It's interesting that some people find science so easy and others find it kind of dull and difficult
Especially kids you know some of them are just heat it up
And I don't know why it is it's the same for apps
but also good for instance lots of people love music and I never could carry a tune and
It's I lose a great deal of pleasure out of that and I think people lose a lot of pleasure who find a science doll
In the case of science do you think that one of the things?
That make it very difficult as it takes a lot of imagination
It's very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like
Nothing's really as it seems. We were used to get you know hot and cold and all that hot and cold is is
The speeds that the atoms are jiggling if they jiggle more it corresponds to hotter and colder is jiggling less so if you have
a
Bunch of at a cup of coffee or something sitting on a table and
the items of jiggling a great deal in the coffee
And they bounce against the cup
And the cup then gets shaking and the atoms in the cup shake in Asian cramps against a source in the heat heats the cup
And heats have any other hot thing spreads its heat into other things by mere contact
Because the atoms that are jiggling a lot in the hot thing shake the ones that are jiggling
only a little bit in the cold thing so that the hot heat we say goes into the
Cold thing it spreads
But what spreading is just jiggling and the irregular motions?
Which is easy to untie to understand?
It brings up another thing that's kind of curious
That that
Don't say the things jiggle and if you're used to balls bouncing you know they slow up and stop after a while
But we have to imagine with the atoms of perfect
Elasticity they never lose any energy every time they bounce that keep on bouncing or kind. They don't lose anything. They're perpetually moving
And that the things that happen when we say something loses, and if a ball comes down and bounces it shakes
You irregularly some of the atoms in the floor and the one that comes up again. It's leaves some of those atoms moving
The jiggling so as it bounces, it's passing
It's extra energies is extra motions to little patches on the floor each time it bounces and loses a little each time
Until it settles down we say is if all the motion he stopped
But what's left?
Is the floor is shaking more than it was before and the atoms and the ball is shaking more than they were before?
that the organized motion of all these atoms moving the same way falling down and
The quiet floor is now transformed into a ball sitting on the ground
But all that emotion is still there in a form when the energy of motion in the form of the jiggling of the floor which
Is a little bit warmer?
Unbelievable, but anybody who's hammered a great deal on something
Knows that. It's true that if you pound something then hit a lot
You can feel the temperature difference it heats up it heats up. Simply because you're jiggling it
This picture Adams is a beautiful one that you can keep looking at all kinds of things this way
see the
drop of what a tiny drop and
the atoms attract each other they like to be next to each other they want as many partners as they can get
Now the guys are at the surface
Have only partners on one side here in the air and the other side said they're trying to get in
And you can imagine this team of people these teaming people all moving very fast
Or trying to get to have as many partners as possible and the guys at the edge are very unhappy and nervous and they keep
Pounding in trying to get in and that makes it a tight ball instead of a flat
And that's what you know surface tension to wait even you realize when you see how sometimes a water drop
Sits like this on a table
then you start to imagine why it sits like that because everybody's trying to get into the water and
At the same time while all this is happening there are these atoms that are leaving the surface and the water drop is slowly disappearing
If I might stop trying to imagine all kinds of things all the time, and I get a kick out of it
Just like a runner
Gets a check out a sweat inch I get a kick
out of thinking about these things I
Can't stop I mean it you could may I could talk forever
Cooled off the water so the jiggling is less and less energy go slow and slow
Then the atoms get stuck in place they like to be with their friend. There's a force of attraction and they get packed
Together they're not rolling over each other they're in a nice pattern like oranges in a crate
In a nice organized pack all judgy going in place
but not having enough
Motion to get loose of their own place and to break the structure down and that's what I'm describing as a solid
It's ice it has a structure
If you're held the atoms at one end in a certain position all the rest are lined up in a position
Sticking out and it's solid at the end
Whereas if you heat that?
Harder then they begin to get loose and roll all over each other and that's the liquid
And if you heat that still hotter and they advance harder, then they simply bounce apart from each other
And they're just individual I say out of there's really little groups of atoms molecule which come flying and hit
And although they have a tendency to stick they're moving too fast
Their hands don't crab so to speak as they pass and they fly apart again, and this is the gas and cross steam
You can get all kinds of understanding when I was a kid with it with this air which I was always interested
I've noticed that when I pumped up my tires or device, but you learn a lot
but I think advisability pump up the tires that the pump would get hot and
that also
understand we see as the pump handle comes down and the atoms are coming up against it and bouncing off and it's moving in the
Ones that are coming off have a biggest speed than the ones that are coming in
So that as it comes down and each time they collide it speeds them up
And so they're hotter when you compress the gas at Heat and when you pull a piston back out
Then atoms which are coming fast at the piston feel a receding or sort of a give it gives
And it comes out with less energy
It's like going up against something which is soft and yielding it go bump bump
And it loses so as you pull the piston out and the atoms are hit
They lose their speed and they cool off and gas is a cool when they expand
And the fun of it is that all these things, which you see or you notice in the world about it
They pump heats the gas and the gas pools one of the expands or the steam evaporates
Until you cover the cover and all these things you can understand from these simple pictures
And that's kind of a lot of fun to think about I don't want to take this stuff. Seriously. I think we should just
Have fun imagining you're not worried about there's no teaching when I ask you questions, otherwise. It's a horrible
The atoms like each other the different degrees
Now oxygen for instance in the air would like to be next to carbon, and if they get in near each other they snap together
If they're not too close though they repel, and they go apart they don't know that they could snap together
It's just as if you had a ball
It was trying to climb a hill and there was a hole it could go into like a volcano hollow
Deep one its rolling along
It doesn't go down in the deep hole because if it starts to climb the hill and then rolls away again
but if your men made it go fast enough it'll fall into the hole and
so if it said something like it would in oxygen there's carbon in the wood from a tree and
The oxygen comes and hits it common, but not hard enough. It. Just goes away again
The air is always fun
Nothing's happening
If you can get it faster by heating it up somehow somewhere somehow get it started a few of them come first
They go over the top so to speak
They come close enough of the carbon and snap in
And that gives a lot of jiggly motion which might hit some other atoms making those go faster
So they can climb up and bump against other
Carbon atoms and they jiggle and they make mothers jiggle and you get a terrible catastrophe
Which is one after the other all these things are going faster and faster. I'm snapping in and the whole thing is changing
That catastrophe is a fire
It's just a way of looking at it, and these things are happening
They perpetual once it gets started
It keeps on going the heat makes
the other atoms capable of reaching to make more heat to make other atoms and so on so this terrible snapping is producing a
Lot of jiggling, and if I put with all that activity of the atoms there, and I put a cup of coffee over that
massive wood that's doing this it's going to get a lot of jiggling so that's what the heat of the fire is and
Then of course say if you see this is what happens. We just start to think you just go out, and I what the way
how did it get started why is it that the woods been sitting around all this time with the oxygen all this time and
It didn't do this earlier or something. Where did I get this front?
