troubles and there were shipwrecks, and there was the whole works. And it’s an exciting story. When it, for example, heated up, it was said in the paper, “It’s heating up, and we’re learning from that.” What could we be learning? If you know something, you realize you can’t learn anything. You put satellites up near the earth, and you know how much radiation you get from the sun . .. we know that. And how much do they get when they get near Venus? Its a definitely accurate law, well known, inverse square. The closer you get, the brighter the light. Easy. So it’s easy to figure out how much white and black to paint the thing so that the temperature adjusts itself.
The only thing we learned was that the fact that it got hot was not due to anything else than the fact that the thing was made in a very great hurry at the last minute and some changes were made in the inside apparatus, so that there was more power developed in the inside and it got hotter than it was designed for. What we learned, therefore, was not scientific. But we learned to be a little bit careful about going in such a hurry on these things and keep changing our minds at the last minute. By some miracle the thing almost worked when it was there. It was meant to look at Venus by making a series of passes across the planet, looking like a television screen, twenty-one passes across the planet. It made three. Good. It was a miracle. It was a great achievement. Columbus said he was going for gold and spices. He got no gold and very little spices. But it was a very important and very exciting moment. Mariner was supposed to go for big and important scientific information. It got none. I tell you it got none. Well, I’ll correct it in a minute. It got practically none. But it was a terrific and exciting experience. And in the future more will come from it. What it did find out, from looking at Venus, they say in the paper, was that the temperature was 800 degrees or something, under the surface of the clouds. That was already known. And it’s being confirmed today, even now, by using the telescope at Palomar and making measurements on Venus from the earth. How clever. The same information could be gotten from looking from the Earth: I have a friend who has information on this, and he has a beautiful map of Venus in his room, with contour lines and hot and cold and different temperatures in different parts. In detail. From the earth. Not just three swatches with some spots of up and down. There was one piece of information that was obtained—that Venus has no magnetic field around it like the earth has—and that was a piece of information that could not have been obtained from here.
There was also very interesting information on what was going on in the space in between, on the way from here to Venus. It should be pointed out that if you don’t try to make the thing hit a planet, you don’t have to put extra correcting devices inside, you know, with extra rockets to re-steer it. You just shoot it off. You can put more instruments in, better instruments, more carefully designed, and if you really want to find out what there is in the space in between, you don’t have to make such a to-do about going to Venus. The most important information was on the space in between, and if we want that information, then please let us send another one that isn’t necessary to go to a planet and have all the complications of steering it.
Another thing is the Ranger program. I get sick when I read in the paper about, one after the other, five of them that don’t work. And each time we learn something, and then we don’t continue the program. We’re learning an awful lot. We’re learning that somebody forgot to close a valve, that somebody let sand into another part of the instrument. Sometimes we learn something, but most of the time we learn only that there’s something the matter with our industry, our engineers and our scientists, that the failure of our program, to fail so many times, has no reasonable and simple explanation. It’s not necessary that we have so many failures, as far as I can tell. There’s something the matter in the organization, in the administration, in the engineering, or in the making of these instruments. It’s important to know that. It’s not worthwhile knowing that we’re always learning something.
Incidentally, people ask me, why go to the moon? Because it’s a great adventure in science. Incidentally, it also develops technology. You have to make all these instruments to go to the moon—rockets, and so on—and it’s very important to develop technology. Also it makes scientists happy, and if scientists are happy maybe they’ll work on something else good for warfare. Another possibility is a direct military use of space. I don’t know how, nobody knows how, but there may turn out to be a use. Anyway, it’s possible that if we keep on developing the military aspects of long-range flying to the moon that we’ll prevent the Russians from making some military use that we can’t figure out yet. Also there are indirect military advantages. That is, if you build bigger rockets, then you can use them more directly by going directly from here to some other part of the earth instead of having to go to the moon. Another good reason is a propaganda reason. We’ve lost some face in front of the world by letting the other guys get ahead in technology. It’s good to be able to try to get that face back. None of these reasons alone is worthwhile and can explain our going to the moon. I believe, however, that if you put them all together, plus all the other reasons which I can’t think of, it’s worth it.
Well, I gotcha.
I would like to talk about one other thing, and that is, how do you get new ideas? This is for amusement for the students here, mostly. How do you get new ideas? That you do by analogy, mostly, and in working with analogy you often make very great errors. It’s a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. You have to blow them out with an egg, and so on. Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn’t know he’s got the wrong theory of what happens. If I’m in the tribe and I’m sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn’t know what he’s doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they’ll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course. If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can’t all be there. It’s too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time. However, I remind you that if you’re in the tribe, there’s nobody else to go to.
And now I can have some more fun, and this is especially for the students of this university. I thought, among other people, of the Arabian scholars of science during the Middle Ages. They did a little bit of science themselves, yes, but they wrote commentaries on the great men that came before them. They wrote commentaries on commentaries. They described what each other wrote about each other. They just kept writing these commentaries. Writing commentaries is some kind of a disease of the intellect. Tradition is very important. And freedom of new ideas, new possibilities, are disregarded on the grounds that the way it was is better than anything I can do. I have no right to change this or to invent anything or to think of anything. Well, those are your English professors. They are steeped in tradition, and they write commentaries. Of course, they also teach us, some of us, English. That’s where the analogy breaks down.
Now if we continue in the analogy here, we see that if they had a more enlightened view of the world there would be a lot of interesting problems. Maybe, how many parts of speech are there? Shall we invent another part of speech? Ooohhhhh!
Well, then how about the vocabulary? Have we got too many words? No, no. We need them to express ideas. Have we got too few words? No. By some accident, of course, through the history of time, we happened to have developed the perfect combination of words.
Now let me get to a lower level still in this question. And that is, all the time you hear the question, “why can’t Johnny read?” And the answer is, because of the spelling. The Phoenicians, 2000, more, 3000, 4000 years ago, somewhere around there, were able to figure out from their language a scheme of describing the sounds with symbols. It was very simple. Each sound had a corresponding symbol, and each symbol, a corresponding sound. So that when you could see what the symbols’ sounds were, you could see what the words were supposed to sound like. It’s a marvelous invention. And in the period of time things have happened, and things have gotten out of whack in the English language. Why can’t we change the spelling? Who should do it if not the professors of English? If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell “friend,” I say to them that something’s the matter with the way you spell friend.
And also, it can be argued, perhaps, if they wish, that it’s a question of style and beauty in the language, and that to make new words and new parts of speech might destroy that. But they cannot argue that respelling the words would have anything to do with the style. There’s no form of art form or literary form, with the sole exception of crossword puzzles, in which the spelling makes a bit of difference to the style. And even crossword puzzles can be made with a different spelling. And if it’s not the English professors that do it, and if we give them two years and nothing happens—and please don’t invent three ways of doing it, just one way, that everybody is used to—if we wait two or three years and nothing happens, then we’ll ask the philologists and the linguists and so on because they know how to do it. Did you know that they can write any language with an alphabet so that you can read how
