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Internet addresses and telephone numbers given in this book were accurate at the time it went to press.
© 2017 by Bill Nye
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Book design by Ariana Abud
Illustrations by Bill Nye
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978–1–62336–791–6 hardcover
ISBN-13: 978–1–62336–792–3 e-book
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Bill’s Guide to Doing Everything All at Once
PART I: PRINCIPLES OF NERD LIVING
CHAPTER 1:The Tao of Phi
CHAPTER 2:Scout Lifeguarding
CHAPTER 3:Me Against the Rock
CHAPTER 4:When Slide Rules Ruled
CHAPTER 5:The First Earth Day and National Service
CHAPTER 6:How My Parents Quit Smoking
CHAPTER 7:Ned and the “THANKS” Sign
CHAPTER 8:Why the Bow Tie?
CHAPTER 9:Land of the Free, Home of the Nerds
CHAPTER 10:Everybody Knows Something You Don’t
PART II: NERD IDEAS INTO NERD ACTIONS
CHAPTER 11:The Joy of Constraints
CHAPTER 12:Upside-Down Pyramid of Design
CHAPTER 13:Comedy and Me
CHAPTER 14:Not Faking It
CHAPTER 15:Resonating to the Nerd Beat
CHAPTER 16:Critical Thinking, Critical Filtering
CHAPTER 17:A Vaccine Against Deception
CHAPTER 18:Destiny Be Damned—Full Speed Ahead
CHAPTER 19:Time for Measured Urgency
CHAPTER 20:A Mind Is a Wonderful Thing to Change
PART III: HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
CHAPTER 21:Are You an Imposter?
CHAPTER 22:How High Can You Go?
CHAPTER 23:Tragedy of the Traffic Accident
CHAPTER 24:Cold, Hard Facts of Ice
CHAPTER 25:West Virginians and All That Coal
CHAPTER 26:Security Through Nerdiness
CHAPTER 27:Think Cosmically, Act Globally
CHAPTER 28:Humans Control the Earth; Nerds Should Guide the Humans
CHAPTER 29:A Reasoner’s Manifesto
CHAPTER 30:Design for a Better Future
Acknowledgments
BILL’S GUIDE TO DOING
EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE
OBJECTIVE:
CHANGE the WORLD
EVERYONE you’ll ever meet knows something you DON’T.
GOOD ENGINEERING invites right use.
Constraints provide OPPORTUNITIES.
Be part of the START.
Think COSMICALLY; act LOCALLY.
QUESTION before you BELIEVE.
CHANGE YOUR MIND when you need to.
Be OPTIMISTIC; be RESPONSIBLE; be PERSISTENT.
This is a book about everything. It is about everything I know and about everything I think you should know, too.
I realize that may sound a little crazy, but I’m completely serious. We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. When you pick up your phone or open your laptop and go online, you are instantly connected to a trillion trillion bytes of data; that’s a 1 followed by 24 zeros. Every year another billion trillion bytes of data move around the Internet, carrying everything from those important videos with kitty cats to the arcane but fantastic detailed results of subatomic particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. In that sense, talking about “everything” is easy. Everything you and I know, and everything we need to know, is already out there for the taking.
Yet despite all those whizzing ones and zeros—the collective intelligence of billions of human brains—I still feel that we seem awfully . . . well, stupid. We’re not using all this shared wisdom to solve big problems. We’re not facing up to climate change. We haven’t figured out how to make clean, renewable, reliable energy available to everyone. Too many people die in avoidable auto accidents, succumb to curable diseases, do not get enough food and clean water, and still do not have access to the Internet’s great busy beehive mind. Despite being more connected than ever before, we’re not particularly generous toward, or understanding of, one another, preferring to hide behind denial and personal bias. The flood of information has effectively allowed us to know something about everything, but that knowing is clearly not enough. We need to be able to sort the facts and put our knowledge into action, and that is why I wrote this book.
I want to see humanity band together and change the world. I think it will take a special kind of personality to get this done: people who can handle the modern overflow of information, take in everything all at once, and select the parts that matter. It requires rigorous honesty about the nature of our problems. It requires creative irreverence in the search for solutions. The process of science and natural laws don’t care about our politics or preconceptions. They merely set the boundaries of what is possible, defining the outer limits of what we can achieve—or not, should we shy away from the challenge.
