omenti

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile. 

 

 

 

how to speak

minipost

Some of you are amazing speakers.  I'm not.  Thankfully I'm not teaching anything this year - Zoom lecturing was a disaster for me for a number of reasons.  Rather than a post mortem, here's something useful.

 

This is from the 'how to speak' course that Patrick Winston gave for years at MIT. Not all of it will be applicable, but you may find a few bits of useful information. 

stories and star support

Watching the latest Physicsgirl video made me think of a couple of things, but first take a look.

Combining her almost reckless enthusiasm with a serious work ethic, Dianna is my candidate for the best visual physics explainer around. It's one thing to describe something with high production videos or stories, but quite another to fun educational demos that actually work.  These days she has a couple of people working with her and perhaps a dozen physicists who volunteer suggestions, but these still take several weeks of hard work to get right.  Her brilliance is making them look easy while being clear.  Trust me - that's hard.

 

Some types of educational story telling are a team effort.

 

It made me think of my first chemistry class in college - the basic inorganic class most people take.  I was just sitting down in the large lecture room when we heard and felt a large bang coming from the front of the room.  A cloud of chalk dust rose from the slate black board and the right quarter of the board crashed to the floor. Dr Spicer, the chemistry prof, rushed towards an opening door to the left of the slate.  As it opened Jerry and a cloud of acrid smoke poured out.   Coughing, Jerry pointed to the exists.   Our dispatch wasn't exactly orderly.

 

Jerry was a lab tech and in charge of the department's demos.  He was preparing something for a pchem class when the explosion happened.  It convinced me that pchem must be interesting.  

 

Good demos are hard to get right.  A teacher usually isn't the right person to create one.  You need someone with the inclination and time to devote to what needs to be a memorable visual story that the professor can embellish with words and equations. Often you need a someone with serious maker skills. This is true for real experiments too.  

 

I learned my lesson a few years later teaching a lab section of a physics for premeds class.  Two of us co-taught  two sections with forty students each.  The lab was a third of their grade so they paid attention.  (I didn't realize it at the time, but having power over a grade in a competitive class gives the instructor an inflated opinion of their teaching skills as the students are overly attentive.)  We hauled out an old Van de Graff generator - something that must have been made in before WWII.   A big one can generate a formidable amount of static electricity. We had demonstrated how the charge was enough to burn a hole through a piece of cardboard. The other grad student had an insulated copper wire running from his finger tip, inside his shirt, down his pants and connected to the room's electrical ground.   Since the students were interested in medicine, we reasoned they'd see this as dangerous and pay attention and learn why grounding is important.

 

The generator was at maximum power as he approached the terminal.  What neither of us realized was his connection to ground had come off.  The spark jumped about twenty centimeters and knocked him over.  I realized what had happened and yelled in anyone knew CPR.  They thought it was a stunt and started applauding.  Fortunately he wasn't hurt badly.  The sparked burned him a bit, but mostly he was startled, causing him to fall over.  At least it was memorable.

 

Another path to is memorable storytelling.  Ideally it isn't a solo effort as the audience should be involved. That's what I aspire to these days, but I'm not very good at it.   The other day we were talking about patents when I remembered Feynman's patent story.  It was one of his favorites, so I checked to see if there was recording.  Note he has an audience.  My own experience is that this kind of story telling is much easier with an audience - for me a very small one. In an odd way it becomes a collaboration.

 

making obsolete tech sing and beyond

Over the past few weeks I've been playing around trying to repurpose old hardware. Mostly CD and DVD drives and they're chock full of useful parts - lasers, motors, lenses and so on...  That and a bit of Arduino prototyping to come come up with a bag of junk that could be sent to undergrads next year.   Motivation came from the COVID-19 teaching experience.  At least in physics online classes proved difficult and labs unworkable.  Some folks at Caltech suggested a different lab experience where the student assembles or even invents a piece of  experimental apparatus to use to make some measurements.   The fact that most students have smartphones - basically computers with a number of interesting sensors and a network connection - makes this even more appealing.  It probably isn't appropriate for 101 non-major courses, but it may make a better lab experience for more advanced physics and engineering students.  The potential for real learning rather mechanically following directions is great - assuming you have good instruction to go along with it.  There's also the possibility of creating inexpensive lab kits for high schools.  High school lab experiments are ridiculously expensive and inflexible.  There are a number of interesting directions.  It's been fun and several of us are in exploration mode.

