~ MESSIAEN: Quartet For The End Of Time
WOMAN: I would say that he is... elderly.
I think that...
obviously he's not English.
He has a rounder face than most of the English people.
I should say he's probably continental...
...if not Eastern continental.
The lines on his face...
would be... lines of...
possible agony.
I thought at first they were scars.
It's not a happy face.
BRONOWSKl: One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture
of the material world.
One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
Take a good concrete object,
the human face.
This is the face of Stefan Bor-grajewicz,
who, like me, was born in Poland.
Here it is, seen by the Polish artist Feliks Topolski.
We are aware that these pictures do not so much fix the face as explore it.
That the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch.
And that each line that is added...
...strengthens the picture...
...but never makes it final.
We accept that as the method of the artist.
But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge.
There is no absolute knowledge.
And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists,
open the door to tragedy.
All information is imperfect.
We have to treat it with humility.
That's the human condition and that's what quantum physics says.
I mean that literally.
Look at the face across the whole spectrum of electromagnetic information.
The question I'm going to ask is
how fine and how exact is the detail that we can see
with the best instruments in the world?
Even with a perfect instrument, if we can conceive one.
And seeing the detail need not be confined to seeing with visible light.
The spectrum of visible light from red to violet
is only an octave or so in the range of invisible radiations.
There is a whole keyboard of information,
all the way from the longest wavelengths of radio waves - the low notes -
to the shortest wavelengths of X-rays and beyond - the highest notes.
We will shine it all, turn by turn, on the human face.
The longest of the invisible waves are the radio waves,
whose existence Heinrich Hertz proved nearly 100 years ago.
Because they are the longest, they are also the crudest.
A radar scanner, working at a wavelength of a few metres,
will not see the face at all,
unless we make the face also some metres across.
(Beeps)
Only when we shorten the wavelength
does any detail appear on the giant head.
At a fraction of a metre, the ears.
And at the limit of radio waves, a few centimetres,
the first trace of the man beside the statue.
(Beeping)
We are now looking at the face -
the man 's face, with a camera which is sensitive to the next range of radiations:
Less than a millimetre, infra-red.
The astronomer, William Herschel, discovered that in 1800,
by noticing the warmth when he focused his telescope beyond red light.
The infra-red rays are heat rays.
The camera plate translates them into light,
making the hottest look blue and the coolest look red or dark.
We see the rough features of the face.
The eyes...
...the mouth...
...the nose...
See the heat stream from the nostrils.
We learn something new about the human face, yes, but what we learn has no detail.
At its shortest wavelength, some hundredths of a millimetre,
infra-red shades gently into visible red.
The film is sensitive to both.
And the face springs to life.
It's no longer a man - it's the man we know.
White light reveals him to the eye, visibly, in detail.
The small hairs...
...the pores in the skin...
a blemish here...
...a broken blood vessel there.
White light is a mixture of wavelengths.
From red... to orange...
to yellow... to green...
to blue and to violet -
the shortest visible waves.
We ought to see more exact details with the short violet waves
than the long red waves.
But, in practice, a difference of an octave or so doesn 't help much.
The painter analyses the face, takes the features apart...
...separates the colours...
enlarges the image.
It's natural to ask, "Shouldn 't the scientist use a microscope?"
Yes, he should.
But we ought to understand
that the microscope enlarges the image but cannot improve it.
The sharpness or detail is fixed by the wavelength of the light.
Here's an enlargement of over 200 times.
And it can single out an individual cell in the skin.
But to get more detail, we still need a shorter wavelength.
The next step, then, is ultraviolet light,
which has a wavelength 1/10,000th of a millimetre and less,
shorter by a factor of ten and more than visible light.
If our eyes were able to see into the ultraviolet,
they would see this ghostly landscape of fluorescence.
The fact is that, at any wavelength,
we can intercept a ray only by objects about as large as a wavelength itself.
A smaller object simply will not cast a shadow.