Fortunately, there is a large and growing clan of people who think that way, who love nothing better than using the tools of reason to solve the most unsolvable-looking puzzles. We call them “nerds,” and I humbly (proudly) count myself among them. I have spent a lifetime developing the nerd mindset and trying to master the admirable but often elusive qualities that come with it: persistence in the pursuit of a lofty goal, resilience to keep trying no matter what the obstacles are, humility for when one approach turns out to be a dead end, and the patience to examine the problem from every angle until a path forward becomes clear. If you already consider yourself one of us, then join me in doing more by applying your nerdiness to the big problems of the day, not just to trivia or minutia (although of course we will set aside plenty of time for those). And if you don’t consider yourself a nerd yet, join me all the same: You will soon discover that everybody has an inner nerd waiting to be awoken by the right passion. My whole life has been a series of those kinds of awakenings, moments of epiphany when I became evermore aware of the joyous power of science, math, and engineering.
It happened to me with a jolt in the 11th grade in Washington, DC, when I took formal physics for the first time. In nerd culture, we might write that it was my phirst phormal physics, and we’d phind that phrasing rather phunny. The “ph” pronounced phonetically with the same fricative that produces the sound from the consonant “f” is from phi, the Greek letter φ. The Roman “p” looks vaguely like a Greek φ. In Greek, the “f” sounds a little breathy, so the Roman letter “h” serves to preserve that sound or tradition. I couldn’t help myself—I had to stop typing and look up the roots of the “ph” in our words “physics” and “phosphate.” When we see these “ph” words, we know they came to us from ancient Greek and then Latin. The scholars call it “transliteration,” meaning “across the letters.” Centuries ago a diligent, perhaps even enthusiastic, transliterator was inclined to add that “h” to the “p,” and here we are. Phew.
This little digression encapsulates what it means to be so into a topic, so phocused and phascinated by some aspect of nature or the human experience, that people consider you—or more important, you consider yourself—a nerd. For me to really enjoy some deliberate misspelled wordplay, I had to think about the background of φ, “ph,” and “f.” I called on my knowledge that most English speakers pronounce the letter φ like the second syllable in “Wi-Fi,” but Greek speakers pronounce φ like “fee,” as in “Fee-fi-fo-fum, / I smell the blood of a nerdy one.” And as I was checking that out, I recalled that φ has other intriguing connections to physics besides the linguistic one. It is the mathematical symbol denoting the golden ratio, a fundamental geometric proportion that appears widely in biology, economics, and especially art. In statistics, φ is a measure of the correlation between two separate factors, and so it is a crucial measure for distinguishing chance events from cause and effect in scientific experiments. Stick that in your back pocket.
You might regard the things I just told you as little more than bits of playful trivia, but I beg to differ. The knowledge I gained in my obsessive pursuit of φ changed me a little, and it just changed you, as well. The impulse to chase down details is central to the way I have solved problems throughout my life. It is also, not coincidentally, a defining nerd trait. Further evidence of my detail-oriented outlook: Long before the ubiquity of the Internet, my friends would say about me, “The party doesn’t start until Bill gets out the dictionary.” I like to know the background of words, the etymology, as well as the meanings of the words themselves. While I was reflecting on the digraph “ph” just now, I was also reflecting on what started that train of thought—namely physics, the study of nature, specifically energy and motion—and the joy I felt when I was first (or phirst) exposed to it.
The word “scientist” was coined in 1833 by the English natural philosopher William Whewell. Before then, the term was “natural philosopher,” which sounds a little odd today but back then was a familiar expression. Philosophy is the study of knowledge; philosophers seek ways to know whether or not something is true, so natural philosophy was the study of what’s true in nature. Or, in modern terms, a scientist is a natural philosopher seeking objective truths.
We look for laws of nature that enable anyone to make concrete predictions regarding the outcomes of tests and experiments. Science belongs to anyone who loves to think and look for connections in nature. It’s not all about math and measurement, but wow, the math is what gives the predictions their precious precision. We can know the motions of distant worlds to such a degree of accuracy that we can land the Curiosity rover on Mars or send the New Horizons probe past Pluto with near-pinpoint accuracy. We can measure the exact age of a billion-year-old rock by clocking the decay of the radioactive atoms it contains. The combined power of math and science is amazing. That’s why nerds are so drawn to them, but the insights that come from science are inspirational even to those who never plan to crunch the numbers.
Digressions and micro-obsessions seem to come naturally to those who catch the science bug. You may meet people who are into trivia or who adore the very small details of some area of study. It might be the names of counties in Maryland or Mississippi or the writing credits on Star Trek. My claim is that by learning those details, these nerdy people know something extra about a bigger picture, as well. The trivia expert (a trivialist?) has in his or her head a framework of an area of study, outfitted with the appropriate memory hooks on which to hang more information, which in turn enhances and fills in the bigger picture.
