I’m sorry to keep you from lunch and dinner but now I guess it’s a bit of a serious issue, because things are not so good.
And it’s a pleasure to be back in Lindau.
It’s four horsemen of the apocalypse and actually there are a lot more.
But I’m going to deal with four.
We’ve only got a few minutes.
Anti-science, sustainability, mystical political dogma and proliferation of powerful weapons.
And when I start this sort of talk I always use my favourite quotation,
‘if you make people think they’re thinking, they love you, but if you really make them think they hate you’.
And in fact one person ranted last year about my talk in Lindau, but unfortunately suffers from anosognosia.
It’s a very good term.
I use it for anybody who doesn’t think the way that I do.
And his disease is irrational paranoia.
And if you discuss these matters you find that’s the case.
Ok let’s talk about science itself because it’s misunderstood.
And I think one should go back a little bit historically.
Abelard in the 12th century, a religious philosopher said in Sic et Non, he wrote,
‘by doubting we come to enquire and by enquiring we arrive at truth’.
And that for me and I hope for many is very much the most important aspect when you come to philosophical issues.
Francis Bacon wrote a book Novum Organum, and amazingly it meant new instrument.
So in the 15th/16th century science was a new instrument.
It did not really exist, it was just empirical observation.
So what was it, it was inductive reasoning.
Observation, hypothesis, evidence and then a law of nature.
The point I’m going to make is that a culture cannot exist without a language.
And one must learn that language first to understand it and secondly to make a contribution.
I’ll use this and some of you...
Anybody read this?
There may be some.
Well it’s “Shenyang” in Chinese.
But in Japanese its “Kroto” and it also means expert or professional.
And this is my wife’s.
Actually in Chinese I heard one time.
In Chinese it’s a bit more complicated, they always say “umm, I’m not sure what this means”.
But this man knows so much you’ll never know how much this man knows.
Ok, so, interestingly.
Now for me an important point was this lecture on springs by Robert Hooke.
And what he said, “The power of any spring is in the same proportion as the tension thereof”.
Therefore if one power stretch it or bend it one space, 2 will bend it 2 and 3 will bend it 3 and so forth.
That is Hooke’s law.
So the theory is very short, and the way of trying is very easy.
The problem is, how do we integrate this?
It’s not an easy thing.
Hooke never wrote an equation.
In fact there weren’t any equations of physics at that time.
Basically as you know it’s slightly easier to integrate an equation,
and therefore you get basically the wonderful parabolic curve of the harmonic oscillator.
And I argue, as strongly as I can, that there was no science until an equation of physics was written.
And the algorithms enabling transformation such as calculus had been developed.
Because you now look deeply into it.
And there some students who actually appreciate this.
For instance they decide to tattoo these on their shoulders.
Actually there’s an error on that one, a minus sign missing.
I’ve seen Maxwell’s equations, DNA and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
I’ll move, that’s LSD, just in case you want to synthesise it.
And buckytubes and Moebius strips.
And my favourite is this one: Nicole a physics graduate student, “My tattoo is the Taylor expansion of sine.
I consider it the most beautiful thing I have ever learned.”
Now listen to that, how many people would say the most beautiful thing they’ve ever learned is an equation?
Very small number of people.
Many in this audience probably, but outside this audience probably very few.
And it turns out in 2010 Nicole was here.
And she walked past.
And I looked at this and this was my favourite tattoo.
So I was able to actually photograph more of it.
And here she is, fantastic student from Stanford in 2010.
So that’s an interesting aspect.
It’s saying something about the appreciation of the language of the universe.
Now some of the parents of science are Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, Newton and Leibniz.
And in fact one of my favourites is Emilie de Chatelet because she translated Principia into French.
And Voltaire was one of her lovers.
And he wrote to Frederick II of Prussia to say that ‘de Chatelet was a great man whose only fault was that she was a woman’.
I thought you’d like that.
So there were many people involved in this.
Walt Whitman, the great American writer, I think he encapsulated science better than anybody else,
better than even the scientists.
He said, ‘I like the scientific spirit, the holding off, the being sure, but not too sure’.
That’s the great writer, the double take.
‘The willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them.
This is ultimately fine, it keeps the way beyond open’.
That’s the most important aspect of the sciences.
It moves on in exorable, improving and getting better and explaining more.
And in fact all other constructs are locked in immutable nascent dogma for all eternity.
They will not change.
It’s impossible, in some cases blasphemous to change.
