Simplicity

Simplicity

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

— Sir Isaac Newton



Science fiction is a real passion for many scientists and non-scientists. Perhaps it may even account for the reason many of us work in science at all. For my generation, and my parents’ generation, there are two television series that most represent an idealized technological universe, Star Trek and Doctor Who. These two are markedly different from Orwellian type futurist fiction, in that they are not meant as a warning against technological advancement, but rather an excitement for its arrival. Something which strikes me as amazing is that the most popular character in Star Trek is Spock, the logical, knowledgeable Vulcan, who, until the recent Star Trek film, avoids human emotion in favor of reason. The Doctor, in Doctor Who, is certainly emotional, but he avoids commitment in a way, favoring discovery for its own sake. The Doctor sees nothing more romantic than traveling to the edges of time and the known universe, where even his vast comprehension is challenged, forcing him to learn something new. The reason that Spock and The Doctor are so enticing for the scientist, and the fan, is that they are able to reduce the complexity of the universe into something that is comprehensible for them, so, therefore, we feel it is possible for us. They remind us that while it takes a long time to learn things (The Doctor is over 900 years old!), once we know them those things become simple. The goal for them and for us is to have as much simplicity as possible in our lives. If we succeed, Quantum Chromadynamics and partial differential equations become second nature.

Business tends to have the inverse value system. Specialization is not the same in business ideology. A CEO is not meant to understand the mechanics of financial models that make up the foundation of his company, or to understand the cultural components that affect the work habits and productivity of his thousands of employees. The job of a CEO is to create layers of complexity in the system, all of which he feels are handled by others, so that he can focus on the most illogical part of the process, which is vision. A business leader relies on the two things that Spock or The Doctor would never accept; faith and emotion. The faith is accepting that the system in place works, and that the thousands of employees he doesn’t even know are doing something useful. The perception, even by the leader himself, is that this is not happening.

Now more than ever a CEO is bombarded with data. This data is too much for any one person to fully grasp; yet major decisions need to be made from it. In Malcolm Gladwells essay on the Enron crisis, he speaks of the complications of the accounting, and structural components of the Enron crisis. He suggests that there was so much data form special entity companies that Enron created, that it was actually not possible for the CEO Jeff Skilling to truly understand what was going on. So while claiming to be using numbers, those numbers were useless in really evaluating the situation. The company was just too large and too complex. Like Skilling, many CEOs then revert to an instinctual and rigid evaluation of a company’s health. My mother refers to this as “management by spreadsheet”, which until recently I didn’t completely understand, or even agree with. A spreadsheet appears to be very scientific. Then I revisited the lab environment. During a course of any experiment, enormous amounts of data are generated, and put into spreadsheets. Nearly anyone can do this. The creative scientist is not the one to compile data, but to properly analyze it. It is possible that a trained CEO could analyze data well. It is not likely though that he can analyze well the complete data that is presented to him. A scientist is always trying to narrow the scope of a single evaluation, because looking at multiple things at one time introduces too many variables to properly understand. A CEO, even if somehow very mathematical and analytical by nature, couldn’t possibly do this. He is instead forced to rely on generalizations about the data. This leads to an impersonal management style, and ultimately on that is not quantitative at all.



Being emotional, and trusting are not bad qualities. It is what makes us different from a Vulcan or Time Lord. It is risky though to be in a situation where you are incapable of returning to the hard facts when necessary. This is a major advantage for small technology companies, who have less than 100 employees. In these companies you can read the financial statements monthly, talk with all of the engineers daily, and analyze customer satisfaction on your own.

The hallmark of an overly complex business community can be seen at corporate headquarters, when business managers spend 90% of their days in meetings. I have been a consultant for large companies, and have found myself in some of these meetings. The goal is a good one; to make grand plans for the business. These meetings usually end up producing documents of notes from the meetings, and the notes produce documents of a strategy, which if you wait long enough trigger another meeting, which in the rare instance result in a document that gets passed down the management chain. Occasionally this may lead to innovation, but it is by nature an isolating process, where the meeting room and the document generation process become a bigger part of the route than the product or customer. This actually tends to happen even at small companies, especially those managed by MBAs. It rarely happens at small companies run by engineers or scientists, because engineers are too curious to not be involved. The Doctor would never delegate a mission to the future in a distant galaxy, because the joy of being a Time Lord is visiting it yourself, or with partners. This is one place where Google, even as large as it has become, succeeds. The founders and all major executives are engineers themselves, and avid users of the product. They understand creativity and how it comes from experimentation, rather than meetings. So each Google engineer is required to spend 20% of their time working on any idea they have. The other 80% is spent on other Google projects. That is 100%, none of which is in meetings. CEO Eric Schmitt, in a 2006 Charlie Rose interview, admits that this is getting more and more difficult as they grow. He claims that founder Larry Page knew the first 2500 employees personally, and exactly what each made. Page is brilliant of course to be able to remember 2500. For most of us knowing 100 people is about maximum. So now that Google has 30,000, even Page is in the dark about most of his employees.

