During an inspiring WORLD.MINDS dinner, I asked my Harvard colleague and friend, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who was sitting next to me: “Wouldn’t you admit that life is inefficient and we spend most of it in misguided pursuits?” Dan disagreed: “Everything in life is valuable, nothing is wasted.”
And so, I had to explain my perspective. Early in my career I wasted most of my time in trying to gain scientific credibility and respect among peers in order to secure tenure and access much needed funding for my students and postdocs. In retrospect, it would have been more efficient for me to concentrate on creative work, as many of the people I tried to impress are dead by now and the younger ones did not witness my early efforts. Later on, I served in many leadership positions in order to improve my academic environment, but by now the benefits ushered in by this service are either forgotten or taken for granted like the weather. And so, late in my career I chose to focus on substance and creative work, without caring much about what other people think. Richard Feynman’s first wife, Arline — who died during his work on the Manhattan Project, often asked him: “What do you care what other people think?” when he seemed preoccupied with the opinions of colleagues about his work. Feynman used Arline’s question as the title of one of his most celebrated books.
There is no substitute to the joy associated with creative work away from the crowd. In the class I taught about General Relativity just before dinner, a student asked whether Albert Einstein had competition in coming up with a dynamical theory of gravity as a generalization of the static theory of Newtonian gravity. This would have been analogous to the way that James Maxwell wrote a dynamical theory of electromagnetism as a generalization of electrostatics. I explained that Einstein did not have competition because he walked way outside the beaten path and was unrecognized in his early career. As a result, he had the privilege of working for a decade on a revolutionary theory with little competition. The simplest way to avoid competition is to think outside the box. The most efficient way to make a revolutionary contribution is to avoid the crowd.
The brilliant Rolf Dobelli, founder of WORLD.MINDS, noted that I had to pay inevitable taxes to my academic environment in order to reach the status of freedom that I currently enjoy. I disagreed, and mentioned Diogenes as an alternative role model.
The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes lived in tubs, expressed indifference to wealth and did not seek approval from anyone. For one, he believed that virtue is better revealed in action than in theory. This is timely advice for “justice warriors” of Gen Z or “virtue signal” addicts in academia. Diogenes tried to demonstrate that wisdom and happiness belong to the individual, independent of society. He scorned socio-political organizations, property rights and reputation. In effect, he tried to improve the efficiency of life by focusing on the `wheat’ and ignoring the `chaff’.
But even with our best intentions, we sometimes cannot avoid the `chaff’ when exploring the unknown. This is true in private life as it is in science.
Consider the discovery of `dark matter’ in clusters of galaxies by Fritz Zwicky in 1933. The notion that this invisible matter might be a form of dark objects made of ordinary matter was pursued by the Physics Nobel Laureate Jim Peebles in a model that he proposed in 1987, the year I started my career in astrophysics. Based on the exquisite data we currently have on the brightness anisotropies of the microwave background and the large-scale structure in the distribution of galaxies, this model is clearly ruled out. Ironically, Peebles promoted this wrong model after pioneering in 1982 the Cold Dark Matter model — which is now believed to be correct. This is a sign of inefficiency in Peebles’ career, as his earlier proposal was more relevant than his later proposal, so Gilbert’s rationale of learning from every experience in life cannot heal the wound. Despite Peebles’ richer experience and better perspective on cosmology, he wasted time.
The same applies to Albert Einstein, who in 1937 argued in collaboration with Nathan Rosen that gravitational waves do not have physical significance. In 1957, Richard Feynman realized that gravitational waves must be real because they would move beads sliding with friction on a rigid rod and dissipate heat. Indeed, the LIGO experiment detected gravitational waves in 2015, seventy eight years after Einstein reached the wrong conclusion about his own theory of General Relativity. When exploring the unknown, it is easy to take the longer path and waste time.
The most efficient way to learn is to be guided by experimental data about nature. Sure, we can dream up a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity by adding extra spatial dimensions, but if these do not exist — we might have wasted our career by taking the wrong path towards describing physical reality. Virtual realities offer the benefit of longevity within large enough communities of scientists that do not adhere to reality checks. Doing physics without experimental constraints resembles playing tennis without a net. Rolf Dobelli added that it is actually like playing without a ball. The community members might enjoy their social status, honors and accolades, but in the global scheme of understanding the physical Universe — if they took the wrong path, they wasted their time.
Enrico Fermi asked: “Where is everybody?” to which the likely answer is: “Wasting their time on misguided pursuits.” Nevertheless, there might be lights in the darkness of space. The Galileo Project is aiming, under my leadership, to discover evidence for the `sharpest cookies in the jar’ of intelligent civilizations. The commissioning paper from our Observatory at Harvard University was posted this morning. Check it out here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