It’s much easier to remember the names of counties if you have a mental picture of a state map that indicates what county is contiguous with what other county. The names, the map, the driving distances to the state capital—they’re all much easier to keep track of if you have the details properly placed in a mental map. This big-picture frame, combined with detailed views of the world, enhances one’s ability to navigate across county lines, carry out commands on a sailboat, or do a little brain surgery. I’ve found this to be a recurring theme in my most formative experiences: The details inform the big picture as much as the big picture organizes the details. Is it enough simply to know where Maryland is on a map? Maybe, but the extra knowledge of the state’s inner workings creates a much clearer picture and brings with it immeasurable value.
I’m encouraged by how deeply nerd behaviors have been absorbed into mainstream culture. Not so long ago, the nerds were often defined in opposition to the popular kids in school. Nowadays, it’s downright fashionable to exhibit an obsessive attention to detail—not just in science but in nearly anything. The kind of trivia knowledge that was once considered a TV game-show oddity is now a staple of Thursday-night social gatherings at hip neighborhood bars. Another encouraging sign: The most popular show on television as I’m writing this is The Big Bang Theory, which every week overwhelms sitcoms, dramas, and news commentary in the ratings. Tens of millions of people apparently identify with an odd bunch of characters who are nominally engaged in complex science but who also display their very human quirks.
Now, as much as I love nerds and nerd culture, I have also observed some worrisome trends over the last years that have motivated me to speak out. On the surface, things look promising. The increased attention to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning is terrific; it’s great that programmers and tech-oriented entrepreneurs have become major celebrities in our culture and businesses. After all, our society is increasingly dependent on technology, and we will be in deep trouble if very few people understand the scientific ideas that the technology depends on. What’s not to love? The growing fondness for trivia and geek-speak would seem like a great thing.
But the current pop version of nerd culture leaves me with a nagging concern. Geeking out—going fanatical about characters in comic books, for example—can be fun. It can develop a community of people whose lives are enriched by sharing a common interest. It brings together hundreds of thousands of people every year at Comic-Con and the like. But it’s most definitely not the same as diligently studying math and science to grasp the complexities of climate, to engineer a disease- or pest-resistant crop, or to become one of our time-honored quintessential smart people: a rocket scientist. Geeking out is driven by the same instinct to hoard information, but the application of the knowledge is a different and considerably harder-working sort of thing. It takes me right back to my original thought: Information and application are very different things. When I talk reverently about the nerd mindset, I’m extolling the virtues of a worldview that involves gathering as much information as possible and being constantly on the lookout for ways to use it for the greater good.
The difference between information and application may seem obvious to someone reading along here, but it’s not obvious to a great many people in the general public. There are charlatans and cult leaders out there who are able to pawn off false details and bias as fact and reason. I continually meet people who espouse their own stories of the origin of the universe and how we all got here, attempting to pawn off false information and bias as fact and reason. I’m not talking about traditional religious believers; I’m referring to people who string together some general concepts into their own quasi-physical theory of the big bang (or black holes, or some secret way to “fix” Einstein’s relativity theory). I also meet and hear about too many people who exploit bits of scientific information to peddle worthless products, to promote counterfactual political arguments, to sow fear, and to justify sexist or racist thinking. In some cases, these people seem to genuinely think they are doing science, but they aren’t. They may even think of themselves as nerds, but they really aren’t. They adopt the language of physics or biology without having spent the time to know the established science and current thinking with regard to the stars and the space-time these stars inhabit.
Here’s another important cautionary point: It’s very easy for us, any of us, to draw faulty conclusions from a small sample of events. Superficial familiarity with nerd-style thinking may even encourage it. If you switch off the lights in your living room at the same moment two cars smack into each other outside, you might conclude that your switch-throwing caused a car crash. You might decide to never touch that switch again, at least not while there are any cars passing by. Or you might wait for a particularly disliked neighbor to cruise past and then start switching that switch as fast as you can.
In this extreme case, the cause-and-effect connection seems obviously wrong. I imagine the readers of this book have no trouble concluding that there is almost certainly no link between a light switch in your house and automobile-driver attentiveness (unless it causes the light to shine right into oncoming windshields, in which case, please switch it off right now). But what if it’s a much more subtle effect, like reading that people who drink red wine are less likely to have heart attacks? Or that people with certain skin colors have lower IQs? At different times, some very influential researchers became convinced that such things were correlated. Should you believe them?
The geek-trivia attitude toward science is no help in sorting out false correlations. You might say that the connection between geeking out and doing science is itself a false correlation: Nerds adore geek trivia and make great use of it, but adoring geek trivia does not signify that you are thinking critically like a nerd scientist. The search for cause and effect—one of the foundational φs in physics—takes hard work and close attention. Even then, you have to be constantly on the lookout to make sure you aren’t fooling yourself. There’s no shortcut of just memorizing a few science buzzwords or adopting nerd-style hobbies. You’re never going to change the world if you can’t figure out the right ways to do it.
