I am old enough to have had a resource called the encyclopedia in the home of my youth. A multi volume piece that was printed on fine paper with elegant pictures, and text running up and down the pages. When we had a question about something, we were fortunate enough to be able to grab a volume and look it up. I do remember struggling to write papers for school assignments without just copying what was written down (way before copy/paste). I feel fortunate to have grown up having a middle class life life that allowed me this luxury.
For the past few days, during supper, I’ve been bringing my plate of food in front of my desktop computer in my upstairs office and watching a piece on an interesting YouTube channel called StarTalk. This channel is hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose guest this time was Brian Cox. What an opportunity it was for me to sit down and interact with two of the great minds in science. All for free, and out there for anyone with access to the internet that is interested.
During Neil and Brian’s discussion, a paper by Richard Feynman called “The Value of Science” was mentioned. I found myself pausing the video, spending about 30 seconds searching for the paper, then the next several minutes reading enough of it so that I understood the context of their discussion. Some more minutes on, Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, Third Movement was mentioned. Again I paused the video, easily found a performance of the piece by the London Symphony Orchestra on YouTube, and was able to watch and listen to the entire movement before continuing with the video.
None of this was possible during the encyclopedia days, of course. The barrier to jumping from one topic to another made it easy to get lost. Flipping through the pages of the volume you were reading made the possibility of losing your place almost inevitable. And that was if you were lucky enough to have to look up what you needed in the volume at hand. If not, another volume had to be fetched, the correct passage found, read, and understood, then your way had to be made back to the original thread.
Two guys talking about science are clearly interacting in several dimensions. They say words to each other, respond, and move from topic to topic. None of us can interact with their discussions they way they do, because we lack the context their thoughts are based on. I think of these ideas as shafts of light shooting out at right angles from the talking. Some of these shafts have enough basis in reality that we can get the drift, and some don’t. What a luxury it is to be able to explore these light beams before the discussion gets way over our heads. We can hit the pause, learn enough to get the gist, and then restart the talk where we left off.