Stumbled across this while browsing “Cool Tools” – tech guru Kevin Kelly’s cooperative encyclopedia of awesome design and problem-solving. (If you’re not already enthralled with it, get so.)
One entry is his list of “Books That Changed My Life” – he lists books that . . . well, you understand . . . and why. (Surprising fact: He’s a Christian. More surprising: Reading Gandhi made him so. I guess not totally surprising, but equally dismaying: He’s an Ayn Rand fan. Still a brilliant and far-thinking guy, though.) He gives links to book lists from some other prominent tech intellectuals.
Those are a lot of fun to read, but of course you want to list your own, too. I don’t have time right now, and haven’t given it enough thought, but feel free to chime in. List your Books That Changed Your Life in comments – and give one sentence for each, saying why.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
Atlas Shrugged – It gave me an even stronger appreciation for the dignity, rights and worth of the individual while simultaneously pointing out the numerous failings of collectivism, no matter how flowery its rhetoric or how good it might make one feel. More than 50 years later, it’s still ahead of its time.
*ducks while putting on asbestos long johns*
Atlas Shrugged
Admit it, you just liked it for all the dirty sex.
More than 50 years later, it’s still ahead of its time.
Only because the elitists never actually follow through on their threats to “go Galt,” as much as we might wish they would.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..The Problem With The Health Care Debate =-.
I remember getting into an online debate with an Ayn Rand acolyte several years ago. Afterward, someone emailed me privately to say that she had read Rand in college and while she thought it would be an interesting philosophy to a college sophomore, she had never imagined that there were actually people who would base their life philosophy on it.
Which I think sums up Rand rather well.
As for the actual topic, I don’t know if I can cite any books that literally “changed my life” but I can think of a few that had a real influence on how I view the world. The first that come to mind are The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing and Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
A little more thought adds The Crazy Ape by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Relativity by Albert Einstein, Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, and Points of Rebellion by William O. Douglas.
.-= LarryE´s last blog ..You’re getting warmer, Footnote to the preceding =-.
Whoops, skipped the part about the whys/hows.
Laing: The single line “‘Normal’ people have killed perhaps 100 million of their fellow ‘normal’ people in wars in the past 50 or so years” is more than enough cause.
Thoreau: “When a law requires you to become an agent of injustice, transgress it at once, the better to end the injustice.” I carried a copy of the essay in jail.
Szent-Gyorgyi: The first sentence of the book is “Why does man behave as a perfect idiot?” He also noted that the militaries of the US and the (then-)USSR were, despite appearances, the best of friends because for each it was the existence of the other than gave them a justification for their own existence. Militarism needs enemies and will exaggerate or even create threats in pursuit of its own continuing influence.
Einstein: Relativity! How cool is that? It opened a whole new way of conceiving of, well, of existence. All the reading (and in some cases teaching) since on quantum mechanics, astrophysics, chaos theory, string theory, it all started with that book.
Postman/Weingartner: One of a number books on education I read, the first of which was How Children Fail by John Holt, which probably should be on the list itself. (I have more than once acidly observed that it took me two years to recover from school so I could go back to learning.) Postman and Weingartner argue that the purpose of education should not be on “learning” the “right answer” but on actually learning how to find out the answer, how to formulate, ask, and seek the answers to relevant questions. It should seek to provide learners with, quoting Hemmingway, a “built-in, shock-proof, crap detector.”
Douglas: The sheer pleasure and tremendous encouragement of discovering that some in the upper echelons of power and government could understand and even learn.
.-= LarryE´s last blog ..You’re getting warmer, Footnote to the preceding =-.
¨Hector Heathcote: Great American Patriot and Builder of Boats”
“Out of Their League” Dave Meggyessey
The Glory of Their Times, Lawrence Ritter
“The ‘Good’ War” Studs Terkel
The Canonical Works of Kenneth Burke
“The Two Marxisms” Alvin Gouldner
“The Rhetoric and the Poetics” Aristotle
“Trickster Makes This World” Lewis Hyde
“Metaphors we live by” Lakoff and Johnson
1) Don’t know why, I remember learning to read with this book. Happy memories, history.
