1. On My Mind I
On My
Mind: Discipline and Curiosity4/16/2019 7:30 AM
Prefatory Remark--
Feynman’s Explanation
Preview
A
Repertoire of Examples
Analogy
is destiny
1.
What
is really going on
a.
What
I am up to
b.
Analytic
Description
2.
Thinking
for a Living
a.
Thinking
and Analogy, Syzygy…
3.
Ideas
a.
Balance
and Layers
b.
Differentiation
and Hierarchy…
c.
Harmonies
d.
The
Stages for Our Action
e.
Diego
Rivera’s Detroit
f.
Making
the World Linear
4.
Out
of Brooklyn
a.
Productive
Themes
b.
Out
of Brooklyn
c.
Models
d.
What’s
going on here?
--------------------------
Prefatory Remark
On My Mind is about how
one person thinks and understands the world. In seminars, in various
departments at the University, I come out of left field to make useful
observations. What am I doing? In part, my training as a physicist is different
than the social science or legal training of my colleagues, yet most of the
time my observations have no obvious relationship to that physics educationhhh.
In part, there was that remark from my ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Webb,
who told me that I think in analogies. Who knew? In part, I am the guy who is a
perpetual outsider, and wants to be let in, and so I pay close attention in a
seminar or in reading a paper, trying to figure out as soon as possible, What’s
Up? I have little patience, as such, and I like to try to figure out what is
going on, then and there. And I am willing to ask a speaker, Do I understand
what you are doing, by saying…?
For
me, there is a resonance with the following account by Richard Feynman, the
physicist, of how he thinks:
Good. Give me one example. That was for me: I can't
understand anything unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and
watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I
don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb"
questions. Is a cathode plus or minus?
Is an ion this way, or that way?
But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of
equations, he'll say something and I'll say, “Wait a minute! There's an error!
That can't be right!
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after
a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who
hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these
equations?”
He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but
that's not what I'm doing. I have the specific physical example of what he’s
trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of
the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know
that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake.” [1]
(R. P. Feynman)
I imagine that some historians or students of
literature might also have such a repertoire of examples or situations that are
waiting to be called up at the appropriate time. What is always a problem in
all these employment of analogous situations is whether they really are good
analogies.[2]
I am
trained as an experimental particle physicist, but for most of my career I have
been a professor of city planning and public policy. Hence there were be
references here to both scientific and social phenomena.
Preview
I think for a living, figuring out the
world so that it makes sense for me: analogy and analytic description are my
modes. Whatever is in my air—ideas, notions, reading,…--may condense into a
project. I work busily on condensation, but I must be patient for the
appearance of the condensate and its orderliness.
By having a variety of
perspectives or analogies onto a situation, whether it be social or economic or
cultural, in effect something like a computer aided tomogram (a CAT scan), I
get a better sense of that situation, and I am more likely to feel I really
understand it. Yet, there will be blind spots or aspects I cannot get hold of,
nonetheless.
I’ve always been trying
to figure out (some of) the world. Out of Brooklyn, at the ends of the Subway
lines, my figuring is, it turns out, somewhat idiosyncratic. So, for example, out
of an old-fashioned Orthodox Jewish home, where grandma and not God is the
focus, and where people on the Coney Island beach had tattooed Nazi numbers on
their arms, I have come to see the usual Western Civilization and Humanities as
Jewish. The New Testament is a Jewish document.
Or, put differently, albeit saying much
the same:
It seems that I think in
terms of analogy, and analogies of analogies (what is called a “syzygy”). The
idea is to try to get at what is really going on, behind all the rigamarole, by
seeing what is going on from various perspectives, an “identity in a manifold
presentation of profiles.” I want to figure out the world I encounter, make
sense of it, albeit imperfectly, in terms of what I already understand.
Again, I am from the
ends of the Subway lines in Brooklyn, and I want in to the world of Manhattan,
so to speak. I am Jewish, and insist that the writers of the New Testament were
Jews as well. It is my world.
Many notions are in the
air, from reading or listening, and what happens is that some eventually do
condense into a project. Here, the life of the mind is actual work. Thinking
for a living.
If I can provide an
analytic description of some thing or process, I then have a hold onto it. The
analogies suggest the terms of analytic engagement.
But none of this is
abstract. Always, a small number of ideas or models or notions are in mind and
employed. They are diverse but for me they are at hand, given my training and
earlier work
Notes
[1]. R. P. Feynman and R. Leighton, Surely
You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. Norton,1985, p. 224.
[2] See, for example, R.
Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time
(New York: Collier Macmillan, 1986), for the problems in thinking about policy or political situations as being like
another earlier one.
[3]. J. C. Scott, in Seeing like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), defines métis as a “wide
array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a
constantly changing natural and human environment.” Within this definition are
two important keywords: practical and environment.