 

I need to add I'm a privileged white male with the ability to take a bit of time and focus on this kind of craziness during an epidemic.  Too many people aren't in that position.  

 

The project reminded me of some attempts to help my mother when she was dealing with dementia.  She became forgetful, so we'd make lists.  Then she lost the ability to read so picturegrams.  All along the way glasses, remote controls, almost anything that wasn't nailed down managed to get misplaced.  And then there was medication.  She went into a managed care facility. Life was less stressful, but she was constantly misplacing things and forgetting how to operate the style telephone and TV remote.  I started building gadgets to help out, but by the time one sort of worked, she had lost more capability.  

 

I've thought about it a fair amount since. The facilities are expensive - at least $80,000 a year and usually more.  What could you change to allow someone stay at home a few years longer?  Even if it cost ten or twenty thousand dollars, it could save a lot of money and be better psychologically.  (Greg Vesonder has done thinking along these lines)

 

Om and I were talking about where the local and personal application of "intelligence" is a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing, for Apple going forward.   With their sensors and local connectivity outside of the cloud, the iPhone and Apple watch have great senior citizen potential. The iPhone has machine learning hardware.  Combine this with ultrawideband location and a dozen applications immediately leap to mind.¹   Fertile ground indeed.

 

Of course the trick is to stay healthy and sharp as you get older.  It turns out there's a wonder drug which, taken regularly, doesn't have negative side effects.  The AMA now considers physical exercise a powerful drug -  often with superior results than conventional drugs. It has been shown effective in lowering the probability of several types of cancer, heart diseases, many forms of dementia, and is even associated with "happiness". You don't need a lot. Walking enough counts and you get it for free if you use a bicycle.  But you have to do it. 

 

Many people use smartphones , watches or dedicated fitbit type devices for motivation.It turns devices aren't universally motivating over time, but if they work for you it's money well-spent.  The sensors and processing can be useful for athletes training at the amateur level, but not at the elite level. That's a separate and fascinating story at the frontier of sports science these days.

 

Finally it's becoming clar that certain types of mental stimulation help push back the onset of dementia.  Forget the memory games marketed for the purpose - they've been shown to be ineffective.  What you want is something that challenges you - something you've never done that you have really work at.  Anecdotally creatives who constantly push boundaries are in good shape.  I suspect it doesn't matter how creative you are - just the fact that you're forcing a lot of new neural connections.  The brain stays plastic for a long time.

_________

¹ Current generation iPhones have the U1 ultrawideband chip.  They haven't done much with it, but it makes a lot of sense for augmented reality, ID verification and object location.  I wrote a bit on UWB a few months ago.

 

remote learning laboratory kits

a mini-post you can have fun with

 

I managed to survive a bit of remote online instruction.  While it doesn't fit my teaching style, it seems clear it's going to be with us for awhile.  Labs are a big issue for science and engineering courses. Watching videos and running simulations isn't a rich experience, but what is?  A few of us have been thinking about that recently.  The fact that most students have access to a smartphone opens up some real possibilities.  A smartphone is basically a computer with a lot of sensors and a network connection.  The trick is to get raw data from the sensors and devise experiments students can run or - better yet - design on their own.  You need an app with a good interface. 

 

I know of a  few projects working on apps to get at sensor data.  They tend to fill different niches, but  there are some existing apps.  

recommendation

Get phyphox from Apple's AppStore or GooglePlay.  (if you have a choice I recommend the iPhone version as the variety and quality of sensors is well-defined).  It's a free download from Bergische Universität Wuppertal.  Their webpage (English and German) has some experiments including some videos and forums. It's a great starting point.  

