I’m here today for a lot of reasons but
the most important one is to praise the
guppy there shouldn’t be that much to
praise about a guppy
it’s an unsubstantial thing barely 2
inches long weighing less than a tenth
of an ounce little more than a
tablespoon of organic chemistry a guppy
is born swims around for a couple of
years and then dies returning to that
fundamental tablespoon compare that to
the grandeur of a star a star is vast
powerful and by comparison to our short
lives practically eternal it radiates
its power out across the galaxy burning
for perhaps 15 billion years and when
the largest stars collapse and explode
in the end of their lives in the
violence of a supernova they shake the
very fabric of space-time and yet so
what a star is in fact entirely
unremarkable a three layer ball of gas
that knows exactly one trick how to fuse
hydrogen into helium and whose grand
final act is blowing itself up compare
that to the guppy the guppy is a thing
of elegance a symphony of systems and
subsystems auditory ocular olfactory
muscular neural reproductive skeletal
it’s very cells are tiny biological
universes all by themselves a guppy is
small so what it’s fleeting so what it’s
also a work of artistry and engineering
of fantastic complexity we think we know
what simplicity is we think we know what
complexity is we’re wrong
we see complexity in the big the
beautiful the fearsome we see simplicity
in the modest the quiet the drab we saw
monsters in the men who destroyed the
World Trade Towers agents of a global
web of people possessed of diabolical
cunning but any fool can knock down a
skyscraper it takes a genius to build a
skyscraper we see what we think is
chaotic simplicity and a Jackson Pollock
painting and orderly complexity in a
Botticelli
but Botticelli never set foot in the
complex world of ever repeating fractals
that Pollock called his home we think
that a surgeon’s job must be more
complex than psychologists accept that
surgeons manipulate tissue they can see
and feel and hold in their hands
psychologists have to Intuit the
ineffable workings of the human mind
everywhere we turn we see the simplexity
of the the conundrum of simplexity let’s
consider something grander than the
Gubbi
even more wondrous than the star let’s
consider the martini vodka thank you
very much not yet in a world of in a
world of bartenders in which the
greatest of the bartenders are equal
parts artists chefs and chemists the
martini is an exercise in austerity a
martini can be shaken or stirred in a
metal or glass container with sweet
vermouth or dry vermouth it can be
served with olives or onions or a twist
or nothing at all that’s it and yet when
you multiply all of those variables
times one another
determining how many different
combinations of martinis so few X
factors can
produce you come up with six point nine
quadrillion you could serve every one of
the five billion adults on the planet
1 million martinis each and never pour
the same drink twice we’ll be doing that
later by the way the reason we’re so
confounded by simplexity is because we
think that it like so many other things
ought to consist ought to live on a
clean continuum
with simple things at the left and
complex things at the right but in fact
that continuum is more of an arc
anchored at both ends by simplicity with
complexity at the peak consider an empty
room room this size pumped full of gas
made up of atoms representing all of the
elements in the periodic table the room
is a very uninteresting place but a very
busy one with the gas swirling and
colliding and random Eddie’s in all
directions that is the simplicity of
chaos now take that same gas and
condense it down to a cube about this
big around chill it too close to
absolute zero the point at which nearly
all molecular motion stops that’s the
simplicity of robustness now go back to
the first end of that arc and begin
climbing it as the atoms sort themselves
into something organized and interesting
a car a horse a satellite a guppy
catching themselves before they slide
down the other side of the arc to
something fixed and hard and lumpish the
simplexity arc governs all manner of
systems let’s consider traffic a
multi-lane highway at 3:00 in the
morning with just a scattering of cars
moving and weaving in all directions is
the simplicity of K
the lockdown of rush-hour traffic with
nothing moving at all is the simplicity
of robustness it’s somewhere in the
middle hours with a great swarm of cars
moving together
calculating speeds and dangers ducking
into gaps that we find the real
complexity of traffic in fact highway
planners have reduced this idea to an
equation determining that the greatest
efficiency on any road is achieved when
speeds range from 25 to 45 miles an hour
and the number of cars moving past any
given point are somewhere between 5,000
and 6,200 this is peak efficiency fewer
cars and higher speeds you move down to
the chaos side more cars and slower
speeds you move down to the robust side
not everything in the simplexity
universe is so easily plotted on a graph
in some cases it requires zooming in on
