Collective Conscience

Why does everyone know abut Albert Einstein, but not too many people know about John Bardeen? Bardeen was the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field, shouldn't he be just as famous as Einstein? I think it has to do with the limitations on the world's "collective conscience." There is only so much material that can be told to everyone (or at least let's say 90 to 95 percent of the world--or maybe just the US). Someone--or a group of people--in the media decide what gets put on the front pages of the major newspapers and what gets reported during the first several minutes of a news broadcast. There is only so much material that can fit there. My guess is that there are about five or six stories that get rehashed over and over. Every news outlet tells pretty much the same ones. Or if they don't tell all the same stories, then it's only the stories that do overlap that reach the 95% majority of the world (or national) audience. So there is only room for a certain number of people to make the really big news that makes them famous. And to be really famous you need to make the news many times. There's even less room for the "many-timers". Or put another way, if someone gets reported on many times, then there is someone else that is not getting reported on.

For example, Barack Obama. He's probably the most famous person in the world right now. We heard about him all during the campaign and now we still hear all about him--perhaps more. He is definitely in the collective conscience. Everyone knows who he is. But how many people do we not know about, or how many inportant events did not reach the collective conscience because we were hearing instead about Barack's ice cream choice on his family's Father's Day outing?

Sports give several examples. Lance Armstrong? Everyone knows about him. He made the news so many times with seven Tour de France victories. Now whenever anyone talks about the Tour de France, they mention Lance. We have Floyd Landis, too, who made the news because of drug-use accusations. I'd say he's in the collective conscience, or was. Perhaps now, a year or more later, he's falling out of it. There is only so much room in the "cycling" collective conscience and if you don't keep making headlines, you're out.

Tennis? Andre Agassi. Pete Sampras. Roger Federer. I could think of a few others, but that's about it.

Nobel laureates? Einstein. Fermi. For literature: Hemingway, Steinbeck. I just browsed through the Nobel laureate list and, of course, I don't know 90% of them. These are the people whose contributions to the world were deemed so awesome that they earned the biggest prize known. But there is only so much room in the collective conscience even for Nobel laureates. Indeed, instead of knowing about Martti Ahtisaar, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize winner, there is only enough room in the collective conscience for Brittany Spears (or is she dropping out now, too?).

So how does this relate to research? There are certain things that everybody knows. The challenge is to go beyond that and find the interesting things that nobody is yet talking about. And if you can find out things that will enter the collective conscience, then your work has the most impact.

But on the other hand, we should realize that there is much, much more of importance in this life than what everybody knows about. That collection of information is so small that if we're only focussed on it, we're really missing out.

Burger Freak

In a paper by Low (1981) there is a relationship for tortuosity and porosity called the "Burger-Frieke" equation. (tortuosity)^2 = porosity + a(1-porosity) where a is a fitting factor. Yummy. 

Carman meets Hoek

For lunch I decided to find a park where I've never eaten lunch before. I did find one, and I was amazed I've never noticed it before. 

As I sat and ate leisurely I pondered on how to model the fouling in my RO system. Hoek and Elimelech's 2003 paper on cake-enhanced concentration polarization is what I've been working with. The trick is figuring out how to distinguish between cake-enhanced concentration polarization and simple cake resistance. Then I figured, they should be related, right? The parameters in the Carman-Kozeny equation for cake resistence should be the same as for cake-enhanced concentration polarization (specifically the calculation of hindered back-diffusion). We'll see if it works.

The big problem with my dissertation

Sitting here in the Collaboratory getting away from the roofing fumes in my office, I just sat down to write the 'Final Thoughts' section of my dissertation. I leaned back and looked at the ceiling to ponder. Then it hit me. The problem with my dissertation is not that it's too broad; it's actually pretty narrowly focussed. It focusses on fouling in seawater desalination by bloom-forming algae. Actually, just one algal speceis. The problem with that focus is that it's not broadly applicable. This is, I feel, one key to a PhD research project: narrowly focussed but broadly applicable. That's why the structure of DNA was such a good project. Or figuring out how to calculate an integral. Or how to make synthetic rubber. Those would have been good PhD topics.

So are there any more of those topics left? I guess one needs to be creative to find them. Hopefully they'll let me graduate with my non-optimal topic so I can work with future students on finding some NF-BA topics. Something to think about for the post-doc, too.

Starting a blog now is a bad idea.

I've thought about starting a new blog for a while. It seems like it would be nice to have a place to put thoughts and ideas and keep a record. But why start it right now, less than two months away from defending my dissertation?! Sounds like procrastination and a means of wasting time to me. But it was excellent weather when I went running this morning and the trees at the arboretum were inspiring. So here's the new blog. 

The first post topic: the blog's name. It was going to be something like "Dave's observations and wild ideas." Then I thought maybe "Dave's observations and crackpot ideas" would be more fitting. This American Life aired a story about a crackpot physicist who knew he was a crackpot but didn't accept it. That could be me; so many crazy dreams and wild ideas, but without the background and experience to make anything come of them. Crackpot. 

A few years ago I made a crock-pot dinner for a girl and called to tell her it was ready. In the message I left it sounded like I said, "My crack-pipe is warm and ready to go..." So crackpots and crockpots have an intwined history. I'll go with crockpot.

Crockpot is fitting, too, because here is where I'll put a lot of raw carrots, celery, meat, and potatoes. They will be without form or polish, just the ingredients. Some of them will get drowned out and you'll never know they were ever in the mix. But hopefully some of them will release their flavors over time and become a yummy productive meal.

And the reason this might not be a bad time to begin is that I'm stuck in the doldrums of Science: writing my dissertation. Any new ideas I have must remain unexplored while I tweak all my old ideas and line up all my citations and equations. How is a guy to be creative while he's reading material that he wrote two years ago for the 15th time? Here is my outlet.