Horizon (1964–…): Season 18, Episode 9 - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - full transcript

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I have a friend who is an artist

and has sometimes taken a view
which I don't agree with very well.

He will hold up a flower and say,

"Look how beautiful it is."
I will agree, I...

He says, "You see, I, as an artist,
can see how beautiful this is,

"but you, as a scientist,
take this all apart



"and it becomes a dull thing."

And I think that he's kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees
is available to other people

and to me too.

I believe, although I may not be

quite as refined, aesthetically,
as he is

that I can appreciate
the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more
about the flower than he sees.

I could imagine the cells in there,
the complicated actions inside,

which also have a beauty.

I mean, it's not just beauty
at this dimension of one centimetre,

there is also beauty
at a smaller dimension -

the inner structure,

also the processes, the fact that...



the colours in the flower
are evolved

in order to attract insects
to pollinate it is interesting.

It means that insects
can see the colour.

It adds a question.

Does this aesthetic sense also
exist in lower forms? Does it...

Why is it aesthetic?

All kinds of interesting questions,
which a science knowledge

only adds to the excitement,
the mystery and the awe of a flower.

It only adds.
I don't understand how it subtracts.

I can't think of anything to say
on top of all this.

It's too much for a human mind.

You have to tell me when
you are going to draw my mouth

Yeah, all right, I will.

You'll get time to compose yourself.

The trouble is you look good
and the pictures never match it.

(Ain't going to be any good.)

- You always say that, Richard!
- I know.

And I am almost always right!

Ah, well.

I've always been rather...
very one-sided about the science

and when I was younger,

I concentrated almost
all my effort on it.

I didn't have time to learn

and I didn't have much patience with
what's called the humanities,

even though, in the university,

there were humanities
that you HAD to take,

I tried my best to avoid, somehow,
to learn anything and to work at it.

It's only afterwards, when I have
gotten older and I'm more relaxed,

that I have spread out a little bit
and I've learned to draw

and I read a little bit, but I'm
really still a very one-sided person

and don't know a great deal.

I have a limited intelligence

and I've used it
in a particular direction.

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica
at home

and even when I was a small boy,
he used to sit me on his lap

and read to me
from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And we would read, say,
about dinosaurs

and maybe it would be talking about
the brontosaurus or something

and it would say something...

Or the Tyrannosaurus rex,
and it would say something like,

"This thing is 25 feet high and the
head is six feet across," you see,

so he'd stop always and say,
"Let's see what that means.

"That would mean that if
he stood in our front yard,

"he would be high enough
to put his head through the window,

"but not quite because the head
is a little bit too wide

"and would break the window
as it came by."

Everything we'd read would be
translated, as best we could,

into some reality,
so that I learned to do that

and everything I read, I try
to figure out what it really means,

what it's really saying,
by translating.

And so I used to get read
the encyclopaedia when I was a boy,

but with translation, you see,
and so it was very exciting

and interesting to think that
there was animals of such magnitude.

I wasn't frightened that there
would be one coming in my window

as a consequence of this,
I don't think,

but I thought it was
very, very interesting

and that they all died out
and at that time nobody knew why.

We used to go to
the Catskill Mountains.

We lived in New York
and the Catskill Mountains is a place

where people went in the summer
and the fathers...

There was a big group
of people there,

but the fathers would all go back
to New York to work during the week

and only come back over
in the weekend.

On the weekends, when my father came,

he would take me
for walks in the woods

and would tell me various things
about interesting things

that were going on in the woods,
which I will explain in a minute,

but... the other mothers,
seeing this, of course,

thought that was wonderful
and that the other fathers

should take their sons for walks,
so they tried to work on them,

but they didn't get anywhere...
at first

and they wanted my father
to take all the kids,

but he didn't want to because
he had a special relation to me.

We were a personal thing together.

So it ended up that the other fathers
had to take their children for walks

the next weekend.
And the next... Monday,

when they were all back to work,
we were...

All the kids were
playing in the field

and one kid said to me, "See that
bird? What kind of bird is that?"

And I said, "I haven't the slightest
idea what kind of a bird it is."

He said, "It's a brown-throated
thrush," or something.

He says, "Your father
doesn't tell you anything!"

But it was the opposite.
My father had taught me...

Looking at a bird, he says,
"Do you know what that bird is?

"It's a brown-throated thrush,

"but in Portuguese
it's a hunto la pero,

"in Italian, a chutto la pittida."
He says,

"In Chinese it's a chung wong tah,

"in Japanese, a katano tekeda," etc.

He says, "Now you know
in all the languages you want to know

"what the name of that bird is and
when you've finished with all that,"

he says, "You will know absolutely
nothing whatever about the bird.