My father ran Tech Pro with Google style ideals. Since Tech Pro was so small it wasn’t necessary to formally structure them. There were small clues that let employees and customers know that it was a business run by curiosity and the thrill of science, rather than by meeting. One was that no one had titles on their business cards. While this may have been a deliberate choice, it was more of a practical one. Technician, salesman, engineer or president were each expected to be an advocate for the customer.. There was a constant feedback loop between customers and product development, without the middle or top bureaucracy which slows down progress. Another system which was at place at Tech Pro was a loose work schedule for engineers and especially programmers. These jobs were as creative as they were scientific, and people work better at different times of day or night. Often a programmer would still be at Tech Pro at midnight, even though he might not arrive the next day until noon. This made everyone feel a certain ownership in the products they were creating, but also a feeling of ownership in the company itself. The workplace often became an extension of their home where they not only worked but made coffee and ordered pizza. This sometimes meant that during the actual work day some engineers did very little work. They talked, had lunch and walked around the outside of the building smoking. With this strange schedule there was no time for, or really any need for long formal meetings, because small informal ones were happening all of the time.

It is obvious to me that this bureaucracy -free system is simpler to maintain, and for small companies more effective and fun. It also has a way of transferring to the products and services as well. Customers become a natural extension of this environment, as the Tech Pro team is used to seeing the business “universe” as approachable rather than intimidating. Product design also tends to reduce complexity into simpler components. Tech Pro always used off the shelf components because they were available quickly and any time of day or night. For development this meant that you didn’t need to wait for an outside consultant to prepare a proprietary scheme. This made the costs of the final product less, and also led to innovation that could not have happened otherwise.

By working simply, Tech Pro was actually more efficient and more interesting Simplicity was the rational approach to organization that Spock would have wanted and the adventurous approach that The Doctor would have embarked on. Technology and business can seem very complex but when seen in retrospect everything that has been done is very simple.

Risk

For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept such odds if there were no lion.



— Christiaan Barnard



Scientists suffer from an unfair reputation in America. They are considered to lack instinctual savvy. For this reason, nearly every physicist I know is deeply offended by the stereotypical characters in the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” They are socially awkward and tend to quantify even the most banal details of life. What my colleagues miss about “The Big Bang Theory” though, is that hidden underneath all of the silliness these characters possess something that is unique, and apparently rather attractive about scientists. After all, even the Asbergian self-centered Sheldon is likeable , I actually think that there is something about the geekiness of “The Big Bang Theory” that is every bit as attractive as the coolness of the “Sex in The City” ladies. Though this is certainly a project for sociologists and not me, I have a hypothesis regarding television likeability and culture. I think that somehow we know that the common perception of cool is not really all that important, or even interesting. This is a significant, even if unconscious, realization for modern television viewers, because common wisdom takes a long time to become common. It is also interesting because it gives a defense for seeing the Universe and ourselves differently. In essence we think that everything Sheldon does is not intuitive. He is a classic clown in this way. He humiliates himself by creating friendship surveys so that he can create a mathematical model to see who would best qualify as a friend. Our instincts are the opposite of this. We become friends with people because they are attractive in some, sometimes superficial, way. They make us laugh, or they are handsome, or they are somehow dynamic in a way that we wish we were. For anyone who has had friends they ended up hating, or has been married and divorced, human instincts are exceptionally bad.

