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Professor Tykociner was concerned with what is common to the arts and the sciences as well as the interplay between these very different areas, a subject that has always intrigued me. Whether what is common is more important than what is obviously different will probably be argued about for ever. However, the sharp distinction between the sciences and the arts that has been recently much talked about may not be that well posed. We might as well ask, considering the vastly different techniques employed, whether what the musician, painter, and playwright have in common is more important than where they differ.

I believe that there does exist a deep commonality of purpose among the arts and the sciences. But you will have to decide for yourselves whether this is significant enough – considering their many differences – to be worth emphasizing.

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Robert Penn Warren has spoken on “the use of the past.” One such is surely to situate the present. If for science the present seems unfriendly we might, for comfort, recall the inscription on the dome of the great hall of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington:

TO SCIENCE PILOT OF INDUSTRY MULTIPLIER OF THE HARVEST EXPLORER OF THE UNIVERSE REVEALER OF NATURE'S LAWS ETERNAL GUIDE TO TRUTH

The nineteenth-century optimist who wrote these words is, alas, no longer with us. Instead we have the professional demonstrator, the fundamentalist preacher, and the moralist legislator. Perhaps it is too much to say that we have fallen on the winter of our discontent.

But there are cold winds that blow from Washington, and the chill of indifference, even hostility, from the country as a whole, makes it somewhat unlikely that these words would be written today.

It is with pride and pleasure that I speak to you on this nine hundred-year celebration, this anniversary of the signing of your Magna Carta: nine hundred years of intellectual activity, nine hundred years of continuous university existence. Of course, during these nine hundred years we expect a certain sufficiency of bureaucracy, excess of tenured faculty, occasional bad teaching, and some sleepy students. But these nine hundred years are also (I'll try not to be too effusive) a triumph of our all too human intellect – possibly alone in the universe – our struggle to understand, our struggle against brute nature and dark superstition. Is it out of place to paraphrase that cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, charmer? “Neverhave so many (all human beings) owed so much (of what we enjoy) to so few (ladies and gentlemen, that is us).”

You are probably thinking, “Can he be serious?” Yes, this is a grand occasion but doesn't he read the papers? Radiation, plutonium, ozone, and new viruses. Hasn't he heard of the dangers as well as the limits of science?

The essays in this collection are taken from articles and lectures that I have written or delivered over many years – some of which I hadn't looked at in quite a while. Putting them together I am struck by the recurrence of certain themes. This shouldn't be surprising since I have been thinking about these subjects for a long time. They occur in somewhat different contexts and reflect the evolution of my thoughts on the relation of science to other human activities.

Since some of the articles were written years ago, I have occasionally included footnotes to update matters where the situation has dramatically changed; but otherwise I have pretty much left things the way they were because that was the way I thought about them at the time.

What is more problematic is that in the originals there are paragraphs and even sections that are repeated from one article to the next. As with itinerant actors and musicians over the centuries, each performance is pieced together from those that have come before – self-plagiarism. But each is presented in a new package and sometimes the package is as interesting as the content.

So I've deleted extended repetitions; also in some of the essays I have excised sections that, in my opinion, don't contribute to the main line of thought and, sometimes, are discussed in other essays.

In science, the saying goes, one weighs and measures, one deals in numbers; there is perhaps a suggestion that those elsewhere deal in a currency of less substance. At this point eyes close and minds go to sleep; the decimals unfortunately awaken memories of sultry afternoons in algebra class. It is, of course, true that physics deals with numbers and occasionally with very accurate measurement. One is impressed when an extraordinarily complex calculation of the quantity of magnetism the electron possesses, referred to a certain standard magnet, agrees with experimental observation to ten decimal places.

The usefulness of a theoretical structure lies in its concreteness and in the precision with which questions can be formulated. The more precise the questions, the easier it is to compare theoretical consequences with experience. An approach that has been very successful is to find the minimum number of assumptions that imply as logical consequences the qualitative features of the system that we are trying to describe. If we pose the question this way, it means that we agree to simplify. As Albert Einstein once said, “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler”. Of course, there are risks, and it is here that science becomes as much art as logic. One risk is that we simplify too much and in the wrong way, that we leave out something essential. This is the intellectual risk. Another risk is political – that we may choose to ignore in the first approximation some facet that an important individual has spent a lifetime elucidating.

We might ask why this question of the difference between art and science is posed. Why are we not talking about the similarities or differences between a painter and a musician, or between a sculptor and a poet? Why is the distinction between the scientist and the artist of special concern? I would like to suggest that this is less an intellectual than a sociological question. It is perhaps because, unfortunately, more and more people who call themselves scientists live, think, and work in a different part of society, both intellectually and socially, from the part inhabited by those who call themselves artists.

There are indeed enormous differences of style in science. Yet, one characteristic of science is that the way things are said in science is almost always less important than what is said, whereas the way a concept is expressed in art is almost always more important than what is expressed.

There is a vast difference between science being created and science being presented (in textbooks, for example). For science being created, I see a closeness between art and science.