While it came from a tree
And the substance of the tree is carbon. Where did that come from?
That comes from the air
It's carbon dioxide from eeeh people look at trees
And they think it comes out of the ground that plants crawl out of the ground
But if you ask where the substance constant you find out where does it come from the trees come out of the yeah?
They surely come out here. No they come out of the air
if the carbon dioxide in the air goes into the tree and it changes it kicking out the oxygen and
Pushing the oxygen away from the carbon and leaving the carbon surfaces with water
Water comes out of the ground you see only to have to get in there. It came out of the air
I didn't it he came down from the sky
So in a fact most of a tree almost all of the trees out of the ground
I'm sorry. It's out of the air. There's a little bit from the ground some minerals and so forth
Now of course I told you the oxygen and we know the oxygen and carbon stick together bet berries tight
How is it the tree is so smart is to manage to take the carbon dioxide?
which is the carbon oxygen nicely combined and undo that so easy ah
Life life has some mysterious force
No, the sun is shining
And it's the sunlight that comes down and knocks these oxygen away from the carbon
so it takes sunlight to get the plant to work and
So the Sun all the time is doing the work of separating the oxygen away from the carbon the oxygen is some kind of terrible
By-product which it spits back into the air and leaving the carbon and water and stuff to make the substance of the tree
then when we take the substance of the tree it stick it in the fireplace and
the is there all the oxygen made by these trees and all a carbon would would much prefer to be close together again and
Once you'd let the heat to get it started
It continues and makes an awful lot of activity while it's going back together again
And all this nice light and everything comes out and everything is being undone you're going back from carbon and oxygen back to carbon dioxide
And the light and heat that's coming out. That's the light and heat of the Sun that went in
So it's sort of stored Sun that's coming out when you burn it a log
Next question how is it the Sun is so jiggly so hot?
I gotta stop somewhere. I'll leave you something to imagine
Most elastic things like
Steel springs and so on is nothing
but this electrical thing pulling back your pulley Adams up a little bit of pot when you bendin something and
Then they try to come back together again
But rubber bands work on a different principle
There there's some long
molecules like chains and
other little ones that are shaking all the time that are bombarding them these chip and
The chains are all kind of kinky in knocked about and shape
When you pull open the rubber band the strings get straighter
But these things are being bombarded on the side by these other atoms trying to shorten by kinking them, so it pulls back
It's trying to pull back and it's pulling back only because of the heat
So if you heat a rubber band it'll pull strong more strongly for instance if you
Hang a weight with a rubber band up a little match - it's kind of fun to watch it rise
Require it each one and there's another thing you can check that this idea is right
That it's heat that drives a rubber band if you pull the band now
Just like when we pushed the piston in the gas if you pull a band out
These tightening string hitting those molecules makes them move faster, and so it's warmer
And if you take the band and let it in
Then the molecules hitting the strings which sort of give as a thing hits it a they
Give in to the soft like and they lose energy when they hit these retiring
bear estranged strings, so it cools and
There is a little way you can do this you're not very sensitive
It's a small effect
And if you take it a fairly wide rubber band and put it between your lips and pull it out you certainly notice
It's hotter and if you then hold it out that let it in you'll notice. It's cool
At least you'll notice the subtle difference in whether what happens when you expand it when you contract it
And that's I've always found rubber bands fascinating to think
That when they sitting on an old package of papers for a long time holding those papers together
It's done by a perpetual
Pounding pounding pounding of the atoms against these change the holder trying to kink them and trying to keep them
Here after year well rubber bands don't last that long, but then you have a long time trying to hold this whole thing together
The world is a dynamic
Mess of jiggling things if you look at it, right
Have you magnified you can hardly see anything anymore because everything is jiggling in there all in patterns
And there are lots of little balls
And it's lucky that we have such a large scale view of everything that we just see them as
Things without having to worry about all these
Adams's all the time
I've got hold of two magnets and you push them you can feel this pushing between them
Turn around the other way in it then they slam together now. What is it the feeling between those two magnets?
What do you mean?
What's the feeling well to an?
Aryl there isn't I mean that the sensation is that there's something's there when you push these two magnets together?
Listen to my question. What is the meaning when you say that there's that there's a feeling of course you feel it now?
What do you want to know?
What I want to know is what's going on
Between these these two bits of metals repel each other and well then what does that?
But what does that mean or why are they doing that or how are they doing it?
You're at I'm not saying I think that's a perfectly reasonable question cause the reason it's an excellent question, okay?
To put the problem that you're asking you see when you ask why something happens
How does a person answer why something happens for example
Aunt Minnie is in hospital why?
Because she slipped she went out and she slipped on the ice and broke her hip that
satisfies it people
Good sized mice, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet knew nothing about things. You first should understand
Why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital?
