I am not a big fan of movies, but last weekend, my three year old son forced me to watch “Flubber” with him, which is a 1997 family comedy about a kooky, but genius science professor (Robin Williams) who invents a new energetic material called “Flubber.” My son’s favorite scene was when the cute, giggly “flubber” creatures started dancing around to some catchy Latin tunes. My favorite scene was the absent-minded professor walking into an art class and carrying on a lecture, obviously meant for his physics class, un-phased neither by the confusion of the students nor by the presence of the two nude models in front of his desk.

This cute family flick got me thinking – does a scientific genius always require the absence of skills that human race has been evolving over thousands of years? Skills, like talking to other humans so that they understand us. Making other people feel comfortable around us, thus allowing us to build strong communities and survive as a species. Abilities, like reading facial expressions of our audience to make sure that we are not presenting a physics lecture to a room-full of art students, or simply not boring our audience to death.

While striving to become research geniuses, how often do we downplay these regular, everyday, but valuable human skills in order to appear more, well, genius?

How many times have you “smarted-up” (opposite of dumb-down) your description of an engineering project in a conversation? How about sprinkled in some extra equations into your power-point slides just so you would appear smarter? You knew that most of the audience would not understand every term in those equations. Yet, you decided to add them into your presentation, not because it would clarify things for your audience but because it would make your presentation less practical, less understandable and, therefore, more genius.

I present to you…The Absent Minded Professor Theory. I am willing to bet that every single one of you have applied this theory more than once. I certainly have.

The Absent Minded Professor Theory

If one keeps saturating one’s power-point slides with mathematical equations and keeps steadily pouring technical jargon into one’s conversations, until the said one’s audience can barely understand what he/she is talking about, the resulting perception by the outside world is that one is a genius.

This theory might have worked for Robin Williams in Flubber, and for Einstein (although I think that Einstein was pretty good in describing scientific phenomena with words and pictures, as well as with equations). The problem is that even if all scientific geniuses are absent-minded and removed from reality, not all absent minded and removed from reality people are geniuses. Most off us will never come close to winning a Nobel Prize. We might write textbooks, discover new reaction pathways even create new equations. But most of us will never achieve such levels of genius that would excuse us from making sense when talking to others.

Disproving The Absent Minded Professor Theory:

Definitions:

Next time that you are trying to stay awake at one of the technical talks at your next ASME/SAE/AIAA/etc conference,  look around. If the Absent Minded Professor Theory were true, the equality below would also hold true:

# of BS at the technical session = # of G at the technical session

This would also mean that in almost every technical talk you are trying not to fall asleep while being surrounded by the likes of Einstein and Newton. Which is clearly not the case, judging by the numbers of Nobel Prize Laureates and persons accepted as scientific geniuses by our society.

(By the way, if you find a technical talk interesting because the material presented is directly related to your narrow research topic, the presenter might still very well be a BS. To determine for sure, during the next talk that you personally find interesting, see how many people around you are surfing the net, how many are sleeping, how many are doodling in their notepads and how many simply get up and leave. During a truly excellent presentation, less than 5% of the audience would be involved in such activities.)

A few years ago, a very well renowned professor gave an invited talk at my alma mater - UC San Diego. The audience included many very well-known university professors… most of who slept soundly through the invited lecture, waking up only for the Q&A section so as to provide compelling arguments, peppered with numerous equations, of why the invited lecturer’s research was obviously wrong.

It was during that Q&A session that I first disproved the The Absent Minded Professor Theory for myself. It was quite obvious that half the audience did not understand most of the lecture while the other half simply slept through it. Yet, during the Q&A session, there were plenty of questions full of complex mathematical terms. That’s when I realized that although all of the researches in the room were well-known in their narrow research area, none of them, me included, will probably ever receive a Nobel Prize or be elevated to the levels of Edison or Newton. This means, that all of their efforts of jamming in analytical equations and technical terms into their questions and explanations were sadly in vane.

I am not opposed to math, or equations. I love the feeling of satisfaction that comes with getting through a complex theoretical derivation as much as the next engineer. I see the complexities of engineering research everyday and am not, by any means, trying to minimize them.

I simply realize that the probability of me becoming the next scientific genius or a Nobel Prize Laureate is rather small. So I do not have to morph my communication skills into an incomprehensible mess, in the hopes that the Absent Minded Professor Theory holds true. Because it does not (see the disproof above). I would be far more useful to the Universe as someone who can explain engineering in a way that others can understand, instead of neutering my ability to communicate in the hopes that being a BS would somehow lead to being a genius.

Cheers!

Masha

P.S. Are you a G without being a BS? Perhaps know someone who is an amazing scientist/engineer but yet can explain things in a way that is interesting and undestandible to others? Let the blog readers hear your story! Comment below…

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.