Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem Read online

  One afternoon back in the 11th grade, my friend Ken Severin and I set out to test for ourselves the equation for the period of a pendulum, the time required to complete each swing. If you’re scoring along with us, the period is proportional to the square root of the length of the string, chain, or wire divided by the acceleration due to gravity. (If that didn’t make sense to you, you can readily look it up. The pendulum equation is one more of the bazillion cool science things on the Internet.) We set up our own pendulum. It seemed to work okay, but the air drag and the friction in string fibers slowed this first one down too much for our liking. We rigged a longer string from the ceiling. Then we commandeered a stairwell and rigged a 4-story-long string with a sizable weight at the end. We were in business: The equation predicted the swing period of our pendulum with satisfying precision. It felt as though we had unlocked a mystery of the universe.

  Science and what is nowadays called “critical thinking” take discipline and diligence. What enables us humans to make a living here on Earth is our ability to make predictions by finding patterns in nature and then to take advantage of them. Imagine how much easier it was to have a settlement or farm if you could count the days and know the seasons so that you planted and harvested crops at the optimal times. Imagine how much easier it was for ancient people to hunt successfully once they understood the migration patterns of game animals, their main source of protein. Imagine how much more fun it was for me and Ken Severin to watch the pendulum swing in exactly the way we’d predicted, because we were proving for ourselves the amazing thing about cause-and-effect scientific analysis: It really works!

  As it happened, I was supposed to get a vaccination from my family doctor that afternoon. For over an hour, school officials paged Ken and me, but we didn’t hear any of the public addresses. We were completely caught up in the experience, swept away with such nerdy ecstasy at each stroke of the stopwatch and slip of our slide rules—this being well before the days of electronic calculators, much less classroom computers. With each swing of the pendulum, we weren’t discovering anything that many others before us hadn’t already learned. That’s the nature of being a student. But the process . . . the joy . . . Each detail of our experiment taught us a little bit more about sines, cosines, and tangents, about aerodynamic drag, about patience . . . There is nothing like it; science is empowering like no other human endeavor I know of.

  The reason I was so rapt is twofold. First of all, that was my first true exposure to the predictive power of physics. In politics and all manner of social interactions, we use the expression “the pendulum will swing back,” but we mean it in an impressionistic way: Attitudes will change again in the future, someday, sooner or later. In physics, the words have a precise, mathematical meaning. If you record your experimental setup accurately, you can determine exactly how high a pendulum will swing and precisely how far it will swing back. If you’re as diligent as the 19th-century French physicist Leon Foucault, you can use a swinging pendulum to prove Earth is spinning, and even use it to determine how far you are from the equator. Push the equations a bit harder, and you can measure how our spinning planet distorts space and time around it, as NASA’s Gravity Probe B satellite did—all because you took the time to understand a rock swinging on a string.

  The second part of my passionate attraction to physics was the people. The boys and girl (only one at that time) in my 11th-grade physics class were my kind of people. It was an elective class, not required for graduation, and back then there weren’t any special requirements to get in. We all just loved learning math and studying motion, finding out at the deepest level why things happen in the world. At this fancy private school, there were many very smart kids who had been raised by very smart parents with strong traditions of academic achievement. The kids in my physics class were especially brilliant. I swam as fast as I could to keep up, and I loved every moment of it. We made one another laugh with arcane, corny science puns, but that wasn’t what really bonded us. We were all on the same team, you might say, all swimming toward the same goal: We wanted to get to the truth of how nature works, or at least as close to the truth as our minds could take us. In short, we were all nerds.

  Thinking like a nerd is a lifelong journey, and I am inviting you here to take it with me. I truly believe it is the best use of your years on this planet. It keeps you constantly open to new ideas. Everyday events—tying your shoes, parking your car, watching a snowstorm—become revelatory experiments. When the results are not what you expected, you press to find out why and to figure out a better approach. That way of looking at the world soon becomes second nature. You will marvel that so many people around you don’t do it. And I’ll tell ya, if they did, we could change the world more quickly.