I had no idea that all this was about to hit me when I started in 10th grade at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Until then I had attended the DC public schools, which had sharply degraded on account of the reckless management by the long-serving, drug-addicted mayor, Marion Barry. But after a kid was shot in a nearby DC junior high school, my parents had had enough. That’s when they decided to send me to a private high school.
I had to really hustle to catch up with the other students and prove myself. After a year, though, I became comfortable in my new school. I got a circular slide rule as an award for being the school’s “most improved” math student. It was a double validation to me. Not just that I could hold my own in a much tougher school, but also that I was surrounded by a culture that valued numbers and big-picture thinking and all the other nerdy things that meant so much to me then, and now.
Then it happened. I fell (phell?) in love with physics in Mr. Lang’s class.
One afternoon back in the 11th grade, my friend Ken Severin and I set out to test for ourselves the equation for the period of a pendulum, the time required to complete each swing. If you’re scoring along with us, the period is proportional to the square root of the length of the string, chain, or wire divided by the acceleration due to gravity. (If that didn’t make sense to you, you can readily look it up. The pendulum equation is one more of the bazillion cool science things on the Internet.) We set up our own pendulum. It seemed to work okay, but the air drag and the friction in string fibers slowed this first one down too much for our liking. We rigged a longer string from the ceiling. Then we commandeered a stairwell and rigged a 4-story-long string with a sizable weight at the end. We were in business: The equation predicted the swing period of our pendulum with satisfying precision. It felt as though we had unlocked a mystery of the universe.
Science and what is nowadays called “critical thinking” take discipline and diligence. What enables us humans to make a living here on Earth is our ability to make predictions by finding patterns in nature and then to take advantage of them. Imagine how much easier it was to have a settlement or farm if you could count the days and know the seasons so that you planted and harvested crops at the optimal times. Imagine how much easier it was for ancient people to hunt successfully once they understood the migration patterns of game animals, their main source of protein. Imagine how much more fun it was for me and Ken Severin to watch the pendulum swing in exactly the way we’d predicted, because we were proving for ourselves the amazing thing about cause-and-effect scientific analysis: It really works!
As it happened, I was supposed to get a vaccination from my family doctor that afternoon. For over an hour, school officials paged Ken and me, but we didn’t hear any of the public addresses. We were completely caught up in the experience, swept away with such nerdy ecstasy at each stroke of the stopwatch and slip of our slide rules—this being well before the days of electronic calculators, much less classroom computers. With each swing of the pendulum, we weren’t discovering anything that many others before us hadn’t already learned. That’s the nature of being a student. But the process . . . the joy . . . Each detail of our experiment taught us a little bit more about sines, cosines, and tangents, about aerodynamic drag, about patience . . . There is nothing like it; science is empowering like no other human endeavor I know of.
The reason I was so rapt is twofold. First of all, that was my first true exposure to the predictive power of physics. In politics and all manner of social interactions, we use the expression “the pendulum will swing back,” but we mean it in an impressionistic way: Attitudes will change again in the future, someday, sooner or later. In physics, the words have a precise, mathematical meaning. If you record your experimental setup accurately, you can determine exactly how high a pendulum will swing and precisely how far it will swing back. If you’re as diligent as the 19th-century French physicist Leon Foucault, you can use a swinging pendulum to prove Earth is spinning, and even use it to determine how far you are from the equator. Push the equations a bit harder, and you can measure how our spinning planet distorts space and time around it, as NASA’s Gravity Probe B satellite did—all because you took the time to understand a rock swinging on a string.
The second part of my passionate attraction to physics was the people. The boys and girl (only one at that time) in my 11th-grade physics class were my kind of people. It was an elective class, not required for graduation, and back then there weren’t any special requirements to get in. We all just loved learning math and studying motion, finding out at the deepest level why things happen in the world. At this fancy private school, there were many very smart kids who had been raised by very smart parents with strong traditions of academic achievement. The kids in my physics class were especially brilliant. I swam as fast as I could to keep up, and I loved every moment of it. We made one another laugh with arcane, corny science puns, but that wasn’t what really bonded us. We were all on the same team, you might say, all swimming toward the same goal: We wanted to get to the truth of how nature works, or at least as close to the truth as our minds could take us. In short, we were all nerds.
Thinking like a nerd is a lifelong journey, and I am inviting you here to take it with me. I truly believe it is the best use of your years on this planet. It keeps you constantly open to new ideas. Everyday events—tying your shoes, parking your car, watching a snowstorm—become revelatory experiments. When the results are not what you expected, you press to find out why and to figure out a better approach. That way of looking at the world soon becomes second nature. You will marvel that so many people around you don’t do it. And I’ll tell ya, if they did, we could change the world more quickly.