The ultraviolet microscope looks into the cell, enlarged 3,500 times,
to the level of single chromosomes.
But that's the limit.
No light will see the human genes within a chromosome.
Next to the X-rays, they can 't be focused.
We cannot build an X-ray microscope.
So we must be content to fire them at the face and get a sort of shadow.
The detail depends now on their penetration.
We see the skull beneath the skin...
...for example, that the man has lost his teeth.
This probing of the body made X-rays exciting as soon as Rontgen discovered them.
He was the hero who won the first Nobel prize in 1901.
A lucky chance in nature will sometimes let us do more.
We can map the atoms in a crystal because their spacing is regular.
This is the pattern of atoms in the DNA spiral.
This is what a gene is like.
The method was invented in 1912 by von Laue
and was the first proof that atoms are real.
We have one step more:
To the electron microscope...
...where the rays are so concentrated that we no longer know
whether to call them waves or particles.
Electrons are fired at an object,
and they trace its outline like a knife-thrower at a fair.
This is the smallest object that's ever been seen.
A single atom of thorium.
It's spectacular,
and yet even the hardest electrons do not give a hard outline.
The perfect image is still as remote as the distant stars.
We are here, face to face, with the crucial paradox of knowledge.
Year by year, we devise more precise instruments
with which to observe nature, with more fineness.
And when we look at the observations, they are as uncertain as ever.
We seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity,
every time we come within sight of it.
Let me put it in the context of an astronomical observatory.
This is the observatory that was built for Karl Friedrich Gauss in Gottingen.
Throughout his lifetime, and ever since,
astronomical instruments have been improved.
We look at the position of a star
and it seems to us that we are closer and closer to finding it precisely.
But when we compare our individual observations,
we are astonished and chagrined to find them as scattered within themselves as ever.
We had hoped that the human errors would disappear
and that we would ourselves have God's view.
But it turns out that the errors can 't be taken out of the observations.
And that's true of stars or atoms or just looking at somebody's picture,
or hearing the report of somebody's speech.
Gauss recognised that with that...
marvellous, boyish genius that he had,
right up to the age of nearly 80 at which he died.
When he was only 18 years old,
when he came here to Gottingen to enter the university,
he had already solved the problem of the best estimate...
...of a series of observations which have internal errors.
When an observer looks at a star,
he knows that there's a multitude of causes for error.
So he takes several readings.
And he hopes, naturally, that the best estimate of the star's position is the average -
the centre of the scatter.
So far, so obvious.
But Gauss pushed on to ask what the scatter of the errors tells us.
He devised the Gaussian curve,
in which the scatter is summarised by the deviation or spread of the curve.
And from this came a far-reaching idea.
The scatter marks an area of uncertainty.
We are not sure that the true position is the centre.
All we can say is that it lies in an area of uncertainty.
Gauss was particularly bitter about philosophers
who claimed that they had a road to knowledge more perfect than that of observation.
Of many examples, I will choose one.
It happens that there is a philosopher called Friedrich Hegel,
whom, I must confess, I specifically detest.
And I am happy to share that profound feeling with a far greater man, Gauss.
In 1800, Hegel published a thesis, if you please,
proving that, although the definition of planets had changed since the ancients,
there still could only be, philosophically, seven planets.
Well, not only Gauss knew how to answer that -
Shakespeare had answered that long before.
There is a marvellous passage in King Lear
in which who else but the Fool says to the King...
"The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason."
And the King wags sagely and says,
"Because they are not eight."
And the Fool says, "Yes, indeed. Thou wouldst make a good fool."
And so did Hegel.
On 1 st January, 1801,
punctually, before the ink was dry on Hegel's dissertation,
the eighth planet, Ceres, was discovered.
History has many ironies.
The time bomb in Gauss's curve is that, after his death,
we discover that there is no God's-eye view.
The errors are inextricably bound up with the nature of human knowledge.
And the irony is that the discovery comes here in Gottingen.
