Toward a science of simplicity George Whitesides

most of the talks that you’ve heard in

the last several fabulous days have been

from people who have the characteristic

that they have thought about something

they are experts they know what’s going

on all of you know about the topic that

I’m supposed to talk about that is you

know what simplicity is you know what

complexity is the trouble is I don’t and

what I’m going to do is share with you

my ignorance from the subject I want you

to read this because we’re going to come

back to it in a moment the quote is from

the fabled Potter steward opinion on

pornography and let me just read it the

important details here shorthand

description hardcore pornography and

perhaps I could never succeed in

intelligibly to finding it but I know it

when I see it I’m going to come back to

that in a moment so what is simplicity

it’s good to start with some examples a

coffee cup we don’t think about coffee

cups but it’s much more interesting than

one might think a coffee cup is a device

yes which has a container yes and a

handle yes the handle enables you to

hold it when the container is filled

with hot liquid yeah why is that

important well it enables you to drink

coffee but also by the way the coffee is

hot the liquid is sterile you’re not

likely to get card that way so the

coffee cup or the cup with a handle is

one of the tools used by society to

maintain Public Health scissors or your

clothes

glasses enable you to see things and

keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or

run down by automobiles and books are

after all your education but there’s

another class of simple things which are

also very important simple and function

but not at all simple in how they’re

constructed and the two here are just

examples one is the cell phone which we

use every day and it

rests on a complexity which has some

characteristics very different from

those that my friend benoit mandelbrot

discussed but are very interesting and

the other of course is a birth control

pill which in a very simple way

fundamentally changed the structure of

society by changing the role of women in

it by providing to them the opportunity

to make reproductive choices so there

are two ways of thinking about this word

I think

and here I’ve corrupted the Potter

steward quotation by saying that we can

think about something which spans all

the way from scissors to the cell phone

internet and birth control pills by

saying that they’re simple the functions

are simple and we recognize what that

simplicity is when we see it or there

may be another way of doing it which is

to think about the problem in terms of

what if you associate with moral

philosophers is called the teapot

problem the teapot problem I’ll pose

this way

suppose you see a teapot and the teapot

is filled with hot water and you can

then ask the question why is the water

hot and that’s a simple question it’s

like what is simplicity one answer would

be because the kinetic energy of the

water molecules is high and they bounce

against things rapidly that’s the kind

of physical science argument a second

argument would be because he was sitting

on a stove with the flame on that’s a

historical argument a third is that I

wanted a hot water for tea that’s an

intentional argument and since this is

coming from a moral philosopher the

fourth would be that it’s part of God’s

plan for the universe all of these are

possibilities the point is that you get

into trouble when you ask a single

question with a single box for an answer

in which that single question actually

is many questions with quite different

meanings but with the same words asking

what is simplicity I think falls in that

category

what is the state of science and

interestingly complexity is very highly

evolved we have a lot of interesting

information about what complexity is

simplicity for reasons that are a little

bit obscure is almost not pursued at

least in academic world we academics I

am an academic

we love complexity you can write papers

about complexity and the nice thing

about complexity is it’s fundamentally

intractable in many ways so you’re not

responsible for outcomes simplicity all

of you really would like you’re wearing

blender in the morning to make whatever

a Waring blender does but not explode or

play Beethoven you’re not interested in

the the limits of these things so what

one is interested in has a lot to do

with the rewards of the system and

there’s a lot of rewards in thinking

about complexity and emergence not so

much in thinking about simplicity one of

the things I want to do is to help you

with a very important task which you may

not know that you have very often which

is to understand how to sit next to a

physicist at a dinner party and have a

conversation and the words that I would

like you to focus on are complexity and

emergence because these will label you

to start the conversation then daydream

without other things all right what is

complexity in this view of things and

what is emergence we have actually a

pretty good working definition of

complexity it is a system like traffic

which has components the components

interact with one another these are cars

and drivers they dissipate energy it

turns out that whenever you have that

system weird stuff happens and you in

Los Angeles probably know this better

than anyone here’s another example which

I put up because it’s an example of

really important current science you

can’t possibly read that it’s not

