Well it’s a pleasure to be back again, and for those who were here the last time I’ve got one new joke I think,
and hopefully you won’t even recognize it.
But it’s a pleasure to be with young people and for some of you,
you may see me again unfortunately in a couple of weeks time if we’re going to this particular Olympiad.
Is anybody going to that?
Let me just check.
Okay well you’ve probably seen yourself flashing then.
I’m now going to talk about some issues that I feel are rather serious and that young people,
young scientists who have got to face the problems and the mess that we’ve left behind, we old guys, may have to consider.
And when I do this, I often use Don Marquis’s quote.
I like quotations and this is my, I think, all time favourite, is ‘if you make people think they’re thinking, they love you.
But if you really make them think they hate you’ (laughter).
And I think probably many of you have felt you’ve been in that sort of situation before.
Well how did I get here?
Well I did have aspirations and I think it was to be Superman
because I found this photograph of myself with the ‘S’ on there but I had to come down to earth.
I did gymnastics at school and tennis and one thing really tell you, that you really should be,
do other things apart from the sciences and I acted in a school play
and I’m the handsome guy on the right in this picture and I always tell people that they should really do science.
The guy in front stayed an actor and you notice that he aged a lot more than I did.
Ian McKellen and I were in the same year at school and of course many of you may recognize him.
A fantastic actor and we met last week because he was in London in ‘Waiting for Godot’.
So basically it’s not just science.
Science actually, if you are a scientist, it really helps to do other things.
One reason that I think I’m a scientist, is that I have Meccano and you take these bits and pieces
and you make things and in fact, you can make cars and I thought I’d show you an advertisement from those days.
'Meccano boys' - and of course today we have to add girls - 'are keen, ambitious and inventive.'
'No boy' - or girl - 'who follows the Meccano hobby can be a bad boy or bad girl' - unfortunately.
Alright there you go.
So that’s the sort of world that I was in, made of nuts and bolts and that’s what a chemist actually uses.
He uses his electrons and atoms to put our world together.
So it’s a big sort of analogy there.
When I was a kid the best thing for me on Saturday was to go down to a travel agent and get the new brochures
and I used to love these free brochures.
These beautiful works of art and that was my big thing.
I would go and pick these things, fantastic works of art, for nothing.
And I still enjoy trying to get these.
The other thing at school and also at other places is graphics.
My real passion was actually art and design and these are some drawings of when I was a kid at school.
I’ve censored this one so you don’t know what the rest of her looks like (laughter).
These are posters at university and at university it’s a place where you really can branch out and do things.
This is what I looked like as a little boy and I used that.
My first award was not for science, it was for this design for a book jacket and that’s what I used to look like.
Now, many of you are young and beautiful now
but you’re going to look old and decrepit like me one day so enjoy your beauty whilst you may, will not last I’m afraid.
So these are book jackets for the university magazine.
This was a poster on the Underground in London, I’m not sure what that was but (laughter),
this is a colleague who ran a rock group and I used to sort of improvise.
This is sort of surface diffusion effect, a bit like chromatography.
This is my wife Margaret and I do logos and this is my logo for a buckyball workshop down under.
I designed this stamp as well for the Nobel Centenary and these are some for various little groups in Sussex,
oh sorry, in Sheffield.
I also redesigned the Japanese flag (laughter), I was hoping they were going to pay me for that one, but no.
I steal from Leonardo to actually do things.
Now probably the reason I’m a scientist is that I only got good for my frog at school
and I used to get good, very good for my maths and science.
But this is a drawing of Stockholm town hall at the age of thirteen when I’d never heard of the Nobel Prize
and this wonderful building is where the Nobel Prize was awarded so there was some thought in there.
Let’s talk about science first of all.
How many of you had this when you were a kid, okay?
Wow, really, very impoverished children in this place, (laughter) anyway there was a little kid who shall be nameless who,
he, every time he picked up the cube he tried to put it into the round hole.
It didn’t matter what shape, it was always the round hole.
So his mum said, thought he wasn’t going to really make it to university so she thought I’ll take him to see the psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist said, don’t worry, my analysis of this kid is that it doesn’t matter what the problem is,
he sees only one solution and there is a perfect career for that kid, and that’s to be a politician,
Mrs. Blair (laughter).