 

Chemistry seems more difficult and I think biology needs real samples if you're going to get serious, but I'm confident we'll see some inventiveness.    We'll probably see other sensors and adaptors that attach to phones.  Microscopes are naturals and I have an ultrasound adaptor that is a dandy bat detector.  Some would be easy - like a simple  spectrograph and others would take some design and manufacture.  Many could be vastly cheaper than current lab gear if enough units were sold. A school system or university could just give them to students.  Also old smartphones can be donated to kids who don't have one - you don't need a network connection for most of this. 

 

Engineering has huge possibilities with Arduino kits and simple sensors and actuators. So much exists - it's a question of crafting projects and instruction. 

 

I would love to see inexpensive, easy to calibrate environmental sensors.  Environmental work would be a lot of fun and could engage students socially and politically.  Imagine mapping out toxic substances at the block level around the country. Collaborative student science. 

 

And all of this works for the amateur at home.  Perhaps someone needs to restart SciAm's old Amateur Scientist column or create and Amateur Technologist... and I'm particularly interested in the intersection of this and art (folks like Shuli would probably be or already are all over it as she's already in the space).  

 

And I'm working on an amateur project of my own. (although that's usually the case)

 

exciting times

 

 

pathfinding and appropriate encouragement

Last night I caught a John Cleese interview.  In the US and UK, he complained, it's common to tell children how talented they are at something and that perhaps it is ok to not do well in something else because talent is the deciding factor.  In his experience that's entirely wrong.  Kids should be taught perseverance and to recognize that luck is extremely important.  

 

I mostly agree..  some things may come more easily to some people, but work and perseverance can get you a long way down the path.  Rather than pure luck I believe the act of paying attention and having the sagacity to notice when the new and interesting appears. Basically serendipity.  Cleese found himself in a serendipity generator of sorts when he joined a student comedy group at Cambridge. He immersed in comedy at the right level for learning the trade. Other than having timing he wasn't very good, but he stuck with it.  One thing led to another.. successes and failures, but it worked.

 

He made another point.  When he went to Cambridge he started into the sciences as he did well in tests.  Very quickly he discovered the other students actually enjoyed physics and chemistry and realized  that put him at a distinct disadvantage. He changed his major, but at least he tried and worked hard enough to recognize he didn't enjoy the science path.  When you get to a point where major focus is necessary it makes sense to take stock of what you like and take that path if there's a choice.  Of course this is at odds with current advice to get a degree in something that you can make a living at.  I'm afraid I have trouble with that as general advice.

 

The serendipity part is critical. My focus was initially far too narrow, but I managed to slowly branch out.  Sometimes, like John Cleese, you find yourself in a rich environment.  At other times you must concoct your own serendipity.  There are a variety of techniques - mine is tithing my time.  I devote ten or eleven hours a week to the projects of friends.  While it's not perfect, it's been an incredible education. 

 

Finally back to praise and perseverance.  I try to encourage others, but am parsimonious with praise.  Of course there are times when it's well deserved and it's always a wonderful example of perseverance. In that spirit I'll recognize one of you. Yesterday Sarah was named the best beach volleyball blocker for 2018-2019.   Here's a link to a short video compliation posted to Twitter.  Amazing Sarah!  Now on to Tokyo and a gold for Canada.

 

An update - today her teammate Melissa Humana-Paredes was named the best female defender in the world and together they are the best women's team in the world.

 

 

woodie

an Omenti mini-post

I was shocked and saddened to learn of Woodie Flowers' passing.

 

There's an interesting question you can ask about a school.  Who is the most important person?  Of course it depends on your point of view and what you think a school should be doing.  It might be an administer who has managed to turn the place around,  a remarkable alumni member who does the same, a Nobel Laurette perhaps? and for some it might be a coach who somehow energizes the place.  Is there someone who makes the place special?  Universities mean a lot of things to different people.  Ask me about MIT and I'll suggest Woodie Flowers.  He managed to light *that* spark and inspire more young engineers than you can imagine.  In light of the current ethical problems ripping apart a school on campus, he was a beacon of ethics for decades.  

