UNEXPECTED CONVERSATION: Richard Feynman

In this episode, Rick connects with the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Known for his groundbreaking contributions to quantum mechanics, Feynman’s work inspires curiosity and innovation in science. ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  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 had not 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've gotten older and I'm more relaxed, that I've spread out a little bit. 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.

• 1:06Rick Rubin?

  You're really missing out. Art has so much potential to stimulate the mind. Tell me about your family, tell me about your father.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yes, well, we had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Even when I was a small boy, he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And we would read, say, about dinosaurs. And maybe it would be talking about the Brontosaurus or something. And they would say something like, "This thing is 25 feet high and the head is six feet across." And he'd stop always and say, "Now 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. It would break the window as it came by.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Everything we'd read would be translated into some reality. So that I learned to do that. And everything I read, I tried to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying. 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.

• 2:27Rick Rubin?

  I'm not sure if we know why now or even if they ever existed, but it is interesting to think about. Tell me more about your childhood.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  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 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 on the weekend. And 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'll explain in a minute. But the other mothers, seeing this, of course, thought that was wonderful and that their 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 relationship to me.

• 3:22Rick Rubin?

  It's great that you and your father were so close.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 a bird is that? And I said, I haven't the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is. He says, 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 hontarapeiro. In Italian, a chutera picchita. He says, in Chinese, it's a chungong tong.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  In Japanese, it's a patata kurecha, etcetera, he says. Now, do you know all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is? And when you're finished with all that, he says, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now, he says, let's look at the bird and what it's doing."

• 4:26Rick Rubin?

  So he didn't just put names on things, but inspired you to think about what was going on?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  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."

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Now, that's 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, very early.

• 5:42Rick Rubin?

  So before you even knew it, you were interested in physics. What else did your dad say?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  If you look close, you'll 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 wagon, but relative to the sidewalk, it was moved forward a little bit. It's just the wagon caught up with it. So that's the way I was educated by my father, with those kind of examples and discussions. With no pressure, just lovely, interesting discussion, though.

• 6:32Rick Rubin?

  That's great that your dad was such a great teacher. Were there any other influences around you that you could learn from when you were a kid?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  My cousin at that time was three years old, who was in high school, and was having considerable difficulty with his algebra and had a tutor. And I was allowed to sit in the corner while the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra. I said to my cousin that, I said, "What you trying to do?" You know, I hear him talk about X. He said, "Well, you know, two X plus seven is equal to fifteen," he said. "And you're trying to find out what X is." I says, "You mean four?" 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. I learned algebra, fortunately, by not going to school.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  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 a 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 did understand what you were trying to do.

• 7:53Rick Rubin?

  You learn to actually solve problems, not just apply a formula.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  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. 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 encyclopedia, 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 thirteen. And then the calculus book finally came out, and I was so excited. And I went to the librarian to take it out. And she looks at me, and she says,

• 8:43Speaker 01

  "You're just a child. What are you taking this book out for? This book is..." So it was one of the few times in my life I lied. I said it was for my father, he sold 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. 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, that he didn't understand it. So that was the first time I knew I had learned more in some sense than he.

• 9:20Rick Rubin?

  I don't know if you had learned more, but you somehow were able to see through the problems in a way that your dad couldn't.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:34Rick Rubin?

  What else did your dad teach you about?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that my father taught me beside physics, whether it's correct or not, was disrespect for certain kinds of things.

• 9:46Rick Rubin?

  Like what?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  For example, when I was a little boy, in a rotograph viewer, that's the printed pictures and newspapers first came out, and 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," he'd say. "Here is one human standing here, and all these others are bowing. Now, what is the difference? This one is the Pope, and those are the..." Or maybe 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. But 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?

• 10:31Speaker 01

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

• 10:45Rick Rubin?

  So he was wary of authority and he taught you to be wary of authority?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you think he was proud of you?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  He was happy with me, I believe. Once, though, when I came back from MIT and been there a few years, he said to me, no, he said, you become agitated about these things. And there's one question I've always had that I've 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 then 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 all right. He says, well, now, is the photon in the atom ahead of time that it comes out? Or is there no photon in start with?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I said, there's no photon in it, just that the electron makes a transition. He comes, he says, well, then where does it come from and 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 couldn't try 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 started, he was talking and he suddenly said that he could no longer say a certain word. The word was cat. Because his word bank 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.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  You just make them as they 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, and I never was able to explain any of the things that he didn't understand.

• 12:36Rick Rubin?