This is one area where a geeky physicist may have some insight on business that is different than everyone else. Physicists are used to the facts being different than the way they feel. The Copernican revolution is one of the first examples of this: it doesn’t feel right that the earth rotates around the sun. This is even truer of 20th century physics. Our instincts are absolutely insufficient to understand Einstein. General Relativity, with warped space-time, just isn’t in our normal arsenal of instinctual survival skills. Quantum mechanics is even less intuitive, so much so that one of its discoverers, the Danish Nobel Laureate Neils Bohr famously said, “If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.” So to be a good physicist or scientist in general, it is important to be at least a little “Sheldonesque.” We must not trust our instincts, but instead investigate the truth. In facts and friendships we need to consider quantitative data, not just attraction.

A field of science which is relatively new is called “evolutionary biology”. You would think that this would have started just after Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was published in 1859, but it wasn’t. That revolutionary book was so well written, that it debunked all of recorded history’s various religious interpretations of biology without being all that difficult to understand. In fact, when you read “Origin of Species” the first thing that comes to mind is “why did it take so long to realize this?” Darwin just observed and recorded nature for many years, and made a leap which was incredibly obvious in retrospect; that there is a relation between species and that certain traits and species survive because of natural selection. This was, of course, controversial for all of the obvious reasons as well. Religion is both very personal and very political. Even though what Darwin was doing was science, it did step on some sacred beliefs. Still, to most people who read the book it made sense. Theodore Roosevelt read it when he was 14 years old and for the rest of his life claimed it was the most important book ever written. It is easy to see that Roosevelt’s love of nature shaped his decisions as president, and much of that can be traced back to his admiration for Darwin. So because of its apparently intuitive qualities, Natural Selection could be taught in biology classes, without there being a separate branch of the discipline devoted to it.

The surprising thing is that as much as Natural Selection made sense, it really wasn’t as intuitive as expected. What made most sense to humans about evolution was not the centuries it takes for species to transform themselves. This is hard to visualize. Instead it was an idea that humans could only prosper through a conscious survival of the fittest. The term Social Darwinism was coined in 1944 by the historian Richard Hofstedter to reference some rather disturbing contemporary human behavior that was carried out with the excuse of Darwinian naturalism. The most obvious during Hofsteder’s time was the eugenics programs of the Nazis. The concept of superior races, and linking human survival to the elimination of the unfit seemed like an extension of Darwin’s work. In fact, Darwin’s own cousin, Francis Galton, was the founder of Eugenics at the end of the 19th Century.

It is only when you let go of this instinctual idea of survival of the fittest that you can really see the true scope of Evolutionary Biology. Genetic mutations are slow to occur, and happen because of natural means, but humans have removed themselves from the natural process. Technology, as wonderful as it is, is only 10,000 years old. Until that time there was not agriculture or architecture. There were no cities or writings. We call everything before this “prehistory,” because until that point history was not created by deliberate societal choices. Darwinism has been in progress since the beginning of life on earth, but social Darwinism exists only during those times we call “history”. Therefore most scientists feel that we as humans are effecting nature, while behaving as if they were outside of the natural process. This is not instinctual, and is not as easy as “Origin of The Species” initially seemed to be.

Social Darwinism is also evident when evaluating risk. The 2008 credit crisis and banking collapse can be seen in this light. The majority of the crisis was caused by misunderstanding risk. Was it riskier to give certain loans or not? Was it riskier to make certain credit swaps or not? There are two prevalent points of view about why this happened, and in such dramatic and drastic ways. Most people not working in finance see it as a case of greed. This viewpoint is an unconscious blaming of social Darwinism. It holds that the wealthy Wall Street Bankers wanted to be the strongest, therefore richest, so they pushed for larger profits at the expense of the weaker greater population. On the other hand, the banking industry blames poor financial modeling for the collapse. The claim has been that the models did not appropriately explain the risks associated with these transactions. Even the most famous economist and Federal Reserve chief of all time, Allen Greenspan, used this explanation saying “the models of finance that I have followed were not accurate in predicting this crisis”. When we look at these two explanations we see a huge contrast, while both ignore something that is probably more accurate. It was neither greed nor modeling alone that caused this. It was merely a deficiency in our ability to instinctually comprehend risk. The numbers were too big, our vision of history too limited, and our confidence too great. It seems that we were not as smart as we thought. Growth seemed inevitable. We thought that credit and finance in general were part of the evolutionary process, but in fact they were removed from it. Derivatives and credit default swaps just happened too fast for Natural Selection to catch up with them.

