Miming Great Scientists

Category: Organizing Research

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Purpose

The behavior of great scientists are an amazing source of worthwhile experiment ideas.
1. It’s unclear what practices are causally connected to consistent breakthrough,
Surveying great scientists will lead to a list of the skills and techniques which can be identified (in discovering & hiring scientists) or trained.
It will provide valuable source data for abstracting over scientists into scientific styles

People

John Von Neumann

Clarity, above all.
Decomposition - extreme skill.
1. “He had the invaluable faculty of being able to take the most difficult problem, separate it into its components, whereupon everything looked brilliantly simple, and all of us wondered why we had not been able to see through to the answer as clearly.” {Macrae, Pg. 29}
Stealing from other research and researchers
Comparatively un-creative.
1. Or at least, his major skill was re-representing the existing unclear ideas of others with clarity backed by formalism.
2. “His Mind was not as original as Leibniz’s or Newton’s or Einstein’s, but he seized other people’s original (though fluffy) ideas and quickly changed them in expanded detail into a form where they could be useful for scholarship and for mankind.” {Macrae, Pg. 23}
Relatively free of self-obsession
1. “Johnny was amazingly free of amour propre, in a profession where many top mathematicians up to and including Sir Isaac Newton had been sick as peacocks with it. Newton spent his early life denying he had plagiarized anything from anybody (although he fortunately had) … In contrast, Johnny borrowed anything from anybody, with great courtesy and aplomb. “ {Macrae, Pg. 22-23}
Hungarian education system
1. TODO: Get best practices for teaching scientists while young from this system. It produced Neuman, “The Martians
2. Produced Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner
10-second trances
1. “Somebody asked him “What percentage of all mathematics might a person aspire to understand today?”
Intensity of concentration {find Macrae cite}

Notes

Lamenting that mathematical progress makes the whole of mathematics ungraspable

Nikola Tesla

His visualization method is "radically opposite" to the experimental. It's a new scientific method, where the hypotheses all happen in the mind, not on the world. It's a much more rapid form of development and perfection.
1. “... This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 12}
2. Einstein has something very similar.
Incredibly hard working.
1. “I had made up my mind to give my parents a surprise, and during the whole first year I regularly started my work at three o’clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted. As most of my fellow-students took thinks easily, naturally enough I eclipsed all records. In the course of that year I past thru nine exams and the professors thought I deserved more than the highest qualifications. Armed with their flattering certificates, I went home for a short rest, expecting a triumph, and was mortified when my father made light of these hard won honors. That almost killed my ambition; but later, after he had died, I was pained to find a package of letters which the professors had written him to the effect that unless he took me away from the Institution I would be killed thru overwork.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 37}
Imagination “affliction” during childhood.
1. “In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. … “When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish weather what i was was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology, whom I have consulted, could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomenons.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 9}
Deep love of thinking.
1. “Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 5}
Mother was an inventor of first order.
1. “She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 9}
2. “She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home were the product of her hands.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 9}
Tesla was a visualization MACHINE, traveling the world in his imagination, where the people he met and knew in his mind where just as real as those in real life.
Imagination based design
1. “My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practise of a crude idea as is being generally done is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money and time.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 12}
Reading Voraciously
1. “Of all things I liked books the best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly into a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn, when all others slept and my mother started on her arduous daily task.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 16}
Completion Obsession
1. “I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, “Never more!””{Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 38}
Book Memorization
“One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s “Faust.” The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage:” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 42}

Notes

Tesla was in a state of continuous rapture for years, high on the thrill of experienced brilliance and invention.

Tesla's brother, though he died earlier, was even more exceptional than he was, to the point where his parents couldn't deal with Tesla's brilliance without thinking of their dead son.

He has these manic experiences These 'luminous phenomena', where his brain LITERALLY HEATS UP UNBEARABLY

He's insane An abnormal psychology, which has extreme aversion Of all things, he liked books the best His mind had many desires, and they would grow like the hydra

Tesla mastered making desire and will identical And so he “toyed with passions that destroyed the strongest men”

Deriving insane satisfaction from what most men would consider privation and sacrifice (It's frame / reframe - you can either accept your emotional reality and attune your life (say, via balance) to accord with that emotional reality. Or you can change the way you experience reality to accord with the way of living you know is most worthy.

Tesla basically doesn't age normally. He's as limber as a cat, has super vision, and weighs the amount he does at 59 as at 35. Shannon

Deconstruction (Simplify and deconstruct the problem recursively)
Transfer / Abstract over similar solutions
Attack the problem from multiple angles
1. Multiple levels of abstraction
2. Different modes of processing
3. Question foundational assumptions
Shannon refers to deconstruction as "structural analysis" - breaking
Generalization - if you've solved a problem, extend the solution to its farthest reaches

Shannon and Deconstruction:

Bob Gallager, a Shannon graduate student who went on to become a leading information theorist himself, saw this process of radical simplification in action. He describes coming to Shannon's office one day with a new research idea full of "bells and whistles." For Shannon, though, bells and whistles were just a distraction and he proceeded to take the problem apart piece by piece. As Gallager said:

"He looked at it, sort of puzzled, and said, 'Well, do you really need this assumption?' And I said, well, I suppose we could look at the problem without that assumption. And we went on for a while. And then he said, again, 'Do you need this other assumption?'… And he kept doing this, about five or six times. ... At a certain point, I was getting upset, because I saw this neat research problem of mine had become almost trivial. But at a certain point, with all these pieces stripped out, we both saw how to solve it. And then we gradually put all these little assumptions back in and then, suddenly, we saw the solution to the whole problem. And that was just the way he worked."