2) Football as a social cause, my old man cancelled his subscription to the Sports Illustrated book club when this subversive book showed up in the mail, I thought it was great.
3) Taught me about the power of oral history.
4) Grad school go-to texts; the complexity and the simplicity of rhetoric
5) Introduction to critical marxism which helped me sever my reading of marx as an economist from the work done on culture and influence.
6) I still like reading Book I of the Rhetoric, its overly categorical, but still provocative
7) Criticism is an attitude, it works for me as social surgery as opposed to blunt force, the metaphor of the trickster fits with my notion of criticism
8) Metaphor as the central component of human thinking and attitude shaping, I learned it at the right time.
There’s a ton more, no fiction here (but for #1) How about “Geek Love”
Dave
“Trickster Makes This World” Lewis Hyde . . .
7) Criticism is an attitude, it works for me as social surgery as opposed to blunt force, the metaphor of the trickster fits with my notion of criticism
Entirely by coincidence, less than an hour after reading this I picked up Maps & Legends, a book of literary criticism by Michael Chabon (The Wonder Boys, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). The first piece happens to be an essay on short-story genre called “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, in which he cites that same work as an influence on him.
I’ve read a little on Trickster themes, but not this work. I’ll check it out.
.-= KTK´s last blog ..National Coming-Out Day =-.
Wow. This is likely incomplete, by how about…
(various works of) MC Escher
I vividly remember being of (perhaps not even) elementary school age and spending hours sprawled out on the floor, several days a week, flipping through books of reprints of Escher’s work at my grandmother’s house. At such a young age, two major impacts registered as a result of Escher’s work. One, boundless creativity and seemingly off the wall thoughts or ideas are beautiful and worthy of celebration. When you’re really young, you often wonder if the weird ideas you have are had by other, older, smarter people too. Even as a young child, I understood Escher’s work as a celebration of individuality. Two, things are always more complicated than they seem and there’s almost always something weird lurking beneath the surface. I loved those pieces where everything seemed normal, except when you look closely enough, there’s one huge thing out of wack – hey, wait, there’s no gravity here!
Subway Art by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper
Again not a book, so much as a collection of photos/art. I’m sure this book got a whole lot of mid-to-late 70’s and 80’s babies into the graffiti scene. To this day, there’s only one thing I pay attention to when staring out the window of any aboveground train. Born in 1980, the trains were mostly done by the time I got into the culture but the rooftops and highways were still alive. I’d look with excitement for new throw-ups and/or pieces from greats like “Cope2” on the Bronx rooftops of the 4-line; sometimes it was the only thing motivating me to get on the train to go to school, frankly.
When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten and Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti
I was well on my way to being radicalized before this. I remember writing a paper in my freshman year of high school defending Fidel Castro and I started read Marx and Nietzsche when I was around 15 or 16. But, I read both of these books, within a few weeks of each other, when I was a bit older; probably about twenty. These books really helped connect my more abstract political views with my more immediate experiences. It was around this time I got arrested for the first time too, an experience which may have been the most salient, personal proof point of the Parenti book one could have experienced.
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
I mentioned I had read Marx and what not when I was about a sophomore in high school. I was very interested, but a good part of me reading all that stuff was just being the precocious contrarian many of us were at 15. It wasn’t until I read this, later in college, that so much of the more latent Marxism really started settling in.
Pacifism as Pathology by Ward Churchill
For a period of time in my early twenties I somewhat abandoned reading books in favor or downloading lectures, speeches, and readings. After 9/11 I heard the little commotion over Churchill’s comment implying there were no such things as innocent victims in the attack. This idea intrigued me greatly. I listen to a number Churchill’s speeches that articulated his philosophies about the place of violent tactics within the scope of dissent, and his history including that of armed struggle on behalf of indigenous peoples of North America rocked my world, compelling arguments against absolute pacifism. He also questioned what “violence” actually is, and whether even the distinction many traditional pacifist tactics even are “non-violent” in the first place.
