Sep 21, 2008

Excuse me while I wax poetic

Over the summer I finally got around to reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. I highly recommend it if you like baseball, economics, or stories of poor, scrappy underdogs. The author devotes a chapter to a man named Bill James who was basically the first sabermetrician. I came across the following excerpt and couldn’t help but think that it also applies to our lives as grad students.

When the numbers acquire the significance of language, they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry… And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat.

We spend so much of our time staring at a computer screen, trying to analyze data in new, different ways. We spend so much time trying to attain some benchmark number. I’m trying to make a photodetector that operates at 10 GHz. That number has started to mock me. The goal is 10 GHz - but why? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is buried beneath layers of physics and engineering. Someone before me came along and decreed that my detector will work that quickly. Thus, my detector will work that quickly.

But the reality is that if I ever achieve this (*cough* PhD *cough*), and if a thousand other things go right - that is, if a dozen other grad students laugh back at the numbers that mock them - the numbers will have attained something else. They will no longer be just numbers, they become language. All of a sudden, rather than this 10 GHz nonsense, we can say to the outside world, “We’ve designed an analog-to-digital converter that’s faster than anything you’ve ever seen. It’s a completely novel device that has the potential to change computing as we know it.”

I think we all forget that these numbers that mock us actually represent something very real and something very world changing. Hopefully, for each of us, they will attain “the significance of language” that James mentioned. When our numbers stop being numbers and start being language, when they start to take on a greater significance, then we’ve succeeded as grad students. We’ve succeeded as engineers.

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