Strategy Boffins

Doubt is a thing of very great value

Idea Almanac

Doubt is not a fearful thing,” Feynman observed, “but a thing of very great value.” It’s what propels science forward.
“When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.”

Excerpt From: Philip E. Tetlock. “Superforecasting.”

A theory of strings of symbols

Idea Almanac

“When in the late 1940s C.E.Shannon created Information Theory there was a general belief he should call it Communication Theory, but he insisted on the word “information”, and it is exactly that word which has been the constant source of both interest and of disappointment in the theory. One wants to have a theory of “information” but it is simply a theory of strings of symbols. Again, all we suppose is there is such a source, and we are going to encode it for transmission.”

Excerpt From: Richard R. Hamming. “Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.”

Measurement of the Earth

Idea Almanac

The word geometry literally means “measurement of the Earth.” It’s ironic that had Euclid actually taken the trouble to measure triangles on the Earth’s surface, he would have discovered that Euclidean geometry doesn’t work. The reason is that the Earth’s surface is a sphere,2 not a plane. Spherical geometry certainly has points and angles, but it’s not so obvious that it has anything that we should call straight lines. Let’s see if we can make any sense out of the words “straight line on a sphere.”

Excerpt From: Leonard Susskind. “The Black Hole War.

Frozen light beam

Idea Almanac

“Earlier, he had read a children’s book, Aaron David Bernstein’s Popular Books on Natural Science, that asks you to imagine racing alongside a telegraph wire. Instead, Einstein envisioned running along a light beam, which should look frozen. Racing neck and neck alongside the beam, the light waves should be stationary, he thought, as Newton might have predicted. But even as a sixteen-year-old boy, Einstein realized that no one had ever seen a frozen light beam before. Something was missing. He would ponder this question for the next ten years.”

Excerpt From: Michio Kaku. “The God Equation.” – Amazon Link

Calculating the area of a square, rectangle, and trapezoid

Idea Almanac

“The Egyptians had always had death, but with wealth and settlement, they now also had taxes. Taxes were perhaps the first imperative for the development of geometry, for although in theory the Pharaoh owned all land and possessions, in reality temples and even private individuals owned real estate. The government assessed land taxes based on the height of the year’s flood and the surface area of the holdings. Those who refused to pay might be beaten into submission on the spot by the police. Borrowing was possible but the interest rate was based on a “keep it simple” philosophy: 100 percent per year. Since much was at stake, the Egyptians developed fairly reliable, if tortuous, methods of calculating the area of a square, rectangle, and trapezoid.”

Excerpt From: Leonard Mlodinow. “Euclid’s Window.” – Amazon Link

Einstein was wrong since he said

Idea Almanac

“Dear Professor Susskino [sic],
Einstein made a bad mistake and I discovered it. I wrote to your friend Hawkins [sic] but he didn’t answer. Let me explain Einsteins’ [sic] mistake. Force equals mass times acceleration. So I push something with a constant force for a long time the acceleration is constant so if I do it long enough the velocity keeps increasing. I calculated that if I push a 220 pound (that’s my weight. I should probably go on a diet) person with a continuous force of 224.809 pounds in a horizontal direction, after a year he will be moving faster than the speed of light. All I used was Newtons’ [sic] equation F = MA. So Einstein was wrong since he said that nothing can move faster than light. I am hoping you will help me publish this as I am certain that the phycicist’s [sic] need to know it. I have a lot of money and I can pay you.”

Excerpt From: Leonard Susskind. “Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory.” – Amazon Link

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