Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - An Illumination

Episode Date: January 27, 2015

Cédric Villani won the prestigious Fields Medal for his work in 2010.  He wrote a book about his experience called Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure. It is a book about where ideas come from. There is something spider like about Villani, and I say that not just because of the pins he is famous for always wearing. He knows how to catch ideas, and he wants to teach us how as well. We also talk with Maria Popova about another great Science book: The art of Scientific Investigation. I found this book thanks to the idea catching web that Maria Popova built:   brainpickings.org.    

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called An Illumination. I don't really know where the ideas come from. What I know is how ideas did happen to me. Cedric Rulani is a mathematician, quite an accomplished one. In 2010, he received the Fields Medal for his work on the Boltzmann equation. Lately, he's been thinking a lot about where ideas come from. You see, this mathematical genius has actually only experienced two flashes of illumination in his life. One when he was sitting in his room thinking about the problem that he won the Fields Medal for, and another when he was boarding a train to Paris from Lyon, where he lives and teaches.

I was scheduled for lecture in a course, prestigious seminar, and I wanted to present some new results, but just a few days before the intended seminar, I discovered there is a few days before the intended seminar I discovered that there is a fatal mistake in the proof. And I desperately want to present this, and so think hard and hard during the two days before the lecture how to repair this, and it still doesn't work, and how to do this. Work hard at night, wake up early, still don't see it.

Think about it all the way up to the train station where I'm leaving to Paris when I'm presenting hopefully this result and it still doesn't work and I'm despaired and I arrive on the train and I sit and at the precise moment where I sit, I know how to do it. It's really, I know.

This is one of the key moments in Cedric Villani's new book, The Birth of a Theorem. It's a story about how and why these moments of illumination take place. It's also a serious study of what Villani calls the prepared mind. One should not believe that there are things which come through brute force and things which come through illumination. I believe most of the time it's a combining process of the two. There was hard work before in terms of thinking and preparing around, certainly.

Then there was an instant of magic. And after that, there was hard work again to convert this instant of magic into the complete proof. Now, I always enjoy listening to scientists and mathematicians talk about magic. And Cedric Villani, well, he looks like a fashionable French relative of Harry Potter. And he never goes out without one of his giant spider brooches. But still, this is math. So when it comes to the concept of luck, he does tread carefully. I think that I may put maybe more emphasis than others on this idea of the role of chance and

encounter. But I think that qualitatively, my approach and the way I work is no different Qualitativement, mon approche et mon travail ne sont pas différents des autres mathématiciens. Peut-être que je suis un peu plus confiant que d'autres dans le pouvoir de cette chance. Ce n'est pas rationnel, mais c'est une croyance. Et la persévérance est quelque chose dont vous avez vraiment besoin. La persistance pour traverser les difficultés et les risques. Et beaucoup de gens me disent aussi, vous savez, j'ai lu votre livre, je ne suis pas mathématicien du tout, mais je reconnais beaucoup de choses que vous avez dites dans mon travail.

L'importance de l'ouverture, de l'échange, I recognize many of the things you said in my own work, the importance of openness, of exchange, and recognizing when you are lucky. And I think that's a question that not only the scientists, but everybody is asking. This is definitely one of the questions yours truly is asking. But I'm not a scientist. I'm an artist. So I don't want to understand how ideas happen.

I just want them to keep happening. Of course, I'm trying to prepare myself, but I always seem to overdo it. The only method I've seemed to work out is a blind wandering in the dark. Perhaps this is why I'm drawn to Cedric Villani's book, because in his stories about research and discovery, everything just comes together perfectly. Of course, I understand why artists hate to be asked the question, where do you get your ideas? For several reasons. One is that most of the time they don't know where they get their ideas from. And then there is a bit of you don't want to demystify the thing.

I believe that what people naturally, I was going to say biologically, but at least naturally prone to is listening to stories. We like stories. And we have the stories, which is the history of mathematics, the history of discoveries, and so on. We tend to forget this because we only care about the final result, final proof, but the storytelling behind the proof can be extremely compelling. I like to say that there are three ways to talk about science and one is to insist on the point of view of the people who make it, this is the human side, One is to insist on the events, like there is this big project to solve, like we want to understand

this, we want to make an atomic bomb, we want to discover the rules of very high energy and complete the standard model, whatever. And the third is the story of concepts, which in science are kind of living beings with their own life.

Cédric Villani taught me this word, accouchère. It means intellectual midwifing. Cédric Villani is most definitely a mathematical accouchère, because for him, the question is not so much where do ideas come from, but rather, how do we catch them? The ideas we have, they are there for us to grasp, and we are really like, you know, doing the accoucheur. Or building a web.

I'm looking at the spider on your jacket, and you are known for having these beautiful spider pins, and I can't help but think, as you were discussing, the way of constructing ways for us to catch the ideas, I think, of the spider. I like this idea too. You know, web is such a modern concept in many senses of the world. Even if it's not the internet, we are in the web more nowadays than any other day. I've been struggling with this episode of The Theory of Everything

for a number of weeks now. At first I thought it was just the post-holiday blues or a desire for a break after killing myself on that Dislike Club series. But now I realize there's something else going on. I've been waiting for an illumination. There are actually two books at the heart of this episode. Cedric Villani's The Birth of a Theorem and this strange volume from 1957 called The Art of Scientific Investigation.

This one was written by a professor of animal pathology named William I.B. Beveridge. According to Google Image, Beveridge did not fancy brooding Victorian-style clothing, nor did he have a penchant for spider brooches. But he does share with Cedric Villani an obsession with the question, where do ideas come from? It's hard to explain why this particular book made such an impression on me, because it's basically a training manual written for the scientific researcher of the future. But like Villani's book, it's filled with stories, compelling stories about scientists and scientific concepts.