This applies also to the personal and professional risks associated with starting a technology company. The common wisdom on the risks of entrepreneurship are strangely opposed to the way we approach risk in our daily lives. Most people change their risk threshold based on how much money they have. When we have very little money we tend to risk all we have, because we feel there is not much to lose. This is why lottery lines are longest in poor neighborhoods, and why casinos are filled with people who can’t really afford to lose the money that they are gambling with. These people feel that the upside is much larger than the downside. It just feels right, but is completely wrong. The odds of a poor person winning the lottery are just as bad as the odds of a rich person winning the lottery, but the risks associated with the poor person playing are so much worse. This wrong instinct extends through the middle classes and even to the wealthy, not for lottery tickets but for ideas and the money it takes to pursue them. Someone who is worth 2 Billion Dollars is less likely to risk 1 Billion dollars on a single venture or idea, than someone worth $ 200,000 is to risk $100,000 Even though the billionaire may lose much more money he certainly is in better shape financially than the person who loses half of his $200,000 investment. Our instincts are just that bad.

Instinctively entrepreneurs often work by the motto “never spend your own money”. I have been told this many times, by everyone from the founder of Cirque Du Soleil, to the investor of the leveraged buyout concept in the 1980’s. These people have been undoubtedly following their instincts, and those instincts have made them a lot of money. The question I need to ask myself  is whether that would make me a lot of money too, and more importantly whether that would be the best thing for my company and the happiness. We have tended to answer no to that question. Seeking other people’s money presents a bigger risk for me than risking my own for reasons that seem completely unreasonable.

The main reason why technical entrepreneurs, like me and my family, may want to take relatively large risks compared to the Billionaire, but relatively small risks compared to the lottery addict is because it is a scale that we can relate to. There is an assumption that the risk taken is never so great that it will land us and our children on the street corner, but is none the less a risk that could alter our lifestyle. This is something a scientist can understand. A scientist knows he cannot appreciate in an instinctual way, those things which he cannot feel, and that further comprehension only comes through a deep knowledge of a subject. For a scientist starting a small company it isn’t always the most interesting use of his time to fully understand business, so he shouldn’t have to do it. The risk and reward factors change when this is considered. It becomes more risky to raise large sums of money because large sums of money may be out of the scientist/entrepreneur’s expertise. In order to gain that expertise he would have to sacrifice his true interests, which may very well be the riskiest choice of all.

Technically Responsible

Many years ago my wife and I had dinner with a friend of mine, who is a very talented theatre director, and performer. His work was inspiring to me, and I would generally see anything he did. I must admit though, as with my free jazz performances, his style of experimental theatre did not attract very large audiences. He made a statement to us, which at the time I thought rather pretentious. He said that he did not care if there was an audience at all. He would do his performance every night in an empty theatre if he had to, and still feel the same power and importance for creating a unique art. He felt no responsibility to an audience, only to himself. I would later find that many great and even successful artists's, whether it was Miles Davis, or Ingmar Bergman cared little about the audience. In both of those cases the audiences came anyway, as they should have, because the art was so special. For those of us whose art does not appeal to large groups however, we can still continue to perform. The idea of responsibility to an audience is actually a huge distraction for the most part, as we may very well choose quantity over quality. In the arts we also need to be honest with ourselves, especially if we play free jazz or do experimental theatre. No matter whether we have a relatively big audience or not, it doesn't make such a difference. Either the product will live on, or not, but the moment is fleeting. It is also not exactly perfect to speak about responsibility to an audience, as even a bad performance won't be genocide, a famine, a world war or even a hangover. It will just be an unpleasant hour or two in a theatre. While this may be true in the arts, as a scientist, or a technologist there is much more at stake.

Many mornings when I am going to work I listen to Podcasts from the Stanford Literature Professor Robert Harrison called "Entitled Opinions". I highly recommend this podcast, as it is both entertaining and educational. Also for those of you that work in Academic Science or Technology it will be a huge change for you, as it was for me. Dr. Harrison is a classicist, and literary intellect, who while respecting and even hosting scientists from time to time, can be critical of modern society's manic drive to innovate, without particular attention to long term consequences. Though this may seem obvious, it is far from it for those of us who read and respect some of history's great scientific discoveries. I have often repeated a famous quote by Richard Feynman, who in addition to being a Nobel Laureate Physicist also worked on the Atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project. This is what Feynman said:

"scientific technology improves production, but we have trouble with automation. It brings about advances in medicine, but then we worry about the number of births and the fact that no one dies from the diseases we have eliminated. It produces rapid air transportation, but it also makes possible the severe horrors of air war. In a sense, science is like a key that can open the gates to heaven or hell. Which portal the key unlocks depends on the humans who employ it."