~ O alte Burschenherrlichkeit
~ Wohin bist du entschwunden?
~ Nie kehrst du wieder, goldner Zeit
~ So froh und ungebunden
~ Vergebens spahe ich umher
~ Ich finde deine Spur nicht mehr
~ O jerum, jerum, jerum...
Ancient university towns are wonderfully alike.
(Bell chimes)
Gottingen is like Cambridge in England or Yale in America: Very provincial,
not on the way to anywhere.
No-one comes to these backwaters except for the company of professors.
And the professors are sure that this is the centre of the world.
There's an inscription in the Ratskeller here:
"Extra Gottingen non est vita."
"Outside Gottingen there is no life."
The symbol of the university is the barefoot goose girl
that every student kisses at graduation.
~ Gaudeamus igitur
~ Juvenes dum sumus
~ Gaudeamus igitur
~ Juvenes dum sumus...
The university is a Mecca,
to which students come with something less than perfect faith.
It's important that students bring a certain ragamuffin irreverence to their studies.
They're not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Like every university,
the Gottingen landscape is criss-crossed with long walks that professors take after lunch.
The research students are ecstatic if they're asked along.
Perhaps Gottingen in the past had been rather sleepy.
The small German university towns go back to a time before the country was united,
and this gives them a flavour of local bureaucracy.
Even after 1918,
they were more conformist than universities outside Germany.
(Train whistle)
The link between Gottingen and the outside world was the railway.
That was the way the visitors came from Berlin and abroad,
eager to exchange the new ideas that were racing ahead in physics.
It was a byword in Gottingen that science came to life in the train to Berlin,
because that's where people argued and contradicted and had new ideas,
and had them challenged too.
In the years of the First World War...
...science was dominated - at Gottingen as elsewhere - by relativity.
But in 1921, there was appointed here Max Born...
...who began a series of seminars that brought everyone interested in atomic physics here.
It was rather strange. Max Born was almost 40 when he was appointed.
By and large, physicists have done their best work before they're 30,
mathematicians much earlier,
biologists perhaps a little later.
But Born had a remarkable, personal, Socratic gift.
He drew young men to him.
He got the best out of them...
...and the ideas that he and they exchanged and challenged
also produced his best work.
Out of that wealth of names, whom am I to choose?
Obviously, Werner Heisenberg,
who did his finest work here with Born.
Then, when Erwin Schrodinger published a different form of basic atomic physics...
...here is where the arguments took place.
And from all over the world, people came here.
It's rather strange to talk in these terms
about a subject which, after all, is done by midnight oil.
Did physics in the 1920s really consist of argument, seminar, discussion, dispute?
Yes, it did. Yes, it still does.
The people who met here,
the people who meet in laboratories still...
...only end their work with the mathematical formulation.
They begin it by trying to solve the riddles of the subatomic particles,
of the electrons and the rest.
Think of the puzzles that the electron was setting just at that time.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,
it would behave like a particle.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, it would behave like a wave.
How could you match those two aspects brought from the large-scale world
and pushed into a single entity
into this Lilliput Gulliver's Travels world of the inside of the atom?
That's what it was about.
And that requires, not calculation, but insight, imagination,
if you like - metaphysics.
I remember a phrase that Max Born used, when he came to England many years after,
and that still stands, in his autobiography.
He said: "I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy."
Max Born meant that the new ideas in physics amount to a different view of reality.
The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects out there.
It shifts under our gaze,
it interacts with us.
The knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us.
There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment.
Is the electron a particle?
It behaves like one in the Bohr atom.
But de Broglie, in 1924, produced a beautiful wave model,
in which the orbits are the places where an exact, whole number of waves
closes round the nucleus.
(Steam train)
Max Born thought of a train of electrons as if each were riding on a crankshaft.
So that collectively, they constitute a series of Gaussian curves,
a wave of probability.
A new conception was being made on the train to Berlin
and the professorial walk in the woods of Gottingen.
