What is this?
At a few points in your life, you will be struck by a sentence, a happening, an action of a person, some sort of incident that is so at odds with the rest of your experience up to then, that you will never forget it. You had an insight. Germans call this an "Aha!-erlebnis" (an "Ah!-event").
Here is a list from my life:
- For my service in the army I chose to be in the medical team as first aid paramedic. One rule remains with me: when you arrive at a scene with lots of wounded people, ignore those who are screaming: they are still alive and full of energy. Inspect those who don't move first, they probably need your help more.
- When I went to school by bike, a good classmate & friend told me: "de goede fietser pompt zijn banden keihard", the good biker pumps up his tyres until they are rock-hard. True of course: there is much less friction and you feel the road condition much better.
- One of my bosses once said: "the manager should reward effective work, not hard work." Indeed, some people work hard but achieve nothing, some work toward the wrong goals, some do very little work but achieve great ends. "I worked so hard at this!" is no excuse if you have done the wrong thing because you did not think hard enough beforehand. There is also a profound difference between "effective" and "efficient".
- On one maths exam in high school I finished very early. I was quite astonished and thought I had probably overlooked something or not understood some of the problems. I checked all my answers again and again, while everyone else in the room was still sweating away (I had of course been somewhat lucky in that the exam's questions fitted what I knew). The teacher graded my paper at 196 out of 200 points. When I wanted to know what was wrong (4 points out of 200??), he admitted that I had made no mistakes at all, but that nobody is perfect and hence I could not get the full marks. I'm still of two minds about whether that was good or bad, but the point of view did make me think.
- Of the book "Language in thought and action" by Hayakawa, I remember one item: intelligent persons are capable of climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction.
- One of my fellow students at the University of Michigan (1971) wondered how it was that I already knew all the maths for the courses we were taking together. It occurred to me then that much of pre-university studies in the US were centred on the big pictures and a multitude of subjects, which certainly was not the case in Europe. But we had learned all the machinery (what Richard Feynman called his maths toolbox) and so it was easier for me to concentrate on the deep insights because I did not need to spend time understanding the maths.
- A meeting with engineers, physicists and sociologists was held at CERN in 2000 to explore methods for electronic collaborative work. I was Chair and participant, and after having expressed an opinion on something I terminated: "I don't know enough about this though, so I should shut up and sit down" and did so. My sociologist counterpart commented: "nobody would do that in any of our meetings, it would imply loss of face." But at CERN we actually never made a secret of what we thought we were incompetent at. Let me add that we also never made a secret of what we thought our competences were.
- I had a marvelous professor of Electricity, M.C. Van Wormhoudt. During several months we struggled with lots of differential equations, petty problems of electric and magnetic fields and more or less general theorems. We became quite familiar with the behaviour of currents and charges. Then one day he strode into the lecture room, behaved in a solemn manner and wiped the blackboard meticulously clean while reminding us of everything we had so far learned. He proceeded to chalk the important theorems on one side of the board. Then he looked at us for a while, and then he showed us how all that detail could be captured in just four lines: Maxwell's equations. That was quite an aesthetic experience. The equations have an awful beauty about them, but it can only be seen after having gone through all the toil of understanding the details. Like the view from the mountaintop that is the reward after the long climb that gives the familiarity with the details of the landscape.
- Another professor that marked my thinking said in a 1966 course in Organic Chemistry: "We should not burn petrol in cars and for heating. It is a sin, we should keep those precious chemicals to synthesise stuff we need like medecines and difficult to make materials." People are slowly beginning to become aware of that.
- Film director Mann was at CERN to make a movie and needed some help with a technical matter. He found me, but I was very busy. He told me: "If you want to be helped, always look for a busy person, he will find time to help you; the people who are not busy will just refer you to someone else." I guess it is those people's way of avoiding work.
- Discussing art with Paola Pivi and Miltos Manetas, Miltos convinced me that art does indeed accumulate, in a way similar to the accumulation of knowledge coming from practicing science. Until then I had considered that art behaved more like fashion. Paola and I spent quite some time trying to find out why some things are art and some other things are not. My thesis currently is that art causes a resonance in the brain in built-in pathways or pathways recording previous experiences. We then feel similar emotions even though we don't know exactly how to place them. It's no use describing these emotions in words, but that's what art critics love to do. And it is not sublime or highly spiritual, it's just a resonance.
- The cod war broke out just after I had visited Iceland. I knew the Icelanders had hardly any other resources than fishing grounds, so I put an Icelandic flag up in my office. A British colleague called me "an incurable romantic". I guess he was right.
- Another colleague, in about the same period, got nervous when I pointed out obvious errors or missing parts of the software designs he was making. He called me "a professional complainer". I guess he was right too, and this site is proof of it.
- The wife of my clever Italian friend of artistic inclinations just told me: "He [the friend] claims he's getting old and bored now, and that there is not even anymore an actress he lusts after." Must be pretty bad indeed. The current set of actresses, I mean.
- Discussing the nature of explanation with Leon O. in 1980, I expressed my wish to learn things by following the historic path of discoveries. Leon found this wrong: he claimed that in each era people should be taught a subject matter in the most coherent and concise manner, leaving out all the historic difficulties, dead ends and so on. According to him, one should not even mention failed theories such as flogiston, aether etc. I now think he is right certainly as far as the general population is concerned. Yet I derive a more satisfying understanding from also knowing how one arrived at the knowledge. And sometimes, in engineering at least, it may let you see where there is a dead end ahead.
- During a dinner debate a Belgian friend told me what he had learned as a quick summary of the difference in attitudes between the East and the West: the West has guilt, the East has shame. Indeed finding the culprit is more important in our countries, and not losing face is more important in Eastern countries.
- In a strange way to put it, a friend of student years proclaimed that "In marriage, your wife should be as lazy as you are". I do know a number of marriages where stress comes from one partner being naturally much more active than the other.
- Discussing the relative merits of office furniture one co-student proclaimed: "All I need is a large table". We still do: computer screens are not big enough and "desktops" remain a mess (not mine though).
- Wondering where a colleague managed to find time to build complex model airplanes, he said: "No project resists if you do a little bit every day." He wins many competitions in electric-powered model plane races. His observation is correct provided that the little bit you do every day is more than the little bit of decay that time causes every day.
- At one point in my career I had to pass before a selection board. I explained the directions I wanted to go in, discussion followed, and I did get the job. But afterwards one of the board members came up to me and said: "I felt that it was as if you were all the time fighting a battle. Do you really think it's that bad?" He was referring to the state of computing at the time (1977), and I replied that I thought indeed it was abysmal. I have not changed my mind yet.
- The first book I read on playing the game of chess stated that beginners often waste time analysing bad moves they made. They should only concentrate on the position at hand and how to win from that. The history of how they got to a position is irrelevant to the strategy/tactics to apply when in that position. Chess, and life also, plays only forward.
- After a fairly long explanation of why I dislike the word "Darwinian" in the phrase "Darwinian Evolution" (see communication of science) my interlocutor summed it up as follows: "Au lieu d'acoller un adjectif à quelque chose d'universel, on la détruit." Translated: "Instead of adding an adjective to something that is universal, one destroys it." Exactly.
- Somewhere I read: "If you see a parenthesis all by itself, it is up to no good." Likewise, if you hear a number mentioned without another number for comparison, someone is up to no good. This is especially true for costs and budgets.
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