Was just watching a Knuth Q&A with Stanford from 2011 in which his pipe organ skills are praised, and then went over to his Stanford homepage [1]...He has a page devoted to his pipe organ. He also has a page for a hard-to-find book of his, "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated", in which he examines every 3:16 verse in the Bible [2]
This is extremely interesting, and something that I have wondered about myself. Although I am not, by any stretch of the definition, an "elite scientist", my professional life is all about algorithms, distributed systems, race conditions, memory leaks, linear algebra, binary arithmetic... but in my free time I write (novels, screenplays) and do some acting.
Something like 10 years ago I wouldn't have hired someone who didn't write code as their main/only hobby, for not considering them "vocational enough". I think many people here can relate to that feeling. But to my surprise, I have now become that person. Not that I don't love what I do, but my programming cravings are satisfied enough by my job, so I enjoy my free time becoming a richer, better-rounded human.
Part of this was getting over the feeling that every single minute of my existence had to be "productive". Now I can enjoy baking some cookies without considering the equation that says it would be "better" to buy them and do something more "productive" with that time. I enjoy writing novels that only a handful of people will read and screenplays that will almost certainly never be produced. Ironically, "unplugging" from my job is probably the best vaccine against burnout and thus making me more productive on the long term... not to mention generally happier :)
I find that I get the most mental and spiritual energy, by far, when I just "do what I want to/feel like doing." Rather than trying to live by some rational maxim like "maximize productivity." Part of what you said sounded kind of like this.
This fits well with the "Babylonian vs. Greek" approaches to science that Feynman talked about (a few days ago linked here, too), the Greek approach being "linear, logical", while the Babylonian approach is more all-encompassing, but possibly more messy, too.
If you like to read more about this, take a look at Mlodinow's "Feynman's Rainbow" - it's a small autobiographical book about his time as a starting physics post-doc after a highly promising PhD thesis. He had his office a few doors down from Feynman (Babylonian) and Gell-Mann (Greek) and the book juxtaposes both positions.
Mlodinow took up screenplay writing as a hobby, similar to OP's text his old PhD supervisor got angry when Mlodinow told him about his new hobby, "what a waste of time and thinking power" (paraphrased quote). He actually did end up writing a few episodes for Star Trek: TNG and is still a accomplished scientist, with quite a few successful popular science books published (one with Hawking: "The Grand Design").
Another thing:
>Salvador Dali would dream in his chair as part of his work routine. The authors of the paper “Dual thinking for scientists” suggest controlled risk-taking, and artistic hobbies, and so called “mind-wandering” into future scientific education.
You might have heard this (I think unproven) story a few times. Descartes always famously slept until lunch-time. One day he was idling in bed and watching a fly, which gave him the idea to describe the fly's movement in terms of three coordinates. Thus the Cartesian coordinate system was born.
Would 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' fit here too?
For me it is translates to lists vs maps (or hierarchy vs network) data structures. Where working on your topic it is very hard to thing outside the box, but as soon as you do some other intellectual task the chances of some random neural network mutation dramatically increases. These novel neural connections is a sole definition of creativity.
I wonder what is the correlation between left and right brain here (which are often mistakenly assigned to logic and emotion)?
Mlodinow published a few papers on what are called large N expansions in field theory, which are still a valid technique, but were very much in fashion back then. I don't think he's done much since.
You're right - I checked Google Scholar, most of his publications are from the PhD time in the 80s, one in 1997 and 2005, the rest is his popular science books. In the 2005 paper his affiliation is listed as "Department of Physics, Hunter College of CUNY, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021 USA" so maybe he focuses on teaching and popular science books?
If you ask an average person with no great accomplishments about their hobbies they are inclined to downplay them into temporary activities. When you go to make a biography of someone after an accomplishment everything they did seems like it may be of significance.
Hobbies that leave a lot of artifacts may have been a passing phase and not how the person would describe their hobbies 95% of the time when randomly polled.
Taking Feynman as an example, if his drawing weren't his official hobby then his percussion playing would be. Both of these could have been rather sporadic and therefore wouldn't be his responses as an anonymous scientist most of the time. He may also have been more into percussion, but drawing was much more likely to leave artifacts in those times.
They included scientists who have documented music, art, writing, etc., even if it wasn't self reported. Those samples are also going to be heavily biased towards the most accomplished scientists.
I think hobbies are important for everyone. I know just getting by is enough of a hobby for most of us, but to those who have a little free time--develop some interests?
My father was content with his job. He loved to talk about his job, something I didn't inherit. He was his job. He never pursued any hobbies. When he retired he literally didn't know what to do with his free time. He had the money to do pretty much whatever he wanted--within reason, but was lost. Looking back, he never should have retired?