"You only know about humans
and different places

"and what they call the bird.

"Well," he says, "Let's look at
the bird and what it's doing."

He had taught me to notice things

and one day, when I was playing with
what we call an express wagon,

which is a little wagon
which has a railing around it

for children to play with,
that they can pull around...

It had a ball in it. I remember this.

It had a ball in it
and I pulled the wagon

and I noticed something
about the way the ball moved,

so I went to my father and I said,
"Say, Pop, I noticed something.

"When I pull the wagon, the ball
rolls to the back of the wagon,

"it rushes to the back of the wagon

"and when I'm pulling along
and I suddenly stop,

"the ball rolls to the front of the
wagon." I said, "Why is that?"

And he said,
"That," he says, "nobody knows."

He said, "The general principle is

"that things that are moving
try to keep on moving

"and things that are standing still

"tend to stand still
unless you push on them hard."

And he says,
"This tendency is called inertia,

"but nobody knows why it's true."

Now, that is a deep understanding.
He doesn't give me a name.

He knew the difference between
knowing the name of something

and knowing something...

..which I learned very early.

He went on to say,

"If you look close, you will find

"the ball does not rush
to the back of the wagon,

"but it's the back of the wagon
that you're pulling against the ball,

"that the ball stands still, or, as
a matter of fact, from the friction,

"starts to move forward really
and doesn't move back."

So I ran back to the little wagon
and set the ball up again

and pulled the wagon from under it

and looking sideways
and seeing indeed he was right,

the ball never moved
backwards in the wagon

when I pulled the wagon forward.

It moved backward
relative to the wagon,

but relative to the sidewalk,
it moved forward a little bit.

It was just that the wagon
caught up with it.

So that's the way
I was educated by my father,

with those kind of examples
and discussions.

No pressure,
just lovely, interesting discussion.

My cousin at that time, who was three
years older and was in high school

and was having considerable
difficulty with his algebra

and had a tutor come.

And I was allowed
to sit in the corner

while the tutor would try
to teach my cousin algebra.

And...

So, problems like 2X +...

I said to my cousin, I said,
"What are you trying to do?

"I hear him talking about X."

He said, "Well, you know,
2X + 7 = 15,"

he said, "And you are trying to find
out what X is." I says, "You mean 4?"

He says, "Yeah, but you did it
with arithmetic.

"You have to do it by algebra."

And that's why my cousin
was never able to do algebra,

because he didn't understand
how he was supposed to do it.

There was no way...

I learned algebra, fortunately,
by not going to school,

by knowing the whole idea
was to find out what X was

and it didn't make any difference
how you did it.

There's no such thing as

"You don't do it by arithmetic,
you do it by algebra."

That was a false thing
that they had invented in school

so that the children who have to
study algebra can all pass it.

They had invented
a set of rules which,

if you followed them without
thinking, could produce the answer.

"Subtract seven from both sides.
If you have a multiplier,

"divide both sides
by the multiplier," and so on.

A series of steps by which
you could get the answer

if you didn't understand
what you were trying to do.

There was a series of
math books which starts

Arithmetic For The Practical Man and
then Algebra For The Practical Man

and then
Trigonometry For The Practical Man

and I learned trigonometry
for the practical man from that.

I soon forgot it again because
I didn't understand it... very well.

But they were GOING to get...

The series was coming out
and the library was GOING to get

Calculus For The Practical Man
and I knew by this time,

by reading the encyclopaedia, that
calculus was an important subject

and it was an interesting one
and I ought to learn it.

This was...
I was older now, I was perhaps 13.

And then the calculus book
finally came out

and I was so excited and I went
to the library to take it out

and she looks at me and she says,
"You're just a child.

"What are you taking
this book out for? This book is..."

So this was one of the few times
in my life I was... I lied.

I said it was for my father,
he selected it.

So I took it home
and I learned calculus from it

and I tried to explain it
to my father

and he started to read the beginning
of it and he found it confusing

and it really...
That bothered me a little bit.

I didn't know that he was so limited,
you know, he didn't understand

and I thought it was relatively
simple and straightforward

and he didn't understand it,
so that was the first time I knew

I had learned more,
in some sense, than he.

But one of the things that my father
taught me, beside physics -

whether it's correct or not -

was a disrespect for respectable...
for certain kinds of things.

For example, when I was a little boy
and rotogravure -

that's printed pictures
in newspapers - first came out

in the New York Times,
he used to sit me, again, on his knee

and he'd open a picture,
and there was a picture of the Pope,

with everybody
bowing in front of him,

and he'd say,
"Now, look at these humans.

"Here's one human standing here
and all these others are bowing.

"What is the difference?
This one is the Pope and..."

He hated the Pope anyway.

And he'd say,
"The difference is epaulettes."

