Chaotic Matching & Spwins / Bill Russell / Einstein

(Note: This section focusses on the central role of chance/luck in creating essential development opportunites for those who eventually become 'great'. The ideas underling this analysis - chaotic matching and spwins - are first illustrated with reference to Bill Russell - a surprising and compelling story - and then applied to the question of how Einstein went from being a 15 year old school boy in the 1890s to penning his Special Theory of Relativity slightly over a decade later)

Regardless of individual's community of birth, the opportunities and links this provides; regardless of s talents, efforts/ struggles, persistence, plans, and aspirations, the dynamics of the matching process are always embedded in the ever changing, never fully knowable/ predictable interactions between 'the 4 worlds' of which person is ever a part: the personal (goals, motivation, level of development of key chars, etc), the interpersonal, the institutional, and the societal. As such each match which occurs (ie, each match between the individual's characteristics and organizations offering problems to be solved) will inevitably be chaotic. Every step in this developmental process - every step from Norma Jeane first looking in the mirror, from Mozart first 'striking those thirds', from Michael first eyeing the hoop on that little dirt court in Wilmington, to Einstein finally penning those "three Rembrandts" of 1905 - every step is laced with coincidence, laced with chance events that start out too tiny to notice and end up being too big, way too big, to ignore

The chaotic nature of this matching process is much like the process by which a snowflake is created over the course of a couple hours blowing across winter skies. Because individuals and organizations are continually changing on the basis of past experience/ structure and ongoing internal and external influences on them, the process by which a particular individual's characteristics will become available to fit with particular organization's problems over a given period of time is inevitably chaotic. It's much like trying to predict the weather, ie we can predict the general overall pattern over a short period of time (2-3 days) but cannot predict the "small pieces of weather" within this.

In any generation we pretty much know where the greats of, eg, science, boxing, ballet, are coming from. What we can never know is just who exactly they are going to be. Likewise from point of view of the individual involved - the person who is trying to find and take on organizational problems which perfectly match with s own characteristics (int, pers, self) over a given period of time - the process is like "walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with each step you take". Scientists, artists, jocks - it's all the same. Greatness, to borrow Bill Russell's words, always comes at the end of "a whole string of unlikely events".

Bill Russell?? Bill Russell was the "greatest defensive center" and the most successful player in the history of professional basketball. But he didn't exactly start out that way. In his own words, Russell was an "easily forgetable high school player". He was "the kind of player who tried so hard that everybody wanted to give him the 'most improved' award - except that he didn't improve much". No matter. Bill Russell had two things going for him. He played for McClymonds and he was a "splitter". So when Brick Swegle got around to selecting players for his 1952 "California High School All-Stars" team, Russell was a cinch. Why? Because Swegle was trying to build up the prestige of his all-star tour. So he had to have someone from McClymonds, the powerhouse of Northern California high school basketball. Since the tour took place in January, it was "designed exclusively for graduating 'splitters' - students whose school year ran from January to January". And Bill Russell, that "mediocre", "easily forgetable" player? He was the only graduating 'splitter' on the McClymonds basketball team.

How did Russ spend his time on the All-Star tour - barnstorming across 1000s of miles of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia, from Seattle and Victoria to the likes of Brinaby, Penticton, Nanaimo, and Trail?. He spent it mostly sitting on the bench, or more precisely "sitting on the bench, watching Treu and McKelvey". Actually he wasn't watching, he was studying. You see, a few years earlier, when he first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, basketball wasn't Bill Russell's first love. Fact is, he used to hang out in the Oakland Public Library. And worse yet, when he wasn't there, he'd be sneaking prints home, prints of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, "rolled up and tucked under his arm to keep other kids from seeing what they were" In those days Russ was gonna be an architect and he figured the best way to get there was by "memorizing the paintings". Once he got home and unrolled the prints, he'd be "spellbound". Russ "would study a Michelangelo for hours, trying to memorize each tiny detail, working on one section of the painting at a time." He'd spend weeks on a print, before he was ready for the "acid test: drawing the painting from memory".

