Listen now (59 min) | My guest this week is the distinguished physicist Sylvester “Jim” Gates. Jim was my colleague at Brown for years (he’s now at the University of Maryland), and we’re both alumni of MIT. Jim has made pathbreaking contributions to areas of physics that laymen like me can barely understand—he’s a deep, deep guy. He’s also got some thoughts on race and diversity in the sciences that give us an opportunity for some friendly debate.
I was particularly struck by Dr. Gates comments concerning test scores. While I do not disagree with the analysis, I would take the statement further: An IQ test measures nothing more than how well one can take an IQ test. Please forgive the tautology.
My academic background is in the preparation of teachers for urban, public-school classrooms. Several out-of-school factors have always been an important part of that preparation.
First, kindergarteners from print-rich homes come to school with working vocabularies far in advance of fellow students from print-poor homes. It is as fundamental a problem as brain development. That initial vocabulary gap can follow a capable, charming, bright student throughout her academic career.
Elementary teachers know this and work hard to identify those students and help them as much as possible in the time they have together.
Second, stressors at home (chaotic, unpredictable schedules, lack of quiet time, arguments, disciplinary techniques, TV babysitting, violence, fear, threats - real or imagined, etc.) create cycles of cortisol dumps that can permanently affect brain development (see David Berliner, et al. Arizona State University).
Elementary teachers know this too, and do what they can to create warm, loving, safe environments for their students, as best they can in the time they have together.
Finally, remember that teachers have their elementary charges about 6-7 hours a day, 30-35 hours a week. The students, each of them dripping with potential and hope, return to their neighborhoods and homes for the remaining 18 hours a day, about 138 hours a week. What happens in those 18 hours is out of their teachers’ direct control.
We often hear the old adage, “It takes a village to raise a child.” That’s true...but their is a prior, ongoing component to that: “It takes teachers to raise that village.”
God bless and protect the children, their parents and their teachers.
Your reference to 'lack of quiet time' is often understated as a stressor. I'm an African American who has been in innumerable low/middle income African American homes. More often than not it's a home with multiple siblings (and other relatives) who are often verbally sparring with each other, music and social media is constantly in the background and the shows/social media/movies/sites/music they are ingesting is mostly African American centric (or adjacent). The time for reading, focus, concentration and creativity is a rarity. Their social and emotional maturation is stunted, not to mention learning development.
Well said, but teachers need always to exercise caution to not overstep. Its one thing to guide a child behind the back of an abusive parent, but quite another to coach them to begin a course of hormone and/ or surgical gender transition that a parent doesn't know about, based on what could prove to be something they'll grow out of.
I fully agree on our need to expand educational resources to invest in all people. We don't know where the next Einstein will come from. However, we need to use the resources that we have prudently and to areas where it's been proven to work (a la Roland Fryer). Moreover, there has to be a way to inculcate in young, inner-city youth the value of spending more time learning academic subject as compared to bball. The odds are better that young men and women can develop skills learned in the academic setting and be very successful in life as compared to becoming an NBA player.
I think the very best resources we have are the parents of each student. They are the most fundamental foundation for any child. There is power in parents! If only we can all understand this and just do our best. I’ve known of and read about (not counting my own experience) countless instances where poor but focused parents help their children value learning (of ALL things) and expend a mighty effort to help their kids gain access to the best education they can find and press forward to be successful - and successful can just be graduating high school and finding a job, or it can be attending and graduating college or even graduate school. In our family, regardless of each one’s educational status, success is raising children to become self-reliant adults who can take care of themselves and participate fully in caring for their families.
My observation rests in the discomfort in Glenn's voice; even as he shows due respect for Dr. Gates' opinion on the gamble of out-of-the box hiring and academic acceptance practices, he seems torn over it. That's what makes this such riveting intercourse. I'm sure Dr. Loury has played a hunch or two based on the perceived potential of an unpolished candidate, but he seems discomfited about totally buying into jazz theory that might analogize fast twitch muscle fibers with nimble neurons.
I’m sure you probably didn’t mean it that way, but it sounds like you think jazz is a matter of fast twitch muscle and not nimble neurons. I’m sure you realize that jazz requires a lot of nimble neurons (as does basketball, the other oft cited analogy, for that matter). In fact, early mastery of a musical instrument is very strongly related with the development of mathematical thinking.
