Don't play God

Global economic, network and climate systems are complex, and their true nature can't be understood by referencing a single event or characteristic apparent to us. By itself, a cold and snowy March Kentucky day says nothing about global climate change.

Beginning with a story about a courageous British doctor and prisoner in the second world war, economist Tim Harford delivers a lovely mediation on the all-too-human tendency to meet complex unknowns with judgements that harden into certainty, and asks us to apply the same wisdom applied by that doctor, ever the scientist: don't play God.

Rather, fail better. In open systems better outcomes can be had by taking measured risks to improve a product or service - a practice for which Google, seemingly always in beta, is well known. In open systems, complex questions of science respond to patient probing. In open systems, it can be better, and not because one person or group of persons are certain that it can, but because reality will always be bigger than our uncertainty anyway. Isn't that good news?

Based on his best selling book, Drunkard's Walk, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow will talk about the related idea of randomness at IdeaFestival 2011. And one of Harford's colleagues at TED Global in Scotland, Sheril Kirshenbaum, will be at IdeaFestival 2011 to present "the science of kissing." Bring your boyfriend or girlfriend. Come prepared to learn.

I hope to see you there!

Wayne

New "multiverse" hints from ancient radiation

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Astronomers analyzing years of data returned by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe believe they have located places in the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, that may mark the locations where other universes have touched our own.

"Multiverse theory" proposes that the Big Bang that produced our universe is, in fact, a regular event. BBC:

The theory that invokes these bubble universes - a theory formally called "eternal inflation" - holds that such universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding - meaning that they are forever out of reach of one another.

But Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.

The Planck telescope will study the CMB in greater detail, and will help to either confirm or refute the current findings. Public data from that space-based observatory is expected by 2013.

At IdeaFestival 2011, Suketu Bhavsar, a professor of astrophysics at Cal Poly Pomona, will talk about the possibility of a “multiverse” and will no doubt touch on this developing story.

Purchase your All-Access Pass today to lock in the lowest rate of the year!

Wayne

Your human resource department, the IdeaFestival

At the IdeaFestival, "new connections" happen all the time. Some extraordinary people, like Jan Winter, have been inspired at the festival to start businesses. Jan, in fact, is changing the fitness habits, and futures, of tens of thousands of children.

When organizations send employees to the festival, business is the real winner. Free to recharge their imaginations, to think laterally, employees return energized by what they've seen and heard and ready to make a contribution. For organizations today, which depend more than ever on human capital, that's a bottom line result.

Whether you send your employee to attend just one event or several - and trust me the effect is cumulative - you might think of the IdeaFestival as the coolest human resource department you've ever had.

Wayne

To know what you think, be alone with your thoughts

I'm still digesting this wonderful lecture to West Point plebes from essayist William Deresiewicz, who quotes from Heart of Darkness to make a point about the important and neglected value of solitude. If you want others to follow you, be alone with your thoughts.

What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence.

When you're done with that, read this.

Wayne

In "Many Worlds," you'll read this

In this five-part BBC series on the pursuit of a "theory of everything," a number of new concepts are introduced that attempt to bridge the gap between what we know of the vanishingly small and paradoxical nature of the quantum world, and what we know of the cosmic-sized structures of the universe, which are ruled by Newton's deterministic laws.

At IdeaFestival 2011, Suketu Bhavsar, professor of astrophysics at Cal Poly Pomona, will talk about the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.

"Many worlds" resolves the paradoxes of quantum mechanics by suggesting that the single material outcomes that you or I observe from the interaction of matter at tiniest scales is but one outcome of many that occur in an infinite number of branching, alternate futures.

Think of it this way. If you have read this far without watching this video, somewhere a version of you will click the video play button, another will reach for that second cup of coffee and yet another will think, I really should get to the IdeaFestival this year.

Buy your all-access pass to hear Dr. Bhavsar, or I'll have to explain the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. Nobody in any universe wants that.

Wayne