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My favorite work-life balance commentary comes from Darren Aronofsky's film Pi: Sol Robeson You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes
by Arjuna 10y ago
My favorite work-life balance commentary comes from Darren Aronofsky's film Pi:
Sol Robeson
You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time.
It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks. Insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end.
Finally, his equally exhausted wife... she's forced to share a bed with this genius... convinces him to take a bath to relax.
While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density... weight over volume.
And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka!" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery.
Now, what is the moral of the story?
Maximillian Cohen
That a breakthrough will come.
Sol Robeson
Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your wife, she will give you perspective. Meaning, you need a break, you have to take a bath or you will get nowhere. There will be no order, only chaos.
Go home, Max... and you take a bath.
- nitpicker9123 10y agoThis is the first time that I hear the claim that Archimedes was married. Wikipedia: "It is unknown, for instance, whether he ever married or had children."
- saganus 10y agoIt's a movie, so I don't take it as an actual claim. Take it as a creative license to make a point :)
- a-priori 10y agoIt's a parable, not a claim. Since it's unknown whether he was married, just suppose he does. Then you can tell a story where the moral depends on him being married.
- enraged_camel 10y agoVery fitting username. ;)
- westoncb 10y agoIt's funny: I'd mostly forgotten that particular scene, but the movie is strongly associated with questions of work/life balance in my mind. Sometimes when I wonder whether I'm getting too carried away with intellectual work, an image comes to mind of Max Cohen standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a drill in hand.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y agoI think the moral of that story is not work life balance. It's that you should work crazy, just don't forget to take a break when you're stuck. For example, I worked all day today (true story), trying to figure out some algorithm. I got stuck. So I took a walk. And it just came to me while I was taking the walk. Now I'm back and am back to work and it's super productive. If I worked like 3 hours and then went out to meet friends, have dinner, go watch some musical, and came back. I literally wouldn't have had time to even get to this point. Back to Archimedes, "The breakthrough came" only because he put his time in, and it just synthesized in his brain when he finally took a break. If Archimedes was a "40 hour work week" guy, he probably wouldn't have got to that state.
- ciaranm 10y ago3 * 7 = 21 != 40 3 * 5 = 15 != 40 So why do you use the '3 hours of work then slack off' example to deride people working a typical week?
- sidcool 10y agoTrue. I loved the movie, but couldn't understand the ending of the it. Was he hallucinating? Did he have nervous breakdown?