Often I and many other scientists working on theories or in labs even tend to use this as an excuse. In fact I am so convinced that this is a good statement that I think it is expressing something almost necessary in our evolution as a species. It is a desire to understand the universe of the large and small, and the mechanisms by which it functions. In doing that we uncover new ways to extend our lives, such as medicine, bio-engineering and even more futuristic notions such as neuro-regeneration and the downloadable brain. This seems to me to be what we must do. What Dr. Harrison and his guests put in perceptive for me is that we cannot pursue science and technology in intellectual isolation. Isolation has several relevant meaning here. Often when working on complex equations or experiments we physically and politically isolate ourselves, almost out of necessity. It is just too hard to lose focus. Maybe more importantly we isolate ourselves philosophically. I have written in this blog before of a convergence of art, science and philosophy, and how our specialized Academic world can limit our experience, and even hold back progress in the fields we work in. What I think of more now however is how working without recognition and understanding of philosophy can be dangerous, and counterproductive to human progress. Certainly the bomb is an obvious one. It was hard working, brilliant scientists' pursuing an idea which could lead to destruction. But what about the seemingly smaller efforts we make? For example, what about the impact of a new material, not only on our environment but on our interaction with nature and other people? My French father in law and I have had many arguments about progress. He is an extremely educated polymath, who worked as an engineer, but is equally proficient in quoting Victor Hugo, and Chateaubriand by memory at the dinner table. With all of this knowledge, as well as the fact that he has used computers since computers were becoming personal, he has always told me that society should be conscious of the "arbre de connaissance". For many years I thought that his idea was anti-democratic. The free flow of information and the ability for everyone to participate through the internet is one of the luckiest benefits of being alive in the 21rst century. But he is right. Without thought of consequence, knowledge alone is not progress. Advances in science and technology require responsibility. The reason this is truer now than ever, is that not just academics are using and creating sophisticated technologies. Nearly everyone is a technologist, no matter what field they work in. Still, with these new technologies, and our constant innovation we have the same human struggles we have always had. We face our own mortality. Unlike Epicurus, and other great philosophers though, we tend to not address that mortality metaphysically, but rather physically or religiously. For the non religious, like me, we try to conquer death through invention. Reading great literature or philosophy though, puts us back in the same boat as all humans in recorded history. Suddenly we realize that we must continue to innovate, but if we do so only with tools and not the mind we will be alone. We must think of technology as a responsibility. We are no longer playing to ourselves in an empty theatre, even if it feels like it.

    

Embracing Abstraction

Mathematics and philosophy have come together and separated countless times in Western civilization. It seems to me that they diverged in one of the strongest ways just over 100 years ago when Einstein published his great works on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and quantum mechanics. Suddenly science and mathematics seemed to encompass such an important and large part of the imagination that philosophy was relegated to dealing primarily with human suffering and existential dread. Both of these are important, but they are limited to human consciousness, while physics was not just reaching towards far away galaxies, but also inwards. It was analyzing time in new ways and exploring the invisible, but real worlds of atoms and molecules. This was the unofficial debut of the theoretical scientist as the stars of logic. The idea of theory to an artist and philosopher is one of ideas. To a scientists theory is mathematics. Theoretical physicists use mathematics to model the universe. To extrapolate our experience beyond our vision.

Recently my wife Marine was explaining Montessori education to me, and the systems that are used for teaching mathematics. Though I am now deeply interested in this, I still don’t know much at all. The main point was that children will learn numbers as a physical reality in small quantities. They can then extrapolate the concept for larger values. Only after this do they learn the symbols, which are written numbers. Though this is a digression from my point, it is what got me thinking about abstraction and science for this blog.

A scientist derives, proves and calculates in order to represent reality in a precise way. What the artist and theoretical scientist have in common in this regard is that both pursuits exist only with a strong ability to abstract. Physics which is the study of nature is not explored by the theoretician in a manner of direct observation, but by manipulation of matrices and formulae.

