Abstract of the Commemorative lecture
The Center of “Why?”
I've long been an enthusiastic appreciator of great ideas in many genres—ranging from the graphic, musical and theatrical arts to math, science and engineering, and have been driven by beauty, romance and idealism. So I owe many more intellectual debts than most, starting with my artistic and musical mother and scientist father. This scattershot approach to the world of ideas created a patchwork quilt of a mind formed from going deeply into any idea that interested me regardless of what field it was supposed to belong to. My best results have come from odd reactions to these ideas around me—more like rotations of points of view than incremental progress.
My aim in this short piece is not to provide a biography, but instead tell a few mini-stories about some of the critical, and mostly accidental, turning points in my early life—chance encounters with ideas, people and situations that have taken me one way and not another, and led me to think about things the way I do.
The incidents I chose are the ones with the highest emotional memories and sense of shift of point of view. Since some of them happened more than 50 years ago, I've tried to track down the books, magazines, movies, toys and other artifacts to check my memories (this was an interesting process in itself and the Internet was wonderfully forthcoming with references and resources).
One of Marshall McLuhan's greatest contributions was to point out the important differences between oral and written presentations of ideas, and I have taken advantage of this to make the two renderings of this lecture somewhat different: the oral one is shorter and relies more on pictures, while the written one is longer and contains more anecdotes in greater detail.