  It's funny, it sounds like he might have understood photons better than you.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  So he was unsuccessfully sent me through all these universities in order to find out these things and never did find out.

• 12:50Rick Rubin?

  Why did you get involved in the atomic program?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Well, it was a completely different kind of a thing. It would mean that I would have to stop the research in what I was doing, which is by life's desire to take time off to to do this, which I felt I should do in order to protect civilization, if you want.

• 13:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so that was what I had to debate with myself. My first reaction, I didn't want to get interrupted in my normal work to do this odd job. Uh, there was also the problem. Of course, of any moral thing involving war, I wouldn't have much to do with that. But it kind of scared me when I realized what the weapon would be, which I realized. And that since it might be possible, there was 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.

• 13:46Rick Rubin?

  In retrospect, do you have any qualms about being involved?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  When we got to moral questions, I do have something I would like to say about it because the original reason to start the project, which I had, which was the Germans were a danger. Started me on a process of action, which was to try to develop the system in Princeton, then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work. And 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 can make it go. And so it was a project in which we all worked very, very hard and all cooperating together. And with any project like that, you continue to work trying to get success, having decided to do it.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  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 single thought came to my mind at all about that, that that meant now that I have to reconsider why I'm continuing to do this. I simply didn't think, okay?

• 14:56Rick Rubin?

  Once you've decided to work on a project and you're trying to solve a puzzle, you're enthralled by the puzzle. So you're in the puzzle. I can understand you not second guessing why you're doing the puzzle once you've accepted doing the puzzle, even if the situation changed. How did it feel when you made progress on the puzzle?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Only reaction I remember, perhaps I was blinded by my own reaction, was a very considerable elation and excitement. And there was a kind of 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 sitting on the hood 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.

• 16:06Rick Rubin?

  When did it change from the celebration of the success to realizing the real world consequences?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature. It may be from just the bomb itself and 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. 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 realized from where we were, I O 59th Street, to drop one at 34th Street. And that would spread all the way out there 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.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  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 to 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. That they didn't understand that. And I had this very strange view of any construction that I would see.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  I would always thought how foolish they are to try to make something.

• 17:48Rick Rubin?

  It sounds like you were really hopeless. You viewed it in a global way.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yes. I was really in a kind of depressive condition.

• 17:57Rick Rubin?

  How do you think you changed after this experience?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Well, they expected me to be wonderful to offer me a job like this, and I wasn't wonderful. And therefore, I realized a new principle. Was I'm not responsible 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, I could relax about this, and I thought to myself, I haven't done anything important. Well, I'm never gonna 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 gonna do things only for the fun of it.

• 18:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  And then I went to Hans Bethe, and I said to him, hey, by the way, I show you something amusing. And I explained this to him. And he said to me, it's very amusing and interesting, he said, but what is the use of it? What, I said, that doesn't make any, it hasn't any use. I'm just doing it for the fun of it.

• 19:39Rick Rubin?

  That sounds great. You reconnected with the thing that first connected you to physics, the fun. It didn't mean anything, it didn't have to be for anything. It was for the joy of knowledge, the joy of understanding. That's what we're here for.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Well, and then Bob Wilson, who was the head of the nuclear lab there, the same Bob Wilson. I've had some kind of instinct or something, because it was at the same day or the that he called me and he told me that when they hire a professor at a 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 a 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, play it, as I said, with the rotation.

• 20:37Rick Rubin?

  That sounds great. It sounds like you had an inclination of going back to your roots of why you loved it and then an administrative source came to you and supported your position.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  This rotation led me to 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've been working on. And I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done and everything is just like taking a cork out of a bottle, everything just poured out. By the way, in a very short order, worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.

• 21:18Rick Rubin?

  What's interesting about that is that you were working in the practical to get to the theoretical. You didn't start in the theoretical and work to the practical. So much of what we see now is taking the theoretical at face value without consideration for the practical.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  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 analyze, how to control and discuss the original theory of quantum, quantum theory of electricity and nanotronics that had been written in 1928, how to interpret it so as to avoid the infinities, to make calculations in which there were sensible results, which have since turned out to be in exact agreement with every experiment that's been done so far. So that in quantum electrodynamics, we have a theory which fits experiment in every detail

• 22:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  For which I won a Nobel Prize.

• 22:33Rick Rubin?

  How did it feel to win the Nobel Prize?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  I said.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  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 a Nobel Prize.

• 22:54Rick Rubin?