How do you get to the hospital when the hip's is broken well because her husband seeing that she had the hip with broken
And call the hospital up and sent somebody to get her all that is understood by people
And when you explain it a why you
Have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true
Otherwise you're perpetually asking. Why why did the husband call up the hospital?
Because husband is interested in his wife's welfare
not always some husbands aren't interested in their wives when they're drunk, and they're angry and
So you begin to get a very interesting
Understanding of the world and all its complications in order to if you try to follow anything up
You go deeper and deeper in various directions
For example you would all go, Why did she slip on the ice will ice too slippery everybody knows that no problem
But you ask why is ice slippery
That's kind of curious ice is extremely slippery. It's very interesting you
Say, how does it work? You couldn't you see so you could either say, I'm satisfied that you've answered me
Ice is slippery that explains it or you could go on and say why is ice slippery?
And then you're involved with something because there aren't many things as slippery as ice
It's very hard to get greasy stuff, but that's sort of wet slimy but a solid that's so slippery
Because it is in the case of ice that when you stand on it they say
Momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit, so you got a sort of instantaneous water surface on which is slipping
why on ice or not on other things because ice expands when it water expands when it freezes so the pressure tries to undo the
Expansion and melts it is capable of melting but other substances cracked
When they're freezing and when you push them they're just as satisfied to be solid
Why does water expand when it freezes and other substance don't expand when they freeze all right
I'm not answering your question, but I'm telling you how difficult the why question is you have to know what it is
That you're permitted to
Understand and allow to be understood and known and what it is. You're not you'll notice in this example that the more I asked why
it gets interesting afterwards my idea that the deeper a thing is the more interesting and
We could even go further and say why did she fall down once you slip that has to do with grabbing
Involved in all the planets and everything else never mind it goes on and on now when you're asked for example. Why two magnets repel
there are many different levels it depends on whether you're a student of physics or an ordinary person it doesn't know anything or not if
You're somebody who doesn't know anything at all about all I can say is that they're measure magnetic force that makes them repel
and that you're feeling that for
You say, but that's very strange because I don't feel kind of force like that in other circumstances
When you turn them the other way they attract
There's a very good Allegan force electrical force, which is the same kind of a question, then you say, that's also very weird
But you're not at all disturbed by the fact that when you put your hand on the chair. It pushes you back
But we found out by looking at it that that's the same force as a matter of fact the electrical force not
Magnetically exactly in that case, but it's the same electrical repulsion that are involved in keeping
Your finger away from the chair because everything's made out of it's electrical forces in minor in microscopic details
There's other forces involved because this is
Connected to electrical forces it turns out that the magnetic and the electric force with which I wish to explain these things
This this repulsion in the first place is what ultimately is the deeper thing that we have to start where we can start with
To explain many other things that looked like they were
Everybody would just accept them. You know you can't put your hand through the chair. That's taken for granted
But that you can't put your hand through the chair when looked at more closely why that involves the same repulsive forces
that appear in magnets
The situation is then have to explain is why and magnets it goes over a bigger distance than an ordinarily
And there it has to do with the fact that in iron all the electrons are spinning in the same direction
they'll all get lined up and they
Magnify the effect of the force until it's large enough at a distance that you can feel it
but it's a force which is present all the time and very common and is in a basic force of
Almost I mean I can go a little for me the back your fight with more technical
But in the early level. I have just got that to tell you that's going to be one of the things you'll just have to
Take as an element in the world the existence of magnetic repulsion or electrical
Electrical attraction magnetic attraction, I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else, that's familiar to you
For example if we say the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands. I would be cheating you
Because they're not connected by rubber bands
I shouldn't be in trouble you soon asked me about the nature of the band and
Secondly if we were curious enough you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again
And I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces
Which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain so I have cheated very badly you see
So I'm not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other
except to tell you that they do and
To tell you that that's one of the elements in the world of the different kinds of forces
There are electrical forces magnetic forces or gravitational forces and others and those are some of the parts
If you were Steve indeed go further I could go further
I could tell you that the magnetic forces are related to the electrical forces very intimately
that our relationship between the gravity forces and electrical forces remains unknown and
so on
But I really can't do a good job
any job
Of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with because I don't understand it in terms of anything else
That you're more familiar
This stuff will fantasising you're looking at the world
Imagining things it really isn't fantasizing because you're only trying on a pageant way it really is
comes in handy sometimes
The other day I was at the dentist. He's getting ready with his electric drill to make holes
And I thought I better think of something fast, or else it's gonna hurt
and I thought about this little motor going around and what was it that made it turn and
What was going on?
And what's going on is if there's a dam some distance away here and water going over the dam turns a great
big wheel
and this wheel
Is connected with long thin pieces of copper?
Which split up and other pieces of copper and split up and spread all over the city
And then they're connected back through another little gadget that
Makes wheels turn all the wheels of the city attorney because this thing's in turns if this thing stops all the wheel spot that starts
Again they all start again
And I think that's kind of a marvelous thing of nature. It's kind of he's extremely curious that phenomenon I
Like to think about a lot because all of these
It's copper and iron see sometimes we think it's a man-made generator
it's very complicated the phenomenon as a result of some special something that we may, but it's nature doing it and
It's just iron and copper
And if you took a big long loop of copper and had an iron
At each end and move the piece of iron here the other iron moves at the other piece
and if you get it down to the
nothing
You're just moving a piece on in a loop of copper. I'm seeing another piece of iron. Move you realize what a
fantastic
mystery
the nature is
That you don't even need the iron
You could if you at least get this pump prime primed and started by
Jiggling copper strands around fast enough knotting them and unknotting them and so forth you can get other copper strands to move at the other
end of a long
connection
And what is it? It's only kapa?
Emotional
And we're so used to
Circumstances in which these electrical phenomena are all canceled out?
