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(instrumental synthesizer music)

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(tape rewinding)

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(electronic instrumental music)

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- [Voiceover] My father, you see,

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interested me in patterns
at the very beginning

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and then later in things,
like we would turn over stones

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and watch the ants carry the little

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white babies down deeper into the hole.

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We would look at worms.

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We’d go for walks and we’d
look at things all the time,

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the stars, the way birds fly.

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He was always telling
me interesting things.

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I mean this story’s a rumor,
as far as I’m concerned,

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but the story is that before I was born,

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he told my mother that,

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“If it’s a boy, he’ll be a scientist.”

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My father used to sit me on his lap

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and the one book we did use all

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the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica

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and he used to sit me on
his lap when I was a kid

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and read out of the damned thing.

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There would be pictures of
dinosaurs and then he would read,

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you know the long words,
the dinosaur so and so

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attains a length of so and so many feet.

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He would always stop and he would say,

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“You know what that means?

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"It means, if the dinosaur’s
standing on our front yard

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"and your bedroom window, you
know, is on the second floor

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"you’d see out the window his
head standing looking at you."

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He would translate everything

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and I learned to translate everything,

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so it’s the same disease.

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When I read something,

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I always translate it in the best I can

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into what does it really mean.

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I can remember my father
talking, talking, talking.

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When you go into the museum, for example,

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there are great rocks
which have long cuts,

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grooves in them, from glacier

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and I remember, the
first time going there,

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he stopped there and explained to me

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about the ice moving and grinding.

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I can hear the voice, practically

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and then he would tell me,

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“How do you think we know

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"there were glaciers in the past?”

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He’d point out, “That's
what we're looking at,

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"that these rocks are found in New York

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"and so there must have
been ice in New York.”

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He understood.

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A thing that was very
important about my father

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was not the facts, but the process.

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How we find out.

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What is the consequence
of finding such a rock?

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But that’s the kind of guy he was.

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I don’t think he ever
successfully went to college.

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However, he did teach
himself a great deal.

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He read a lot.

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He liked the rational mind

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and liked those things which

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could be understood by thinking.

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So it’s not hard to understand
I got interested in science.

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I got a laboratory in my room.

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We also played a trick on my mother there.

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We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels

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and another substance, an iron salt,

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probably alum, in the soap

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and when they come together,
they make blue ink.

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So we were supposed to
fool my mother, you see.

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She would wash her hands and
then when she dried them,

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her hands would turn blue,

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but we didn’t think the
towel would turn blue.

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Anyway, she was horrified,

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the screams of, “My good linen towels!”

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But she was always cooperative.

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She never was afraid of the experiments.

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The bridge partners, would tell her,

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“How can you let the
child have a laboratory?

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"He'll blow up the house,"
and all this kind of talk

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and she just said, “It’s worth it.”

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I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”

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I took later solid
geometry and trigonometry.

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In solid geometry was the first time

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I had any mathematical difficulties.

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It was my only experience with how

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it must feel to the ordinary human being

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a then I discovered what was wrong.

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The diagrams that were being drawn

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on the blackboard were three-dimensional

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and I was thinking of
them as plane diagrams

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and I couldn’t understand
what the hell was going on.

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It was a mistake in the orientation.

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When he would draw pictures
and I would see a parallelogram

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and he called it a square,

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because it was tilted out
of the plane, you know

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and I, “Oh God, this thing
doesn’t make any sense.

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"What is he talking about?”

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It was a terrifying experience.

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Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling.

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But it was just a dumb mistake.

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But I suspect that this
kind of a dumb mistake

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is quite common to people
learning mathematics.

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Part of the missing
understanding is to mistake

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what it is you’re supposed to know.

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It isn’t the question of
learning anything precisely,

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but of learning that there’s
something exciting over there

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and I think that the same
thing happened with my father.

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My father never really
knew anything in detail,

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but would tell me what’s
interesting about the world

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and where, if you look, you’ll
find still more interests,

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so that later I would say,
“Well, this is going to be good.

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"I know this has got
something to do with this,

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"which is hot stuff.”

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This kind of feeling of what was important

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and that is the key.

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The key was somehow to
know what was important

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and what was not important,
what was exciting,

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because I can’t learn everything.

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(electronic instrumental music)

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The thing that I loved was,

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everything that I read was serious,

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wasn’t written for a child.

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I didn’t like children’s things.

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Because, for one thing I was very,

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very, and still am, very sensitive

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and very worried about was that
the thing to be dead honest,

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that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy.

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Details purposely left out

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or slightly erroneous explanations,

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in order to get away with it.

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This was intolerable.

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I kind of try to imagine what would

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have happened to me if
I’d lived in today’s era.

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I’m rather horrified.

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I think there are too many books,

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that the mind gets boggled.

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If I got interested, I would
have so many things to look at,

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I would go crazy.

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It’s too easy.

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(tape reversing)

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