My brother reminds me of the moments when, as a kid, I stuck my hand out the passenger window of our car while it was moving at highway speed. I had seen the curved metal slats, or leading-edge flaps, come out of the front of the wings of airliners as they landed at Washington, DC’s National Airport (now Reagan International Airport). I tried to shape my hand and move my fingers so that my hand became a wing and my thumb or index finger became a leading-edge slat. Well, I could get lift; my hand would get pushed up like a wing (still can). But my fingers are round; they’re not strongly curved and thin like a slat or flap. A finger doesn’t work as a so-called “high-lift” device. Nevertheless, I still routinely roll down the window and try my hand at flying. Knowing how wings generate lift proved extremely useful to me later when I worked as an engineer at Boeing, but even if I’d followed a totally different career, that type of insight would still have informed my life in a thousand other ways.
I’m always investigating nature, and people who spend time with me get used to it. I’m always looking for details that might lead me somewhere useful, whether I am plotting the future of space exploration in my day job at The Planetary Society or tinkering with a new solar collector on my home. Over the course of this book, I’ll offer myself as a case study, sharing some of my most memorable nerd moments with you so that you can amplify your own nerdy tendencies and start changing the world. There is nothing more thrilling than the φ of physics, I’ve found, because it is the most powerful thing that humans have discovered. I make my way toward truth and happiness by embracing a point of view from which I can see the big picture.
I try to take in all the details—everything all at once—and then sift through them to find the meaningful patterns, as part of an effort to make the world a little bit better. But I’m just one guy. With you, and millions of others like you, we can turn our best ideas into action. We can solve our most pressing problems and live better lives. Join me and prepare to be amazed at how much lies within your power.
When he was a boy, my father was an outstanding Scout. He could hike for 20 miles a day by pacing himself carefully and picking the optimal paths. He could start a fire in the rain and then cook dinner over it. There are a few family pictures of my dad as a teenager decked out in a sharp Scout uniform, full of pride. He passed along a sense of mastery to my brother and me. We embraced the Boy Scout way of doing things outdoors as a way to learn about nature and to develop self-confidence in the sun, rain, and snow. If you can deal with adversity outdoors, we learned, you can deal with adversity in many other aspects of life. There was an implicit experimental method in all this, though I’m sure Ned Nye would not have put it in those words. If things go wrong while you’re in the woods, you focus a bit and figure out what to do. If one kind of solution doesn’t work, you try another.
Boy Scout training is a small, beautiful example of just how important a practical understanding of science and engineering is (and has been) for our success as a species. For instance, here’s one important lesson I learned about keeping warm: Should you find yourself in a rainy, night-shivery situation, you need a basic understanding of how fire works in order to get one started. The trick is to split some firewood with your ax and use your knife to shave some thin strips from the insides of the logs; that way, you start with dry fuel. Have spare time while you’re sitting around camp on a wet afternoon? Cut and carve yourself some “fuzz sticks” by peeling back thin strips along the length of sticks; aim for pieces about as big in diameter as a felt marker. Then keep them in storage for use at night. The thin, peeled-back strips of wood burn like crazy, and in turn ignite the stick, which you can use to light bigger, reasonably sized pieces of firewood.
These are the kinds of insights our human ancestors started figuring out perhaps a million years ago, probably in the region that is now East Africa. They surely did a lot of trial and error, though without the cool Scout pocketknives, and kept passing along what they had learned to the next generation—first by demonstration, much later by written instruction. They kept pushing into new territory, migrating out of Africa and into Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. With each push came new threats and new experiments into how best to survive the new environment. Our ancestors had to confront unfamiliar predators, discover what animals were easy to catch and what plants were good to eat, and develop clothing and shelter appropriate to the environment. They also had to learn how to work cooperatively. Their ever-growing knowledge was what allowed them to keep going . . . well, some of them at least.
I joined the Boy Scouts when I was 11 years old. Not too long after, I was helping an older boy named Robbie build a fire in the rain. We took turns carving strips from a log and stoking the fire. I’m not saying that we got carried away; I’m just saying, wow, you can get a fire really hot when you’re motivated by being shivery cold on a damp afternoon as the Sun is going down. I remember our scoutmaster’s comments: “Er, uh . . . wow, that’s a pretty nice fire.” (He meant, “Whoa, boys, that’s a huge fire—way bigger than we need.”) We were on a roll. Once the fire got going, the steam from the larger wet branches and logs became a reminder of how cold you can get when your clothes are wet while you’re camping in the woods. Ever felt that kind of chill, followed by the relief that comes when the warmth hits you? It’s one particular hands-on science experiment that you never forget.
