From Edison’s diary

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest inventors we know about. Sometime ago, I stumbled upon a book titled THE DIARY AND OBSERVATIONS OF THOMAS ALVA EDISON, and was an interesting read. In there we obtain an insight to Edison’s view on many different subjects including education, work, religion etc. Edison was a person with strong views. His working methods were unconventional. Here are a few interesting facts I learnt from this book:

1) Edison had to recruit many executives to his labs; he always emphasized on a memory test and gave them a questionnaire to answer. He insisted that memory is very important for decision making, and he usually employed those people who had very good memory. Edison wrote “…Certainly the brain should have the facts. If a brain possesses an enormous number of facts, those facts, through action of the subconscious mind, will automatically keep themselves available when needed and will automatically keep themselves out of the way, not interfering when not required.”

2) Edison’s view on education was interesting and bold for his times, and he believed that learning through movies would be vital for future education. As early as 1890s, he said that best way to teach geography is either by taking the student on a tour or to show them a movie. Edison wrote “…motion pictures can be applied to a scientific, systematic course of memory training in the schools, taking the children at an early age when the mind is plastic enough to adapt itself most readily to new habit of thought.

Most of our text books fail on two big counts. They are not sufficiently human, and their application is not sufficiently practical”

3) In the following lines Edison gives an insight to how he worked: “When I want to discover something, I begin by reading up everything that has been done along that line in the past-that’s what all these books in the library are for. I see what has been accomplished at great labor and expense in the past. I gather the data of many thousads of experiments as a starting point, and then I make thousads more.”

“ …..The motive that I have for inventing is, I guess, like the motive of the billiard player, who always wants to do a little better-to add to his record. Under present conditions I use the reasonable profit which I derive from one invention to make experiments looking towards another invention…..”

4) Edison rates phonograph as his greatest discovery. He writes “Which do I consider my greatest invention ? Well, my reply to that would be that I like the phonograph best. Doubtless this is because I love music. And then it has brought so much joy into millions of homes all over this country, and , indeed, all over the world.”

5) The following quotation by Joshua Reynolds was hung in every room of Edison’s laboratory “ There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking”

There are many more fascinating thoughts of Edison, many agreeable and a few disagreeable ones, in the above mentioned book, and if you happen to find it, read it through…it’s a classic autobiography.

Sailing against the wind

John Petit-Senn told “True courage is like a kite, a contrary wind raises it higher”. To have a firm belief in something and to pursue it courageously till the end is one of the finest human qualities. This quality was exemplified by Daniel Shechtman, who recently won the Nobel prize in chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals. According to conventional knowledge of crystallography, crystals can exist with certain symmetries only. So the convention was that crystals in nature can have only 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- or 6-fold rotational symmetry, with everything else not allowed. Contrary to this, Daniel discovered that there exist crystals whose rotational symmetry is 10 fold. When he announced this discovery, he was mocked and humiliated, and was asked to leave his sabbatical research group. Great scientists including Linus Pauling made fun of the discovery on quasicrystals saying “There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientist”. However, Daniel pursued his research and submitted it to Journal of Applied Physics, but was rejected. Yet he persuaded his colleagues in different countries to verify his discovery and finally his paper was published in Physical Review letters. This speaks of Daniel’s character of persistence and how he believed in his observations and finally triumphed. Nowadays everybody approves of quasicrystal’s existence, and Nobel prize is a fair indicator.

[A word of caution: all great research will not fetch the Nobel prize, and some of the deserving scientist may have been omitted in the past for various reasons. Who gets this prize, they usually deserves it, but the one who misses it should not be forgotten.]

What is related to this matter of persistence is that there have been plenty of scientific discoveries in the past that was initially rejected by the scientific community, but later went on to win the Nobel prize. A search on internet resulted in an interesting paper by a Spanish researcher named JUAN MIGUEL CAMPANARIO who wrote on Rejecting and resisting Nobel class discoveries: accounts by Nobel Laureates, in Scientometrics, Vol. 81, No. 2 (2009) 549–565. There he notes how more than 20 discoveries which were rejected ina journal were later accepted either in a different journal or in the same journal, and further went on to win the Nobel prize.

So the next time when you make a discovery and if somebody rejects it, you know what to do !

