How I Get Access to This Talk
The situation was, after I had finished a talk given by a woman who issued the subject of autism and in which she mentioned that Wolfram and Gates both had given talks there on the TED stage before her, I was so anxious to listen to talks of the famous guys instead of the no-so-famous ones. So I scanned the beginnings of the filenames for those talks, until I encountered that name – George Whitesides. That is a comparatively rare surname and it cannot be any other one than the big guy in Chem. Dept., Harvard.
This big guy talked little about chemistry on the TED stage.
About Simplicity
He said, “We are (in a) academic (world). We love complexity. We can write papers about complexity and the nice thing about complexity is that fundamentally intractable in many ways so you are not responsible for the outcomes.” I suppose if the words came out of a young scientist with a rather low status, he would be laughed at with great scorn.
Despite such sort-of-kidding words, the main theme of the latter half of his speech really caught the point. I cannot agree more. The idea issues that the world needs a simple technology to improve public life, though it stands a good chance that the simple tech is built upon an extremely complex system. Many simple objects in our daily lives prove this, such as cell phones, birth control pills.
So the question is, how to apply our complex science we are devoted to today (it is complex, if the previous quote of Whitesides stands true), to a simple technology that we can use in our life? The most famous patented invention of Gore Inc., the Gore-Tex, is a simple fabric that can resist water and allow moist, despite the complexity in terms of its molecular and engineering structures. Another example is the paper chip presented by Whitesides in the talk (I even did not know they were working at it, it is fantastic!).
About Giving Talks
Recently I’m getting a stronger feeling that those big guys in academia have something in common – they have the gift of talking and giving presentations. Lei Sun also referred to such phenomena when he described the ACS meeting to me. He attended the talks of those big guys, which included George Whitesides himself. He said the speech they gave were fantastic, the things they presented were extremely beautiful. However, maybe (and very possibly) the work they had done did not reach that altitude. He referred to it as “能扯”.
Most big guys, when giving speeches, are prone to fix the subject to a wider and broader range than the fields they are actually in, or sometimes just change their themes. The Nobel Laureates speeches I attended are perfect examples in spite of occasional exceptions (Aaron Ciechanover had been to our campuses more that twice and his speech may have a little relationship with his own field). Myron Scholes talked how he came into his field instead of describing his model to us in a simple way. David Jonathan Gross talked about a rather big question – “The Future of Physics”, in which, I remember Lei Sun asked the presenter a question on quantum computing. Now today, George Whitesides (though he hasn’t got a Nobel Prize yet), talked about simplicity, as if he is an esthetician or philosopher, rather than a chemist. Interestingly enough, we can still have the sense from his wording that he is a chemist, such as kinetic energy of the water molecules, building blocks, etc.. Such phenomena might be ascribe to the considering that the audience are totally ignorant of this particular field, or just an expression of contempt (some scholars have such superiority indeed).
Anyway, personally I have to practice more to speak, to blurt out the things in my mind or under my pen.
