Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

But artists and scientists still have one important commonality, he noted; they both recognize the inherent value of research. "They're always in the process of noticing," Alda said. "They both have to do research. They both have to really dig into what they want to work on.... They get grounded in some version of reality. They're both rigorous. And often you don't think of artists as rigorous. But just any color won't do on a painting, and any word won't do on a paragraph... And just being off a little bit means something entirely different."

"The scientists will have an outcome that's testable and repeatable by other people," he added. "But the artist, in my opinion, gives you a view of reality that does something to your understanding of reality, that in many ways puts you in close touch with it, but not in a way that's testable."

"There's a real effect that art creates; if it doesn't make an effect of any kind, it's hard to say that it's art. You can take a person that's really good at metaphor. I'd rather cross a bridge with someone who's studied engineering than someone who's studied metaphor. Though I'm sure the person who studies metaphor could build a really interesting bridge."

"In inspiration, in inventiveness and discovery - that's where science and art overlap."

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Alda dedicated much of the conversation talking about how he was influenced the late Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman. "I did this play about Feynman named QED," Alda began. "Feynman is sort of a hero of mine.... He was so honest and so smart and so able to understand things and getting people to understand them.... He was avid about communicating - an extraordinary communicator. It took six years to get this play ready about Feynman, because he was such an extraordinarily varied person - 18 people in one."

Example of a Feynman Diagram

"One of the greatest things he left behind were these drawings, the Feynman Diagrams," Alda said. "He wanted to draw so he could express in other ways the awe he felt about nature. Arrows and squiggly lines that expressed in ways he couldn't express in words or formulas as well as he could with the diagrams."

"These diagrams make you see interactions between subatomic particles - photons hitting each other, what happens when they break up.... things that are happening that can usually only be expressed numerically. He let us see with these diagrams things that can't ordinarily be expressed. The scientist uses his brain the same way to make these diagrams that he uses to see the Louvre and the Mona Lisa."

Of particular interest to Alda is the role of play in inspiring scientific discovery. He described the way scientist James Watson used the metaphor of Tinker Toys as a way to describe the structure of DNA, but then pulled back from it. "I think he was afraid that it would sound like uninformed play. But there's a difference. You can steep yourself in it so much, back off, then mess with it, put it in different positions.... For example, I play a word game on my iPhone.... If I hit a button that puts them in a different order, I see more words.... And I think Watson was playing in the same way I'm playing."

But when it came to play, Feynman was in a class of his own. "Feynman is the Himalayas of play," Alda said with a smile. "After he worked on the atomic bomb, and after they set it off and he realized the destructive power.... he became very depressed. And he was teaching at Cornell, and he got so depressed he couldn't do his work: 'What happened? It used to be fun. I want to get back at it and have fun.' And soon after he said that to himself, he was in the cafeteria and he saw a kid, a student, playing with a plate, and he could see the Cornell symbol on the plate go around and wobble. 'I wonder if there's a relationship between the spin and the wobble. That would be fun.'"

"So he went home and started doing calculations - a month of them," Alda continued. "He started to see there was a two-to-one relationship, and he went to [fellow atomic scientist] Hans Betha, but Betha said, 'Fine, but how is that important? It has no importance!' But from that point onwards, he only did things that were both interesting and fun.... Those calculations he did on that plate led to those diagrams and the work he did to get him his Nobel prize. That's play - that's pure play."

The conversation shifted again, this time focusing on Alda's own role in science, as host of Scientific American Frontiers. At the beginning of the series, he would prepare rigorously for every interview, wanting to appear intelligent both on camera and in front of the scientists he met. It seemed like a good idea at the time, until scientist Carl Sagan called him on it. Following one of their first encounters, Sagan asked bluntly: "So I was wondering why you were trying to act smart?"

"The uncomfortable look on Sagan's face was that I was boxing him in with misunderstandings of what he had said," Alda realized. "I was really arrogant to think I could do that." So from that point forward, he altered his interview technique. "Instead of prepping like that, why don't I let myself be as dumb as I actually am, and ask questions from square one? Let them explain their work from the very first layer.... They then had to make me understand what they were doing.... and once I got it, it was a real television moment."

"I would ask the simplest of questions. 'What is it you're doing? How does it work? Why is that so important?' And then, I find that it's really useful to say, 'Wait a second - you just said this. How could that be true?' Any question I could ask that could make them to get personal would bring them to life."