The Scouts movement was started in England in 1907 by Robert Baden-Powell. He was a military commander who apparently got his inspiration while fighting colonial battles in Africa. He noticed that many of his troops were dying in the jungle, not from enemy actions but just by being lost on their own—and this was happening in a relatively warm region where food was growing on trees all around. In response, Baden-Powell wrote a book for his soldiers, a guide to the basics of wilderness exploration and survival. He later modified it and republished it as Scouting for Boys. It has sold 150 million copies and is, according to the Guardian newspaper, the fourth-most-popular book of the 20th century.
Having the knowledge and skills to survive in the woods is hugely empowering. The reality-TV show Survivor has versions in dozens of countries and has been a ratings success in the United States for more than 15 years, with plenty of spin-offs and other programming all loosely based on the idea that you can survive in just about any wilderness if you know what you’re doing. As a Scout, I fully embraced the concept. You can do it. Follow the motto: “Be prepared.”
Scout training lies at the far practical end of the nerd mindset. People often raise questions about the applicability of ideas in math and science; many a parent has heard a child’s laments along the lines of “When in life will I ever need to know the Pythagorean theorem?” Well, when we were Scouts learning about the combustion physics of wood or evaporative cooling in damp fabric, we knew exactly why these nerdy details are important. We didn’t even realize, generally, that we were learning science. We just understood that these were the rules of the world and great things were possible if we learned to master them. That, in a nutshell, is where the whole adventure begins.
From before I can remember, my mother insisted that my brother, sister, and I learn to swim. As a kid suffering through the stupidly hot summers in Washington, DC (this was before our house had air-conditioning), I knew better than to miss a chance to jump into a cool pool. I became a natural swimmer, completely self-assured in the water. Maybe I couldn’t make my hand fly by holding it out a car window, but I sure could use my arms to propel my body through the water. I could move up and down, side to side. I felt like I was flying down there, and in a certain scientific sense, I was. I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble or drowning, because I was in my element.
Well before I was 10, the summers we spent at Lake Waullenpaupak in Pennsylvania got me confident enough that I wasn’t concerned if the water was too deep for me to see the bottom. I swam down there with a mask and navigated through the clear dark-green lake, getting close enough that I could look at rocks and deep-dwelling fish. The deeper I dove, the cooler the water felt. Looking back, I realize those watery adventures were intensifying the scientific impulse in my brain. The fish seemed to take little interest in me; they had places to go and mates to seek. I felt like I was seeing nature almost as if other humans did not exist. I also experimented with the effects of buoyancy and resistance.
In high school, I took and passed the Senior Lifesaving test. This is a class in which you nominally learn how to rescue a drowning victim. It takes another, more intense form of concentration to rescue a classmate who is only pretending to drown. You swim out to the fake victim and pike-dive in front of him (or her). From his point of view, you disappear. Underwater, holding your breath, you twist him around by the knees so that his back is toward the edge of the pool or shore. Then you sling your arm over his chest and sidestroke your way to dry concrete or sand. It wasn’t just theoretical. We got drilled on it over and over. I admit it took tremendous effort to rescue a certain classmate victim who happened to be a young woman, who happened to look amazing in a bikini—but I managed.
Next I became a Scout Lifeguard, putting my knowledge to practical use. Becoming a Scout Lifeguard is very much like getting your Senior Lifesaving patch, but Scouts are also expected to learn to row because so many camps feature swimming areas marked out in lakes. In those days, the Scout rescue procedure was a little different from the one I learned in high school. You were expected to dive completely under the drowning victim; that, apparently, was the Scout style. Then you came at the drowner from the seaward or farther-from-the-dock side. After securing the victim, you had to swim in a 180-degree turn to get that guy (no women around at Scout camp) and you headed back toward shore.
The idea was to simulate a real-world situation. Knowing your technique was not enough. You had to understand human nature and know what to do when the drowner’s instinctive reactions were counter productive, even dangerous, to the rescuer. In either case, Senior Lifesaving or Scout Lifeguard, the main challenge of the final test is that the victim is supposed to be panicked—not stricken with panic so much as violent with it. We all looked forward to playing the part of the victim. It was a chance to thrash; you even might get the opportunity to legally punch an acquaintance or a rival in the face with a well-placed arm flail. The final exam became one type of rather tame opportunity in a coed high school pool and a whole other, more violent affair in the much larger, all-boys Scout swimming area.
