Toys, Tools and Meta-Tools

The biggest giants in the history of ideas gave us nothing.

By "us" I mean the masses, laypeople, consumers.  That "we" wants toys: items, products, content, artifacts.  We want food and cars and stories.  Einstein didn't give us those.  Engineers and entrepreneurs gave us those.  But the Aristotles and Einsteins gave engineers tools to design and manifest our toys.

In the context of the game industry, I advocate that engineers should create engines and authoring tools, not content or features.  Indeed, my most lasting legacies have been engines and tools.

As a physicist I never amounted to much.  I published a few papers and gave up.  The most I ever did was apply tools, and I did so poorly.  It wasn't why I became a physicist.  I remember the essay I had to write to submit with my applications to graduate school.  I wrote that I elected to pursue a doctorate primarily so that I could turn the scalpel on the human mind itself.  The best way to understand how humans understand the world, I claimed, was first to study the world employing the most precise and articulate formalisms of physics.  I postulated that if I could apply that razor to the world, I could try to catch a glimpse of myself in the act, and that would inspire an understanding of how humans understand.  Essentially, I wanted to model human intelligence by studying myself studying the world. Well, turns out, I'm not that meta.

Pondering recent events reminded me that the greatest contributors in science were not those who made useful products, or even useful formulae, but those who made tools.

An example:

• Content is a document.
• Tools like a word processor help authors make content.
• Meta-tools like a compiler help programmers make programs.
• Meta-meta-tools (meta²-tools) like those in formal languages (the Chomsky hierarchy and whatnot) help meta-programmers design and write compilers.

The heros in this story make the meta^N-tools.  We could measure intellectual heroism as the degree of meta a tool-maker achieved.

Another example:

• Chip-maker engineers applied condensed-matter physics to construct circuits in silicon.
• Lab techs tabulated the properties that helped the chip-maker.
• Experimental physicists refined some model for condensed matter.
• Theoretical physicists concocted models for aspects of condensed matter.
• Mathematicians concocted a framework which that model exploits.

Who gets that meta?

John von Neumann comes to mind.

I'm unprepared to think of John von Neumann as human or mortal or earthly.  Among his contributions:

• Repaired aspects of a broken set theory, at the very foundations of mathematics. (Then helped destroy it.)
• Created a mathematical framework for quantum mechanics.
• Invented game theory.
• Created the model of programmable computers.  You could say he invented software.
• Developed the Monte Carlo method of numerical simulation.
• Invented new kinds of linear programming.
• Invented self-replicating automata.
• Identified and solved problems with computational fluid dynamics.

The list of wonders from this man goes on and on but here I focused on tools he provided to other scientists.  These are meta-tools of the Nth degree.  He created whole frameworks in which other tools could be invented.

But ask most people to name famous physicists or mathematicians and I wager very, very few would name von Neumann.

You've probably never heard of him.

He's too meta.