Everything's sort of neutral pushing and pulling is really very dull
But nature has these wonderful things magnetic forces and electric logic comb your hair with your comb and you get some strange
Condition so you put it in front of a piece of paper and it lifts up the paper or the paper jiggles at a distance
far away
And that's in fact change on that that is the thing that's more
deeper inside of everything
Then the things we're used to we're used to forces that only act directly all right you push with your finger it only acts directed
But then you have to imagine what it is
That's pushing with the finger is this little fingers may have little balls
and atom and it's got another bunch of atoms that I'm pushing and there's a little space between those atoms and
this pushing is going through that space and the only thing that happens with the comb and
The paper is that circumstances have arisen
Which make it possible to see that these it forces go through a bigger distance than just the short distance between yeah
What what it is is they have kept charges like electrons that are both the same they repel each other with a force
their little tiny pikes they're a piece of the atom need to repel each other with a force which is enormous
It's inversely as the square of the distance just like gravity is inversely as the square root of distance
But gravity is attractive and this is repulsive and for two electrons the gravity is so weak
Compared to the electricity electricity is so much more enormous, then the gravity I can express a girl
I don't know the name of the number
It's one with 30 or an eight or forty zeros after the 1 bigger is electricity. It's so enormous that
if I were all electrons
Well as the number to be so
if
There's also however electrical things other kind of charge positive charges an example of protons are positive
They're inside the nucleus of the atom and they attract electron opposite charges attract and like charges repel, so you have to imagine
Enormous forces where likes are trying to get away from likes and unlikes are trying to get near
the opposite what would happen if you had a lot of
Maybe all the likes would collect with unlikes they attract each other and they get an intimate mixture of pluses and minuses all on top
of each other very close together
You wouldn't have a lot of pluses anywhere because they repel each other
They'll all be compensated by minuses very close, and you get these little lots of plus and minus
the reason if the nots don't get smaller and smaller is because they are particles then it's quantum mechanical effects that we
Discussed the beat that makes the decay any smaller than a certain size, and so you get these little lumps which are balls
they're the atoms the atoms have positive and negative charge, and they're neutralized they cancel that charges nearly as they can and
Because of this intimate this force is so big it ends up nowhere
With very little left because it's so big it cancels out. There's always so exactly the same pluses and minuses in any normal material
When you call me a head
Yet, but it's just a little bit extra. Huh just a few extra minuses say here and somewhere else a few extra pluses
But the forces are so big
there's just the extra ones which make a force that we can see that seems to be at a long range and
That we find mysterious
that we need an explanation for
And we try to find an explanation for it in terms of ideas like the forces that are inside of
Rubber bands or steel bars or twisted things we would like to have some kind of puller at a distance because we're used to it
That we don't get any push until we're touching but the fact is that the reason we don't get any pushing to a touching
Is this the same force as you see in a long distance only?
It's come down to short because the pluses and minuses have canceled out so well that you don't feel anything
Until it gets very very close
When it gets close enough of course it makes the difference which is plus and which is minus and where they are and they repel
Each other so it's kind of fun to imagine this intimate mixture
highly attractive
opposites
Which is so strong that they cancel out the effects and it's only sometimes when you have an excess of one kind in another
That you get this mysterious electrical force
And how KY explained a mysterious electrical force in any other way? Why should I try to explain it in terms of?
Stiff of something like jelly or other things which are made
And I understand the other way around in terms of strong long distance forces
Which have all canceled out
so it's the electrical forces in fact than the magnetic forces in thing that we have to accept as
The base reality in which we're going to explain all the other things so again it turns out
It's hard to understand. They do have to do a lot of imagining that the real world has this as its base a
force which acts at a long distance
That we haven't got much experience with that for us
We had peculiar phenomena here and there
But ordinarily we don't have much experience with that force is simply because that's what requires explanation
That's what requires imagination
the long distance force we have no other picture for
And then the example of them
but a
generator
What happens is that the electrons which are a part of an atom?
You have to they're pushed by the motion of the copper wires
and
it's it's
Wonderful the thing you'd you push a few here, and they get too close together
So they push the others because they repelled at a long distance
There's not just like water which repels in a short distance
But it's a wonderful fluid
Which we pose at a long distance and the effects therefore can go very quickly through the wire if there's a little concentration equals Inge
Through the wire all over the city at once and electrical you can use that stuff to make signals
You can push a little few electrons here and there by talking in a telephone at the other end of the line
Long line a copper across the city the electrons respond because of this very rapid interactions over these long distances
To what you're saying miss moon and to discover experimentally
The existence of these long forces and these rapid motion actions and so forth
Was a tremendous thing for human beings, I think that the discovery of electricity
the magnetism and the electromagnetic effects which
Or finally worked out the full equations for everything was worked out by Maxwell in 1873 is
probably the most
fundamental
Transformation of our most remarkable scene history the biggest change
I went to a scientific school MIT and
then
fraternity when you first joined they try to
Keep you from being if you think you're smart being to feeling that you're too smart
By giving you what looked like simple questions to try to figure out what actually happens, and it's like training for imagination George
It's kind of fun, and I thought I'd I tell you some of them that I remember
I learned them of course once you learn him the next time someone who comes along with this wonderful puzzle
You look at them kind of quietly you wait two or three seconds or five seconds to show
Whiz that you were thinking, and then you come up with this answer to astonish your friends
But the factoids of course that you were trained by your fraternity brothers. That's the heart of these things early on
Now one of the questions were used to we got was the problem about the mirror. It's an old fashioned
It's an old problem. You look at a mirror
And let's say you
Part your hair on the right side and you look in the mirror than the images got his hair fought on the left side
So the image is left-to-right mixed up
It's not top and bottom mixed up Chris the top of the head of the image is enough that it's a top and the bottom
of the feeders
at the bottom and the question is how does the mirror know to get the left and right mixed up and not the up and
Down you get a better idea of the problem if you think of lying down and looking at the mirror
All right your hair is still on the left side and now the ileft and right was the up and down
Where was the up and down which look?