“summer of Alfred Korzybski, Robert Anton Wilson, and Carl Jung”
I’m not sure I can point to a specific book, as again much of this came from listening to lectures and speeches more than reading source material. But, my preoccupation with labeling, archetypes, and metalinguistics in general can be traced to various works by and about these three guys. Much of this was due to a particular summer, in which I these topics dominated by book, internet, and listening time.
Stonewall by Martin Duberman.
The final frontier for the politically active hip hop head and sports fanatic is actively supporting the gay rights movement. This book gave me a great appreciation and respect for the gay rights movement; which was far more “gangsta” than the vast majority of these homophobic, posturing, candy-ass rappers today.
Various essays/books by Bill James. The work of people like James, Pete Palmer, and Tom Tango shattered my preconceived notions about how the game of baseball works, and how we actually measure value in a player, etc. more harshly than any of these other works shattering any of my youthful political or philosophical naivette. …Perhaps because I always thought the American dream smelt like a crock, but I had actually believed that RBI was a meaningful baseball stat. A paradigmatic shift in the way I understand my oldest, and perhaps most dear, hobby. Though, again, it’s hard to pin this down to one book or essay because I was actually convinced of these ideas through arguments and debates and read many of the works after I had ostensibly been converted already.
Honorable mention/omnipresent caveat: Perhaps the most fundamental influence on my persona, behavior, and thought, is the late, great George Carlin. While I can’t point to a particular written work, his catalog of stand-up specials hold up to the anthologies of any of the authors listed here, in my opinion. Perhaps, the closest thing I ever had to an “idol.”
Honorable mention 2: “Howl.” Ginsberg was my introduction into the beats and to counterculture in general. I stumbled across Ginsberg when I was about 14, but, as a young, more fragile, and closed-minded kid, I was kind of taken aback by all the gayness. As I got older and more educated about the (counter) culture of his generation, I developed a much greater appreciation for him and his work.
Okay, I was having trouble working up the motivation to join this thread, but now I have to. First, because I’m a bit of a joiner, at least in the domain of didacticism, and second to note how weird it is that I have any political overlap with any of you folks (especially Digg) given these posts.
I must first point out that I don’t think there are any books that “changed my life”. My opinions (or rather my meta-opinions) have always moved at a slow drift, with few sharp turns, and those sharp turns (which I’ve always described as my “brain re-writes”) were never the results of books, but instead the result of people. (Yes, I see the irony of this given my generally claiming to hate people and love books.)
One book that was influential on how my mind functions was David R. Palmer’s Emergence. It’s a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel in which the narrator claims to be conserving paper by writing in shorthand (a neat conceit by the author, who does not know shorthand and in fact published the book in Roman text, just like any other book) and thus wrote in the most terse, elliptical English possible, almost entirely avoid the verb to be (but not quite; this wasn’t E-Prime — thankfully) and generally letting the reader’s intelligence glean meaning from juxtapositions of words, almost like a action-packed, long-form haiku. After a few chapters of reading this book, you started thinking in the same language, which was really just more efficient (I now suspect that this usurped grammar hardware in the brain to perform work normally allocated to vocabulary.), and to be prosaic, let me take very, very good notes all throughout high school.
Probably the single writing that had the most obvious discrete effect on my beliefs was “Consciousness: An Afterthought“, which I read in early college. The thesis is that an information processing system can contain a (possibly very inaccurate) model of itself, and that that model can include an assumption of agenthood and qualia. An entity that lacks qualia but which impliments (“mindlessly”) a model of itself as having qualia is, from the perspective of stimulus response implemented by the entity, indistinguishable from an entity that actually does have qualia. In effect, this is the counter argument to Descartes: “I lie to myself that I think, therefore I seem to all the world to be.” Personally, not only am I a strict materialist in that I disbelieve in the soul, I’m a strict computationalist is that I disbelieve that the cascades of chemical changes occuring in our brains “feel” anything. But it sure is convenient to interpret our bodily behaviors as corresponding to feelings and experiences. (This may explain why I don’t have an especially high opinion of people.)
On the other hand, my high school ethics class exposed me to two essays that eventually became very profound for me.
Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story that shows that no matter how good the consequences of an act are, if the act is itself not just, then there will be both those who accept the act as moral and those that reject it. And when I was mature enough, I realized that as much as this tells you about the range of morality, its important implication is actually about ethics: Ethics is a means of satisfying the morality of the many individuals of the community, but is itself is not moral.
The other essay from high school that I only understood in retrospect was by Josiah Royce. I do not recall the specific work, but his idea was terribly simple: One day, perhaps, each of us has a moment where we realize — where it is made real to us — that other people are the same as us. That the pain or joy another feels when we hurt them or help them is the same pain or joy as we feel. But the important lesson that I took from that idea (eventually) was less obvious: You only need to feel the reality of others once. Then, you must only remember it. To me, ironically, this understanding of human empathy is much like my belief above about minds: I don’t have any reason to think that either minds or feelings are real, but I am compelled by the human condition to pretend that they are, because they are equally real for all of us.
And perhaps the least obviously influential on me, but important in its breadth, was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Really, in a way, the book teaches you nothing that you don’t already know by simply paying attention. There is pain and suffering in the world, and the world isn’t fair. But most of all, it teaches that there are two great evils. The first and foremost is poverty. The second is righteousness, barren of the unfairness of mercy and the justice of consequences. Though only a pale shadow of poverty, it is the more culpable, because it is the product of human action, rather than brute fortune.
“All the reading (and in some cases teaching) since on quantum mechanics, astrophysics, chaos theory, string theory, it all started with that book.”
Though I can’t say I know about curricula in sub-atomic physics (string theory, parts of chaos theory), the statement that all of the reading on quantum mechanics started with Einstein’s Relativity is pretty inaccurate. Relativity had been discussed prior to Einstein’s further development by Max Planck, which is likely why Einstein won the Nobel for his work on the photoelectric effect in showing that light had particle-like properties, discrete quanta a.k.a. photons, and not relativity. The quantum mechanical revolution is rooted in experiments that predate Einstein’s work on relativity by several decades, and some of these late 19th century experiments were actually part of the foundation for Einstein’s Relativity. Some of these key experiments were Planck’s relation E=hv which related energy to vibrational frequencies, and Boltzmann’s studies on partitioning of energy in discrete states. And these studies were rooted in earlier work by Bunsen, who was among the first to study patterns in spectroscopic lines (from burning stuff and looking at the light – hence the Bunsen burner), which led to the conclusion that constituents in our atmosphere absorbed discrete parts of the visible light spectrum.
Einstein’s relativity is actually one of the most difficult theories to incorporate into quantum mechanics. Einstein himself was very loath to accept certain postulates of quantum mechanics, especially the uncertainty principle, which is still highly relavent in measurement on the atomic scale. I would argue that his later work, which he did following his work on the photoelectric effect, and which was actually motivated by his desire to disprove the strange implications of quantum mechanics, such as the law of indeterminate outcomes and the uncertainty principle(“God does not play dice with the universe”) laid the groundwork for theories like quantum entanglement.
Einstein’s role in the quantum revolution is arguably on of the greater, in terms of his body of work and the significance it still plays today, but Einstein’s Relativity was far from the starting point. The interesting thing about quantum theories is that they are not easily combined, in fact, many of the central theories contradict other theories which are known to be true. Quantum mechanics is diametrically opposed to verifiable aspects of Newtonian physics, for one, but that doesn’t mean one theory is correct while the other theory is wrong. Each is correct within the limittations. The initial models of Blackbody radiation failed to explain results at UV frequencies, a.k.a. the UV catastrophe, but that doesn’t mean the model was totally wrong, it means it has limittations of application. That’s actually a lousy example, because better models were found and gave complete explanations. Essentially, however, our discoveries of the limittations are what prompted revolutions in theory. Even though Einstein’s Relativity cannot be incorporated into many parts of quantum mechanics, it doesn’t make those theories less relavent. Relativistic calculations have limits to their applications as well. The greatest contribution from Einstein’s Relativity may be really that we are able to postulate when relatistic calculations must be considered.
