The value of failure

Recent highlighting of the value of failure includes a book by Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, and coincidentally the opening in Edinburgh of the world’s first Library of Mistakes.

In engineering, it’s usually possible to try things out, learn from failure and adapt quite quickly. In developing a successful light bulb, Thomas Edison did hundreds, even thousands, of iterations in developing a filament that would both provide good illumination and last a decent length of time, with a multitude of failures along the path.

Science is rather different, as major new theories sometimes have to wait for years before they can be either validated or discarded.

The new library in Edinburgh records a litany of financial disasters. I wonder if anyone at RBS (or any of the other banks that ran themselves into the rocks) will be paying it a visit?

 

Women wanted for innovation?

Interesting piece on the Voxy news/blog site in New Zealand lamenting the lack of women innovators: http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/women-wanted-innovation/5/116926

According to Voxy, women take out less than 1% of all patents in New Zealand. Of course, this is a real problem – and not only in Kiwiland, but all over the Western world.

In my view the source of the matter lies in the negative attitudes of women towards science and mathematics, and in particular towards engineering. In the “West” there are simply too few women engineers. For it’s engineers that dominate the patent game.

I wonder what the figures look like in Russia or China, where there are shedloads of female engineers?

But perhaps Voxy is taking too pessimistic a view of the situation. After all, in the real world, most innovation happens without any consideration of patents – in strategy, in brand development, in organisational change, in people management, in design, in cultural development, in the arts and so on.

And women may well be in the majority in all those fields, innovating day by day.

Byron’s daughter – the world’s first computer programmer

It’s not so easy finding important innovators in the history of science, mathematics and engineering who are women. In fact, it’s really quite hard. So I asked a couple of friends to come up with some names.

Suggested by Jacki Fortune in Sydney (who also proposed Helena Rubinstein), one who certainly deserves our attention is Ada Lovelace. She was born Ada Byron, the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron, in 1815. She was to marry the Earl of Lovelace.

Quite early in life she became fascinated by mathematics, and in due course by the work of Charles Babbage. Babbage was impressed with her intelligence – he called her “the enchantress of numbers” – and in 1842-43 she wrote a series of notes on his “Analytical Machine”, the world’s first computer. These notes described how Babbage’s machine could be programmed and are now widely credited as being the world’s first computer programme.

Of course, a major contributory reason for the lack of outstanding female maths, science and engineering students in our schools in western societies is the expectation that girls are not good at these subjects.

At a fine girl’s school in Sydney, Ascham, my daughter, Rachel, was lucky enough to find a brilliant (male) teacher of maths, who thought that she had real gifts. How right he was.

I wonder whether any real progress is being made now with the teaching of maths, science and engineering to girls in our schools?

And which are the other women who should be celebrated?

Someone I never met

Although it’s in an extraordinarily beautiful part of England, Uppingham School in the late 1950s and early 1960s was mostly a stultifying experience for me.

With the aim (for him) of following my father as a General Practitioner, I was coerced into studying sciences at school, whereas all my own interests were in the arts, history and languages. In many ways I’m grateful now that I have some understanding of science and scientific method. For example, it has enabled me to spend a working life up to my armpits in the analysis of data. And to facilitate innovation meetings on leading edge subjects such as nanotechnology.

I’ve also been able to pursue my own preferred path consistently since leaving school at eighteen.

One thing that was an enormous help to me was to identify, while I was at Uppingham, a former pupil who went on to forge a brilliant career in the arts – in his case as a film director and opera producer – John Schlesinger. While I was still at school, he directed a wonderfully vital documentary about Waterloo Station, later going on to make many of the best movies on his generation – A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Marathon Man and many more.

His example was with me both at school and thereafter. I followed everything he did. And on Wednesday, on the hundredth anniversary of the première of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, I took time out to watch (on DVD) his timeless production of the opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is the final trio with Kiri Te Kanawa, Anne Howells and Barbara Bonney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WIscFQy1CQ&feature=related

He’s gone now, but I owe him a great deal.

Do you have someone you never met who unknowingly helped to shape your creative life?

Arts creative, science logical?

Throughout my childhood and so-called education, I had the notion that the arts were “creative” and science was “logical”. And I clung to this belief for a long time, only gradually coming to realise that some profound paradoxes were involved.

On the one hand, with the help of Karl Popper I came to understand that scientific advance comes from intuitive creative leaps (to be later explored through experimental research).

Yet most scientists (and lay people) still appear to believe that the process is the other way around, and that logical deductive thought is the driver of new knowledge. More than that, my experience is that too many scientists and engineers seem to have a belief that they are not creative beings at all.

On the other hand, most musicians and artists go through rigorous executant training that enables them to become highly skilled practitioners in their particular field. Most artists and musicians (and people generally) assume that their achievements are driven by creativity, whereas my sense is that they are usually driven by learned skills.

Put simply – science is primarily driven by creativity and the arts by skill.

Why have we come to believe that it’s the other way around? And what might be the implications for our education system?