Okay but let me tell you what science is to me, it’s, patterns, not just in space and images but also in numbers
and one of my favourite patterns is this one and it gives the whole of chemistry in basically thirty seconds.
We know we use classical mechanics for the earth orbiting the sun.
And we use an electron orbiting nucleus, we have quantum mechanics.
And though angular momentum is involved and there are orientations with the angular momentum.
When J is zero two J plus one is one, when J is one, two J plus one is three.
And when J is two, two J plus one is five.
And that’s the origin of this.
Now how many of you don’t like numbers, mathematics,
okay for you I’m going to just throw away the numbers and leave the boxes there.
You’re probably physicists, well as far as I can tell.
Anyway let’s double them up, move them together, do this, this and this, double that, double this, double that,
move this to there and that again and what have we got?
Yeah.
Fantastic, it’s based on the numbers one three and five.
It’s so simple.
It explains the whole of chemistry, all of biology, all of life and all the useful bits of physics,
if any (laughter and applause).
Well of course, chemistry is that massive part of physics, the over arching,
but the one that pertains to us and I think that was a revelation for me.
The other thing to recognize is that many of the big surprises came, come from left field, totally unexpected
and it’s very difficult to convince people who don’t understand science but who have to pay for it,
tax payers and politicians, that that’s the case.
When the discovery of C60 was made, about six papers came out saying it wasn’t right.
It was a very difficult time, that was the same time as cold fusion so you know,
you were thinking if you were after committing suicide or something.
But anyway I developed a rule.
It’s my four out of five rule.
If you make an observation, develop a theory that explains it.
Then design further experiments to test the validity of that theory.
Four observations fit out of five, then the theory is almost certainly right.
If only one out of five fits, the theory is almost certainly wrong and the key part of that is almost for a scientist.
Okay so well let’s make sure we get some sound okay.
Let’s just do that again alright, it should be okay and then (sound effect - bomb).
That’s to wake you up because you know, let’s think about modern science.
Most people think that genetic engineering is new.
But without any knowledge of DNA we’ve been able to make this guy into a Chihuahua (laughter).
Now, and we’ve probably, I mean Kurt with his, he may be able to make a human being into a Chihuahua soon right
and I have some people that I suggest he does that too really (laughter).
But if you want to know what nano technology is, it’s as old as biology itself.
Atom by atom, molecule by molecule assembly of a complex or functional system.
And by that definition we are actually produced by nano technology, okay.
And so when people get worried about it you better tell them this.
Another aspect of it is we should with molecular electronics be able to take all that super computing capacity
and to put it into a wristwatch.
Now that happens to be a Calvin Klein wristwatch and just by Calvin putting CK on it
you’re prepared to pay ten times what it’s worth alright.
If I put HK on it I can’t even sell it at all and it really irritates me (laughter).
But that’s the situation we’re in.
We’re in an age of really I think distorted values and I think we need to worry about those.
I’ll come to my view of the next century which is incredibly exciting in the sciences.
My favourite molecule is not C60, it’s actually this molecule.
It looks like a dog to me, I hope it does to you.
It’s my dog made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, red nose okay.
I used to be a microwave spectroscopist, it was the only subject I really fully understood.
And by looking at the spectrum I can show that the dog shakes his head okay, and it looks at its tail alright?
Not only that, it undergoes what’s called internal rotation and I think this is really very interesting
and something that people haven’t really realized.
It’s been drinking too much schnapps so you know when you’ve been drinking up too much beer, the problem is
and if you’re walking down the street and you’re a dog, the most important thing to find is a lamppost (applause and laughter).
Now, the thing is little kids love that but older kids do too, but the take home message is that molecules are flexible
and that is very exciting because, I’m going to show this because it’s really a shame that John Walker isn’t here.
I remember going to his lecture and seeing this molecule for the first time and it was just fantastic.
I almost fell off my seat.
I wanted to start all over again and play around with these molecular machines.
As protons go in here and neutralize negative charges on this molecular protein wheel,
it turns a rotor in here, opening cavities and making ATP.
ADP goes into those cavities.
A perfect enzymic catalyst.
It’s a fantastic molecular machine developed by life long before Faraday.
I think Faraday, I really wish he would be alive to see these things.
I think he would be absolutely bowled over.
I don’t think he would mind that life had invented electric motors before he did.
And unfortunately you’re going to miss a wonderful talk by John probably discussing those machines.
And my view is that these machines are the future.
