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04 Nov 09

Chapter3: Luie

muller.lbl.gov/...Nemesis3.htm - Preview

research philosophy self-improvement collaboration physics

The real problems
to solve are not the ones at the end of each chapter in the textbook. The
real problems come in dealing with the unexpected. The questions are vague
and fuzzy. How do you pick a research topic? How long do you study a subject
before you publish? What do you do when things don't look like you expected
them to look, when your results surprise you? How do you recognize when to
quit a not-completely-hopeless endeavor?
The real problems
to solve are not the ones at the end of each chapter in the textbook. The
real problems come in dealing with the unexpected. The questions are vague
and fuzzy. How do you pick a research topic? How long do you study a subject
before you publish? What do you do when things don't look like you expected
them to look, when your results surprise you? How do you recognize when to
quit a not-completely-hopeless endeavor? Coping with these problems is the
art of physics, and it is very similar to the art of business, or the art
of art.
18 more annotations...
- It was a research area
  in which many people could work together, be they great scientists or only
  mediocre. Some people would fit more pieces together than others, and some
  were particularly good at finding that hard piece, the one that everyone else
  had given up on. But everybody was able to find some little way to help.
- He intro duced himself with
  "I'm Luie Alvarez," avoiding the title "professor," which
  many other faculty members obviously favored.
- At the end of the tour, Alvarez
  asked me, "When can you start?" I had not understood much of what
  I had seen, and I didn't think I had asked any intelligent questions. In addition,
  Alvarez hadn't had a chance to check my grades or to look at my record in the Physics Department office, so he had
  no way of knowing whether I was a good student. But it was an offer I couldn't
  refuse.
- Alvarez's
  whole approach to physics was that of an entrepreneur, taking big risks by
  building large new projects in the hope of large rewards, although
  his pay was academic rather than financial. He had drawn around him a group
  of young physicists anxious to try out the exciting ideas he was proposing.
  Many of these people were later to leave basic research and become entrepreneurs
  themselves of one kind or another. The true rewards for this kind of work
  were in the challenge, in the adventure. Alvarez seemed to care less about
  the way the picture in the puzzle would look, when everything fit together,
  than about the fun of looking for pieces that fit. He loved nothing more than
  doing something that everybody else thought impossible. His designs were clever,
  and usually exploited some little-known principle that everyone else had forgotten.
- You can read memos anytime, in the evenings, at home, but you can only learn
  experimental physics by being in the laboratory, by doing it
- Even today, when I visit someone's laboratory and they sit me down in a nearby
  office to hear a lecture on their experiment, I protest. I want to go see
  the hardware, if possible to touch it.
- In the Greek legend, the wrestler Antaeus
  was invincible as long as he touched the ground. Hercules defeated him by
  lifting Antaeus above his head, out of reach of the Earth, where he was able
  to squeeze him to death. This legend may have originated as a reminder to
  farmers to stay in close touch with the land, the source of their sustenance,
  and not to relegate all the manual work to hired laborers. The reminder applies
  equally well to experimental physicists, who must return periodically to their
  apparatus, to get their hands dirty, lest they forget why it often takes an
  hour to put in a screw.
- To become an experimental physicist,
  Alvarez seemed to feel, you had to destroy some expensive equipment. It was
  a rite of passage. "Don't do anything differently," he advised.
  "Keep it up."
- There were more Nobel laureates at Berkeley than in the entire
  Soviet Union. And there was Luie, who had no Nobel Prize then but seemed to
  have more important discoveries to his credit than any of the scientists who
  had won the honor.
- But it wasn't the art of invention, but the art of discovery that
  I most wanted to learn. How did he do it? What secret knowledge enabled him
  to make discovery after discovery? If only I could identify what it was, then
  I could try to learn it.
  
  Skepticism,
  the ability not to be fooled, was clearly important, but it is also cheap.
  It is easy to disbelieve everything, and some scientists seemed to take this
  approach. Sometimes Luie was skeptical, but more often he seemed to embrace
  crazy ideas, at least at first. He rarely dismissed anything out of hand,
  no matter how absurd, until he had examined it closely. But then one tiny
  flaw, solidly established, was enough to kill it. His openness to wild ideas
  was balanced by his firmness in dismissing those that were flawed. He had
  a finely honed skepticism. Perhaps that was part of his secret talent.
- the
  key to discovery was not being "lazy."
- The
  hardest discoveries to take seriously are often your own.
- Walter Alvarez never came that close to a Nobel Prize again,
  but he made sure that his son learned the lesson.
- he hadn't looked long enough
- The
  art of physics consists in knowing what to work on and for how long.
- Luie
  worked out virtually all the details before he even told anybody what he was
  thinking of, and he put these in a memo.
- The gaps in his
  knowledge were surprisingly large, but not detrimental to his work.
- He seemed to have a knack for learning just the right amount about everything,
  and for spending the time he saved inventing and bringing together ideas from
  disparate fields.

