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