tesla mythology

Every now and again I try to post something on the history of science, technology, or math - at least in the areas where I've spent time with primary sources or history of science and technology classes. My first director at Bell Labs was big on the history of science and engineering, encouraging us to take a series of courses offered at Rutgers. Such courses are important, but far too rare. One counts as one of my favorite undergrad classes:  'Engineering disasters of the first part of the 20th century'.

 

My problem is keeping such pieces short and to the point. Nikola Tesla is someone I've started writing about at least three times before bailing as there was too much for an hour or so of writing.  Another issue is much of the folklore is wrong. As an electrical engineer he was incredibly intuitive, but his understanding of the underlying physics was often somewhere between wrong and batsh*t crazy.  It seemed like to much to deal with.

 

This short video on Tesla touches the high points and  is consistent with a course I had along with a lot of reading from the period.  The course was great.   Looking at the period from from from Michael Faraday through Philo Farnsworth, it touched on the physics, engineering and the business interests that drove the middle and later parts of the period.  Describing the period as colorful would be understatement.  

 

Reality doesn't diminish my respect for Tesla - it's just he wasn't what popular myth suggests. And a side note.  I spent about three years at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.  The remains of the old Tesla tower is nearby, protected by a too  easily scaled fence:-)

 

To the video - it's a short must-watch piece.

latin

Ab his via sterniture ad maiora.

 

In about 1820 the local monarch ordered Carl Friedrich Gauss to carry out a survey of the Kingdom of Hanover.   The great mathematician toiled away on the survey for about four years.  While physically difficult and stressful, it's nature gave Gauss something interesting to think about.  

 

Halfway through he realized you could chop a flat map up into small triangles and get an approximation for the topography, but it could never be perfect. The Euclidian geometry we tend to think of where parallel lines never meet and the sum of the angles of a triangle is always 180° just doesn't work.¹  He set his mind to consider the geometry of curved spaces.  It undoubtedly seemed nutty to anyone but a mathematician at the time, but he pushed on and developed the Theorema Egregium - a masterpiece of thought.  At a high level it shows you can determine the curvature of a surface with just local measurements.  You don't need to consider the space the surface is embedded in. Among other things it tells you why we hold pizza the way we do and that the sum of the angles on a sphere is greater than 180° and changes on an egg and the border of Wyoming isn't a rectangle..   Here I link to a great explanation by the wonderful Cliff Stoll.

 

Gauss realized this was fundamental, but only a beginning.  At the beginning of his paper describing the discovery was this phrase:

 Ab his via sterniture ad maiora - 'From here the path to something more important is prepared'

Indeed it was. Thirty or so years later Bernhard Riemann generalized what Gauss had started.  Its beauty was appreciated and enhanced by a few mathematicians until Albert Einstein needed a tool to describe the curvature of spacetime.  And there it was - a beautiful, but fairly obscure, mathematical result from the mid 19^th century revolutionized physics 70 years later. Our Universe is not Euclidian .. that's only an illusion, albeit a very good approximation most of the time,  dictated by where we live and our senses.  Among mathematicians Gauss is a great  GOAT candidate.²

 

We didn't have Latin in high school and I probably wouldn't have taken it anyway.  Since then I've learned a little on my own, but am very rusty. Still, there are phrases that seem more useful than their English equivalents.  Encountering one you pause and think a bit.  This is one I use encouraging people working on long term goals where much of the day to day grind to major accomplishments seem like small steps on the way to the goal. It is a reminder to keep pushing ahead.

__________

¹ Think of lines of lines of latitude on the Earth.  They intersect the equator at right angles added to 180°.  The angle they subtend at the pole is greater than 0°, so the sum of all three is greater than 180°.

² The story of a school master telling the seven year old Gauss to add the integers from 1 to 100 to occupy him for an hour appears in a summation of his life shortly after his death.  Given the problem, he thought for awhile and answered 5050.  He wrote the integers 1 through 100, folded the series and added .. so 1+100, 2+99 and so on. Each pair sums to 101 and there are 50 such pairs so 50*101 = 5050.  He had shown the sum of integers from 1 to n = n(n + 1)/2.  

I don't know if it was apocryphal, but he was doing serious math a few years later.

 

 

peak oil - really?

Once a year I read BP's Energy Outlook.   They have a record of serious greenwashing, so anything from them (or the other fossil fuel companies) requires a bit of skepticism, but this year's report took a turn from the normal path. They suggest global oil demand peaked in 2019.  There have been any number of 'peak oil' predictions, but most refer to extractable supply - a bit more on that later.  While the BP predictions are more scenarios than rigorous predictions, it's significant that a large oil company believes oil demand is, and will continue to, drop.  

