That kid who flunked chemistry

His older brother seemed to be good at everything and was recognized as a scholar. Not only that but he was a great swimmer, and got along well with everyone.

The younger brother was nice, and quiet. But he definitely didn't get all A's. After high school the younger brother went to community college. But he couldn't care enough about a lot of the classes to attend. Administrative problems began piling up.

A world class physicist out at Columbia intervened and got him transferred to Columbia despite his poor transcript. He still refused to attend classes that didn't interest him. He still flunked chemistry.

I just read the story of Julian Schwinger and I love it. He wrote his first paper in theoretical physics when he was 16. At the community college he continued giving all the time he could to physics. After transfering to Columbia he continued his pattern and completed his PhD dissertation before finishing his undergraduate degree. He went on to be the first person to really pin down quantum electrodynamics for which he won the Nobel Prize. He was one of the few people Feynman had to hold in awe. But I think my favorite thing about him is that he flunked chemistry.

There was a boy who knew what he cared about and excelled in it and didn't let other things get in his way. (Note: it only worked so well because he was so dang good! But on the other hand, would he have been so good if he had allowed himself to be distracted?)

the Code of Doug

I've always wanted to distill true principles about life and apply them. At various points I've come up with statements that I called by the name "Code of Doug." The whole thing is a work in progress and this one is not complete. But I thought I might as well put up a link to what I have. Perhaps the knowledge that it is up there in its imperfect form will help me to complete it more effectively. Anyway, I'll link to it from the side of the page.

To hold the photon's shadow

Hi, guys. I thought I would talk a bit today about my current direction of research. It's a pretty simple goal to state: we want to hold the photon's shadow.

Of course, photons don't have shadows: if you send two laser beams together they will pass right through each other, each progressing as though the other weren't there.

That's true to a point. When the laser beams start getting strong they temporarily (or sometimes permanently) change the nature of the matter they traverse. When they are (or if they were) really strong one must begin to say that they change the nature of space itself.

Those changes to media through which beams propagate can then allow one beam to have an indirect impact on a second beam. There is now a shadow.

This type of change can be used for optical switches. People can make LCD screens (which are just large arrays of liquid crystal optical switches) that are activated and deactivated by light.

But it can also happen in air. If the laser is strong enough it will change the properties of the air it traverses--density, temperature, and so on--and that will change the index of refraction of the air. Just like heat wafting up from the fire leaves a shiny, plasticy shadow, so can heat from the heart of a laser leave a more structured, plasticy shadow.

A moderately strong (100 mW--somewhat dangerous) laser produces around 3*10^17 photons per second (here I'm assuming visible light). Let's see: 9 zeros means billion, 12->trillion, 15-> quadrillion. So the laser produces around 300 quadrillion photons per second. Your eyes are so sensitive they can see a single photon if properly adjusted to the dark. That's why shooting them with lasers is a bad idea.

Anyway, the effects I've been talking about would be hard to observe from a moderately strong laser. Crank it up by a factor of 1000 or 1000000 and keep the profile reasonably tight and you should see them alright.

If we want to use the photon's shadow to build quantum circuits and make precision measurements we need to go the other direction. Instead of looking at the net shadow of 300 quadrillion photons we want to see the shadow of a single photon. Obviously, that isn't going to happen in air.

Or at least not in ordinary air. It just may happen with a specially prepared gas. Imagine a set of identical atoms. Now smack them with highly ordered light rays of specific wavelengths and specific strengths coming from specific directions. The light interacts with the atoms and the atoms with the light and the whole, beautiful as it is, is different than the sum of the parts. What you have now is an artificial construct, an ephemeral chimera. What are its properties? They depend on the nature of those light rays. In other words, you have some ability to control its properties.

We know what properties we want: we want the nonlinear index of refraction to be such that shadow of the photon would be enhanced over the shadow it would have in ordinary air by about a factor of one quintillion. And we want the chance that the photon will be absorbed to go to zero. Now it is a question of getting as close as possible to what we want.

All in all, it's a pretty cool project . . .

My new hero: Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy

This is word for word out of a neat book Gina just found for me and got from the library called Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters. There are a lot of amazing stories in the book. I think this is my favorite one so far. The bolds are my own.

Govindappa Venkataswamy thought he had found purpose in life when three cousins died in the las three months of their pregnancies. His broken heart drove him to devour his medical school training, bent on becoming an OB-GYN. His intent was to rescue people like his cousins, but he never got the chance. Fresh out of medical school rheumatoid arthritis crippled him, making it impossible for him to deliver babies. He was hospitalized for years and suffered pain that still grips him to this day.

“You don't spend your life helping people just out of sympathy. You know that the sufferer is part of you,” said Dr. V., as he is known today. Not only does he have great empathy empathy for the pain that his patients endure, but he did not let his permanent disability limit his ambitions. He started over, this time studying opthalmology to confront a different need. In India, there are nine million blind people—most of whom suffer from cataracts, which are curable with surgery. Dr. V. opened an 11-bed eye hospital in his brother's home in Madurai to perform free or low-cost cataract surgery. He even designed instruments suited to his crippled hands, and these tools enabled him to perform 5,000 surgeries in his first year.

Today, his clinics perform over 200,000 surgeries annually and are among the largest single providers of eye surgery in the world, having given sight to more than one million people in India. Dr. V. made the process of conducting operations so efficient, it could be done as fast and almost as cheaply as making a burger.

He believes that it may be possible to 'franchise' his operations throughout the world, recruiting people and resources to his dream as if it were McDonald's. They sell billions of burgers through thousands of stores, he tells everyone he meets. “We can sell millions of people new eyesight, saving them from starvation.” The clinics run a profit even though 70% of the patients pay nothing, or close to nothing, and the clinics do not depend on donations or government grants. With his hands hopelessly crippled, you would think he had earned the right to give up. Instead, Dr. V. refused to let that interrupt his commitment to save lives. He could not change his condition, but he could change the way he thought about his goal and, as a result, he is changing the lives of millions.

