A Tale of Two Picket Fences

Wallace Carothers, American chemist and inventor extraordinaire, had a brief teaching and research appointment at Harvard before leaving to make history at DuPont.  I wrote about him here.  Carothers' mentor at Harvard was Professor E. P. Kohler, a veteran teacher by the time Carothers got there in 1926.  A contemporary of Carothers remembers Kohler:

But after I met him [Kohler]..we sat around listening, waiting for the words of wisdom. He was a bachelor, and he had an old New England house down in some town south of Boston. He had a picket fence around his house, and he talked at great length about what a great thing it was to paint a picket fence. He got enormous joy and satisfaction out of this, and I thought it was awfully stupid. Finally he said, 'The reason this is so wonderful: it's the only thing that I do that has a beginning, has an end, and at anytime I know exactly where I stand.' Twenty years later it finally dawned on me that I'd heard some words of wisdom.' Kohler, now 62, was in his sixteenth year at Harvard when James Conant and Roger Adams presented to Kohler--'the King' he was called--the convincing case for Wallace Carothers as a new Harvard instructor. 

Enough for One Lifetime by Matthew E. Hermes.

Carothers lasted just three semesters before leaving Harvard for DuPont in 1927.  The rest is history. I bring up the story because Professor Kohler's peculiar (and real-life) attitude about fence painting contrasts so starkly with that of the fictional Tom Sawyer, forever captured by Mark Twain:

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.

Of course the guileful Tom goes on to convince his friends to paint the fence for him, and that of course is part of his charm.

What sort of character do we reward in workers and leaders today?  Which traits do we admire in ourselves when faced with such a task?

Titan Macht Kohlenstoff

Titanium is the carbon of transition metals. The Germans realized this early on. Look again at this "carbo-centric" Periodic Table of the Elements from 1926:

Follow the color code (carbon is black) down and to the left. The association runs right through titanium and zirconium, down to hafnium and thorium. To the right, the rhymes-with-carbon pathway runs down through germanium, tin, and lead; I'll get to the latter later after having some fun with the first row transition metals.

Titanium has probably touched more carbon atoms than any other metallic element. And there are two words for this Benjamin--just two words I want to say to you. Are you listening Benjamin?

Ziegler-Natta!

Reasons for Resonance

Ideas are like electrons. When shared among many people, ideas may resonate, leading to a more stable idea. A more stable idea is a stronger idea. Some might argue that prejudice is a strong idea that finds resonance among groups of like people. True enough. The notion is independent of whether an idea is "good" or "bad."

The quantum mechanical concept of resonance was introduced by Heisenberg in 1926:

...in a discussion of the quantum states of the helium atom. He compared the structure of the helium atom with the classical system of resonating coupled harmonic oscillators. Linus Pauling used this analogy to introduce his resonance theory in 1928. In the classical system, the coupling produces two modes, one of which is lower in frequency than either of the uncoupled vibrations; quantum-mechanically, this lower frequency is interpreted as a lower energy. link

Such resonance is really an energy exchange mechanism via coupling. Pauling showed that whenever there is resonance between two or more parts, the whole is stabilized. Such resonance differs from mere conjugation: conjugation is just a yoking together--there is no implicit notion of resonance. Resonance requires certain other features--foremost a recognizable likeness (symmetry) and ideally a ring structure (which brings up obvious symbolism).

The notion of resonance extends beyond quantum mechanics and chemistry into mechanics and social interactions. link. It also holds for pair-bonding interactions of other sorts. Communicative resonance spans a greater range of communicative space. The same idea may stimulate two or more people at two different locations.  Excitation at one level excites another at a different level. The message resonates right between them-as if through thin air. But there is no real sense of the message being above or below the two: what counts in the quantum mechanical version is the energy overlap and symmetry.