 

BP outlines three scenarios: Accelerated, Net Zero and New Momentum.  I'm guessing they'd prefer the New Momentum scenario, and will probably lobby and use other tactics to move in that direction, but the bottom line is they see less oil coming from the ground.

 

I think they're transportation modeling is too conservative. Electrification will probably take place much more rapidly than predicted.  Granted there's a lot of inertia in fleet replacement given how long cars last, but the assumptions strike me as too  slow.  They don't seem to be taking into account the likely unbundling of transportation. Horace Dediu has been a big proponent of unbundling and points out most trips are local and short. [side note: you really need to follow Horace as well as well as David Levinson if you have any interest in the future of ground transportation] It makes no economic or environment sense to use a two ton car, gas or electric, to make a three mile trip. While much of North America has saddled itself with legacy transportation infrastructure and little imagination of what is possible, change is coming to Europe and it seems likely the developing world will favor very inexpensive electric micromobility solutions. 

 

Back to peak oil. M. King Hubbert was a geophysicist with the Shell Oil Company in the 50s when he started looking at long term oil production predictions.  All tended to make use of variables that weren't well pinned down.  Hubbert's model was simple assuming once a discovery was made, production would increase exponentially as more resources and efficiencies are brought in. At some point a peak is reached and an exponential decline begins. The model can apply to any region, or groups of regions,  assuming all of the discoveries are taken into account.  It also assumes the impact of new technologies occurs at a constant rate.

 

On the extraction side the so-called Hubbert curve has accurately modeled many oil fields and regions - notably the US through about 2005.¹  When dramatic new technologies appear - like practical fracking, shale and tar sands production, and  computer guided drilling - you effectively add new sources.   It's an interesting resource mining curve that's been used in many areas outside of oil production.  Hopefully we'll move to a point where most extractable oil is left in the ground and oil exploration becomes a thing of the past. 

 

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¹ It may look like a Gaussian or Bell curve, but it doesn't die off as quickly.  It takes the form

 

 

beyond abracadabra

More than a few in my line of work, particularly those from the generation before me, are amateur musicians.  The first time it became clear to me was in Gale Dick's living room on Friday evenings. He loved to play the violin and had a nice homemade harpsichord as well as a piano.  Friends would come to play, or in my case just listen to, chamber music.  Regulars included a couple of physicists, a mathematician, a chemist, as well as some real musicians who seemed to enjoy themselves anyway.  It was great fun and the beginning of a life-long addiction to live music, even though I'm just a lurker. 

 

Years later I asked Gale if he understood the connection.  He paused and then replied Bach letting it sink in before elaborating.  Bach ... you see, so much of it has beautiful symmetries...   He recalled when he was coming to grips with group theory in grad school.  The year before he'd come across Noether's Theorem and was blown away.¹  Years later, deep into the thicket of a difficult problem,  he found himself playing a Bach violin sonata in his mind.  

Then magic crackled and the work I was doing connected rather profoundly to those other areas. 

Words came easily to him and new ones, or at least ones I couldn't find in the dictionary, would appear.  As he described the violin sonata sequence, one I hadn't heard before appeared:

You see, Bach's music is this abracadaptor that connects two different kinds of magic giving birth to something that is also magic.

 

That was a long time ago.  Years later I found myself giving a talk at Disney Animation.  After lunch I spent the afternoon chatting with a number of people.  Then it happened.  We were talking about the curious physics that often appears in cartoons.  He said that Walt Disney had a set of rules that defined how things moved in his world building.  The rules are good enough that most survive intact. 

They're the abracadaptor that connects the original story with the artwork.  When it's well done the resulting magic is better than what went into it. 

 

Today I found myself using it in a text message to Sarah.  The beach volleyball season that ultimately determines selection for the Paris Olympics begins in Doha tomorrow.  She and her new partner Sophie have only been playing together for a short time and are still working things out.  

You’re armed with some new knowledge and are likely making great progress putting your abracadaptor into regular operation.°

° abracadaptor. n. - A mechanism or technique that connects two different kinds of magic.

 

There are people who do this: that rare skill that allows them to connect the conversation of those with very different backgrounds creating a deep and wonderful communication.  It's a skill I lack and I'm in awe of the few who can do it.  I like to use some engineering terminology to describe these people - impudence matches.  At its highest level two different magics are connected creating something deeper and an abracadaptor is afoot.

 

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¹ Don't worry about either of these if they sound foreign.  Both are important tools in the study of symmetry and deeply connected with physics.