Quote of the Day

There are wavelengths we cannot see. There are sounds we cannot hear. So why, then, would there not be thoughts we cannot think?

Richard Hamming*
1996
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Chapter 5 — “You and Your Research”

This was in the context of the dual nature (particle and wave) of photons and electrons. He suggested, perhaps these baffling dual characteristics are just one thing which we cannot really comprehend. He arrived at this hypothesis by observing that after decades of research and thinking by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet no one can really explain what it is that has these dual properties. They just have mathematic equations that can describe them in different circumstances. With all the effort put into trying to figure out what is really going on, yet always failing, perhaps it is because our minds just can’t think those thoughts.

I don’t know for certain quantum object thoughts are beyond everyone, but I do know there some thoughts beyond some people.

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* The name Richard Hamming might not mean anything to most people. But to an Electrical Engineering communication theory person (me) he is near god-like. He invented error correction codes.

He worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project and helped with the computer simulations of the spherical implosion nuke.

He did the computer simulations on the Nike missiles and was the first to realize it was counterproductive to launch them at an angle. It was better to launch them straight up, get to the less dense air with the minimum distance in the thick air, then make the turn to get to the target. The distance saved by being launched at an angle consumed more fuel than getting to the thin air and then turning.

He worked for Bell Labs for 30 years. He worked with some of the very first computers. In the beginning they programed computers in binary. Not even assembly language. When assembly language was developed, many programmers refused to use it, “That is for sissies!” Those people did not have long careers.

Hamming wrote one of the first books on digital filters.

And Hamming Distance has nothing to do with the distance between the pig slaughterhouse and the ham smoke house. It measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or equivalently, the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other.

I found the book fascinating. I wish I had read it when it came out in 1996. He was born in 1915 and died in 1998.