Okay, was the right and left before the mirror somehow figured out what you're gonna do when you're looking at it
So what to describe in a sort of symmetrical way? What a mirror does?
That it doesn't look lopsided, and it takes left it mixes it up with right, and it doesn't do the same with up and now
And after a lot of fiddling you gradually read
I knew the air we could worked out the answer to that one is if you wave this hand
Then the hand in the mirror that waves it's right opposite forehand on the east
It's the end on the east of the hand on the West is the hand on the West and the hand that head that's up
Is up, and that feet that are data down
Everything's really all right
But what's wrong as if this is north?
Your nose is to the north of the back of your head, but in the image
The nose is to the south of the back of the head so
What happens really in the image is neither the right nor left mixed up in a proper, bun
But the front and back have been reversed to see that which is
The nose on the thing is in the wrong side of the hand if you find it all right now
Ordinarily when we think of the image we think of it as another person
And we think of the normal way that a person would get into that condition over there. It's a psychological thing
We don't think of the idea that the person has been squashed and pushed backwards forwards with his nose in his head because that's not
What ordinarily happens to people a person gets to look like he looks in the mirror?
by walking around and facing you and
Because people when they walk around don't turn their head for their feet
We leave that part alone
But they get their right and left hands swung about you see when they turn around and so we say that its left and right
And to change, but really the symmetrical way is along the axis of the mirror that things get interchanged well
That's kind of an easy a hard one
What keeps the train on the track titan-1 and very entertaining was what keeps the train on the track
And of course the answer is everyone thinks the flanges on the wheels you know the wheels have some kind of flange on
But that's not the answer
But you know this flange is just safety devices if the fledge is rub against the tracks you hear a terrible squealing
Then just in case the Ryo mechanism doesn't work
There's another problem with trains. That's connected to it
That people all know this about their automobile that when you go around the corner
The outside wheels have to go further than the inside wheels and
At the front if the wheels were connected on a solid shaft. You couldn't do that
You can't turn the outside wheels further than the inside wheels and so the shaft is broken in the middle with a gear system
It's called a differential
Did you ever see the differential on a railroad train?
No, you look at those wheels under a freight car and there are two wheels and there's a solid
Steel rod going for one wheel to the other there's nothing that one turns the same as the other so now how does it go?
Around the corner occur when the outside wheel has to go further than the inside wheel?
and the answer is that the wheels are
Flange like this. I mean not pointers that their cones
This way that is they're a little fatter
Closer to the Train and a little thinner further out if you look closely just you there
I got this beveled edge, and it's all very simple when they go around the curve
they slide out on the track a bit so that this wheel
travels on a flat upon a bigger diameter and this on a smaller diameter
so when they both turn one turn this swings further than the other and
That's what keeps it on the track
Also, the same way suppose the trains running along on this thing on the track of the tracks here
Yeah
And the two wheels are exactly balanced and it's nice and even suppose accidentally it gets a bump or something and slides out this way
Then this wheel is on a bigger
circumference than this one, but they're on a solid shift
So when it turns once around it carries this wheel forward
Both of the other end steers the train back on the track of course if it gets too far off on the other side it
Goes back and forth and it stays on the track because the wheels are tapered
And the flanges safety well we had a lot of stuff like that that we hadn't learned
Get straightened out before we could become full-fledged
Except sitting next to a swimming pool
Somebody dives in and she's not too pretty so I can think of something else
I think of the wave since things that have formed in the water and
When there's lots of people have dived in the pool
There's a very great choppiness of all these waves all over the water and to think that it's possible maybe
That in those ways is a clue as to what's happening in a pool
That's some sort of insect or something with sufficient cleverness could
sit in the corner of the pool and just be disturbed by the waves and
by the nature of the
irregularities and bumping of the ways have figured out who jumped in where and when and where what's happening all over the pool and
That's what we're doing when we're looking at something
The light that comes out is its waves
Just like in the swimming pool except in three dimensions instead of the two dimensions of the poulos
They're going in all directions, and we have a eighth vintage black hole into which these things go
Which is particularly sensitive to the part to the ways that are coming in a particular direction?
It's not particularly sensitive when they're coming in at the wrong angle, which you say it's from the corner of our eye
And if we want to get more information the corral we swivel this ball about so that the whole
place to play
then
It's quite wonderful that we didn't see figure out so easy
That's really because the white waves are easier than the waves in the water a little bit more complicated
It would have been harder for the bug that for us, but it's the same idea to figure out
What the thing is they were looking at at a distance?
And this is any kind of incredible because when I'm looking at you
Someone's standing to my left can see somebody who's standing at my right that is the light could be going right across?
This way the way is it going this way the way is it going this way the way is it going this way
It's just a complete network
Now it's easy to think of them as arrows passing each other
But that's not the way it is because all it is is something's shaking it's called the electric field
But we don't have to bother with what it is. It's just like the water height
It's going up and down so some quantities shaking about here and in a combination of motions
That's so elaborate and complicated and that result is to produce an influence which I makes me see you at the same time completely undisturbed
By the fact that there are influences that represent the other guys seeing him on this side so that this is
tremendous mess
Waves all over in space
Which we call her?
Which is the light bouncing around the room and going from one thing to the other because of course most of the broom?
Doesn't have eighth inch black holes
It's not interested in that light
but the lights there anyway every two bounces off this and advances off that that all this is going on and
Yet, we can sort it out with this instrument
But beside of all that you see those waves that I was talking about in the water
Maybe they're so big some of them, and then you could have slowest washes which are longer and shorter perhaps are
Animal who's making his study is only using waste between this length of Natalee so it turns out that the eye is only
Using waves between this length and that length except those two lengths are hundred millions and hundred thousandths of an inch
hundredths of an HP and
What about the slowest swashes the waves that go more slowly that have a longer distance crest to trot?