something that seems simple going closer
and closer until you see it’s elegant
internal machinery take for instance the
handshake it’s the simplest and most
retail of human transactions we learn it
early we master it for life and it’s not
exactly as if it takes much practice a
quick grip a few shakes and you’ve said
hello but think of what goes behind
making that tiny exchange happen the
neural fire is the tactile feedback the
unerring spacial reasoning of two
autonomous beings converging in the same
spot in the same moment for the same
shared ritual think two of the long
history of human traditions that go
behind the handshake the semiotic of
boughs and waves and smiles of hat tips
from men and curtsies from girls all
conveying the same extraordinarily
important premise
we come in peace we mean no harm
the idea of hidden complexity and simple
things follows us through to our careers
in general we respect the work of
corporate presidents and CEOs more than
we do the complexity of the work of the
people the armies of people they employ
we should take for instance call center
workers those people who keep us on hold
for 15 minutes and ask us questions
about our mother’s maiden name and the
street we grew up on in the name of your
first pet and mine died six months after
we got it so I never remember the name
to begin with and yet they deserve more
respect than we give them according to a
Cornell University study the average
call center worker has to feel one call
every three to five minutes or a hundred
and sixty calls a day if they work for
an insurance company they have to be
familiar with dozens of policies if they
work for a consumer electronics company
they have to be familiar with hundreds
of products and no sooner are they done
with one policy one product then they
have to turn their attention to another
every three to five minutes a hundred
and sixty times a day could you do that
I couldn’t do that up and down the job
scale we see this idea of the unexpected
complexity of lower tier workers the
factory floor manager whose
organizational and interpersonal skills
have to be much better than those of the
board member who helps run the company
the ambulance driver or paramedic who
has to be better able to diagnose an
injury or illness in the moment and on
the fly far better than say the chief of
cardiac surgery who hasn’t stepped into
an operating room in years the taxi
drivers who know the streets of their
city better than the trans
‘chief ever could ultimately it’s the
star in the gummy over and over again
round and round in the long run
understanding complexity simplicity and
simplexity is a little bit like
photography a business of establishing
aperture and focal lengths knowing what
to take into your frame and what to
leave out of it this idea of knowing
where to look and where not to look may
have been most powerfully captured in
the work of a scientist most people
haven’t heard of Karl Jansky the early
19th century physicist in 1931 when
Jansky was a young man working for Bell
Telephone laboratories just 26 years old
he was given the job of trying to
understand the cause of the constant
hiss and crackle that was forever
plaguing overseas phone calls the
problem wasn’t the cabling they were
well insulated and the problem wasn’t
the telephone equipment itself that
worked perfectly in the lab so Jansky
looked at the sky the atmosphere is a
busy energetic place forever crackling
with lightning and humming with the
energy of radio broadcasts but the
interference on the phone cables was
relatively steady and atmospheric
disturbances fluctuate depending on
local conditions so Jansky
wisely looked higher still into space
building a radio antenna on a rotating
base and allowing it to survey the
cosmos constantly looking for the source
or sources of the interference and
before long he found it every 23 hours
and 56 minutes or about the time it
takes the earth to complete one rotation
the hiss on the line Pete and it
happened at the very moment the antenna
was pointed to the constellation
Sagittarius which itself lies near the
center or in the direction of the center
of the galaxy it was then Jansky
realized that his on the phone line was
the voice of the cosmos itself
the combined electromagnetic energy of
every star nebula and galaxies in the
universe
prior to Jan sqeeze discovery scientists
trying to study space were limited to
doing it in the visual spectrum a bit
like stand you know foot from a door and
peering through the keyhole trying to
determine what’s happening in the other
room Jansky kicked the door open and
allowed the entire electromagnetic
spectrum to pour in gamma rays
microwaves x-rays the ultraviolet the
infrared and with that the science of
radio astronomy was born even now
decades later as phone calls have
improved we can still hear jazz keys
exquisite hiss in the background static
of a poorly tuned radio station the song
may be the thing you want to hear the
static may be the thing you don’t but
the true key to understanding simplexity
is appreciating the music in both thank
you [Applause]
