The Zen of Working on the Bus

When I was a graduate student in Berkeley, I lived in two locations which had a bit of a walk to get to my office on campus (around twenty minutes.) While this may sound like a horribly unproductive waste of time, I found that almost all of my research got done because of this walk. In my walk to work I would often start thinking about a problem I was working on. Sometimes I would make significant progress on the walk. One reason for this may be that I had to do all the thinking in my head (no pad of paper, no whiteboard.) More importantly, though, I think the walk almost always woke my brain up and got it primed to continue to work thoughout the day.
When I moved to Caltech and then to Santa Fe, I lived in locations where I would drive to work or where the walk was for a very short distance. I definitely noticed that it was more difficult to get my brain working in the morning because of this.
So it’s quite fun, now, taking the bus to work. Beside the pain of riding the bus in one of the sideway seats (so that the hurky-jerky motion of the bus makes your back muscles big and strong), the thirty minute trip to campus has been extremely productive. Just this morning I found a polynomial time reduction for a problem I’ve been working on while the bus rounded a corner. In fact, I may just add this to my list of criteria for discovering if you are a theoretical physicist:

• You might be a theoretical physicist if someone describes prison to you as a very isolating place and you ask “Do they give you a pen and paper?”
• You might be a theoretical physicist if you find that you can work on a problem so hard that the clock on your desk mysteriously skips two or three hours when you thought only ten minutes had passed.
• You might be a theoretical physicist if you discover that in locations where most people are listening to their iPods, you are inverting a three by three matrix in your head.