Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Beyond 10,000 Hours (#021)

Episode Date: March 6, 2019

On this episode, we explore physics, education, and what it takes to train imaginative scientists with Carl Wieman, Nobel Prize winning physicist with joint appointments as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Dr. Wieman is interviewed by Brian Keating, UC San Diego Professor of Physics, Director of the Simons Observatory, and Associate Director of the Clarke Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two. Hello and welcome to Into the Impossible, a podcast about how we imagine and how what we imagine shapes what we do from the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. Today, we're going to be speaking with Carl Wyman, professor of physics and at the grader. Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. In addition to doing research on atomic physics, he studies science education. And so our associate director, Brian Keating, sat down to talk with him about creativity in science and how one might teach imagination.

We hope you enjoy it. So just for the audio, I always like to ask people, if you were, somebody comes up to you and says, I've got good news for you and bad news, which do you want to hear first? The good news are the bad news. I'm asking you. I'm not sure I have any bad news for you. No, no, no, I'm saying if somebody tells you, I have good news for you and bad news for you, which do you want to hear first?

I want to hear the bad news. You want to hear the bad news? Okay. I've kind of gotten 50-50. I had Freeman Dyson on last month, and he said he wants to hear the good news because that'll soften the blow of any bad news that would come later. Well, partly this actually is governed by my work in education. Oh, really? Yeah, where it turns out negative feedback is much more.

more useful for learning, contribute is much more to learning than positive feedback. Right, right. So, you know, to the extent bad, it was just negative feedback. You're going to get the course. Actually, so just dovetails nicely into what I, the question I was dying to ask you yesterday, but you're thronged by so many interesting students. I think that was the thing I liked, that the students were asking your questions about pedagogy and your talk yesterday about, you know, how do you really turn non-experts into

experts. So I'm in one of my hobbies in my copious amounts of spare time is I'm working on my certified flight instructor rating. So I've got a commercial pilots license. I've got all sorts of experience. But one thing my original flight instructor told me 25 years ago is never stop learning because once you stop learning, you get complacent. Once you get complacent, bad things happen. And so I started this process of getting my government issued, FAA issued flight instructor license. and to do that, you have to study a great deal of human psychology. And I thought it was interesting. I think it's probably the only, you know, I can't imagine the IRS has, you know,

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, that the auditors need to know about or something like that. But it dawned on me that, you know, I've been a professor for 14 years and no one ever taught me how to teach. And more than that, nobody ever taught me, you know, these basic principles, hierarchical structure of needs, whether you agree with it or not. I would be interested to hear, first of all, your take on, is that a legitimate thing in the eyes of, you know, in social sciences, they seem to really cling to it. And the fact that the FAA, you know, seems to want to prevent people from dying. And so they feel like this is an important thing. You know, the pyramid of needs, right, in their handbook for flight instructors alongside, you know, how to land an airplane on, you know, a single engine that only is a two-engine airplane.

So what are your thoughts on the kind of the classical modalities of pedagogy? And is there a reason that we should or should not be teaching physics instructors how to be professors on day one? I mean, it's very clear now that, yeah, if you want them to be good teachers, there's a level of expertise in that. You know, to be a good teacher, you have to have the expertise just like you do to be a flight instructor. And that means that you have to know about the research on basic learning and connects with some basic cognitive psychology. And you've got to know about how to implement those things properly in the classroom for the different ranges of students you have. And, you know, 10 or 20 years ago, and certainly in the previous thousand years, which universities are running, Yeah. One didn't have that research to show. So, you know, it was kind of, there wasn't anything clearly to learn. It was kind of individual art form. And the trouble is we haven't historically, we haven't gotten past that. Yeah. Because we're just in that transition region. So I, you know, like a pretty good analogy is to think about medicine. So where at the place medicine was in about the mid to late 1800s.

leeches and phrenology. Well, yeah, before then, you know, it was kind of every crazy idea that somebody came along and declared themselves to be a doctor. Right. And, you know, that was all that took. And then, but then you had this kind of scientific medicine coming along. And, and, but you still had the people practicing cookies, you know, their own individual idiosyncratic stuff at the time you had real signs saying, no, there's better ways to do this.

