by Bill Nye
To me, the most moving thing about staring at those very old pieces of parchment is remembering how utterly modern they are. Sure, they are illuminated dimly to preserve their fading inks, and they are sealed in a vault of inert argon gas to keep the paper from turning to dust, but the words on them are as alive as ever. They are stirring reminders that in law, as in science, good-enough thinking is never good enough. That’s why the Constitution needs constant reinterpretation. It comes back to that wonderful notion of progress. Maybe we’ll even get rid of the Electoral College one of these days. You wouldn’t want to base modern medicine on ideas from the time before the germ theory of disease, or try to build a jet engine using the old theory that heat is a fluid called “caloric.” Fortunately, the founders embraced a never-ending search for better ideas and better solutions. The Constitution is one of the most beautiful examples of everything-all-at-once thinking, and it’s a personal inspiration as well as a political one.
Say what you will about the shortcomings of American society, and there’s certainly a lot to say, but our progressive style of doing things is a constant reminder that such greater things are possible. We do not have to accept things the way they are. We can nudge, adapt, revise, evolve, improve . . . and change the world.
CHAPTER 10
Everybody Knows Something You Don’t
Carefully consider the title of this chapter. I hope you can take a moment and let those words really sink in. It is such a simple idea, yet I find it constantly humbling and empowering. You are surrounded by people who are experts in one field or another, and most of those people are ready to share their knowledge freely with you. All you have to do is approach them openly, generously, and attentively.
The expertise that others have might not be what you or I expect. It might not even be something you recognize immediately. I can pretty much guarantee that a janitor knows more about chemical interactions among cleaning solvents than the average person. A flight attendant is sure to be trained in the latest CPR techniques. A grocery checkout worker can probably tell you the exact texture of a ripe mango or the true meaning of the sell-by date on a carton of milk. It’s marvelous to think about all the knowledge that’s around us at every moment. But in order to tap into all this great wisdom, you still have to reach out and ask for it. There’s no shortage of reasons why we don’t. We are too busy, too shy, too proud, too oblivious. A lot of the time we don’t even notice other people—or we are so certain that our own knowledge must be superior (or at least plenty good enough) that we don’t bother to ask. But think about it: No matter how many things you’ve studied or how many life experiences you’ve had, somebody else has studied things you haven’t and has experienced things you haven’t.
I’m a walking case study in knowing a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff and still having a warehouse full of ignorance. I especially had that feeling when I was first starting out as an engineer at Boeing in 1977, at a time when I had more education than life experience. I was about to work on engineering upgrades for the company’s biggest and most famous jet, the 747. Fortunately, my boss, Jeff Summitt, was an amazing guy. He grew up with slide rules, and he had an intuition about forces, pressures, and mechanisms. I wanted to impress him with my competence and tried to emulate him so much that I even wore the same brand of safety shoes he wore and ordered the same thing he did for lunch in the cafeteria.
There was one Boeing test pilot who was really bothered by vibrations in the control yoke—the pilots’ steering wheel—on the 747. I say “vibrations,” but what he picked up was more of a subtle buzz. You had to concentrate for a moment to feel it. But once felt, you noticed it every time you touched the yoke (which a pilot does all through a flight). Jeff assigned me to figure out how to get rid of the bad vibes. The Boeing 747 was the first commercial airliner that was all fly-by-hydraulic, meaning that there were no direct, unpowered connections between the pilots’ controls and the aerodynamic surfaces (the ailerons, rudders, and elevators) that steer the plane. To give the pilot a sense of what the plane is doing in the air, there was a gizmo called the “feel computer.” Using hydraulic fluid at a pressure of 2 megapascals (3,000 pounds per square inch), the loaf-of-bread-size computer generated artificial control forces. Just as the steering wheel of your car pushes back on your hands when you turn, the feel computer provided force-feedback in the pilots’ yokes in the cockpit. The 747 has four redundant hydraulic systems to deal with the extraordinary forces needed to control such a large aircraft flying at such high speeds. That arrangement means there is almost no chance that a single fault, or even a combination of faults, can disable the plane.
