I’ve shared shorter versions of this story verbally many times and I think that it’s not so much about me, me, me, as it is about life lessons. I write it down in hopes that it will aid some Gentle Readers who face similar forks in their road of life. It might even be entertaining.

Love & polynomials

The teenage years are when you fall helplessly in love. At thirteen, I fell helplessly in love with science and math. And a lot of girls, but that’s off topic. I came to science through science fiction, a common gateway drug. Always a voracious reader, in boredom I had devoured my father’s small paperback collection of Heinlein and Asimov. The first hit is free. Seeking more of the drug, I vacuumed my local library and loitered like a vagrant at the local bookstore. Inevitably the habit led to harder stuff—Dr. Asimov also wrote science articles, collections of which appeared in books. (When I use the term, “Gentle Reader”, I pay homage to Isaac Asimov, who used the term liberally in his science articles.) I was quickly addicted. But my descent had only begun.

(The next part embarrasses me, so please forgive my dramatizing.) In a box in the basement, I found a moldery old book of my father’s with the lurid title of, “Tables for Statisticians”. The tables were no more interesting than a phone book (do you even know what that is?), but the “explanatory” text was full of gross, yet strangely compelling equations. Oh, wow! Adult secrets! (See, embarrassing, right? While everyone else was discovering porn at that age, I was discovering algebra. It gets worse.) There was something there about the formulae for higher moments of the Gaussian distribution that I didn’t get at all, so in all innocence I showed the book to my eighth grade math teacher. Instead of reporting me to the authorities for treatment, he showed me his college statistics textbook. He lent it to me, if you can imagine. Oh, the iniquity. I read it. Mostly. I wasn’t just looking at the pictures. Later we were writing huge polynomials on the blackboard together, trying to get to those mysterious higher moments. We failed. But I learned a lot of algebra.

(Okay, I can’t keep up the farce. But the next part is still embarrassing.) In ninth grade, math class was all about algebra, so I was bored. I started reading science fiction in class, right in the open. Every once in a while the teacher would get pissed and force me up to the blackboard in front of some algebraic challenge. I’d solve it and go back to my seat and my book. So that was ninth grade math.

Harder stuff

That summer, I knew that we would be studying “analytic geometry” in tenth grade, but I had no idea what that was. Hmm—this might really cut into my science fiction reading. I had the bright idea of going to the bookstore and buying a book on analytic geometry and reading it during the summer so that I could keep reading science fiction in math class. This was not so far-fetched—after all, I had read my eighth grade teacher’s statistics book and it had saved me from algebra class. How hard could analytic geometry be? So I bought the Barnes & Noble College Outline Series book on the subject and read it in August. Somehow the word “College” didn’t register with me; I had no idea that the stuff I was reading was way beyond what I was about to see in high school. It was hard going, but it was so beautiful. Conic sections are so … perfectly curvaceous. Now I was ready for tenth grade math.

My teacher that year was the head of the math department and she was ready for me. She invited me to her office and said, “I’ve heard about you. You like to read in math class.” Uh-oh. “That’s okay, you can read in my class …” (I flinch, this can’t be good) “… but only if you’re reading a math book.” And she dropped a big moldery pile of her college textbooks in front of me. They smelled pretty musty, but hey, they were math, so I took ‘em. Sampling them, none of them really spoke to me, so I went back to the bookstore. I bought the Barnes & Noble “College Mathematics”, “Calculus”, and “Differential Equations” books. I read the first one in class in September, the second one in October and November, and the third one in December. Actually I was reading them in every spare moment. The calculus book took an extra month because it was filled with hundreds of typos, which required me to check every equation and correct them in pencil. In the spring, I moved on to “Plane and Spherical Trigonometry” and some other book that I’ve forgotten. (I had a girlfriend at the time, so math didn’t seem quite as important right then.)

One drug to rule them all …

Then in eleventh grade, I discovered the most powerful addiction of them all: physics—math applied to reality. OMG! You can actually predict the motions of planets and baseballs with the same tiny but powerful little piece of math. In the lab, my partner and I predicted where a ball bearing would land on the floor after rolling down a ramp, across the lab bench, and through the air, to make a dot right on the X on the carbon paper we had taped to the floor! I might not be Albert Einstein, but I could feel his rapture at understanding the thoughts of God. I could DO this! Suddenly, a Nobel Prize in physics seemed like the most desirable thing in the world. Except my girlfriend.

I toured colleges on my own to get a sense of where I might go. When I visited MIT, I knew all at once—these are my people. In high school, I was the only one like me. I was weird. At MIT, they were ALL like me. Thank god I was admitted. I planned to double major in math and physics. Talk about trying to drink from a firehose. Two firehoses!

I quickly found out that I am not a mathematician. I love math and it comes very easily to me, but real mathematicians are more than that. They love proofs. All day they show proofs to each other and when they get to the QED at the end of one, they do this little bouncy dance on their toes with a big wide grin. Every time. Then they start another proof. Sorry, I respect that, but I don’t swing that way. So, no double major. That’s good, I was starting to drown.