So my sound bite on this is that the standard UriS. University professor is currently still practicing the pedagogical equivalent of bloodline when there are antibiotics out there. Right. Yeah, it's a problem of educate. I mean, the first university was in, you know, 1088. And back then I always point out, although I don't do it to my students, when the students were unhappy with the professors, the students would go on strike

and the professors wouldn't get paid. Thankfully, that barbaric process has been replaced by tenure. No, they charge the students up front. That's right. Yeah, we charge them for the wonderful education to come. But yeah, I mean, I feel like just having learned a little bit, and I never encountered, I'd heard of that from my social scientific friends, but I never really encountered, well, you know, a student needs to feel, you know, a sense of security and physical safety and all those

things. And we can assume, for the most part, a lot of that's in place. But then, you know, a sense of purpose and meaning and progress. And you touch upon this in your talk. But, you know, when I took away from your talk is this concept, which, you know, I believe is attributed not to Malcolm Gladwell. Although I think he made it famous, this 10,000 hour rule, which actually applies to pilots as well. I mean, a master flight instructor has 10,000 hours of flight time. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's not an accident.

I mean, yeah, Gladwell was really. doing, he was talking about the work of Anders Erick. Anderson, that's right. He's done all the pioneering research in this. And he, but he was playing a little fast. I mean, a lot of it's actually pretty close to the research, but then he wanders away at times and kind of putting in his own stuff, which the only problem is he's not very good of differentiating.

Right. What's actually research. And what's glad. That's right. Which, so Erickson is actually just written a popular. book, which, you know, you don't have to read, well, it's not reading between the lines. Right. Right.

It's right to correct a bunch of things. The misconson. That's right. To undo the, unring the bell. The Gladwell bell. Yeah, it's called peak, something about peak. Oh, right. Yeah, you reference that in your talk.

Yes, that's right. So I'm meaning to get that. But anyway, I mean, it's certainly 10,000, this arbitrarian number, 10,000, kind of ify, but it's certainly several thousand. Yeah. And I can certainly see that, you know, just keep on. you know, beating this metaphor to death. But with flight instruction, you know, you really can't encounter the different weather systems

and altitude systems and air spaces around big cities and small towns unless you do accumulate a lot of hours. But in the teaching of physics, you know, I remember for myself, oh, sorry, go on. Let me break in to make a correction. A important point there. You talk about you can't encounter all those things. But that makes a very important point about those. Those hours have to be spent doing the right things. So if you went to always the same place with the same weather condition, you could do 10,000 hours, and you are not an expert pilot.

You know what? You have to be testing, practicing on all this different conditions. Expanding the conditions. And so that's very critical. Some people say, you know, that applies to all of these different situations. Exactly. Some people say, you know, you can get 100 hours of flying experience. You can fly the same flight 100 times.

You're absolutely right. And that was kind of also dovetailed with. with the statement that you mean. You also need feedback. It's not just enough to have accumulation. But I do feel like there was an element, you know, at least in my education, and I conversed with some of the colleagues sitting around me yesterday. And you're talking about your flight education.

Oh, no, sorry. No, my physics education. Well, whereas, you know, when I, I made an analogy to, you know, like the Stephen Jay Gould, you know, punctuated equilibrium where you really kind of go from state to state in a hopping mechanism. Like, when I learn what a Fourier transform is, then I started to see everything in terms of Fourier transform. It wasn't like, well, I put in, you know, one hour's worth of studying on trigonometry and then another hour.

You know, it was all of a sudden now I could see things in a whole new light and that opens up vast different areas. So there seems to be two different evolutionary paths, one where you do get big jumps and mental breakthroughs. And, you know, but I think a lot of it has to be done, you know, on your own. Like, as well as getting feedback. I mean, the ratio is probably hard to determine how much feedback to, but you made the good point that we shouldn't waste our time, you know, teaching or wrote stuff, you know, that they can memorize or at least encounter before Klaus. But I wonder, you know, throughout that, I couldn't stop thinking about this notion of creativity.