Abstraction may be a unique human ability which makes the creation of technologies, sculptures, space ships and books possible. It is also likely connected to our desire to distance ourselves from real nature by abstracting it further and further into our models. Goethe, the great poet, famous for words, which are abstractions en par with numbers, pushed back from Newtonian reductionism in favor of a more observation based science of Optics. In most ways Goethe’s scientific ideas were wrong. Newton describes nature in a much more accurate way; the question which remains however is who saw it (as opposed to describe it) more accurately? I believe what the Physicist Richard Feynman said to an artist friend who complained to Feynman that scientists take away the beauty of a yellow flower by reducing it to its scientific components. Feynman said that because he understands why a flower is yellow he appreciates it more. Feynman was unique in his ability to see nature on a deeper level esthetically and realistically while representing it with numbers and diagrams. This is the human intellectual evolution where we can congregate to abstract, but not without first observing. A child may not be able to calculate 1,000,000, but because she understands how to get from 1 to 10, from both observing and abstracting, she can comprehend the concept of 1,000,000. This is what Marine explained to me. As scientists we need perhaps to intuitively understand those things we can see, create numerical abstractions, then extrapolate. With that the theoretician, artist and philosopher can meet on common ground.

Was Wilbur a Rheologist?

Sometimes I stay up late at night and read, watch sci-fi television or write these blogs. Of course in the blogs sometimes my exhaustion shows, as I make rather strange connections between the science I am working on and art. This is all to say that though this one may involve the most farfetched of analogies, I am perfectly awake, and at least as sane as I usually am. Since I am up late some nights, it is especially difficult to wake up early when my little girl does. Many times my wife gets up with her, but other times I do. I find that coffee is slow in getting me going, and since my little girl wants to play, I find things that will get us both moving, and that we both like. My wife put the kibosh on gansta rap music, which had become a nice ritual, when my daughter started saying that “it’s all about the Benjamins baby”, and “It’s hard out here for a Pimp”, at family dinners. So I turned to another source of funny entertainment from my childhood, the 1960’s television series, Mr. Ed., which I had watched in reruns, while home sick from grammar school. Thanks to You Tube I can now share the miraculous talking, brilliant, hilarious horse with my 4 year old daughter, who now even translates “a Horse is a Horse of course of course” to French. I guess that the show was a hit in those days, because it was so damn funny, but also because people could relate to both the horse Mr. Ed., who due to the unfortunate act of birth was born a horse with an IQ and vocal abilities that combined Albert Einstein and Frank Sinatra, and Wilbur, who had such a brilliant friend, but because this friend lived in the stables, could not share the companionship with anyone. Perhaps we all feel lonely like this sometimes, and that either ourselves, or the people (or animals) we love are misunderstood. Mr. Ed. reads every newspaper that Wilbur brings to him, and he has an excellent analytical mind. In one episode for instance he figures out the problem in the Dodgers line up, and has Wilbur write to Dodgers management. The solution clears up the whole problem, and the Dodgers go on to winning a pennant, in addition to getting great publicity with pictures of a horse sliding into home base taken when Wilbur brings Mr. Ed. to the field. What didn’t occur to me, though it must seem obvious to anyone who thinks about it outside the isolation of Nickelodeon Syndication, is that Wilbur most likely has a severe case of schizophrenia. Though we mostly think of people with this disease as homeless, and in many cases dangerous, it is a rather common disease, and it is not unlikely that upper middle class Californians like Wilbur are visiting the barn for a night cap with a thoroughbred. So suddenly this old sitcom became all the more personal to me, as I have related to Wilbur and Ed since 1980i. I started thinking about my days, and whether I am either farm animal living amonst creatures who don’t speak my language, or a bourgeois business man whose intellectual equals eat hay while standing on all fours. It is probably not so uncommon that I am thinking in these terms, as I am living in France, where my French is not so good. I have conversations in a language, where I might as well be saying neigh half of the time. Still there is something more to this. I also spend the majority of my day working in a small field of physics called Rheology. If you ask 99.9% of all Physicists in the world their opinion on rheological issues they will not know what you are talking about. Yet like most academic pursuits those of us who do spend a good amount of time considering issues relating rheology, we find it very interesting, compelling to the point of obsessiveness, and even extremely important. Though I assume everyone reading this must have a basic understanding of rheology (do I suffer from delusions?), it will sum it up to say that it is the study of complex flow of materials. Any materials that is, which to me seems like it is the study of nearly everything in the Universe. That is very a very broad philosophical interpretation of it though, as the truth is we have to study very specific properties, of very specific materials, which means that the universe as a whole rarely comes into focus. Still, I spent all week, and will spend many more working on this topic, with one, or at most two other people who are smarter, than, and at least as passionate as I am about this subject. This weekend I played with the family, and tomorrow I go back to the University (or is it the stable), and figure out how to analyze polymers in the fluid state, or is that win the pennant?