23 Oct 09

You and Your Research

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research self-improvement collaboration collective-intelligence

One lesson was sufficient to educate my boss as to why I didn't want to do
big jobs that displaced exploratory research and why I was justified in not
doing crash jobs which absorb all the research computing facilities. I wanted
instead to use the facilities to compute a large number of small problems.
Again, in the early days, I was limited in computing capacity and it was clear,
in my area, that a ``mathematician had no use for machines.'' But I needed more
machine capacity. Every time I had to tell some scientist in some other area,
``No I can't; I haven't the machine capacity,'' he complained. I said ``Go tell
your Vice President that Hamming needs more computing capacity.'' After a
while I could see what was happening up there at the top; many people said to my
Vice President, ``Your man needs more computing capacity.'' I got it!
You can educate your bosses.
It's a hard job. In this talk I'm only viewing from the bottom up; I'm not
viewing from the top down. But I am telling you how
you can get what you want in
spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.
12 more annotations...
- The people who do great
  work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who
  have great skill and dabble in it, who work during the day and go home and do
  other things and come back and work the next day. They don't have the deep
  commitment that is apparently necessary for really first-class work. They turn
  out lots of good work, but we were talking, remember, about first-class work.
  There is a difference. Good people, very talented people, almost always turn out
  good work.
- personality defect of wanting total
  control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the
  system
- If you want to do something, don't ask, do it.
  Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'
- UNIX was never a
  deliverable!
- Management can do very little. If you want to talk about
  managing research, that's a totally different talk. I'd take another hour doing
  that. This talk is about how the individual gets very successful research done
  in spite of anything the management does or in spite of any other opposition.
- I find it desirable to talk to other people; but a session
  of brainstorming is seldom worthwhile
- I picked my people carefully with
  whom I did or whom I didn't brainstorm because the sound absorbers are a curse.
  They are just nice guys; they fill the whole space and they contribute nothing
  except they absorb ideas and the new ideas just die away instead of echoing on.
- Yes, I find it necessary to talk to people. I think people with closed doors
  fail to do this so they fail to get their ideas sharpened, such as ``Did you
  ever notice something over here?'' I never knew anything about it - I can go
  over and look. Somebody points the way. On my visit here, I have already found
  several books that I must read when I get home. I talk to people and ask
  questions when I think they can answer me and give me clues that I do not know
  about. I go out and look!
- If you
  read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they
  thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a
  lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to
  look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you
  would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.
- there's no effect named after him because he read too much
- You read; but it
  is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.
- The
  present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools.
  I believe that books which try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the
  duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying
  ideas clearly of what we know now, will be the things the future generations
  will value.

09 Oct 07

Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.

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collaboration

Main Page - Meta Collab

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collaboration collective-intelligence wiki

3form Free Knowledge Exchange

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3form collaboration collective-intelligence knowledge-markets q-a

This project combines intelligence and creativity of many people in order to solve their problems. - alexko on 2006-11-18

obby - Trac

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collaboration software tools

IBM Research | Watson | Cambridge | Collaborative User Experience

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collaboration

The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research group conducts Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research with emphasis on the interaction between people and computer systems in support of collaboration. - alexko on 2006-11-18

WWW Collaboration Projects

www.hypernews.org/...collaboration.html - Preview

collaboration collective-intelligence

This is a list of resources about collaboration technologies and WWW projects that support collaboration by participants. - alexko on 2006-11-18

Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project. Many-to-Many:

many.corante.com/...on_and_the_wemedia_project.php - Preview

collaboration reputation wikipedia

Some thoughts about introducing reputation management into wikipedia - alexko on 2006-11-18

Reputation management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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collaboration reputation

This article compares several ways of reputation management techniques in online communities. - alexko on 2006-11-18

Dialogue Mapping

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collaboration

Dialogue Mapping is structural augmentation of group communication. As the conversation unfolds and the map grows, each person can see a summary of the meeting discussion so far. The map serves as a "group memory," virtually eliminating the need for parti - alexko on 2006-11-18

openspaceworld.org

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collaboration

05 Sep 07

Social computation and creativity » Blog Archive » MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence opens up

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collaboration collective-intelligence legal mit wiki wikipedia

01 Sep 07

Ed H. Chi's research paper list

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collaboration hci

26 Jul 06

3form Free Knowledge Exchange

3form.com/ - Preview

collaboration problem-solving

Exchange your
problems with us and share your knowledge.
Exchange your problems with us and share your knowledge.

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