Of course not in the case
of the Pope. Maybe it was a general.

It was always the uniform,
the position.

That this man has
the same human problems -

he eats dinner like anybody else,
he goes to the bathroom,

he has the same kind of problems
as everybody. He's a human being.

Why are they all bowing to him?

Only because of his name
and his position.

Because of his uniform, not because
of something he especially did.

Or his honour,
or something like that.

He, by the way,
was in the uniform business

so he knew what the difference was
with a man with the uniform off

and the uniform on -
it's the same man for him.

He was happy with me, I believe.

But once, though,
when I came back from MIT -

I'd been there a few years -

he said to me,
"You've become educated

"about these things and there's
one question I've always had

"that I'd never really
understood very well

"and I'd like to ask you
now that you've studied this,

"to explain it to me."

And I asked him what it was
and he said that he understood

that when an atom made a transition
from one state to another,

it emits a particle of light
called a photon.

I said, "That's right."

He says, "Well, now, is the photon
in the atom ahead of time

"that it comes out, or is there
no photon in to start with?"

I said, "There's no photon in,

"it just... the electron
makes the transition..."

He goes, "Then, where does it come
from, then? How does it come out?"

So I said... Of course
I couldn't answer him.

The view is that photons, numbers,
aren't conserved.

They're just created
by the motion of the electron.

I tried to explain it to him
something like,

that the sound that I'm making now
wasn't in me.

It's not like my little boy said
when he was just little,

one day he was talking

and he suddenly said that he could
no longer say a certain word -

the word was "cat" -

because his word bag has run out
of the word "cat".

So there's no word bag
that you have inside

that you use up the words
as they come out.

You just make them as you go along,

and in the same sense,
there was no photon bag in an atom,

and when the photons came out,
they didn't come from somewhere,

but I couldn't do much better.

He was not satisfied with me
in that respect,

that I never was able to explain

any of the things
that he didn't understand.

So he was unsuccessful. He sent me
through all these universities

in order to find out these things,
and never did find out.

It was a completely
different kind of a thing.

It would mean that I would have
to stop the research

into what I was doing
which was my life's desire,

to take time off to do this,

which I felt I should do in order
to protect civilisation, if you want.

OK? So that was what I had to debate
with myself...

My first reaction, well,

I didn't want to get interrupted
in my normal work to do this odd job.

There was also the problem...

of course,
of any moral thing involving war,

I didn't want to have much
to do with that, but...

it kind of scared me

when I realised what the weapon
would be, which I realised,

and that since it might be possible,
it must be possible, there was no...

Nothing that I knew that indicated
that if we could do it,

they couldn't do it

and therefore it was very important
to try to cooperate.

With regard to moral questions,

I do have something
I would like to say about it,

because the original reason
to stop the project, which I had,

which was that the Germans
were a danger,

started me off
on a process of action,

which was to try to develop
this first system in Princeton

and then at Los Alamos,
to try to make the bomb work.

Now, all kinds of attempts
to redesign,

to make it a worse bomb or whatever,

and so on, and all working
all this time to see

if we could make it go,
and so it was a project in which

we all worked very, very hard
and all cooperated together.

Now, with any project like that,
you continue to work,

trying to get success,
having decided to do it.

But what I did immorally,
I would say,

was not to remember the reason
that I said I was doing it,

so that when the reason changed,

which was
that Germany was defeated...

..not the singlest thought came
to my mind at all about that,

but that meant now
that I had to reconsider

why I'm continuing to do this.

I simply didn't think, OK?

Only reaction I remember, perhaps
I was blinded by my own reaction,

was a very considerable elation
and excitement, and there was...

going to parties and people got drunk
and it would make...

..a tremendously interesting contrast
of what was going on in Los Alamos

at the same time as
what was going on in Hiroshima.

I was involved with this happy thing
and also drinking and drunk

and playing drums
and sitting on the hood of a...

the bonnet of a Jeep
and playing drums

and excitement running all over
Los Alamos at the same time

as the people were dying
and struggling in Hiroshima.

I had a very strong reaction
after the war of a peculiar nature.

It may be from just the bomb itself,

or it may be for some other
psychological reasons,

I had just lost my wife,
or something,

but I remember being in New York
with my mother in a restaurant

right after, immediately after,
and thinking about New York.

And I knew how big
the bomb in Hiroshima was,

how big an area it covered
and so on

and I realised,
from where we were,

I don't know, 59th Street,
to drop one in 34th Street

and that would spread
all the way out to here

and all these people would be killed

and all the things would be killed

and that wasn't
only one bomb available,

but it was easy
to continue to make them

and therefore that things...
were sort of doomed

because already it appeared to me,

very early, earlier than to others
who were more optimistic,

that international relations
and the way people were behaving

was no different
than it had ever been before

and that it was just going to go out
the same way as any other thing

and I was sure it was going therefore
to be used very soon.