  My brother reminds me of the moments when, as a kid, I stuck my hand out the passenger window of our car while it was moving at highway speed. I had seen the curved metal slats, or leading-edge flaps, come out of the front of the wings of airliners as they landed at Washington, DC’s National Airport (now Reagan International Airport). I tried to shape my hand and move my fingers so that my hand became a wing and my thumb or index finger became a leading-edge slat. Well, I could get lift; my hand would get pushed up like a wing (still can). But my fingers are round; they’re not strongly curved and thin like a slat or flap. A finger doesn’t work as a so-called “high-lift” device. Nevertheless, I still routinely roll down the window and try my hand at flying. Knowing how wings generate lift proved extremely useful to me later when I worked as an engineer at Boeing, but even if I’d followed a totally different career, that type of insight would still have informed my life in a thousand other ways.

  I’m always investigating nature, and people who spend time with me get used to it. I’m always looking for details that might lead me somewhere useful, whether I am plotting the future of space exploration in my day job at The Planetary Society or tinkering with a new solar collector on my home. Over the course of this book, I’ll offer myself as a case study, sharing some of my most memorable nerd moments with you so that you can amplify your own nerdy tendencies and start changing the world. There is nothing more thrilling than the φ of physics, I’ve found, because it is the most powerful thing that humans have discovered. I make my way toward truth and happiness by embracing a point of view from which I can see the big picture.

  I try to take in all the details—everything all at once—and then sift through them to find the meaningful patterns, as part of an effort to make the world a little bit better. But I’m just one guy. With you, and millions of others like you, we can turn our best ideas into action. We can solve our most pressing problems and live better lives. Join me and prepare to be amazed at how much lies within your power.

  CHAPTER 2

  Scout Lifeguarding

  When he was a boy, my father was an outstanding Scout. He could hike for 20 miles a day by pacing himself carefully and picking the optimal paths. He could start a fire in the rain and then cook dinner over it. There are a few family pictures of my dad as a teenager decked out in a sharp Scout uniform, full of pride. He passed along a sense of mastery to my brother and me. We embraced the Boy Scout way of doing things outdoors as a way to learn about nature and to develop self-confidence in the sun, rain, and snow. If you can deal with adversity outdoors, we learned, you can deal with adversity in many other aspects of life. There was an implicit experimental method in all this, though I’m sure Ned Nye would not have put it in those words. If things go wrong while you’re in the woods, you focus a bit and figure out what to do. If one kind of solution doesn’t work, you try another.

  Boy Scout training is a small, beautiful example of just how important a practical understanding of science and engineering is (and has been) for our success as a species. For instance, here’s one important lesson I learned about keeping warm: Should you find yourself in a rainy, night-shivery situation, you need a basic understanding of how fire works in order to get one started. The trick is to spli
t some firewood with your ax and use your knife to shave some thin strips from the insides of the logs; that way, you start with dry fuel. Have spare time while you’re sitting around camp on a wet afternoon? Cut and carve yourself some “fuzz sticks” by peeling back thin strips along the length of sticks; aim for pieces about as big in diameter as a felt marker. Then keep them in storage for use at night. The thin, peeled-back strips of wood burn like crazy, and in turn ignite the stick, which you can use to light bigger, reasonably sized pieces of firewood.

  These are the kinds of insights our human ancestors started figuring out perhaps a million years ago, probably in the region that is now East Africa. They surely did a lot of trial and error, though without the cool Scout pocketknives, and kept passing along what they had learned to the next generation—first by demonstration, much later by written instruction. They kept pushing into new territory, migrating out of Africa and into Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. With each push came new threats and new experiments into how best to survive the new environment. Our ancestors had to confront unfamiliar predators, discover what animals were easy to catch and what plants were good to eat, and develop clothing and shelter appropriate to the environment. They also had to learn how to work cooperatively. Their ever-growing knowledge was what allowed them to keep going . . . well, some of them at least.