The problem of excess

Somebody unknown wrote: give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks. In the current age roti, kapada aur makhan has a new companion: information. Information has become integral part of our lives, and we have devised many mechanisms to obtain them. In 90s and early 2000s, we saw revolution is terms of internet and satellite technology, as we amassed various methods to obtain quick information. But now we live in age where there is an overload of information. This overload of information is a problem of excess, and many of us will have to think deeply about its consequences.

Information overload has many outcomes. One of them is multitasking. We tend to tackle many different issues at a given period of time by dividing our attention to various tasks at hand. We will have to introspect about this division of attention. Researchers at Stanford University have looked into the concept of social media multitasking and it consequence on cognitive control (PNAS paper), and their results show that attention-to-detail decreases as multitasking increases. This is obvious because the average time that one spends on each task is reduced, and the continuity of thought is interrupted every time one switches task. This can be easily evidenced when we browse on the internet. Just observe how many tabs are open in your window, this a fair indication of how your attention is divided between tasks. Another assessment you could make is to check how many times you log-in to your e-mail. You will be surprised that one does this more than the required number. Why do we do this? After all, e-mail gives us the freedom of access at our own will, but even then we sometimes over use it.

What is further surprising about the Stanford study is that it shows that heavy-multitaskers tend to be more susceptible to interference from irrelevant information. This is indeed a cause for concern as our decision making can be affected due to multitasking.

Now the important question is how do you overcome the problem of information overload? First thing is to acknowledge that we cannot stop the inflow of information, so the choice at our hand is to filter the incoming information carefully. We will have to somehow set priority on the basis of importance and interest, and stick to one task at a time. In this context let me give 2 examples of great minds:

1) Isaac Newton was asked how he could successfully solve so many scientific problems. His answer was that he paid patient attention to the problem at hand and thought about it for long periods of time. Some of his contemporaries have mentioned that Newton could think about a problem not for hours or days but for months. Such unperturbed attention is indeed hard to achieve, especially in the present context, but it is indeed fascinating to learn that Newton had this remarkable capability.

2) Henry Poincare, who was one of the greatest mathematicians, describes in detail about his mathematical creativity, and in there he mentions that a conscious unsuccessful effort to solve a problem is usually followed by a unconscious effort by his brain, and this unconscious effort further leads to an answer that one was seeking while working consciously. For this unconscious effort to perform well, we need to put-in concentrated effort during the conscious effort, and this can happen only when we perform a single task at a time.

The above two examples give an overview of how deep, unperturbed thinking has interesting consequences, and also indicates that one thing at a time is indeed far more productive than multitasking.

It is an intriguing situation we live in today. Around 20 years ago people were struggling hard to obtain information, and the most powerful people were the ones who had the information. Now we are in a more democratic situation where information is just a matter of a mouse click but we struggle hard to discriminate the intellectual wheat from the chaff. The problem of excess is here to stay, it is up to us make a choice whether we want to multi-task or multiply our effort on each task.

There is a short, funny movie made by XEROX on Information Overload Syndrome: you may want to watch it.

Facts in Fiction

To

My African Friend

Developing country

My Dear Friend,

Greetings from India ! I hope you and your family is doing well. It was heartening to get your letter, and your words conveyed your well-being, and I am glad to learn that. It’s been quite a long time, in fact 5 years, since we have met each other. Our first, and the only meeting was on a train journey from Bangalore to Delhi, but I am happy that our friendship and the intellectual conversations has been active through mails. I understand from your previous letter, that you are writing a book, and you wanted to know some specific things about India. This letter is an attempt to unveil few of my thoughts on 3 issues you had asked for. Please remember that what I write here are my own views, and my words vary from being accurate to inadequate to mere speculation. I leave it to you to make the judgment. So here are some of my thoughts.

India vs China

This comparison has been done all over the world, but I think it is an unfair comparison. Specifically, the rate of technological growth in China is far superior to India. This is partly due to the pace at which we work. Our decision making bodies take quite a looooooooooooooooooooong time to come to conclusions. In fact, it is so long that even to install a security camera in Delhi high court, we took more than 3 years, and I am not sure whether the cameras are working or not. So if you think that we are head and shoulders with China in development, then my friend, you are under a wrong impression. China has its own problem – some are simple and some difficult ones to solve, but atleast they are trying. In India we are fighting our enemies within and it will take a while to wake up. If you look at India and China as an outsider, you will always see that China will be leading for next 20 years, at the least. My prediction is that our development gap will widen in future. In general, an argumentative Indian is a sheer joy to watch, but you ask the same guy to execute what he has argued upon, he will fail miserably. Execution of thought is the burning problem of India. We have great minds and very ordinary hands. After all, empty vessels make more noise, and our political class is a vessel of infinite volume.