So I felt very uncomfortable
and thought, really believed,

that it was silly...

I would see people building a bridge

and I would say,
"They don't understand."

I really believed that
it was senseless to make anything

because it would all be destroyed
very soon anyway.

But they didn't understand that.

And I had this very strange view of
any construction that I would see.

I always thought, "How foolish
they are to try to make something."

So I was really in a kind
of depressive condition.

Well, they expected me
to be wonderful,

to offer me a job like this,
and I wasn't wonderful

and therefore I realised
a new principle.

It was, "I'm not responsible

"for what other people think
I'm able to do.

"I don't have to be good because
they think I'm going to be good,"

and somehow or other, I could relax
about this and I thought to myself,

"I haven't done anything important,

"well, I'm never going to do
anything important,"

but I used to enjoy physics
and mathematical things

and because I used to play with it,
it was never very important,

but I used to do things
for the fun of it.

So I decided, "I'm going to do
things only for the fun of it,"

and only that afternoon
when I was eating lunch,

some kid threw up a plate
in the cafeteria

which has a blue medallion
on the plate, the Cornell sign,

in the cafeteria,

and as he threw up the plate
and it came down, it wobbled

and the blue thing
went around like this and I wondered,

it seemed to me the blue thing
went around faster than the wobble

and I wondered what the relation was
between the two.

See, I was just playing,
no importance at all,

so I played around with the equations
of motion, of rotating things,

and I found out
that if the wobble is small,

the blue thing goes around twice
as fast as the wobble goes around

and then I tried to figure out

if I could see why that was
directly from Newton's laws

instead of through
the complicated equations

and I worked that out
for the fun of it.

And then I went to Hans Bethe
and I said, "Hey, by the way,

"I'll show you something amusing,"
and I explained this to him.

And he said to me, "That's very
amusing and interesting," he said,

"but what is the use of it?"

I said, "That doesn't make any
difference, it hasn't any use,

"I'm just doing it
for the fun of it."

And then Bob Wilson, who was
the head of the nuclear lab there,

the same Bob Wilson, had
some kind of instinct or something

because it was at the same day
or other that he called me in

and he told me that when they hire
a professor at the university,

it's their responsibility
what the professor does

and it's their risk
and if he doesn't do anything

or he doesn't accomplish anything,

it's not his thing
to worry about that.

They're taking the risk
to put him in the environment

and I should do whatever I want,
amuse myself, or whatever I want,

so with that double combination,
I could relax.

Somehow I was getting out
from some psychological problem

and I relaxed and started to play,
as I said, with this rotation

and this rotation led me
to the problem... a similar problem

of the rotation of the spin
of an electron

according to Dirac's equation
and that just led me back

into quantum electrodynamics which
is the problem I'd been working on.

And I kept continuing now to play
with it in the relaxed fashion

I had originally done
and everything just...

It was like taking a cork
out of the bottle,

everything just poured out and,
by the way, in a very short order

worked the things out for which
I later won the Nobel Prize.

Well, what I essentially did...

and also was done independently
by two other people,

also independent,
Tomonaga in Japan and Schwinger,

was to figure out how to analyse,
how to control,

how to analyse the... and discuss,
the original theory of quantum...

quantum theory of electricity
and magnetism

that had been written in 1928,
how to interpret it

so as to avoid the infinities

and to make calculations in which
there were sensible results,

which have since turned out
to be in exact agreement

with every experiment
that has been done so far,

so that in quantum electrodynamics,

we have a theory
which fits experiment in every detail

where it's applicable, not involving
nuclear forces, for instance.

And it was the work that I did in
1947 to figure out how to do that...

..for which I won a Nobel prize.

Was it worth a Nobel prize?

I don't...

I don't know
anything about the Nobel prize.

I don't understand what it's
all about, or what's worth what,

and if the people
in the Swedish Academy

decide that X, Y or Z wins
a Nobel prize, then so be it.

I won't have anything to do
with the Nobel prize.

It's a pain in the...

HE CHUCKLES

I don't like honours.

I appreciate it for the work that I
did and for people who appreciate it

and I notice a lot of physicists use
my work. I don't NEED anything else.

I don't think there is any sense
to anything else.

I don't see that it makes any point
that someone in the Swedish Academy

decides that this work
is noble enough to receive a prize.

I've already got the prize.

The prize is the pleasure
of finding the thing out,

the kick in the discovery, the
observation that other people use it.

Those are the real things,

the honours are unreal to me.

I don't believe in honours.

It bothers me. Honours bothers me.

Honours is epaulettes,
honours is uniforms.