I was trying (perhaps, unsuccessfully) to make a point about Glenn's discomfiture with the idea of applying a stereotype ahead of judging the skills and proclivities of an individual. I should have presented "jazz" in the way I do here-- in quotes.
He lost me with his discussion on test scores. Over the past 50 years an enormous investment has been made in public schools, albeit poorly by governments. Those who want to learn from dedicated teachers will do so.
While rhetorically appealing, the idea that poor funding is responsible for disparate test scores between races doesn’t actually make any sense when examined. If monetary investment in students is returned in academic success, then we should expect the primary predictor of academic achievement to be school--and not race. But that isn’t what we see at all. Go to any suburban upper middle class high school like the one I went to, where this variable is controlled for, and you’ll find the same thing: Asians at the top, blacks at the bottom.
I’m reluctant to start arguments with people clearly much smarter than me, such as Gates, but even his own anecdote about his chess club seems to contradict his premise. He had good teachers and received a good education; he didn’t need lavish funding to beat the white schools in chess, or to outperform them on tests.
Good schools are important. Funding plays a role. But the idea that investment is anywhere close to the primary explanation for the major achievement gaps in this country is obviously shallow. Wilfred Reilly would post his chart of “hours spent studying by race.” I’d link it here, but let’s be honest--we all know what it’s going to show.
All that said, Gates is an amazing speaker, and this was a great episode.
The relationship between money and educational quality doesn't have to be a perfect 1-1 linear one to have some validity. There are a lot of really bad schools in America, but it could be, for example, that past a certain basic threshold (which some schools are well below), spending provides diminishing returns.
What they don't address is the notion that in "elite" education now, kids are being actively misinformed. It would appear that Stanford law students are actually worse off than if they had never gone to school at all.
I don’t know… I went to a pretty mixed high school (both ethnically and economically) and the biggest predictor of success was wealth more than race. The top of the class were mostly immigrants who worked really hard, especially the most affluent immigrants. All six of the kids in my graduating class with 4.0 or higher were born in other countries (not all Asian) and most of the kids I’d gone to elementary school with (one of the poorest in the district at the time) either didn’t graduate, graduated from the “alternative” high school program, and/or didn’t continue on to college.
I currently live in an affluent area of a mixed district and though per student funding is the same across the county there are huge difference in resources at the schools. My kids’ elementary school PTA annual budget is over $50k with $20-30k carryover because it is too much to spend. The teachers get at least twice a year class gifts worth multiple hundred dollars. On the less affluent side of the district kids don’t always have shoes, haven’t had breakfast or enough to eat on weekends, may have trauma and behavioral issues, etc. With the exception of the rare do-gooder, where do you think the best teachers would prefer to work?
Thank you so much for having Dr. Gates on your podcast. It was an informative, engaging and entertaining conversation. On the issue of supersymmetry theory and Dr. Gates work in the field, I was disappointed and frankly a bit surprised that he did not acknowledge the 1974 work of Austrian theoretical physicist Julius Erich Wess and Italian theoretical physicist Bruno Zumino for their joint development of
supersymmetry and conformal field theory. Dr. Gates was just beginning his post graduate work when Wes’s and Zumino were publishing their theories. I’m confident it was not an intentional oversight on Dr. Gates part.
I have one suggestion for another way to approach Affirmative Action. This approach works well for both business and sports. If a manager is looking to hire someone for a position, it often makes sense to consider what each candidate will contribute to the team 2 or 3 years down the road rather than basing the decision on what the candidate currently would contribute. This approach forces a sensible manager to consider each candidate's background. If a candidate has not had effective training, but they present evidence that they can catch-up to others with effective training, then that should be considered.
Indeed, I frame it that Affirmative action shouldn't be lowering the bar, but devoting extra resources in recruiting sufficiently meritorious individuals from underprivileged demographics so that people can meet their potential
Sometimes a candidate can be rough around the edges even though they have a lot of potential. Someone with a lot of potential might be behind others now, but that person might benefit more from additional training than someone would.
I enjoyed the analogy to the discipline of music and symbolic vs. experiential knowledge, particularly with the implied understanding that blacks have made enormous contributions to our musical culture and, indeed, the modern world. I wonder, under closer scrutiny, how well this translates to STEM fields. I also question how the two dimensions of knowledge are presumed to act upon on each other. A common assumption is that they are somehow inversely correlated, but I'm not sure that this is true.