the most important one is to praise the
guppy there shouldn’t be that much to
praise about a guppy
it’s an unsubstantial thing barely 2
inches long weighing less than a tenth
of an ounce little more than a
tablespoon of organic chemistry a guppy
is born swims around for a couple of
years and then dies returning to that
fundamental tablespoon compare that to
the grandeur of a star a star is vast
powerful and by comparison to our short
lives practically eternal it radiates
its power out across the galaxy burning
for perhaps 15 billion years and when
the largest stars collapse and explode
in the end of their lives in the
violence of a supernova they shake the
very fabric of space-time and yet so
what a star is in fact entirely
unremarkable a three layer ball of gas
that knows exactly one trick how to fuse
hydrogen into helium and whose grand
final act is blowing itself up compare
that to the guppy the guppy is a thing
of elegance a symphony of systems and
subsystems auditory ocular olfactory
muscular neural reproductive skeletal
it’s very cells are tiny biological
universes all by themselves a guppy is
small so what it’s fleeting so what it’s
also a work of artistry and engineering
of fantastic complexity we think we know
what simplicity is we think we know what
complexity is we’re wrong
we see complexity in the big the
beautiful the fearsome we see simplicity
in the modest the quiet the drab we saw
monsters in the men who destroyed the
World Trade Towers agents of a global
web of people possessed of diabolical
cunning but any fool can knock down a
skyscraper it takes a genius to build a
skyscraper we see what we think is
chaotic simplicity and a Jackson Pollock
painting and orderly complexity in a
Botticelli
but Botticelli never set foot in the
complex world of ever repeating fractals
that Pollock called his home we think
that a surgeon’s job must be more
complex than psychologists accept that
surgeons manipulate tissue they can see
and feel and hold in their hands
psychologists have to Intuit the
ineffable workings of the human mind
everywhere we turn we see the simplexity
of the the conundrum of simplexity let’s
consider something grander than the
Gubbi
even more wondrous than the star let’s
consider the martini vodka thank you
very much not yet in a world of in a
world of bartenders in which the
greatest of the bartenders are equal
parts artists chefs and chemists the
martini is an exercise in austerity a
martini can be shaken or stirred in a
metal or glass container with sweet
vermouth or dry vermouth it can be
served with olives or onions or a twist
or nothing at all that’s it and yet when
you multiply all of those variables
times one another
determining how many different
combinations of martinis so few X
factors can
produce you come up with six point nine
quadrillion you could serve every one of
the five billion adults on the planet
1 million martinis each and never pour
the same drink twice we’ll be doing that
later by the way the reason we’re so
confounded by simplexity is because we
think that it like so many other things
ought to consist ought to live on a
clean continuum
with simple things at the left and
complex things at the right but in fact
that continuum is more of an arc
anchored at both ends by simplicity with
complexity at the peak consider an empty
room room this size pumped full of gas
made up of atoms representing all of the
elements in the periodic table the room
is a very uninteresting place but a very
busy one with the gas swirling and
colliding and random Eddie’s in all
directions that is the simplicity of
chaos now take that same gas and
condense it down to a cube about this
big around chill it too close to
absolute zero the point at which nearly
all molecular motion stops that’s the
simplicity of robustness now go back to
the first end of that arc and begin
climbing it as the atoms sort themselves
into something organized and interesting
a car a horse a satellite a guppy
catching themselves before they slide
down the other side of the arc to
something fixed and hard and lumpish the
simplexity arc governs all manner of
systems let’s consider traffic a
multi-lane highway at 3:00 in the
morning with just a scattering of cars
moving and weaving in all directions is
the simplicity of K
the lockdown of rush-hour traffic with
nothing moving at all is the simplicity
of robustness it’s somewhere in the
middle hours with a great swarm of cars
moving together
calculating speeds and dangers ducking
into gaps that we find the real
complexity of traffic in fact highway
planners have reduced this idea to an
equation determining that the greatest
efficiency on any road is achieved when
speeds range from 25 to 45 miles an hour
and the number of cars moving past any
given point are somewhere between 5,000
and 6,200 this is peak efficiency fewer
cars and higher speeds you move down to
the chaos side more cars and slower
speeds you move down to the robust side
not everything in the simplexity
universe is so easily plotted on a graph
in some cases it requires zooming in on
something that seems simple going closer