My papa brought me up this way.
I can't stand it, it hurts me.

When I was in high school,

one of the first honours I got was
to be a member of the Arista,

which was a group of kids who got
good grades, hm? And you were...

Everybody wanted to be
a member of the Arista

and when I got into the Arista,

I discovered that
what they did in their meetings

was to sit around and to discuss
who else was worthy

to join this wonderful group
that we are.

OK? So we sat around trying to decide

who it was who would get to be
allowed in to this Arista.

This kind of thing bothers me
psychologically

for one or another reason
I don't understand myself.

Honours. And from that day to this,
always bothered... bothered me.

I had trouble with...

When I became a member
of the National Academy of Science

and I had ultimately to resign

because there was
another organisation,

most of whose time
was spent in choosing

who was illustrious enough

to be allowed to join us
in our organisation,

including such questions as,

"We physicists have to stick together

"because there is a very good chemist
that they are trying to get in

"and we haven't got enough
room for so-and-so..."

What's the matter with chemists?
The whole thing was rotten!

Because the purpose was mostly to
decide who could have this honour.

OK? I don't like honours.

One way that's kind of a fun analogy
to try to get some idea

of what we are doing
in trying to understand nature

is to imagine that the gods are
playing some great game, like chess,

let's say a chess game, and you
don't know the rules of the game,

but you are allowed to look at the
board, at least from time to time,

and at a little corner perhaps.

And from these observations,

you try to figure out
what the rules are of the game,

what are the rules
of the pieces moving.

You might discover, after a bit,
for example, that when there is

only one bishop around on the board,
that the bishop maintains its colour.

Later on, you might discover
the law for the bishop

is it moves on a diagonal,
which would explain

the law that you understood before,
that it maintains its colour.

That would be analogous to
we discover one law

and then later
find a deeper understanding of it.

Er, then...

Things can happen, everything is
going good, you've got all the laws,

it looks very good and then all
of a sudden some strange phenomenon

occurs in some corner, so you begin
to investigate that, to look for it.

It's castling, something
you didn't expect there to be.

We are always, by the way,
in a fundamental physics,

always trying to investigate

those things in which
we DON'T understand the conclusions.

We are not trying to check
all the time our conclusions.

After we've checked them enough,
we're OK.

The thing that doesn't fit is the
thing that's the most interesting.

The part that doesn't go
according to what you expected.

Also, we can have
revolutions in physics.

After you've noticed that
the bishops maintain their colour

and they go along the diagonals
and so on for such a long time

and everybody knows that that's
true, then you suddenly discover,

one day, in some chess game, that the
bishop doesn't maintain its colour,

it changes its colour. Only later
do you discover the new possibility

that the bishop is captured
and that a pawn went all the way down

to the queen's end
to produce a new bishop.

That can happen,
but you didn't know it.

And so it's very analogous
to the way our laws are.

They sometimes look positive,
they keep on working

and all of a sudden, some little
gimmick shows that they are wrong

and then we have to investigate
the conditions under which

this bishop change of colour happens
and so forth

and gradually learn the new rule
that explains it more deeply.

Unlike the chess game, though,
in the case of the chess game,

the rules become more complicated
as you go along, but in the physics,

when you discover new things,
it looks more simple.

It appears, on the whole,
to be more complicated

because we learn about
a greater experience,

that is, we learn about
more particles and new things

and so the laws
look complicated again,

but if you realise all the time
what's kind of wonderful

is that as we expand our experience

into wilder and wilder
regions of experience,

every once in a while
we have these integrations

in which everything is
pulled together in a unification,

which turns out to be
simpler than it looked before.

If you are interested in the ultimate
character of the physical world,

of the real, the complete world...

..and, at the present time,
our only way to understand that

is through a mathematical
type of reasoning...

..then I don't think
a person can fully appreciate,

or in fact can appreciate much...

of these particular aspects
of the world -

the great depth and character
of the universality of the laws,

the relationships of things -

without an understanding
of mathematics.

I think it's, er...

It's just...
I don't know any other way to do it.

We don't know any other way
to describe it accurately and well

or to see the interrelationships
without... without it.

So I don't think a person who hasn't
developed some mathematical sense

is capable of fully appreciating
this aspect of the world.

Don't misunderstand me, there are
many, many aspects of the world

that mathematics is unnecessary for,

such as love,
and which are very delightful

and wonderful to appreciate
and to feel awed and mysterious about

and I don't mean to say that the only
thing in the world is physics,

but you were talking about physics

and if that's
what you are talking about,

then to not know mathematics
is a severe limitation

in understanding the world.

What I'm working on in physics
right now is a special problem

which we've come up against
and I can describe what it is.

