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arXiv:1105.4532v1 [physics.hist-ph] 23 May 2011
The art of science: interview with Professor
John Archibald Wheeler
Jiˇr´ı Biˇc´ak∗
Institute of Theoretical Physics,
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University,
V Holeˇsoviˇck´ach 2, 180 00 Prague 8, Czech Republic
May 24, 2011
Published in General Relativity and Gravitation 41 (2009), 679-689,
the special issue on quantum gravity, dedicated to the memory of John
Archibald Wheeler.
John Archibald Wheeler, born on July 9, 1911 in Jacksonville, Florida, died
on April 13, 2008. He must be known to all readers of General Relativity and
Gravitation, if not from anything else, then at least as “W” in the relativists’
“biblical text” MTW and as the physicist who coined the term “black hole”.
By fundamental work and by many new ideas Professor Wheeler enriched
different fields of modern physics, including nuclear physics, elementary particle
physics, general relativity, astrophysics and cosmology. He was the teacher
of such physicists as Richard Feynman, John Klauder, Charles Misner, Kip
Thorne and many others. His life was deeply influenced by a close relationship
with Niels Bohr before and during World War II. After the death of Albert
Einstein in Princeton in 1955, Professor Wheeler became a leading personality
in the general theory of relativity in Princeton—and in the whole world. He was
a member of many scientific societies (the president of the American Physical
Society in 1966) and the recipient of many medals and awards.
During the conference on the methods of differential geometry in physics in
Warsaw in June 1976, Professor Wheeler gave an interview for the Czechoslovak
Journal of Physics A (published in Czech, in contrast to the series B). After 1968,
an unhappy year for Czechoslovakia, I became a member of the editorial board
of this Journal (replacing Karel Kuchaˇr who moved to Princeton following the
invitation from Prof. Wheeler). The journal was quite independent of then
common censorship; by means of interviews with interesting personalities we
tried to keep some ties with the “external world”. The following interview was
∗Jiri.Bicak@.mff.cuni.cz
1
quite enthusiastically accepted by our readers but I did not attempt (perhaps
did not dare) to publish it in English. After Professor Wheeler authorized
the English version in January 1977, the Czech translation was published in
ˇ
Ceskoslovensk´y ˇcasopis pro fyziku A 28 364-374 (1978) and soon afterwards
the Polish translation appeared in Post¸epy fizyky 29 523-534 (1978). The last
time I met John Wheeler was at the 12th Pacifc Coast Gravity Meeting and
Karel Kuchaˇr fest in March 1996 in Salt Lake City. He recalled the interview
and, in fact, expressed a wish to continue with some questions which later
occupied his mind primarily—the problem of the quantum and its relation to
reality. He suggested the interview could be published in Physics Today. But
I never asked more questions and I never tried to send the interview to an
English journal. After John Wheeler’s recent death it occurred to me that it
would now be appropriate to publish the original interview from 1976 so that it
would not be lost to English readers; and so, despite being more than 30 years
old, the interview appears here. John Wheeler would now surely add more
about black holes in nuclei of galaxies, not mentioning just Cygnus X-1, when
discussing cosmology he would undoubtedly address the problem of dark energy
etc. However, in the conversation about Einstein and Bohr, about the need for
choosing appropriate names, or about the relation of science and philosophy
and art, he would probably give answers as he did more than 30 years ago.
In the last twenty years, Professor Wheeler, you have changed significantly
the field of your primary interest: after having done much influential work in
nuclear physics and related regions you turned to general relativity and cosmol-
ogy, created a school, developed many new ideas and attitudes—became a world
leader in general relativity. Would you, please, recall the impulses and motiva-
tions which led you to get into a new field?