That, whatever fundamental units the world is put together from,
they are more delicate, more fugitive, more startling
than we catch in the butterfly net of our senses.
All those woodland walks and conversations came to a brilliant climax in 1927.
Early that year, Werner Heisenberg gave a new characterisation of the electron.
"Yes, it is a particle," he said.
"But a particle which yields only limited information."
That is, you can specify where it is at this instant,
but then you cannot impose on it a specific speed and direction at the setting off.
Or conversely, if you insist that you're going to fire it
at a certain speed and in a certain direction,
then you cannot specify exactly what its starting point is,
or, of course, its end point.
That sounds like a very crude characterisation.
It is not.
Heisenberg gave it depth by making it precise.
The information that the electron carries is limited in its totality.
That is, for instance...
...its speed and its position fit together in such a way...
...that they are confined by the tolerance of the quantum.
That's a profound idea.
One of the great scientific ideas, not only of the 20th century...
...but of the history of science.
Heisenberg called this the principle of uncertainty.
In one sense it's a robust principle of the everyday.
We know that we cannot ask the world to be exact.
If an object, a face, had to be exactly the same before we recognised it,
we should never recognise it from one day to the next.
In the act of recognition, a judgment is built in - an area of tolerance or uncertainty.
So, Heisenberg's principle says that no events, not even atomic events,
can be described with certainty -
with zero tolerance.
What makes the principle profound
is that Heisenberg specifies the tolerance that can be reached.
The measuring rod is Max Planck's quantum:
In the world of the atom,
the area of uncertainty is always mapped out by the quantum.
Yet the principle of uncertainty is a bad name.
In science or outside of it, we are not uncertain.
Our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance.
We should call it the principle of tolerance.
First in the engineering sense.
Science has progressed step by step.
The most successful enterprise in the ascent of man,
because it has understood that the exchange of information
between man and nature and man and man
can only take place with a certain tolerance.
But I also use the word...
...passionately... about the real world.
All knowledge, all information between human beings...
...can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance.
And that's whether it's in science, or in literature...
...or in religion, or in politics,
or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma.
It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours...
...that, here in Gottingen...
...scientists were refining to the most exquisite precision...
...the principle of tolerance...
...and turning their backs on the fact that, all around them,
tolerance was crashing to the ground, beyond repair.
(Train whistle)
~ Alter Jagermarsch
The sky was darkening all over Europe,
but there was one particular cloud which had been hanging over Gottingen for 100 years.
Early in the 1800s,
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had put together a collection of skulls
that he got from distinguished gentlemen with whom he corresponded all over Europe.
There was no suggestion in Blumenbach's work
that the skulls were to support a racist division of humanity.
All the same, from the time of his death, the collection was added to and added to
and became a core of racist, pan -Germanic theory
which was officially sanctioned by the National Socialist Party when it came to power.
~ Alter Jagermarsch
When Hitler arrived in 1933,
the tradition of scholarship in Germany was destroyed almost overnight.
Now the train to Berlin was the symbol of flight.
(Train whistle)
Europe was no longer hospitable to the imagination -
and not just the scientific imagination.
A whole conception of culture was in retreat:
The conception that human knowledge is personal and responsible,
an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
Silence fell, as after the trial of Galileo.
The great men went out into a threatened world.
Max Born.
Erwin Schrodinger.
Albert Einstein.
Sigmund Freud.
Thomas Mann.
Bertolt Brecht.
Toscanini.
Bruno Walter.
Chagall.
Enrico Fermi.
Leo Szilard, coming finally after many years to the Salk Institute in California.
The principle of uncertainty fixed once for all
the realisation that all knowledge is limited.
It's an irony of history that, at the very time when this was being worked out,
there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and tyrants elsewhere,
a counter-conception -
a principle of monstrous certainty.
When the future looks back on the 1930s,
it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it.
The ascent of man, against the throwback of despotic belief,
to the notion that they have absolute certainty.
