In particular, once publishing lots of papers, patents, book chapters, books, and the like, there can be a tremendous empty feeling inside --- a feeling of "so what!", e.g. what does it all mean.
It seems that publication may be merely a rite of passage more than an end unto itself.
I think it is the kind of playful childish never-ending energy that makes a professor distinct from a professional.
It's also the idea of knowing no boundaries, e.g. not merely interdisciplinary (combining existing disciplinary boundaries), but more along the lines of what one might call "interpassionary", e.g., as Einstein once wrote "Love is a better master than duty".
Glenn Gulak and I thought that perhaps publications are an "existence proof" that you can synthesize ideas, but are only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for really affecting the world in an important and "good" (for whatever subjective values of "good" you might choose) way.
We've also been talking about the way in which companies no longer concentrate exclusively on their own ideas, but, rather, often invite outside "passinaries" to cook up (with love) new innovation in the "primordial soup" that exists everywhere, not just in big labs like Parc, Bell Labs, and Darpa. Although the big labs gave us many important inventions, it seems now that alot of really good thinking comes from energetic and forever-young passionaries.
Glenn mentioned, for example, that Cisco doesn't have a research lab, and instead, they buy technology. They let the primordial soup evolve whereever it may, and they then capitalize on it, using the new skill of "latching on to trendlines".
This news is good for us (academics and university types); we play a new role in the sense that we are often at the plenum of the primordial source of new ideas.
--mann@eecg; Fri Jan 9 19:24:00 EST 2004