<p>Thought I'd open a new thread, so that this issue could be discussed without the "MIT rejects" in the title.</p>
<p>geomom, in #119 on the old thread, has separated polish into two components, superficial (physical calmness, composure, being articulate, connecting with an audience) and intellectual (ability to converse about a variety of topics, to ask questions, to find common ground).</p>
<p>In both of these senses, Feynman would qualify as polishedthough I think he might sometimes lose physical calmness, due to his enthusiasm about physics. He definitely had wide-ranging interests. But, to defend my earlier statements, Feynman wasnt polished in the sense that Beltway insiders, prep school students, or Booz, Allen would understand the termi.e., the kind of polish that Booz, Allen used to send the technical people to charm school to acquire. Im not alluding just to Feynmans early career (the teas at Princeton), but to the later stages as well. </p>
<p>The investigation of the explosion of the shuttle Challenger provides good examples. In the collection of Feynmans letters, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, Feynman writes about his experience when the committee was first meeting: William Rogers, who was consummately polished, discouraged committee members from becoming involved in the detail work themselves. Feynman seems to have a hard time getting a word in edgewisehe mentions that the need to introduce a new person or some other event kept causing interruptions. Rogers apparently adjourned the first meeting while Feynman was still trying to speak; and Feynman felt that he left without a specific assignment. I read all this as an attemptobviously futileto marginalize Feynman. (But look up Rogers reaction to Feynmans O-ring and ice-water demonstration.) If Feynman had the Washington patina, would General Kutyna ever have had to tell him, Copilot to pilot. Comb your hair?</p>
<p>Feynman + polish = John Wheeler? And how polished could Einstein have been, if he didnt wear socks?</p>
<p>Another comment: In my experience, scientists of a certain temperament tend to acquire the kind of polish geomom mentioned (both superficial and intellectual) almost automatically, as their expertise grows. I've seen scientists change from uneasy, hesitant speakers to entertaining, polished speakers at the time when they make the transition from addressing the world's experts to being the world's experts. People continue to grow quite a lot after age 22; so personally, I wouldn't set the acquisition of polish as a goal in itself, for undergraduate education--although Michael Woods makes a good case for the opportunities to develop polish at Caltech. </p>
<p>But I have to mention that I once saw a Nobel laureate who seemed very jittery before a talk. I asked the person next to me why the speaker was concerned, since he had already won the Nobel prize. He commented that I had to bear in mind that the speaker had won a one-quarter share of the prize, while several people in the audience had won the prize singly.</p>
<p>^^That's exactly what I was trying to communicate. </p>
<p>I would add that my gut feeling is that a guy like John Wheeler would have <em>lost</em> polish as a professional physicist had he been significantly involved in things like student council during undergrad. (For those that don't know, Wheeler was Feynman's advisor and a Nobel Laureate.) In high school there is a lot of time, but in college there isn't--especially if you go to MIT or Caltech. Frankly, I think doing stuff like that is more valuable if you plan to do something more non-technical immediately after graduating. Or maybe something where you don't rely completely on your undergraduate foundation--like law or medical school. </p>
<p>I just don't feel like this is an additive thing, if you are thinking mathematically. Like you don't become a smooth CEO (or chief technical officer CTO, if you like) by filling your plate with some technical things like courses and adding some "polish" activities.<br>
(smooth CEO/scientist) != T + P</p>
<p>Oppenheimer is a good example of this. The guy was the consumate intellectual--fluent in both sciences and the humanities. Yet he led the Manhattan project with no administrative experience other than running his research group I believe. And he oversaw not just fellow physicists but also all the physical plant workers. I think it would have been a mistake to advise Oppenheimer to let some of his A+ grades at Harvard drop to just A's so that he could have time to be involved in planning and organizing events. </p>
<p>This is not to say you have to study 24/7. But if you're not going to work, then have fun. There are reasons to not go to Caltech (or MIT), but I don't think the whole polish issue is really one of them. Maybe you want to go to a school where the work is not like a firehouse. Attend a few football games, ace your classes, get a monster GRE/MCAT/LSAT score, and then go to a great grad school. A few of my friends who are CEO's now of technical companies pretty much followed that formula. They didn't really do any organizing stuff in college or high school and I wouldn't say they really looked like natural leaders as high school students.</p>
<p>Thanks. When I first clicked on the link, I got an odd error and leapt to the conclusion that it was a site-available-by-subscription-only issue. But the error was irreproducible, so I've listened to the podcast now. </p>
<p>I'd say Josh Simon sounds polished--adding the qualification that he was talking to George Musser from Scientific American, and not to a typical NPR reporter. Whether he would appear polished in Congressional testimony, for example, it's hard to guess.</p>
<p>The content of the podcast--the issue of "missing" dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way--is quite interesting. I'm not an astronomer, so I would have liked to hear a brief sketch of the connection between the velocity dispersion of stars in the dwarf galaxies and the dwarf mass, rather than an assertion (I'm risking the possibility that the connection is obvious, just not to me), but other than that, I found the conversation quite informative.</p>
<p>Re dwarf galaxies: I've been tempted to offer a bet to a local astronomer on the number of them that will eventually be found, and as a subsidiary issue, what the largest n in Willman n will be. (Right now, I know there is Willman 1--anything higher than that?)</p>