Straight
winged airplanes always had stability issues when flying at high speeds, but
research into the aerodynamics of straight winged airplanes did not start until
after the death of a Lockheed test pilot named Ralph Virden in 1941.John Stack pioneered the study of airflow
over airplane wings using a special kind of photography called Schlieren
Photography.
Schlieren photography
This
photography allowed him to see the airflow moving over the top of the
wings.He noticed that in straight
wings, small pockets of air moving faster than the speed of sound were creating
small shockwaves.These shockwaves
disrupted the flow of air over the wings, causing increased drag and decreased
lift.By angling the wings backwards,
air is able to move diagonally along the front of the wind.This results in less air moving over the
wings and less shockwaves when traveling at high speeds.
John Stack
But he
did not angle the wings back right away.His
first idea was to place a small flap on the underside of the wing.This flap increased the lift of the plane
during high speeds to prevent an uncontrolled dive.Then during the production of the Bell X-1 he
used very thin wings and raised the tail wing above the height of the
wings.This kept the tail out of the
disrupted airflow of the wings, allowing for better speed and control.The Bell X-1 became the first manned vehicle
to break the sound barrier even with straight wings.
Bell X-1 (1946)
The
Bell X-5 was the first plane that could change its sweep angle during
flight.It was able to sweep its wings
farther back based on how fast the plane was flying.Although John Stack was not on the primary
development team for the X-5 his research was crucial to its success.
Bell X-5 (1951)
John
Stack’s creativity came mainly from motivation.He was externally motivated by the death of test pilot Ralph
Virden.This pushed him and his field to
develop safer ways to fly at high speeds,but also created the problem for him. We discussed how often finding the problem
was the hardest part of creativity. Ralph
Virden’s crash showed John Stack that the problem was in the wings of the
aircraft. He was also a pioneer in his field.As Collins and Amablile explored, “creativity is motivated by the
enjoyment and satisfaction that a person derives from engaging in creative
activity.”As a pioneer he was
intrinsically motivated to push the limits of his field because he enjoyed his
work.
The study of physical and social sciences has always been very subdivided into specialized fields, and it is little wonder. The immense complexity of nature and humanity means that nobody is capable of grasping everything there is to know. However, despite the challenges, Dr. David Christian, a historian of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, believes that it is of utmost importance not to lose sight of the whole thing. That is why Christian created "Big History," a school of history which studies everything. Literally everything, at every point in time: From the Big Bang to the end of the universe.
As you can see, it takes some time to get through it all
Unlike most conventional historical studies, which draw largely on documentary evidence, (and occasionally dabbling in archaeology if they must), Big History draws from a vast range of different fields, including Cosmology, Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry, Biology, Ecology, Paleontology and Anthropology, covering the few several billion years in which no one was considerate enough to write anything down. Such a multitude of fields necessitated that Christian employ many colleagues from different fields, including Berkley geologist Walter Alvarez, Historian Craig Benjamin at Grand Valley State University, Physicist Joseph Voros at the Swinburne Institute of Technology, and Anthropologist Fred Spier of the University of Amsterdam, to name a few. In fact, it would be better to say that Christian spearheaded the school rather than created it, as such an immense project can't really have a single creator.
Of course, attempts to write longue durée history is nothing new, and Christian drew on many of them for inspiration, particularly from the Annales school of history popular in France, which focuses on the geology and environment in which history occurs, as much as (if not more) than the people themselves. Unlike the Annales school, however, which focuses on a specific region, Christian combines this with the common desire to create a universal history. Thus, Christian not only put a single region in context, but the entirety of humanity, as well as putting those contexts in context, and from there it's recursive context all the way down. By putting the entirety of existence into context, a historian is able to tease out trends which occur over the span of all time, which traditionally restricted historians and scientists may be unable to see
The basic premise of Christian's thesis is as such: the Universe has two major observable trends which can be seen at various levels of magnitude. First is pretty much the second law of thermodynamics: entropy increases and the energy present at the Big Bang slowly transitions into a state in which no work can be done. No big revelations there. The second trend, however, is that at the same time, the complexity of how the energy is arranged seems to be exponentially increasing. Now, in a universe where energy was perfectly distributed, this would be impossible, but because it was not perfectly distributed, small bits of energy fused into matter, which, having mass, started drawing more matter together because gravity (I'm not a physicist so I'll leave it at that). Once enough matter was drawn together in a single place, the energy/matter-dense places (stars) created energy flows to empty space, and also started to construct more complex forms of matter. These are one of the first steps of a sort of domino effect of complexity, which uses the energy flow to maintain more complex structures despite the effects of entropy. The Big Bang and the creation of the Universe about 13 billion years ago. Christian divides these with eight "thresholds" marking an exponential increase in complexity.