Of course Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is not about physics. It is about the memories and interactions of three important, passionate, figures struggling to make sense of a meeting that took place in Nazi-occupied Denmark in September of 1941. The question that dominates the play is why did Heisenberg, head of the German nuclear project, make that visit to Bohr, his old mentor, one of the creators of quantum theory and nuclear physics.

Since memory of the past is shaped by the present, and since each of the characters, particularly Heisenberg, has reasons of their own for wanting to reinterpret what their intentions were, we probably never can be sure what the actual reason for the visit was. (According to the quantum superposition principle, might it have been a combination of all of the various possibilities – all of the above, as the multiple-choice question puts it.)

But two of the three characters, Bohr and Heisenberg, happen to be among the founders of modern quantum theory – certainly one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century.

Euclid's Elements

Geometry, like Latin, with generations of repetition has become synonymous with the trials of adolescence and evidence of the inhumanity of adults to their young. Much has passed since Plato had inscribed over the doors of his Academy, “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here”, or since Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.” What there is in the Elements of Euclid that made them the model for the science of Galileo and Newton, and for the philosophy of Descartes. Why they provide a gem-like example of a mathematical system and of a physical theory remains a mystery to numberless students for whom Euclid evokes only a memory of pain.

In a world beset by uncertainty, the demonstrations of geometry at one time seemed a model for what a sure argument should be. A dispute in the marketplace begins obscurely, and ends in turmoil. In political arguments opinion sways first to one side and then to the other, fluttering like a butterfly, finding no place secure enough to rest.

Recent highly publicized cases of “scientific fraud” have elicited much excited comment. We hear cries for watchdogs and oversight committees. We read perturbed editorials speaking of a scientific Watergate. But let's put the situation in perspective and avoid creating something worse than the disease – a cure.

In science, as elsewhere, lying, cheating, stealing, and fraud are distinctly unpleasant. Because scientists are human, one must anticipate that in their daily as well as their scientific activities, they will occasionally stray. What is surprising is our surprise. I recall my mother pointing out to me, a hopeful teenage scientist, an embarrassing situation in which scientists were involved. My smart-aleck response was, “So what? Everybody does it.” “But,” she responded, “these are scientists.”

Well, the fact is that scientists do it, too. Under pressure for promotions, grants and the necessity to publish, we can be “reasonably assured” that corners are cut, work is sometimes sloppy and, occasionally, I suppose, there is deliberate fraud.

In his famous parable, “The Silence of the Sirens,” Franz Kafka tells us that the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. “It is conceivable,” he says, “that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.”

That more fatal weapon, silence, is, perhaps, the key to the continuing ambiguity in the interpretation of the Second Amendment.

If the founders had wanted to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” they could have done so in a completely transparent manner: “Congress shall make no laws that infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” They did not. Why not? Why did they remain silent on so important an issue?

What they did say was: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The most natural and unstrained interpretation of this statement is that it concerns the necessity for a “well regulated” militia (a pressing issue at the time) and forbids the government from disarming the militia.

As a scientist (a hard scientist with a soft heart) before this audience, I believe it is appropriate to quote a remark made by Ed Bloom, a departed colleague. Once, when addressing the Modern Language Association, Ed said he felt like a lion thrown to the Christians.

I was very much influenced by Freud's writings on psychoanalysis, particularly by his theory of dreams. I didn't believe all of Freud's elaborations, but I thought he touched on concepts that were enormously deep, such as the unconscious, the conscious, and the very powerful interaction between them. It is of great interest to me since biologists and neurophysiologists expect to find the underlying physical correlate for such concepts as the unconscious. For example, we might say that the unconscious is related to stored memory and what is conscious is memory in play.

I seem to remember that Freud believed we would eventually find the biological basis for psychoanalytic concepts. But at the beginning of the past century that time had not arrived. So the best way was to proceed without such a basis. He was right.

The scientific optimist who wrote in the 1808 Elements of Natural Philosophy: “The great object of science is to ameliorate the condition of man, by adding to the advantages which he naturally possesses,” is no longer with us. He has been replaced by the environmentalist, the conservationist, the consumer advocate, and the professional demonstrator who criticize every aspect of science and most other human activities – who, regarding the splendor of this gathering and the obvious prosperity of its participants, might suggest that the appropriate question is: Can mankind afford to continue to serve science?

As is evident from the topics covered in this conference, in a material sense science has provided, and continues to provide, solutions for many problems. It is obvious that life as we have come to expect it would not be possible without the material fruits of science.

Toward the end of his wonderfully productive life, Francis Crick engaged in a search for neural correlates of mental states. At least a glimmer of possible correlates is provided by techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); these have been extraordinarily effective in determining regions of the brain involved in various mental activities. An additional glimmer is provided by the remarkable progress that has been made in elucidating the cellular and molecular basis for learning and memory storage. Although these are suggestive of the neural correlates for which Crick was searching and although many words have been expended on possible substrates for mental states, the origin and nature of consciousness, our awareness of ourselves, remains a complete mystery.

The mystery is sufficiently vexing to provoke occasional claims that the problem is not soluble using ordinary scientific methods. I have heard it argued, for example, that consciousness is an epiphenomenon (secondary phenomenon). (I'm not sure what is intended by this argument, except to suggest that consciousness is not really there and so doesn't have to be explained.)