Russ always failed those tests. He couldn't get the details, they always came out "cockeyed and jarring", like "Michelangelo had sent his work down to the nursery for completion". But when it came to studying Treu and McKelvey, it wasn't the tiny details that mattered. It was the way Treu moved with the ball, the way he "hardly ever went anywhere in a straight line", the way he would "cut and weave, his head and eyes scissoring back and forth in a constant fake as he dribbled, hesitated, switched hands, changed direction", and spun "repeatedly while still controlling the ball".

That's what Russ was studying, working it over in his head, just like Michelangelo, bit by bit, Treu and McKelvey, until he had an "accurate version of each technique in his head". Then Russ would "start playing with the image right there on the bench, running back the picture several times and each time inserting a part of himself", until finally he could see himself "making the whole move over and over" in his head. With McKelvey - another tall, frontline player - it worked perfect. When Russ "went into the game and grabbed an offensive rebound, he'd put it in the basket just the way McKelvey did. It seemed natural, almost as if he were just stepping into a film and following the signs."

But with Treu it was a different story.. continues in Arrival.

Spwins

And that's just a small glimpse of the "whole string of unlikely events" which, as Bill Russell noted, was essential to the development of his basketball career, ie, a whole string of seemingly irrelevant, often tiny, coincidences which turn out to have massive consequences in relation to accelerating the development/ use of the key characteristics of a person who eventually becomes 'great'. In short what you might call the Spwins of Change. The term, ‘spwin’, is of course simply a combo of two words, ‘spin’ and ‘wind’, which hopefully are evocative of the dynamics underlying this concept, ie, chance ‘winds’ / forces in the societal, institutional, interpersonal, and/or personal worlds of the person resulting in an accelerated ‘spin’ / development of the person's key characteristics. This is of course a conceptual parallel to the developmental process of a snowflake as it spins across the winter sky with it's own molecular growth ever being influenced by the continual changes occurring in the skies around it.

In Bill Russell's case over the course of just the couple months we considered, there are at least 4 such spwins - starting with the fact that he happened to play for McClymonds, and happened to graduate in January. These two tiny, seemingly irrelevant coincidences were of course the only reasons why such a "mediocre", "easily forgetable" player was selected for an all-star team in the first place. As a further result of this, rather than playing much of the time on the tour, Russell was sitting on the bench - the perfect place for him to be, given his third spwin,ie all those months and weeks and hours he's spent "memorizing" Michelangelo prints back in his early teens. Instead of wasting most of his time running up and down the floor with the real all-stars, Russ got the opportunity to study them over and over and over again from the perfect vantage point, ie the bench. In short, in our terms due to three essential coincidences, he got the chance to work on the "right kind of problems" over and over again. And as a result after a few intense weeks of being "nearly possessed by basketball", as Russ put it : "Suddenly I knew that I could do on the basketball court what I had not been able to do with painting. I got the details right, and repeatedly they fell into place. When I pulled off one of McKelvey's moves I'd try to review what I'd done while running back up the court. I could see the play I'd just made, and if there were an extra jerk in my arm or a faulty twist in my body, I'd try to correct it the next time. The long bus rides never bothered me. I talked basketball incessantly, and when I wasn't talking I was sitting there with my eyes closed, watching plays in my head. I was in my own private basketball laboratory, making mental blueprints for myself. It was effortless; the movies I saw in my head seemed to have their own projector, and whenever I closed my eyes it would run. I was having so much fun that I was sorry to see each day end, and I wanted the nights to race by so that the next day could start".

