 | | | |
| |||
| has traditionally been one of the very special strongholds of that tenet. I wish it also applied to politicians and advertisers, so that they would ostracize people who willingly and deliberately fabricate data. One of the nice things that is true of the Exploratorium is that people trust it. We don't 'rig' any of the exhibits; the exhibits do not show things artificially. The natural phenomena are there, and the visitors can ask questions of the exhibits. The exhibits can then answer these questions because they behave according to nature. There's another very special property that is true of the pursuit of science and essential to its ability to flourish. It has to do with the fact that the effort and activity of trying to understand something can be, and often must be, separated from, divorced from, the process of trying to accomplish something, and from the business of doing, of making a living, of constructing. A great deal is learned in the process of doing, but one can rarely stop the doing in order to look into some unexpected behavior more closely or to follow the side-dreams of one's curiosity far enough to complete the understanding. I know that during World War II, when we were working on the separation of the readily fissionable isotope of uranium from the more abundant one, we were in a hurry. We couldn't stop to look at all the new things that we saw. We had to start with a gas discharge, like a neon sign, but through the gas of some uranium compound. These discharges produced separated beams of the two isotopes. These beams started as extraordinarily small currents, just tenths of microamperes, but eventually ended up in factories that produced hundreds of amperes of uranium ions. We ran into trouble. When we tried to increase the current, we got violent random fluctuations in what was happening - 'hash' we called it. But we couldn't stop to examine the nature of discharge plasmas; we just had to try something different. If our change made the current larger, we did more of the change; if it made things worse, we did less of it. There was no way of getting the job done and at the same time trying to | understand the phenomenon. I had the same kind of experience when, during the 1950's, our family was farming. We planted a certain wonderful grass: Amur wheat grass that was selling at a dollar fifteen a pound for the seed. We decided to grow the seed as a cash crop. We plowed up eight acres of virgin soil and got a wonderful harvest that filled our granary with sacks of the precious seed. But not one seed was fertile. However, we couldn't stop growing the grass to understand why. Besides, by the next year there was no point in understanding it since the price of the seed had dropped from a dollar fifteen to thirty cents a pound. And so we just continued to have a good hay crop, but without ever having a seed crop. Bringing up children provides another example of the impossibility of combining research and activity. For example, I have always wondered whether major and minor keys had something special about them, the minor one being intrinsically sad. So after my daughter was born, when I was happy or we were dancing, I would sing or play music in a minor key, and when we were sad, I'd play music in the major scale. But it wasn't a very good experiment because there were too many outside influences: other people sang songs which sort of destroyed my experiment. Whether you are bringing up children or teaching or farming or developing products, it's very hard to really look into things at the same time. The very special thing about science is that one isolates the business about finding out about something from the business of doing it. Of course, many very fundamental properties of nature have been discovered in the course of trying to get something done, but the establishment of separate research environments in which people are paid just to find things out has been a key element that has made science flourish. The experiments with cosmic rays that Dr. Panofsky mentioned when he introduced me provide an interesting example of the way in which the course of fundamental research can fruitfully be redirected in midstream. In 1947 the Chairman of the University of Minnesota Physics Department, Jay Buchta, had brought | ||