The Second Law of Corporate Dynamics

If you have ever wondered why your life seems increasingly chaotic, and your desk ever more cluttered, you might find a good answer in one of the most basic laws of physics. The law is the second law of thermo dynamics, and was perfected by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1871. This law guarantees that entropy never decreases in nature. In other words everything either stays the same (which is rare) or grows increasingly more chaotic. This has always been the case, from the very low entropy, well ordered singularity of the big bang, to the ever increasing, and cooling universe we are a part of. It is also true in everyday life. Not only do your things become more cluttered, unless you arrange them, an omelet never becomes an egg again.

The 20^th century physicist and science/art advocate CP Snow loved to encourage all of society to think creativity about the way nature behaved. He was an admirer of Einsteinein thought experiments, and a rebelliousness amongst people to try to prove the laws of nature to be wrong. Even with this adventurous, and risky mentality, Snow said something to the effect that you can prove anything wrong, but if you find evidence that the second law of thermo dynamics is wrong, your results must be in error. For physicists, material scientists, and biologists, there is nothing more important than this law.

Since this is so well established in science, and its analogies fit so well, I wonder whether certainty of moving towards a more chaotic state doesn’t also apply to our society, especially to businesses. I watched the major Bank CEOs testify before congress last month about the financial crisis of 2008, and was left with one of two possibilities about these businesses. Either the businesses were so large that the CEO had no idea what each division was doing, or the businesses were so large that they needed to keep growth at such a high level that they were willing to compromise good business practices. Though I can’t speak to the intentions of these leaders, I would guess that both of these apply. During the same time that the banks were receiving TARP funds, General Motors was getting a bailout from Washington, because it was either, too big and bureaucratic to keep up with a quickly changing marketplace, or it was too big and bureaucratic to keep up with its own research. Again, I would guess that both of these statements are true. Large companies by nature become more difficult to manage. They become slower, and like the once densely hot universe, they become colder. This is why when you read Wired Magazine, or MIT Technology Review, so few of the summaries of new inventions come from large companies. Start-ups have greater potential energy. They are not spread across the universe of board rooms, and private jets. They are crammed in garages and studios, building up Intellectual Property, and exploding outward.

So, is the inefficiency and cluttered landscape of large corporations as inevitable as the second law of thermo dynamics? It might very well be, except that there is a caveat in the law which large businesses often don’t acknowledge. The law states that entropy will never decrease. It is possible to stay the same. Not changing is looked at as the enemy of innovation, as innovation itself is a change in doing things. What is neglected in this is that as companies become larger they are changing automatically due to size. This change in size is happening regardless of what the leadership does. If a company then does nothing dramatically different in the way the company operates, you will have enormous change. If however this were acknowledged, it may very well be possible for a company to retain the energy it had during its big bang to success. In a way Google is doing this by continuing to require employees to work on independent ideas during work hours. Toyota did this by having employee feedback through its ground breaking production systems. What neither of these examples did was to succumb to increasing entropy, but rather to remain ideologically stagnant. It may well be though that this cannot last forever. Toyota is now the largest car company in the world, and experiencing quality problems.

When I look at corporations, and the government explanation that certain companies are too big to fail, I recognize that naturally the opposite is true. At some point a company can be too big not to fail. The only hope of keeping entropy at bay is to explode again the way they did the first time. This knowledge is not obvious, and is not what most business people believe. It requires that quarterly profits and growth not be stressed above all. It requires a self awareness that as growth occurs so does the tendency towards chaos. This might be a hard sell to a group of investors or a board of directors; unless that group is made of physicists. 

Insanity or Persistence?

The power of a word to invoke emotions is certainly evident in the word insanity. There are 10 normal definitions for this, all of which are familiar, having to do with lack of mental health, court room pleas and your run of the mill "craziness". The definition that I have known for about 6 years now is one that was first credited to one of my heroes Albert Einstein. He said that the " definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". The reason I am familiar with this connotation of insanity is that it is the one that is explored in a movie that my wife and I were Associate Producers for, which is just now available on DVD called "The Definition of Insanity". The film deals with the stubborn passion of a talented actor who endures torturous loss of integrity, family and even mental stability in the pursuit of succeeding in the only thing he feels he must do. In one important scene, he compares his acting with a disability. This is so self analytical that the character reveals both intelligence and an insightfulness that makes us see a depth in his personality that is very profound.