You know that everything is made out
of atoms, we've got that far already

and most people know that already,

and that the atom has a nucleus
with electrons going around.

The behaviour of the electrons
on the outside is now completely...

The laws for it are well understood,
as far as we can tell,

in this quantum electrodynamics
that I told you about

and after that was evolved,
then the problem was

how does the nucleus work?

How do the particles interact?
How do they hold together?

One of the by-products was to
discover fission and to make a bomb.

But...

in investigating the forces that hold
the nuclear particles together,

it was a long task.

At first, it was thought that it was

an exchange
of some sort of particles inside,

which were invented by Yukawa,
called pions,

and it would be predicted that
if you would hit protons against -

the proton is one of the particles
in the nucleus - against the nucleus,

it would knock out such pions and,
sure enough, such particles came out.

Not only pions came out,

but other particles
and we began to run out of names -

kaons and sigmas and lambdas
and so on.

These are all called hadrons now.

And as we increased the energy

and the reaction got
more and more different kinds

until there were hundreds of
different kinds of particles,

then the problem was, of course,
during all this...

This period is from 1940... er,
'50 up to towards the present.

It was to find the pattern behind it
and there seemed to be

very many interesting relations
among the particles,

patterns among the particles,

until a theory was evolved
to explain these patterns,

that all of these particles were
really made of something else,

and that they were made of
a thing called quarks and that...

Three quarks, for example,
would form a proton.

A proton is one of the particles
in the nucleus,

another one is a neutron. The quarks
came in a number of varieties.

In fact, at first,
only three were needed to explain

all the hundreds of particles
and the different kind of quarks,

they were called U-type, D-type,
S-type. Two Us and a D made a proton,

two Ds and a U made a neutron...

If they were moving
in a different way inside,

they were some... another particle
and so on.

Er...

Then the problem came - what is...

what is exactly the behaviour
of the quarks

and what holds them together?
And the theory...

..was thought of, which is...

a very simple analogy
to quantum electrodynamics,

a very close analogy
to quantum electrodynamics,

not exactly the same, but very close,

in which the quarks are like
the electron

and the photons,
which go between electrons,

which makes them attract each other
electrically, were called gluons

and the mathematics was very similar,

but it's a few terms
slightly different.

The difference in the form of
the equations that were guessed at

were guessed by principles,
by such beauty and simplicity,

that... it isn't arbitrary,
it's very, very determined.

What is arbitrary is how many
different kinds of quarks there are,

but not the force... character
of the force between them.

Now, unlike electrodynamics...
There is a thing in electrodynamics

that two electrons can be pulled
apart as far as you want.

In fact, when they are very far away,
the force is weakened.

If this were true
and these were made out of quarks,

you would have expected that when you
hit the things together hard enough,

the quarks would come out.

But instead of that,

when you do an experiment with enough
energy that quarks could come out,

instead of that, you found a big jet,

that is all particles going
about the same direction,

of the old hadrons.
No quark. And the theory...

It was clear that what was required
was that when the quark comes out,

it kind of makes
these new pairs of quarks

and they come in little groups
and make hadrons.

The question is, why is it
so different than electrodynamics?

How do these small
term differences,

these little terms that are different
in the equation,

produce such different effects,
entirely different effects?

In fact, it was very surprising
to most people

that this would really come out,

that at first you would think
the theory was wrong,

but the more it's studied,
the more clear it became

that it is very possible

that these extra terms
would produce these effects.

Now we were in a position
that's different in history

than any other time in physics.
It's always different.

We have a theory,
a complete and definite theory,

of all of these hadrons

and we have an enormous
number of experiments

and lots and lots of details,

but why can't we
test the theory right away

to find out if it's right or wrong?

Because what we have to do is
calculate consequences of the theory.

If this theory is right,
what should happen?

And does that happen?

Well, this time,
the difficulty is in the first step.

If the theory is right, what should
happen is very hard to figure out.

The mathematics needed

to figure out what the consequences
of this theory are

have turned out to be,
at the present time,

insuperably difficult,
at the present time, all right?

And, therefore,
obvious what my problem is.

My problem is to try to develop

a way of getting numbers
out of this theory,

to test it really carefully,
not just qualitatively.

Does it look like it might give
the right result?

I spent a few years trying to invent
mathematical things

that would permit me
to solve the equations

and I didn't get anywhere
and then I decided...

that in order to do that,
I must first understand

more or less
how the answer probably looks.

It's hard to explain this very well,

but I had to get a qualitative idea
of how the phenomena works

rather... before I can get
a good quantitative idea.

In other words, people didn't even
understand ROUGHLY how it worked

and so I've been working most
recently, in the last year or two,

on understanding ROUGHLY
how it works, not quantitatively yet,

with the hope that in the future...

that rough understanding
can be refined

into a precise mathematical tool...

a way, or an algorithm, to get
from the theory to the particles.

