We tend to think of knowledge as piles, stacks of facts and ideas. A 2nd grader has a short pile and a PhD has a big stack of knowledge. Further, we tend to generalize the picture so that we imagine the 2nd grader doesn’t know much about anything and the PhD knows more than the kid about everything. Such ideas are based on an overly simplistic way of thinking about knowledge, especially in this day of both mass and specific communication and information dispersion.
I enjoy getting a good thinker off in an area in which he is not an expert. It is well known that many of the advances in knowledge, understanding, theoretical advances and valuable inventions have come in the last 100 to 150 years from non-experts who did not think in traditional terms. It can certainly happen that traditional terms and usual explanations serve as blinders and obstacles. A new explorer, with good sense and a different sort of background, can sometimes see things and place emphasis and attention quite differently from those who have been trained along some traditional path.
So, when working on my dissertation on the subject of human decision making, something that is part of psychology and of economics, I enjoyed looking at the collection of books related to decisions in the Engineering library. It might also be instructive and inspirational to look at the resources in a library that specialized in art. It would probably be useful to look over an engineer’s views of how to be the president of the US or governor of a state.
Such a thinker emerges when listening to Prof. Sean M. Carroll. Yes, he does a fine job explaining the trouble with tinkering with time in the Great Courses “The Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time”. But as interesting or more, is his use of language. Get the picture, now. A college physics major takes lots of courses and sits through lots of lectures. She does lots of homework that you and I couldn’t do. But Dr. Carroll aims to make clear some of the most profound mysteries of physics to us, without all that training and ground-laying, all those math credits and tests and papers. Clearly, to have a prayer of succeeding he has to be nimble with words. He very clearly is, indeed.
It is fun to listen to his everyday examples, his use of normal prepositions and parallels, as he not only explains what modern physics understands and predicts but also what questions are well-formed but still remain. He continuously brings in the possibility that a given idea or a possible question is misleading, confusing or simply ought not to be pursued.
Questions can be very helpful but some are not. "What about the xxx of the yyy?" is a very general question? “How can I invert time?” might actually be nonsensical. Listening to Prof. Carroll (Sean M is not the same scientist as Sean B), one gets a feeling of the importance of trying to judge the value of a given question before putting too much effort into answering it.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
