Authors > Ellen Sandbeck >

Author Voices

OUTTAKE #16, The Barbarian At Work

"If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"   --  Albert Einstein In his book, “The Private World of Pablo Picasso,” David Douglas Duncan wrote: "There was but one Great Law in that house: DO NOT MOVE ANYTHING! Everything had its place and even its own dust pattern. To move anything out of its place, or pattern, might easily destroy a composition, unseen by anyone else, which Picasso had been watching, thinking about, and turning over into other forms in his mind.” The artist’s studio was famous for its menagerie of dogs, goats, pigeons, and chickens. Picasso produced more than 20,000 drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures and photographs during his very long career, so he obviously knew a thing or two about how to keep his creative juices flowing. Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the Japanese artist who created “The Great Wave,” produced more than 30,000 woodblock prints and fifteen volumes of manga (random sketches) that contained more than forty-thousand individual sketches. He also illustrated five hundred books and painted innumerable ink paintings. Hokusai led a lively life: married twice, fathered a son and two daughters, and changed his name twenty times, each time to commemorate a change in his artistic style. He also packed up and moved to a different house ninety-three times, each time because his old residence had gotten so dirty and messy that he could not function. Apparently housekeeping and art were not compatible. Many scientific discoveries have been made by accident, and those accidents depended upon a bit of messy serendipity: In 1882, Dr. Sydney Ringer of University College Hospital, London, was attempting to keep frogs’ hearts alive in a solution of pure sodium chloride in pure water. The hearts kept beating for only a short time, though Ringer had very carefully formulated the solution so that it had the same concentration of sodium chloride as frogs’ blood. Then one day a disembodied frog’s heart kept beating for several hours in the solution. Ringer was puzzled until the laboratory boy made a confession: he had used tap water rather than distilled water to make the solution. The tap water happened to add just the right proportions of calcium and potassium to make a reasonable facsimile for frog plasma. Ringer’s solution is still used in medical and biological research. In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a young bacteriologist at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, returned from a month-long vacation, and discovered that the petri dishes of staphylococcus cultures in his laboratory sink had been invaded by mold, and the mold was killing the bacteria. A neater, more methodical investigator than Fleming might have cleaned up his laboratory before going on vacation. The penicillin mold would not have invaded his petri dishes, and he would not have been the first to discover antibiotics. Physicist-turned-biologist Max Delbrück coined the phrase “the Principle of Limited Sloppiness,” and recommended that researchers should be “sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can’t find out that it did.” If your work depends upon absolute accuracy and order, a disorderly workplace is probably not a good idea, but if your work demands creativity, a touch of Limited Sloppiness may behelpful.