Surprised that Gates failed to mention that, in addition to being an "outsider" of sorts, Einstein was also a terrible student!
I understood him, when speaking of STEM fields and music/jazz, to be discussing pushing boundaries on existing knowledge. Most people in STEM just apply other peoples knowledge to build or test or make things. Some people have to have imagination to try something new, or see the same thing from a new perspective to create something new. There are a lot of different skill sets in STEM that take people on different career paths and trajectories.
Thanks, Amy. I grew up playing jazz and understand the analogy in the same way, but while I find it compelling in a poetic sense, I'm not sure it goes all the way through in the real world. For instance, there are musicians who play entirely by feel, can't read a lick, and happen to be some of the greatest, most innovative players I've ever encountered. How exactly does this translate to the physics lab?
The other piece that I found strained was the implicit notion that students who excel in one dimension must therefore be deficient in the other, and that by selecting for the first in admissions standards, you are effectively skewing the racial makeup of the student body.
How it applies in the physics lab would be in the asking of a new question (like Einstein did with his relativity thought experiments, even though his math skills sucked), coming up with a new way to test a hypothesis (Rosalind Franklin using X-ray crystallography to “photograph” DNA), or have a new interpretation on someone else’s work (obviously lots of examples of this, but noting it’s hard to go against perceived settled science that takes a different kind of thinker/contrarian ).
I understood the feeling vs experience thing a bit differently. In science there is knowledge and intuition, knowledge impacts your ability to solve the problem and intuition impacts how you solve the problem. Or if you rather, there’s the math skills that let you sit down and apply the formulas and there’s the imagination that lets you model the problem mentally. You really need both, but usually people are stronger in one than the other. Probably most people who are successful are good at both, but one is still a relative strength. I think his argument is that the testing only finds the knowledge, and ignores the value of the intuition.
Cheers, Amy. I think we're mostly on the same page, and I can certainly understand how something like intuition might be undervalued on the SAT, but I maintain that the metaphor is imperfect, particularly as Gates emphasizes jazz. In the end, all the great jazz innovators also had "chops" -- they weren't "non-musicians" of the Brian Eno ilk. Eno is a brilliant producer, but his talents are only manifested with the input of real players.
Much is made of Einstein's shortcomings as a student -- it is a trope of sorts, and indeed you and I both invoke it above -- but he also had serious math and physics chops, which were evident at a young age. I'm quite certain he would have aced the quantitative portions of a modern aptitude test.
The role of cultural diversity in the development of music is very real, but I think this gets conflated somewhat with the "dimensions of knowledge" argument. Gates mentions the influence of American music on Dvorak. Of course, it was the modes of Eastern music that helped propel jazz into the post-bop era. And the roots of American music itself lie in a wonderful amalgamation of diverse traditions. Going back to physics, however, I don't see the same potential for a set of diverse traditions to blend in the lab or the lecture hall. What exactly are those traditions? In my mind, this is where physics and music are different. Music sits at the base of human experience: most cultures have a rich musical tradition. Physics is esoteric.
So first, let me admit I am not at all a music person. In fact, I may be completely wired backwards with respect to emotional reactions to it. Also, I have no desire to speak for the professor, he clearly is very skilled at that. That said, I respectfully submit you may be taking the metaphor too literally. The professor seems used to for lack of a better word “dumbing” down physics to be understood by a general audience, and music is an analogy that a general audience gets…
Perhaps the SAT/GRE analogy is to reading music? You can pay an instrument by ear without ever.reading music and have amazing skill. It is my understanding that at one point schools rejected amazing musicians because they couldn’t read music. It is a lot easier to learn to read music than to learn to have a musical ear, so a lot of talent in this scenario went unrecognized. Similarly, I suspect not every mind-blowingly talented concert pianists could ever improvise. That’s okay! They are just totally different skill sets!
Similarly, he’s talking about moving physics forward… that doesn’t only take “concert pianists” it also takes the self learned, by ear musicians who don’t know enough about music theory to be constrained by it…? Of course in physics you need math, but contrary to your assertion that Einstein had serious math chops, it is my understanding that he did not (that his wife and research partners went through the tedious math proofs to prove his intuition, but who knows… everyone hijacks Einstein for their own pet theory). I heard his argument to be a simple warning that if we judge purely on math skills on tests we miss a whole lot of levels of thinking. I agree with this just from personal experience.