Indian media and entertainment

Hey, you liked food with lots of masala, isn’t it? well, this aspect is typical of Indian food. Our media and entertainment has taken this concept too seriously and have adapted this into their working. There is a huge difference between substance and image, and our news and films are mainly run by images but not by substance. This does not mean we lack the right people, but it means that wrong people are on the right camera. You will observe that stupid films made by egomaniac, animal killing, drug-addicted actors will make box office hits, and deep, thought provoking, low-budget movies made by some talented people will hardly make a mark on the media, leave aside the people. I have a strong feeling that most of the movie directors in Indian cinema have miserably failed in their basic science classes in the school. They show many unphysical things in theirs movies, that a pool of fans think that physics is a joke, and Indian movie is a reality. I fear for their mental stability and I seriously wish that our government build more mental hospitals for them. Coming to the advertisements in our media, you must see some of the “Fair and nonsense” brands that go around the circuit. If you think we are not racist after seeing these ads, then you are deceiving yourself. It’s dripping in our society. There are many regional news channels which cover and recover news day and night. They go to every nook and corner of India and report anything which can be detected on the CCD of the camera. If you think India has given great freedom to its news media, then you are right. Right because our news media can covers anything on earth including the fictious news.

Sports

Cricket : 99.999999% :: other sports : ~ 0

We are obsessed with cricket. We like it and sometimes take it very seriously. We have a very famous team of cricketers, who are richer than some of your African kings. Few are great. Many of them are good cricketers in Indian conditions, and not so good when they travel. This team is usually coached by a guy who will not make them work very hard. If the coach tries to do so, our captains and media will annihilate him. Now the recent trend in Indian cricket is to couple itself with our film industry (bollywood), and make a lot of noise in a tournament called Indian Premier League (IPL). It is a league played by the cricketers, run by the jokers, feasted by the pokers and funded by liquors. Other sports hardly fill a part of the final pages of newspapers. Actually field hockey is our national game, but it is so poorly administered that someday the players may use their hockey sticks to play cash rich cricket with bollywood funds. There are many willing sports persons in our country, and some of them have made their mark in international circuit, be it chess, shooting, despite the hardships they face.

All the above are tiny insights to the great Indian tamasha. We are still “work in progress” mode, and I hope to update you in future. Meanwhile, you may explore more on the web, and don’t watch too many bollywood movies in Africa. I know you like it, but you may have to re-learn your physics from scratch. Beware !

This is all I have for this letter, I hope this will help.

cheers,

Pavan

A Wonder called Work

George Bernard Shaw said “When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.” Yes, it’s plain and simple : MORE WORK. Time and again, we have seen that ordinary people, with the philosophy of doing ‘more work’, flourishing in their deeds. Let me sight some examples. Approximately 10 years ago, I had the privilege to visit ISRO and see the construction of the satellite INSAT 3C from close quarters. I learnt that most of the scientists working on the satellite were from humble background with conventional education from universities of India, not from IITs. What I also learnt is that they worked with a philosophy that systematic thinking and hard work (~12 hrs/day) was more important than sophistication and style. We all owe a lot to them because the communication systems, be it mobile phones, or satellite television or any other hi-fi stuff we use in India is due to these hard working people. Over the years, my research career has given me an opportunity to work with various researchers across the globe. I was impressed to observe a professor who had a limited background and was rated average in a particular research field, but through sheer hard work, he accomplished so much over the years that even the experts in the research field were found wanting in comparison to his work. While I observed all this, I read an interesting book TALENT IS OVERRATED. Written by Geoff Colvin- the editor-in-large of Fortune magazine, this well researched book shows that extra-ordinary effort by ordinary people can accomplish some wonderful things. The author notes that excellence come from deliberate practice, and deliberate practice is not just practice for long hours, but a practice with vision for accomplishment. There are many anecdotes and references in the book which substantiates these claims. It’s worth a read as one can adapt many things into their life by understanding work is more important that talent.

India is undergoing a change. The middle class society, especially the younger lot, is seeking an external change in terms of politics and many other things, which is heartening. But in a youthful world of instant messages and fast-food mentality, hard work and patience is compromised by the majority of the youth in this country. It is high time that we seek not only an external change but also an internal one. Then most accomplishments we intend to achieve are only a matter of time and EFFORT. After all, hard work pays off.