I’d think that the drug industry hasn’t even started to use devices as smart as the ones that they’re up against
in the body and that’s exciting.
I’ll come to the second, probably more serious aspect of my talk.
It’s about society and society is something that’s in these people’s heads rather than what’s out there.
The big difference between science and society is that science is nature, the way nature works.
And if nature, if you don’t like it, it’s just too bad.
It punches you on the nose.
Society is something different.
My wonderful colleague Kappa Cornforth, now 94, is shown in this picture at the age of eighteen
when he realized he was going to be totally deaf for the rest of his life,
yet he overcame all that to become a Nobel Prize winner.
I used to think you had to be as smart as this guy to win the Nobel Prize,
I guarantee it’s not necessary now from my own experience.
He says: "It may seem odd that a system of knowledge based on doubt
could have been the driving force in constructing modern civilization.
Scientists do not believe, they check.
I’m not asking you to believe anything I say on a scientific matter,
only that there is tacit evidence for all of it and I know the nature of that evidence and I can make a judgment of its worth."
I’m going to talk about I think the scientist philosopher.
I’m not a great fan for philosophers, maybe because I can’t understand them but I can understand this guy.
"I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vex questions in accordance with evidence
or leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive."
"The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held,
instead of being held dogmatically, they’re held tentatively
and with a consciousness that new evidence may, at any moment, lead to their abandonment."
This is the way opinions are held in the sciences as opposed to the way in which they’re held in theology.
I like this one.
"It is now lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics,
though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry."
Those are interesting things.
Another interesting British scientist is J.B.S. Haldane.
"My practice as a scientist is atheistic.
That is to say, when I set up an experiment I make the assumption that no god, angel,
or devil is going to interfere with its course,
and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career."
He has another quotation and he goes on: "I should therefore be intellectually dishonest
if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world."
I like this one.
Haldane: "In the unlikely event that there is a god, what would you say?"
He seems to be very fond of beetles.
There are 350,000 of them, right so there, so that’s where I stand.
Another aspect of science for me is really how do you get to the answer, but I like this quotation:
"I seek not the answer but to understand the question."
And I wanted to find out where this came from, so where do you go, Google (laughter) alright?
And what do I find, it’s me.
I was looking, it’s me, I mean I know this can’t be right but I’ve five quotations to me.
So there you go, so if you change it slightly, I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions,
you get closer to where it comes from and it’s Kung Fu, okay.
And it’s Cane and of course many of you know about David Carradine, actually I don’t know how many people,
he died a few weeks ago, yes a few of you do.
So here he is, but it probably goes back to Confucianism.
I think it goes to Confucius and it’s very interesting.
You have to frame the question and somehow in framing the question the answer falls out many times.
Walt Whitman, the great American writer, gave what I think is the best definition of science that I’ve ever come across.
He says: "I like the scientific spirit, the holding off, the being sure, but not too sure", brilliant line.
"The willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them.
This is ultimately fine, it keeps the way beyond open."
If you don’t have that attitude, the future, the way beyond is closed off.
Don’t underestimate the power of belief in closing you off from real understanding of anything, it’s dangerous.
I’ve decided there are three senses.
There’s common sense tells us the sun goes round the earth and we watch it, it goes round.
That’s common sense.
You don’t really need to know it’s the earth turning.
It’s basically uncommon sense if Copernicus and Galileo okay, that really works,
well something odd here to find out is that really true.
The real problem is that nonsense is now common and that’s a problem it seems to me.
And let me give you an example.
I was invited to Cincinnati and Margaret said "Harry would like to go to this museum",
I thought, I do, but anyway, let me show you this wonderful museum, 27 million dollars, just outside Cincinnati.
Young children in buses are coming into it.
They’re coming to learn that the Grand Canyon is 5,000 years old and was carved by Noah’s flood.
Here’s Noah and he’s Scottish, he’s got a Scottish accent.
"We’ve got to build a big boat because there’s a big lot of water coming", alright?
(laughter) Humans, did they live with dinosaurs?
God made Adam and Eve on the same day as the land animals so dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.
So we must have ridden, put saddles on them and ridden the damn things (laughter).
What did dinosaurs originally eat?
Originally before Adam sinned, all animals including dinosaurs were vegetarians, that Tyrannosaurus Rex,
I’ll tell you man they, what happened to the dinosaurs that didn’t get into Noah’s Ark?