Then came the problem, the impossible problem, of Bill Treu, of realizing that "it was fruitless for me to insert myself in his place", that "I couldn't dribble through crowds that way he did, or twist my way to the bucket at high speeds". And with this realization, "more or less on a lark", Russ began "imagining myself in plays with Treu, shadowing him on defense". And hence came the fourth spwin - the fluke coincidence of Bill Russell's newly acquired "awesome mental camera", his inability to mimic Bill Treu, and the fact that he happened to be left-handed all coming together with the result that Russ started to "concentrate on defense". As he put it: "Defense came to me more or less accidentally. It fit well into the peculiar way I studied the game on that trip. I was the only left-handed player on our team. When I imagined myself guarding a player on the court it was easy for me to see my left hand working against his right one. I blocked a lot of shots on that tour mainly because it was fun to carry out some of the designs I had made up to use against Bill Treu; but nobody, including myself, thought of the blocked shot as much of a defensive weapon; in fact, nobody thought much about defense at all".

Nobody until 5 years, and many spwins, later when that "mediocre", "easily forgetable" player led the Boston Celtics to their first NBA title.

Ok, but does it go any further? Can we go from basketball to, say, physics? From the Boston Garden to the universe? No problem. Same spwins keep showing up over and over again, this time opening doors for a young Einstein on the road to relativity -- a road we'll pickup back in the 1890s when Einstein was still a teenager in Munich, and physics... well, see for yourself.

Einstein

During "the last decades of the 19th century" there was a crisis looming in "the world of Newtonian physics". Newton ’s Laws, the very "foundations of classical science", were being "undermined by a score of experimental physicists tunnelling along their own separate routes from a dozen different directions". In particular there was the problem of "the luminiferous ether" - that "ghostly medium" which was essential to a Newtonian explanation of light, magnetism, and electricity - the ether through which "Maxwell's electro-magnetic waves (were assumed) to be transmitted like shakings in an invisible jelly", the ether which noone could find, the ether which - as Michelson and Morley showed in their "almost legendary" experiment of 1887 - simply did not exist.

And It wasn't just the "awkward results" of Michelson & Morley that "permeated the scientific climate of the 1890s". By the time Einstein had entered his teens in the early 1890s, Newton 's Laws were getting littered with footnotes. Recent "technological advances" had opened the door for a whole "new group of disturbing discoveries" - discoveries which simply could not be explained by "Newtonian mechanics". There was that little problem with "Mercury's orbit", that "obstinate planet" which simply refused to "conform to Newtonian calculations". There was Wien in Berlin, and Lorentz in Leiden... continues in Arrival... and these were only the worst offenders - finding inexplicable "discrepancies in the phenomena of heat and radiation"; atoms "containing electrically-charged particles"; "bits of electricity which not only had an existence of their own but a mass and an electric charge" to boot; a "metal which was giving off streams of radiation and matter".

Surely Einstein was not the only 'precocious' student of his generation who started pondering all the "worms in the apple" of Newtonian physics, pondering the "revolutionary implications of Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory". Just think back to the discovery of evolution, or the takeoff of the computer revolution. The problem was in the air. Remember Peter Deutsch, Lee Felsenstein, Ed Fredkin, Bill Gosper... continues in Arrival ... Stephen Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates? How about Patrick Matthew, Robert Chambers, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin? Exactly. If it hadn't been Allen and Gates, or Wallace and Darwin, it would have been someone else. Einstein came "on the scene at the moment physics was about to be revolutionised". If it hadn't been him it would have been someone else, maybe a bit earlier, maybe a bit later. It was all down to that "whole string of unlikely events", that flight of the snowflake, those spwins of change which happened to put Einstein - rather than one of his contemporaries - in the right place at the right time to go from his interest in "one of the most hotly disputed scientific subjects (of the mid 1890s), the relationship between electricity, magnetism and the ether" to his revolutionary paper of 1905. That right place was ETH, the "famed Zurich polytechnic", the "MIT of Switzerland".