intended that you read it but that’s a

tiny part of the chemical reactions

going on in each of your cells at any

given moment and this like the traffic

that you see the amazing thing about the

cell is that that actually

maintain a fairly stable working

relationship with other cells but we

don’t know why anyone who tells you that

we understand life walk away and let me

reduce this to the simplest level we’ve

heard from Bill Gates recently all of us

to some extent study this thing called a

Bill Gates terrific you learn everything

you can about that and then there’s

another kind of thing that you might

study and you study that hard that’s

bono this is bono but then if you know

everything you can know about those two

things and you put them together what

can you say about this combination the

answer is not a lot and that’s of

complexity you know imagine building

that up to a city or to a society and

you’ve got obviously an interesting

problem all right now so let me give you

an example of simplicity of a particular

kind and then I want to introduce a word

that I think is very useful which is

stacking and I’m going to use stacking

for a kind of simplicity that has the

characteristic that it is so simple and

so reliable that I can build things with

it I’m going to use simple to mean

reliable predictable repeatable and I’m

going to use this an example the

internet because it’s a particularly

good example of stacked simplicity we

call it a complex system which it is but

it’s also something else the internet

starts with mathematics it starts with

binary and if you look at the list of

things on the bottom we are familiar

with the Arabic numbers one to ten and

so on in binary one is zero zero zero

one seven is zero one one one the

question is why is binary simpler than

Arabic and the answer is simply that if

I hold up three fingers you can count

that easily but if I hold up this circle

hard it’d say that I just did seven the

virtue of binary is that it’s the

simplest possible way of representing

numbers anything else is more

complicated

you can catch errors with it it’s

unambiguous and it’s reading there are

lots of good things that by

right so it is very very simple once you

learn how to read it now if you’d like

to represent this 0 and 1 of binary you

needed device and think of things in

your life that are binary one of them is

light switches they can be on and off

that’s binary now wall switches we all

know fail but our friends who are

condensed matter physicists managed to

come up some 50 years ago with a very

nice device shown under that bell jar

which is a transistor a transistor is

nothing more than a wall switch it turns

things on and off but it does so without

moving parts and it doesn’t fail

basically for a very long period of time

so the second layer of simplicity was

the transistor in the internet so since

the transistor is so simple you can put

lots of them together and you put lots

of them together and you come up with

something called integrated circuits and

a current integrated circuit might have

in each one of these chips something

like a billion transistors all of which

have to work perfectly every time so

that’s the next layer of simplicity and

in fact integrated circuits are really

simple in the sense that they in general

work really well with integrated

circuits you can build cell phones you

all are accustomed to having your cell

phones work the large majority of the

time in Boston Boston is a little bit

like Namibia in its cell phone coverage

so that we’re not accustomed to that all

the time but some of the time but in

fact if you have cell phones you can now

go to this nice lady who’s somewhere

like Nvidia and who is extremely happy

with the fact that although she does not

have master’s degree in electrical

engineering from MIT she’s nonetheless

able to hack her cell phone to get power

in some funny way and from that comes

the internet this is a map of bit flows

across the continent those two blobs

that are light in the middle there are

the United States and Europe and then

back to simplicity again so here we have

what I think is one of the great ideas

which is Google which in this simple

portal makes the claim that it

accessible all of the world’s

information but the point is that that

extraordinary simple idea rests on

layers of simplicity each compounded

into a complexity that is itself simple

in the sense that it’s completely

reliable all right let me then finish

off with four general statements and

example and two aphorisms the

characteristics which I think are useful

to think about for simple things first

they are predictable their behavior is

predictable now one of the nice

characteristics of simple things is you

know what it’s going to do in general so

simplicity and predictability or

characteristics of simple things the

second is and this is a real-world

statement they’re cheap if you have

things that are cheap enough people will

find uses for them even if they seem

very primitive so for example stones you

can build cathedrals out of stones you

just have to know what it does you carve

them in blocks and you pile them on top

of one another and they support weight

so there has to be function the function

has to be predictable and the cost has

to be low what that means is that you

have to have a high performance or value

for cost and then I would propose as

this last component that they serve or

they have potential to serve as building

blocks that is you can stack them and

stack you can mean this way or it can