Historically, I had been concerned with trying to find a simple description
of the force between particles both in nuclear physics and more generally. That
had led to the work of Feynman and myself on action at the distance as a way of
describing the electromagnetic coupling between one particle and another. And
from that I had gone on to start to work on finding the equivalent description
in gravitation theory, in gravity. In electromagnetism, action at the distance
means two particles coupled directly rather than making any mention of the
field of force between them. In the case of gravitation, this would mean that
one would talk of a coupling between one particle and another with no mention
of the space and time between them. If electromagnetic interaction at a distance
sweeps out the field from between the particles, then gravitational action at a
distance should sweep out space and time from between the particles.
I had started on that but then my life had been very much affected by
getting involved in national defense questions. And then, when I came back
again after three years to gravitation, I started giving a course in relativity and
that brought to my attention how many great questions there are in relativity
and, particularly, the question about gravitational collapse. I had got interested
in the question of trying to find a simple model of gravitational collapse, a case
where one would be free of all the issues of matter and its equation of state
2
and its density, where one could talk in a very simple language. And it seemed
it would be the most simple description, most simple example, most simple
problem of gravitational collapse to talk of a star which was made entirely of
photons—then all the gravitational attraction will arise from something one
understands well. So this led to the idea of a “geon”, an ob ject composed
entirely of radiation but appearing from the outside as a concentration of mass.
Well, I got in on many problems since that time in 1953 when I first started to
teach general relativity, but always at the centre of my attention has been this
question of gravitational collapse because it first made one recognize that one
was moving into a new field.
You could say why should one get into a new field like that. I can remember
coming back from the first hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific at Eniwetok on
an airplane. And then I came to Honolulu, was there a few hours, and at that
moment a tidal wave came—which had nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb,
it had to do with the great earthquake in Kamchatka. But I thought how small
the efforts of man are. Even the biggest explosion that the United States ever
made, which my group at Princeton did the design work for—working for and
with Los Alamos—even that greatest explosion was a thousand times smaller
in energy than the energy of a hurricane, a thousand times smaller than the
energy of an earthquake. And then I could not help thinking of the big bang
and the expansion of the universe so much larger, and as one flies over the
infinite distances of the Pacific ocean suspended between the heaven above and
the ocean below, one feels he is somewhere in the space between the stars like
man’s position in the universe, and one realizes what great mysteries surround
us. One asks himself, how can I get at the heart of this mystery of the universe.
And I’ve never seen a more central place to get at the heart of this mystery
than gravitational collapse.
Yes, I remember how Kip Thorne, in his article in “Magic without Magic”,
recalls the time in 1962 when he, as a new graduate student in Princeton, for the
first time entered your office and you began immediately to discuss the many un-
solved aspects of gravitational collapse. And as he writes, “John Wheeler alone
was grinding the axe of gravitational collapse (to put in crude terms what he did
so elegantly) before quasars, before pulsars, before singularity theorems. . . ” By
now we know most vividly how the question of gravitational collapse has been fol-
lowed in recent years. What today is your opinion on future developments, what
kind of methods do you now expect to be of importance in solving the problem
of gravitational collapse? In particular, do you expect that it will, like nuclear
physics appears today, be predominated by sophisticated numerical methods in
near future?
On this question of gravitational collapse we have today, of course, an enor-
mous amount of information, and you have been one of the leaders in discussing
the question of the field around a collapsed body. We now have also beautiful
theorems about how standard the conditions are on the outside of the collapsed
body. But all the irregularities, all the disturbances, all the hydrodynamics, all
the magnetic fields, all the turbulence, all the entropy that goes into the horizon
3
and gets hidden behind the horizon in gravitational collapse, leaving these beau-
tifully standard conditions outside surely must show up inside of the horizon,
so it seems to me. That inside must be extremely interesting, extremely full of
violence and turbulence. And I can well believe that we can find methods and
will find methods and must find methods to see what goes on there—whether
they will be numerical or whether they will be in terms of what one calls a
qualitative theory of differential equations, or some mixture of the two, only the
future will tell. I suppose that the main reason for interest in this is to see what
kind of physics goes on there. If we say a black hole has the wonderful feature
of giving us an example of gravitational collapse without our having either to
go back to the big bang at the start of the universe or to go forward to the big
stop at the end of the universe, then everybody will feel certain vividness about
dealing with the black hole.