It was Einstein’s 4 years at ETH that provided him with his first crucial sustained opportunity to accelerate his own development in relation to eventually solving the problem of relativity. It was here that he got the first perfect and sustained match between his key characteristics - both intellectually and interpersonally - and the resources/ opportunities on offer in the ETH university environment, a match which hugely accelerated his development in two crucial ways. First, intellectually, it locked him on to the problem of “the electrodynamics of moving bodies”, the problem which would eventually led to his 1905 paper on "the Special Theory of Relativity". This is not to say that Einstein saw it that way in his years at ETH. Clearly he did not. He was still miles from working out the problems raised by earlier explanations of "first-order aether drift effects", by the "observations on stellar aberration", and by "Fizeau's measurements on the speed of light in moving water"; not to mention his "rediscovery of all essential elements of statistical mechanics" and his "derivation of the Lorentz transformations".

What is crucial is that by the time he left ETH in 1900, Einstein had formulated his own ideas relevant to the electrodynamics of moving bodies, and come up with his own experiments to test them - ideas and experiments which, inadequate though they inevitably were, would push his thinking further and further along the path he'd now found for himself, i.e. the path to relativity. In short, as a result of his 4 years at ETH, Einstein was locked on to the problem of “the electrodynamics of moving bodies”, locked on to the problem that would eventually be solved by his Special Theory of Relativity.

Equally important in terms of accelerating Einstein’s key characteristics with regard to relativity, the four years at ETH profoundly altered his conception of himself, not only in relation to the intellectual problem, but critically in relation to his peers, his fellow students at the "Switzerland's MIT". Over the 4 years at ETH he had become - at least to himself and the "three close friends" who mattered most - the Helmholtz among them - the guy with the "almost fanatical” fascination with physics who was going to bring a "freshness and ruthless application of basic principles to fundamental problems", i.e. the Helmholtz of their generation.

How did these accelerations at ETH come about? Crucially, the "environment at the ETH was relaxed", so Einstein could be "highly selective about which lectures he attended". One suspects that was quite often when it came to the "excellent teachers" like Adolf Hurwitz or Hermann Minkowski, "a mathematician of the first order” who later provided Einstein with "a mathematical interpretation for the theory of relativity". When it came to the "top man in the physics department", Professor Heinrich Weber - or "Herr Weber" as Einstein liked to call him ... continues in Arrival ... Einstein took advantage of the fact that at ETH he had to "suffer far less under the coercion (of cramming for exams) than was the case in many another locality". A lack of coercion which left one free to "do just as one pleased". Moreover for Einstein "this was especially the case" because he "had a friend who attended lectures regularly and worked over their content conscientiously", a friend who "passed on his beautifully transcribed lecture notes" to Einstein just in time for him to "skim off the essentials" for exams.

As for being free to "do just as one pleased", Einstein, unlike most university undergraduates then or now, had an intellectual problem that was already focusing his attention, and hence his reading, thinking and discussions, i.e., that "hotly disputed" scientific topic of the 1890s, the problem which was "to remain constantly at the back of his mind for a decade", i.e. the "the relationship between electricity, magnetism, (light), and the ether".

Moreover, in addition to the excellent resources on offer in the ETH university environment ... continues in Arrival ... Einstein had a superb support team of "three close friends" virtually throughout his 4 years at ETH. All three were students like himself at ETH, and hence had a common knowledge base and interests. Collectively they all served to accelerate his knowledge and engagement with the ideas which would eventually lead to his "three Rembrandts" of 1905. They were the key people involved in the ongoing process of study and rapping and thinking and rethinking and rapping again; the process that accelerated his ability to question and puzzle and rework the relationships and discrepancies among the ideas that were "constantly at the back of his mind"; the process that allowed Einstein to rework them into his own ideas, ideas which would then be further stimulated by the next round of intensive study, thought, and discussion with his "three close friends".

And beyond this collective dialectic, each of these three served a further individual role, a special complementary role that provided Einstein with essential supports - both intellectual and emotional - for his accelerated development. These roles could be roughly described as "assistant", "sounding board", and "mother".