Totally impervious to rational criticism.
And that’s what we face.
That’s what you will face in the next century.
If we survive it.
Science, well there are many aspects.
But an important one is the body of knowledge which you learn at school.
Another one is the application of that knowledge, technology.
Another one very important is the way we discover new knowledge.
The scientific methodology.
But there’s something more important.
Before it was useful it had a real value to intellectuals as a culture.
And particularly politicians, they don’t think that science is useful unless it makes money.
But in fact the most important aspect is that it used to have another name, ‘natural philosophy’.
And the most important aspect of natural philosophy is, it is the construct,
the complete set of constructs we have devised to determine anything which is true with a significant degree of reliability.
And science is part of that.
It’s this overall attitude and construct to determine what is true.
And therefore the ethical purpose of education must involve the teaching of young people
how they can decide what they’re being told is actually true.
And that’s a problem.
Because a lot of people are teaching stuff that is patently untrue.
And that is I think a serious issue today.
Thus the teaching of a sceptical evidence based assessment of all claims, without exception is an intellectual integrity issue.
With evidence anything goes.
Think about it.
Now scientists and engineers make up probably about 1% of the population.
And I think nothing compares with the contributions we have made.
Humanitarian ones and unfortunately of course as you well know some are not, are to the detriment of society.
Let’s take one of my favourites: anaesthetics.
Perhaps you don’t realise what it was like to have an amputation before.
Have a good look.
Here is Rowlandson, the paparazzi of the 16th century.
People died.
Lots of people had operations.
Women had mastectomies without an anaesthetic.
There can be no more wonderful contribution to humanity, from chemistry, than anaesthetics.
Penicillin, another one.
This is a miracle.
You don’t have to pray, this works.
Here blood poisoning in 1942.
In 3 or 4 weeks this girl was cured by penicillin.
And here is one of the unsung heroes of that particular breakthrough.
The future you are facing is that bacteria are evolving with an immunity to antibiotics.
You could be going back to this.
We have a serious problem.
We need young people who are smart to combat this sort of problem.
Misplaced credit.
Here’s one example.
The great achievement of DNA fingerprinting is that Alan Crotzer was released.
He spent 24 years in a Florida jail for a crime he did not commit.
“It’s been a long time coming”, he said, “I’m not bitter.
I’m angry but I’m not bitter”.
He said “I thank god for this day”.
Well faith kept him going.
But science got him out.
And here is Alec Jeffries who developed DNA fingerprinting.
So we are to some extent playing god apparently.
Anti-science.
There’s a lot of it around.
Now let me take an example.
Basically there are 3 senses.
Common sense tells us that the sun goes around the earth.
Who agrees with me?
Who disagrees with me?
Well it must have been the other N minus 3 people that didn’t put your hand up.
Well Giordano Bruno.
This film in the 16th century, I could have had all the people
who didn’t put their hand up then burned at the stake for claiming I was wrong, ok.
Uncommon sense is required to look more deeply and realise that the earth is turning on its axis.
Which makes it seem as though the sun is going around us.
The uncommon sense and bravery of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno who was burned to death by the inquisition.
And if you want to know what it really was like, go on You Tube and watch Giordano Bruno.
I can never watch it again.
It’s horrific, we’re in better times in some parts of the world.
How many of you know the evidence for the fact that the earth is turning on its axis?
And the earth is orbiting the sun.
Have a look round.
Almost nobody, there’s almost nobody.
Now that’s interesting.
Because the problem is, that becomes ever more frightening as weapons of mass destruction and these become available,
the fact that many find justification in mystical dogma to drag us back into the dark ages.
And they don’t need evidence for what they believe.
In fact you have not required evidence to accept that the earth is orbiting the sun and the earth is turning on its axis.
And I want you to think about that.
How much else have you accepted without evidence?
Because that’s one of the most serious problems again that we face today.
And now the problem is nonsense is common.
So what is the most beautiful example of nonsense is that the Kentucky Fried Creation Museum, just outside Cincinnati.
School children in bus loads are going to this and other groups as well.
Did humans live with dinosaurs?
God made Adam and Eve on the same day as land animals and so dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.
What did dinosaurs originally eat?
Originally before Adam sinned, all animals including dinosaurs were vegetarian.
Well you don’t need those teeth to eat a lettuce, I tell you.
What happened to the dinosaurs that didn’t go on Noah’s ark?
The dinosaurs that did not enter Noah’s ark,
were drowned in the flood, 4,350, about and many were buried and preserved as fossils.