Well he decided to retire at 55. The first few weeks were o.k., but I was worried because he didn't cultivate any outside interests/hobbies. Well he started drinking more, and died a painful death from liver cancer 10 years later.
My mother is afraid to retire because she saw what happened to my father. I got her into photography years ago, but she still needs something more. I think the secret is incorporating a hobby with others in a social setting? She's not into meeting new people, like myself, so I just hope she finds a group of people she feels comfortable with. She's not a drinker, so I don't have that to worry about. She is prone to depression though.
When I hear people stating I just don't care about "that stuff". I tell them just give it(whatever) a shot? The Internet has made learning a hobby so much easier?
I wonder if/how they controlled for age and free time. Surely those elite scientists are more likely to be old, retired or at least have a secure career so they have time to spend on their hobbies.
Totally. Scientists typically aren't given Nobel prizes until decades after the fact. And while I don't have any numbers to back it up, I suspect that more mostly-retired 70-year-olds have time to pick up a hobby on the side than the 35-year-olds in the heat of their career. Controlling for age is critical to relevance in a study like this.
Most of the really accomplished men and women I know in medicine have a wide range of interests, often including artistic pursuits. In fact it's quite a tradition among medical practitioners to take it very seriously to play a musical instrument, show great passion for photography, do fine woodworking, write inspired poetry, among an endless range of creative endeavors.
The same applies to the top-flight programmers I know, though fewer seem to take up visual art forms vs. music or writing. Just a theory, but perhaps the talents that lead to programming excellence overlap more with non-visual expression.
But that is the key: the best in any field very likely have more than one talent, so only natural to do a number of seemingly unrelated things well.
While I'm hardly in the league of the individuals mentioned in the article, I have contributed worthy if modest accomplishments. Like the subset of physician colleagues juggling "parallel" artistic careers, I'm also a professional artist (printmaking, photography), and not coincidentally pretty handy at manipulating computers as well.
It seems entirely natural for energetic, curious, motivated and gifted people to enjoy using their abilities in diverse ways. It follows that the most capable people will be show it in several domains.
A final thought is the experience of intense interest in seemingly diverse fields is probably not as discontinuous as others may think. People often say to me art must be a nice diversion from practicing medicine. Actually for me going from one to the other is seamless, there are common elements among my whole range of activities, the essential problem-solving core is not different. Yes the goals and technologies are unmistakeably distinct, yet putting some part of myself into every task is a constant.
Need to control for the correlation of financial privledge and experience.
Its a huge leap to conclude "showing great passion" for something is equivalent to talent. I would say in photography, the industry is supported by two main business models: (1) supporting ad-driven media; and (2) dentist-level dilletante hobbyists. The actual scale of (3) "true artists" as in art-gallery-collector level is staggeringly small. However, it is the work of (3) that really drives (1) and (2).
Relatedly, it's a very difficult leap to correlate the various composites of "accomplished" with skill or underlying quality. Its not at all difficult to gain large followers on modern media platforms for reasons not at all relying on "quality".
Asymetric access to information will almost always trump "talent" whatever that is when it comes to media-driven distribution networks. It doesn't matter if it is "writing" or "reportage (photography)", if you have information that is not widely available otherwise people will 'like' it, 'follow it' or 'pay' for it. This is a simple cost-benefit analysis by the consumer (its easier and cheaper to consume the experience via media than by actual-real-world means). It says nothing really of the skill underlying the product...the talent of the "writing" or the quality of the "photography" can be quite incidental to the consumer who lacks the relevant choices (this is the asymetric information distribution at play).
This is why for the most part, journalists and pj's are not considered part of the artistic pantheon despite their widespread popularity...until they cross over using other formats (eg long-form/anthologies, published works, gallery exibitions etc).
The point being that weath and asymmetric information are higly correlated, emprically.
Wealth and artisinal-skill or artistic talent, not obviously, but in any even much more loosely, so.
My fiancee's uncle is one of the top doctors in India. He is the private physician to some of the country's leading politicians and bureaucrats. He's often on TV to educate the general public about diseases.
He is also a very serious musician and takes an hour of music lessons every morning.
Elite scientists also have more money and spare time to do this shit. This is pretty poor science; one presumes the author has no artistic inclination.
Not shocking to me that passionate, intellectual people pursue hobbies outside of their work. It gives the mind something to do and provides for curiosity and sense of fulfillment that is completely under one's own control (vs. things in professional life, oddly may be limited based upon where one works, work place politics, etc).