You mentioned the “big stop” at the end of the evolution of the universe. It
is well known that you are a great advocate of the idea of a closed universe in
which a recollapse into the singularity occurs, in contrast with an open universe
which keeps expanding forever. What are your reasons for the belief in the closed
model of the universe?
This wonderful issue of the open universe compared to the closed universe is
most lively at the present time. I can believe that debate about it and analysis
of it will grow in intensity in the coming year, in the coming several years.
Einstein long ago, of course, was led into general relativity not least by his
idea—going back to Ernst Mach—that the inertia of one particle here and now
arises from its interaction with other particles elsewhere in the universe. Later
on, in his famous book, The Meaning of Relativity, p. 150, he talks about his
reasons for still believing in a closed universe. Closure would mean a finite
number of particles in the universe for given particle to interact with.
Today, of course, there is another reason that one has to think of a closed
universe instead of an open universe: there is no natural way to define the
boundary conditions for an open universe. One might at first think the most
natural boundary condition for the universe is asymptotic flatness. But in a
universe that goes asymptotically flat one has no way to define what flat is in
the framework of a modern quantum theory. The metric is really oscillating
and fluctuating everywhere. No matter how great the distance to which one
goes one never comes to a distance so great that space becomes flat. Therefore
“asymptotic flatness” is a physically impossible boundary condition. No alter-
native boundary condition has ever been proposed for an open universe that
does not run into the same difficulty. Closure is the only boundary condition
we know that is at the same time mathematically well-defined and physically
reasonable.
But still we have to recognize that the universe is not something that we
necessarily can be confident in making theories about. We have to be open to the
possibility that the evidence might some day compel us to think of the universe
as open. In that case I suppose that we will be forced to say that as time goes
on in the history of the universe we are all the time getting information from
4
greater and greater distances in the universe and new parts of the universe will
forever be swimming up into our horizon and sending signals to us.
But I do believe it is worthwhile remembering back to 1953. That was
the time when it looked as if one were in great difficulty with Einstein’s idea
of a universe with its expansion slowing down with time. The astrophysical
evidence at the time pointed to an expansion of the universe that speeded up
with time. Imaginative investigators put forward all kinds of theories like “the
theory of continuous creation” and “the steady state universe”. Every one of
those theories meant giving up Einstein’s simple ideas. In the end it turned
out that they were all wrong—that Einstein’s original idea was correct that
the expansion of the universe is slowing down. The trouble was only that the
astrophysical data on distances to the other galaxies had been wrong by a factor
of six.
That is the story of one difficulty with the idea of a closed universe—a
difficulty that turned out not to be a difficulty. Well, today what is the difficulty
with the idea of the closed universe? It’s primarily that we do not see enough
matter around; we appear to be short by a factor of something like 30 from
having enough matter to curve up the universe into closure. However, today
our colleagues in the world of astrophysics are beginning to tell us that there is
much more matter in the universe than we had realized a few years ago. They
find evidence that typical galaxies weigh somewhere between 3 and 20 times as
much as one had first believed.
It is, of course, a wonderful outcome of recent years that astrophysics and,
in particular, general relativity and cosmology have left the ivory tower of theo-
retical speculations and have become directly connected with experiment. What,
according to your opinion, will be the role of future experiments, using more and
more advanced technology?
Yes, I believe that everybody would agree that astrophysics has developed
absolutely spectacularly in the last five and ten years. We have new telescopes,
we have X-ray astronomy, we are getting infrared astronomy, radio astronomy
continues its marvelous output, and we look forward to gravitational wave as-
tronomy and neutrino astronomy. Fifteen years ago who would have believed
that we could hope to know anything nearly as much as we do today about the
far away and long ago! What an enormous development!
On relativity, too, observation contributes more than ever, and especially in
connection with gravitational collapse. First came neutron stars, and then our
present incomplete but partly convincing evidence that the X-ray source Cygnus
X-1 is a black hole. It focused attention more than ever on gravitational collapse
and on the search for gravitational radiation which is going on so actively now.