Now, every time I hear someone insist that we must learn to think for ourselves, as Beverage does, I can't help but think of that scene in The Life of Brian where Brian implores the crowd to embrace their individuality. And they answer, in unison, yes, we are all individuals. For Beveridge, true independence comes from diversity. Originality, he says, consists in linking up ideas whose connection was not previously suspected. The fertile mind, he says, tries a large number and variety of combinations. New combinations in our thoughts arise from rational associations or from fancy or perhaps chance circumstances. And while it is of course impossible to organize a method around chance or fancy, beverage still gives it a shot. This leads to some amusing bits like his admission that he actually has no idea why he's creating separate chapters for imagination and

intuition. But I'm certain that many great researchers have taken inspiration from this book. I certainly did. This is one of his thoughts on observation. It is impossible to observe everything, and so the observer has to give most of his attention to a selected field. But he should, at the same time, try to watch out for other things, especially anything odd. This, I think, leads us to the problem that I am currently struggling with.

How does the observer pay attention to his selected field and deviate from it if the selected field is everything? He created a Tumblr. You know, half a century before Tumblr, he built a Tumblr that was about how creativity works and how ideas come to be. That's Maria Popova. She's the writer and curator and brain behind Brain Pickings, the popular website that features stories about everything, art, culture, philosophy, science.

It's where I discovered the Beverage book a few years ago. Maria says she was attracted to the book because it fits the mission of her site, an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. She began the site in 2006 when she came to America from Bulgaria for college. She found her classes understimulating, so she spent most of her time in the library educating herself. She kept track of her findings in a newsletter. She spent most of her time in the library educating herself. She kept track of her findings in a newsletter. She shared this newsletter with her colleagues at the ad agency she worked at part-time. They shared it with their family and friends, who in turn shared it with

theirs. Today, Brain Pickings is one of the most successful and popular sites on the internet. Originally, it was not writing. It was selection. It was pointing. It was only links. Every week, five links to things that I thought were important with no context as to why, other than coming from my selection, which counted for nothing because I was a kid in college. And so it was initially basically saying this. And eventually I started writing a little paragraph about each thing and explaining why.

And it became this because. And over time, the more of these pieces, this is, I accumulated, the more I became interested in how they relate to one another. And it became this because and. At this point, Maria Popova's loaded up brain pickings with about nine years' worth of deep links. She's built a very intricate web. So it's easy for a reader to make connections on his or her own or just revel in the ones that she makes. A few months ago, I was reading Alan Watts,

and I came upon this passage where he talks about how the formal education system is like little boxes. He uses the term ticky-tacky. Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky-tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same And for some reason, I remembered a song by Melvyn Reynolds from the 60s, which coincidentally was on the soundtrack of the show Weeds in the first few seasons. It was the opening tune.

And it's a very memorable song where it's called Little Boxes, and she uses the word ticky tacky. And nowhere to my knowledge was there a reference as to why she wrote that song, because that's such a distinct phrase and kind of an uncommon phrase. And then I put two and two together and I saw that the Alan Watts book was published the year before that song was written. And he was very big in Northern California, but also really in the U.S., in those sort of pleasantly hippie, spiritual, new-agey circles, and Melvyn Reynolds was in them. And so I would say it's fair to say that she read that book, and that's what inspired that song.

Now, there is no record of that anywhere, and the only way to discover that really is to have a prepared imagination that has both and is able to hold both together and see that thread between them. I hate to admit it, but it's hard for me to keep up with Maria Popova's brain. She's just too prolific. But I do pay attention when she writes about the creative process. We talk about creativity as this grab bag term, but as soon as you try to talk about it directly or write about it directly, chances are you fail. You might have to, you might, you know, you might quote one or two studies by some prominent psychologists that kind of address

it directly. But the most effective way to me, which is why I very rarely write about creativity as such directly, the most effective way is to look at people who you think, or we as a culture, as a civilization thing, have put meaningful creative things into the world, and to try to understand not only how they think, because you can never replicate how another person thinks, but what is meaningful to them, what drives them, what makes them get up in the morning, what makes them feel happy and gratified when they go to sleep at night, which is why a lot of the quote-unquote creativity topic that I cover is really looking at the diaries and letters and autobiographies and all kinds of personal reflections of these notable creators

and picking apart really the building blocks of what we then lump sum into creativity. But the building blocks, which are the struggles and the turmoil and the excitements and the triumphs and the mundane things that happen, all of which amount to what we call creativity, those are much more important. I'm just very interested in this notion of discovery being a creative act, even though it doesn't invent, you know, it uncovers what already exists. And I think some of the great scientists were very well aware of that.

And if you look at even the Beverage book, The Art of Scientific Investigation, so many of the things that he quotes touch on that. The vaster and richer your pool of creative resources, the more you're able to actually notice the chance when it happens and seize it and turn it into something productive and something beautiful and something meaningful. That book, the beverage book, actually, he uses this term, chance opportunism, which I love. I love. We must be opportunist when it comes to chance. It wasn't until I finished putting my talk with Marie together

that I got the illumination that I've been waiting for these past few weeks. A focus on everything does not automatically entitle you to a prepared mind or imagination. In fact, Villani and Beveridge and Popova all make it clear that our human definition of everything gives us, at best, a tiny penlight to help us with our wanderings in the dark. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called An Illumination.

The episode featured Cedric Villani and Maria Popova and it was produced by myself. I don't know if you've noticed but the podcast pool is getting more and more crowded every day. So help us out with a friendly review in the iTunes store. That's what makes their

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