By long tradition, the Scouts seeking the Scout Lifeguard badge had to “rescue” the camp counselors, who were a few years older, bigger, stronger, and ornerier than we were. It was daunting. How was I, skinny young Bill, supposed to drag in Big, Strong Counselor Man? I had the training and the knowledge; the X factors were courage and commitment. All of us who sought to pass our final swim test were lined up on the dock, and we were accompanied by the camp counselors. The drowning-actors swam out about 25 yards from the dock, and on a leader’s signal, those strong young guys pretended to become panic-stricken, big-splashing victims. As you might imagine, they were having great fun becoming as charming as an angry bull and as easy to wrangle as a greasy anvil. Probably because of my precocious (that is, obnoxious wisecracking) tendencies, I got assigned to “rescue” the counselor whom everyone called Big John. I was 15; he was 19. He was a good 14 inches taller and 50 pounds of muscle heavier. Big John was determined not to let me get an arm across his body and swim him in to the dock. I was just as determined to show that my training and knowledge could overcome his desire to mess things up.
They tell you over and over that if your drowning victim is being wild, just roll with it. Once you’ve got your victim in hand or in arm, let him (or her) flail. If he dips his head in the water, let him. We were assured that he would soon flail himself again to get his face out of the water, and while he was catching his breath, you could catch a break. Then you could begin again your journey toward the shore. As reasonable as that might sound, Big John was a full-on flailing machine. I looped my arm across his chest and started for shore, pulling hard with my free hand and kicking just as hard with what is called the “inverted scissor kick.” It’s an unnatural position, and it takes practice, even if you don’t have a Big John fighting you every step of the way.
They also tell you that if your victim is too thrashy, too violent, or, as in this case, too obnoxious, you have to secure him with two arms. You have to hold him from above and below. Big John was able to twist his way out of every one-arm hold I tried. So after a few failed attempts at that method, I tried holding him by clamping two arms around him. This meant the only propulsion I had was by means of my inverted scissor. It took a long time to drag flailing John to the dock by those means—yet I succeeded. Very much to my surprise, I was the only guy that morning to get his victim to the dock.
I absolutely do not attribute my success to any superior athletic ability. Much bigger guys were dealing with much less motivated counselors that day. Instead, I think what helped me was my approach to the problem. The Scout instructors had told us what to do in each situation. I had a precise rule book to work from. You have to swim under the guy and surface beyond him. You have to swim in a semicircle. You have to invert your kick. If he’s acting wild, you have to hang on with both hands. I was in the internal reality of the rescue simulation; I wasn’t considering my counselor’s motives for making the task so difficult, but I accepted the terms of the situation and was solely focused on finding a resolution. I had to just get ’er done. So I did.
I am pretty sure the only reason the other guys didn’t get their counselor victims to the dock was because they knew they didn’t have to. Everyone there could swim. Everyone there had spent some time in the water learning the inverted scissor. Everyone was nominally strong enough to do the right thing and get a kid or a big grown-up to shore in a real, serious situation. After each Scout had shown his skills to the counselor in the water, even if he didn’t get his “victim” to shore, the counselor said, “Okay, fine, you passed. Let’s get to the dock.” But I was driven by a bigger goal. I wanted to do it for really real. I wanted to put the theory to a hard test—I did, and it turned out that it worked. Well, it worked for me. The other guys were all standing on the dock, arms akimbo, unimpressed. Their attitude toward me was, roughly, “Are you quite done? The rest of us passed without all the extra splashing.”
I’ve often thought about that morning in the many years since. I took everything I knew and, in a fit of nerdy ambition, tried to do something slightly more ambitious than what I thought was possible. We’ve all had that feeling at one time or another. It happens when you first learn to ride a bicycle, or master a gymnastics move, or find yourself running to second base after hitting a double, or perform a piece of music flawlessly for the first time. It’s also the feeling of the scientist running experiment after experiment until the data begin to fall into place and a deeper awareness emerges. You can surprise yourself, I realized, if you focus, follow the procedure, and stick with it, stick with it, stick with it.
Not that I was spinning any such highfalutin notions at the time. All I knew was that I had studied all the rules of lifesaving and lifeguarding, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to see them through, Big John or no Big John. My motivation and belief were what convinced me that this task, even though it looked nearly impossible, could be accomplished if I trusted myself.
It was what I believe we call a “life lesson.”
Nothing sharpens your appreciation for science and engineering like a nice, rousing life-or-death situation. But hold on—I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and take you on a return trip to my childhood in the 1960s.
As you have probably realized by now, I love being in the water. I also love spending time on the water, navigating under my own power. I trace that second love to age 11 when, along with some other tenderfoot Scouts, I got in a canoe for the first time. My scoutmaster, “Uncle Bob” Hansen, was a stockbroker, a gentleman farmer, and a consummate outdoorsman. Significantly, he also had a close friend named John Berry, a champion canoeist who built his own fiberglass boats at home. Listening to our scoutmaster talk, you’d think this guy practically invented the decked canoe. A decked canoe looks like a kayak but with subtle differences. A canoe has more bottom; its hull is rounder than that of a kayak, and its bow and stern curve up toward the sky a bit more than a kayak’s hull does. If swimming taught me respect for the physics of water, my encounters with the canoe made me appreciate that science alone is not enough. When you are in a dangerous spot on a river, engineering is awfully important, as well.