It may seem like I am saying that either I am a nut who can’t communicate with other people, like Wilbur, or a genius that no one understands, Like Mr. Ed. This is not really true in a directly analogous way. Wilbur and Mr. Ed. are cultural extremes. Wilbur is the most middle class normal married guy, and Mr. Ed is the most… well talking horse. Neither of these extremes exists in real life. What do exist are small enclaves in University science departments, art schools, back rooms of jazz clubs, and internet chat rooms. In these places everyone is working very hard at doing something they find important in some way, while struggling with to find a language that the rest of society can understand. We run up against a society where conformity now means not only having the best cocktail parties for the neighbors, but how many Facebook Friends you have, and Google hits occur when you type your name into the subject line. All of this pressure to speak and to be understood by the world as a whole however isn’t what our lives are really about. Really it is more like Wilbur and Mr. Ed, facing the world together and apart.

Why does France like the piano?

I have never given this much thought until the first night I was living in Paris. My wife, little girl and I went to Bistrot Amelot, almost across the street from our new 400 year-old apartment. We picked this restaurant because they had confit de canard and homemade sorbet but I soon noticed that it also had a 1920’s upright piano on the bar-side. When I asked about it, the waitress, who is also one of the owners, invited me to play it. This was incredible luck. I had found a regular place to play within 2 hours of moving to Paris.

So now that I have been in Paris for one month, I have made the Bistrot my own salon, where I play almost daily, take my daughter for snack and get to know my new neighbors. I could write an entire book, a kind of Damon Runyon of Le Marais tale of the regulars of the Bistrot but that will wait.

One aspect of conversation that always surprises me is how much the clientele love the piano. Everyone has a favorite piano player, piano style, piano composer, and even, in some cases, piano maker. The French pride which causes them to buy Renaults and Peugeots religiously also gives them an unquestioned loyalty to the Pleyel. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me when I think of French music history. Chopin, the most famous piano composer in history, though Polish-born, composed most of his important work in Paris. He was more than welcomed here along with Liszt, also lived in Paris. They were arguably the most sought after artists and social figures in Paris. Within one hundred year, Paris had Debussy and Satie, both innovators on the keyboard who are still respected, performed and taught throughout the world. Other examples are Messian in contemporary classical music and most recently the pianist Pierre Aimard who is so famous in the classical world that he played at the Cleveland Orchestra and Carnegie Hall in the same week.

So why do the French like the piano? I have an idea, which is so much a guess, that I am not even sure why I am bothering to write it. France has a long history of Salon life, especially in upper-class and artistic societies. This is not uniquely French, but it is famously French. Though it is hard to point to the beginning of this movement, we are certain that it is at least as old as the 17th century. I am currently writing this while looking at a house that once belonged to the writer Madame de Sévigné. She chronicled some of the most important Parisian salons, where along with food and gossip, music was served and respected.
By the time Chopin was living and composing in Paris, the salon was the primary place for musical entertainment, competition and experimentation. While Chopin didn’t much like public performances, he did thrive on salon playing. Often, Liszt would be in the same room and the two of them would replace each other at the keyboard to both try out new composition and to improvise on themes suggested by other guests. Witnesses from these salons say that the Chopin improvisations were more impressive even than the formal compositions. This continued throughout the 20th century. Even the famous art salon of Gertrude Stein had a Pleyel where both Satie and Stravinsky played while everyone from Proust to Picasso listened. Later in the 20th century, the presence of the salon and the piano were reduced in importance but some of the residual feelings remained. For one thing, the French tend to spend hours together at home, essentially around a meal. Even when a meal is finished, family and friends entertain and challenge each other with stories, jokes and even music. Some of my wife’s finest memories of childhood are late evenings falling asleep to her parents and family friends singing and playing instruments in the salon.

There is a big difference between salon music and concerts. It is of course more intimate, which may be why the French have a more personal connection with this type of music. It is hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent. It just doesn’t seem the same to have Béyoncé performing in our living rooms, though some of us wouldn’t mind.

