Chapter 3 - A Good Engineer: Part 3 - The Machine of Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)
Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish
All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

In his coursework, Alfred continued the pattern he had found so useful at the realschule for getting by with a passing grade. He attended classes consistently, following his teachers’ lectures closely, taking notes, participating in labs as needed, and building for himself a comprehensive view of the various subjects. Outside of class, though, he continued to pursue his own reading and barely touched his textbooks, except to cram for examinations. Such cramming sessions often took place on the day of the exam. His lack of preparation led to some ‘interesting’ situations. He had already learned how to successfully take shortcuts on exams based on his understanding of the underlying principles of a subject. This had allowed him to deal with test problems whenever he had failed to learn a specific formula and other significant details, or whenever he felt he could save time and effort. He probably had perfected this method at the realschule.

The instructor of one mathematics class there had given the students a difficult problem and told them he wanted them to solve it using only algebra. At Rudnik, multi-lingual Alfred had sometimes accomplished his troubleshooting by translating between speakers of different languages. His method for solving the algebra problem followed this method of translation. Alfred first solved the problem by using differential calculus—ultimately simpler than using algebra, if one knew calculus—then translated what he had done back into algebra. He not only passed the test but, in addition, gained something even more important. Having to translate between algebra and calculus gave him greater insight into the interconnections between these two branches of mathematics. Furthermore, a sense of mathematics as language seemed to have taken shape in Alfred’s awareness. His experience with algebra and calculus as forms of language provided a clear example of the fact that different modes of expression could serve a particular purpose with different degrees of usefulness.

At the Polytechnic, Alfred discovered that his failure to adequately prepare for lessons could backfire and that his subsequent need for 'short cuts' might actually result in having to take a longer way around. During one final examination in higher mathematics, he needed some formulas he hadn’t memorized. So before he could solve the test problem, he had to derive the formulas from scratch. He finished the test—thirteen hours later. The instructor, though livid, had allowed him to complete it. Alfred passed but realized the professor had justification to fail him. 

In order to graduate, Alfred also had to pass an oral examination for a physics/mechanics course. As he remembered it years later:

I was told to build up a machine or instrument by X,Y,Z. Some famous stuff. Now I knew the principle of the…machine, but I didn’t know the details. …I knew what the machine was supposed to do. Oh, it took me an hour or two to do that on the blackboard, but I did it. And the professor in the meantime was busy with somebody else…Then the professor [asked] “What is it?” and I say “Well, this is the machine of XY.” “What! XY. I’m sorry. There was never a machine like that.” My answer was “But, professor, this machine is supposed to do so and so.” “Yes,” answered the professor, “But this is not the machine of XY. This is the machine of Alfred Korzybski.” I say, “Never mind, the machine does work.” The professor say[s], “Prove it to me.” And damn it, I went on to prove it to him that the machine does work…The professor told me…that it has nothing to do with the machine of XY, but he approved that the machine worked. So I passed the examination.

 In the meantime somehow I was not feeling so well about the machine so at home I began to verify my machine, not XY machine, but my machine, and I came to the conclusion that the machine does not work. The professor…also felt uneasy about it. He sweated all night on that machine and discovered that the machine did not work. Several days later I met the professor after the graduation and all that successfully. And we were then no more in the relation of student and professor. So he told me “You certainly are a so and so. You kept me awake all night verifying your damn machine…But I’m not sorry that I passed you in the examination because you have shown by independent work that you are fit to solve problems." Of course, granting the mistake, the professor praised my independence. He was a very big man.(5)

Alfred had successfully graduated. Yet afterwards, he did not look for engineering work. Indeed, for the remainder of his life he never held a formal job as an engineer—chemical or otherwise. In spite of this, as he later said, he continued to operate with the attitude of an engineer: “I was always a good engineer. I had always to do with engineering of some sort. Practically I was. ”(6)

Like Leibniz, another scientific-philosophical synthesizer, Alfred's early desire to "grasp the whole" by finding underlying connections, included the necessity of connecting theory with practice.  His time at the Warsaw Polytechnic refined his natural way of behaving by socializing him into the professional engineer’s ethos of making things work by applying what we know. He had not completely wasted his time there. 

At the Polytechnic, Alfred also had gotten a thorough grounding in the technical details of the physical science of 1898–1902, a period in the midst of great changes. This helped prepare him for his later assimilation of relativity, quantum theory and other innovations in 20th Century science and mathematics, which had such importance for his own formulating. His Polytechnic experiences also confirmed for him his sense that he could solve problems. In relation to this, he had gained an increasing respect for what he later called “the miracles of mathematics”. His seat-of-the-pants troubleshooting experiences since childhood were now supplemented by an even greater appreciation of the ‘magic’ in a mathematical approach to problems, where and when one could employ exact methods. Indeed, the exactness of mathematics, which seemed to assure agreement, became an ideal for him that he would struggle to understand. What stopped it from being extended to areas that seemed beyond the reach of traditional mathematics?