mean this way or it can mean in some

arbitrary n dimensional space but if you

have something that has a function and

it’s really cheap

people will find new ways of putting it

together to make new things cheap

functional reliable things unleash the

creativity of people who then build

stuff that you could not imagine there

is no way of predicting the Internet

based on the first transistor it just is

not possible so these are the components

now the example is something that there

to give you from the work that we

ourselves do we are very interested in

delivering health care the developing

world and one of the things that we wish

to do in this particular business is to

find a way of doing medical diagnosis at

as close to zero cost as we can manage

so how does one do that this is a world

in which there’s no electricity there’s

no money there’s no medical competence

and I don’t want to spend your time and

going through the details but in the

lower right hand corner you see an

example of the kind of thing that we

have it’s a little paper chip it has a

few things printed on it using the same

technology that you use for making comic

books which was the inspiration for this

particular idea and you put a drop in

this case if urine at the bottom it

wicks its way up into these little

branches you know no power inquired it

turns colors in this particular case

you’re reading kidney function and since

the healthcare worker of much of this

part of the world is an eighteen year

old with an ak-47 who happens to be out

of work and is willing to go around and

do this sort of thing he can take a

picture of it with his cell phone send

the picture back to where there is a

doctor and the doctor can look at it so

what you’ve done is to take a technology

which is available everywhere make a

device which is extremely cheap and make

it in such a fashion that it is very

very reliable if we can pull this off we

can build more function it will be

stackable that is to say if we can make

the basic technology of one or two

things work it will be applicable to a

very very large variety of human

conditions and hence extendable in both

vertical and horizontal directions part

of my interest in this I have to say is

that I would like to how do I put this

politely change the way or maybe

eviscerate the capital structure of the

US healthcare system which I think is

fundamentally broken so let me close

let me close with my two aphorisms one

of the minutes for mr. Einstein and he

says everything should be made as simple

as possible but not simpler and I think

that’s a very good way of thinking about

the problem if you take too much out of

something that’s simple you lose

function you have to have low cost but

you also have to have a function so you

can’t make it too simple and the second

is a design issue and it’s not directly

relevant but it’s a nice statement this

is by sending super ray and he says you

know you’ve achieved perfection and

design not when you have nothing more to

add but when you have nothing more to

take away and that certainly is going to

the right direction so what I think one

can begin to do with this kind of cut at

the words publicity which doesn’t cover

brand koozie it doesn’t answer the

question of why Maruyama

is better or worse or simpler or less

simpler than menthol and certainly

doesn’t address the question to whether

Mozart is simpler than Paco

but it does make a point which is one

which in a sense differentiates the real

world of people who make things and the

world of people who think about things

which is there is an intellectual merit

to asking how do we make things as

simple as we can as cheap as we can as

functional as we can and as freely

interconnect able as we can if we make

that kind of simplicity in our

technology and then give it to you guys

you can go off and do all kinds of

fabulous things with it thank you very

much

good question

so can you picture that a science of

simplicity might get to the point where

you could look out at various systems

say a financial system or a legal system

health system and say that has got to

the point of danger or dysfunctionality

for the following reasons and this is

how we might simplify it yes I think you

could but if you look at the components

from which the system is made and

examined their fragility or their

stability you can probably build the

kind of risk assessment based on that

basis have you started to do that I mean

with the health system you’ve got a set

of radical solution on the cost side but

in terms of the system itself well you

know how do I put that simply know that

that was that was a simple powerful

answer yes um so in terms of that that

diagnostic technology that you’ve got

where is that and when do you see that

may be getting rolled out to scale

that’s coming out soon I mean the

system’s working we have to find out how

to manufacture them and do things in

this kind but the basic technology works

you’ve got you’ve got a company set up

to a foundation a foundation

not-for-profit all right well thank you

so much thanks for your talk thank you

what does a machine know about itself

can it know when it needs to be repaired

and when it doesn’t in industries like

manufacturing and energy they’re using

predictive analytics to detect signs of

trouble helping some companies save

millions on maintenance because machines

seek help before they’re broken and

don’t when they’re not that’s what I’m

working on I’m an IBM er let’s build a

smarter planet