Here's a simplistic analysis viewing everything as data.
Average scientists like music and photos. Music is patterned data. Photos are dense data (1 picture=1000 words). They don't like writing as much, which is thinking. They don't like arts and writing as much, which is associative thinking.
Nobel prize winning scientists like music even more (patterned data), photos less (dense data dilute quality?). They like writing (thinking) more. They like arts and crafts (associative thinking) even more.
I felt like the Nobel prizewinner connection to the hobby or avocation of "writing" (which was among the strongest of the effects seen) has a very simple explanation: when you win a Nobel, you get lots of invitations to write opinion articles.
In other words, causality can run the other way -- the prize causes the writing to assume greater importance.
The process by which a discipline selects a standard-bearer to represent it in newspaper op-ed articles, TV interviews, plenary lectures, and future-of-the-discipline commissions is complex, but it is all wrapped up in prizes and seniority.
What about taking photos? That packs the thing you associated more with average scientits with the creativty and art that would belong to top scientists.
(Not a criticism, I just thought that up and would like to hear your point of view).
I think I made I mistake when I called photos dense data.
I think I meant photos are high quantity of data (1 photo=1000 words).
But high quantity doesn't equal high quality. High quality (high data density? high signal?) is found in a single, 10-word succinct sentence more often than it's found in a photo. In that sense the signal in a photo is more diluted by more noise.
This definition is in line with what I said about elite scientists. They prefer photos less than average scientists do, because the signal is low. It's interesting that this difference isn't as big though. Maybe it's harder in general to find the signal in high noise (the few good words in the 1000 words of a photo), irrespective of being elite or average.
Maybe that's where painting comes in. It isn't as fixed of a medium as a photo, which may make it easier for the elite to capture the few good words a photo may not. Although this is probably connected with time too. You can continue working on a painting; paintings are abandoned. Whereas a photo is a still in time, often completely uncapturable at other times.
I wish the study had also captured physical exercise. That'd be more data on kinetic thinking.
A thought on music, which is off the charts for elites. Music is patterns and paradoxically patterns compress very well. Literally, think .mpeg, deflate, arithmetic coding and dictionary compression that can yield 100x benefit. Music is probably an uncompressed spider web that reels us in to some small, powerful data function. Music is the macroexpanded source code and its data expression is the macro.
As an amateur photographer (luckily praised by friends and family, thought I'd never try to make a carreer of it), I can tell you a good photograph, and photography as an art, are extremely difficult.
Technically it requires a deep understanding of lenses, film/sensors (and file formats in digital photography too), but mostly how light behaves. And then comes composition, imagination (to "see" a shot before you even try it, prepare the lens at a set focal distance, focus, aperture, exposure, ISO levels, if you need a filter or not, and how that would affect the shot), the "artistic" characteristics of the image, making the subject feel comfortable if it's a person, timing for the precise moment that will make or break the picture.
However, I didn't find it clear if you were referring to "seeing photographs" (apreciating them?) or "doing photography". Like I said, having a small knowledge on it, I find it as artistic and complex as all the other mentioned alternatives. Different too, but I wouldn't call it better or worse.
I read the article and I don't think they answered one of my biggest questions: is there a causative link from artistic endeavors to improvement in scienctific endeavors? Learning a musical instrument has been on my todo list for a while and I can't help but wonder in light of articles such as these if it would have other ancillary benefits to my cognition.
If you're interested, then I suggest pursuing it for enjoyment, and see how it goes.
I'm a scientist and a musician. If there's a link between art and science, I think it may simply be that both are sources of enjoyment. And maybe the great scientists are the ones who have elevated themselves to a level where they can afford to pursue science as an art form, rather than as a competition or job.
For me, playing music is like a way to recharge my mental batteries. The benefit may lie in what I'm not doing, i.e., thinking about work. And since I play in groups, it forces me into a different social environment than what I encounter at work. But it can also be an individual pursuit -- I know musicians who love to play at home but have no interest in performing.
Perhaps it could be a deeper understanding of the subject matter, and the ability to apply the material to other topics. In the case of sculpture and mechanical engineering, there are many skills that overlap.
Application of studies and science is really neat too, I always reuse things that i learn to my car restorations, comes in handy to be sneaky.
I recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's The Innovators books. One of the things that caught my attention was that for many of the people mentioned in the book there was a mention of extra-curricular interests.
[1] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/books.html
[2] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/316.html
edit:
And of course, Feynman and his "very, very many female nudes"...he has a hilarious chapter in one of his memoirs about visiting strip clubs: http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/17/richard-feynman-ofey...