The dinosaurs that did not enter Noah’s Ark were drowned in the flood 4,350 years ago
- about, by the way - and many were buried and preserved as fossibles.
No wonder the kids going here are scratching their heads (laughter), right, they’re told in school,
maybe, if they’re lucky, that the earth is 4.5 billion years old,
that the Grand Canyon is something like 6 million years in carving and 200 million years older the rocks at the bottom.
There’s a problem.
And it’s not just the kids.
Here’s Louisiana Governor, signed into law the Academic Freedom Bill
making sure that teachers teach alternatives to Darwin’s theory.
He signed it into law and he was being promoted as the Republican’s answer to Obama.
So I thought I’ll give my alternative theory, my favourite alternative theory is Simon the wanderer
sole human survivor of the earth travels the universe with a dog, an owl and a mechanical lover (laughter),
searching for the answer to "Why are we created only to suffer and die?"
At the end of the journey Simon meets a hoary old cockroach called Bingo.
We learn that the universe is an experiment carried out by a race of cockroaches
and that life and humans evolved from cockroach crap which they deposited on the earth, right (laughter).
So here is my favourite, we all live up and for some of us I can certainly believe that.
Simon asked: "Why did they do this when it meant so much agony,
suffering death to sextillions upon sextillions of living beings?"
Bingo asked Simon, answers to Simon's repeated ‘why, why, why’, with "Why not"?
(laughter).
I like that one and if you’re in Florida or some of you want to know an alternative,
you should see the seminal’s version of the origin of human beings, it’s a bit politically incorrect I might point out.
But what have we learned?
We’ve learned something wonderful from DNA.
That this is one of our cousins, okay, 98% of our, I love this guy, just look at the face.
He’s, I mean he’s looking at that because he clearly realizes,
it must be a Manchester United supporter being beaten by FC Barcelona in the European Cup.
70% the same as frogs.
50% as fruit flies, and if that’s not bad enough, 50% of fruit fly maggots as well.
Those are our cousins.
I like this one, 70% the same as pumpkins.
I love it, that’s what we’ve learned.
So from all that learning there’s only one religious leader who really seems to be understanding what’s going on.
And Dalai Lama says: "Buddhism must accept the facts whether found by science or by contemplative insight.
If, when we investigate something, we find there is reason and proof for it, we must acknowledge that as reality.
Even if it is in contradiction with the literal scriptural explanation
that has helped sway for centuries or with deeply held opinion or view."
I think we’ve got a problem.
This is the way that children are indoctrinated in Christian play schools, in madrases there’s 17,000
in the tribal lands of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
spending much of their time from the age of two, three four or five reading the Koran.
In Israel, also separated.
This area from Poland on the right, I could have been one of these.
My grandfathers came from central Poland.
And children in, they don’t look any different.
Children all over the world are identical.
But we have a question: Should parents have the right to bring up the children as they want?
Put your hands up if you think that’s correct.
Very interesting.
Well should parents have the right to teach their children that their classmates will go to hell
because they are not of the same religion or no religion at all?
It brings it into sharper focus.
This is an issue in Britain today because that is happening at the tax payers’ expense.
Northern Ireland, an advertisement I’ve had many years.
Let’s play Protestants and Catholics.
Gerald, “If I were prime minister of Northern Ireland”, he’s twelve years old, “this is how I would solve the problems.
First I would split Northern Ireland into two parts
and I would put Protestants on one side and Catholics on the other side.”
David, 14, “I would pass a law that said any Roman Catholic who set foot on the street
to start trouble would be shot instantly and without mercy.
I would starve them like rats until there wasn’t one left in Northern Ireland.”
That’s the legacy that you have of separating our children, okay.
It’s dangerous for the future and I think it’s obvious, all our kids should be taught together.
This is my favourite picture of a workshop.
These two kids enjoying science and if we don’t sort of change this and get our kids from the earliest possible age,
working together and playing together we’ll have big problems in the future.
Jefferson understood this.
We left Britain when I had to retire to go to the USA
and I’m really amazed at how brilliant some of the fathers of the American revolution were.
Jefferson said: "Because religious belief or non-belief is such an important part of every person’s life,
freedom of religion affects every individual.
State churches that use government power to support themselves
and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights.
Erecting 'the wall of separation between church and state' is therefore absolutely essential in a free society."