  I joined the Boy Scouts when I was 11 years old. Not too long after, I was helping an older boy named Robbie build a fire in the rain. We took turns carving strips from a log and stoking the fire. I’m not saying that we got carried away; I’m just saying, wow, you can get a fire really hot when you’re motivated by being shivery cold on a damp afternoon as the Sun is going down. I remember our scoutmaster’s comments: “Er, uh . . . wow, that’s a pretty nice fire.” (He meant, “Whoa, boys, that’s a huge fire—way bigger than we need.”) We were on a roll. Once the fire got going, the steam from the larger wet branches and logs became a reminder of how cold you can get when your clothes are wet while you’re camping in the woods. Ever felt that kind of chill, followed by the relief that comes when the warmth hits you? It’s one particular hands-on science experiment that you never forget.

  The Scouts movement was started in England in 1907 by Robert Baden-Powell. He was a military commander who apparently got his inspiration while fighting colonial battles in Africa. He noticed that many of his troops were dying in the jungle, not from enemy actions but just by being lost on their own—and this was happening in a relatively warm region where food was growing on trees all around. In response, Baden-Powell wrote a book for his soldiers, a guide to the basics of wilderness exploration and survival. He later modified it and republished it as Scouting for Boys. It has sold 150 million copies and is, according to the Guardian newspaper, the fourth-most-popular book of the 20th century.

  Having the knowledge and skills to survive in the woods is hugely empowering. The reality-TV show Survivor has versions in dozens of countries and has been a ratings success in the United States for more than 15 years, with plenty of spin-offs and other programming all loosely based on the idea that you can survive in just about any wilderness if you know what you’re doing. As a Scout, I fully embraced the concept. You can do it. Follow the motto: “Be prepared.”

  Scout training lies at the far practical end of the nerd mindset. People often raise questions about the applicability of ideas in math and science; many a parent has heard a child’s laments along the lines of “When in life will I ever need to know the Pythagorean theorem?” Well, when we were Scouts learning about the combustion physics of wood or evaporative cooling in damp fabric, we knew exactly why these nerdy details are important. We didn’t even realize, generally, that we were learning science. We just understood that these were the rules of the world and great things were possible if we learned to master them. That, in a nutshell, is where the whole adventure begins.

  From before I can remember, my mother insisted that my brother, sister, and I learn to swim. As a kid suffering through the stupidly hot summers in Washington, DC (this was before our house had air-conditioning), I knew better than to miss a chance to jump into a cool pool. I became a natural swimmer, completely self-assured in the water. Maybe I couldn’t make my hand fly by holding it out a car window, but I sure could use my arms to propel my body through the water. I could move up and down, side to side. I felt like I was flying down there, and in a certain scientific sense, I was. I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble or drowning, because I was in my element.

  Well before I was 10, the summers we spent at Lake Waullenpaupak in Pennsylvania got me confident enough that I wasn’t concerned if the water was too deep for me to see the bottom. I swam down there with a mask and navigated through the clear dark-green lake, getting close enough that I could look at rocks and deep-dwelling fish. The deeper I dove, the cooler the water felt. Looking back, I realize those watery adventures were intensifying the scientific impulse in my brain. The fish seemed to take little interest in me; they had places to go and mates to seek. I felt like I was seeing nature almost as if other humans did not exist. I also experimented with the effects of buoyancy and resistance.

  In high school, I took and passed the Senior Lifesaving test. This is a class in which you nominally learn how to rescue a drowning victim. It takes another, more intense form of concentration to rescue a classmate who is only pretending to drown. You swim out to the fake victim and pike-dive in front of him (or her). From his point of view, you disappear. Underwater, holding your breath, you twist him around by the knees so that his back is toward the edge of the pool or shore. Then you sling your arm over his chest and sidestroke your way to dry concrete or sand. It wasn’t just theoretical. We got drilled on it over and over. I admit it took tremendous effort to rescue a certain classmate victim who happened to be a young woman, who happened to look amazing in a bikini—but I managed.