 

I was lucky enough to have spent time with him on a few occasions.  He was even more optimistic and even evangelistic than what comes over in this video:

 

 

Woodie was like this in many areas.  He was responsible for developing and promoting the concept of gracious professionalism..  from an email a few years ago:

 

The election has been painful. It reminds me that we have a responsibility to help students become thoughtful citizens. Rational thought blended with empathy seems too rare everywhere.

Personal experience leads me to believe our students would be receptive to hearing us address their obligations to society. Dean Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in 1989. A couple of years later, Dean and I co-founded the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) patterned after the creative design exercises I had been running for many years in the Mechanical Engineering design courses. The “2.70 Contest” was anchored by “gracious professionalism,” a term I coined to celebrate the wonderful behavior prevalent among students in that course. They competed like crazy, but treated one another with respect and took pride in helping and teaching one another.

At the first FRC Kickoff, I used one slide with the term “Gracious Professionalism.” Encouraged by Dean, at the second FRC Kickoff, I used six slides featuring the phrase. Since then, Gracious Professionalism™ has become a powerful part of the ethos of the whole FIRST community. FIRST competitions have grown and have millions of alumni. Scattered over 80 countries, young people have embraced the notion that competition and kindness are compatible. At MIT, 10% of our freshman classes are FIRST alumni.

As we make the transition to digitally-enhanced learning and machine-assisted professions, I believe “uniquely-human” will be a powerful differentiator. Professionals who understand the laws of the universe and also have an emphatic response to others will be the leaders. Those who think science is a la carte will have aspirations that Mother Nature will not tolerate.

MIT students will have an obvious advantage because of their understanding of what is possible. We need to make sure they are also well equipped to manifest creativity, leadership, good judgment, and ethical behavior.

I offer Gracious Professionalism as a convenient label. It blends rigorous adherence to the laws of the universe with the human qualities we hope to see as those laws are applied by our alumni. Giving back with conscience. Blending hard knowledge with soft feelings. Facts, feeling, and fairness. The FIRST community, which includes all ages, have embraced “GP” and actually compete to “out GP” one another.

How might Gracious Professionals have voted?

Woodie Flowers

 

I'm not an engineer, but am amazed what the good ones do.  This is a big loss for MIT, engineering and the world

 

the danger of over simplification

In the early 1990s Anders Ericsson of Florida State University went to a music school in Berlin to test an idea about deliberate practice.  The music school had high standards.  Ericsson suspected practice separated the best of the best from the average.  He asked the eighteen year old violin students to think back on how much practicing they did since they took up the instrument.  Then he had the music professors to divide them into three groups - great, good and average.  Those in the great group averaged about 10,000 hours of practice.  The good, about 8,000 and the average practiced around 5,000 hours.  It seemed like a neat result - practice more and you do better.  He published a paper that wasn't exactly rigorous - it lacked statistical measures like ranges and standard deviations and was more of a discussion than a formal paper.  

 

Prof. Ericsson didn't push the result was a bit to the side of his core work and he didn't heavily promote the result.  But others saw a compelling story around that lovely round hour and a work ethic.   One was Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he often oversimplifies and gets things wrong.  The 10,000 hour result has been disproven by more careful studies over and over, but his books and TED talks are enormously popular and have made the idea something of a cultural meme.  

 

Recently I was thinking about something else he said that was misleading. Great storytelling, but misleading.  The more I thought about it, the more damaging it seemed.  It's partly linked to the 10,000 hour story and some unhealthy forms of training. 

 

In Outliers Gladwell talks about a relative age effect.  He uses sports, but it can apply to academics and other areas.  Say the calendar allowing kids to participate in a sport begins on January 1.  Kids born in the first quarter would be  January → March birthdays.  He noticed that ice hockey players born in the first quarter are over-represented and forth quarter kids are  under-represented.  The pattern appeared in several other sports so he set about writing a compelling sounding story.