Both the kayak and the canoe have a long engineering history behind them; they are products of different cultures working out different solutions on different continents. Kayaks were invented by the Inuit, Yup’ik, and Aleut peoples of North America. The earliest known canoes were built in northern Europe, though the same basic design appeared (independently, apparently) in Australia and the Americas. The similarities are no coincidence. Everywhere, people were trying to solve the shared problems of getting food by navigating across the water. On first glance, a canoe looks like a kayak, and a kayak looks like a canoe. Inspect them for a few more moments, though, and you can see that river people and ice-fishing people made distinct choices to optimize their various vessels’ performance. For carrying loads like animal pelts or sacks of rice, a flatter-bottomed canoe has more room and is more stable. For chasing and hooking fish, a kayak is more maneuverable, especially perhaps around small floes of ice.
Each type of boat requires its own paddle and its own technique. A kayaker wields a long paddle with two blades, one on each end. By tradition, and by two or three dozen millennia of trial and error, a canoeist goes forth with a shorter single-bladed paddle. In a kayak, you’re sitting down. Your legs react and support the force of each paddle stroke, but sitting down restricts how much leg you can put into each pull of your arms. In a canoe, I quickly learned that you’ve got to kneel, not sit, and you’d better keep paddling or the river will do whatever it wants with you. Your hips and thighs can provide a good bit more force to drive and steer the boat, so much more that it’s hard to muster enough force with your arms to compensate for all that, unless you put both hands in the service of a single paddle blade.
The 10 or so canoes issued to us Scouts that summer in 1967 were open boats, sturdy, time-tested, and made of hard-to-damage aluminum. My fellow Scouts and I found that we could run them over the river rocks pretty recklessly. Afterward, the boats would show scars, but they’d still be quite river-worthy. Our teachers had shown us how to angle the keel and use the river current to ferry right or left, how to figure which rocks were deep enough to slide over and which would stop one end of the boat and spin you around. They had shown us nominally how to shoot white-water rapids. Nevertheless, we—I’m pretty sure it was all of us, not just me—were often terrified. We were not yet fully in control of our nerd powers, and we knew it.
There are a couple of tricks with a single-bladed paddle that enable you to push a lot of water around in a hurry. You’re probably familiar with Newton’s third law of motion, whether or not you call it by that name: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s the scientific principle that sends rockets into space, with the exhaust throwing the mass of the fuel down while the mass of the rocket soars up. In the same way, when you push on the water, the water pushes back and moves the boat in the other direction. When you pull on the water, you pull the boat toward your paddle. When you really get smooth with it, moving the boat feels like magic. But as I am so fond of pointing out, it’s not magic; it’s science. It is perfectly, beautifully predictable—if you know what you’re doing.
When you are in a canoe, you don’t need to study physics to understand action and reaction. Action and reaction, viscous drag, wind resistance, turbulent flow, force equals mass times acceleration . . . you don’t have to know the theory behind these things to master a kayak, but you sure do need to know how they all work. You learn it somatically—in virtually every fiber of your body—when you put paddle to water. That’s what the early Inuit, Aboriginal Australian, and other water-faring cultures did, and that’s what I was doing all over again on Pennsylvania’s run of the Youghiogheny River in the summer of 1967. I was mastering a fundamental piece of technology and learning how nature works, just as other eager kids had done for thousands of years before me. If you’ve ever gone paddling, you know exactly what I mean. And if you haven’t, well, I highly recommend it.
A lot of this is intuitive, but some important ideas are not.
For the hard-core kayaker or C-1 decked-canoe paddler, a major rite of passage is the “Eskimo roll.” Here, the physics is predictable if you know what you are doing. It is utterly unforgiving if you do not. Skilled kayakers from any culture can roll their boats completely over, under, around, and back upright again, all in a single fluid (pun intended) motion. Their head and torso go completely underwater, but only for a few moments. This is where more engineering comes into play. Whether you are rolling for fun or desperately trying to recover from capsizing, when you attempt an Eskimo roll, it’s all too possible to get stuck head-down with no source of air. That’s bad. Then you have to either abandon your boat by wrestling free and swimming straight down—no easy task in a close-fitting kayak or decked canoe—or stroke with just the right motion, with the paddle pulled hard from behind your head toward your thighbone, to twist yourself back upright. In other words, you can easily drown beneath your own, nominally very maneuverable boat.
This buddy of my scoutmaster, our stalwart Mr. Berry, was accomplished on the water, almost ridiculously so. He smoked a pipe while he plied the white water; that’s how cool and calm he was. One chilly