This is his tombstone and it’s a very interesting one.
First of all the author of the Declaration of American Independence, these are the things he was proud of.
The second was a very important one, particularly for Americans and anyone who wants to understand America.
The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, a fantastic document and finally the father of the University of Virginia.
He was a great guy.
Have a look at it, it’s on the web.
I do workshops with small children, all over the world, just talking about science
and the children are the same wherever they are, okay (plays video).
There is no difference between kids of that age, they just love playing around.
And wherever I go, they’re just delightful.
This is in Japan, in Santa Barbara, in Mexico, in Malaysia, this is by internet to Iceland and then Australia and also in the UK.
I show this in the UK, sometimes young women are screaming
but unfortunately it’s the bloke on the left not the bloke on the right that they’re screaming about (laughter).
This is the only kid who found a use for C60 (laughter), there we go.
If someone else doesn’t find something soon I might have to give the prize back.
Let’s get to the last parts of what I want to say.
Kappa again, this wonderful article which is on the vega website which I shall mention in a minute.
He says: "A few hundred years ago, a mere breath of time, a concentrated source of energy was discovered in the fossil fuels.
Essentially the energy of old sunlight, trapped by life and buried by the earth.
Humanity has exploited this resource with all the restraint of a fox in a chicken house.
Among non scientists there seems to be a general vague expectation,
if they think of the matter at all that scientists are sure to find some way
to rescue future generations from the shit into which the present one is dropping them."
He’s an Australian so you know they gather a way with words.
It took a million years to create the fossil fuel we have, that we use in one year.
"So if you’re a scientist", he says, "you realize before long, that if the future is in anyone’s hands",
and that’s a big if, "it’s in yours".
So it’s in your hands, there you go, let me go back to here, sustainability.
There are lots of issues.
And I think unless we split water I don’t think we’re really going to be able to use energy so voraciously as we have done before.
We would need even more efficient solar electricity production
and maybe genetically develop a wheat that can fix its own nitrogen.
There are hundreds of different things that we can do.
Water splitting is just one of them.
Well as I told you I like design and particularly I like making, doing logos and in fact this is my favourite animal.
And you know what it’s on, yes, elephant crap.
If there were no dung beetles Africa would be something like eighty, hundreds of feet deep in elephant crap
because they’re recycling it.
Well let’s look at our crap.
Let’s look at the world and a field in England with a hundred and forty thousand refrigerators.
That’s our crap.
And we have to know how to recycle it.
So here’s my logo for the future, we need to recycle our crap okay, and it’s a difficult thing to do.
So I’ve developed an initiative which I call Global Educational Outreach and one reason for that is the following,
that it, I’m incensed by the second part, well I’m incensed by all of it.
Because after, at the end of, as you go through this Kentucky museum it says, asks, why do we suffer,
why do we have to die, is there any hope, am I alone?
These are psychological brainwashing.
Well let’s look at what science has done, anaesthetics.
We don’t have mobile phones in those days but this is actually amputation without an anaesthetic.
Just think about it, what it was like in the eighteenth century, just put yourself in that guy’s leg, if you wish.
Let’s look at Penicillin, whoops, it’s just moving a little bit or for some reason, there it is.
Okay, this is a miracle.
This is blood poisoning in 1942.
In three weeks cured by Penicillin, there’s hardly anybody in this room whose life has not been touched by Penicillin,
either that or your immediate family.
I’m so incensed that science and technology is not credited with those sorts of contributions by people.
Let’s have a look at our heroes.
Who should they be?
The problem is this, that can we shake off our mad media image and who is responsible?
Here’s the guy who did it, if only he’d cut his hair alright (laughter).
But actually he’s an imposter and the reason he’s an imposter is, he was not the guy who did all that beautiful work.
The guy that did it was this guy.
In fact yes young Einstein.
Someone, in fact he was probably younger than almost everybody in this room
when he first started to think about what it would be like to travel at the velocity of light.
It’s young people.
And unfortunately we’ve got this guy and he’s a scientologist on top of it.
Darwin, is not this guy, the guy who created this work is young Charlie.
Maxwell, this is the old guy, who created probably the biggest breakthrough of the nineteenth century.
It was Wee Jamie, Wee Jamie Maxwell, with the little quiff on the top of the head.
It’s young people like you who do it.