I don’t know that, per se it’s culture that makes the difference. I’m not sure if you picked the best at math from 5 cultures that you’d have the best team. I think you’d do best to pick 5 people that are all good at math and think differently. I think the issue is how you decide “good at math”. I think too often we have unnecessary binaries between capable and not, and I heard him hesitant to say a person is in the “not” category because they didn’t get a 800 on the math SAT. I could get out my personal soapbox… but that was the impression I got.
For you particular example, of people I am unfamiliar with… (sorry!) Brian Eno Ilk being a great producer but a less talented musician on his own is exactly the point! Science these days is based on teams, and to go back to the jazz metaphor, teams are what enable people working together to really shine. Study after study have shown diversity (not merely racial, but of experience) make for better, more productive groups and help to overcome groupthink.
All good points, Amy. I think we may have to agree to disagree on this one aspect even as we are mostly in agreement on the larger issue.
This whole discussion makes me think of one of Val Kilmer's first movies, "Real Genius", which explores the space between what might be called "measurable" smarts and the less tangible counterpart. Now, the science in the story is pure fantasy, and it has been mocked as such (in my opinion, unfairly -- it is 80s teen comedy after all!), but it draws on very real ideas about well-roundedness and social barriers to learning. In the movie, the character played by Kilmer has an epiphany that supposedly leads to a huge advancement in the science of lasers, and it is brought on by a spiritual breakdown of sorts.
In real life, I wonder how much scientific advancement is revelatory in nature, and how much can be attributed to sustained "outside-the-box" thinking.
Can I say that having listened to Prof Gates for many years, that he is also the one of the most engaging science communicators in the world, and he was able to demonstrate that during this interview. And I can imagine his contribution to physics extends greatly to his inspiring many to follow in his path.
Prof. Gates is new to me. As I listened to this conversation I felt as though I was listening to a master communicator of the sciences and also a refreshingly open person. I hope he comes back sooner than later to TGS.
What a joy this conversation was. Thanks, Drs. Glenn and Jim.
I was particularly struck by Dr. Gates comments concerning test scores. While I do not disagree with the analysis, I would take the statement further: An IQ test measures nothing more than how well one can take an IQ test. Please forgive the tautology.
Great stuff. PLEASE extend this conversation by a factor of 20.
My academic background is in the preparation of teachers for urban, public-school classrooms. Several out-of-school factors have always been an important part of that preparation.
First, kindergarteners from print-rich homes come to school with working vocabularies far in advance of fellow students from print-poor homes. It is as fundamental a problem as brain development. That initial vocabulary gap can follow a capable, charming, bright student throughout her academic career.
Elementary teachers know this and work hard to identify those students and help them as much as possible in the time they have together.
Second, stressors at home (chaotic, unpredictable schedules, lack of quiet time, arguments, disciplinary techniques, TV babysitting, violence, fear, threats - real or imagined, etc.) create cycles of cortisol dumps that can permanently affect brain development (see David Berliner, et al. Arizona State University).
Elementary teachers know this too, and do what they can to create warm, loving, safe environments for their students, as best they can in the time they have together.
Finally, remember that teachers have their elementary charges about 6-7 hours a day, 30-35 hours a week. The students, each of them dripping with potential and hope, return to their neighborhoods and homes for the remaining 18 hours a day, about 138 hours a week. What happens in those 18 hours is out of their teachers’ direct control.
We often hear the old adage, “It takes a village to raise a child.” That’s true...but their is a prior, ongoing component to that: “It takes teachers to raise that village.”
God bless and protect the children, their parents and their teachers.
Your reference to 'lack of quiet time' is often understated as a stressor. I'm an African American who has been in innumerable low/middle income African American homes. More often than not it's a home with multiple siblings (and other relatives) who are often verbally sparring with each other, music and social media is constantly in the background and the shows/social media/movies/sites/music they are ingesting is mostly African American centric (or adjacent). The time for reading, focus, concentration and creativity is a rarity. Their social and emotional maturation is stunted, not to mention learning development.