 

What happens is when  kids are allowed to try out for a sport - say nine or ten years old - many of the first quarter kids are significantly more developed than forth quarter kids.  Most coaches can't tell the difference between maturity and ability and tend to select the kids who perform the task better.  The rate of change at that age is so great that the majority selected will be the older kids. 

 

A problem is the better players get moved to the better coaches and facilities. The talented ones in the chosen pack progress riding a premium training infrastructure.  There may be very talented kids who are later born who miss the advantages of this training and infrastructure who are lost to the system as they miss a chance to develop and are soon left far behind.

 

Combine this with the 10,000 target (as an exercise figure out how many hours a day you need between the age of nine and seventeen to become expert) and you realize specialization needs come early for the better athletes. I'll admit to oversimplification here - this is a fascinating area that has become something of an arms race as, at least in the US, the goal of a college scholarships can force specialization before a kid becomes a teenager.

 

The funny thing is when you look at more carefully you see sixty to seventy percent of the college age players in many sports are first quarter births, but for professional athletes in the same sports the relative age effect almost goes away.  Almost as at the very elite level there's a slight over abundance of third and forth quarter athletes. What appears to be going on is there's a great weeding of talent from college to pro. In many sports late bloomers - kids who got their growth spurt late for example - finally reached parity, but the fact that they had to work harder and learn the sport better ultimately made them better athletes.

 

There are other complexities I won't go into other than mentioning playing a variety of sports rather than concentrating tends to make better elite athletes.  We have a bias when we hear about prodigies like Tiger Woods and tend to assume they're the norm, but it's not. We also tend to forget about the prodigies that never make it.  One estimate is that only about one percent of sports prodigies identified by the media (written up in a magazine) by the time they're teenagers ever make it into the pros.  

 

So the American and some other systems do manage to train a number of elite athletes in many sports and show it internationally in the Olympics.  What about the potentially elite athletes that were never trained?   It turns out some systems cast a much wider net.  The Nordics, notably Norway, push universal recreation and sport for kids as a healthy way to provide fun and lower healthcare costs. Early specialization is discouraged and good facilities are made available to all.   It appears to work very well.

 

I'm far from athletic and am not recommending changing any system (although I think Norway's goal of a healthy population is excellent).  This is an illustration.  Similar issues of pipelining kids exist in music, art and academics.  Broadly speaking STEM education is an example of exclusion and producing a population that isn't as literate as it could be.

 

Back to the storytellers and  oversimplification.  If something isn't important and you just want to get a tough idea across, it might be appropriate, but anything of importance needs an appropriate level of depth. That places serious demands on the author, teacher - anyone trying to communicate.   It's something I struggle with a lot. 

 

 

 

the question of getting bent and slowing down

 

(a) Without resorting to equations, why light slows down when it travels from air to sheet of glass and why it speeds up when it exists?

(b) Again without equations, why does light refract?

 

For the past decade and a half a friend in the engineering department of a very large and famous university in the midwest is infamous for asking "unfair" questions of graduating seniors.   The student's grades aren't affected. He's interested in how deeply students thought about everyday phenomena that are fundamentally important to engineering,  He hopes to learn about teaching in and outside of the department as well as the curiosity of the students. 

 

This year's question was a disaster.  Nearly two hundred students took the exam and four got part a correct.  The same four gave the only correct answer for part b.  Refraction is really important - lenses wouldn't be possible, there wouldn't be rainbows.. there wouldn't even be vision.  It has practical use throughout engineering, even finding use in certain types of market trades where gaining an information advantage is important.   I'll answer part a and leave b for another time because it requires a bit more background.