The Big Bang and the creation of the Universe about 13 billion years ago
The creation of the first complex objects, stars, about 12 billion years ago
The creation of chemical elements inside dying stars required for chemically-complex objects, including plants and animals
The formation of planets, such as our Earth, which are more chemically complex than the Sun
The creation and evolution of life from about 3.8 billion years ago, including the evolution of our hominine ancestors
The development of our species, Homo sapiens, about 250,000 years ago, covering the Paleolithic era of human history
The appearance of agriculture about 11,000 years ago in the Neolithic era, allowing for larger, more complex societies
The "Modern revolution", or the vast social, economic, and cultural transformations that brought the world into the modern era
For those with a bit more time, I'll let Dr. Christian himself go into more detail about his thesis
Fitting Christian into Gardener's theory of multiple intelligence is a bit tricky, because the roll of a historian, especially one like Christian, does not fit neatly into his given categories. Certainly, he is intelligent linguistically (It's hard to imagine how a professional historian could not be), but one of his biggest achievements is in spacial intelligence. The reason for this is because the ability to smoothly and naturally navigate widely varying scales without getting lost in the details was key to successfully create a coherent narrative for the Big History School (as he says in his Great Courses lectures "not losing the elephant in the wrinkles..." it makes sense in context). Finally, the sheer amount of interdisciplinary organization it took not only to compose a thesis, but to create interdisciplinary college courses with muliple instructors and found an organized historical school belies no small amount of interpersonal intelligence too.
Big History represents a growing trend to re-unite once disparate fields of study. It doesn't really make that much sense that a historian ignore important things like ecology or chemistry, nor does it really help for a scientist to be unaware of the natural and human contexts in which he is studying. I doubt it will make any field of study obsolete, but thanks to David Christian, all the fields of science, natural and social can be observed into a single context, which makes our understanding of the universe, ever so slightly more precise.
Sources:
Wikipedia: David Christian and Big History
Cosmic Timeline: http://eps.berkeley.edu/~saekow/chronozoom/ChronoZoom-Big-History-Brochure-1.jpg
Christian, David (2008). Big History: The Big Band, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. Chantilly, Virginia, USA: The Teaching Company.
It’s a pattern I find myself in again and again, and it’s
particularly relevant as college students wrap up midterms and move into the
second part of the semester. Stress seems to be a constant condition for many
today, and luckily, resources are available to learn how to manage stress.
Stressed one hundred years ago? Society (and physicians) may not have been
helpful at all.
Stress.
The American Psychological Association’s “Stress in America”
report came out last week, and represents a decade of tracking stress in the
lives of Americans. The report is an acknowledgement that physical, mental, and
emotional stress is a real problem that hurts people. Civil War era doctors
called stress ‘soldier’s heart.’ World War I era doctors coined stress as
‘shell shock,’ even when diagnosing civilians. In general, doctors of
yesteryear did not consider stress to be an issue that could lead to further
health issues.
Hans Selye led the field in studies of stress beginning in
the late 1930s. Selye was born in Slovakia, studied in Prague, and lived in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Canada – truly an international
scholar. As a medical researcher in Toronto, Selye discovered that the rats
that he used in his experiments appeared to be dying from stress and not the
hormones he injected. Selye looked at this phenomenon closely and published an
obscure study about his findings.
Despite the minute attention paid to his research, Selye
perservered. He noticed that many people suffering from different ailments
shared similar or identical symptoms. This led to Selye’s discovery of General
Adaptation Syndrome, which shows how stress can lead to hormonal changes, which
can lead to other problems, such as ulcers, arthritis, cancer, and allergies,
among others. In other words, Selye found that frequent or constant activation of the fight-or-flight response network in a person's body can lead to physical complications. This theory gained ground after several decades of research. A 1983 TIME Magazine cover story explores the cycle of shock,
alarm, and eventually, exhaustion that stress causes.
Selye’s creative genius is not so much in his discovery as
it is in his paradigm shift. Selye explored stress as a medical issue instead
of merely an accepted part of life. Selye identified stress as a problem and
explored it in search of solutions. No one else had ever researched general
stress as a problem that could require a scientific solution. Always the
prolific writer, Selye would certainly fit Gardner’s standards of creative;
Selye published over 40 books and 1,700 articles in his lifetime (to say he was
prolific is an understatement!).
A graphic from TIME tracking Selye's analyses of stress in the human body (6 June 1983)
Selye’s research is notable also because it triggered a new
field of research in ‘stress science.’ The conceptual change Selye led gave
room for scientists in similar fields to relate their research to human stress.