Einstein's 'assistant' was Marcel Grossmann, "a dedicated and studious young man" who not only provided Einstein with those "beautifully written, meticulously organized lecture notes", he also "regularly filled him in on what had been covered at college each day", leaving Einstein to "play truant and read what interested him". What interested him was of course the "works of Kirchhoff, Hertz, and Helmholtz", the "papers of Lorentz and Boltzmann", and most critically... continues in Arrival... - in short the works of "the scientific revolutionaries" whose research and ideas would move Einstein far beyond his initial "naive and incomplete" speculations about the relationships between "magnetic fields" and "currents" and that "elastic medium" called "aether".

The 'sounding board' was Michelangelo Besso, "an engineering student whom Einstein met several months after his arrival in Zurich"; the Michelangelo Besso who drew his "awed attention" to Mach's Science of Mechanics with it's "critical attitude to the whole Newtonian framework", an attitude which had a "profound influence" upon Einstein’s thinking at the time; the same Michelangelo Besso who became his "best friend", and who showed up nearly a decade later as only person whose help Einstein acknowledged in his revolutionary relativity paper of 1905. And what sort of help had his "friend provided"? Exactly the same sort he had been providing since their years together at ETH - the perfect sounding board for Einstein to do "battle on (theoretical physics) questions which were difficult for Einstein to understand".

And there was Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student who shared Einstein's classes on "mechanics and differential and integral calculus... continues in Arrival... and projective geometry"; the Mileva who appreciated Einstein's "pungent" critiques of both their textbooks and lecturers; the Mileva to whom Einstein would "pour out his ideas as they walked home from the laboratories", to whom Einstein would write of the "doubts that would later lie at the heart of his 1905 paper explaining special relativity" -- of his growing conviction that the "current thinking did not 'correspond to reality' in the key area of electrodynamics", that "the introduction of the term 'ether' into theories of electricity led to the notion of a medium of whose motion one can speak without being able to associate a physical meaning with this statement"; a conviction he elaborated in one letter with "the help of a formula". She was the Mileva who "had become his intellectual confidante", who was the "first person to share his ideas", the ideas he "sketched out" in his letters to her, letters which were the "first evidence of Einstein making a sustained attempt to wrestle with the questions that would one day be answered by his theory of relativity".

And she was the Mileva who filled another essential role in the life of the "hopeless impractical" young man, who like his father, was "never able to make up his mind on everyday matters". She was the Mileva who became Einstein's "Dollie", his "sweet little one”, his "little witch”, his... continues in Arrival... over their years together at ETH; the woman who exchanged "a great many letters" with Einstein when they "were frequently separated during vacation"; letters which clearly suggest that "Einstein did most of the running in their courtship", which clearly suggest that Einstein needed her for much more than "reading Helmholtz together" -- that he needed her for her "skilled hands", her "hen-like enthusiasm", for the "sense of order" she brought into his life; that he needed her to provide the "stabilising influence", the "maternal authority" his mother used to provide; that he needed her to be "decisive about everything".

And so it was that Einstein's perfect match with the resources on offer in larger university environment, and more specifically with the complementary knowledge and interpersonal characteristics of his "three close friends", accelerated his development over those four years at ETH. He went from his "naive and incomplete" views of 1895 on the "State of Aether in a Magnetic Field" - the views of a "philosophical", "young fellow", who within a year would be entering the ETH to "study for a teacher's degree" - to those of the "almost fanatic" young physicist who was going to bring a "freshness and ruthless application of basic principles to the fundamental problems" of the field; to those of the young Helmholtz who had his "doubts" about how physics was "dealing with the way that the motions of charged bodies such as electrons are influenced by electric and magnetic fields", doubts he conveyed to Mileva in his letters of 1899, doubts he intended... continues in Arrival... He went from his "naive and incomplete" views to the doubts of a young Helmholtz, doubts we've have no reason to mention if Einstein had never arrived at ETH in the first place - an arrival, it turns out, that in 1894 was about as likely as one special little snowflake fluttering down through the winter skies and landing right on the tip of Rudolph's nose.