  It seems like you're more interested in the work than the acclaim.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  I don't like honors. I appreciate it for the work that I did. And for people who appreciate it, and I notice other physicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's 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 a thing out, the kick in a discovery, the observation other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors. It bothers me. Honors bothers me. Honors is epaulettes. Honors is uniforms.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  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 honors I got was to be a member of the ARISTA, which is a group of kids who got good grades. 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 to discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group that we are. Okay, so we sat around trying to decide who it was 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.

• 24:22Rick Rubin?

  It's because you don't want to put yourself over other people. You see people as people. We're all the same. We're all one.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  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 organization, most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to join, to be allowed to join us in our organization. Including such questions as, "We physicists have to stick together, because there's a very good chemist that they're trying to get in, and we haven't got enough room for social..." What's the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten, because the purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor. Okay, I don't like honors.

• 25:03Rick Rubin?

  It sounds like people who are focused on that live for that and not the work.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Um, in one way, it's kind of a fun analogy to try to get some idea of what we're doing and trying to understand nature. Just 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're allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, and in a little corner perhaps. And from these observations, you try to figure out what the rules of the game, what the rules of the pieces moving. You might discover after a bit, for example, that when there's only one bishop around on the board, that the bishop maintains its color. Later on, you might discover the law for the bishop as it moves on a diagonal, which would explain the law that you understood before, that it maintains its color.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And that would be analogous to we discover one law and then later find a deeper understanding of it. Then, things can happen. Everything's going good. You 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 it. We're always, by the way, in a fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. We're not trying to check all the time our conclusions. After we check them enough, we're okay. The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting.

• 26:23Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like what's most exciting.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, part that doesn't go according to what you expected. Also, we could have revolutions in physics. After you've noticed that the bishops maintain their color 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 color. It changes its color. 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're wrong.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of color happen and so forth, and gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply.

• 27:18Rick Rubin?

  So it sounds like we have to hold all of these ideas loosely enough to allow the thing that doesn't fit to show itself and teach us what we don't know, we don't know.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:53Rick Rubin?

  So the reason it looks complicated is because we don't see enough of the picture to see how simple it actually is.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  But if you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful, 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 it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

• 28:16Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like a great revelation when you find out it's simpler than you thought it was.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  If you're interested in the ultimate character of the physical world or 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.

• 28:55Rick Rubin?

  I find that surprising.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I, 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.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  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 the awe 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're talking about, then to not know mathematics is a severe limitation in understanding the world.

• 29:40Rick Rubin?

  I wonder if there's some version of physics where knowing mathematics is a limitation.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Well, what I'm working on in physics right now is a special problem which we've come up against. And I can't describe what it is. You know that everything's 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 behavior 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 are the particles interact? How do they hold together? One of the byproducts was to discover fission and to make bomb. But it investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task. At first, it was thought that was an exchange

• 30:31Speaker 01

  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 of 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 1950 up to the present, toward the present, was to find the pattern behind it. And there seemed to be very many interesting relations

• 31:12Speaker 01

  among the particles, until a theory was evolved to explain these patterns, that all of these particles were really made of something else, that they were made of a thing called quarks. And that three quarks, for example, would form a proton. Proton is one of the particles in nucleus. Another one is a neutron. The quarks came in a number of varieties. In fact, at first, only three. What needed to explain all the hundreds of particles? And the different kinds of quarks, they were called U-type, D-type, S-type. Two U's and a D made a proton, two D's and a U made a neutron. If they were moving in a different way inside, they were some other particle and so on.

• 31:54Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Then the problem came, what is exactly the behavior of the quarks and what holds them together? And a theory was thought of, which is 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. The mathematics was very similar, but it's a few terms slightly different. The difference in the, the form of the equation that we're 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.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  But not the four, character of the force between them. Now, unlike electrodynamics, there's a thing in electrodynamics, two electrons can be pulled apart as far as you want. As fact, when they're very far away, the force is weakened. If this were true, and if these were made out of quarks, you would have expected that when you hit 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 hadron. The question is, why is it so different than electrodynamics?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  How do these small term different, 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 up. At first, you would think the theory was wrong. But the more it's studied, the more clear it became that it's very possible that these extra terms would produce these effects. Now, we're in a position that's different than 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. Now, 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.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  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. 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 I might give the right result?

• 34:45Rick Rubin?

  So what did you do?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Uh, well, 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 have 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.