If you liked the ideas of Relativity, I suggest you look for a book called “the ghost in the atom,” in which the experimenters involved in many of the studies around the same time discuss quantum. It’s a transcript of interviews which were initially aired on BBC, for the purpose of explaining the significance of this new science to the public. Many of the experiments are discussed in significant detail, and the opinions of the scientists who performed them, as well as their thoughts on competing/contradictory theories of the times, are really interesting to read. Another terrific book is Quantum Electrodynamics, by Feynnman. Feynnman’s QED is perhaps the model which is most consistent with nature, and the book was designed, in Feynnman’s words, as 4 lectures on the subject, and it is written in a narrative tone, which is truly enjoyable because Feynnman was one of the most charismatic of physicists.
Sorry for the long post; I just find the history of science so damn interesting. It’s truly sad that Nikola Tesla was such a reclusive weirdo, because he was studying wave-particle duality before Einstein “discovered” the photon. Only recently was he recognized for inventing wireless transmission. Marconi had been recognized as it’s inventor, which is much to Nikola’s own fault, for he was very much opposed to the idea of patents (“how can anyone own an idea”). It eventually came to light that Nikola had in fact done the principle amount of work despite the lack of patenting. Several biographies exist. One of the most enjoyable novels I’ve recently read is “The Invention of Everything Else,” which is a fiction-nonfiction about Nikola’s final days. It is based on what we know of him from biographies authored by his acquaintances. I like this book because it does a fantastic job of illustrating the quirks of scientific revolutionaries. Tesla is a great character for such a book, because of what was known about him as a public figure – he was very weird. He was OCD and obsessed with Pigeons. The book opens with a story he had told to his biographer, about how he fell off a roof while attempting to fly as a child. His thought on his failed flight was “surely, with practice, I can get it.” Remarkable! It also illustrates the depth of character in (some) scientists, and how the career and mind of a scientist is not shaped only by what they know about science, but how they perceive theirs and other’s sciences as a human being. The book contains some very passionate and inspiring quotes from Tesla and about Tesla, i.e. from Edison. Edison later would admit that he should’ve listened to Tesla on the subject of AC power.
Feynnman’s autobiographies, “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynnman,” and “What do you care what other people think,” are terrific books about what it’s like to grow up as a scientist. Though he talks a little about his work, he mainly gives perspective to how science influenced his personal life, and vice-versa. Again, written with such charisma!
I do read other books besides science texts and books about scientists. Clockwork Orange was one of my favorites. Interesting, the mind of the psychopath as written by Burgess. Most interesting was the idea regarding Alex’s rehabilitation, and the tragedy that in order to be conditioned out of his destructiveness, his one and only inoccucous and pure enjoyment: listening to classical music, was destroyed. Though in the end he overcame it. I liked the hidden chapter, regarding his growing up, because it presents the notion that a person must desire to change his ways in order for change to be real. You can lead a horse to water, you can imprison someone and do operant conditioning to an extent, but the human’s desires will triumph, and if they ultimately desire to be a destructive asshole, they will be.
Farenheit 451. Scarily accurate for a fiction written some time ago.
Stranger in a Strange land: nice book about people and the acquisition of understanding, and how wrong this can go.
Slaughterhouse Five: a good time-travel book, considering the idea of static waves, that entropy is not time’s arrow, that the future, past, and present exist concurrently. I don’t know if I agree with that idea, and it doesn’t cross my mind all that much, but it was fun to think about it and to read a story about it. In this story, the main character, upon learning about time’s nature, asks why no one is concerned with the fact that they know when the universe ends and won’t try to change it. So it goes!
Barbie:
I felt the last chapter of A Clockwork Orange was a cop-out, and I thought the US version (which lacked it, and which was adapted for the film) was much stronger.
And apropos of not much, Tesla is in Memphis tonight. I was surprised to learn they’re still together.
Dan M:
I’m with you. I can’t really think of any books that “changed my life,” so to speak. My abortive attempts to read The Scarlett Letter convinced me that if it’s required reading in a high school English class, it’s almost certainly not worth reading. There are books I’ve read that I felt were particularly interesting or enlightening, but nothing I’d call life-changing in any way.
