We are sharing the foreword of Think Like a Nobel Laureate – Ideas That Change the World by Swedish author Gustav Källstrand, one of the world’s leading experts on the Nobel Prize. The book was published in Swedish last year but has not yet been translated into any other language. The foreword serves as a kind of mission statement, describing the common thread running throughout the book, which is change:
Everything changes, all the time. We encounter change on a more or less daily basis. Some changes we like; some scare us. Sometimes we want everything to be as usual; sometimes that is precisely what we fear most.
Change is also one of the most significant questions in science, philosophy, and culture. How do things change? Why do they change? Can we influence their conditions or results? Can we slow down, accelerate, or change their direction?
Yet it is easy to see change as an exceptional state of affairs. The norm is for everything to be as usual, while transitions from one state to another are often accompanied by ceremonies and rituals, from life events such as weddings or funerals to seasonal celebrations like New Year’s or Midsummer. The constant feels safe, while the inconstant is something we must manage.
This is also evident in the history of science and philosophy, which has been characterised by a search for the eternal, the constant. Even if the world appears chaotic, we seek the underlying rules revealing that the chaos is just an illusion. But what if there is no eternal order? What if everything is fluid?
In this book, you will meet people who have faced situations in which they have grappled with changes in nature, and where the solutions have required or involved new ways of looking not only at the world but also at the nature of change itself. A good place to look for people like this is among Nobel Prize laureates.
That’s because the Nobel Prize is an award given to individuals who have made ground-breaking scientific discoveries and opened up new perspectives, thereby expanding our understanding and the applications of that knowledge.
I have been looking for answers among this group of people for many years. I have researched and worked with the Nobel Prize, and met quite a few Nobel laureates.* It’s a very special feeling to meet someone and hear them describe what it’s like to discover something that no one else has ever seen – to be the first to know something that no one else knows. This book is about what I have learned from listening to and reading about people and ideas that have changed the world – and what I keep returning to is the question of change.
Take, for instance, scientists like Frances Arnold, who found a way to use evolution to create new chemicals. Or Adam Riess, one of the people who discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster; Jennifer Doudna, who found a new tool for changing our genes; or Giorgio Parisi, who wanted to understand how starlings move in flocks and discovered a new way of looking at science. But also about Jacques Monod, who drew upon his understanding of life’s changes to construct a philosophical worldview, and of course, Albert Einstein, who altered our very understanding of what time is – and thus what is the fundamental basis of all change.
The book explores how people throughout history have sought to understand the process of change, as well as accept and cope with the fact that things do change. It also explores what we can learn from people who in various ways have challenged how we view change.
Science is about exploring the world. Often this means following the paths that others have taken before and correcting, confirming, or expanding on what we already know – which is essential work. But sometimes the paths start to go in circles, at which point someone needs to break new ground. To do that, you have to be open to knowledge itself fundamentally changing.
Scientists who achieve major breakthroughs know that it is only when knowledge changes that you learn something new, so even though it can be challenging, it is the only way forward. Moreover, they understand that not changing their knowledge isn’t even an option. Every notion that previous knowledge may be wrong, has already changed the knowledge.
And we can all learn something from this way of thinking. If we nurture the idea that everything is forever changing, our existence becomes both more exciting and more interesting. We discover the beauty of a world not eternal – that life is not a state but a process.
In that sense, this then becomes a book about ideas that are both in change and the cause of change, as well as ideas about change itself. We will examine the nature of the path taken by our ground-breaking Nobel Prize winners, how they changed this path, and which ideas about change they employed or contributed to in doing so. The very idea that things change will, as we shall see, have major consequences for everything, from how we view life on Earth, the origins of the universe, the direction of time, and the meaning of life, to the end of the world, among other things.
We will also see that ideas about change are everywhere, even beyond science and philosophy. They are present when we are thinking about mortgages, school choices, careers, and pension funds, or whether things were better in the past, and when we look in the mirror and wonder if there is anything that can make the passage of time a little gentler.
What makes the question of change both fascinating and relevant is that it deals with everything from the most astonishing science, such as the building blocks of life and the evolution of the universe, to understanding such concrete things as why things get messy at home, or why it is more difficult to predict what will happen on a regular Tuesday at work than how the planets move in some faraway galaxy.
Once you start looking for them, you discover questions about change everywhere, even when you’re relaxing in front of the TV, with your favourite films. In any case, I discovered that several of my film favourites turned out to be about change, in different and sometimes unexpected ways, and because of that they too ended up in the book. Both because they serve to illustrate the questions, and because they themselves illustrate how change is everywhere.
It may seem obvious to state that the world we live in looks the way it does because it has changed – but it’s easy to miss. Both we ourselves and the environment we live in are the result of processes that have affected nature and culture for not just millions but billions of years. The same forces that formed the first stars, that formed galaxies and planets, that caused atoms to form molecules, and made molecules turn into living cells, are affecting our bodies right now.
We are here and now, but neither here nor now are unique positions in the geography or history of the universe. If we want to understand our place in the world, we shouldn’t just try to understand how things happen to be at this point in time, but also the processes behind everything turning out that way.
The interesting thing is not that things are the way they are, but how they turn out the way they turn out, and the goal of this book is to provide inspiration and tools for understanding and dealing with the fact that change is the only constant – and to see how this understanding of the forces of change can make life richer, freer, and more exciting.
* My doctoral thesis on the history of the Nobel Prize was published in 2012. Since then, I have worked at the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, researching, writing, lecturing, and conducting interviews. For several years, I have also produced the podcast “Ideas that change the world,” which features the prize winners, their discoveries, and their impact on what we know and how we act.