And in fact Noah’s ark is there and here’s Noah and he’s a Scot.
He’s saying there’s a big flood coming and we’ve got to build a big boat.
(laughter).
And children are being led to believe that creationism is true and science is false.
And I think that’s unethical and something needs to be done about it.
What, I don’t know.
Global warming is a hoax.
Well maybe it is, who knows, probably not.
My colleague Kappa Cornforth, now 95, a fantastic guy, a real genius.
He’s been deaf since the age of 18 and has overcome that to win the Nobel Prize.
He says,
‘it may seem odd that a system of knowledge based on doubt could have been the driving force in constructing modern civilisation’.
Scientists do not believe, they check.
I’m not asking you to believe anything I say on a scientific matter.
Only that there is tested evidence for all of it and I know the nature of that evidence and I can make a judgment of its worth.
That’s what a scientist is.
And I use what I call my 4 out of 5 rule.
Ok, scientific method.
If you have an idea and you make an observation, develop a hypothesis,
carry out at least 5 experiments to validate your hypothesis.
If 4 observations out of 5 fit, you’re almost, accent on almost, certainly right.
If only 1 out of 5 fits you’re almost, accent on almost, certainly wrong.
And if 4 out of 5 fit, rough estimates give you a 99.9% possibility of being right.
And the one that doesn’t fit you made some sort of error there.
Well what do we do about climate change?
We know all about it, we’ve discussed it here.
Don’t simply say it’s a fact to people who are sceptical.
After all scepticism is the primary law of science.
Discuss the evidence and ask them to draw their own conclusions.
Well, what about rainfall, is it increasing, temperature, is that increasing?
Glaciers, are they receding or not?
Is the sea level rising?
Are animals moving from their natural habitats?
What about CO2, what about hurricanes and tornados, are there more or less.
Is there more energy in the atmosphere?
What about the ice in Artic and Antarctica.
Present the evidence that you have looked at and get those people to consider why you think there’s climate change, or do not.
Sustainability, that’s obviously another problem.
And again I go back to my friend and colleague Kappa Cornforth.
In this article which I hope you will all read, it’s on my website, vega.org.uk, he has a fantastic article,
‘scientists as citizens’.
I really hope you will go to the website and read it.
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.
The perspective of the politician does not extend beyond the next election, the unborn have no vote.
The average citizen’s reaction is ‘What did posterity ever do for me?’.
The administrator seldom has a scientific background or any remit to consider an extended future.
The businessman wants a profit.
The quicker the better.
Among all these people there seems to be a general vague expectation,
if they think of the matter at all then science is assured to find some way to rescue future generations from the shit
into which the present one is dropping them.
Well he’s an Australian, so you know there you go.
Great line, took a million years to produce 1 years’ worth of fossil fuel.
So if you’re a scientist you realise before long that if the future is in anyone’s hands, it’s in yours.
And here’s Kappa a few years ago, Andy Sierkowski and myself.
He’s standing on top of me, ok.
So what do we think?
Just 1 or 2 issues of sustainability.
One of my favourites is this one.
You know what this guy is doing is recycling shit?
But this is ours; this is a field in England with 140,000 refrigerators, supposedly recycling them.
We don’t know how to do it.
And so here’s my logo for the future, we need to recycle our own shit.
(laughter).
We need to solve water splitting.
Mystical and political dogma.
I guess sometimes my favourite.
I am not here to make you feel comfortable.
I’m here to make you think.
And these are some issues.
The philosopher Kant wrote an article, “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit”.
Now it’s difficult to translate Unmündigkeit, but we’ll try.
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed mental immaturity.
This immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance”.
If you want to be enlightened you have to make your own decisions.
And think very carefully and look very carefully at what people tell you.
This immaturity is self-imposed, if its cause lies not in lack of understanding
but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest.
But the myth persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion - a great line - without the discomfort of thought.
And who said it?
President Kennedy.
Great statement.
La dudo es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia, doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Don’t be frightened of not understanding and questioning, being unsure.
That’s the most important aspect of the scientist.
Jefferson, with Madison probably my favourite president.
He said: “Because religious belief or non-belief”, yeah I’m in there too, amazingly,
“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 to persons of other faiths,
undermine our civil rights.
Erecting the wall of separation between church and state therefore is absolutely essential in a free society.”
The Virginia act of establishing religious freedom, 1786.