I suppose in an oblique way you could argue that Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series “changed my life,” but not in the ways you might think, and that story’s almost as long as Barbie’s comment.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..YouTube War! =-.
Barbie,
I think Larry meant that his reading of that book prompted his own involvement in those disciplines.
For the record, I wanted to answer this topic, but tgirsch’s and Dan’s, the molding of my mind/life into the (atrophied and discombobulated) state that it is currently in would better be described as an evolution than a metamorphosis. In fact, when looking back at my own list, I find it a pretty logical flow. The fascination with the urban, with the arbitrary nature norms, with the voice of the oppressed, and with how systems are organized are themes that run through nearly every branch of philosophy/sociology, art form, or genre of music I’ve fallen in love, or at least fleeting, whirlwind lust, with.
So, I don’t think it would be fair to say that any of these works had a 180-degree effect on me, so much as they gave me insight that either more finely honed, or more broadly interpreted that which ‘m forever in the process of building.
It is remarkable that Dan and I often bearer very similar opinions regarding matters discussed on this board, though our lists are in no way similar.
Also, as important as anything I ever read, I remember listening for the first time to the album that turned me on to real hip hop. It was Naughty by Nature’s second album (self-titled). I had heard “OPP” on the radio—it was a smash hit after all–and knew it was raunchy and what not. I ordered the album, along with like 11 others, for a penny off of one of those music club promotions I pulled out of the TV Guide. When I first popped the tape in and listened to the first track, “Yoke the Joker,” I was floored. It was raw, violent, and more explicit than I had figured music could be. But the sound was great to me and I was immediately drawn to Treach’s cadence and word play. Now, hip hop music, that changed my life – mainly because as an adolescent one of the major determinents of how your social network develops is the type of music you choose to align yourself with. It’s partly what connected me with my neighborhood friends, even though I spent most of my days off at gifted schools, populated largely by white kids who preferred Nirvana and Guns ‘n Roses, which I liked too, by the way, but not to the extent I liked rap.
My love of hip hop predates my interest in politics, my formal study of sociology, and nearly everything I’m “into” today with the exception of sports. I’m about 30 now and maintain a strange relationship with the music.
Hip hop was stigmatized by most of my family, who felt it wasn’t really music. (I was unsuccessful at getting a useable definition of what that charge even meant.) It’s hard to explain to many people who know me as an intelligent, professional, and intellectual (white guy), why I have such an affinity for music that so often gratuitously glorifies violence, misogyny, homophobia, and materialism. Internally, I see no conflict with who I am and what I like; I know hip hop helped raise me. It certainly helped sharpen my wit and nurture my appreciation for language and writing—two of what many claim to be strongest skills. If those inclined to judge could understand it the way I do, they would never question anything, but since I know they don’t, as much as I love the music, a tiny part of me remains embarrassed about it.
And, this to me (though trivial by comparison), is powerful insight into the subtle self-loathing that is often said to exist beneath the surface in so many members of marginalized groups. Being so proud of who you are and so committed to preserving the integrity of that institution, but at the same time somewhat embarrassed of your membership because you know how pervasive the lowest common denominator perception of that group is. Proud to be a hip hop head, hesitant to have to admit it!
It is remarkable that Dan and I often bea[r] very similar opinions regarding matters discussed on this board, though our lists are in no way similar.
This is exactly why I felt a need to post. And with the growing consensus that books do not change our lives, I think it’s interesting to ask what does shape our minds.
I suspect that what we read shapes how we express what we believe, but really has relatively little effect on content. I know that for my part, my time in early college was critical. In particular, I think it was who my friends were that shaped my morals most.
That’s certainly where (and from whom) I unlearnt the homophobia instilled in me by my Catholic school education — a fact that still causes me shame for myself, a little disappointment in my parents, and a deep and abiding anger at the Roman Catholic Church. Anger at the church not only for the harm it does with its continued bigotry and at the harm I must have contributed to to how ever many closeted classmates I had, but most importantly an anger that I so narrowly escaped becoming one of those bigots. The Catholic church not only rapes and kills, but it destroys the character and virtue of those that it does not oppress.