So what was causing the vibration? A 747 is a complicated piece of machinery, and Jeff helped me break down the problem. With all four hydraulic systems running at full pressure (i.e., normally), they sometimes work, or at least push, against one another a bit. When I first looked at the problem, Jeff dryly pointed out that any vibration the pilots were feeling had to be coming from those hydraulic systems, not from the air. I investigated further, examining the entire system piece by piece. I finally concluded that the tubes themselves were to blame; along their considerable length, they were ever so subtly creating a high-frequency wave in the hydraulic fluid. Nothing to see, just a buzz in your fingers.
Now we had a better-defined problem: how to dampen the artificially generated vibrations. We added an extra length of hydraulic tubing and made the pressure wave destructively interfere with itself. It was a clever trick from wave theory. When the pressure wave went high, our new, artificially created antiwave went low and canceled out the whole problem. Since I was fresh out of engineering school, Jeff assigned me to do the math. I computed the speed of the waves in the fluid and the volume needed to generate the exact right antiwave. My numbers guided our design, and the vibration went away. I’ll never get over how little I knew about the things Jeff had me doing. He not only had detailed knowledge about hydraulics and control systems but also knew how to filter his knowledge. Such filtering is what we typically call “intuition.” It took me a while to appreciate just how much Jeff knew that I didn’t, but he was patient with me. He never made me feel embarrassed about asking questions. He made me part of the team, treated everyone with respect, and encouraged us to share our best assets and strengths. We all contributed to the designing, building, and testing of our antivibration system. It was the beginning of a journey.
Years later, I left Boeing and worked a number of other engineering jobs. In 1982, I joined Sundstrand Data Control, the company that makes most of the black-box flight data recorders for airplanes. It’s right across the highway from what is now the Microsoft campus. At the time, it was across from a cow pasture.
Along with those crash boxes, Sundstrand made all sorts of other aviation electronics, or avionics. Many of those avionics packages incorporated small, astonishingly accurate accelerometers—ultrasensitive devices that measure small pushes or pulls. When I say “ultrasensitive,” I mean ultra ultra. Even back then, the accelerometers were so precise that they could measure the Moon’s gravity from the surface of the Earth; that’s a pull of about 30 micro-gees of acceleration. To put that in more concrete terms, my home scale says that my weight on the surface of our planet is a lean, mean 70 kilograms. When the Moon passes overhead, its gravity pulls me slightly and I weigh a bit less. Precisely speaking, if I weighed 70 kilograms on the scale before, my weight decreases by 30 parts per million to read 69.99979 kilograms.
No, you cannot notice a tiny tug like that, but the ultrasensitive autopilot in a jet airliner most definitely can. Instead of measuring the Moon, the accelerometers in autopilots sense the effects of the pulls and pushes of the airplane’s motion in what we call “inertial space.” They can also be used underground to help guide the drill in a mineshaft or an oil-well drill casing. At Sundstrand, the specific problem my fellow engineers and I were working on was how to find, with extremely high precision, which direction pointed straight down anywhe
re a drill was working underground. You couldn’t see up and down from deep inside the earth, of course, and yet you had to know precisely where you were pointing your drill bit. We were using a combination of accelerometers in x-, y-, z-fashion (basically east-west, north-south, up-down) to aim and steer complex heavy drilling systems.
Here was another problem whose solution exceeded the extent of my knowledge. When you’re designing a system like this accelerometer setup, you have a great many choices available to you. For instance, you could design some of the parts to exquisitely tight tolerances by building them in a special temperature-controlled room. That entails a lot of work, but it may allow you to make another part to not-quite-so-precise tolerances, which in the end could simplify the overall assembly. Alternatively, you could make all the parts with somewhat loose tolerances, but then carefully align the parts and secure them in precisely the right locations using an additional fixture that is built to extremely tight tolerances. That way, you’re letting the fixture do the work of aligning, smoothing, or assembling.