“Well aware that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship place or ministry whatsoever.
Nor shall be enforced, restrained or molested or burdened in his body or goods.
Nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinion or belief.
But that all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion.
And the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or effect their civil capacities.”
As some of you will know that is essentially,
or they say it’s impossible for an atheist to become president of the United States.
This is a very important statement.
Proliferation of powerful weapons.
I think we must all really be worried about this.
My friend Leon Lederman, physics Nobel Prize winner of ’88 wrote last year.
He said: “Harry you see a lot of young people, will you read this from me to you?”.
“So many years have passed and the human race is still saddled with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet.
We must redouble our efforts to unify the science community against this huge stupidity.”
The greatest man I knew personally was Joseph Rotblat.
Beautiful guy, he died at the age of 97.
I got to know him in the last few years of his life very well.
He was I think possibly the only one of 2 who left the Manhattan project when it was clear that the bomb was not necessary.
He had gone on that because he felt it was a deterrent.
There was no nuclear threat.
So he resigned before it was completed.
With Pugwash he got the Nobel Prize.
And I want to read from his Nobel address.
‘We appeal as human beings to human beings, remember your humanity and forget the rest.
If you 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 how 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 and forget the rest’.
And here is Jo in his office.
You can hardly see him, there’s so much paper in there.
And look at this, I don’t know how that is staying up, I tell you.
(laughter).
How did he do that?
Ok, good scientist.
Well coming to the end of what I want to say, we need answers.
But they’re going to be hard to get.
And I love quotations as you know.
My favourite again, another favourite is, ‘I seek not the answer but to understand the question’.
It’s an interesting one.
You really need to know what the question is for which you’re seeking the answer.
And I love this so much that I decided I want to know where did it come from.
So of course where do you go?
Google.
Google knows everything.
And what did I discover, it was me.
(laughter).
I’d say it so often Google thought that I was the originator of this particular statement.
But I changed it slightly and didn’t realise.
I seek not to know the answers but to understand the questions.
If you do that you find it’s Kung Fu.
And in fact it’s probably deeply buried in Taoism and Confucianism.
So what have we got, saving the planet will require some technical fixes.
Water splitting is a holy grail.
Saving the planet will require society to change its habits.
And it does have a few habits which are disturbing.
For instance the world population, here we see it, rising suddenly in this century, dramatically to 10 billion by 2025 to 2050.
Malthus said, ‘no technology can save us from unfettered population growth on a planet with limited resources’.
You need to think about that.
And I got a logo for a conference on the population explosion.
I do logos in my spare time.
We need to have a reverence for nature.
In fact if we want to save the rain forest,
we have to teach all children on the planet to love trees as much as wild animals and their pets.
And we need to think about this because a lot of people go around killing animals for pleasure.
This guy isn’t going to eat that.
That is a lot of steak I tell you, right.
He shot it, what pleasure could that man have got for shooting that magnificent animal.
This is father and son bonding, ok, the NRA think this is wonderful.
And what are they looking at, they’ve shot something.
What about that, are they going to eat all that fish, I don’t know.
You know fish actually feel pain as much as your pet kitten.
The neurological studies on a website from Australia has studied the pain that fish have.
So just imagine have a hook and being pulled out of the water by a hook in your mouth.
Just making you think.
Sheep are hard to shoot and it’s a future king of England probably there shooting things for pleasure.
Another way, working with your children, or parents.
And here these animals have been shot by mum with a camera.
That’s the way to shoot.
So basically our survival is a global citizen project.
And Benjamin Franklin, one of my favourites, he said, ‘we must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately’.
Benjamin Franklin on the signing of the declaration of independence.
So we must throw away our nationalistic patriotic attitudes.
They’re not good.
Science is the one that cuts through all that race issues and that colour issues and that national issues.
We are united by the philosophy, the natural philosophy of the way it is.
And it’s the same on Mars as it is on the other end of the universe.
Because you’ve got to recognise that’s just an excuse for being selfish.
Nationally selfish.
But who are this group of people, maybe 1%?
They’re not even understood.
Here’s a typical thing, ‘can society shake off their mad media image’.
These are typical pictures.
I know it looks like me, you know I just took my glasses off.
(laughter).
Alright, I’m holding the test tube.
And this guy, he’s an imposter, he didn’t do that.
The guy that did it was this guy, totally unknown.
Yeah, young Einstein.
In fact he was 17 when he thought of first “what would it be like to travel at the velocity of light?”.