Norman Heatly is totally unknown.
But he did all the work on Penicillin, all the starting, all the breakthroughs in Penicillin
and he didn’t get the Nobel Prize for it, okay.
These are the young people, Jim Heath, Sean O’Brien, Yuan Liu and Jonathan Hare who helped us in the discovery of C60 molecule.
So I set up the Vega Science Trust to make programmes for television and the internet.
Basically it’s the second revolution because the internet allows us all to broadcast.
We’ve got programmes, scientific discussions, we’ve pioneered this new concept,
totally new concept in TV debate that participants should actually understand what they’re talking about, okay (laughter).
Children’s workshops we’ve got fantastic lectures by Feynman.
These are the most wonderful physics presentations.
Four one and a half hour lectures by the greatest communicator I have ever seen.
We deal with malaria and the fact that the embargo on DDT condemns a million children to death each year.
Joseph Rotblat the greatest man I ever knew personally and Max Perutz who developed the structure of haemoglobin.
We’ve also got interviews, in fact we’ve got interviews with people actually here, okay and in fact you can see them again.
Some were in depth interviews at the top ones and also at Lindau.
In fact I have taken this, this is very interesting, Richard,
I’m not quite sure what they’re up to but I certainly like it (laughter).
These are some of our interviews here and basically the people in white are actually here, you can watch them again.
But our world has changed.
It’s changed because the encyclopaedia has been revolutionized.
How many have looked at the encyclopaedia?
This week?
(laughter).
How many of you looked at Google this week?
How many looked at Wikipedia this week?
That’s, you can’t just look at that and not realize that a revolution has taken place.
I used to wonder where the images in encyclopaedias came from.
And in fact, I call it the GooYouWiki world.
Google, You Tube and Wikipiedia have revolutionized our world, GYWW.
Well let’s see how they’ve done that.
This is an image of C60 in an encyclopaedia.
If I go to Google in the image browser what I get are pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages
and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages even rotating, (laughter).
That’s why encyclopaedias now have been changed.
It’s a triple revolution.
I want you to understand exactly why it’s a triple one.
The first is, Google has found a way of seeking and finding and accessing information.
Interestingly, this is the important part, that Wikipedia has fostered the passion to create and make that material available.
That is a creative aspect, you understand?
It’s an enabling one and You Tube has brought audio visual sort of aspects into it
and so I’ve, I’ve now started what I call GYWW 2.0.
Teachers all over the world can get access to the internet.
If we can put those onto mud huts in Kenya and Nigeria then we can surely get the internet to every teacher all over the world
and we give them access to that information.
Well what have we done?
We set up global educational outreach for science engineering and technology.
I call it ‘geoset’ and it’s pretty straight forward.
It’s basically a computer, a capture station.
I think it’s the sort of new thing that’s coming through and you can have a video and downloadable power point for teachers.
I don’t need to be here because most of you are watching that ninety percent of the time.
So what can we do?
Well I’ve got my young undergraduates to make little movies.
Let me show you these to give you an idea of the future.
You’re all going to have to think about this very carefully and I think you’ll find it fascinating what our young people,
under graduates can actually do.
(plays clip - ‘Recently, the first case of inbreeding that was scientifically linked to deformities in animals was released.
This study was done by John Vucetti and Ralph Peterson with the School of Environmental Science
at Michigan Technology University on a population of wolves, a very close relative of the dog.
The study was conducted on a small isolated wolf population
located at Isle Royale National Park in Northern Lake Superior Michigan.
The three packs are comprised of around 24 wolves, all descended from one female
and one or two males who crossed an ice bridge from Canada during an unusually cold winter in the 1940s.
Since then they have been isolated on the islands that make up the Isle Royale National Park’.)
Okay this is the most detailed study over 70 years of animals that have been trapped on an island
and let me just go through it because.
(‘This graph shows the vertebrae defects in relation to the estimated birth date of the wolf.
The number of deformation, deformities, seems to increase significantly during the late 1980s.
The photograph on the left hand side is what a normal wolf vertebrae should look like.
And this photograph on the right is the defected vertebrae.
Again in this photograph you can clearly and compare and contrast the deformed vertebrae versus the one..’).
I’m going to stop it there because I’m running out of time and I just want you to see some other things, one on beetles.
Kerry Gilmore is a graduate student and next year every student of chemistry will have to make a presentation like this
and put it up on the web okay.