Well said, but teachers need always to exercise caution to not overstep. Its one thing to guide a child behind the back of an abusive parent, but quite another to coach them to begin a course of hormone and/ or surgical gender transition that a parent doesn't know about, based on what could prove to be something they'll grow out of.
I fully agree on our need to expand educational resources to invest in all people. We don't know where the next Einstein will come from. However, we need to use the resources that we have prudently and to areas where it's been proven to work (a la Roland Fryer). Moreover, there has to be a way to inculcate in young, inner-city youth the value of spending more time learning academic subject as compared to bball. The odds are better that young men and women can develop skills learned in the academic setting and be very successful in life as compared to becoming an NBA player.
I think the very best resources we have are the parents of each student. They are the most fundamental foundation for any child. There is power in parents! If only we can all understand this and just do our best. I’ve known of and read about (not counting my own experience) countless instances where poor but focused parents help their children value learning (of ALL things) and expend a mighty effort to help their kids gain access to the best education they can find and press forward to be successful - and successful can just be graduating high school and finding a job, or it can be attending and graduating college or even graduate school. In our family, regardless of each one’s educational status, success is raising children to become self-reliant adults who can take care of themselves and participate fully in caring for their families.
I fully agree.
My observation rests in the discomfort in Glenn's voice; even as he shows due respect for Dr. Gates' opinion on the gamble of out-of-the box hiring and academic acceptance practices, he seems torn over it. That's what makes this such riveting intercourse. I'm sure Dr. Loury has played a hunch or two based on the perceived potential of an unpolished candidate, but he seems discomfited about totally buying into jazz theory that might analogize fast twitch muscle fibers with nimble neurons.
I’m sure you probably didn’t mean it that way, but it sounds like you think jazz is a matter of fast twitch muscle and not nimble neurons. I’m sure you realize that jazz requires a lot of nimble neurons (as does basketball, the other oft cited analogy, for that matter). In fact, early mastery of a musical instrument is very strongly related with the development of mathematical thinking.
I was trying (perhaps, unsuccessfully) to make a point about Glenn's discomfiture with the idea of applying a stereotype ahead of judging the skills and proclivities of an individual. I should have presented "jazz" in the way I do here-- in quotes.
He lost me with his discussion on test scores. Over the past 50 years an enormous investment has been made in public schools, albeit poorly by governments. Those who want to learn from dedicated teachers will do so.
The state I live in has for decades been pouring money into inner city schools with predominantly black population. These schools
Are still severely underperforming.
So, it's not just money. But, money is still the legal tender for education. It just has to be used more effectively, whatever that means.
While rhetorically appealing, the idea that poor funding is responsible for disparate test scores between races doesn’t actually make any sense when examined. If monetary investment in students is returned in academic success, then we should expect the primary predictor of academic achievement to be school--and not race. But that isn’t what we see at all. Go to any suburban upper middle class high school like the one I went to, where this variable is controlled for, and you’ll find the same thing: Asians at the top, blacks at the bottom.
I’m reluctant to start arguments with people clearly much smarter than me, such as Gates, but even his own anecdote about his chess club seems to contradict his premise. He had good teachers and received a good education; he didn’t need lavish funding to beat the white schools in chess, or to outperform them on tests.
Good schools are important. Funding plays a role. But the idea that investment is anywhere close to the primary explanation for the major achievement gaps in this country is obviously shallow. Wilfred Reilly would post his chart of “hours spent studying by race.” I’d link it here, but let’s be honest--we all know what it’s going to show.
All that said, Gates is an amazing speaker, and this was a great episode.
The relationship between money and educational quality doesn't have to be a perfect 1-1 linear one to have some validity. There are a lot of really bad schools in America, but it could be, for example, that past a certain basic threshold (which some schools are well below), spending provides diminishing returns.
What they don't address is the notion that in "elite" education now, kids are being actively misinformed. It would appear that Stanford law students are actually worse off than if they had never gone to school at all.
I don’t know… I went to a pretty mixed high school (both ethnically and economically) and the biggest predictor of success was wealth more than race. The top of the class were mostly immigrants who worked really hard, especially the most affluent immigrants. All six of the kids in my graduating class with 4.0 or higher were born in other countries (not all Asian) and most of the kids I’d gone to elementary school with (one of the poorest in the district at the time) either didn’t graduate, graduated from the “alternative” high school program, and/or didn’t continue on to college.