Some of Selye’s theories have since been proved incorrect, but one should still
note the expansion of the medical domain that resulted from Selye’s research.
As Dr. Paul Rosch wrote for the American Institute of Stress, Selye’s “real
legacy can be summed up by what he often reminded me: theories don’t have to be
correct – only facts do.” Selye refused to ignore the hidden roots of disease
and found a new medical field through which to theorize.
Miguel Valenzuela - father, husband, civil engineer, and the creator of the PancakeBot. Valenzuela, when he is not working, enjoys building with Legos and drawing pancakes for his two daughters. He currently lives in Norway, was born in Mexico, and has lived "all over the United States." He moved to Norway after obtaining a Bio Resource and Agricultural Engineering degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California. Looking at Valenzuela, his life seems orderly and typical - not quite the makings of a "creative." Nonetheless, this happily married father of two is who we have to thank for the invention of the PancakeBot.
The PancakeBot, a fairly recent invention, was bought by "StoreBound" only two years ago in 2014. This artistic pancake machine's original design is featured below, along with Valenzuela and his two daughters:
Valenzuela credits his two daughters as his inspiration in his invention. In an interview with "Digital Cooks," the inventor tells us: "It was an accident as a matter of fact. I was reading an article in 'Make Magazine' when Lily [daughter] asked me what I was doing... She turned to her sister and said, 'Papa is going to build a Pancake Machine out of LEGO!' and that is how it all started." From then on Valenzuela carefully created the original PancakeBot, handcrafting some pieces that took up to 6 months. The original was finished in 2010. Now, no longer using LEGOs, the PancakeBot functions as shown below:
Under the website's return policy, it states: "we developed the PancakeBot to be a product that inspires creativity and builds a deeper understanding of technology." Any person can play a part in creating a design to be made into a pancake. Creativity can be created and used personally, via SD card, as well across the world, when uploaded to PancakeBot's website. Designs range from Snoop Dog to Jesus and the Sydney Opera House to a T-Rex. This vision is also due in part to Valenzuela's wife, Runi. When he asked what to do now that he had a PancakeBot she responded, "Make art with it." Valenzuela has done just that with his own creative short video and the help of the PancakeBot:
As mentioned above, Valenzuela does not appear to embody what one might view as a typical creative type. In Handbook of Creativity, Collins and Amabile touch on this subject admitting that it is a "widespread belief that creativity stems from madness" and although this is a controversial topic, it remains a common view that creative types are the person who stays awake for days, skips meals, and is socially isolated. Again, when looking at motivation, Valenzuela does not fit in with many theorists' view of the creative. Here I stopped to ask myself is Valenzuela was actually creative. He simply does not fit in with the early theorist's perception of creative people. His stated motivation doesn't appear to be driven by reducing the tension of inappropriate desires, as Freud would have argued. Crutchfield's belief that creativity must primarily be intrinsically motivated also does not align with Valenzuela's case; his daughters' joy is an extrinsic motivator. Studies reported by Collins and Amabile also support that when creator's are being watched, they are less creative. Again, Valenzuela counters this as his daughters were a large influence on his project. Despite all of these theories, I would argue that there is no way a PancakeBot and subsequent breakfast food video are not creative. My personal takeaway from this is that though creative types may generally fit a certain status quo, there is not limit to who can be creative or to what extent. Perhaps Valenzuela's main motivation is the joy he feels as a result of his daughters' joy.
To find out more about the PancakeBot: http://www.pancakebot.com/home Full interview with Miguel Valenzuela, inventor of PancakeBot: http://3digitalcooks.com/2014/05/interview-miguel-valenzuela/ Handbook of Creativity, Mary Ann Collins and Teresa M. Amabile (in syllabus)
In 2012, M.I.T. created the "Center for Art, Science, & Technology" (CAST) and the findings and scientific art that has come out of that creation is incredible. CAST's attempts to "humanize technology and creative more expansive-thinking scientists" has led to amazing art projects created by M.I.T. scientists that are breaking the stereotype of the boring, left-brained science nerds.
In "Sandcastles", M.I.T. graduate student Marcelo Coelho collaborated with artist Vik Muniz to draw beautifully intricate castles...on a single grain of sand. Coelho had been playing around with sand grains and lasers for a few years to no avail, since the lasers inevitably pulverized the grains, but when he was granted access to the multi-million dollar microscope (with its own set of lasers), he was able to create tiny, tiny drawings of landscapes and castles. Coelho's discovery of the unorthodox use of the microscope for something other than science sent "excitement percolating through the [M.I.T.] system", he said.
