LibraryCog

Feynman's Genius and the Quantum Physics of Cataloguing

I loved Mlodinow's book not only for its sympathetic portrayal of Feynman, but also because it captures well the tensions that exist in almost any academic organization. Mlodinow faced not only the daunting prospect of working at Caltech at the same time that Feynman was in the same department, his office was literally beside another giant of the physics world, Murray Gell-Mann, inventor of Quark Theory and, like Feynman, a Nobel laureate. The joy of Mlodinow's book is that he comes across as a somewhat insecure observer of the towering intellects that surrounded him. Although I have no doubt Mlodinow belonged in such exalted company, he was clearly finding his way in the period that he knew Feynman, and was able to obtain insights from both Feynman and himself that might not have emerged had he been a fully confident scientist well into his career. In fact, Mlodinow's book gives a view of true genius from a vantage point that most of us can relate to. Mlodinow has his own, later unjustified, fears about mortality in the book and his own story is compelling on its own, but it is Feynman that deftly weaves science and everyday life together. Mlodinow taped some of their conversations and Feynman observed:

Don't think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do. Everyone puts together in ordinary life certain things to come to conclusions about the ordinary world. They make things that weren't there, such as drawings, such as writing, such as scientific theories. Is there something common in the process? I don't see such a big difference between that and the scientist's work.

It is hard to imagine any other human on earth who was more productive at building more useful things that were not already there than Richard Feynman. It was Feynman who proposed such a radical solution to the quantum confusion that exists in the sub-atomic world that he probably would have been marginalized for most of his career if it were not for the explanatory power of his theory. Feynman calculated a cosmic dance for objects in the quantum world, one where an object like an electron ignores our notions of past and present, and runs through a twilight zone of possibilities and positions. Adding them all together in a "sum over paths" leads to the consistent view of the world we observe for the large objects that surround us while accounting for the seemingly impossible things that occur at the quantum level.

One of the difficulties in understanding the quantum realm is that it seems to removed from our experience. If you could expand an atom to the size of the known universe, a lot of the really interesting stuff would take place in an area that would be smaller than your arm, and that’s a long way from the objects we are used to working with. The big stuff, on the other hand, happens near stars and black holes, destinations that are not going to be anyone’s vacation calendar for the immediate future. Still, many of the consequences of quantum physics have been confirmed experimentally, including Einstein's assertion that time is relative (atomic clocks can be shown to record slightly different times if one is left on the ground and the other is put in a fast plane), and that the notion of locality may not even exist on the quantum level due to the curious entanglement of twin quantum objects, a phenomenon that seems to allow them to "know" the position of the other, no matter how far apart they are. Even if science has never been of interest to you, it is well worth reading about nature's symphony of patterns and possibilities at the quantum level if only to appreciate an artistry that we interact with everyday without realizing it.

Feynman was able to make the mental leap to the quantum world and created an ingenious way of using diagrams to work with particle processes. Initially regarded with suspicion, Feynman diagrams became common place in Feynman’s own lifetime, a huge achievement for a scientist, and a testimony to the pragmatic nature of scence. It is one thing to dismiss an idea as absurd, it's quite another when it leads to solving problems in half an hour that used to take months.

Larry Laudan once wrote an overview of the progress of science and identified two fundamental building blocks for constructing theories.

Thesis 1: The first and essential acid test for any theory is whether it provides acceptable answers to interesting questions: whether, in other words, it provides satisfactory solutions to important problems.

Thesis 2: In appraising the merits of theories, it is more important to ask whether they constitute adequate solutions to significant problems than it is to ask whether they are "true," "corroborated," "well-confirmed" or otherwise justifiable within the framework of contemporay epistemology.

In fact, Laudan's book offers a compelling argument that problem solving is the most important hallmark of a successful theory. If Laudan is right, then Feynman was one of the ultimate practitioners of scientific progress. The genius of Feynman was not so much powerful mathematics, but powerful imagination, and he fundamentally seemed to believe that making the process playful and fun was a key component for success. He described to Mlodinow how he had invented equations and mental models even back in his high school days, often when the problem set had no application or even utility to anything in his life at the time. It was just a fun activity at the time.

I have often thought that quantum physics has some lessons that could be useful in the library world, even beyond the indirect benefits that will undoubtedly occur as a result of quantum computing, one of the hottest research areas for building tomorrows hardware and which may someday power vast library systems. The quantum world has required ingenious problem solving abilities and audacious mental maps to handle the implications and consequences that have arisen every time existence throws a few curves into our attempts to define an orderly existence. I wonder what Feynman would think of the famous mathmetician, and sometimes Stephen Hawking collaborator, Roger Penrose's work on applying quantum principles to conciousness, that the brain itself holds multiple possibilities in quantum superimposition, collapsed into something approximating a single answer when a problem or an information need arises.

Every physicist learns to deal with the Uncertainty Principle, Werner Heisenberg's gift to the world that dictates when you observe a particle, you cannot determine it's position and momentum without compromising one or the other. The more precisely you measure one, the more you forgo the possibility of precision in the other. In libraries, I would argue that this is comparable to IR notions of precision and recall. Our metadata models, information systems, and cataloguing practices reflect a view of the world in the same way that Newton constructed a model of the world as consisting of well-behaved objects right up to more recent descriptions of p-branes living in multi-dimensions. The reference desk might be one of many points where there's evidence that a myriad of factors hang in juxtaposition to meet an information need. I suspect that there are library equivalents of "sum over paths" in information seeking and Feynman diagrams yet to be drawn to compliment our honoured Venn diagrams. If nothing else, Richard Feynman showed the value of "thinking outside the box" in the face of information challenges. He would have made a great Librarian.

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