If gravitational wave detectors bear out their promise—not fifteen detectors of
low sensitivity but three detectors of high sensitivity—if they turn out to work
well and give occasional evidence of events, they will achieve two goals at once:
(1) give us additional evidence that relativity is right and (2) yield new and
direct information about what goes on in the interior of distant stars.
5
Allow me now to go over from general relativity to its creator himself. In
fact, you are one of very few physicists who were not only closely related to Albert
Einstein, but you were also one of the nearest collaborators of Niels Bohr. Could
you, please, characterize by what have you been most influenced when having
been in contact with these two greatest architects of modern physics?
It has been a wonderful inspiration to know both men. I first came to
know Einstein in 1934 on my first visit to Princeton, very shortly after he had
come to the United States. And then in 1953, I remember when I first started
to teach relativity that although it was only 18 months before his death, he
was kind enough to invite me to bring my students around to his house for
tea. So we sat around the dining-room table and his secretary Helen Dukas
and his stepdaughter Margot Einstein brought tea and students asked Einstein
questions. One of them: “Professor Einstein, what do you think about the
nature of electricity?”—and he told about his thoughts over the years about
electricity. And another one: “Professor Einstein, do you agree with the idea
of an expanding universe?”—and, of course, he did. And another student:
“Professor Einstein, you had so much to do with the quantum theory and why
don’t you agree with the quantum theory?” And then Einstein said again that
he did so often in his famous words: “I do not believe that God plays dice.” And
finally one student got up his courage and he said: “Professor Einstein, when
you are no longer living, what will happen to this house?” And Einstein gave a
great big laugh, he threw up his hands and with his hearty voice he spoke with
a childlike simplicity and smile on his face and bright eyes—and his choice of
words was always so careful and so beautiful: “This house will never become a
place of pilgrimage where the pilgrims come to look at the bones of the saint.”
And so it is today. The tourist buses drive up in the front of his house and
people get out and photograph the outside but they do not go in the inside.
And then Bohr, Bohr the greatest leader of physics and father-figure of all
physicists. I went to Copenhagen and I can remember, as a student applying for
a fellowship, the words I put down in my application for the fellowship—why I
wanted to go. That was in 1934, very early 1934. Why did I want to go to work
with Bohr in Copenhagen?—It was because “he has the power to see further
ahead in physics than any other man alive”. From my arrival in September I saw
his great gift to think deeply in nuclear physics. There in Copenhagen in the
spring of 1935 Christian Møller, fresh back from Rome, reported Fermi’s results
on the capture of slow neutrons. Bohr immediately became terribly concerned,
interrupted, walked up and down, talked and talked, and as he talked one could
see the liquid drop model of the nucleus taking shape right there before one’s
eyes. For him no physics was of any interest unless it yielded some paradox or
some beautiful way of seeing things simply. I do not remember anyone at Bohr’s
institute who ever succeeded in finishing a seminar talk, even though he was the
invited speaker. He might be able to speak five minutes, he might be able to
speak fifteen minutes, but soon Bohr would take over and would use the whole
time discussing the meaning of the speaker’s results and what they proved and
what did not prove.
I became involved with Bohr on nuclear fission at the time when he brought
6
word of the discovery of fission to the United States on the sixteenth of January
in 1939. I was down at the waterfront pier in New York and I had hardly said
“Hello” when he took me aside and started to tell me that on this very ship just
before he left Copenhagen he had been told about the discovery of Hahn and
Strassmann. So we dropped everything else and started to work on fission. I can
remember rushing—we worked at night as well as in the day—rushing up the
steps in the library—from my office to the library— to look at the dictionary to
see whether there is a better word than “fission”. “Fission” had an unfortunate
property. The noun is all right but there is no good verb. A nucleus “fissions”
is not a very nice verb, but we stayed with “fission” in spite of that.
