Potential

Listening to Richard Feynman explain the world is phenomenal. TED has done us the courtesy of adding amazing non-ted talks and interviews, so that you can get even more laterally bewildered. This happened to me this morning, after listening to Dimitar Sasselov (below).  After hearing Sasselov’s talk, there was this link to Feynman on BBC, and hey, it just doesn’t stop. So if you want to invest even more of your time to check out one of the greatest connected and connecting minds of the past century, stay tuned. Your atoms will jiggle, guaranteed.

I read on Wikipedia that Feynman was denied acceptance to Columbia because he was Jewish. We think of Europeans as being the great anti-semites of the western world, but if you were a Jewish student in North America in the 1920s to 1940s it was almost impossible to get accepted to some of the famous ivy-league universities.

I remember reading once that Feynman at one stage shunned music because it kept his mind off thinking, but there is a great segment on youtube of him playing bongos during the period of his terminal illness. So right I now have both of the segments running simultaneously: Feynman explaining how atoms bang into each other, and Feynman banging on the bongos.  Some musical geek (or Person, perhaps) should do a segment.

As I mentioned, I connected with Feynman after watching Dimitar Sasselov  describe the likelihood that somewhere, sometime, somehow, there is a solar system like ours with a planet like ours, with some alien being, perhaps typing out a similar blog. Check it out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dimitar_sasselov_how_we_found_hundreds_of_potential_earth_like_planets.html

As an undergraduate student, I wrote (1973)  a term paper on the theory of how life began as a sac of chemicals in a bilayer membrane, citing Alec Bangham’s research

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20430797

and thus subsequently started out my graduate research on bacterial membranes as a result.

 http://www.ted.com/speakers/richard_feynman.html

Outlets

John La Grou has a terrific idea for communication between electrical plugs and outlets that will prevent house fires, save lives and electricity.  They have applied for over 400 patents (one wasn’t enough?).  This won’t fly until someone (governments?) forces manufacturers (China?) and housebuilders (everywhere) to make it standard.  That may take a while, considering how much trouble it is plugging an American electrical device into a European outlet (or verse vica). All this in four minutes. Makes you wonder whether all TED talks should have a short four minute version. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_la_grou_plugs_smart_power_outlets_1.html

Where good ideas come?- Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson – Where good ideas come from (2010) and

Steven Johnson tours the ghost map (2010)

The more recent of the two talks is a top notch TED presentation, so feel free to skip straight to the clip itself. Oh well, if you insist, I’ll elaborate. Steven Johnson is an extremely talented thinker and writer who has been wondering where new ideas come from. Or to paraphrase Jeff Pulver, where do we get our ‘shower moments’?  Johnson thinks he has found the answer: the coffee shop. The coffee shop, according to Johnson, dates back to around 1650 and encouraged the Brits to drink stimulants (coffee and tea) that arouse the more intelligent neurons rather than booze (beer and wine) that tend to depress innovative thinking. According to Johnson, the coffee shop creates a creative space where good ideas can interconnect, conjugate and ‘have sex’ (as opposed to pubs I guess, where people themselves can get drunk, interconnect and then have real sex).  In some cases, he says, the coffee shop ideas take years to ‘fade into focus’. That’s a pretty long shower, Jeff. And loads of lattes.

Indeed a lot of good and stimulating projects come from sitting in coffee shops and sharing half-baked ideas with close friends (who will not finish the baking and eat the cake).  In Israel, the tens of thousands of coffee houses (there seem to be one per capita) are indeed a breeding ground for ideas. I took a look at “Start-up Nation” by Dan Senor and Paul Singer http://www.startupnationbook.com/

and found that they don’t mention the coffee house as a source of  Israeli innovation. Guys,  in your second edition please correct this slip.

In my opinion many new ideas come from moments spent alone, rather than in company, often doing something routine (like washing the dishes) which frees the mind to wonder and wander. Then of course when you look back, you say to yourself “however did I think up that one”. If we had the answer, we would all be Edison.

Steve has another excellent 2006 TED talk, this time closer to my area of expertise – smells and bacteria.  

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_tours_the_ghost_map.html

Turns out in mid 19^th century London the smell of sewage, garbage and decay was so offal that people thought that the odors themselves were contagious and spreading the cholera epidemics. It took two clever Brits to figure out that it was coming from contaminated drinking water wells.  You must infer that they spent most of their free time in coffee houses, rather than having pints with the boys.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.ht