Sometimes, though, even the simple questions fail to provoke the right response, as Alda recalled interviewing a scientist in Boston. "I saw she started to drift off into lecture mode.... She actually turned toward the camera, away from me.... And it was a little dead.... And I just sort of jogged her back by asking naive questions, and she had to turn back to me, and as soon as she did, she'd get human again. But then she'd drift off again. It was the best visual for me of the two ways to communicate."

Sometimes, he noted, the inability to explain a scientific concept easily may mask the reality that the scientist, too, is struggling with comprehending it. "Somebody at Caltech asked Feynman to give a talk on quantum mechanics, but to a freshman class," Alda recalled. "He came back after a few days and said he didn't know how to do it, 'That must mean we must not really understand it,' he said. If he couldn't explain it to a freshman class, he really didn't get it."

The previous day, Alda spent some time teaching improvisational games to a group of USC engineering students, as he was curious to see if the act of improvisation could improve the way they communicated their complex research work to laypeople. He had the students describe their research before introducing them to improv techniques. Once that was done, they'd explain their research once again. The results, Alda explained, were striking.

"We had a wonderful session; it was an attempt to see if we could make the process of communicating science more vivid," he said. The essence of the games is that they take your attention off of yourself and put them on to other actors. You have to observe them very carefully. The rules of these games require you to be aware of what's happening. Because you're not watching yourself, stuff comes out of you that you didn't know was there. Your real voice comes out. Your body becomes more available to you. And you can see their faces get flushed with the exertion of playing the game, and moving away of thinking of themselves. That lack of consciousness lets the unconscious out.... All of this stuff that's being worked on at an unconscious level comes out, and it's shocking to see how interesting it is."

"At the end of playing these games, everyone who'd spoken was asked to give their presentation again," he continued. "What was amazing was every single one of them was elevated. There was so much true animation in the way they spoke. There was the sound of their own real voice - not the voice of someone lecturing - talking in a pure, intimate way, directly to you.... You heard them deep in your head because they were warmed to you; they were human.

"I was really grateful to these young people... I was interested in seeing these improv games would be useful to improve the communications skills of these young scientists. Every one of those young people last night, you could see how much they loved what they were talking about. They didn't censor [themselves]. It was thrilling to see that. There are people who are naturally gifted at talking about science, and you see their love of science pour out of them. And when they talk like this, you begin to love it too."

Quoting actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith, he added: "When the person's syntax starts to break down, that's when the real person starts to come out."

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At this point in the conversation, a cell phone went off in the audience - probably the third or fourth time it had happened in the theatre. Alda shook his head and laughed to himself before launching into a brief story about cell phones going off while he was on stage. "We were in Glengarry Glen Ross and every now and then a phone would go off, and I thought it'd be great if every actor on stage took out their phone and started asking each other, 'Is it you? Is it you?'"

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For the bulk of the talk, Alda managed to avoid straying directly into politics, but there was the occasional moment. "I really have sympathy to the guy who's the science advisor to the president," he said. "It's like being the Shakespeare advisor to Wakko the Chimp." He did, however, address in greater detail the role of the government in promoting and funding the arts and sciences.

"I think it's a good idea for public funds to go towards these efforts that might not be able to raise money other ways," Alda said. "You could never have expected to have had a Manhattan Project based on a free market. On the other hand, what I'm not crazy about is when the government is too directive. I know a lot of great artists that've come out of the support of the NEA, but I think it may be a little restrictive too."

"There are also a lot of government agencies that want to censor art," he said. "We used to have animated discussions on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation because of a desire to give grants to artists working on diversity, for instance. How about encouraging artists who represent diversity and let them do what they want?"

"Any time you direct research or discovery, it's not discovery anymore. I'd like to see art and science go in directions that seem useless. I think that's the way human inventiveness and inquiry work: 'That looks interesting - what's that?'"

"When evaluating a proof, elegance is a key element. Elegance? It seems as though higher mathematics can be a kind of art, a kind of poetry in itself, one that yet gets the plane from LA to New York. Now that's interesting. It seems that some mathematicians know that you get it - that there's this clarity that comes over you - because one proof is simpler and more elegant. And that's what you get with art. It transforms you. But I think that it shows that it's not easy to put things into words about science, either, just like art."

"To be comfortable with uncertainty - that's what I admire about scientists," he said. "They don't cling feverishly to the last thing they were unsure of.... The story of the universe, of the cosmos, of the multiverse... The story keeps getting endless, like the Sheherazade stories.... The scope keeps getting bigger and bigger."