I recently came across an interesting article on how scientists discovered a new way to shape the eye using electricity instead of any invasive procedures.
This would be a potential replacement for operations like LASIK, PRK etc which would also be cheaper and safer.
But what struck me was how they discovered it.
“He had long worked with thermal techniques for reshaping cartilage tissues—which includes the cornea—but found a puzzling “Goldilocks problem” during his research: The heating needed to change shapes often killed too many tissue cells. Then a “happy accident” opened a different perspective, he says. “My postdoctoral fellow connected a pair of electrodes and a Coke can to a power supply… and out of spite, fried a piece of cartilage,” Wong recalls. The cartilage began to bubble, which the postdoc thought was from heat. “But it wasn’t hot. We touched it and thought, this is getting a shape change. This must be electrolysis,” he says.” 1
It was only during ‘off time’ (that didn’t seem to be linked to anything formal) that they discovered this new method. They seem to have been taking a break between experiments and goofing around a little before they stumbled upon it.
And this highlights something very interesting I read a while back and is relevant not only to IT, but to every industry and every career path.
True learning, discovery and understanding often come from playing around with things. Only by messing around with such things and trying to get something working do we come across new ways of seeing and understanding.
This is particularly true of IT, where the most successful people I have come across are always tinkering with something in a homelab, free from any production risk (but often with much more skin in the game for their families!).
It is this tinkering, this experimentation and more often than not, this desire to have something ‘cool’ which serves as the engine for discovery. I myself have spent the last few months learning about containers, compose files, YAML, stacks, docker networking and even semantic search using RAG databases, all to have a few services self-hosted at home for the enjoyment of myself and my family. I don’t think I would have had this knowledge otherwise.
Now I don’t expect to come across any new inventions or change the world in any major way, but the process of play often leads to much deeper learning than any other method.
John Holt writes in ‘How Children Learn’ how children would engage in complicated tasks if they had freely played with an item first:
“If, when a child came in for the first time, they tried to get him “to work” right away, to play some of their games and solve some of their puzzles, they got nowhere. The child would try to do what he was asked to do, but without joy or insight. But if at first they let the child alone for a while, let him play with the materials in his own way, they got very different results … When, through such play and fantasy, the children had taken these materials into their minds, mentally swallowed and digested them, so to speak, they were then ready and willing to play very complicated games, that in the more organized and business-like situation had left other children completely baffled. This proved to be so consistently true that the experimenters made it a rule always to let children have a period of completely free play with the materials, before asking them to do directed work with them.” 2
I believe the same is true with us as adults.
Free play, i.e. ‘labbing it up’ is one of the finest methods of learning.
References
- https://spectrum.ieee.org/electrochemistry-for-eye-surgeries ↩︎
- How Children Learn by John Holt ↩︎