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Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Yeah. Go ahead. Okay, so I don't want to lead creativity. Yeah. I've given a lot of thought to that. I do want to go back to your thoughts of great breakthroughs. Yeah, the least.

So this is something cognizantianian studies, studied a pyramid. And I wondered about myself. So what their research is shown, and they get this actually best by looking brain. activity okay and and what they see is that it actually isn't the it isn't truly you know struggle struggle struggle and then some great leap what it is is it a struggle it's a develop develop develop and then suddenly it becomes apparent but that but your brain processing has still been going on to to to reach that point and you and it's suddenly, you know, it's kind of like you suddenly open the door,

but the stuff behind that door, you were actually had to have been thinking, you know, all that thinking about was actually prepping was wiring the brain in the right way. And you sort of completed the last link as it were. So, so it, and, you know, I think it's important to keep in that, then, mind because it really says no it's not sort of oh I'll just wait around right you know it really they come oh there your brain is actually right it's turning or it has to be turning yeah I see this in my kids too you know see but you see I see sort of equal amounts of of linear well they have to practice piano but then all of a sudden they're like oh they're really

good at arithmetic and well they didn't spend extra time in early it's just they they make these cognitive kind of and it would be great if we could have to have into that you know seven-year-old mind every now and then the connectivity but you just have to realize it I mean and that sort of supports the you know you get people can get frustrated thinking I'm not really making progress but right you actually are and when you have a great great good you should you should recognize oh that's rewarding all that effort that right was right right it's like see it's not really it's not luck right exactly right so it's a preparation and and I mean but that is a

problem when students are first learning when they haven't had experience, really learning something that's hard, and, you know, they've been given just simple things to do, then they can very easily get discouraged because they have no idea, you know, kind of how the process works, what's the payoff?

They don't see the perspective from the end of it. Once they've done it a few times, but anyway, so that's an important thing to deal with new college students, particularly when it's from not very good high school. Right. And, you know, you made this point yesterday that, like, you know, there's probably some saturation point as to how many physicists a society like ours needs, you know, but,

but of course, you know, our job is education and then the question that people have is, you know, I mean, I always heard, I think it's attributed to is it a rabbi who said, you know, something like, you know, if you're paid to do research as a professor and if you're a gentleman or gentlewoman, you, you also put some effort into teaching. And then I, you know, I had a conversation with my friends and I was like, well, you know, we're basically like small business people. Those of us that run labs, we have payroll, we have travel, we have a, you know, accountant. Then we have all the supervision stuff. We have committee things. And then, and I'm like, we're like CEOs of a, you know, very, very, very small fortune, one, you know,

one million company. And then he said, yeah, but they don't, you know, they don't have Tim Cook teaching 40 hours a week or whatever. And it's the question of, you know, prioritization. And I heard this morning just walking, I saw my colleagues down the hall, feverishly debating some of the points you made yesterday. And it was just interesting to me because, you know, as a parent now, I have five kids. My wife and I have five kids as of a couple weeks ago. We had twins. And, you know, I think about, like, if I spend, like, an hour I'm learning about parenting, you know, I feel like I'm super dad or whatever. My wife is super mom. But, you know, I think it's very important that you give these talks because, you know, just spending an hour or thinking about these things that we

really, I mean, literally, never taught me how to teach. And I don't know if it's different on Stanford or elsewhere. But, you know, but I think it's so important. And the way to get a, are right, it would be great to kind of find a way to scale the kind of, I mean, you've given your presentation elsewhere, I know, and you have your book about this, this very topic. But, you know, then the question comes up, you know, what is our mission truly? Is it to teach the undergraduates? Is it to teach graduate students to become us? And then, well, are we just, you know, you know, making, you know, clones of ourselves? And so that was the question of creativity. You know, like, as a physicist, a lot of what we do, and you asked this question of all of us yesterday,

like what are the core elements of what you do and how you characterize what you do? And I had sitting next to me a theoretical biophysicist. I had a particle physicist on the other side. We have very different thing. I'm an experimental cosmologist and we have just very different toolkits. But the one thing that's hard and we talk a lot about in the Arthur C. Clark Center of premium imagination is can you teach creativity? And how do you do it? And I remember interviewing an artist who he was a playwright and an actor.