 

In high school you probably learned the index of refraction of a transparent material determines the angle light will bend if it travels from one transparent material to another.  The greater the index, the greater the bending.  Some (approximate) values are:

 

        a vacuum      1.0000

        air                    1.0003

        water               1.33

        glass                1.5  (it can vary from about 1.5 to nearly 1.75)

        polystyrene    1.55

        sapphire          1.77

        diamond          2.417

 

You probably also learned that light slows to the speed of light divided by the index of refraction in a transparent material, If light travels at c - the speed of light - in a vacuum, it slows to c/1.33 or three quarters the speed of light in water and c/1.50 or .two thirds the speed of light in glass.   The illustration shows light moving from air (for most purposes you round the index of refraction of air to 1.000) to a sheet of glass and out the other side. 

 

The answers given by most of the students clumped into two categories - both wrong.  It's interesting to consider them before moving on to what really takes place.

 

One idea was to suggest light bounced from atom to atom (or molecule to molecule) in the glass taking a three dimensional pinball path,  It would effectively travel a longer distance making it appear to take longer to go from one side to the other.  The problem is light would effectively scatter out even in perfectly clear glass.  A narrow beam, say from a laser, would light up a broadening region inside the glass and the would continue as a broad cone once it left. Some of the light would  even bounce backwards creating an undirected glow on the first side. The clearest materials would be blurry and dim to look through with the  blur increasing with thickness of the glass. Crisp images would be impossible. 

 

The second popular answer was to suggest atoms (or molecules) absorbed the light and then re-emitted it.  It takes a bit of time for them to do this, so the effect would be to slow the light down. The problem is when an atom absorbs and then emits light it doesn't remember the direction the light came from and can emit it in any direction.  Now you have the glowing problem again.  There are other issues - among them atoms and molecules have very special and narrow frequencies they absorb an emit (quantum mechanics).  The effect would only happen for a few very narrow colors and some colors would be completely absorbed. 

 

We don't see either of theses, so something else is going on.

 

__________

I think the simplest way to look at this is to consider light as a wave.  As it travels along there are oscillating electric and magnetic fields perpendicular to its motion.  The animation shows the fields happily moving along with the electric field in red and the magnetic field in blue.  

 

 

You've probably come across the superposition of waves.   Take two waves with the same wavelength and add them together.  If the peaks of one line up with the peaks of the other, you get a larger wave with peaks and troughs twice as big.  If the peaks line up with the troughs, they cancel each other.  The next gif shows two waves and the result of summing them .. 

 

This turns out to be what we need conceptually. 

 

The electric field in the light juggles the electron clouds of the glass molecules causing them to move up and down.  They don't move in direct unison as the mass the molecules dampens the motion, But they still jiggle and very rapidly.  If you take a charge and shake it, you get an electric field. The jiggling molecules are producing their own electric field as they feel the light's electric field.

 

That's it!  

 

The electric fields produced by the jiggling molecules as they dance to the tune of the light combine with the electric field of the light.  The math is a bit messy as you have to consider all of the molecules, but the combined field moves below the speed of light -  just like you had divided it by the index of refraction.   When Thomas Young discovered the index of refraction more than two centuries ago he was only able to predict how light would bend, no one knew what was really going on.  The key came later in the 19^th century with an understanding of Maxwell's equations.

    

An acceptable answer could have been something like:  the electric field of light inside the material jiggles the electrons of the material's molecules generating another electric field.  These fields combine to produce an effective field that travels slower than the speed of light in the vacuum. 

 

Of course you could ask embarrassing questions in any department and discipline and that makes you wonder about education. 

 

_________

I should add that there are deeper ways of thinking about this.  Quantum electrodynamics gets at the interaction between photons and electrons, but it gets very messy and for most applications would be overkill.   It's  like Newtonian physics and Relativity ...  for almost everything we do Newtonian physics is good enough.

 

 

an ecology posed by a children's song and multidisciplinary problems

Last week I read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.  David writes well  I've recommended The Sports Gene as another excellent read.   In Range he talks about real world messy problems that often poorly defined and open-ended.  The really interesting ones usually require a range of backgrounds.  Experts often do worse than generalists.  If you have a group of people, you want a range of expertise and backgrounds.   