You see, we're in a funny position.

It's not that we're looking for
the theory. We've got the theory.

A good... A good candidate.

But we're in the step in science

that we need to compare
the theory to experiment

by seeing what the consequences are
and checking them.

We're stuck in seeing
what the consequences are

and it's my aim, it's my desire,
to see if I can work out

a way to work out what
the consequences of this theory are.

It's kind of crazy position to be in,

to have a theory that you can't
work out the consequences of.

I can't stand it!
I have to figure it out!

Some day, maybe.

To do the kind of high...

real, good physics work, you do need
absolute solid lengths of time.

It's... When you're putting ideas
together,

which are vague
and hard to remember,

it's very much,
and I get this feeling very much,

it's like building
those houses of cards

when you are putting together...

On each of the cards, you're shaky
and if you forget one of them,

the whole thing collapses again,
you don't know how you got there

and you have to build them up again
and if you are interrupted

and kind of forget half the idea
of how the cards went together,

cards being different type...
parts of the ideas,

ideas of different kinds that have
to go together to build up the idea,

the main point, you put this stuff
together, it's... it's quite a tower

and its easy to slip.

It needs a lot of concentrating,
that is solid time to think

and if you got a job, in
administrating, anything like that,

then you don't have the solid time.

So I have invented another myth
for myself - that I am irresponsible.

I'm actively irresponsible,
I tell everybody.

I don't do anything.

If anybody asks me
to be on a committee,

to take care of admissions,

"No, I'm irresponsible, I don't
give a damn about the students."

Of course I give a damn
about the students,

but I know that somebody else
will do it and I take the view,

"Let George do it," a view which
you are not supposed to take, OK,

because then that is not right,
but I do that because I...

want to see if...

I like to do physics and
I want to see if I can still do it

and so I'm... I'm selfish, OK?

I want to do my physics.

All those students are in the class.

Now you ask me,
how should I best teach them?

Should I teach them from the point
of view of the history side,

from the applications, from...?

My theory is that the best way
to teach is to have no philosophy,

is to be chaotic and confusing,
in a sense,

that you use every possible way
of doing it.

That's the only way
I can see to answer it,

so as to catch this guy or that guy
on different hooks as you go along,

that during the time when the fellow
who was interested in history

is being bored
by the abstract mathematics,

on the other hand,
the fellow who likes the abstraction

is being bored at another time
by the history.

If you can do it
so you don't bore them all

all the time,
perhaps you're better off.

I really don't know how to do it.

I don't how to answer this question
of different kinds of minds

with different kinds of interest.

But what hooks them on?
What makes them interested?

How do you direct them
to become interested?

One way is by a kind of force.

"You have to pass this course,
you have to take that examination."

It's a very effective way, many
people go through schools that way

and it may be the more effective way.

I'm sorry, after many, many years
of trying to teach

and trying all different
kinds of method,

I really don't know how to do it.

I got a kick, when I was a boy,
of my father telling me things,

so I try to tell my son things that
were interesting about the world.

We... When he was very small,
I used to rock him to bed, you know.

When he goes to bed,
I'd tell him stories

and I'd make up stories about
little people that were about so high

that would walk along
and would go on picnics and so on.

They lived in the ventilator.

And they would go
through these woods,

which had great big,
long, tall blue things like trees

but without leaves and only one stalk

and they had to walk between them
and so on.

And he'd gradually catch on,
that was the rug, the nap of the rug,

the blue rug, and he loved this game

because I would describe all these
things from an odd point of view

and he liked to hear the stories
and we had all kinds of wonderful...

He even went into a moist cave

where the wind
kept going in and out

and it was coming in cool
and went out warm and so on.

It was inside the dog's nose
that they went and then, of course,

I could tell him all about
physiology by this way and so on.

He loved that and so I told him
lots of stuff and I enjoyed it

because I was...
telling him stuff that I liked,

we had fun when he would guess
what it was and so on.

Then I have a daughter
and I tried the same thing.

Well, my daughter's personality
was different.

She didn't want to hear the story,

she wanted the story
that was in the book,

repeated again and read to her,

she wanted me to read to her,
not to make up stories.

That's a different personality
and so if I were to say,

"A very good method
for teaching children about science

"is to make up these stories
of little people..."

It doesn't work at all
on my daughter.

It happened to work
on my son, OK?

Because of the success of science,
there is a kind of...

..I think a kind of pseudoscience
that...

Social science is an example
of a science which is not a science.

They don't do scientific...

They follow the forms.

You gather data, you do
so and so and so forth,

but they don't get any laws,
they haven't found out anything,

they haven't got anywhere... yet.

