N.B. It has been several months since my official retirement. Now safely ensconced in North Carolina, it is again time to engage in one of my therapeutic pastimes, musing on the past, the present, and the future.
Playing: It’s Serious Stuff
I spent the past weekend playing with my toys. Lest that naked statement conjure untoward images of me playing in a sandbox, confirming my incipient senility, let me hasten to add that they were interesting toys, ones consistent with my undeniable, lifelong geek persona. To wit, I tuned my 3-D printers – an aging dual extruder Lulzbot TAZ5 and a newer Crealty Ender 5S1 – and I chased Parks on the Air (POTA) using my Icom 7300 HF radio, while I looked longingly at my telescopes and contemplated the winter chill that rolling any of them outside would inevitably bring.
As I played, lost in reverie, I realized that in the intervening decades, much has changed but even more has remained the same. Filled with childhood joy, I also mused on the nature of play, and why it is so important.
Childhood Play
As a three year old, I would repeatedly push a chair to the kitchen counter’s edge, turn on the knob for the cold water faucet, and watch the swirling patterns when I placed hands in the water. Over sixty years later, I still remember my childhood thrill. (The photograph at right shows your then much younger author contemplating the wonder that is a dandelion.)
This penchant was so strong that – even after repeated admonitions – my father was forced to remove the faucet knobs from our kitchen sink, placing them out of my reach in a high cabinet. Rather than a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive behavior, I would like to think it was an early fascination with turbulence, one of nature’s subtle complexities that has both enchanted and bedeviled scientists for centuries.
Undeterred, I spent my later childhood playing amateur scientist. Because scientific toys were a luxury my poor family could ill afford, I built and conducted experiments using the detritus from our ramshackle garage. I built simple series and parallel electrical circuits using metal strapping from the sawmill where my father worked and played with lenses and mirrors from the chandelier of an old, abandoned house. I was especially proud when I built a working home weather station using only household items. (Pro tip: A strand of your mother’s or sister’s hair is key to building a working hygrometer.)
In high school, I harbored a waking dream of building a solar-powered car, and friends had a tongue-in-cheek betting pool on my probability of success. The nays won, as I lacked the money for the needed solar cells. However, I did successfully build a light box to support my algae experiments, which ultimately won the biochemistry prize at the state science fair (See Remembering Joel: A Teacher’s Impact).
It was always fun, and fortunately, I did not blow anything up or set anything on fire, though I violated enough laboratory safety protocols to scare my mother more than once. The most notable of these was an ill-fated attempt at distilling, which covered the kitchen windows and walls with dripping water. That experience taught me the importance of tight seals and connections.
Later, I emerged from college chemistry and physics laboratories unscathed, finding both wonder and safe harbor in the world of computers, software, and computational modeling (See A Feeling for the Code).
Play and Cognitive Freedom
We often view playing as a childhood pastime, but it is serious stuff, a deep and innate behavioral pattern found at almost every level of biology. Children jump in mud puddles with unabashed delight. Dogs and cats play with sticks and string; bears slide in the snow; even bumblebees play with toy balls when given the opportunity. (I would be remiss if I did not address the myth of bumblebee flight. The notion that they don’t know their wings are not big enough to fly, but do so anyway, is a canard, an old failure to understand the complexity of bumblebee wing movements to generate lift. The vortices are both complex and beautiful.)
Though the biological origins of play and their neuroscience rationales are properly the domain of psychologists and neuroscientists, there is no doubt they are important to both our cognitive processes and mental health. For me, playing has always been a way to free my mind from the exigencies of daily life. No matter how nagging the intellectual problem or how angst filled the research politics, a period of play is an intellectual reset.
When I was a graduate student, a three hour bout of full court basketball left me physically sated and intellectually refreshed, ready to attack challenges with renewed vigor. Sadly, my vertical leap is now measured in millimeters, and my unrealistic dream of playing in the NBA is long gone. reading (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind), writing (See My Balm in Gilead), and my geek hobbies now fulfill the same need.
Playing Scientist: Seriously Important
As I have written many times, I believe every child is born a scientist, innately curious about the world around them. (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder and The (Scientific) Good News). All too often, we preempt that important play in the name of conformity and perceived cultural norms. Yet childhood play is a way to explore the world, in a safe and protective environment, largely unencumbered by formal rules and processes.
While playing, children fill their minds with possibilities and potentialities, and the imagination and curiosity are far more important than the accoutrements. Every parent who has watched their child play with the box, rather than the toy contained in the box, ruefully knows this all too well. I learned this at an early age, building my own rudimentary scientific toys.
Science is the grownup version of playing, one where the toys can be inexpensive and incidental, perhaps only pencil and paper, or enormously expensive and critical – massive particle accelerators, expensive telescopes, or planetary scale environmental sensing systems. In both cases, the imagination, the ideas, and the ability and willingness to explore the unexpected matter most.
As a practical matter, it is also why research funding must embrace flexibility and not sacrifice opportunity and serendipity on the twin alters of financial efficiency and suffocating bureaucracy. Good science happens when prepared minds are freed to explore the unexpected, highlighting the truth in the adage that research is what you do when you do not know what you are doing.
In its purest form, science is goal-directed playing, where the unbridled joy of curiosity and the cognitive loading of one’s mind, freed from all other concerns, drive scientific discovery (See On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany). It is also a deep and unbridled desire, one the astronomer Edwin Hubble, father of the eponymously named Hubble Constant, captured eloquently:
At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed.
This is truth. Even the playful bumblebees know this.
Coda
Now excuse me, while I go stick my hands in the water. I need to satisfy my three-year-old curiosity again and see the Reynolds numbers dance and frolic, while I laugh with delight. For good measure, maybe I will turn one of my telescopes to the stars and watch the adaptive control system and digital camera capture a few photons older than human sentience.
The toys may (or may not) have changed, but they still bring me the same joy I felt as a six year old child, piloting my woodpile spaceship across the galaxy, trusty stick robot at my side.
Go now, my child, and play with your toys. It’s where your dreams are born.
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