Morgenbladet nr. 8 (February 25 – March 03) – 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfjWa6yW2mk&fmt=18

Although you undoubtedly already know this, it’s pretty hard to ignore Feynmann as a physicist. Anyway, in my opinion a great summary of the kind of mindset you’re taught when you study physics (and the most useful thing I’ve learned during my time studying it).

And about the car thing: isn’t a common train of thought that the car appeals to our territorial instincts? Just like our home is our territory, our living space, the car has a similar appeal, with the addition of being mobile. Making any judgement on it very personal for the owner.

Also, Scott McCloud remarked in Understanding Comics (get your wisdom where you can ) the following interesting thing: humans have the capacity to make external things become extensions of ourselves, like say, a car. We never say in a car accident “his car hit my car!” Instead we say: “HE hit ME!”

it’s actually a very simple thing: I just have realized that it often is enormously difficult to get a good idea about what actually is true and what not. That is a question of developing good judgment, and – unfortunately – judgment is one of those things you do not learn at school. And if you think about the deeper role of schools in our society, which are to a large extent about teaching obedience to authorities who “tell us how the world works”, that is not overly surprising.

So, what reliable sources of insight do we have at our disposal, every one of us? There are a few of them, and while they do not provide such extensive coverage that one could consult them like an oracle, they help enormously for giving the right clues about what’s wrong with a picture, often the first important step: You realize you have to disassemble part of the jigsaw because you mis-interpreted something before, and have to re-assemble it in a different way.

The first, and most immediate, source of insight is personal experience, hence, experiment. To give an example, when I first came across permaculture some years ago, I’ve read lots of books, and I think I by now have a quite extensive overview over the literature. But those things that really matter, i.e. what part of a plan is how easily thwarted by other agents, such as slugs, or just your own stupidity, I only learned when I started an own garden. Quite small – but it is more about education than food at the moment. Similar issue with the role of pollinators, and the need to provide access to water in a garden. You don’t realize it if you just read it in a book, you have to develop judgment by doing it. (Incidentally, that’s also what I tell my “Complex Systems Science” students: If you want to really learn something about complex systems, you have to work with one to develop your judgment. Start a garden.) With me, it can easily happen that you see me talking about something highly technical such as linear group representation theory all morning, while over lunch, I tell you that the dandelion that grows in the back yard of your institute is an exceptionally sweet variety.

Another source of insight is the ability to do quick guesstimations. Now, unfortunately, the only time most people work with numbers seems to be when it is about money. I do give courses about that, see e.g. http://www.soton.ac.uk/~doctom/teaching/transition/03-guesstimation.pdf

The third important point is the ability to let go of cherished beliefs. That is difficult, and also needs training. But the key point is: Once you convinced yourself that X does not hold, and you have compelling evidence, it is just stupid to stick to old ideas and not allow the transformation in understanding to happen. Without this, no progress that leads from one new insight to another one ever could happen.

Always remember, as long as you have to believe whatever you are told, by authorities or by other people around you, you are a slave. Only if you have some independent way of testing ideas with a hammer, you can set yourself free. The education I give is all about helping people to learn about these hammers, and about the need to improve their judgment. Quite often, the conclusions I ultimately arrive at are strongly at variance with widespread deeply held beliefs about, say, society, civilization, or belief systems. But, at present, people at least listen to me, because I can point out connections few people seem to pay attention to. Sometimes, they even act.

Yes, I’ve heard that idea before. Now, a true and dedicated physicist’s response to this question perhaps would be to do a really big self-experiment to test it. It so turns out that there indeed is at least one person who did precisely that:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/13/ethicalliving-carbonfootprints

Quite an amazing story. I’d actually love to have a chat with that female physicist. Does anyone reading this happen to have her email address?

Personally, I first learned about this story in spring 2009, and was very bemused, since I just had gone through a self-experiment of going through the coldest part of winter without heating in southern UK. (There were a number of factors involved in this, but I considered it as an important opportunity to learn something. Given that I regard the prospect of transient interruptions of the UK’s gas supply in the coming years as very real, and the UK’s inability to store large amounts of gas (according to a friend who presently works for the government), I really want to know in advance what this would mean for ordinary households, how I would cope, and in particular how I might contribute to avoiding major panic by keeping a cool head and showing people around me how to deal with it.) It’s quite an interesting experience if you’ve never done it before. Lowest indoor temperature I experienced was 3 degrees celsius. Has a number of advantages: You don’t need electricity for a fridge anymore, the roses my wife sent me (who was in Germany at that time) kept for four weeks, etc. However, olive oil turns to olive fat, and speaking of fat, washing up becomes quite tricky if you have to get rid of it (any good tip you outdoor people here)?

Hm. Is it just us dedicated physicists (for I’m one myself) who have such weird ideas, or do other people occasionally do that as well? I mean, after all, the opinions and ideas you get from the media as well as other people, can be expected to contain all sorts of nonsense if no one ever sets out to actually do the experiment and test them. If you really want to know what the actual truth is, you often have to do the experiment yourself. (I remember one of my PhD students at that time, an Italian, showing great concern that, without hot showers for more than three days, I surely would have to die… Oh well…)

Gandhi understood this one point very well, the importance of experiments as a major source of insight into what is true and what not. His claim that “any number of experiments is too small” incidentally makes him, in my view, one of the greatest physicists ever (even if education-wise, he was a lawyer).

Now that I have done my own small low energy living experiment, this completely has changed my perspective on the vast range of options we still have. It’s certainly true that one learns more from self-experiments than from reading books. If I could just get more people into experimenting, and out of that mode of “passive living”, that would perhaps be the most important contribution I ever could make to the present situation.

But coming back to fire: Yes, there seems to be some aspect of human nature that responds to it in a way that is difficult to understand, in the sense that I’ve not yet come across a rational scientific description of what goes on in our heads when we deal with fire. I’d say the same about other relevant phenomena I also don’t understand, such as pornograpy, say. And, at times, I seriously wonder whether there is something to the thought that we actually “evolved more to run than to think”, and as such, have a particular sub-conscious tie to everything that is about transportation. I do notice a strong emotional component in every question related to the automobile that seems very hard to explain to me.

So many questions…

Funny coincidence considering your example of Rand: the same day this was plublished, New Scientist published this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427390.200-richard-wrangham-cooking-is-what-made-us-human.html

“I was sitting next to the fire in my living room and I started asking the question, when did our ancestors last live without fire? Out of this came a paradox: it seemed to me that no human with our body form could have lived without it.”

Maybe we have a genetic bias to love fire. Would explain some parts of human nature, wouldn’t it? Including some nutcases tendency to worship it.