#gleick

[Quoted from James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, Abacus Books, 1993.]

As a teenager (p. 35-36, 47): 

In school every problem had an answer. In recreational mathematics one could quickly understand and investigate problems that were open. Mathematical game playing also brought a release from authority. Recognizing some illogic in the customary notation for trigonometric functions, Feynman invented a new notation of his own . . . He was free, but he was also extremely methodical. He memorized tables of logarithms and practiced mentally deriving values in between. He began to fill notebooks with formulas, continued fractions whose sums produced the constants π and e.

. . . By the end of this year he had mastered trigonometry and calculus, both differential and integral. His teachers could see where he was heading. After three days of Mr. Augsbury’s geometry class, Mr. Augsbury abdicated, putting his feet up on his desk and asking Richard to take charge. In algebra Richard had now taught himself conic sections and complex numbers, domains where the business of equation solving acquired a geometrical tinge, the solver having to associate symbols with curves in the plane or in space. He made sure the knowledge was practical. His notebooks contained not just the principles of these subjects but also extensive tables of trigonometric functions and integrals—not copied but calculated, often by original techniques that he devised for the purpose. For his calculus notebook he borrowed a title from the primers he had studied so avidly, Calculus for the Practical Man. When his classmates handed out yearbook sobriquets, Feynman was not in contention for the genuinely desirable Most Likely to Succeed and Most Intellectual. The consensus was Mad Genius.

. . . Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, filling a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life, and he would remember that he was standing in Morrie’s father’s leather shop when he learned it.

As a graduate student (p. 130):

Feynman had not yet finished his second year of graduate school. He remained ignorant of the basic literature and unwilling even to read through the papers of Dirac or Bohr. This was now deliberate. In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About. For the first but not the last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject. When he was done he had a notebook of which he was especially proud. It was not much use in preparing for the examination, as it turned out.

As a scientist (p. 437):

The question of what our lives mean causes us all to pause. In my continuing quest to understand, besides my work and talking with colleagues, I read Chaos: Making a New Science ©2008 by James Gleick. by James Gleick I thought understanding more about Chaos would help because it espouses to make universal laws about complex behavior. It also helped me understand that many things we take as…

It iz hard to compreehend a world in which ther iz not a series of defined spellings for the wordes in the English langwege. To continue the joke on any longer would be unnecessary, you get the point. Anyway, I do in fact find it hard to comprehend a world in which there is not a series of defined spellings for words. Whenever I spot a spelling mistake today, I typically cringe or squirm a little bit in my seat. I have grown up learning the right way to spell, fascinated by the annual spelling bees. What's the purpose of words being spelled correctly though? I have read the studies which say that the only thing that matters is the sound of a word, not the actual spelling or order of the bulk of the letters. For example: msot peploe can raed tihs mesgsae wthiuot hvaing to tihnk too mcuh aobut it. Additionally, living in a world of constant spell check, I begin to wonder the question more and more. The opposite of us, "Cawdrey lived in a time of information poverty," (52) and was therefore on a constant quest to answer questions for himself and lay the groundwork for future definitions of correctness with his book A Table Alphabeticall. As humans begin to progress further and further into an assumed state of 'perfection,' I believe it gets increasingly important to remember our personal roots as people before answering the question of why we need uniform correctness.

As a young kid I spent arguably too many hours peering into the pages of a dictionary. However, this did not necessarily mean I was good at spelling, nor that I had 'goodly grammar' either. Conversely, I was horrible at it. Around this time I was in second grade, the grade in which I met my worst enemy - the spelling test. A teacher would yell out a word, and instantly I would have to revolutionize my long-held thought process of just speaking and drawing to a system of ordered writing that made sense. It took me a while to grasp how to simply spell the words, but until now I had never conceptualized just how greatly the world has been changed by the establishment of a dictionary. As I began to further my studies of the dictionary, I embarked on a similar (though a lot less pioneer-like) path to that of Robert Cawdrey writing a dictionary. "Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course," (59) and that was exactly how I was starting to interpret the language. I was surrounded with words, and intelligent people speaking what I knew to be proper English. However, it had not meant anything to me until I actually began to grasp all of the denotations behind what it was that they were saying. As I saw a more defined, uniform version of the English language, I became more in-tune with the world around me. Though Cawdrey was not much of a prominent historical figure, nobody knowing anything about his life other than his magnum opus book, Cawdrey shed a light on the English language that persists even through today (63).