Sketching something that might work

Preface: The goal is to place good information at the center of health-related decisions. Right now noone, not even Drs. or medical institutions, has good information on which specialist, organization or group is the best person to go to for treatment of a specific issue.

The problem is tricky because hospitals and such not only have to guard their data for privacy reasons but also because they view it as valuable and tend to be hesitant to share it.

Here is a plan that might work for getting institutions to be more sharing and might make people more aware of the differences out there:

1. Gather information on everybody and report the info to each individual institution.
2. Publish information on the top 5 institutions and possibly on the bottom 5 institutions.

A starfish's dilemma

In my life here at UNM I have spent years trying to figure out how to solve world problems sprinkled with three intense bursts of entrepreneurial activity, each of which was eventually quenched. I have watched my own behavior with chagrin. Why was I so inconstant? Why didn't I focus on solving health care if that was my stated goal? This most recent burst of activity was quick enough to start and finish that I had a better chance to realize more consciously what I was doing.

You have heard the story of the man who walked along the beach saving starfish one by one by throwing them back into the ocean. The number of starfish was so large that he could never save even a small percentage. Still he continued to walk along and throw them into the water. A man stopped him and asked why he continued to save starfish when the number of beached ones was so large he would never make a difference. The man tossed another starfish in and said "I made a difference to this one."

I am not the man tossing starfish into the ocean. I am one of the starfish still in the ocean. I am studying the nature of the tides and of starfish motion to understand the socioeconomic process that puts so many starfish on the beach. Every once in awhile I see a threat to myself and my little starfish family. As the threat approaches I drop my observations and calculations and frantically build a shelter. But the threat swims right on by and I find that I don't want to spend my life building a shelter when threats are only illusionary: there is a bigger problem to solve. So I go back to normal life and to trying to crack the process that beaches so many starfish.

The health care system is the process that is beaching perhaps millions of human starfish. The threats are times when funding through graduate school looks shaky. Western Capital, SongPiper, and Lobo Mind Loan are the shelters that I have built when things seemed insecure. While finances have been iffy I have had a lot of drive to start something up. But when funding seemed secure the three ventures have seemed like distractions from the real problem that I want to solve, that is health care.

In this light my actions over the past 3.5 years make a lot of sense: when my family seems threatened I begin energetically building. Invariably I find shelter before the building is done and building begins to seem like a distraction because it no longer meets my most pressing need. Now the most pressing need is to solve a larger problem that all of us starfish are facing. However, the fact that the actions make sense is not enough: it would be better to have my actions succeed in meeting the needs that drive them. As the primary need has swung back and forth the actions have also swung back and forth and in the end I have accomplished little outside of learning and making much ado about nothing.

What I need to do is figure out how to meet both needs simultaneously. If I can impact health care substantially and support our family doing it then I have found a company that will work day in and day out. When we are just fine I can use my intuition and my head and my diligence. When things are much less assured I can use my heart and my intensity and determination to make things work.

I talked about the socio-economic problem of the starfish population. I am pretty convinced that the primary problem in health care is not a technical one but an economic and social one. And I think that the key solution to the problem will be informational. I want to create a truly competitive environment in the health care world by providing decision makers with information and health care providers with performance feedback. How to make a company out of that I don't know.

Happy New Year

The following is an exerpt from my journal of yesterday outlining goals for the new year. There is a lot of thinking and planning and more doing left on all of the goals that I wrote down but this is a start. Anyway, here it is.

New Years Day and Eve together make up one of my favorite holidays. If Christmas celebrates the coming of Christ, and Easter his death and resurrection, then for me New Years celebrates the fact that we can repent. What hope there is in repentance! What hope there is in the fact that we need not be bound by our failings of yesteryear. What excitement there is behind the acquisition of new habits and ways of life.

I hunger to make worthy resolutions and then to have life blessed by them. What I have found so far is that I need a trial process or a filtering process on my resolutions. Living by some of them improves our quality of life. Living by others sounds good but ends up not leading to a true improvement. And I'm not sure that I will know in advance what is true. The resolution to write in my journal has been one of the neatest ones so far.

So in a way the concept of a resolution isn't the right one for what I have found to work best. Perhaps the concept of proposals is a better one. Regardless, I hunger to see my life become better than it is right now. Here is not an official list but, at least for now, a brainstorming list:

• Time myself regularly in the mile and progress in running times over the course of the year

• Take charge of education for our children and see that they begin to get a great one

• Court Gina as though I will ask her to marry me at the end of the year. Then actually ask her.

• Gain an intuitive and mathematical understanding of general relativity.

• Become a salesman in the best sense of the word

• Become a teacher in the best sense of the word (is this the same as the previous one?)

• Earn enough money to create a 10 thousand dollar buffer and any reserves we need for known expenditures and dry months

• Go camping with the family 5 times

• Learn to be a real friend and allow myself to take pleasure in the association of others.

• Write at least 8 academic papers and submit at least 7 of them for publication

• Live each day as if the day is a gift and will be gone forever by night.

As I write these I love them. All of them need to be elaborated and thought out quite a bit. All of them can be considered macroscopic goals and their accomplishment will require some real planning and doing. So as a last goal I suppose I ought to include time to think about their accomplishment. At the same time they are all long sentences. It would be wise to come up with a short mental representation for each goal so that I can quickly remind myself of each of them. The exact choice of that representation will be quite important.

I showed the goals to Gina and she approved. And I like them. They are therefor no longer just a brainstorming list but a set of guidelines to be used as tools to help me live an excellent year this year. Happy New Year!