Maybe someday they will,
but it's not very well developed.

But what happens is,
on an even more mundane level,

we get experts on everything

that sound like they're sort of
scientific... experts.

They... They are not scientists,
they sit at a typewriter

and they make up something like...

"Food grown with...

"fertiliser that's organic
is better for you

"than food grown with
fertiliser that's inorganic."

It may be true, may not be true,

but it hasn't been demonstrated
one way or the other.

But they'll sit there on the
typewriter and make up all this stuff

as if it's science and then become
an expert on foods,

organic foods and so on.

There's all kinds of myths
and pseudoscience all over the place.

Now, I might be quite wrong,
maybe they do know all this thing,

but I don't think I'm wrong.

You see, I have the advantage
of having found out

how hard it is
to get to really know something,

how careful you have to be
about checking the experiments,

how easy it is
to make mistakes and fool yourself.

I know what it means
to know something.

And therefore I can...

I see how they get their information

and I can't believe
that they know it,

they haven't done the work necessary,

they haven't done
the checks necessary,

they haven't done the care necessary.
I have a great suspicion...

..that they don't know
that this stuff is...

And they are intimidating people
by it.

I think so. I...

I don't know the world very well,
but that's what I think.

If you expected science
to give all the answers

to the wonderful questions about
what we are, where we are going,

what the meaning of the universe is
and so on,

then I think you could easily
become disillusioned

and then look for some mystic answer
to these problems.

How a scientist can take
a mystic answer, I don't know,

because the whole spirit is to
understand... Well, never mind that.

Anyway, I don't understand that,
but anyhow...

If you think of it...

The way I think of what we are doing
is we are exploring,

we are trying to find out
as much as we can about the world.

People say to me, "Are you looking
for the ultimate laws of physics?"

No, I'm not, I'm just looking
to find out more about the world

and if it turns out
there's a simple, ultimate law

that explains everything, so be it,
that would be very nice to discover.

If it turns out it's like an onion
with millions of layers

and we're just sick and tired
of looking at the layers,

then that's the way it is,
but whatever way it comes out,

it's nature, it's there and she's
going to come out the way she is

and, therefore, when we go
to investigate it,

we shouldn't pre-decide
what it is we are trying to do,

except to find out more about it.

If you say...

But your problem is, "Why do you
find out more about it?"

If you thought that you were
trying to find out more about it

because you are going
to get an answer

to some deep philosophical
question, you may be wrong,

it may be that you can't get
an answer to that particular question

by finding out more about
the character of nature,

but I don't look at it... My interest
in science is to simply find out

about the world
and the more I find out,

the better it is
and I like to find out.

There are very remarkable mysteries
about the fact that we are able to do

so many more things
than, apparently, animals can do

and other questions like that,
but those are mysteries

I want to investigate without
knowing the answer to them.

And so, altogether, I can't believe

the special stories
that have been made up

about our relationship
to the universe at large because...

..they seem to be...

..too simple, too..too connected...

too local, too provincial.

"The Earth, He came to the Earth."

ONE of the aspects of God
came to the Earth, mind you.

And look at what's out there.
How can...? It isn't in proportion.

Anyway, it's no use arguing.
I can't argue it.

I'm just trying to tell you
why the scientific views that I have

do have some effect on my beliefs.

And also, another thing,
it has to do with the question of

how do you find out
if something is true

and if you have all these theories,
the different religions

have all different theories
about the thing,

then you begin to wonder.

Once you start doubting,
just like you're supposed to doubt,

if you ask me,
if the science is true, we say,

"No, no, we don't know what's true,
we are trying to find out.

"Everything is possibly wrong."

Start out understanding religion by
saying everything is possibly wrong.

Let us see.

As soon as you do that,
you start sliding down an edge,

which is hard to recover from,

and so with the scientific view,

or my father's view
that we should look

to see what's true
and what maybe may not be true,

once you start doubting,
which I think, to me,

is a very fundamental part of
my... soul is to doubt and to ask,

and when you doubt and ask,
it gets a little harder to believe.

You see, one thing is,
I can live with doubt and uncertainty

and not knowing.

I think it's much more interesting
to live not knowing

than to have answers
which might be wrong.

I have approximate answers
and possible beliefs

and different degrees of certainty
about different things,

but I'm not absolutely
sure of anything

and on many things
I don't know anything about,

such as whether it means anything
to ask why we are here

and what the question might mean.
I might think about it a little bit.

If I can't figure it out,
then I go to something else.

But I don't HAVE to know an answer,
I don't have to...

I don't feel frightened
by not knowing things,

by being lost in the mysterious
universe without having any purpose,

which is the way it really is
as far as I can tell, possibly.

It doesn't frighten me.