Approximately four hundred years after Cawdrey drafted a preliminary dictionary, John Simpson, "the editor of a grander book of words, the Oxford English Dictionary," (55) came on to the scene. Everyone knows what the Oxford English Dictionary and its significance, but I would wager that few know the roots that John Simpson had in Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall. As I grew older, and was understandably not as interested in reading the dictionary "for fun," I got more interested in using bigger words in conversation, writing, and overall trying to make myself sound more like a pretentious intellectual than I truly ever was - Mom, I swear it was simply a phase. I entered myself in the local spelling bees, I did the library literary submission contests, and I was a total bookworm for a while. As I became consumed by the stringing of words and clever synonyms, I began to develop a new mastery of the English language as I procured a mental dictionary pages longer than it had ever been before. Reading, listening, indexing, all things that I did to better my vocabulary and educate myself in the meaning and spelling of words. In this sense, I was very similar in actions to both Cawdrey and Simpson, pioneering my very own dictionary, always wanting to be better at English.

Little does the common man know about the origin of the manuscript, or of written language altogether. In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood,  James Gleick provides the reader with just that. Starting with Claude Shannon's founding of the electronic communication age, then jumping back to the ancient illiterate civilizations, Gleick provides the reader with a fundamental understanding of how writing has progressed throughout the ages. Through the history of tribal communication and contemporary philosophical thought, writing is essential to our lives, influencing the ways that we go about life as a whole — a storyboard filled with words that are "stable and immobile" (47).

The modern first-world life has a relatively cookie-cutter flow. First, a child is born to a mother and father in a hospital with no sense of communication, no real defined sense of mathematical principles, and a general sense of blissful ignorance. Throughout the first few weeks of its life, a baby wails and cries, each of these sounds trying to convey one of many messages pertaining to the things that he or she is innately feeling. Whether it be hunger, thirst, or a need to relieve themselves, babies make their needs known. Though these needs may always be decipherable, the principle of communication behind them is fascinating. When Gleick writes about native African tribes used drums to convey their messages over miles of ground to nearby tribes, "the drums metamorphosed speech" (22). To someone unfamiliar with the drum language, all you could hear was a series of beats. Similarly, to someone unfamiliar with the language of babies, all you can hear in obnoxious screams or giggles that signal attention. However, the babies like the drummers "were not signaling but talking: they spoke a special adapted language" (22). This form of language, based on tonality, expression, and inflection, is the first stage of language development among modern people and is the first dive into a world of standard, definite means of communication.

Progressing past the years of infancy, we approach the 'terrible twos' and 'terrible-er threes' where kids begin to develop even more cognitive power, and are inundated with the world of numbers and letters. By this time in their lives, toddlers are likely watching cartoons or listening to stories that echo the alphabet and basic word structure. They can communicate ideas through expression and actions, but are limited greatly in terms of their word choice. In The  Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood , Gleick tells us that as words and vocabularies began to evolve, Plato warned that the "multitude cannot accept the idea of beauty in itself rather than many beautiful things... instead of the many specific things" (36). In this passage Plato is discussing how forcing words upon a people is a inhibiting, and that it limits their ability to express themselves when all they have previously known in oral lifestyles. The life of a young kid is strikingly comparable. Though society teaches that the more words and phrases one can tactfully is a measure of intelligence, children are unable to express the full ideas they have in their heads through the limited words they know as they begin to learn the language. This is similar to the problems people face when trying to learn a new additional language. Learners revert to thinking in their original language, unable to fully process ideas in the new system they are researching. However, as soon as kids begin to "purify the medium: eliminate ambiguous words and wooly syntax" (41), they begin to wield the language with a new degree of power that starts to define a stable means of communication uniform between themselves and others.