Exploring the Universe; 11; Values and Limitations of Science

I don't know. The telescope of the microscope. In a way these instruments symbolize the world of scientific research because they extend man's power to observe and to help us better understand the world of nature about us. This is the last program in a series in which we've tried to observe to understand something of the world of the scientist. Because all of us, I think, know that we need each other. These days, in fact, that need becomes more apparent every day. Rather, ambitiously, we've called this series Exploring the Universe. I'm not sure how far our explorations have taken us, but we've tried to find out the one thing, what kind of men the scientists are who are shaping our world so much. Something about the work and the nature of the work in which they're involved. We indeed had some of the major scientists of our time to help us.

We've talked with them about the scientific method, order in nature, the nature of science itself. Is there a scientific fact and things like that? Today, we're going to hear about values. Now, you and I know our own values pretty well, I presume. But what about the scientists and their values? An American scientist said recently, in science, we are writing a wild horse, and we must learn to tame it because we have no choice but to ride. A scientist is Dr. Ai Rabi of Columbia University, recipient of a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944.

Another American physicist wrote recently, and I quote him, I've been much concerned that in this world of change in scientific growth, we have so largely lost the ability to talk with one another, to increase and enrich our common culture and understanding. The writer is Dr. J. Rabi-Nafanheimer. During the Second World War, he was a scientific director at Los Alamos, and today he's director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. I think most of us are equally concerned about the wild horse of science and the problems of communication between the scientists and ourselves. And so we've asked Dr. Rabi and Dr. A Rabi-Nafanheimer to discuss these matters in this program alone without interruptions so that they may interchange freely between themselves. Let us now listen to them. Well, we've known each other more than 30 years. We've lived through a miraculous time in physics.

We've lived through some very strange and portentous and exciting changes in the structure of our world. And we've been friends and we've seen the side of couples together, shared many great moments. But there's one thing you've never gotten around to telling me, how did you get into this business? What made you come into the sciences? How did it start? I've often wondered myself, not exactly wondered myself or how I came into it, but more how strongly it hit me, and yet it hasn't hit some others in similar circumstances. Actually, I came into it partly through a religious background,

a very strong religious background. And the sort of thing that happened to me I've sometimes said, describe this, Copernicus comes to Brooklyn. Reading in the local library, I came upon an astronomy book and learned about the Copernicus theory. And this struck me as such a very great revelation, all at once, to see this tremendous order of the universe, the distances, the grandeur of it all. And the simplicity at the same time, the order of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the planets and their motions. And this was such an inspiration to this very day. I can remember it, the motion and the feeling so vividly. Anybody who doesn't have this, who becomes indifferent

to that sort of knowledge, I find it very difficult to understand. It's an emotional basis for further inquiry. It elevates all my thoughts and respect. And I see the world in the same way. It appeals to me as full of awe and wonder. But there's also another side, which perhaps a part of my make-up immediately, that I wanted to do something about it. To get something, a telescope or opera glasses, or just dying to see the moons of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn, and sense participate in the experience. And that sort of thing has carried me along in a certain sense to the rest of my life afterward. And although I did a great many things. Oh, I think I was about 10 or 11.

But after that, I never thought of myself. Otherwise, in some way, becoming a scientist, not an astronomer necessarily, but a deeper acquaintance in the standing with nature, and actually doing something about it at the same time, not just as a spectator sport. That was a real basis. I had quite different experience. My grandfather, when I was five, gave me a collection of minerals, you know, a two-bit collection. And from then on, the order of crystals fascinated me. And what I did about it was go out and collect them. And this led through chemistry, rather naturally into physics. You know, there are these two sides. Einstein expressed over and over again the same sense of awe.

And indeed, he was not in any conventional sense a religious man. But his admiration for the order of nature had a quality very much like that you described in childhood. He also had a wavering between two notions, both of which have a lot of truth in them, that the order was there, and that one was contemplating it. And that the order was created. He made this famous sentence, a physical theory, as a free creation of the human mind. Of course, it isn't very free, because we find out soon enough if the creation is wrong. But the dichotomy I have in mind is a different one.