Those represent heat we feel those, but while I doesn't see them focused very well. We don't in fact at all
The shorter ways are blue do later. You know
I haven't had the longer waves of red, but when he gets long and that we call him
Infrared all this is in there at the same time. That's the heat
Pit vipers they got down here in a desert. They have a little thing that they could see the longer waves and
Pick out mice, which are radiating in their heat their longer way by their body heat by looking at them with this
Eye, which is the pit of the pit viper?
But we can't we don't are able to do that and then these ways get longer and longer and you know all through the same
Space all these things are going on at the same time so that in this space
There's not only your my vision of you, but information for Moscow radio
That's being broadcast at the present moment and the seeing of somebody from Peru
All the radio waves are just the same kind of weighs only longer waves and
there's the radar from the airplane which is looking at the ground to figure out where it is which is coming through this room at
the same time
plus x-ray
Cosmic rays and all these other things was in the same kind of waves exactly the same ways, but shorter faster or longer slower
It's exactly the same thing so this big field this this area of irregular motions of this
Electric field is vibration contains this tremendous information, and it's all
Really there. That's what gets you if you don't believe it
then you pick a piece of wire and
Connect it to a box and in the wire the electrons will be pushed back and forth by this electric field
Swashing just at the right speed for the certain kind of long ways
And you turn some knobs on the box to get the sloshing just right and you hear Radio Moscow now
You know that it was there. How else did it get there. It was there all the time
There's only when you turn on the radio that it you're noticing
But that all these things are going through
The room at the same time, which everybody knows when you but you gotta stop
And think about it to really get the pleasure about the complexity the inconceivable
Nature of nature
We were talking about the atoms one other trouble that people have with the atoms is that they're so tiny and is so hard to
imagine the scale that the
size of the atoms are in
Size compared to an Apple is the same scale as an Apple is to the size of the earth
And that's the kind of a hard thing to take and you have to go through all these things all the time
And people find these numbers inconceivable, and I do too, and the only thing you do is you just change your scale
I think you're just thinking of small balls, but you don't try to think of exactly how small they are too often?
Or is it get kind of a bit nutty all right, but in astronomy
You have the safe they could reverse because the distances to these stars is so enormous. Do you know that light?
Goes so fast that it only takes a few seconds to go to the moon and back
Or it goes around me
You're at seven and a half times in a second and it goes for a year two years three years
Before it gets to the nearest other star that there is to us
But all our stars are in with the stars that are nearby in a great galaxy a big mass of stars
Which is called a galaxy a group, but this guy our galaxy is
What is it some?
100,000 light years on a thousand years, and then there's another patch of stars it takes a million
Years for the light to get here going at this enormous rate
And you just go crazy trying to make too real that distance you have to do everything in proportion
It's easy you save the galaxies a little patches of stars, and they're 10 times
It's far apart as they are big and that's at these pictures only gets it, but you just go to a different scale
It's easy and once in a while you try to come back to earth
Scale to discuss the galaxies, but it's kind of hard the number of stars that we see at night is about only about 5,000
But the number of stars in our galaxy is if the telescope's have shown when you improve the instrument oh
We look at a galaxy we look at the stars all the light that we see the little tiny and influen
spreads from the star over this enormous distance of 1/3 light-years for the nearest star
On on on this light from the star is spreading the wave fronts are getting wider and wider
Weaker and weaker weaker and weaker out into all of space and finally the tiny fraction of it comes in one square
Ladies of an inch tiny little black hole and does something to me, so I know it's there
Well there know a little bit more about I'd rather gather a little more of this little this tiny fraction of this front of light
And so I make a big telescope which is a kind of funnel that the light that comes over this big area 200 inches across
is very carefully organized so it's all concentrated backs off and goes to a
Pupil actually is better to photograph. They don't nowadays to use photo cells
They're better instrument
But anyway the idea that telescope is to focus the light from a bigger area into a smaller area
So that we see things that are weaker less light and in that way we find
There's a very large number of stars in the galaxy
A hundred there's so many that if you tried to name them one a second naming all the stars in our galaxy
Enemy almost thousand universe just this galaxy here it takes three thousand years, and yet that's not a very big number
Because if those stars were to drop one dollar bill on the earth
During a year each star dropping one dollar bill. They might take care of the deficit which is
suggested for the budget of the United States
Especially see what kind of numbers we have to deal with
and anyway
I think that the numbers are problem in astronomy the sizes and numbers and the best thing to do is to relax and enjoy
the tiny nosov and
the enormity of the rest of the universe of course if you're
Feeling depressed by that you can always look at it the other way and think of how big you are
Compared to the atoms and the parts of atoms and then you're an enormous universe
To those atoms so you can sort of stand in the middle and enjoy everything both ways
But the real the great part of astronomy is the
Imagination it's been necessary to guess
What kinds of structures what kinds of things can be happening to produce the light and the effects of the light and sort of the?