And he played Pablo Picasso in one of the, the plays, the one-man show is unbelievable. Herbert Siguenza is his name. And he did a phenomenal job. And I asked him, like, well, what did Pablo Picasso think about the craft of, you know, being an artist, and then how could you apply it to being an actor? And his thing was like, well, Pablo Picasso didn't start out with cubism. I mean, he started off as a classical artist and replicated the masters.

And I was thinking, well, I'm curious as to what you think. I mean, do you think it would be valuable to go over? You talked about DeBroyley yesterday. I mean, do you think there's a value in the historical, you know, teaching the the evidentiary, you know, final correct path of physics, but basically just repeating derivations or, I mean, how is this notion of creativity? Can you teach it? I mean, that's basically my question. Yes. So, so I'm not going to talk about creativity in the arts and so. Yeah, sure. But I've thought a lot about creativity in science. And I've talked with people and talk about people study this.

And, you know, I can, this is one of the few places I claim that. belt might be some measure of confidence in this area. And what I would argue is that creative insight is pretty simple. It's basically where people are looking at some situation or question about them and simply find a way of looking at that's different than everybody else has been looking at it, and realize that there's some other information or some other approach, which is relevant to think about this, and that mathematical calculation or new ways to understand how this describes some physical phenomena that hadn't realized before.

So it's really this idea of finding a different way to look at it that's, I think, in every case I can think of, It's not bringing in something completely new. It's realizing that things that people already knew but didn't really understand how could apply in this situation. And so that means you sort of have to be well grounded in the discipline. Like Bacaso really had to know how to paint and how to produce images with paint in a real way. And, you know, I get emails almost daily. You too. People who feel they're awfully creative and not bound by all that background nonsense of physicists.

And so, you know, they can create infinite energy. They can explain everything. Faster than light travel. Yeah. And whereas it's just nonsense. And so, you know, that's our creativity. Yeah. So, yeah.

And, you know, in my own work, I'll just give one example. And both condensation really was very clearly looking at this problem. People tried to solve this problem for a long time and recognizing that the bottleneck, the real bottleneck they had to solve was not the bottleneck that they had been working on. And then if you recognize the real bottleneck was all these really cold atoms trying to get three of them together to make a molecule. and that was the process you had to suppress if you're going to make things cold and dense enough. And that led to a completely different experimental approach. But all it was was saying, oh, this problem is more important than the other problems.

But you had to have some wisdom. That's not very brilliant, but you needed to know about how atoms behaved at really cold temperatures and understand that all these troubles they had originated from that process. So if you step back to think about this from point of view of education, what I would argue is the standard educational approach we use in science is it's not ineffective in teaching creativity. It's anti-effective teaching creativity. The reason I say that is that if you think about really in a normal course,

students learn, even a well-tied course, students learn all these things and they're given these tests they're graded on where the fundamental measure is always are you able to produce the one answer that the instructor wants to see exactly and so that's that's completely the opposite of being able to think of ways to look at things or self problems that nobody else has done that way before and so it's really squashing you know you're penalized for creativity up through your entire formal schooling. That's right. I always say when people ask what's graduate school like, I say it's definitely not like a harder version of undergraduate because an undergraduate you may not be able to get the right answer in the homework, but somebody can, you know, somebody who's able to get.