and closer until you see it’s elegant
internal machinery take for instance the
handshake it’s the simplest and most
retail of human transactions we learn it
early we master it for life and it’s not
exactly as if it takes much practice a
quick grip a few shakes and you’ve said
hello but think of what goes behind
making that tiny exchange happen the
neural fire is the tactile feedback the
unerring spacial reasoning of two
autonomous beings converging in the same
spot in the same moment for the same
shared ritual think two of the long
history of human traditions that go
behind the handshake the semiotic of
boughs and waves and smiles of hat tips
from men and curtsies from girls all
conveying the same extraordinarily
important premise
we come in peace we mean no harm
the idea of hidden complexity and simple
things follows us through to our careers
in general we respect the work of
corporate presidents and CEOs more than
we do the complexity of the work of the
people the armies of people they employ
we should take for instance call center
workers those people who keep us on hold
for 15 minutes and ask us questions
about our mother’s maiden name and the
street we grew up on in the name of your
first pet and mine died six months after
we got it so I never remember the name
to begin with and yet they deserve more
respect than we give them according to a
Cornell University study the average
call center worker has to feel one call
every three to five minutes or a hundred
and sixty calls a day if they work for
an insurance company they have to be
familiar with dozens of policies if they
work for a consumer electronics company
they have to be familiar with hundreds
of products and no sooner are they done
with one policy one product then they
have to turn their attention to another
every three to five minutes a hundred
and sixty times a day could you do that
I couldn’t do that up and down the job
scale we see this idea of the unexpected
complexity of lower tier workers the
factory floor manager whose
organizational and interpersonal skills
have to be much better than those of the
board member who helps run the company
the ambulance driver or paramedic who
has to be better able to diagnose an
injury or illness in the moment and on
the fly far better than say the chief of
cardiac surgery who hasn’t stepped into
an operating room in years the taxi
drivers who know the streets of their
city better than the trans
‘chief ever could ultimately it’s the
star in the gummy over and over again
round and round in the long run
understanding complexity simplicity and
simplexity is a little bit like
photography a business of establishing
aperture and focal lengths knowing what
to take into your frame and what to
leave out of it this idea of knowing
where to look and where not to look may
have been most powerfully captured in
the work of a scientist most people
haven’t heard of Karl Jansky the early
19th century physicist in 1931 when
Jansky was a young man working for Bell
Telephone laboratories just 26 years old
he was given the job of trying to
understand the cause of the constant
hiss and crackle that was forever
plaguing overseas phone calls the
problem wasn’t the cabling they were
well insulated and the problem wasn’t
the telephone equipment itself that
worked perfectly in the lab so Jansky
looked at the sky the atmosphere is a
busy energetic place forever crackling
with lightning and humming with the
energy of radio broadcasts but the
interference on the phone cables was
relatively steady and atmospheric
disturbances fluctuate depending on
local conditions so Jansky
wisely looked higher still into space
building a radio antenna on a rotating
base and allowing it to survey the
cosmos constantly looking for the source
or sources of the interference and
before long he found it every 23 hours
and 56 minutes or about the time it
takes the earth to complete one rotation
the hiss on the line Pete and it
happened at the very moment the antenna
was pointed to the constellation
Sagittarius which itself lies near the
center or in the direction of the center
of the galaxy it was then Jansky
realized that his on the phone line was
the voice of the cosmos itself
the combined electromagnetic energy of
every star nebula and galaxies in the
universe
prior to Jan sqeeze discovery scientists
trying to study space were limited to
doing it in the visual spectrum a bit
like stand you know foot from a door and
peering through the keyhole trying to
determine what’s happening in the other
room Jansky kicked the door open and
allowed the entire electromagnetic
spectrum to pour in gamma rays
microwaves x-rays the ultraviolet the
infrared and with that the science of
radio astronomy was born even now
decades later as phone calls have
improved we can still hear jazz keys
exquisite hiss in the background static
of a poorly tuned radio station the song
may be the thing you want to hear the
static may be the thing you don’t but
the true key to understanding simplexity
is appreciating the music in both thank
you [Applause]
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