[...]
DUNCAN WATTS: Well, I started out as a physicist working on
Chaos Theory and then when I got to graduate school at Cornell in
the Engineering Department, I got interested in sort of a
variation of that which is now called Network Science. And as
I – even though I was in engineering I became
increasingly interested in the applications of Network Science
to social problems, to sociology into economics and so on, and so
as a result of that I became a sociologist.
I think my very first advisor at graduate school, Frank Moon, was
an engineer. He said when I was asking him should I concentrate
on experiments, or should I concentrate on theory, or should
I concentrate on models, and he said, "All three; you need to
have all three. There's three legs of the stool and until you
have all three of them you don't really know what you're doing,"
and that's something that I sort of tried to follow ever since.
I was interested in insulation, in building insulation. This
was sort of back in the late 1970's during the first energy
crisis and everyone was suddenly very interested in conserving
energy, and so I was testing all of these – I built this little
apparatus to measure the heat transfer through different kinds
of insulation to try to and figure out like what
the best kind was.
I think it's really that it's a very in some ways self-indulgent
career, that I get to spend a lot of my time sitting around
really thinking about interesting questions, and I
think that's a luxury that relatively few people have.
I think the answer is what we -- what I think all this taste.
That you can have all the technical skills in the world
but in the end I think what matters most is being able to
ask an interesting question and, unfortunately nobody really
knows how to define an interesting question. And so
you sort of have to have this ability to just somehow intuit
that some questions are more interesting than others and pick
those ones and that's what we call taste.
Well, I'm interested in how people interact through networks
and how those networks affect everything from the spread of
epidemics of disease, to information flow in
organizations, to how people solve problems in their everyday
lives. So I think, although we're mostly motivated by basic
scientific questions, the long term implications are possibly
profound for economies, for businesses, government policy
making, all these things.
That's another difficult question. Again, I've sort of
worked in many different fields and I've met a lot of brilliant
people over the years and they've all influenced me in
different ways. I do think my grad school advisor Steve
Strogatz was someone who I spent a lot of time talking with about
science and how to do good science and what it was all
about, and I think that those conversations were possibly the
most important ones that I've had with anyone. So, I guess,
if I had to pick one person it would be Steve Strogatz.
Well, people have all sorts of odd bizarre ideas about what
scientists actually do. In fact, the question that my
friends most ask me, what do you do all day? You wake up in the
morning and then what happens? I think that it's hard for
people to understand what it means to sit and think for long
periods of time and I don't know if that's surprising, but I
think it's an idea that is foreign to many people and
really has to be sort of experienced to be understood.
Be my notebooks. I have – I have notebooks going back to my
undergraduate days that contain just about everything I've ever
thought about and most of it I've forgotten. I don't even
remember thinking most of these things and yet it's all sort of
written down there, and I have this kind of idle dream that one
day I'll have the time to go back through them all and
discover some of these lost thoughts, and it would be
terrible to not be able to do that.
Well, I live in New York City and so I don't have a car, but
when I go out to – whenever I am in a car, it's probably '80's
hair bands, Guns and Roses.