But you might not even know the question. And you mentioned this yesterday. There might not even be a well-formed question, let alone an answer. And so how do you deal with that discomfort? That's after you've passed all your graduate courses. Before that, no, you have to get the one right answer. The qual, yeah, the bane of most questions. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, you have to go through this big hurdle that says, no, you can get the answer that all the fact you want to see, and that qualifies you to then finally go out and do things where there isn't an answer. What a stupid system, right? And of course, for much of our educations, we're always, you know, we're throwing in with the, like, medical doctors. And, you know, the one thing I don't want is my doctor to, you know, take out the scalpel.

So I'm going to just, like, really creative. You know, so, and it has a purpose, but, you know, But the purpose, as you say, is probably anti-effective because it was really set up, I think Ken Robinson or somebody made this point, that it was set up to train people to be useful in British industry in the 1800s. And that's even building upon the Bologna University model from a thousand years before. And so it's just really sad, you know, because I think, and I know we're short on time, and I just want to finish up with. I mean, there's always this notion, and, you know, I haven't seen that it's more pronounced than, you know, dozens of Nobel laureates, whatever. But I have never seen somebody say, well, you know, I'm really, really smart. And, you know, here's, here's proof about I'm a professor at a top university, whatever.

And so that means I can intuit all these things that, you know, my social science or even my English, you know, in the English department, you know, have to take some training to learn how to do. Or even my kids' high school teachers have to get some training to know how to do. I think if we could crack that, you know, is kind of the, is it bottom up or we really focus on the students and flipping the classrooms and going work? books and all those wonderful things. Those definitely work. I've tried it one way. I've tried it the other way. But I feel like we need to make this breakthrough of the educators. They need to have a little bit more humility. Even our colleagues in physics that just because you're brilliant, I see this with these projects. I'm trying to be. But it's the same notion when I'm running an experiment. You know, and I've run, I've worked for people and I've run experiments myself. And the notion is

always, well, I'm super smart and I could be doing anything I want. And, you know, I've, I've chosen to be an academician, but, you know, obviously running a management. And I'm like, there are books written by Fortune 500 CEO, you know, on how to be a manager. And so why not, like, take advantage? No one I know does that. We, you know, no one's gone to business schools to learn how to, how do you run a medium-sized corporation? I think it's, I don't know, do you think it's an ego issue or? So, you know, I think it's, no, it's a culture issue. I mean, first, I know, I know enough that people go to business schools, that that's not going to be the right thing, But there are certainly things that one can learn.

I mean, I actually read books on organization, organizational innovation, that were really pretty useful, both are running by research group, but also in thinking about guiding changes in teaching. So there's lots to be learned there. There is expertise there. But you know, you also can't spend your life going out learning things.

So there's a real balance of efficiency. Yes. but, you know, I will say, I mean, I'll just point to the teaching things where I've looked at a lot. It doesn't take any more time to teach well than it does to do old traditional stuff. And in fact, new faculty spend, when we've looked at this, they spend, in their first teaching, spend enormous amounts of time, much of it ill spent. And so, you know, and we find it takes several tens of hours for people to kind of, if they have been exposed, to be trained to be pretty effective. And then from then on, it doesn't take any more time.

And that's a huge amount of leverage. Sometimes it takes less time. And so if it was, if there was, the culture was just set up recognizing, no, there's some expertise. You need to make sure your new faculty have. And we're going to set up, you know, training programs to make sure that that's done. in a kind of most time-efficient way for everybody. If people and departments start thinking about, let's be more efficient, let's take advantage the fact that it's really not necessary for every new faculty

or every family member to reinvent the course that's been taught for the last 40 years, you know, and spend all that time preparing. But that's so, you know, built into the culture that. But you made the point that until the faculties, you know, recognize that they have to do it and have some metric and maybe some carrot and stick, right? Some reward mechanism. That's right. And just, yeah, I mean, right now, there's only a stick against doing it. And so, you know, that's a shift in the culture.

Since that happens, and I think actually people will teach a lot better and they'll spend less time on it. Yeah. And I got no problems with that. That's great. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much. I know you have a huge, very packed schedule today. Thank you, Dr. Wyman. It's been great having you here at UCSD. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two, one.