The fact that this particular definition of insanity was originally Einstein's is not acknowledged in the film, but since the film was made, I haven't been able to get it off of my mind. I often wonder why Einstein addresses insanity in this way, as his most famous contributions in special and general relativity were not insane at all. In fact both have been shown to be accurate throughout many experiments. So he didn't fail at this by doing the same thing over and over. Though this is true in looking at a snapshot of that particular success, when looking at a long shot of Einstein's life we see some of the insanity he described, and not just in his wild hair. Amongst people interested in 20^th century science, Einstein is not only known for his successes. He is also known for his insistent denial of the century's other biggest breakthrough, which is the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics. Einstein actually won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to Quantum Mechanics. Still he could never take the ultimate step, which was theorized by Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac and Born. They had theorized that momentum and position of electrons and other sub atomic particles could never be located simultaneously, and with certainty. This theory has been tested thousands of times, leaving little doubt to its validity. Still, Einstein despite his rigor and genius famously said of the theory "god does not play dice with the universe". Not meaning God as a deity, but believing in a deterministic beauty of the cosmos was key to how Einstein viewed the universe. He could not break with this view, no matter how many times he tried. In other words using his own definition he was "insane". When challenged about this seemingly denialist view, Einstein would say that there were hidden variables that Quantum Uncertainty was missing. He wanted to find those, but even if he didn't he felt they were there.

Finding the hidden variables for the meaning of life is both what Einstein wanted, and what the main character in "Definition of Insanity" wants. In fact that desire, without the label of insanity, is often considered a kind of persistence that is admired; the actor trying to understand himself and others through characters, and the scientist trying to understand the universe through mathematics and observation. The difficulty becomes knowing when to stop. At what point does daily reality, like family and happiness, trump eternal questioning? More importantly, at what point is the questioning pointless as the question is already solved, or may never be solved? There is a philosophical strangeness to this whole question, and it is one that scientists seem to be aware of. In Brian Greene's book "The Fabric of The Cosmos", he has an introduction which is mentioned to me by more people than anything in the rest of the long and very engaging book. In it Greene discusses finding a copy of the Albert Camus book "The Myth of Sisyphus" as a child. Sisyphus is a book which uses the Greek legend as a backdrop to explain modern existentialism; a man endlessly pushing a bolder up a mountain, never to reach to peek. Why did this story of hopeless persistence make Greene want to be a scientist? The philosophy seems to suggest that the goal to reach a full understanding of the universe will never be achieved. Perhaps this shows Greene's self awareness. By Knowing that life will be only process and repetition; we can embrace the climb rather than the goal.

So what of insanity? I have been accused of being insane for producing plays and films, which always lose money. I have been accused of insanity for arguing about religion with religious people, as no one has ever changed their views from these arguments. The list goes on and on, and those making the accusations certainly have a point. I would say though that in the Einstein sense we are all insane, and that those of us that acknowledge it may actually be on the journey that Brian Greene has taken. It is a pointless persistence of trying and failing that is the reality of living.
By the way, please do buy "The Definition Of Insanity" I am persistently trying to make this film a much deserved success. http://www.amazon.com/Definition-Insanity-Robert-Margolis/dp/B0030EFZZ8

The Poetic Life of Scientists

More than any interview of a physicist of my generation, last Friday's NPR Science Friday Interview with Cal Tech Physicist Sean Carroll created a mystique for the life of a theoretical scientist. It happened in one moment, which was just marginally different from the common job description of a theoretical scientist. Ira Flotow asked Carroll if he spent his time thinking up these big ideas about time, which is what his new book "From Eternity to Here" (http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0525951334/lecturenotesonge) describes to a general audience. He said that is his job. He goes to the wine bar with a pencil and paper, and thinks of new ways to visualize time and space, and new equations to put the puzzle together. He also said that he was lucky that he worked in such a dynamic field where he could discuss his ideas with colleagues, who we get the impression are his friends. In that moment he managed to elevate the image of a gen x physicist in Pasadena, to lost generation poets in Paris. This is a needed transformation of the imagination. Scientists of my generation and younger have been caught in a historic limbo where social and solitary explorations of the mind have been replaced in large part by social and solitary explorations on-line. We think that science happens only because of computing power, our information gathering resources, and our mass connectivity, while all the while admiring with nostalgia the thought experiments of Einstein, the Eagle Pub of Watson and Crick, or long walks through Copenhagen parks. My favorite book of 2009 was Steven Johnson's, "Invention of Air" (http://www.amazon.com/Invention-Air-Science-Revolution-America/dp/B0031MA7UW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265357899&sr=1-1) which not only told of the contribution of Joseph Priestley, but about how coffee bar culture in London led to many of the most important ideas in English science.
Over the last year there have been several books about the need for scientists to be better communicators with the public. I like "Don't Be Such a Scientist" by Randy Olson (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265357791&sr=1-1) which dealt with this topic, by describing the necessity of scientists to use film, and other multimedia tools to demonstrate ideas to a larger public. What I realize now though is that there is an essential step missing from the picture of going from the lab to the screen. That is the step where we write, draw and eventually talk with each other, not at seminars, but at wine bars. A Greek symposium was a long night of drinking and discussing. A college symposium usually takes place in a classroom during the day and is much shorter, but for some reason I think I would be much more likely to sleep in that daytime class than drunk on Plato's sofa. While poets and philosophers have searched for ways to explain the human condition, scientists are exploring ways to understand nature in its entirety. Friendship, debate and Pinot Noir are welcome companions in this pursuit.