Luís and João Batalha: Fermat's Library and the Art of Studying Papers | Lex Fridman Podcast #209

The following is a conversation with Luis and Joao Batella, brothers and co-founders of Fermat's Library, which is an incredible platform for annotating papers. As they write on the Fermat's Library website, "Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous Last Theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics, and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures, ideas, and write in the margins." Fermat's Library is also a really good Twitter account to follow. I highly recommend it. They post little visual factoids and explorations that reveal the beauty of mathematics. I love it. Quick mention of our sponsors: Skiff, SimpliSafe, Indeed, NetSuite, and Four Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words about the dissemination of scientific ideas. I believe that all scientific articles should be freely accessible to the public. They currently are not. In one analysis I saw, more than 70% of published research articles are behind a paywall. In case you don't know, the funders of the research, whether that's government or industry, aren't the ones putting up the paywall. The journals are the ones putting up the paywall while using unpaid labor from researchers for the peer review process. Where is all that money from the paywall going? In this digital age, the cost here should be minimal. This cost can easily be covered through donation, advertisement, or public funding of science. The benefit versus the cost of all papers being free to read is obvious, and the fact that they're not free goes against everything science should stand for, which is the free dissemination of ideas that educate and inspire. Science cannot be a gated institution. The more people can freely learn and collaborate on ideas, the more problems we can solve in the world together, and the faster we can drive old ideas out and bring new, better ideas in. Science is beautiful and powerful, and its dissemination in this digital age should be free. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Luis and Joao Batella. Luis, you suggested an interesting idea. Imagine if most papers had a backstory section, the same way that they have an abstract. So, knowing more about how the authors ended up working on a paper can be extremely insightful, and then you went on to give a backstory for the Feynman QED paper.

Mm-hmm.

This was all in a tweet, by the way. We're doing tweet analysis today.

(laughs)

How much of the human backstory do you think is important in understanding the idea itself that's presented in the paper or in general?

I think this gives way more context to the work of, of scientists. I think people, a lot of people have this almost kind of romantic misconception that, uh, the way a lot of scientists work is almost as this sum of eureka moments where all of the sudden they sit down and start writing two papers in a row, and the papers are usually isolated, and when you actually look at it, it's the papers are, you know, chapters of a way more complex, uh, story. And, uh, the, the Feynman QED paper is a good example. So, Feynman was actually going through a pretty dark phase before writing that paper. It was he lost enthusiasm with physics and doing physics problems, and there was one time when he was in the cafeteria of Cornell, and he saw a guy that was throwing plates in the air, and he noticed that there was, when the plate was in the air, there were two movements there. The, the plate was wob- wobbling, but he also noticed that the, the Cornell symbol was rotating, and he was able to figure out the equations of motions, uh, the equations of motions of th- those, uh, plates, and that, uh, led him to kind of think a little bit about, uh, electron orbits in relativity, which led to the paper of, um, about quantum electrodynamics. So, that kind of reignited, uh, his interest in physics, and, uh, and ended up publishing the paper that led to the, his Nobel Prize basically. And I think it's, it's, there are a lot of really interesting backstories about papers that readers never get to know. For instance, we did, a couple of months ago, um, an AMA around, uh, a paper, a pretty famous paper, the GANs paper with Ian Goodfellow, and so we did an AMA where everyone was could ask questions about the paper and Ian was, uh, responding to those questions, and he also, he was also, uh, telling the story of how he got the idea for that paper in a bar.