• 35:15Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like a really healthy way to go about it. You're not relying on the math to understand it. The math explains the phenomena, but the phenomena doesn't follow the math. The math follows the phenomena.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Hmm. And so I've been working, most recently, 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 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 candidate.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  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 a 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 someday maybe.

• 36:22Rick Rubin?

  That sounds really exciting, and it sounds like it might take some time.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. I get this feeling very much like building those houses of cards. Where you're putting together, on each of the cards is 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're 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 quite a tower. And it's easy to slip. That needs a lot of concentrating. That is solid time to think.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And if you've got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don't have the solid time.

• 37:15Rick Rubin?

  Do you have a way to notate the ideas as they're happening? So that if you lose your train of thought, you can get back to where you were?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  So I have invented another myth for myself, that I'm 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're not supposed to take, okay? Because then that's not right to do. But I do that. Because I I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it. And so I'm selfish, okay? I want to do my physics.

• 38:03Rick Rubin?

  So you have a single point of focus. And until you get to the solution that you're looking for, nothing is going to get in your way. What are your thoughts on the best way to teach?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  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 the? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy. Is to be chaotic and confused in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. That's the only way I can see to answer it. So it's to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you're going along. That during the time when the fellow who was interested in the 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.

• 38:56Rick Rubin?

  Maybe there isn't one right way. It does sound like different people respond to different kinds of feedback.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I don't know how to answer this question of different kinds of minds with different kinds of interests. 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. This may be the more effective way. I'm sorry, after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all different kinds of methods. 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 tried 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 tell him stories.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  And I make up story about little people that were about so high would walk along. They would go on picnics and so on. They lived in the ventilator and they go through these woods, which had great, big, long, tall, blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk and they were all and they had to walk between them and so on. And he 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 got all kinds of wonderful things. He even went into a moist cave where the wind kept going in and out. It was coming in cool and went out warm and so on. He was inside the dog's nose that they went.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And then, of course, I could tell him all about physiology by this way and so on. He loved that.

• 40:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  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. And 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 a little people, it doesn't work at all on my daughter. It happened to work on my son, okay?

• 41:07Rick Rubin?

  What do you think of the social sciences?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Because of the success of science, there is a kind of a, I think, a kind of pseudoscience that social science is an example of a science, which is not a science.

• 41:22Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  They don't do science. They follow the forms. You gather data, you do so and so and so forth, but they don't get any laws. They don't have found on anything. They haven't gone anywhere yet. Maybe someday they will, but it's not very well developed. But what happens is at an even more mundane level, we get experts on everything that sound like they're sort of scientific expert. They're not scientific. They sit at a typewriter and they make up something like.

• 41:53Rick Rubin?

  Give me an example.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Oh, food grown with fertilizer that's organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that's inorganic. 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 they 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 going to. 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 see how they get their information.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And I can't believe that they know it. They haven't done the work necessary, haven't done the checks necessary, haven't done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know, that this stuff is, and they're intimidating people by, I think so. I don't know the world very well, but that's what I think.

• 42:59Rick Rubin?

  It's very difficult to know what to trust these days.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we're 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, well, never mind that. I don't understand that. But anyhow, the way I think of what we're doing is we're exploring, we're 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 is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice to discover.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  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, its nature is there and she's gonna come out the way she is. And therefore, when we go to investigate it, we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do, except to find out more about it.

• 44:02Rick Rubin?

  So nature is never wrong?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  If you said, 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're gonna 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 my interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out, the better it is. I like to find out.

• 44:28Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like a reasonable goal.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  There are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we're 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.

• 44:41Rick Rubin?

  And there's so many things that animals can do that we can't.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  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 local, too provincial. The earth, it 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 you, 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 do have some effect on my beliefs. And also, another thing has to do with the question of how do you find out if something is true? And if you have all these theories of the different religions, have all different theories about the thing,

• 45:29Speaker 01

  then you begin to wonder. Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt. You ask me if the science is true, you say, no, no, we don't know what's true. We're trying to find out. Everything is possibly wrong. Start our 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, when with the scientific view, or my father's view, that we should look to see what's true and what may not be true. Once you start doubting, which I think to me is a very fundamental part of my soul, is to doubt.

• 46:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 01

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

• 46:08Rick Rubin?

  So you're saying, don't trust, verify.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:24Rick Rubin?

  I think there's so much we don't know, and the arrogance of thinking we know more than we do can really get us into trouble.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And in many things, I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're 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... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things. Wow. 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.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin?

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamic? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age?

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Ah, well.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Ah, well.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Take a breath, and see where you are drawn.