A genius as somebody who is 'usefully irritated', implying a dissatisfaction with a problem unseen.

Leonhard Euler

Memorizing books, plays as a child {link Harvard a tribute to Euler video}

Henri Poincare

Mathematical Creation

Gauss

Gauss’s ideas were represented in a very cryptic way.
1. Gauss: “an architect never leaves the scaffolding used to build his creations”
2. Disquentiones Arithmeticae described as “Book of seven seals”

Edward Fredkin (not the same level as others but a variety of contexts matters)

Social proof
1. Top intellectuals like Feynman and Minsky enjoyed talking to Fredkin because he wasn’t boring. Without a bachelor’s degree, Fredkin was the youngest appointed professor at MIT in his early thirties with Minsky and others’ backing.
2. Fredkin and Minsky cold-called Feyman when visiting Caltech and they became very good friends.
Social about ideas
1. “I’m unlike other people. When they have a really good idea, they keep it a big, dark secret until they can explore all the easy consequences and get the credit for all of them… I just told this idea to everyone I could find to try to interest them to work on it. I called Feynman up and told him the idea…” (55)
2. Sometimes cannot give logical reason to pursue an idea, so will “transfer intuitions” to people (55)
  1. Compares following an idea to tracking an animal like Bigfoot
Independent obsessive thought
1. “Fredkin is a notoriously bad listener, and he seldom bothers to read the scientific literature”

Source: Three Scientists and Their Gods Faraday

Aggregate List

Definite

Alan Turing
Nikola Tesla
John Von Neumann
Albert Einstein
Michael Faraday
Claude Shannon
Issac Newton
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Kurt Godel
Thomas Edison
Leonardo Da Vinci
Henri Poincare

Nice to Have

Robert Oppenheimer
Edward Fredkin
Herbert Simon
E. O. Wilson
Marie Curie
Santiago Cajal
Ray Kirzweil
Kenneth Blouding
Srinivasa Ramanujan
James Maxwell
Zeno
Archimedes
Descartes
Fermat
Pascal
Bernoulli
Euler
Lagrange
Laplace
Fourier
Gauss
Cauchy
Jacobi
Galois
Boole
Kronecker
Riemann
Cantor
Andre Weil
Charles Darwin
Grothendieck

From the essay:

Specific Takeaways from Great Researchers

The behavior of great scientists is an amazing source of worthwhile experiment ideas.
1. It’s unclear what practices are causally connected to consistent breakthrough, and this experimentation would attempt to clarify those connections.
Surveying great scientists will lead to a list of the skills and techniques which can be identified (in discovering & hiring scientists) or trained.
The data from an overview will provide valuable source data for abstracting over scientists into scientific styles, a categorization scheme that can guide decision making.

On point 1: Systematically experiment (to the degree that it’s possible) with the biographical content of great researchers, we make an example out of Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla

His visualization method is "radically opposite" to the experimental. It's a new scientific method, where the hypotheses all happen in the mind, not on the world. It's a much more rapid form of development and perfection.
1. “... This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 12}
2. Einstein has something very similar.
Incredibly hard working.
1. “I had made up my mind to give my parents a surprise, and during the whole first year I regularly started my work at three o’clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted. As most of my fellow-students took thinks easily, naturally enough I eclipsed all records. In the course of that year I past thru nine exams and the professors thought I deserved more than the highest qualifications. Armed with their flattering certificates, I went home for a short rest, expecting a triumph, and was mortified when my father made light of these hard won honors. That almost killed my ambition; but later, after he had died, I was pained to find a package of letters which the professors had written him to the effect that unless he took me away from the Institution I would be killed thru overwork.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 37}
Imagination “affliction” during childhood.
1. “In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. … “When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish weather what i was was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology, whom I have consulted, could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomenons.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 9}
Deep love of thinking.
1. “Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 5}
Mother was an inventor of first order.
1. “She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 9}
2. “She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home were the product of her hands.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 9}
Tesla was a visualization MACHINE, traveling the world in his imagination, where the people he met and knew in his mind where just as real as those in real life.
Imagination based design
1. “My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practise of a crude idea as is being generally done is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money and time.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 12}
Reading Voraciously
1. “Of all things I liked books the best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly into a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn, when all others slept and my mother started on her arduous daily task.” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 16}
Completion Obsession
1. “I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, “Never more!””{Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 38}
Book Memorization
“One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s “Faust.” The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage:” {Tesla Autobiography, Pg. 42}

Source: Original Google Doc