Stars that we do see and
I could take an example a historical example
See it many times in science by using imagination you've imagined something which could be according to all the known
Knowledge of the laws, and you don't know whether it is yet or not and that's very interesting. There's a creative imagination
You'd like to call it
Not just imagining things that are relatively easy
but something different and to take an example of a
Star as we understand it to ordinary start like the Sun is a great big ball of gas of hydrogen
That's burning up the hydrogen so forth and it's an enormous mass gas lets held together by gravity
You don't have to always understand gravity his curved space good enough for this purpose the
Force in versus square of the distance when things are closer together the force is stronger
And it pulls everything together by the way, that's why the world is round
Because the globe earth is pulled together as much as possible
And if it had a great mountain and an irregularity of a bumper
So it would be pulled in by gravity and it all gets smooth
Rocks aren't strong enough the whole room Bob much bigger than a few miles and Mount Everest is our biggest Bob
But on the moon where the gravity is less the bumps are higher in the mountains at bigger on the moon
Anyway to get back to the star
It's all held together by gravity
And it's got a nuclear fuel which we've got been
Talking about that's burning up the hydrogen and generating energy which keeps things going and after while I would use the fuel up people began
to think about what what happened and
It would be possible to just be gassed sort of hanging around
held together by gravity, but quiet
But another possibility was to think if I push the stuff together closer
The gravity is stronger would it hold together
Well if you push a little bit together the pressure increases when you push the gas together
There are more atoms than a pound hearts are the pressures higher
But the gravity is stronger
and it turns out the pressure wins so it would just come out again if you pushing a star in my debt ok oscillate and
There are some stars that are oscillating you're vibrating
But it turns out if you keep on analyzing
And you push it together very far to the incredible
Concentration at the whole master the sun's down to the size of the earth or smaller
Then it turns to all the nuclear matter all the nuclei of the atoms are all stuck next to each other tight the electrons are
Spaces where the electrons arms all squashed out, and it comes out that when you get to that far
The gravity is strong enough has overpowered the pressure again
Even though the pressures got to be enormous the gravity has got to be even more enormous
and the thing will stay steady at a different size and be nothing but
neutrons
nuclear manna nothing solid nuclear banner, and this is a
possibility was worked out by Oppenheimer and Volkoff in this called a neutron star and
People waited to see if there were any such neutron stars for years to recently
We found these strange pulsars, which should
emit flashes of off radio age and later
We found light which should go 30 times a second for instance the fastest one so maybe 10 times a second a 1 a second
And at first
That's very mysteriously used two stars being big and slow and how can anything in a star move in a 30th of a second?
well these things are very small neutron stars, and they're spinning very fast and
There's something for reasons not yet understood
they're emitting a beam of radio waves like a searchlight in an airport or something those things go around but
Booked so we get the flashes
That's fast to imagine a star the mass of the Sun
Doing something turning so fast as 30 times seconds another one of these big number
Hard to conceive imaginary things okay?
and the whole idea that there could be a star of such enormous density that a
Teaspoon would weigh so much that if of the matter that if you put it down on the Earth's surface
It's so heavy. It will just plow right through to the center of the earth and things like that
Took a lot of imagination
it comes out of the mathematics and the
analysis
And all this that you helped you to make sure you're not making a mistake and it turns out that such as far as possible
And it turned out later in fact they do exist and that's a good example
Of how imagination is a useful thing and producers are guessing
Ahead of time how we make advances by using
It beside just they're very difficult
So you can imagine all the things that might be up there to explain the things we see
in the case of astronomy we have a large number of things that we see that we are not yet quite clearly got the
Imagination to see what it is that's producing
The quasars are very powerful forces of the light radio waves, but very great distances
they see them because they're so bright and
The exact cause of their sources is only gradually being recently understood in terms of another very concept of
imagination the black hole
Which is something that comes from?
Following the logic of the gravity theory of Einstein towards ultimate
Working out the consequences in crazy circumstances suppose you had in an amount of matter so great
That the gravity force is so much that even light trying to get how it falls back
Nothing can go fast faster than light and nothing could escape
You couldn't see it
How would you get there?
if you had a lot of mad at the spot with it could fall together and
Get into this condition that no longer could the light come out
And so you would have this thing which would continue to attract things to it things would go in and nothing would come out
That's called the black hole
And you'd say well how can a black hole which is absorbing everything make all this energy that?
We see is that an explanation of the quasar actually it may well be
Because the things are falling in don't go through plunk in but go around
falling in by swirling
Then as they fall in and irregularly and so forth and in the fast motions of the producers. They go down this whirlpool
They generate a lot of
Energy and friction and so forth of different kinds of effects magnetic electric effects that could make the jets of matter
that come out of the
Quasar the radio galaxies in ways that are not really understood
We don't have a real picture of why there are Jets of the radio waves and so a matter emitting radio waves
In Galax there are galaxies which great Jets have come out of big clouds of manna on each side which are emitting radio waves
So there's some kind of a source in there this sort of gets wound up on that shoots these Jets of material
With tremendous energy, and it's guessed that maybe that's a black hole
Somehow or other and somehow or other is the challenge of imagination?
Which has not yet been answered by anybody with any great
concert
You asked me if it was very personal by studying Han would get to be able to imagine these things
Like I imagined of course I was an ordinary person who studied hard
There's no miracle people it just happens. They got interested in this thing and they learned all this stuff
They're just people
There's no talent a special miracle
ability to understand quantum mechanics, or a miracle ability
to imagine
electromagnetic fields that comes
without practice and reading and learning and study so if you say you take an ordinary person who's willing to devote a great deal of
Time and study and work and thinking and mathematics and time I then he's become a scientist
But when I'm actually doing my own things and I'm working in the high
deepen esoteric stuff
that I worry about I
Don't think I can describe
Very well
Good what it's like first of all it's like asking a centipede, which light comes after which it happens quickly
And I'm not exactly sure what flashes and stuff going ahead, but I know it's a crazy mixture of
partially equations partial solving an equation
Then having some sort of picture of what's happening that the equation is saying is happening
But they're not that well separated as the words. I'm using and
It's a kind of a nut money
thing it's very hard to describe and I don't know that it does any good to describe it and
Did something that struck me. That's very
Curious I suspect that
What goes on and every man's head might be very very different?
the actual imagery of a semi imagery which comes and
that when we're talking to each other at these high and complicated levels, and we think we're
Speaking very well, and we're communicating
But we what we really are doing is having some kind of big
Translation scheme going on for translating what this fella says into our images which are very different?