And this is going to be part of his CV, their CV.
(plays clip – ‘Hi, my name is Kerry Gilmore and I am a graduate student at Florida State University,
I work for Dr. Al Googan as an organic chemist.
Now I love organic chemistry because it provides you the opportunity to go through and be an architect,
an engineer, a builder, because we can go through and really look at designing molecules,
we can figure out how to actually make these molecules and then finally we actually get to go and…).
I’m going to stop there because I want to show you just one more.
And this is by Steve Acker who is here today using this technology in a highly creative way.
(plays clip (music and sound effects) Hello, welcome to another episode of Secret Science.
You’re going to have to excuse me today, I’m kind of in disguise.
I had a meeting with Agent X and he gave me a secret document, there we are.
Top Secret.
Now the problem is, he gave me all this information X, right before he disappeared.
He gave me these two envelopes, A and B.
Now according to him it contains a secret message.
Okay that’s a secret message written in invisible ink, okay.)
I’m going to stop it there but this is one for kids to learn about invisible ink
and then Steve goes on to show them how to make that in the rest of it.
Okay I’ve got to go on and tell you something else for is, basically assessment is a pleasure.
This is me assessing a pile of papers like this and getting pretty pissed off about it,
sitting there watching the students make their demonstrations.
It’s very easy and very enjoyable (laughter).
I’ve got modules on algebra, on maps, on content, we’re setting up a network all over the world,
in Japan and Florida and UK and also in Australia and New Zealand.
I’m going to finish off with some important key ones.
My favourite quotation from Feynman is “The freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and I believe in other fields.
It was born out of a struggle, it was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure
and I do not want to forget that importance, the importance of that struggle and by default let it fall away.
If you know you’re unsure you have a chance to change the situation.
I want to demand that freedom for future generations”.
That’s for you.
ines is an organization that some of us are involved with.
It’s an international network.
We point out that physics, you shouldn’t be doing physics to create better bombs.
We’ve already got 28,000 of them, we don’t need any more.
You shouldn’t be a chemist to make better napalm and you shouldn’t be an engineer to make better land mines.
Jo Rotblat, I think, the greatest man I ever knew personally, was basically either one or the only scientist of,
one of two people who left the Manhattan project when it wasn’t,
it was found not to be necessary and before the bomb was completed.
In his Nobel address he said something fantastic.
“We appeal as human beings to human beings.
Remember your humanity and forget the rest.
If we can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise, if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
The quest for a war free world has a basic purpose:
survival.
But if in the process we learn to achieve it by love, rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion;
if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent,
the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.
Above all remember your humanity.”
This is Jo just about a year or two before he died at the age of 97.
Here he is, and look at this, can you believe it?
How did it stay up, it’s impossible.
(laughter).
This is a picture of me, in front of a picture of me in front of a picture of Jo, the origin of the picture over there.
Remember your humanity and forget the rest, he goes on to say.
Don’t have time for that.
I want to, so saving the planet is a global citizenship project, we can’t do it all by ourselves.
There are free thinkers all over the world.
There are blog sites join them and work together.
Recognize that ENRON, what did ENRON do wrong, and Madoff, they promised pay back in this life.
My last two slides.
Stein, my favourite poster.
Said "I’m an alien creature, I was sent from another planet with a message of good will from my people and the message says:
Dear earth people when you finally at last destroy your planet and have no place to live, you can come and live with us.
And we will teach you how to live in peace and harmony
and we will give you a coupon good for ten percent off all deep dish pizzas too, sincerely Bob."
(laughter).
Destroying the planet looks like it, I don’t know, our scientists are not sure but it looks pretty bad.
Peace and harmony, isn’t it incredible that we elect, by democratic means in general,
leaders who can’t solve our problems without sending young people like you to go and kill each other.
I can’t understand it.
But at the end of the day he’s got pizzas for a sense of humour.
Without a sense of humour it’s not worth living as far as I’m concerned.
My last bit, I never cease to enjoy this bit of film (plays clip – Enya).
Going to finish with one last comment.
I spoke to some industrialists a few months ago, people who try to make money some way
and I suggested that if their attitude had been not what’s in the best interests of our shareholders
and people who’ve got money in them but what’s in the best interests of those kids,
I think we wouldn’t have been in the mess we’re in today.
Thanks a lot.