A lesson from Feynman

Don't think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do.....

Really all we (scientists) do is a hell of a lot more of one kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don't work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it's just that scientists do more of it.  What isn't ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject. 

A scientist's work is normal activities of humans carried to a fault, in a very exaggerated form. Ordinary people do do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem everyday. Only idiots like me do that! Or Darwin, or somebody who worries about the same question. "Where do the animals come from?" Or, "What is the relation of species?" A scientist works on it, and thinks about it for years! What is do, is something that common people often do,but so much more that it looks crazy! But it's trying to find the potentiality as a human being.

For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like these fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well they work and they work and they work on it. In that case, it might be a fault. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go.And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary. It doesn't mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they're trying to find the greatest potentiality of human beings' activity in a certain direction.

-Richard Feynman
Feyman's rainbow, A search for beauty in Physics and in Life. By Leonard Mlodinow

The book chronicles some exchanges between Mlodinow, then a new postdoctoral fellow at Caltech unsure of himself and Feynman, the resident genius, during the last few years of Feynman's life in the early 1980s as he was battling cancer.

New running experiment

Back after almost a month's hiatus! Didn't realise it had been so long. When work is going at a great pace, it becomes easier to ignore other things. But I made some deliberate time today to write, even if it only a short post (as I suppose most of my posts will be for some time)

I've kept up with running and added weight training to it. Although I wanted to do free weights, the instructor was more keen on machines. Once the body gets used to it, the free weights are to be added later on. I don't understand the logic behind this. Would've loved to start a program like the Stronglifts 5x5. But that would be more time commitment than I can handle right now. Minimalism in goals is important too.

The new running experiment I'm doing is simply to run shorter distances but at a faster pace. Why? Because it's more fun, takes less time, is more intense (hence better cardio and adds power) and I'm terribly slow at running anyway. So, increasing the baseline pace will probably help me run a faster marathon next time. Let's see the results six months from now.