I think that all scientists, they're serious, have this sense of awe, wonder, and this contemplative sense. And in that sense, they're very reverent. But they also, as you know, as your life has proven, the most impudent fellows, they fiddle around with things and they're never content to let well enough alone. And the whole history of modern science, as opposed to the scientific traditions of the ancient world, is to get active, to change, and to use what you found, not as something to admire only, but as in an instrumental sense, something that will produce novelty, that will explore something that's not invisible before, your opera glasses are, of course, historically an important example, but also part of the great success of the laboratory,

the department at Columbia, after the war, was turning the technological devices of wartime radar to the study of the atomic and subatomic worlds. And we never leave well enough alone. We're always monkeying. And the result is that there is a great athletic sense to the scientific activity and a great joy. In a certain sense, we might say that we're a little bit like children who have not really grown up and become indifferent. They're always monkeying and playing with what we have, breaking up toys to see how they work, constructing sometimes a fanciful life, except that we like to test it against the reality in an experiment. It is perhaps this youthful quality which made distinguish us

from other people and make them worry a bit about us and worry about our sense of responsibility when we play around with these tremendous forces of nature. Are we just having fun or while the world is being changed or are we really responsible or are we really thinking about what we're doing to the world or around us? A lot of our environment. We're responsible for finding the order. Anyone who doesn't have that sense is not a scientist. And it's there. Of course, in physics probably of a more sweeping kind than in any other branch of science, still we all know that most of the physical world is a mess

and not yet and perhaps never very fully intelligible to us. But responsibility of the scientist may mean a lot of things and you know some of the things it means. But surely the first responsibility is to understand and to see what the real point is, not to have at all just a collection of childish experiences. Working against this is the desire to enrich what we have to understand and to upset and to disprove and to invent. And they really work at cross-purposes and it's out of this dialogue that the enormous progress of the last centuries has come. But I interrupt you. It's a responsibility to live as a whole man. I mean, there are people who are locked away and their laboratories are in their studies and they do very great science. There are others who's interested abroad or who's approaches the different and may be very successful in their science.

But science is a part of their lives and of their history. And I was just thinking that in your case in particular it has been so very rich. We consider the world and the difficulties which are in at this present moment while we're recording this conversation are difficulties of warm peace. The worries about the dire fate which might overhang the world. And what to do about it? It's a problem which you saw very early, which we spoke of together. It also brings in the deepest questions of science that we were talking of just before. Not only the motivation, but the nature of the scientific enterprise and one side thought and the investigation and the other side it becomes practical in such a way

as to enter human affairs in the deepest sense. We are now in 1962 and it's 17 years since the end of the war and about 17 years ago at this time a little earlier you left Los Alamos after completing the development of the atomic bomb. A device which has already changed the history of the world we don't know where it will lead us. On the other hand during the time on the old leadership at Los Alamos this although it had a practical end it's brought in so many areas of science, of physics, of chemistry, of biology and of management of human affairs, of a group of scientists who were very difficult to control

and I just think that your reflections I would like to hear them. I haven't really asked you about it before 17 years later or it's almost 20 years later since that laboratory was started. How does it look to you? How has it added up? What has that experience now in later maturity mean to you? Well there are many sides to this. We used to talk about the future at Los Alamos. Maybe I can remind you of one story which gives the feel of it better than most. This was rather late in the enterprise and it was quite sure that there was going to be something come out of it and Neil Spore was there and he talked a great deal about the changes this would mean for man and about his hopes which were very high

and about his efforts to bring about an understanding on the part of statesmen that the kind of war we just been through was the thing of the past and one night there was a party because there were a lot of parties at Los Alamos. And he and I were walking along the path outside the dance, the place and it was a rather lovely girl who saw us passing by and engaged in what she took to be very secret conversation and she didn't know what to do so she climbed the tree. It expected to come down again but she was up there two hours as we walked back and forth under the tree talking about the future of the world. Looking back I have two great recollections of Los Alamos. One of the experience of common United effort, you've said it was a difficult people or always difficult people

but by and large everyone there knew what he was there for and knew that his life was bound up with the success of everyone else there and this is something you get in a practical enterprise, something that we live with in science but the acute competitive character that science itself often has was very much muted. Looking at the world I would say that we really did foresee not what would happen. Certainly no one then would have foreseen the acute crises of these last weeks but we did see fought an enormous incentive these developments would give to keeping in some large and general sense the peace and I have not given up hope that what we saw was seen cooling.

I have other things about it but I don't know. I remember sitting with you in your apartment dreaming up the provisions for an international control of atomic energy. This was after the war when our government was concerned with it. Does this ring any bells? Oh it rings. It's a vote say. I remember one of the great times not only in my life but nobody who was at Los Alamos those years remained untouched by it and they included some of the greatest names in science not only the older people who were there but the younger people who have since made their name. It was basically a scientific enterprise although they were turned toward a practical end.