But perhaps that time in my life was formative because it’s when I finally thought enough to discard religion and thus had to find a way to think morally. Do we coalesce at a particular age, or from a particular condition of being adrift, or at a particular encounter with variety in the people we meet, or is there no generalization to draw?
digg -
:sigh: Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. “All the reading” referred to all of my own reading. Given the context in which it was said, I just don’t understand how it got taken another way.
Barbie -
Your history told me nothing I didn’t already know. As for Tesla, he was surely an extraordinary genius but he developed the distressing habit of claiming more than he’d proved, insisting that he had “established the principle” and “only technical problems remain.” Technical problems which he never solved.
And I’m not sure to what “recent” recognition “for inventing wireless transmission” you’re referring. Surely it’s not that Supreme Court case that supposedly declared Tesla the “inventor of radio,” is it?
.-= LarryE´s last blog ..Footnote to the preceding =-.
LarryE – Seemed to me like your opinion was that Einstein’s Relativity birthed quantum mechanics, to which I disagreed, and, since you seemed interested, I thought I’d chime in. Sorry I rambled on, I wasn’t being intentionally pedantic, but quantum chemistry is by far my favorite subject matter. Anyways, glad you’re down with the quantum weirdness. It’s definately a particular taste. What do you (I’ve been told you’re an “educator,” not a teacher, so forgive for saying it by my vocabulary is poor) teach, and is it your profession?
Yeah, it was the declaration of Tesla as the inventor of radio to which I was referring. I consider the mid 20th century to be “recent” in terms of science, or at the very least, part of modern science. We’ve only known the structure of the atom for, well, less than a century. As I mentioned, I’m an ignoramus when it comes to sub-atomic physics, so at least for chemistry, quantum was a recent revolution.
Established the principle, and only technical problems remain…funny – that’s exactly what science is! We know a lot about how it should work, according to established principles, and hacking out the technical details is what takes most of the work! I know that I should be able to deposit a material selectively on one particular surface site on my nanoparticle, according to the principle that the two different crystal faces have different surface energies and electrodeposition on the different sites should occur at different potentials in accordance with that theory, but the technical details of how to show that this actually happens in accordance with the theory are the difficult part to iron out.
Not all scientists solve technical problems. Theorists spend nearly all of their time on the computer, never setting foot in a lab or touching a piece of equipment. Of course, I’m sure you know that already.
.-= Shoothouse Barbie´s last blog ..Diary of a lab rat [10.11.09]: 4 days to go and counting… =-.
Barbie -
I work in the educational field but I don’t call myself a teacher because both my brother and sister-in-law were teachers (both now retired) and I know what they went through and dealt with – along with all other teachers – on a daily basis and no effing way did I ever think my job was that demanding. Beyond that I tend to be vague because, as T. noted, I blog semi-anonymously. I will say that the teaching was mostly on astrophysics, but there was some on quantum physics for other staff.
Several years ago I did a paper for other staff at the place I was working on the invention and early development of radio. And I gotta tell you, the story that SCOTUS called Tesla the inventor of radio is an urban myth. I know exactly the case referred to, I have read the entire decision including the dissent (twice), I have a copy of it in my filing cabinet, and it said no such thing. What it did was cite Tesla’s work (and that of others) in revoking a later Marconi radio patent as lacking sufficient “originality” – but it also said that Marconi’s status as “the inventor of radio” was based on an earlier Marconi patent which was not at issue in the case.
The thing about “only technical details remain” was that, again, Tesla got in the habit of claiming more than he had proved. In this case, “details” does not refer to the physical demonstration of a principle but details of the proof itself. This does not take away from his genius, but it was one of the things that got him a reputation as a flake.
You do know, for example, that he insisted that “the Marconi method” of “wireless transmission” didn’t work and that it all actually operated on a completely different (and wrong) principle which he had “proved” except for those pesky “technical details,” yes?
.-= LarryE´s last blog ..Footnote to the preceding =-.
You’ve all mentioned some pretty great reads! Makes me want to go to my bookshelf and pick up a copy of one of those.