During the war, I met Bohr in Washington at the time he was dividing his
time between Los Alamos and Washington after he had escaped from Denmark
in a small boat over the sea into Sweden. He told me confidentially about his
discussions with President Roosevelt about the future of nuclear energy. He told
me about his efforts to work out some control of nuclear energy after the war.
He said, “It may seem strange, how can such a man as I speak to the president of
the greatest country of the World at the time of the greatest war in the history
of the world. But”, he said, “I put it to him as man to man simply in terms
of what the problem is and what other possibility is there than this.” Bohr
made a great impression on Roosevelt and they had several discussions. The
last speech that Roosevelt wrote—he died while he was still working on that
speech—had in it some words, quoted by Roosevelt from Thomas Jefferson,
about how scientists serve as the most important means of communication and
bringing peace between the different countries of the world. It was enormously
impressive to me to see Bohr’s courage in facing up to what the great questions
are. I can remember his particularly saying to me at one time: “I must seem
always to you like an amateur. But I am always an amateur.” Of course, it’s a
very modest way to say that one is a pioneer, an explorer. If you are working
on something new, then you are necessarily an amateur.
To me the debate between Bohr and Einstein over the years is the greatest
debate in all the history of human thought. I can’t think of any greater men
debating any deeper issue. It took place for a number of years in Europe and
then for a number of years in America. Unfortunately, the artists of the West
seem not to be so much aware of science. But in 1971, on an earlier visit to
Moscow, I visited a studio in the basement of an apartment house where two
sculptors were making sculptures of artists and poets, and great thinkers, and
great scientists. There was a sculpture of Bohr and Einstein debating. It was
wonderful to see that. But I did not tell the sculptors about one of the times
when Bohr came to visit the house of Einstein that I just mentioned. He went up
the stairs to the second floor where Einstein’s study was and—it was a terribly
hot day—he found Einstein lying on the sofa with no one piece of clothing on.
Well, they continued the debate in that frame of reference. The sculptors did
not know that.
The debate concerned what to my mind concerns the deepest, the most mys-
terious, the most challenging idea in all of physics, the quantum principle, the
overarching principle of twentieth century physics. As you know, while Einstein
7
was still in Europe the debate focused on Einstein’s belief that quantum the-
ory was inconsistent. He did not only talk. He tried to give a proof that the
uncertainty principle is logically inconsistent. At the famous Solvay Congress
of October 1930 Einstein confronted Bohr with his idealized experiment. How
dramatic it was when Bohr turned the tables and used Einstein’s own general
relativity to prove that Einstein’s scheme would not work! After Einstein came
to the United States, he gave up trying to prove that quantum theory is incon-
sistent. He now tried to prove that the quantum theory is incompatible with
any reasonable idea of reality. His efforts led to the famous Einstein–Rosen–
Podolsky “paradox” which at the hands of Bohr and Bell and others has brought
us so much understanding.
We shall have to let science unroll through the years ahead before we can look
back and know which is the greater man because we know each new generation
has new insight on history. But to me the two men had so much in common.
They were so happy talking with each other. They were always concerned with
the deepest problems, not only problems of physics but the deepest problems of
mankind.
Einstein preferred to work in isolation. Bohr was greatly stimulated by
having collaborators to talk and argue with.
Bohr was deeply convinced that cooperation in scientific research offers more
than any other policy the opportunity for bringing about close contacts and
common understanding between nations. He believed that the development of
science plays the most important role in tieing together different cultures. We
remember his open letter to the United Nations 1950. His idea of an open society
failed to have much influence at that time, but today we feel it is making more
headway: not to say that this system is better or that system is better but let
everyone visit where one will and draw one’s own conclusions.
As you indicated, Niels Bohr created one of the most influential schools
of modern physics in Copenhagen. But it is well known that you have also
educated many leading physicists both in nuclear physics and in general relativity
in Princeton. What are your basic “rules of interaction” with students?