I found that out because the very earliest I
Won't go into the details, but I got interested in
Well I was doing some experiments
and I was trying to figure out something about our time sense and
So what I would do is I would count trying to count up to a minute
Actually to say I can't before t ate it then it would be one minute so I calibrate myself
And I would count a minute and 48 the gavest count seconds, but it's close enough
and then it turns out if you
Repeat that you can do very accurately when you get to 40 a or 47 or 49 not far off
You're very close to a minute
the rate
That the gravity force is so much that even I could do anything at the same time as I was counting
And I found that I could
do many things I could
There were some things that not for example I had great difficulty if I was in the height
University I had to get my laundry ready
and
I was putting the socks out and
I had to make a list how many socks and there was something like six or eight socks
And I couldn't count them because the counting machine was you being used and I couldn't count them
until I found out I could put them in a pattern and recognize the number and
so I learned away after practicing by which I could go down a lines of type and
newspapers and see them in groups 3 3 3 1 that's a group of 10 3 3 3 without saying the numbers just seeing the
Grouping I could therefore count the lines of type. I practiced in the newspaper at the same time
I was counting internally the seconds and so I would come I could do this fantastic trick of say 48
That's a 1 minute, and there are 67 lines of type usually
it was quite wonderful and I
Discovered many things I could read while I was no I
Excuse me. Yes. Yes, I could read perfectly all right while I was counting and
Get an idea of what it was about but I couldn't speak. I couldn't say anything
Because of course I was sort of when I can I sort of spoke to myself inside
I would say 1 2 3 saw him in the head
well, I went down to the breakfast and there was a
John Tukey was a mathematician
Dam at Princeton at the same time, and we had many discussions
And I was telling him about these experiments and what I could do and he says that's absurd. He said
He says I don't see why you would have any difficulty talking whatsoever and I can't possibly believe that you could read
So I couldn't believe all this, but we calibrated him. It was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds or whatever. I don't remember
And then he'd say all right
He said what do you want me to say mary had a little lamb I can speak about anything blah blah blah blah blah blah
52 it's a minute. He was right
And I couldn't possibly do that and he wanted me to read because he couldn't believe it
And then we compared notes and it turned out that when he thought of
Counting what he didn't mean inside his head is when he counted was he saw a tape with numbers that went clink clink clink
The tape would change with the numbers printed on it. He could see
Well since it's sort of an optical system that he's using and that voice he could speak as much as he wanted
But if he had to read that he couldn't look at his clock
Whereas for me It was the other way
And that's where I discovered at least in this very simple operation of camping the great difference in what goes on in the head?
when people think they're doing the same thing and
so it struck me therefore if that's already true at the most elementary level that when we learn the
Mathematics and the bus'll functions and the Exponential's and the electric fields and all these things
That the imagery's and method by which we're storing it all and the way we think about it
could be it really if we could get to each other's heads entirely different and
In fact why somebody sometimes has a great deal of difficulty understanding a point
which you see is a Fiat and
Vice versa it may be because it's a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on now
I'm talking like a psychologist that you know I know nothing about this
Suppose that little things behaved very differently than anything that was big
Anything that you're familiar with because you see as the animal evolves and so on his brain evolves it gets used to
Handling and the brain is designed
for ordinary circumstances
but if the
gut particles in the deep inner workings would by some other rules and some other character
They behave differently they were very different than anything on a large scale then there would be some kind of difficulty
You know understanding and imagining reality and that difficulty. We are in
The behavior of things on a small scale is so fantastic. It's so wonderfully
Different so marvelously different than anything that behaves on a large scale
Say electrons act like ways. No. They don't exactly they act like particles
No, they don't exactly they act like a kind of a fog around the nucleus
No, they don't exactly and if you would like to get a clear sharp picture of an atom
So that you can tell exactly how it's going to behave correctly
And have a good image in other words a really good image of reality. I don't know how to do it
Because that image has to be mathematical we have a mathematical expression
Strangest mathematics, I don't understand how it is, but we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do
without actually being able to picture
It would be something like a computer that you put certain numbers in and you have the formula for it
What time the car will arrive at different?
Destinations and the thing does the arithmetic to figure out what time the car arrives at the different destinations, but cannot picture the car
It's just doing the arithmetic so we know how to do the arithmetic, but we cannot picture
the car no it's not a hundred percent because
for certain approximations a certain kind of approximate picture works that is simply of
Around the nucleus that when you squeeze it and repels you it's very good for understanding the stiffness of material
That it's a wave which does this and that is very good for some other phenomenon alright so when you're working with certain particular
Aspects of the behavior other atoms for instance when I was talking about temperature
And support that they're just little balls is good enough, and it gives a very nice picture of temperature
but if you ask more specific questions
And you get down to questions like how is it that when you cool helium down?
Even to absolute zero where there's not supposed to be any motion it's a perfect fluid that has many
Viscosity has no resistance flows perfectly and isn't freezing
Well if you want to get a picture of atoms that has all of that in it, I can't do it
Just but I can explain why the helium baize as it does by taking my equations and sewing that
Consequences of them is that the Healey will bathe as it is observed debeso, we know we have the theory right
But we haven't got the pictures that would go with the theory and is that?
Because we're limited and haven't caught on to the right pictures
Or is that because there aren't any right pictures?
For people who have to make pictures and have things that are familiar to them
Well I'd suppose
it's the last one that there's no right pictures in terms of things that are familiar to them is it possible then to
develop a familiarity with
Those things that are not familiar on hand by study
By learning about the properties of atoms and quantum mechanics by practicing with the equations until it becomes a kind of second nature
Just like a second nature to know that if two balls came toward each other. They'd smash into bits you
Don't say there's two balls when they come toward each other turn blue
You know what they do so the question is whether you could get to know
What
things do without
Better than we do today, you know that's the generations develop
Will they invent ways of teaching and weird so that the new people?
Will learn a tricky ways or quickly good things and be so trained so well trained that they won't have our troubles
with the atom of picturing
There's still a school of thought that
Cannot believe that the atomic behavior is so different
Than large-scale behavior, I think that's a deep prejudice. It's the prejudice from being so used to large-scale it and they're always seeking to
Find - waiting for the day that we discovered that underneath the quantum mechanic
There's some mundane ordinary
Balls hitting or particles moving inside, I think they're gonna be defeated
I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's
She's never gonna let us
relax