These people were scientists and mostly stayed after the war was over returned to their science. They were not mostly tempted away from this in spite of the tremendous practical achievement which they made so that in a way we go to the heart of the scientific adventure as it concerns the genius scientists and it was that sort of thing that I thought you might be interested to say something about it because this enterprise was to make this bomb out of materials most of which had never been seen before whose properties were determined where one entered the regions of physics which were inaccessible to experiment which had to be done figured out by pure thought so to speak. In other words you can say this was made of, the bomb was made of

gray matter in the brain plus enormous technical skill at the same time in the procurement and making the fabrication of those materials in the sense you have this whole thing together and the end it was produced and there it was and I remember we were together at El Magado when this went off which was the so to speak the end of your assignment and the feeling we had as referred to by Mr. Garaway, one of my remarks which occasioned by this cartoon of lows with this white stallion that we are now riding this wild horse, not only we but all humanity is riding this wild horse and here is this scientific thing which is changing our lives at this tremendous rate. I mean the post-war developments have been simply fantastic

both in science itself and its knowledge but also in technology and the applications in all fields. Now how is the average man going to understand this? How is he going to get so to speak to you so slang, get with this thing so that he doesn't feel alienated that is on he's along with it and get some of the inspiration and pleasure which we ourselves get out of the enterprise. So we can have some company on the horse. So we can have some company on the horses. Well you've asked too many questions but I'll do what I can. I think that the science that went into Los Alamos and the bomb itself are the most vivid illustrations of something that is generally true of all the sciences, biology, astronomy, just as much as physics.

Everybody says science is cumulative and it's this character which was missing in the Mediterranean and largely in China. Cumulative in the sense that not only is there always novelty but that you don't go back over the same path. And I mean by this two things Rob. One is if you've learned how to do something. If you've learned a technique and there is a civilization intact, this technique doesn't get lost. That power stays with you and that is the problem and the nature of atomic weapons, nuclear weapons, that nobody is going to forget how to make them and the way we live with each other, the way we try to steer our course into a warless and hopefully a less armed world is always going to have to be aware of the fact that this knowledge is there, that that isn't going to be changed. The second point is I think simpler and deeper.

All the real machinery of science is aimed at finding out when you've made a mistake, finding out what you thought but not seemed like common sense, maybe common sense but isn't true. And we always make mistakes who continue to make. But I think you could say that the business of science was helping each other not to make the same mistake twice to have learned in an irreversible way. And that I think has to do with the immense firmness and the immense sense of confidence that we have. I think it's one of the reasons that it's hard to talk to people who haven't had this experience, who've had nothing much in school or who've forgotten what they've had. One of the reasons it's hard to share with them the sense of the massiveness, the adventure and the permanence of the great adventure. Now why is it so hard to share this?

I have some thoughts about that. It seems to me that a person may have even a good grounding in science in high school or in college. And that's the science of the time. We know perfectly well that they will live for another 40, 50 years after that. And if we look back on the course of history and the changes that occurred in the concepts, not only the world around us, but in science, in the concepts of science, in the attitudes, realizing this is the driving force which changes our civilization all the time. This is the wild horse, more generally, in which we are writing. How can we prepare people so as to write this wild horse and be

with it? In other words, in their schooling, they must somehow get science as a living, ongoing thing. Not just look here old socks. This is how the thing is. But they must get the contingency of it. And it's sense of future, it's sense of development. It's that sort of thing which has to be stressed. It must be brought in, seems to me, in the form somehow which would bring in a discipleship, a feeling of participation. Not just as matter to be learned and passed, as a requisite for something else, but as a condition of life, in such a way that they will be able to go on with it, it's not only that they would like to, but to be given the natural tools so that they can continue. Don't you think that we have to do this?

This is certainly true. I mean, how do you live? Well, you're very busy. But how would you live if you weren't so busy? You would be studying. You would be doing your physics. And you would be studying other people's physics. And you would take an interest in new things and biology and whatever came your way. We all have to study. Now, I have a hope, a real hope and vision, that in this society in which we have, if not leisure, a good deal more time and a good deal more affluence than the world has ever known. A very big part of this, for many people, will be spent in a lifelong curiosity, a lifelong sense of awe, a lifelong sense of impudence. And that this shouldn't be confined just to the people professionally engaged in adding to human knowledge. I believe that this is the way in which a sense of community between those who are so to speak paid

to find new things about nature, or to apply them to human wants, and those who aren't, a sense of community tying our whole culture and our whole time together may gradually emerge. And I agree with you. Which brings us right back to the schools and the schooling in science. There must be enough of it. It must be fundamental enough and broad enough so that people can go ahead with some feeling of confidence. There must feel, get acclimatized to this sort of thinking, and not think of it as something outside themselves. Otherwise, after a while, they begin to feel that they're being run by an elite and either turn against the elite or become indifferent. And have no feeling of participation, no feeling, and a strong feeling of alienation. If you're listening to a half hour of talk

between Dr. Ai Rabi of Columbia University, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, talk about scientists and their values. If anything could be added to those words, it perhaps might be a comment by another great American scientist of a few years back, Benjamin Franklin, who said it is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried the power of man over matter. Old and moral science were in a spare way of improvement that men would cease to be wolves to one another. Courage. NET In E.T., National Educational Television.

It's a small feat.