Isn’t there a mistake in your question? I am sure that it is really the students
who educate me! We all know that the real reason universities have students is
in order to educate the professors. But in order to be educated by one’s students
one has to put good questions to them. One always tries out questions on one’s
students. There will be some questions no student gets interested in, and if
after a while no student gets interested in a certain question, then you know
that question is not very good and you throw it away. But if there are questions
that the students get interested in, then they start to tell you new things and
keep you asking new questions, and pretty soon you have learned a good deal.
One feels very happy when a student gets to feel, as one does himself, that the
whole world of science is like a gigantic pie, and you can cut in the pie anywhere
you wish, and take out a slice and eat it.
But the wonderful thing about it is that one finds that with the right kind
of students, they are not interested in small things, they want to do things
8
that are important. But, of course, it’s important also not to make everything
too important because one has to keep in touch with reality. It’s very nice to
have some reality. I brought here with me a piece of reality. This is a piece
of concrete—but it’s very interesting because the reinforcing in the concrete is
made with steel rods not as big as ordinary steel in reinforced steel, but in the
form of hairs. Each piece is about 3 cm long, and is big around as a pin. One
mixes in these “hairs” or “pins” with the sand and gravel and cement and water
at the time one makes the concrete. I am very interested in this type of concrete
because I think it is going to be an entirely new building material. I try to give
some encouragement to the people who work on this.
Yet, a short question concerning students. Do you prefer to speak with them
individually or, rather, do you organize a number of regular informal seminars?
I personally learn more by talking to the individual student.
You invented not only many new ideas but also new names to new ideas.
“Black hole” is an example of such a name which is now accepted all over
the world. But there are other examples: “moderator”, “buckling”, “big stop”,
“charge without charge”, “mass without mass”, etc. Why should not there be a
new idea without a new name?
Mark Twain used to say, “The difference between the right word and the
nearly right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning-bug.” It is
an old idea among mankind that if you can name something you can somehow
get control of it. And even the doctors have convinced us that we should pay
them for giving names to our diseases.
But giving the right name is a part of a larger way of grasping ideas, it seems
to me, which I noticed so much not only in Bohr and Einstein but also in Pauli.
Pauli once put it in these words: “What is the wit of it?” He meant, what is the
central point of it. If one could not state the central point in two or three words
or in one sentence, then one did not really understand it. What a stimulus to
thought it is to be forced to look into an idea so deeply that one can state it in
a simple phrase!
In my country there is a great deal of interest in advertising. It is sometimes
looked down upon a little but people nevertheless take an amused interest in
it. There is one very famous advertising man called Ogilvy who wrote the book
called “The confessions of an advertising man”. He tells there about how one of
his most important duties in helping to advertise a company or its product is for
him to find out—or to make that company to think out for itself—what it stands
for. The most famous example is the Avis company which rents automobiles.
He forced them to think out for themselves what did they have to offer when
there was a bigger company—the Hertz company—that also offered automobiles
for rent. And finally he and the Avis people found it: “We try harder”. “We
try harder” became the advertising slogan of the Avis company. It had and still
has a great psychological effect on the people who work for the company. They
indeed felt: “We try harder”. So, I think, the right phrase has a magic about
it.
9
When I watched in our meeting today people making notes of what the
speakers say, I finally concluded that every one of us wants to be a magician
and he thinks that somehow by getting these magic formulas he can do what
Merlin, the magician, used to do in the old days with his magic incantations
and his magic formulas. But part of the magic is finding a simple word.
Thank you for bringing us nearer to understanding of “Magic without magic”.
Of course, conservatives probably do not welcome such new names as “black
hole” or “mass without mass”. But let me ask you about a better type of con-
servatism. Yesterday I have seen a remark in a little book called “Written into
the clouds” by Josef ˇ
Capek (the painter, writer and the man as deep as his more
known brother Karel) that “the only apology for a cultural conservatism is con-
cern that nothing that we have learned about the world should be diminished and
nothing should be lost”. Similarly one may perhaps look on a conservatism in
science. What do you think about scientific conservatism, what do you think
about fashion in science?