I currently live in an affluent area of a mixed district and though per student funding is the same across the county there are huge difference in resources at the schools. My kids’ elementary school PTA annual budget is over $50k with $20-30k carryover because it is too much to spend. The teachers get at least twice a year class gifts worth multiple hundred dollars. On the less affluent side of the district kids don’t always have shoes, haven’t had breakfast or enough to eat on weekends, may have trauma and behavioral issues, etc. With the exception of the rare do-gooder, where do you think the best teachers would prefer to work?
Thank you so much for having Dr. Gates on your podcast. It was an informative, engaging and entertaining conversation. On the issue of supersymmetry theory and Dr. Gates work in the field, I was disappointed and frankly a bit surprised that he did not acknowledge the 1974 work of Austrian theoretical physicist Julius Erich Wess and Italian theoretical physicist Bruno Zumino for their joint development of
supersymmetry and conformal field theory. Dr. Gates was just beginning his post graduate work when Wes’s and Zumino were publishing their theories. I’m confident it was not an intentional oversight on Dr. Gates part.
This was a good discussion.
I have one suggestion for another way to approach Affirmative Action. This approach works well for both business and sports. If a manager is looking to hire someone for a position, it often makes sense to consider what each candidate will contribute to the team 2 or 3 years down the road rather than basing the decision on what the candidate currently would contribute. This approach forces a sensible manager to consider each candidate's background. If a candidate has not had effective training, but they present evidence that they can catch-up to others with effective training, then that should be considered.
Indeed, I frame it that Affirmative action shouldn't be lowering the bar, but devoting extra resources in recruiting sufficiently meritorious individuals from underprivileged demographics so that people can meet their potential
Sometimes a candidate can be rough around the edges even though they have a lot of potential. Someone with a lot of potential might be behind others now, but that person might benefit more from additional training than someone would.
Thanks for helping me to articulate my point.
I enjoyed the analogy to the discipline of music and symbolic vs. experiential knowledge, particularly with the implied understanding that blacks have made enormous contributions to our musical culture and, indeed, the modern world. I wonder, under closer scrutiny, how well this translates to STEM fields. I also question how the two dimensions of knowledge are presumed to act upon on each other. A common assumption is that they are somehow inversely correlated, but I'm not sure that this is true.
Surprised that Gates failed to mention that, in addition to being an "outsider" of sorts, Einstein was also a terrible student!
I understood him, when speaking of STEM fields and music/jazz, to be discussing pushing boundaries on existing knowledge. Most people in STEM just apply other peoples knowledge to build or test or make things. Some people have to have imagination to try something new, or see the same thing from a new perspective to create something new. There are a lot of different skill sets in STEM that take people on different career paths and trajectories.
Thanks, Amy. I grew up playing jazz and understand the analogy in the same way, but while I find it compelling in a poetic sense, I'm not sure it goes all the way through in the real world. For instance, there are musicians who play entirely by feel, can't read a lick, and happen to be some of the greatest, most innovative players I've ever encountered. How exactly does this translate to the physics lab?
The other piece that I found strained was the implicit notion that students who excel in one dimension must therefore be deficient in the other, and that by selecting for the first in admissions standards, you are effectively skewing the racial makeup of the student body.
How it applies in the physics lab would be in the asking of a new question (like Einstein did with his relativity thought experiments, even though his math skills sucked), coming up with a new way to test a hypothesis (Rosalind Franklin using X-ray crystallography to “photograph” DNA), or have a new interpretation on someone else’s work (obviously lots of examples of this, but noting it’s hard to go against perceived settled science that takes a different kind of thinker/contrarian ).
I understood the feeling vs experience thing a bit differently. In science there is knowledge and intuition, knowledge impacts your ability to solve the problem and intuition impacts how you solve the problem. Or if you rather, there’s the math skills that let you sit down and apply the formulas and there’s the imagination that lets you model the problem mentally. You really need both, but usually people are stronger in one than the other. Probably most people who are successful are good at both, but one is still a relative strength. I think his argument is that the testing only finds the knowledge, and ignores the value of the intuition.