 

You've probably heard of Fermi calculations.  Enrico Fermi liked to frame problems in such a way that you might be able to approximate an answer using common sense and a few bits of information.  Things like "how much water flows through the Mississippi River in a year?"  or "how many piano tuners work in New York City?"  They're extremely common in physics and are used to think about how good or bad a conjecture is.  The type of question you can get a handle on in your head or on the blackboard.

 

There are many other approaches to problems. The school where I did my undergrad work has a course that teaches multidisciplinary thinking.  Although it's a physics class, it really isn't about physics - or at least it doesn't have to be.  People get together a couple of times a week for a few hours and a problem is posed to talk about.  Students come from a variety of backgrounds.  What is common is serious motivation and curiosity.  There aren't midterms or finals, but there is a project each student proposes and works on.  They're given some funding and access to other class members, professors and grad students.  And each week they're immersed in the two hour sessions each featuring something that is best approached as a cross-disciplinary problem.  They learn to sort out the various strengths and weaknesses of the other students and the professor.

 

Getting into the course is difficult. About a hundred apply and maybe six are accepted  You have to pass a couple hurdles - problems you spend about four weeks each on showing you can bring a range of thought to the table.  You must show they're capable of cross-disciplinary thinking.¹  A hurdle problem I'm familiar with was  posed as a line from a children's song:²

Mares eat oats, and does eat oaks, and little lambs eat ivy.

The question is:

Considered in an ecological sense, we have three species each of plant and animal life that interact in a finite geographical area. Supposing that we start out this system with roughly equal numbers of the six species, determine the way the system changes with time.

You have four weeks to come up with something clever and compelling.  Then on to the next hurdle.  The class has had extraordinary success over the years and is something of a legend.,

 

Very few people have a great range of background and expertise.  At least in the US we seem to value those who are broad less than those with a very narrow deep expertise.  One of my favorite thinkers was a mathematician some of you knew - Norm. He would sit and listen to ideas coming from a variety of backgrounds.  Later .. a few minutes to a week or two .. he'd stop you and say "Let me see if I understand what you were saying"  Then he'd proceed to give a much deeper and better thought-out version of what everyone had been trying to say, adding his own bit in the process.  Not always, but often enough history or art might be part of the framing.   These sessions were marked by deep play as well as chocolate coated coffee beans.  Play is the glue that allows communication across disciplines .. even if it's in your own head.

 

My own range isn't that great, but Norm and others - friends who have very different backgrounds - have changed the way I think.   I have this habit of "tithing" my time to the projects of friends.  I'm particularly interesting in areas outside of physics and math as I end up learning something and find myself in Norm's shoes at times.   This broader approach of posing and approaching questions strikes me as richer than the traditional expert deep dive as you can always add expertise where you have it when it's useful.

 

I've had a bit of serious insight on a very difficult problem that changed how I saw the world.  Insights came from a forestry program, a couple of sociologists and a professional volleyball player who has a degree in microbiology.  There are dozens of other problems where outside insight has combined with my own contribution to be a bit out of the box. And who would have thought thinking about bats would be just the right analogy for what turned out to be a neurology problem I didn't realize I needed to know about...

 

I don't know if I manage to help others.  If I do it's probably by offering a bit of thinking that might seem novel as their background is different.  At the same time I'm often lost as an outsider in their world until I start working in it for awhile.  I probably don't get very good at it, but it's the diversity that might be useful.

 

I'm very much against the hyper-specialization in STEM focused education we seem to be moving towards.  There's enough change in the world that the humanities, liberal arts and just practical skills are increasingly necessary. There has been some work on teaching cross disciplinary thinking. That strikes me as having great potential. 

__________

¹ As these are freshmen when they work on the hurdles it's interesting to look at their backgrounds. It's a bit of a problem as so few have taken the course, but it's been around for decades.   I won't go into that here, but it's very different from those of kids who focus on standardized tests and assigned activities.  A really interesting question is how much of the ability to acquire cross disciplinary thinking is wired in and how much is learned. I have suspicions, but that's beyond this post.

² Not to be confused with the song "Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats" from the late 40s:-)  It's sort of a homonymic phrase.