He was younger than almost everybody in the audience.
Darwin.
Here he was Charlie, he was only 24 when he started on that journey that would lead to the theory of evolution.
And this is a drawing of Darwin’s phylogenetic tree.
And here’s a little logo there too.
(laughter).
And actually I did this and I thought I’d show you my T-shirt.
I’m not going to take everything off, you don’t need to worry.
(laughter).
But I’ve designed this for a secret society.
And if you write to me I can send you the design.
So here’s my T-shirt.
(laughter and applause).
I got a hundred and they went like hot cakes.
But in fact if you write to me I can send you the design to put it on your car as a bumper sticker.
Clerk Maxwell, these equations with Feynman were the greatest contribution of any kind in the 19th century.
And they lead to things like the mobile phone.
And every time you use your mobile phone you thank this guy.
Wee Jamie, with the little quiff on the top of his head.
You are now scientists, not those old guys, ok.
Rosalind Franklin took the most important photograph of all time and here it is.
Which led to the structure of DNA.
Chandrasekhar was a young man when he realised that a star, 1.5 times the mass of the sun would collapse into a neutron star.
And they didn’t believe him.
That’s why he wasn’t at Cambridge.
Cambridge astronomers didn’t believe him.
So he went off to Chicago.
The problem is that these people, these young people, like your age, are not our icons.
You think of these old guys.
I’m really past it ok.
I’m not going to say for the rest of my colleagues but certainly I am.
But the problem is you’ve got this guy as your icon and he’s a scientologist, ok.
(laughter).
There you go, this is Jim Heath, Sean O’Brien, Yuan Liu and Johnathan Hare
who were the students who work with Bob Curl and Rick Smalley and myself.
And Dave Walton and Roger Taylor were involved in Sussex on the discovery of C60.
It’s young people like you, not the old guys.
They are imposters.
My favourite book of the moment is “All Over Coffee”.
It’s a fantastic book.
How many of you have been to San Francisco?
You got to get this book.
I mean it’s just beautiful.
It’s full of really curious comments.
You’ll love them, oblique and surreal.
But the wonderful drawings of San Francisco.
And there’s Alcatraz, you can see in the distance.
These are 2 of my favourites.
‘Set your ideals to those of the image of your idol, pull your collar tight and walk into the storm’.
And this is the best, ‘Take a stand and automatically you have a supporter and an enemy’.
Ok, I know that.
Well, there are young people taking a stand.
How many of you know Zack Kopplin?
Just a few.
Well Zack called me on the phone, maybe over a year ago and asked me “could I get a load of Nobel Prize winners to support him”.
And almost all my colleagues did.
I mean he must have got seventy of them.
Zack has campaigned to keep creationism out of the public schools’ science classrooms.
And has been involved in other separation of church and state causes.
At high school student he campaigned against the Louisiana science education and creationism law.
And he has some enemies.
But he’s got you as friends.
And we got to support young people like you who have to take a stand.
A lot of things are problematical today and it needs bravery.
Probably a bravery that I don’t have enough of, I must admit.
So, final thing.
One of my favourite posters is this one by Stine.
I’m an alien creature, I was sent from another planet with a message of good will from my people.
The message says
“Dear earth people, when you finally at least 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 10% of all deep dish pizzas, too.
Sincerely, Bob.”
3 things, destroy the planet.
I don’t know, but we now have something like thirty thousand nuclear weapons.
I don’t know what’s happening with climate change, it looks to me that it is.
I’m worried.
I know something about this.
Is it not incredible that we can’t solve our problems in the 21st century
without getting our politicians to sit down at the table and solve those problems
without sending young people like you to go and kill each other?
It is incredible when you stand back and think about it.
But at the end there’s a pizza and a sense of humour.
And if you don’t have a sense of humour, especially today, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you, there’s a problem.
But anyway, business as usual.
Let’s not get carried away.
We live on an insignificant blue dot among a thousand million, million, million stars.
Actually, there we go, all those zeroes coming out.
10^22 stars in the universe.
And in fact nobody really cares, nobody else, whether we survive.
The dinosaurs and dodos died out.
Extinction is just business as usual.
We’re just improving business efficiency.
That’s what governments want us to do.
And we’re doing it.
The response when they say that scientists make mistakes, which we do, is that although knowledge cannot guarantee good decisions,
common sense suggests that wisdom is an unlikely consequence of ignorance.
I’ll have to think about that.
Thank you very much.
Applause.