So which is the right solution? If you’d asked me then, as my team did, I’d have been stumped. The second option didn’t even seem like a realistic possibility to me: “You can do that? Aren’t alignments like that beyond the capability of our instruments?” That was my thinking at the time, but only because of the constraints of my own knowledge—not because there was no solution. I wasn’t sure there was a way to solve the problem, and I had only a rough idea of where to even start. I was literally not sure which end should be up (and which down, and which north and which south, etc.). Sometimes you need help figuring out how to get past the constraints of your own knowledge. That’s where I was at that moment. I wasn’t quite panicked when faced with the assignment; let’s go with “concerned.” So I asked my very sharp designer coworker, Jack Morrow. He didn’t know the right approach, either, but he knew how to know. He told me, “Go ask the guys in the shop.”
Jack was referring to the machinists, the guys who cut metal using large, elaborate machines with superhard cutting bits, blades, and broaches capable of turning out virtually any part you could imagine. I didn’t know about the shapes and tolerances that can be created and achieved by cutting metal, but Jack pointed out that the guys in the shop certainly did. Then he drove the point home with a disarmingly simple sentence that has stuck with me: “Everyone you’ll ever meet, ever, knows something you don’t.”
I walked down the long hallway to the machinists’ shop and spoke with Roger, Mose, and Phil. They showed me which parts of my would-be inclinometer (measures inclination using acceleration) would be easy to build and which parts would be hard. They talked me through the design process from their perspective, warning me about common mistakes that got made when setting expectations about the metals and clueing me in about useful tricks to avoid misalignments. They helped me, and in the process, helped the whole team design a better instrument. And you know what? They didn’t laugh or make me feel dumb. They didn’t joke about the new kid still learning his way around a jig-bore machine. They were happy and proud to share their expertise. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a chance to show off what he or she knows? I also got the impression that they appreciated being consulted early in the design, when their advice really made a difference. They got to be part of the design team from the start instead of being summoned in frustration at the end to fix problems locked into the final design by people who didn’t know any better. It was a win-win for all of us and ended up saving everybody a lot of time as we worked together from the beginning to come up with an optimal, practical solution.
When I was sitting down with my boss at Boeing, it was obvious who had the expertise. What I realized in that machine shop a few years later was that a lot of the time the people who have the best knowledge are not so obvious. In this case, they were just steps away, but I didn’t realize it. After a few schoolings by the machinists, I went back to the (actual) drawing board and incorporated the machinists’ suggestions. I took their advice about what features to make datum planes, what dimensions to specify as the “basic” ones, and what parts to align. Under Jack’s tutelage, I taught myself the then newly adopted standard called “true position dimensioning and tolerancing.” If you don’t know what these things are, join the club. Now you have an inkling of how I felt. There’s a sense of being useless when you don’t know what is going on. But then when you ask and learn—oh, what satisfaction.
I won’t pretend that everyone had the same status at the company. There were sizable wage disparities between the machinists, who had gone through a long training for their exacting trade, and Karl, the floor sweeper. The softball teams usually were organized around the groups of people who worked closely together. Engineers with engineers, machinists with machinists. Nevertheless, we all had respect for each other. We all had a role to fill, and we understood that we could not do our jobs correctly without the cooperation and expertise of everyone else. In places where everyone is collaborating smoothly that way, often the thing you notice most is—nothing. You do your job, and things just seem a little easier than you expected because everyone is pulling together as a team. But I’ve also been in countless workplaces where people did not appreciate each other’s expertise, and there’s a big difference. It’s frustrating, depressing even. There’s no way to get great things done in those kinds of settings.
