03/07/2002
Can You Count to 60?
Can you count from 1 to 60? I had not counted on meeting an old friend on my predawn walks on the beach here on Marco. I met this old friend on the beach the other day - not a human friend but a bird, a tall stately heron. There were no other birds around when I passed him in the darkness. He and I were both looking at the nearly full moon flitting dramatically between the clouds. Surely it was the same heron I wrote about in these columns last year. Then, too, he was the only heron on the beach and I fantasize him having a philosophic vision setting him apart from his kin. Otherwise, why would he get up so early and just stand there in the dark gazing at the moon? On my return, I planned to ask him but he had moved into a nearby lagoon to join three pelicans in what I presume was either a quest for food or perhaps just a sociable get-together.
There is also the possibility that the heron was anticipating the liftoff of the Space Shuttle Columbia, scheduled for the next morning. Last week, I mentioned Columbia''s mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. When I heard the weather forecast, with predicted temperatures near freezing for most of Florida, I thought to myself, "Please don''t fly that bird!" Fortunately, NASA felt the same way and rescheduled the launch. Columbia was launched and had much the same problem I described with my car on the trip to Marco Island - we both had plugged up cooling systems. Fortunately, Columbia''s problem has not interfered with the Hubble mission, which is going on now.
In his January 28 Bar Chat column, Brian Trumbore dealt with the tragic Space Shuttle Challenger mission, which is what prompted my concern over liftoff of Columbia in near freezing temperatures. It was Richard Feynman who, as a member of the panel investigating the Challenger disaster, showed that those cold temperatures compromised the O-ring seals in the rocket engine. His classic demonstration at a press conference putting an O-ring in ice water and showing that it became brittle was elegant in its simplicity. This direct approach typified the character and behavior of Feynman, one of the most brilliant, and most colorful, scientists of the past century.
Coincidentally, one of the books that I brought to Marco is "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", a collection of short works by Feynman. The book includes his minority report on the Challenger panel. He had to fight to have it included, with opposition to its inclusion due to its critical comments on NASA. Another coincidence - while driving to the grocery store the other day, I heard an interview on Public Radio with someone who apparently knew Feynman. Unfortunately, I only heard a snatch of the program and didn''t catch the fellow''s name. However, I was surprised to hear him say in effect that Feynman was a lousy teacher and wasn''t able to get his colleagues to understand his work.
Feynman''s work, for which he won the Nobel Prize, was in quantum electrodynamics, a field that is just as formidable to me as it sounds. This fellow on the radio said that none of his colleagues understood Feynman and his work but fortunately, Feynman talked with Freeman Dyson. The story of Dyson''s role in the ultimate recognition of Feynman''s is worth mention.
Dyson wrote the foreword to the book I have and likens his association with Feynman to that of Elizabethan dramatist Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Dyson quotes Jonson as saying, "I did love this man this side idolatry as much as any", the man being Shakespeare. Both Dyson and Jonson were learned and scholarly, while both Shakespeare and Feynman were "slapdash" and geniuses. Dyson and Feynman met at Cornell in 1947 after Feynman had worked on the Manhattan project and had been a student of John Wheeler at Princeton (you may recall mentions of Wheeler in the movie "A Beautiful Mind"). Dyson, who came from England, says he hadn''t expected to meet Shakespeare in America, but when he met Feynman, he had no difficulty recognizing him.
He found Feynman not interested in publishing erudite papers but passionately engrossed in trying to understand nature. Feynman was trying to describe nature in pictures and diagrams, later to become the celebrated "Feynman diagrams" that physicists employ in complex calculations of particle interactions. Dyson also was following the works of two other physicists interested in the same problem. Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, however, were using more conventional methods and complex mathematics. Dyson saw that all three were getting the same results and in 1949 published a paper titled "The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman". This paper in Physical Review showed that, though the theories looked different, they were the same. All three shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. Dyson says Feynman never once complained that Dyson was stealing his thunder but encouraged Dyson to publish the paper, which launched Dyson''s own career as a renowned theoretical physicist.
Why did I ask if you count from 1 to 60 in opening this column? I was intrigued by one chapter in the book that illustrates the unique nature of Feynman. When he was a graduate student at Princeton, he read a paper by a psychologist claiming that a person''s sense of time is related to a chemical reaction involving iron. The psychologist based this conclusion on data he collected by having his wife count up to 60 without looking a clock. The poor wife had a chronic fever that would come and go and her husband found that she counted faster when the fever went up and she slowed down when the fever ebbed. Somehow, the psychologist related this to the speed of certain iron reactions as the temperature changes. Feynman pitied the wife having to count all the time and thought the paper was bunk!
However, Feynman wondered what did control one''s sense of time and, typical Feynman, he began to count from 1 to 60. It took 48 seconds, give or take a second or so each time he counted. He now had his "standard rate". Thinking his counting rate might be associated with his heart rate, he would run up and down steps and then lie down and count. He tried counting while running up and down but found, when his dorm mates questioned his activities, that he couldn''t talk and count at the same time.
Feynman tried all kinds of combinations of running up and down stairs and decided that temperature doesn''t play a role - he still counted a 48-second "minute". Then he tried reading newspapers and counting - still 48 seconds. If he typed simple words and counted, same result. However, if he came to a problem word, he would have to stop counting. After many other experiments, he decided the only thing he absolutely couldn''t do and count was to talk. When he reported these findings at lunch one day, a guy named John Tukey was a skeptic and bet that Feynman could not read and count, while he, Tukey, could count and talk at the same time.
Tukey was flabbergasted to find that Feynman could indeed read and count. Now it was Tukey''s turn. After establishing his standard "minute", Tukey began talking, reciting poetry and saying anything that came into his head. Sure enough, he stopped at his "minute" right on the button. Now it was Feynman''s turn to be amazed. Finally, they found the reason for the difference in their contrasting abilities to count and read or talk. Feynman was counting by "talking" to himself as he counted and read. Hence, he couldn''t talk to anyone else and count. Tukey, on the other hand, counted by visualizing a ticker tape with numbers going by. Since he was already "looking" at the tape, he couldn''t count and read, but was free to talk.
From this set of observations requiring no more than a clock, a profound conclusion emerged - when people are performing a task, such as counting, what goes on in their heads is different for different people. Imagine what Feynman could have done with modern technology that permits direct observation of what goes on in the brain when people perform different tasks.
This difference in brain activity in different individuals prompts me to note my own dramatic limitations when it comes to certain concepts. For example, I have a distinct problem visualizing things in three dimensions. Others can mentally view a 3-D object from all angles. Feynman said that he saw letters in colors when he visualized equations and mentions light tan js, brown xs and violet-bluish ns. I can imagine that these colors might have helped him to discern patterns and concepts more clearly than us ordinary mortals. And did Tukey''s ability to see that tape with numbers flitting by help him to become a giant in the field of modern statistics? In addition to becoming a full professor at Princeton, Tukey was an associate director of research at Bell Labs when I was there and was awarded the National Medal of Science.
What about that heron? Who knows what he sees and feels standing there in the dark? What about his sense of time? Is it just insomnia that gets him up so much earlier than his colleagues or is it indeed, as I fantasize, an appreciation of the beauty of the night? And how do I know it''s a "he", not a "she"? You got me there!
Allen F. Bortrum
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