For the two-hundredth anniversary of the independence of the United States,
the National Academy of Sciences a few weeks ago had a special meeting on the
future of science and I had to give the first talk there on the future of physics. In
trying to find a single phrase, a single idea that would summarize more clearly
than anything else the future of physics as I see it, I found nothing better than
to compare physics with life. Life evolves in many different directions to fill as
our friends in the world of biology call it every ecological niche. Some people
work on solid state, some people work in a conservative way and some people
are focused on applying physics to medicine. My feeling is that there is as much
room for different kinds of physics as there is room for different kinds of people.
Everybody has a contribution to make.
Conservatism in art led me to ask you about conservatism in science. But I
would like to ask you also quite generally: what do you feel about the relation-
ship between science and art? I remember that it was Richard Feynman who
mentioned elsewhere how much deeper is the view at a seashore if one adds to
the view of an artist a knowledge of hydrodynamics and molecular physics. You
draw such beautiful pictures to explain your ideas in physics that also because of
this I yearn to ask you such a question.
It is a deep question you ask and an interesting question and I remember
so well the words of one artist who was kind enough to give me art lessons in
Paris in 1949. I went twice a week to him for drawing. He told me how he had
got his education at the ´
Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He said that his fellow
students there were so well trained in observing things carefully and accurately,
to get the truth, that they understood him better than his own father and
mother understood him. This made a great impression on me—this concern for
accuracy and truth.
But to me also it was very interesting the idea that in art you are trying
to distill out of the situation some central thing and find out what that central
thing really is and capture it in its naked essence, free of all complications. And
10
that to me is what is so impressive in science. There, too, we are trying to do
this all the time: capture the naked essence of the situation in the very simplest
terms. So, to me there is a very great similarity between the two: the search
for truth and the search for the absolutely central point.
But certainly there is also a difference. A work of art only really comes
alive if it produces some resonance in the hearts of the people that look at it.
Something may be a wonderful work of art but if the people are wrong people
to look at it, it has no effect. It is tied, therefore, to the human heart in a way
much closer than science is. It is true that science is a human activity, and it is
a collaborative activity, and it is true that if someone does a piece of work and
nobody pays attention to it, then it has no effect. But in the case of science
you could say that there is a kind of democracy about it. The steps in a proof
are democratically open for everybody, or for every qualified person, to check
for himself. Or an experiment is democratically open for anybody to check for
himself if only he knows how to do experiments. In the case of art, well, I
suppose, one would say there, too, that it is democratically open to anybody
to resonate to it but it does not have the same compulsion about it. In the
case of the proof—there is the proof, in the case of the experiment—there is the
experiment. You will come out with “yes” or “no” at the end of it. But in the
case of the work of art it is not “yes” or “no”, it is resonance.
You are not only a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
which combines both creative activities you spoke now so beautifully about, but
also a member of the American Philosophical Society. So, I would like to ask you
yet, what is your opinion on the relation between science and philosophy. Even
with such an outstanding place concerned with fundamental aspects of physics
as Caltech, for example, one feels that at present there is no immediate fruitful
interaction between science and the philosophy of science. But, perhaps, Caltech
is a more “pragmatic” school than Princeton.
Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France in World War One, said that war
is too important to be left to the generals. He took control of the situation.
And one could say that philosophy is too important to science to be left to
the philosophers. But there are two extreme views. There is the view of one
man who describes the philosophy of science as a tin can which is tied by string
behind the automobile of science. And as science goes quietly ahead, this tin
can rattles on the street and it is what makes all the noise. That is one view.
But the other view is much deeper. Thomas Mann, in his lecture celebrating the
eightieth birthday of Sigmund Freud, said: “Science never makes an advance
until philosophy authorizes and encourages it to do so”. . .
Well, you can have your choice between those two views!
It was a wonderful experience to listen to your words. Thank you very much.
Jiˇr´ı Biˇc´ak.
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