Turns out my brain is a physicist’s brain. We make up models of anything, then we predict what will happen. Then we bounce up and down on our toes. Then we do it again. Non-stop. Once I car-pooled from Boston to Philly for the holidays with a fellow physics undergrad. The roads were congested so it took about seven hours. We spent the entire time working out a model of traffic clogging as a phase change phenomenon, including signs of instability, rippling waves of brake lights propagating down the road, transitions of traffic from a liquid to a solid based on cognitive overload, propagation of the solid mass separately from the cars that make it up. It’s a good thing there weren’t any normal people in the car—they’d have either walked home or killed us. But we just can’t help it. There is no cure.

Withdrawal

Until my junior year in college. That’s when I found out what my physics professors did for a living when they weren’t teaching us. Particle physics is a big, big science. They experiment with the biggest, most expensive machines our species has ever made. Papers take years to produce and have hundreds of people on the project. Those machines are incredibly finicky and sometimes they just aren’t working right. If “your” experiment gets approved, it might be years before you get “beam-time” and maybe by then your result will be just a footnote of confirmation because some prior experiment explained something that makes your finding routine. Much as I liked reading about this stuff in Scientific American, I knew I didn’t want to do it for a living.

This was like barreling down the highway into a white-out blizzard. My future disappeared. Poof, no Nobel Prize for you. Instead, damage control. I was too far along toward my degree to change majors, even if I had a Plan B, which I did not. So, complete the physics undergraduate degree. In 1979, that could lead a lot of ways. And that gave me a year to come up with a Plan B.

Desperately seeking … what?

One thing was clear; I was about to enter my last year at MIT. Whatever courses I didn’t take this time around, I’d never get to take. Since I had completed most of my requirements, my schedule was very open. So I indulged in pure intellectual greed. (This tactic has always worked for me; I heartily recommend intellectual greed.) At the time my hobby was high fidelity audio gear. I had spent every discretionary dollar upgrading my sound system and buying albums. So I signed up for every course that had anything to do with acoustics. All three of them.

I quickly dropped one of them—”you can’t fool me, this is really thermodynamics of air”. I hate thermo. “Partial derivative of this with respect to that, holding some other silly thing constant equals blah, blah, blah, more of the same with the symbols rearranged.” Yuck. But the other two courses were the foundation of my next forty years at work. I had no clue at the time.

One of them was a lab course in psychoacoustics: the science of measuring what humans hear. The course was brilliantly designed by Professor Braida, who showed us how to get good scientific data from the most unreliable measuring instruments of all time: his. We students were both experimenters and subjects; we tested our own hearing. I would never take human testimony for granted again, not even my own. In parallel, Professor Braida taught us how we hear and what we can and cannot hear. A decade later I would use all of that to build the first virtual reality simulator of concert halls that could sound exactly like the real thing. In the ensuing three decades, Bose Auditioner has been used to help design more than 10,000 sound systems for public spaces world-wide, including the system in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. I made a model that worked; I bounced up and down on my toes.

The other course was even more important for my future. It was about modeling acoustical systems, including loudspeakers and microphones. It was lovingly taught by Professor Bose, who also happened to be the CEO of his own consumer audio company. For me, this was like studying the DNA of hi-fi speakers. Right away I started measuring and modifying my own speakers and those of my friends. But the biggest benefit came at the end of the term.

The invisible turning point

Physics undergraduates at MIT are required to do a one-term research thesis and I wanted to do something in acoustics. So I sidled up to Professor Bose and asked if he had any topic suitable for me. A few days later we met again and he proposed an idea. I would have said, “yes” to anything, so I did. Then with no fanfare at all came the turning point of my whole career. He mused aloud that the work could either be done on campus or at his company 20 miles away. “Do you have a car?”, he asked. I had just gotten a $100 Chevy with 85,000 miles on it. “Why don’t we do this at my company. I’ll introduce you to some engineers who can coach you.”

So I did my thesis at the factory, building in the machine shop, soldering in my dorm room, testing in the anechoic chamber, and eating lunch with the Bose engineers. By the time I finished my thesis, I did not want to go to grad school. I wanted to learn to design better sounding speakers at Bose, working with those people. And they knew me by then. I was hired without ever writing a resumé.

On my first day, my new boss said, “we’re mostly ready for you. We have a desk, a phone, and a lab bench with a tool box. But we haven’t decided on your first project yet. You’ll either design the next 901 [company flagship product!] or a completely new small speaker called a 201.” I was aghast. “Umm, Bill, maybe I oversold myself. I don’t know how to design a speaker. I came here to learn.” “Oh, we know that. You’ll learn like the rest of us did, by doing it. Now let’s go to the lab and we’ll make a woofer.”

And it was like that for 40 years. Along the way, I made lots of models that made lots of predictions. I bounced up and down on my toes a lot.