Two nights ago, I was watching an amazing television show called “La boite à musique”. This program is 2 hours of classical and contemporary music with modern culture thrown in. There was a prodigious and creative jazz pianist, Yaron Herman who played on the show. Before the program had even ended, I had requested him as a Facebook friend and sent a message that I was also a pianist living in Paris. We are planning on soon meeting to play maybe at the Bistrot or maybe at a home. For me, this may be as close as I can come to the excitement of playing in a Parisian salon. It might also help provide more people with an introduction to the piano.

Adversely Creative

Ever since I have arrived in France two months ago, I have been increasingly impressed by the French appreciation of jazz, and of science. This is very encouraging for me, since neither of these things is particularly popular in the United States at the moment. There is so much truth in this that I am beginning to wonder why we still have some of the greatest innovation, and some of the best music coming out of the States. Quality of innovation is subjective, so any point I make is arguable. Still, while I don’t have any agenda as an American, I would like to figure this out as a professor and an improvisational musician. Like most positive things there seem to be an equal amount of negative. The negatives I am referring to may even be the cause of the creativity.
Last month the guitarist Les Paul died at the age of 94. My family and I had seen him perform twice just in the last 2 years, which was a pleasure from an entertainment and historical perspective, but I never really thought about it beyond the music. I of course knew that there was a Gibson guitar called the Les Paul, and that he must have somehow been involved with the development of this instrument. It was only when I heard a rebroadcast of 1992 interview of him, that I realized how much Les Paul himself straddled the worlds of artistic and technological innovation, and how much his contributions were in part due to the personal obstacles he overcame. Les Paul invented the process of multi tracking, for instance, in order to be able to continue a recording session even after his bass player left the room. He invented extended sustain and looping, because of the immobility in his hands due to extreme arthritis. With these techniques, he could play slower and less notes at the same time, while achieving a sound that was more complex than he was able to achieve when he had perfect fingers. Les Paul also told a story of a time when he was in his late 50’s and could not get a gig. He volunteered to play on Monday nights at Fat Tuesdays in New York, because the club was closed on Mondays. He even worked for door money alone. All of this is to say that his contributions came from adversity.
As I write this, there are protests all around the United States about the proposed health care bill which is being debated in congress. Regardless of what stance people take on this particular plan, there is one thing that seems very obvious from here in Paris. That is that the United States has adversity. There is a very small middle class. More babies are dying than in the rest of the western world (we are ranked 33rd in the world in infant mortality), and the country’s poor are living in fear of bankruptcy due to health care bills (over 60% of personal bankruptcies in 2008 were due to health related issues). Though France has its problems, access of health care is not even discussed here, as the problem has been essentially solved by a proven government run system. Like most things that we get used to, it is assumed that this is a universal status quo. Health care is just one example of this. When my daughter was 4 days old in Brooklyn, we took her to the pediatrician for her first check up. As any new parent knows, this is an anxious time, when you have no idea what you are doing. We waited in the lobby, and were not allowed to enter for the appointment because we had forgotten the health insurance card at home. We have health insurance. I can’t imagine how parents without manage. In France it is forbidden to even ask, before taking in a patient. Other examples of this are pregnancy leave which is 4 and 1/2 months in France (for the first child, more for subsequent children), and universal Pre-K, which starts at 2 ½ years old.
My French wife and friends will point out that France is not the Utopia that I make it out to be, and certainly they are right. I am new to France, and already I have seen how the famous French bureaucracy can lead to frustration, or apathy, while perhaps discouraging entrepreneurship. While this is no doubt true, it doesn’t address the lone talent, who has a vision for composing, painting, or even inventing. While government is a hassle and a help, the society in general is left healthier and more educated than in America.
So how these two stories relate, may answer some questions that could help us learn on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps America’s adversity, like adversity faced by Les Paul, has brought about innovation. Perhaps this feeling that Americans have a positive ambitious creativity is simply out of necessity. A kind of creative survival of the fittest. This is scary, as this will leave out most Americans. For those that do survive however, they may produce some great art and technology. This should not be good enough for us Americans. We should realize that not everyone needs to be a Les Paul, and that everyone does need to have health care. Here in France, the situation is reversed. While the French appreciate art and science, they need to take more risks. In a society that gives as much as France does, it becomes necessary for the artist and scientist to step back from the comfort of that, and recognize what personal shortcomings they may have despite the luck of being born here. When they do that more people will be able to see that their own immobility, like Les Paul’s, may be their greatest asset.