There are many ways to promote open listening and even to institutionalize the idea. Big corporations like Boeing and nonprofits like The Planetary Society have organizational charts listing the hierarchy of employees. At the top is the chief executive officer. Partway down, we find the middle managers. At the bottom, you might find Amy the engineer or Karl the custodian. But in the hotel business, it’s the other way around. The CEO is at the bottom, and the hotel guest is at the top. It’s a cool way of looking at things. At The Planetary Society, we’ve created a similar type of chart to highlight the members who support us. On my Bill Nye Saves the World Netflix show, the audience member is the most important person. On our show’s call sheet (the document that lists everyone working that day and what they are doing), I had myself listed as part of the “On Camera Department” rather than the more traditional “Talent Department.” My job is to deliver words and images for the audience, but I’m not the only one with talent. The camera operators, makeup artists, audio recordists, gaffers, and grips all know plenty of things I don’t. Wow, do they . . . It’s a team, and we work hard and collaboratively to make good shows. We don’t need to fake it, because we can turn to one another for answers. We respect one another.
I like to think nerds are natural listeners, because nerds are natural learners, which gives them (us) a huge advantage in breaking through some of those personal barriers. Even so, it’s a constant battle. In many ways, big and small, our society conditions us not to pay attention to people who are different from us. But you can’t apply the everything-all-at-once method if you don’t make yourself open to the “everything” part to begin with.
These ideas about the importance of expertise and respect came into focus for me after an incident last year when I was on a plane coming back from Guadalajara, Mexico. I had just attended the International Astronautical Congress, and watched as Elon Musk showed the world his plans for sending hundreds of passengers to Mars aboard enormous rocket ships. People there were (however briefly) likening Musk’s presentation to John Kennedy’s 1962 speech about going to the Moon. The audience was wound up; they were all buzzing about the Mars ideas on the outgoing plane flights home. Incidentally, a lot of that debate was centered on the theme of expertise: Did Musk really know how to pull off his fantastic-sounding plans, or had his dreams exceeded his abilities?
While these lively, and at times heated, conversations were going on, I was comfortably ensconced aboard a Boeing 737 and feeling my usual anticipation of ordering a beverage from the approaching flight attendant. She was methodically working her way down the aisle, taking care of the passen
gers with a seamless, well-studied cheerfulness—until the guy in front of me suddenly began ranting about how this particular flight attendant had “dissed” (disrespected) him. He claimed that he hadn’t been asked what he wanted to drink before the person next to him, that the food options were terrible, that he did not deserve to be treated this way, etc.
I was incredulous. I was thinking, “Dude, get over yourself.” I nearly lost my own temper in response, and I was a row behind the guy. I didn’t actually have to deal with him. But my goodness, the flight attendant was amazing. She remained extraordinarily calm and tried out different ways to defuse him. She kindly explained that she was sorry the evening’s meal selections were not to his liking. She asked if perhaps he’d like one of the official-issue snack boxes, which feature hummus and cheese along with olives and crackers. The guy kept going for another couple of minutes, but eventually her calmness did its work. Maybe her kindness finally got through and made him feel ridiculous. Maybe he finally decided he’d received the respect he deserved. Whatever it was, the flight attendant figured it out and made peace with him. I guess people like her are trained to be resolutely polite while handling unruly passengers, but it made quite an impression on me and on everyone else seated around the angry guy.
Fundamentally, I think this guy wasn’t thinking of the flight attendant as a person with thoughts, feeling, and insights. He may be the kind of person who likes to have control over people in the service industry because he lacks control in other parts of his life. He may have been thinking that in that setting on the airplane, he could be in charge because he was a customer. But what I observed in those few awkward minutes was that the flight attendant was the one who managed him. Apparently he presumed that because she was working in a service job she was less than him and not deserving of respect or civility, but in truth, he was the one who lacked it. In his frame of mind, for whatever reason, he could not see the flight attendant as someone with a great deal of expertise, as a professional doing her job to a high standard.
