I enjoy puzzles for fun. Jigsaw, Logic, Crossword, Rebus – they’re fun mind-teasers. As long as they’re not too difficult. Otherwise it feels too much like work rather than fun. Then again, working your way by increasing expertise can also be enjoyable. As a researcher, that’s true for me. As a teacher, I hope it’s true for my students too.
More than a decade ago, my spouse suggested working together on the New York Times crossword puzzle as a fun couple activity. Every evening, we’d block off a little time to fill in the squares. While we could usually successfully complete the Monday through Wednesday puzzles, Thursday through Saturday often went unfinished and we’d look up the answers the next day. The larger strongly themed Sunday puzzles were always fun too! Over time, we were able to complete the harder puzzles together. When she got an iPad, we started solving the puzzles individually, at least the easier ones – me on paper and she electronically. You know what happens next. We got so good at it that we can solve them individually in a single sitting. We even note how long it takes us. A couple’s collaborative activity turned into a light (but fun) competition.
I’ve tried other types of crosswords. In my opinion, the British ones seem harder than the American ones, and not as interestingly themed. There are also some very challenging puzzles where you just have an empty grid and part of the challenge is figuring out where the black squares should be. I don’t enjoy those, and I don’t have the tenacity to put in the time and effort to figure them out. We each have our limits, I suppose. As an educator, part of my job is to figure out where my students are at, and design materials slightly outside their comfort zone, pushing them to learn new things without being overwhelming, and hoping they derive the same type of enjoyment I do in figuring things out!
A decade ago, I dipped my toes into a new area of research, the chemical origins of life – a topic I occasionally blog about here in Potions for Muggles. It’s a very complex, challenging problem, and one that I don’t think will be figured out in my lifetime. My nuts-and-bolts research is aimed at tackling a tiny narrow slice of the problem, but I do enjoy reading widely in the field and allows me to dabble in learning some biology, geoscience, history, philosophy, physics, and religion. I don’t consider myself a hardcore researcher in the area. I’m more of a dilettante working at the edges. Perhaps, once again, I lack the tenacity.
Because of my lived experience thus far, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox. The narrative threads through the lives of three key characters, two well-known, and one that should have received more recognition. The puzzle in this case was how to decipher Linear B, a tantalizing script first unearthed on the island of Crete in the year 1900 by Arthur Evans. The archaeologist Evans is the first of the three protagonists, and his story is well known. He tried, but failed, to crack the riddle even though he had exclusive access to all the primary materials.
Working on what was published, a mere tenth of the carefully guarded Evans horde, was the classical scholar Alice Kober. Her story is the most remarkable part of Fox’s book, which does a great service in bringing Kober’s contributions to light. Very methodical and very restrained in publicizing her work, Kober doggedly and almost single-handedly laid the key groundwork that would eventually lead to deciphering Linear B. I would definitely categorize her as a hardcore researcher. Spending years of her evenings working on the script (she had a full-time day job as a college instructor), she painstakingly devised data-management systems presaging computer punch-cards. Even her preparation for the task was staggering – the mastering of many ancient and modern languages, which were crucial in supporting her meticulous and methodical approach. She scorned the way of the dilettante.
If Kober hadn’t passed away suddenly, she might have gone down in her-story as the woman who deciphered Linear B. But this was not to be. The honor goes to architect wunderkind Michael Ventris, an outsider and seeming dilettante to the field, who also died young, just a few years after his crowning achievement. His story is also well known. But Fox shows how Kober paved the way for Ventris, who hardly mentioned her name when explaining his discovery in the many invited talks he would be festooned with upon achieving fame.
The unveiling of Ventris’ work took place via BBC radio in July 1952. I will quote Fox quoting Ventris on the nature of the problem:
“It is often alleged to be impossible to decipher a set of inscriptions where both the writing and the language are unknown quantities, and where there is no bilingual to help us. But provided there is enough material to work on, the situation is not hopeless at all. It simply means that, instead of a mechanical piece of decoding, a rather more subtle process of deduction has to be undertaken. It is rather like doing a crossword puzzle on which the positions of the black squares have not been printed for you.”
I can’t resist quoting Fox’s marvelous prose in highlighting Kober’s key contributions paving the way.
But it had been Kober, after all, who supplied those first black squares – enough of them to let the puzzle be solved. It was she who, after poring for years over the snarl of symbols and cutting out tens of thousands of cards, identified the language of Linear B as inflected. That was the decipherment’s essential first step. It was she who put her finger on the singular interaction between an inflected language and a syllabic script, pinpointing the “bridging” character. That was the second step. And in the third step – her masterstroke – it was she who realized that it was possible to plot the relationships among characters in the abstract, drawing up the very grid on which Ventris later built.
It was also she who had determined at the start that the only hope of cracking the code lay in hunting down and analyzing internal patterns in the script, without speculating on either the underlying language or the sound-value of any character. And that was as essential to the decipherment as anything.
Arthur Evans fell into the trap of speculation what the Rebus puzzle reads. So did Michael Ventris and many others. Fox describes the lure of such speculation that had confounded the many who had tried and failed. Ventris was able to give up long-cherished speculation before the great breakthrough. But after the puzzle of decipherment was solved, Ventris lost interest in all the now-readable content of the clay tablets. They would turn out to be mostly about mundane issues: recording taxes, and keeping accounts of crops, animals, goods, weapons, and gifts. Not flashy perhaps, but still a gift to our history about the everyday life of people three-and-a-half millenia ago. And Evans was lucky to find them. If not for the fire at Knossos that baked the clay tablets, the information would have been erased annually, allowing fresh recording on recycled tablets. We get to read the last bits of historical information before disaster struck.
Are there lessons to be learned about cracking the code of why life abounds here on planet Earth? Not DNA or even RNA, but what came before. What does it mean to carry out the functions of the living? Perhaps we can read the writing by observing the molecules that come and go, destroyed and remade. But how do we understand the language? Without our cherished speculative preconceptions about what living means? Is measuring energy transduction the key? Or looking for dynamic kinetic stability? Or quantifying entropy and dissipation? I don’t know, and I’m tempted to speculate. I’ve certainly read a lot of the speculation out there, both sober and wild, both from experts and dilettantes. It’s a bigger labyrinth. A more difficult riddle.
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