Guest Blog: Creating New Knowledge.

Here is a link to a guest blog where I posted a short article on creating new knowledge:

Giving Thanks

When Richard Feynman was a boy of thirteen he hung around guys who were a bit older. One day one of the older boys, with the cooperation of his girlfriend, was demonstrating how to kiss. After observing the expert’s technique, Feynman finds a girl, they sit on the couch, and begin to practice the art of kissing when excitement fills the room be “Arlene is coming, Arlene is coming!”

Arlene was very pretty, but Feynman was otherwise occupied and not inclined to change what he was doing just because the queen walks into the room. But later it became obvious to Feynman that she had captured his interest and later his heart. She was very popular. Feynman was the skinny, studious kid and had lots of competition from more able bodied boys.

He was very shy at first. But as they became friends and grew close he began to enjoy more of her time and attention. They began to go steady. Later, while Feynman did his undergraduate work at MIT and his graduate work at Princeton he would go home to see Arlene as frequently as he could. During the time he was at Princeton, Arlene became ill. At first the doctors thought she had typhoid fever, then they were certain it was Hodgkin’s disease, but finally she was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland. In the early 1940, tuberculosis was a fatal disease for most patients. Arlene was going to die.

They married anyway and were very careful with this highly contagious disease. When Feynman was sent to Los Alamos to help in the war effort Arlene came along. Oppenheimer arrange for her to live in the nearest hospital about a hundred miles away in Albuquerque. Feynman went to see her often and she was a prankster. But after a couple of years the disease caught up with them and she slipped away.

Feynman carried this great love for Arlene and the sadness of losing her his whole life. But he treated it as a rich part of being human, and felt fortunate to have lived through such a beautiful love. He managed to be a happy man his whole life.

Richard and Arlene Feynman were on the wrong side of medical science. Had her disease occurred later, antibiotics could have saved her.

The marvelous situation my wife, my children, and I find ourselves in, is that we are on the other side of medical science. Thirteen years ago, my wife was diagnosed with another fatal lung disease affecting the lymphatics for which there was no cure, but because the disease is slow in its progression, a lung transplant provides a new lease on life. Two and a half years later, Linda had deteriorated and was struggling for breath when we got the miraculous call that matching lungs for her rare blood type were available. Today, nearly eleven years later my wife is doing wonderfully.

We are giving thanks this day to everyone who contributed to making this great gift possible, from the scientists, to the doctors and nurses, the donor family, my employer at the time Citigroup, whose insurance program covered the enormous costs involved, to our friend, our neighbors, our families who all came forward and help us during the crisis. Thank you all!!

Empty Space Does Not Exist

I am reading Steven Hawking’s new book (for the semi-ignorant masses like myself) The Grand Design. I am enjoying the book thoroughly. It is the first time I've seen Richard Feynman get the attention he deserves. About halfway through the book Hawking talks about a consequence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that there is no such thing as empty space. Empty space cannot be empty because then the both the value of the field, and the rate of change would be exactly zero and that cannot obtain. Although it seems to me that the problem Heisenberg uncertainty principle depends upon is having something to observe. So this argument seems a bit circular. But, there's a much easier way to show that space is not empty.

A little thought experiment would suggest that within the knowable universe, if Einstein was right, it’s pretty easy to decide space is not empty, in fact it is quite full, maybe completely full (whatever that means). Einstein suggested that energy and mass are forms of the same thing. The conservation of energy and the conservation of mass were both wrong, but combined are true.

Imagine you are in orbit around the earth. You look away from the sun. What do you see? Stars! You see billions of stars. In fact, if your eyes were more sensitive, perhaps more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope, perhaps you could see a couple hundred billion galaxies, each made up of 200 billion to 400 billion stars. That’s a lot of photons hitting your little eye all the time. Now imagine you move a few inches over to your right. What do you see? The same thing. If fact, wherever you move in space you will still be impacted by billions and billions of photons. Thus, space is not empty. Now, all I need is a photon sail and I'm off.

What Really Drives Financial Success?

In the September 2, 2010 issue of Gallup Management Journal there is an interesting article on the link between employee engagement and financial results. It is entitled:

What Really Drives Financial Success?

Two researchers tackle this chicken-or-egg question: Do engaged employees drive an organization's performance, or does success inspire engagement?

A GMJ Q&A with Jim Harter, Ph.D., and Frank L. Schmidt, Ph.D.

I cannot include a successful link to the body of the Q&A but if you Google "What Really Drives Financial Success?" and click on the first result, it should take you to the first of three pages from the Gallup study. If I try to include that link here it just takes you to a page asking you to log-in or subscribe.

“We already tried that and it didn’t work.”

Two scientists set out to look into the machinery for making proteins, the ribosomes, and to see if they are the same in different living creatures. They designed an experiment to take ribosomes from bacteria, insert messenger RNA from peas, and see if they would grow pea proteins or bacteria proteins. Had the experiment worked, they would have been the first to demonstrate the uniformity of life.

But it didn’t work.

You can easily imagine someone coming along later to attempt to do the same thing getting the response “We already tried that and it didn’t work!” Chris Galvin, the former CEO of Motorola, gave a talk this week at the Business Innovation Conference in which he described how he and his father would deal with this kind of question. If someone came to him with an idea that had already been tried, the Motorola CEO wouldn’t say “we already tried that.” Instead, he would encourage the innovator to pursue the idea and give some guidance where to look first. If the reason the idea didn’t work the first time was valid, the innovator would see the problem fairly soon, report the issue back to Galvin, and then go off to pursue some other idea. If you just shoot someone down with “we already tried that,” then you make it very difficult for that person to move off that idea and onto a new one. You also diminish their level of engagement.

In the case of the ribosomes RNA experiment, eventually someone did come along and show the uniformity of life. The reason the original experiment failed was due to the amateurish contribution of the lab assistant. The bacteria ribosomes he brought to the experiment were some he’d developed in a previous experiment and had stored for some time in a lab refrigerator. While there, they’d become contaminated which caused the experiment to fail. Who was this lab assistant. It was Richard Feynman, the renown physicist and Nobel Laureate.

Just because something has been tried before, doesn’t mean there’s no value in trying again. And just because it was tried by someone who’s incredibly smart, doesn’t mean an error didn’t occur.

Innovators are risk takers

At the recent Business Innovation Conference in Chicago, we did a small sample exercise using Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's Prospect Theory question. Yes, innovators are risk takers, but they are just like the regular population in one respect. See the PDF

Putting heads together

At MIT, problem-solving teams containing more women demonstrated greater collective intelligence!

SEE --Putting heads together