I must put all those abstractions into concrete terms,
and I want to do so... in one personality:
Leo Szilard, who was greatly engaged in them,
and with whom I spent the last year or so of his life
and many afternoons, talking.
Leo Szilard was a Hungarian whose university life was spent in Germany.
In 1929, he'd published an important and pioneer paper
on what would now be called Information Theory:
The relation between knowledge, nature and man.
But by then, Szilard was certain that Hitler would come to power, that war was inevitable.
He kept two bags packed in his room, and, by 1933,
he'd locked them and taken them to England.
It happened that, in September of 1933,
Lord Rutherford, at the British Association Meeting,
made some remark about atomic energy never becoming real.
Leo Szilard was the kind of scientist,
perhaps just the kind of good-humoured, cranky man,
who disliked any statement that contained the word "never",
particularly when made by a distinguished colleague.
So he set to mind to think about the problem.
He tells the story as all of us who knew him would picture it.
He was living at the Strand Palace Hotel - he loved living in hotels.
He was walking to work at Bart's Hospital,
and as he came to Southampton Row, he was stopped by a red light.
That's the only part of the story I find improbable -
I never knew Szilard to stop for a red light.
However, before the light turned to green...
...he had realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron
and it happens to break up and release two,
then you would have a chain reaction.
He wrote a specification for a patent which contains the word "chain reaction",
which was filed in 1934.
And now we come to a part of Szilard's personality
which was characteristic of scientists at that time,
but which he expressed most clearly and loudly.
He wanted to keep the patent secret.
He wanted to prevent science from being misused,
and, in fact, he assigned the patent to the British Admiralty
so that it was not published until after the war.
But meanwhile, war was becoming more and more inevitable.
The march of progress in nuclear physics and the march of Hitler
went step by step, pace by pace, in a way that we forget now.
Early in 1939, Szilard wrote to Joliot-Curie,
asking him if one could make a prohibition on publication.
He tried to get Fermi not to publish.
But finally, in August of 1939,
he wrote a letter, which Einstein signed and sent to President Roosevelt,
saying, "Nuclear energy is here. War is inevitable.
It is for the President to decide what scientists should do about it."
But he didn 't stop.
When, in 1945, the war had been won,
and he realised that the bomb was now about to be made
and to be used on the Japanese,
he marshalled protest everywhere he could.
He wrote memorandum after memorandum.
One memorandum to President Roosevelt only failed because Roosevelt died
during the very days that he was transmitting it to him.
Always he wanted the bomb to be tested before the Japanese and an international audience,
so the Japanese should know and should surrender before people died.
As you know, Szilard failed,
and with him, the community of scientists failed.
The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan,
on 6th August, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning.
(Ticks)
(Aeroplane engine roars)
I had not been long back from Hiroshima
when I heard someone say, in Szilard's presence...
...that it was the tragedy of scientists...
...that their discoveries were used for destruction.
Szilard replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply,
that it was not the tragedy of scientists -
it is the tragedy of mankind.
(Barrier creaks)
(Door closes)
(Footsteps)
There are two parts to the human dilemma.
One is the belief that the end justifies the means.
That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering
has become the monster in the war machine.
The other is the betrayal of the human spirit.
The assertion of dogma that closes the mind
and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a regiment of ghosts.
Obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.
It's said that science will de-humanise people
and turn them into numbers.
That's false. Tragically false.
Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.
This is where people were turned into numbers.
Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people.
And that was not done by gas.
It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma,
it was done by ignorance.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge,
with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge.
We are always at the brink of the known.
We always feel forward for what is to be hoped.
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal.
Science is a tribute to what we can know althogh we are fallible.
In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell:
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,
think it possible you may be mistaken."
I owe it as a scientist to my friend, Leo Szilard...
...I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here,
to stand here as a survivor and a witness.
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.
We have to close the distance between the...
...push-button order and the human act.
We have to... touch people.