Cheers, Amy. I think we're mostly on the same page, and I can certainly understand how something like intuition might be undervalued on the SAT, but I maintain that the metaphor is imperfect, particularly as Gates emphasizes jazz. In the end, all the great jazz innovators also had "chops" -- they weren't "non-musicians" of the Brian Eno ilk. Eno is a brilliant producer, but his talents are only manifested with the input of real players.
Much is made of Einstein's shortcomings as a student -- it is a trope of sorts, and indeed you and I both invoke it above -- but he also had serious math and physics chops, which were evident at a young age. I'm quite certain he would have aced the quantitative portions of a modern aptitude test.
The role of cultural diversity in the development of music is very real, but I think this gets conflated somewhat with the "dimensions of knowledge" argument. Gates mentions the influence of American music on Dvorak. Of course, it was the modes of Eastern music that helped propel jazz into the post-bop era. And the roots of American music itself lie in a wonderful amalgamation of diverse traditions. Going back to physics, however, I don't see the same potential for a set of diverse traditions to blend in the lab or the lecture hall. What exactly are those traditions? In my mind, this is where physics and music are different. Music sits at the base of human experience: most cultures have a rich musical tradition. Physics is esoteric.
So first, let me admit I am not at all a music person. In fact, I may be completely wired backwards with respect to emotional reactions to it. Also, I have no desire to speak for the professor, he clearly is very skilled at that. That said, I respectfully submit you may be taking the metaphor too literally. The professor seems used to for lack of a better word “dumbing” down physics to be understood by a general audience, and music is an analogy that a general audience gets…
Perhaps the SAT/GRE analogy is to reading music? You can pay an instrument by ear without ever.reading music and have amazing skill. It is my understanding that at one point schools rejected amazing musicians because they couldn’t read music. It is a lot easier to learn to read music than to learn to have a musical ear, so a lot of talent in this scenario went unrecognized. Similarly, I suspect not every mind-blowingly talented concert pianists could ever improvise. That’s okay! They are just totally different skill sets!
Similarly, he’s talking about moving physics forward… that doesn’t only take “concert pianists” it also takes the self learned, by ear musicians who don’t know enough about music theory to be constrained by it…? Of course in physics you need math, but contrary to your assertion that Einstein had serious math chops, it is my understanding that he did not (that his wife and research partners went through the tedious math proofs to prove his intuition, but who knows… everyone hijacks Einstein for their own pet theory). I heard his argument to be a simple warning that if we judge purely on math skills on tests we miss a whole lot of levels of thinking. I agree with this just from personal experience.
I don’t know that, per se it’s culture that makes the difference. I’m not sure if you picked the best at math from 5 cultures that you’d have the best team. I think you’d do best to pick 5 people that are all good at math and think differently. I think the issue is how you decide “good at math”. I think too often we have unnecessary binaries between capable and not, and I heard him hesitant to say a person is in the “not” category because they didn’t get a 800 on the math SAT. I could get out my personal soapbox… but that was the impression I got.
For you particular example, of people I am unfamiliar with… (sorry!) Brian Eno Ilk being a great producer but a less talented musician on his own is exactly the point! Science these days is based on teams, and to go back to the jazz metaphor, teams are what enable people working together to really shine. Study after study have shown diversity (not merely racial, but of experience) make for better, more productive groups and help to overcome groupthink.
All good points, Amy. I think we may have to agree to disagree on this one aspect even as we are mostly in agreement on the larger issue.
This whole discussion makes me think of one of Val Kilmer's first movies, "Real Genius", which explores the space between what might be called "measurable" smarts and the less tangible counterpart. Now, the science in the story is pure fantasy, and it has been mocked as such (in my opinion, unfairly -- it is 80s teen comedy after all!), but it draws on very real ideas about well-roundedness and social barriers to learning. In the movie, the character played by Kilmer has an epiphany that supposedly leads to a huge advancement in the science of lasers, and it is brought on by a spiritual breakdown of sorts.
In real life, I wonder how much scientific advancement is revelatory in nature, and how much can be attributed to sustained "outside-the-box" thinking.
Can I say that having listened to Prof Gates for many years, that he is also the one of the most engaging science communicators in the world, and he was able to demonstrate that during this interview. And I can imagine his contribution to physics extends greatly to his inspiring many to follow in his path.
Prof. Gates is new to me. As I listened to this conversation I felt as though I was listening to a master communicator of the sciences and also a refreshingly open person. I hope he comes back sooner than later to TGS.