As for the spwins that got him into ETH in first place, Albert Einstein in the mid 1890s wasn't exactly the "greatest mind of the 20th century". Nor was he a 'shoo in' for university, ETH or elsewhere. In fact he was just another "precocious", 15 year old with a fascination for physics and maths and a "revulsion for regimentation", who was stuck in the Luitpold Gymnasium getting "the rudiments of Latin and Greek, of history and geography" and maths "drummed into" him, and not exactly looking forward to the further tightening of the screws he'd be facing a couple years down the road when he moved on to his stint of compulsory service in the German military. Whatever about his "mocking" eyes and... continues in Arrival ... the budding "genius" wasn't exactly doing anything about remedying the situation.

No doubt with good reason. Because at 15 Einstein was also a quite "unsociable" and "introspective" boy; a boy with strong emotional bonds to his "close-knit family"; a close-knit family living in the comfort and security of a "lavish two-story villa complete with roof-top sun terrace and landscaped gardens"; a close-knit family that ran very "smoothly" under the tight reins of the "powerful woman at its center"; under the "discipline" of Albert's mother, a discipline that had organized his life for years.

The first of that "whole string of unlikely events", those spwins of change, which eventually opened the door to ETH came in the summer of 1894, when "the family business failed" and Albert's father accepted an offer to set up a new factory in Pavia , outside Milan . As a result the villa in Munich was sold, and the entire family moved south to Italy , leaving the fifteen-year-old Einstein behind to finish his education in Munich . Watching his family disappear and his home turned "into a construction site", then moving on his own into the "lodging" of some "distant relative", sent Einstein into a "deep depression". The thought of another "eternity" in the Luitpold "barracks", not to mention compulsory "national service" right afterwards no doubt booted him back into action. Knowing full well he was gonna be in deep shit if he showed up in Italy, cap in hand, with no official cover, Einstein managed to get himself a med cert from the local family doctor, stating that "because of a nervous breakdown he should join his parents in Italy". No matter, his "propensity to sarcasm" apparently got to the Luitpold authorities first. They "sent him packing" in the spring of 1895.

So thanks to his father's business failure, combined with the offer from an Italian associate, and hence the family move to Italy, Einstein was now started on his way -- not to another year and a half of "learning gabble by rote", not to bootstepping round the much more serious "barracks" of "the Imperial Prussian Army", not even to whatever trouble his "caustic" reactions to such circumstances would have brought him -- but rather Einstein was on his way to the ETH, to the "MIT of Switzerland".

And what did Albert do once he arrived at the family home in Milan in the spring of '95? Try to relocate himself within the Italian school system and finish up his secondary schooling so he'd "acquire the diploma which would ensure entry to a university"? Well not exactly. His "Italian was minimal" so that was out. And The Swiss School in Milan , where his sister and cousin went? They "only took children up to the age of thirteen". Basically his formal education "halted mid-stream", and Einstein spent his time "enjoying the people and the air of freedom", and especially his solo "cultural" tour of Padua... continues in Arrival... "the main art centers of Italy ".

While Einstein clearly did some thinking during this time about the problems of `'electricity, magnetism, and ether", after his years getting “ramrodded” in the Luitpold Gymnasium, you can be sure the "prickly" 16 year old -- now "half-cocksure" of himself, "his head full of" - in his father's terms - "philosophical nonsense", "determined to renounce his German nationality and drifting further from parental control every day" -- wasn't about to sign himself on for another trip to the "barracks", German or otherwise. That was gonna take a little more help from his spwins. This time starring with next round of "his father's business failures".

With the financial pressure jacked up again, his father after him to "apply himself to the 'sensible trade' of electrical engineering", and his mother "pulling strings" to get her son a shot at the "one possible way out" -- sitting the entrance exam for the only Polytechnic in sight that "demanded no Gymnasium diploma" -- Einstein "was despatched over the Alps" to sit the ETH exam.

