Tuesday, April 18. 2006
I just finished watching an interesting documentary on Dr. RP Feynman. Dr. Feynman is a highly respected physicist. The idea of figuring stuff out just to figure it out is one that has always appealed to me. This idea crosses over to art for me as well. It's freeing to create something for creations sake alone, making your interests supreme as opposed to practicality. The fun is in the chase, constantly challenging yourself. I drew some vague parallels to some of the web work I've been doing lately, so I figured I would write them down for posterity.
Dr. Feynman drew an interesting parallel between a chess game and understanding the natural world. He compares his passion to looking at a chessboard, not knowing how the game was played and not seeing the actual movement of the pieces, but only the results of these movements. For instance, one might notice that the color the bishop was on never changed as it moved around the board. One could than deduce that the bishop could only move diagonally. The really interesting problems in science come when suddenly the bishop does change color (this could happen if a pawn made it to the queens end and was exchanged for a bishop). This doesn't happen very often so it would go unnoticed for quite some time until it finally threw a wrench at your theory. It's very cool to think about deducing the laws of a game by watching the results determined by unknown actions. So, now how does this relate to web development...
Dealing with various problems everyday, I'm always looking for the correct way to solve a problem. I want to put the problem into a box. The second I close that box, the pawn makes it to the queens side... Science is a deliberate and pain staking process. Perhaps this approach would be well suited for some of the problems I encounter everyday with the web. Taking the time to step back, seriously analyze what you need your users results to be, and allow the laws of your application to be defined by them. Constantly re-evaluating your "laws". This seems pretty obvious, but the fun comes in making something beautifully simplistic while adhering to these "laws". Just like a flower (see the beginning of the clip).
I figured I hadn't been nerdy enough lately... if I bored anyone, it just means you're stupid. Or perhaps I'm stupid...