Another of Muniz's projects, called "Colonies", was also made via M.I.T. science equipment - this time using pictures of fluorescent bacteria and cancer cells and turning them into creations and images entirely different - for example, a the circuitry of a computer motherboard.
Muniz's collaboration with scientists comes from the fact that "mutually beneficial collaborations take each party [science and art] into new territories in their respective fields...scientists are imaginative yet with such a different focus than 'traditional' artists."
And M.I.T. bioengineer Tal Danino, in collaboration with Muniz and M.I.T. residency artist Anika Yi, explored the concept of "patriarchal fear" when they took 100 samples of female bacteria and let it cultivate and grow random things in a giant petri dish, which Yi used almost as finger paint (with rubber gloves of course!) to create the pieces in her exhibition.
Other M.I.T. science-art collaborations have happened too, such as Tomas Saraceno's work with M.I.T. civil engineer Markus Buehler, in taking Buehler's scientific study of black widow spiders and pushing it to the realm of art and architecture in their quest to use the protein in the spider silk used to weave spiderwebs as an ideal building material that could be replicated and used synthetically. Tomas and I have pushed the boundaries of what we thought we could actually do," Buehler said about their project, "it's important to be creative. Putting Tomas and my students in the same room lets them learn from him as an artist to think wildly, and that's necessary to solve a problem."
Gardner's theories on "multiple intelligences" fits incredibly well in describing what is happening at M.I.T. Gardner, in studying "multiple intelligences", compared Picasso and Freud, "deliberately contrasting people of different intelligences: linguistic and logical in Freud's case, and spatial and bodily in Picasso's...both men drew on their personal intelligences in most distinctive ways"...
...But just think what might have happened and what might have been created if Picasso and Freud had been able to stretch and push each other in their own version of intelligence like these M.I.T. scientists and artists are doing with and for each other! Now that would have been a science-art collaboration for the ages.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/arts/design/at-mit-science-embraces-a-new-chaos-theory-art.html?ref=international
Gardner, H. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Live of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York: 2011. Print
Elon Musk is what I like to call a modern day fusion of Benjamin Franklin and Iron Man. Franklin is know for being one of the world's most innovative minds, inventing things like bifocals, the lightning rod, and even pioneering the library system. Iron Man, on the other hand, is notorious for his extreme wealth, confident personality, and being able to help take down the robot-king, Ultron.
Although Musk is significantly more cautious about creating Artificial Intelligence than Iron Man, and has yet to encounter aliens, there is no doubt that Elon Musk is a creative innovator and pioneer. He actually had a cameo in the second Iron Man movie, which is featured to the above.
Why can Musk be compared to Benjamin Franklin? Well, a quick look at Musk's resume will undoubtedly drop your jaw and help you understand why. At age 44, Musk has a net worth of $12 Billion [1]. The five main "Big Creative" companies that helped accumulate this wealth are Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and Solar City. Elon Musk has been either the co-founder or sole founder of all these companies.
Impressive, right? Musk has not only produced successful companies, but has revolutionized the respective industries too. Tesla Motors is a great example of this. Musk has stated that he wants Tesla to be a catalyst for the electric car industry [2], and has done so by breaking down stereotypes of electric cars being low in the power department or aesthetically ugly. To prove his integrity, Musk has also released patents to his cars and openly welcomes competition because it will help speed the transition to low-emission transportation. He released this news in a geeky post titled: All Our Patent Are Belong To You, a reference to the 1991 Zero Wing video game. Manufacturing electric sports cars are only a part of what creative innovations Tesla pursues. In the video above is Tesla's prototype charger that finds the car's charging socket on its own.
If you have not noticed the trend already, Musk's current three companies (Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City) all have a focus on sustainability. Elon Musk's intention behind starting all these companies is what I believe to be most telling of his character. In an interview with CNN, Musk stated, "the philosophy behind all three companies is to try to minimize existential threats" [3]. By promoting and revolutionizing the sustainable energy industry, and pathing the way towards making life multi-planetary, Musk seeks to increase the longevity of humanity.
Using Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, I believe Elon Musk excels in logical intelligence more than any other intelligence. Musk is an absolute master at knowing what is lacking within the economic market. PayPal is a great example of this because he was able to streamline monetary transfers during the technological revolution. Explaining this himself, Musk said, "I like to think of things like 'what is the most useful thing that you can think of to do and that enough smart people aren't working on'" [3]. This simple philosophy has helped propel his companies into success and are already changing humanity for the better.
Sources:
1: http://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0871VJfvD1c (BBC interview with Elon Musk)
3: https://youtu.be/hF45qsAwSvw?t=55s (CNN interview with Elon Musk)