Regarding “practical,” Scott states that métis “may well involve rules of thumb,
but such rules are largely acquired through practice.” Further, it “resists
simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted
through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so
complex and non-repeatable that formal procedures…are impossible to apply.”
On the environment in which métis thrives, Scott claims that “the practices and experiences of métis are almost always local” and is
“applicable to similar but never identical situations.” As Scott remarks,
flying a 737 requires a different knowledge set than flying a DC3, although
each example refers to flying a plane.
In short, métis
refers to the skills and knowledge that can only be learned through practice.
Some examples are hunting, riding a bike, driving a car or playing a sport [or
actually doing physics research]. An understanding of these things can be
gained through a book or class but each skill can only be mastered through
practice. Further, métis involves
local or specific experience.
“[Métis]
is the mode of reasoning most appropriate to complex material and social tasks
where the uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our experienced
intuition and feel our way.” JC Scott
According to Scott, métis skills are best cultivated by those close to the local
environment. Those who have a strong vested interest in improving their
condition and who also have access to a wealth of localized information in
regards to how that skill will best work in their area.
A métis
skill is not easily transferred from one bearer to the next. Scott claims
that “métis knowledge is so implicit
and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it.” This implies the
difficulty of exporting a skill set such as democracy from an established
country to one with little practical experience.
Finally, métis knowledge is not learned quickly.
It grows from a long interaction between the bearer, the local environment, and
the skill set. This long period of time allows for the skill to be adapted to
local variables and needs.
This note is a quotation
from, C. M. Patrick, https://mesopotamianmarine.wordpress.com/2013/04/.../democracy-metis-or-techne-3/ As for
Luck is in the Leftovers, “Yuki said, ‘that we must keep going. We find our luck by working through
to the last.’” in M. Cameron, Power and
Empire (a novel in the Tom Clancy series), (New York: Putnams, 2017) p. 564.
[4]. C. McLarty, “The Rising Sea,” in J. Gray and K. Parshall, Episodes in the History of Recent Algebra
(American Mathematical Society, 2007), is an essay on Grothendieck with the
metaphor of the rising tide erasing problems in the sand.
[5]. R. Langlands, “On the zeta-function of some simple Shimura
varieties,”Canadian J. Math. 31
(1979).
[6]. G. Winogrand, in a 1974 talk at MIT.
[7]. Taken from the obituary for Bill Cunningham, New York Times, 25, 26 June 2016.
[8]. Susan Faludi, “In My World,
Photographs Lie,” New York Times
online, Lens, May 16, 2017.
[9]. H. Liesbrock, “The Historiography and Poetry of Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans: Depth of Field, ed. J. T.
Hill and H. Liesbrock (Munich: Prestel, 2015), pp. 23, 24. Evans was much
influenced by Flaubert (on describing) and by Baudelaire (on walking and
looking).
[10]. In my recent work on everyday dress in public, I have employed a
long focus lens, 90mm on a 35mm camera. While I am out in the open I do not
wish to get too close to those people walking by. It proves difficult to keep
the focus sharp since the subjects are moving, but if I home-in on one point
and let subjects enter my viewfinder, I can do much better. In any case, I am
not doing what is called documentary photography.
[11]. In the case of the 2-dimensional Ising model, a model of a
permanent magnet, those particles are (Cooper) pairs of fermions, as in
superconductivity, and the the partition function ≈ Πq exp -εq,
where q indexes the particles, and εq is their energy (albeit
expressed in thermal units of kBT, kB
being the Boltzmann constant, and T
being the temperature), and the FreeEnergy ≈ Σq εq.)
So when the
mathematician Richard Taylor says, "Why Galois
representations should be the source of Euler products with good functional
equations is a complete mystery.", we might say, at least for the physics
of the 2-d Ising model, “the transfer
matrix (representation) is a source of products (in forming the partition function) with good functional
equations, because of the geometrical and physical symmetries of the Ising
lattice.”
[13]. Physicists have discovered three generations of particles, called
electron, muon, and tau (called leptons, for lightweight particles), and the
associated quarks and neutrinos, where quarks interact within a proton, say,
and neutrinos barely interact with anything and are emitted in radioactivity.
The intermediate particles include the photon, the W’s, the Z, and the gluons.
(Gluons present additional problems that we shall return to a bit later.) The
Higgs boson is a sort-of molasses background that gives mass to the electron,
muon, tau, and quarks, W’s, and Z, so making it harder to accelerate them. In
effect, the Higgs is like a society’s culture; culture sets our
[14]. In physics, there is a
similar analogy, exhibited most beautifully in understanding a simple magnet:
counting the interactions among its atoms, the scaling-up similarities as we go
from atoms to increasingly larger blocks of atoms to the whole magnet, and
remarkable relationships of the magnet at very high temperatures and at very
low temperatures, all, mirror the mathematicians’ threefold analogy. (A magnet
at a very high temperature exhibits a little order in small regions is like the
same magnet at very low temperature where it might exhibit a little disorder in
small regions.)
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