Although he had at best only a "vague idea" of what he might want to be in the fall of 1895, the "'sensible trade' of electronic engineering" (read "technician") was not part of it. So Einstein simply failed the exam, the "general-knowledge questions" anyhow. Not that it mattered. Despite himself, Einstein's "obvious scientific and mathematical abilities" so "impressed the principal of the ETH" that, with the "support of an old family friend" living in the area, they managed to get "the boy into the nearby cantonal school at Araru, where a year's study might enable him to pass the ETH entrance exam".

At Araru the third and final round of spwins occurred. Instead of another year of studying with the "obedience of the corpse", Einstein experienced "one of the happiest periods of his life". At the "small country school" for "the first time in his education", Einstein "found a school that perfectly suited his temperament". The principal, Professor Winteler, was a... continues in Arrival... who treated his pupils as adults and approached education with a free thinking manner". And beyond that, Einstein lodged with the Wintelers throughout his time at Araru, developing a "close and lasting relationship" with 'Papa' and 'Mutti' who soon "became a second family to him".

As a result when next round of ETH entrance exams came up in the summer of 1896, the 17 year old was not only sitting right on door step of the only 3rd level institution that would consider him without a diploma, he was also ready and eager to sit the exams.

That gives us a quick glimpse of - to borrow Bill Russell's words again - the "whole string of unlikely events" which was essential to the development of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, ie, that string of seemingly irrelevant, often tiny, coincidences which turned out to have massive consequences in relation to accelerating the development of Einstein's ideas and capacity to think creatively about (and finally resolve) the contradiction between Maxwell's "world of electromagnetism where light was propagated at a constant speed which could not be surpassed" and the world of "Newtonian mechanics" where it was "possible to increase the speed of an object indefinitely by adding more energy to it". In short, the chance combination of circumstances which created the opportunity for Einstein to gain access to the 'right kind of problems' for him to accelerate the development of his capacity to think creatively about the Maxwell-Newton conflict and eventually develop his Special Theory of Relativity, what we are calling the ‘spwins of change’.

Spwins from Beginning to End

Chaotic matching occurs at all levels of development from birth through the attainment of greatness. We’ve seen plenty of early examples - Norma Jeane being "dropped off" at the Bolenders (vs eg with the likes of Aunt Ana) right at the very beginning of her life; the oil boom hitting Okemah just as Woody's "intellectual curiosity", his desire "to know", to "take part in parental roles" were all skyrocketing; World War I arriving just as Hitch was needing free access to a university education. The same is true when it comes to solving the final problems - the key problems of your field, of your generation; the kind of problems which can put you in the textbooks, the history books, the halls of fame; the kind of problems which with any luck will turn you into an icon, a living image, a part of the culture, the language. . . or at least, as Utah Phillips would have it, "a rumor in your own time".

The discovery of the chemical structure of DNA, ie of the double helix, by James Watson and Francis Crick in the early 1950s provides a compelling example of such chaotic matching in action. We can start by looking at what Crick was doing before James Watson arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in fall of 1951... continues in Arrival

Most of the information and quotes re Bill Russell comes from Russell & Taylor (1991).

Most of the information and quotes re Einstein come from Clark (1973), Einstein (1957), Golden (1999), Gribben & White (1993), Highfield & Carter (1993), Pais (1983), and Reiser (1931).

All of the analysis presented above was developed by the author over the course of researching and writing Arrival. At this point the concepts of Chaotic Matching and Spwins do not exist anywhere else in the research literature.

In addition to the case studies of Bill Russell, Einstein, and Watson & Crick, Arrival presents a lengthy discussion of these concepts in relation to existing research (eg Simonton, 1983), and to the lives of various ‘greats’, eg, the Beatles, Tchaikovsky, Bill Gates, Van Gogh, Marilyn, Hitchcock.

References cited above are available in Arrival. See Sources.