The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

Overview

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn is a book by Richard Hamming that was published in 1996. It is about creativity, which Hamming thinks can’t be taught directly like math or science. Rather, it has to be shown in similar fashion to how a master painter teaches an apprentice in virtue of demonstration. So, he sets out to show how to be creative by displaying his own thinking about a wide range of subjects.

In the sections that follow, I’ll try to tease out the major ideas he puts forward about creativity and how to be creative.

Analogy

Analogy is crucial to creative thinking. Being able to find similar-but-different relationships between things often illuminates both the similarities and differences. Reconceptualization is the act of teasing out those similarities and differences. For example, a dream by Kekule about snakes biting their own tails suggested to him, when he awoke, the ring structure of carbon compounds.

Sometimes reconceptualization shows difference rather than similarity, such as reconceiving of the computer as a symbol manipulator rather than a number cruncher. Fortran represents and spurred on that reconceptualization, shifting our thinking about the role and use of computers significantly.

Finally, sometimes reconceptualization will show you that you have the right solution to the wrong problem. Hamming didn’t give any examples of this, but consider the pacemaker. In 1956, Wilson Greatbatch was trying to build a device to record the rhythm of hearts. He was building a circuit and used a wrong resistor on accident. After installing it, he noticed that the circuity emitted electrical pulses. Those pulses made him think of a heart beat, and led him to develop the first pacemaker. His pacemaker was the right solution to the wrong problem, and was far more valuable than recording heart beats.

Being future-directed

To be creative, one needs to be directed. Otherwise, our different creative directions would unravel our creative capacity. Here’s an excellent analogy Hamming gives of being directed:

It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n.

Our goal should be to go as far along as we can, which requires a direction and a steady path.

Fundamental things

Creativity requires deep knowledge of the fundamental things one is to be creative about. How are we to recognize those fundamental things? They are that which the rest follows. Hamming discovered a method for self-correcting errors in computers. It started with an insight, if the computer could but locate where the error was, it could flip the bit in that location and correct the error. He understood the spatial layout of the machine and knew how to represent that space. He synthesized those fundamental things and discovered self-correcting code.

Understanding fundamental things also extends to deeply understanding our own beliefs. Hamming gives three important questions to ask yourself about your beliefs:

1) What would I accept as evidence that I'm wrong?
2) Why do I believe whatever I do?

He also gives an excellent question for pulling out the fundamental nature of problems:

1) What kind of solution would be good for this problem?

For when you understanding the kind of solution that would be good, you understand something deep about the problem.

Preparation

Throughout the book, Hamming gives examples of how his preparation in both the fundamental and accidental things prepared him to make discoveries and progress. It’s hard to show the synthesis of his preparation allowed him to make those big breakthroughs, but the message is straightforward: preparation gives you the depth and breadth of knowledge required to synthesize disparate ideas into cohesive insights.

Dropping unfruitful problems

One key aspect to creativity is dropping unfruitful problems. For example, Einstein was tremendously creative in his early years, but once he began to search for a unified theory he spent the rest of his life on it and had about nothing to show for that effort.

Social and personal goods

The importance of creativity is that a creative life is one worth leading. So too is the life spent struggling with oneself to become as good as one can be. This struggle is a refinement of ourselves, and gives meaning to our lives. Finally, there are also certain duties attached to the public good: we ought to be creative for those concentric circles of our organization, community, society, and world.