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

5. Korzybski 1947, pp. 44-45. 

6. Korzybski 1947, p. 32.

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Chapter 3 - A Good Engineer: Part 2 - A Chemical Education

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)
Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish
All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

In the late 19th Century, chemical engineering had just emerged as a separate profession from mechanical engineering. With a boom in industrial chemical technology, Wladyslaw Korzybski seems to have hoped his son would be able to leap onto a lucrative bandwagon. So in spite of Alfred’s clear attraction to mechanical engineering—he enjoyed working with electrical and mechanical tools and in subsequent years invented and constructed a number of mechanical devices for his own and others’ use—he majored in Chemical Engineering and minored in Organic Chemistry in order to satisfy papa.(4) His classes also covered mathematics, physics, and basic engineering subjects.

In 1898 the science of chemistry had not yet reached the level of theoretical, mathematical treatment that physics had achieved and which Alfred, the lover of mathematics, seemed to yearn for. Yet it seems hard to imagine that he did not find interest in at least some of what he was learning. For example, in chemistry, as in the rest of 1898 science, fundamental discoveries and changes in basic understandings had been coming fast and furiously. This followed a relatively stagnant 2000 or so years from Democritus until Lavoisier at the end of the 18th Century.

Only at the start of the 19th Century had John Dalton developed his atomic hypothesis and attempted to classify the elements. New elements had been discovered throughout the century. And then in 1869, only 10 years before Alfred’s birth, the Russian Mendeleev had his vision of the periodic table, which revolutionized chemistry with its systemization of the qualities of elements by their atomic weights. The periodic table allowed Mendeleev to predict new elements and their characteristics, which were then subsequently discovered. Throughout the 1890s, elements forming an entirely new chemical group, the inert gases, were being found. They fit into Mendeleev's schema with remarkable ease.

In the physics of matter, the invisible atom, the basic elemental unit once thought indivisible, had begun to reveal an inner structure. In 1897, two years after Rontgen discovered x-rays emanating from cathode tubes, the British researcher J. J. Thomson found a particle discharged from such tubes which he named the “electron”, thought to be a constituent of the atom. Strange energy related to certain elements had also recently been discovered—phenomena that scientists could not easily understand in terms of established chemistry or physics. In 1896 Becquerel had discovered a powerful kind of ray labeled “radioactivity” coming out of the element uranium. Recently in Paris, Alfred’s compatriot Marie Curie, with her French husband Pierre, had begun to isolate another new element, radium, from pitchblende ore and to explore its radioactive properties. Matter was beginning to seem like something other than a solid brick. Alfred nigh undoubtedly followed many of these developments.

Thermodynamics had become a separately recognizable discipline within the previous 50 years. Here, Maxwell’s, Bolzmann’s, and Gibbs’ independent but related work in statistical mechanics challenged older accepted notions of determinism. This work demonstrated probability as basic to the study of the energetic changes in the physical-chemical systems Alfred was studying. As time went on probabilistic thinking would take on ever greater importance to Alfred in his understanding of the world beyond physics and chemistry and how humans think about it.

Alfred's minor field of organic chemistry, the chemistry of carbon-based compounds, had also been born in the 19th Century. Its applications to the manufacture of dyes, synthetic materials, explosives, drugs, etc., had great importance for a chemical engineering career. One aspect of organic chemistry probably had more lasting interest for him: its emphasis on structure. Louis Pasteur had found that the characteristics and reactivity of molecules depends not just on the proportions of their constituent atoms but also on their arrangements in space. Investigating samples of racemic acid, a residue seen on the wooden barrels used to ferment grapes, he isolated two crystalline forms. He discovered that the two forms of the acid rotate polarized light in opposite directions. In other words, they exist in right-handed and left-handed versions. He went on to find that these mirror-image molecules of the ‘same’ substance have different chemical and biological properties as well. With his minor in organic chemistry, Alfred would have had to learn about and visualize such molecules. He would not have been able to miss the significance of structure, which, in a much more generalized form, became central to his later work.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

4. Korzybski, “American Men of Science Application, 1948”. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 3 - A Good Engineer: Part 1- Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Alfred had no passion for chemistry. But he would do as his parents wished. Deeply frustrated, he resigned himself to attend the Warsaw Polytechnic.
 
The original Polytechnic, the Preparatory School for the Institute of Technology was founded in 1826. The Tsarist government closed the Institute after the failed Polish Insurrection of 1831. It was reopened as the Emperor Nicholas II University of Technology in 1898.(1) Fifty years later, in 1948, the 68-year-old Korzybski wrote that he spent four years there, from 1898 to 1902.(2) Having lost his personal records from Poland, he did not feel definite about those dates. But other references he gave for events around this part of his life, are consistent with this time period. That four-year period would have placed him among the new students of the entering class at the just-reopened school.

The reopening, after so many years, of a Polytechnic in Warsaw would likely have felt like a day of celebration to Polish students. Whatever joy Alfred may have felt would

not have come unmixed with disappointment. As a Polish patriot, he would have found grating the official Russian name for the school and the use of Russian as the language of instruction. And personally, he also felt cut adrift from the dreams he had held for so many years: “My life became aimless. I could say deal in chemical engineering… I just went ahead, [but I] lost interest, certainly lost interest in engineering…”(3)


Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. “Warsaw University of Technology - University History”, Warsaw University of Technology (Polytechnika Warszawska) http://eng.pw.edu.pl/University/History (accessed on 10/21/2010)
2. Korzybski, “American Men of Science Application, 1948”. IGS Archives. 
3. Korzybski 1947, p. 52. 

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