Experts

It doesn't feel like October here in Chicago, but who's complaining?  Unfortunately, as the saying goes, "If you don't like the weather in Chicago, just wait a few minutes."  I've lived here long enough to know that the reverse is true - "If you like the weather in Chicago, just wait a few minutes."  Truthfully, the weather doesn't change quite that fast here, but we've certainly been enjoying what will undoubtedly be some of the last remaining days by our swimming pool.  Even if the weather hasn't changed very much, Autumn is here according to the calendar.  And with the transition from September to October, I wanted to take a very brief break away from the themes I've been posting about over the last couple of weeks (network science, complexity, and chaos theory). 

My interest of late in the fields of network science, complexity, and chaos theory have forced me to pick up some articles and books that I probably would have avoided in the past.  As I've admitted a number of times in previous posts, if our children ever had questions about their math homework growing up, they were smart enough to go talk to their mother!  However, these topics of late have forced me to go back and brush up on some of my mathematics skills, as well as learning some new ones (graph theory, topology, and algorithms in the field of computer science).  I've learned new words such as cybernetics and cellular automata, and I have even learned some very basic (if there is such a thing) theoretical physics.  

During my reading, I've come across several quotes pertaining to the nature of expertise.  Realize that most of these quotes have been attributed to scientists who were not only considered experts in their respective fields, but they were also considered to be some of the most brilliant minds in the history of science.  The first quote is by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational contributions in atomic theory and quantum physics.  Bohr said:

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in  very narrow field.

Werner Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating the field of quantum mechanis.  Heisenberg published his famous "uncertainty principle" in 1927 (a topic for another day, trust me).  Heisenberg and Bohr certainly agreed on the nature of expertise, and perhaps Heisenberg was thinking of Bohrs when he wrote:

Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about his subject.  To this I would object that no one can ever know very much about any subject.  I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Of course, as I started to look up both of these quotes to verify that Bohrs and Heisenberg actually said them, I found a quote by a pediatrician named W.P. Northrup of New York University who wrote in 1904 (before the two quotes above, by the way):

My one admirer kindly spoke of me, he being in an amiable mood, as an expert in this diagnosis [referring to Northrup's expertise at diagnosing pneumonia in children].  "Yes," I agreed, which took him aback.  "I've made all the mistakes that are possible."  The net result of that should be expert.

I am reminded of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, who said, The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.  My point is that all of us, even the intellectual greats, started out as beginners.  Rather than looking at our mistakes as failures, we need to consider that our mistakes are what make us better in the long run.    

Ancora Imparo!