  Next I became a Scout Lifeguard, putting my knowledge to practical use. Becoming a Scout Lifeguard is very much like getting your Senior Lifesaving patch, but Scouts are also expected to learn to row because so many camps feature swimming areas marked out in lakes. In those days, the Scout rescue procedure was a little different from the one I learned in high school. You were expected to dive completely under the drowning victim; that, apparently, was the Scout style. Then you came at the drowner from the seaward or farther-from-the-dock side. After securing the victim, you had to swim in a 180-degree turn to get that guy (no women around at Scout camp) and you headed back toward shore.

  The idea was to simulate a real-world situation. Knowing your technique was not enough. You had to understand human nature and know what to do when the drowner’s instinctive reactions were counter productive, even dangerous, to the rescuer. In either case, Senior Lifesaving or Scout Lifeguard, the main challenge of the final test is that the victim is supposed to be panicked—not stricken with panic so much as violent with it. We all looked forward to playing the part of the victim. It was a chance to thrash; you even might get the opportunity to legally punch an acquaintance or a rival in the face with a well-placed arm flail. The final exam became one type of rather tame opportunity in a coed high school pool and a whole other, more violent affair in the much larger, all-boys Scout swimming area.

  By long tradition, the Scouts seeking the Scout Lifeguard badge had to “rescue” the camp counselors, who were a few years older, bigger, stronger, and ornerier than we were. It was daunting. How was I, skinny young Bill, supposed to drag in Big, Strong Counselor Man? I had the training and the knowledge; the X factors were courage and commitment. All of us who sought to pass our final swim test were lined up on the dock, and we were accompanied by the camp counselors. The drowning-actors swam out about 25 yards from the dock, and on a leader’s signal, those strong young guys pretended to become panic-stricken, big-splashing victims. As you might imagine, they were having great fun becoming as charming as an angry bull and as easy to wrangle as a greasy anvil. Probably because of my precocious (that is, obno
xious wisecracking) tendencies, I got assigned to “rescue” the counselor whom everyone called Big John. I was 15; he was 19. He was a good 14 inches taller and 50 pounds of muscle heavier. Big John was determined not to let me get an arm across his body and swim him in to the dock. I was just as determined to show that my training and knowledge could overcome his desire to mess things up.

  They tell you over and over that if your drowning victim is being wild, just roll with it. Once you’ve got your victim in hand or in arm, let him (or her) flail. If he dips his head in the water, let him. We were assured that he would soon flail himself again to get his face out of the water, and while he was catching his breath, you could catch a break. Then you could begin again your journey toward the shore. As reasonable as that might sound, Big John was a full-on flailing machine. I looped my arm across his chest and started for shore, pulling hard with my free hand and kicking just as hard with what is called the “inverted scissor kick.” It’s an unnatural position, and it takes practice, even if you don’t have a Big John fighting you every step of the way.

  They also tell you that if your victim is too thrashy, too violent, or, as in this case, too obnoxious, you have to secure him with two arms. You have to hold him from above and below. Big John was able to twist his way out of every one-arm hold I tried. So after a few failed attempts at that method, I tried holding him by clamping two arms around him. This meant the only propulsion I had was by means of my inverted scissor. It took a long time to drag flailing John to the dock by those means—yet I succeeded. Very much to my surprise, I was the only guy that morning to get his victim to the dock.

  I absolutely do not attribute my success to any superior athletic ability. Much bigger guys were dealing with much less motivated counselors that day. Instead, I think what helped me was my approach to the problem. The Scout instructors had told us what to do in each situation. I had a precise rule book to work from. You have to swim under the guy and surface beyond him. You have to swim in a semicircle. You have to invert your kick. If he’s acting wild, you have to hang on with both hands. I was in the internal reality of the rescue simulation; I wasn’t considering my counselor’s motives for making the task so difficult, but I accepted the terms of the situation and was solely focused on finding a resolution. I had to just get ’er done. So I did.