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Hello, everybody.

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Thank you for being here.

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In childhood, I wrote dozens of poems,

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and in my poetry,

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I tried to express my feelings
about loneliness,

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my questions about death,

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my unrequited love
for 14-year-old girls.

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(Laughter)

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Reading, listening, even thinking,

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I was mesmerized by the sounds
and the movements of words.

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Words could be sudden, like "jolt,"

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or words could be slow, like "meandering,"

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words could be silvery,
prickly to the touch,

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and by magic, words
could create scenes and emotions.

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Between poems,
I did scientific experiments,

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and these I conducted
in a little laboratory,

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a homemade laboratory
that I built off my second-floor bedroom,

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really, a large closet.

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And there I hoarded resistors, capacitors,

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wire of various lengths,

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test tubes, beautiful pieces of glassware.

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I loved my equipment;
I loved to build things.

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By the age of 12,

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I had built a remote-control device

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that turned on the lights in any room
of the house from any other room.

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When my scientific projects went awry,

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I could find certain fulfillment
in mathematics.

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In geometry,

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I loved the inexorable relationships
between lines and angles.

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And in algebra, I loved the abstraction -

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I loved letting X's and Y's

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stand for the number
of nickels and pennies in a jar

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and then solving
a connected set of equations

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one logical step after the other.

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I loved that shining purity
of mathematics,

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that precision.

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I loved the certainty of mathematics.

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In mathematics,

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you were guaranteed an answer

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as clean and as crisp
as a new 20-dollar bill,

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and when you found that answer,

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you knew that you were right,
unquestionably right -

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the area of a circle
is pi r-squared, period.

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Mathematics contrasted strongly

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with the ambiguities
and the contradictions of people.

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The world of people confused me;

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the world of people
had no logic or certainty:

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My Aunt Jean continued to drive recklessly
in her little MG sports car

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even though everyone in the family

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told her that she would kill herself
in that car one day.

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We had a wonderful woman named Blanche,
who worked for our family for years.

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Blanche had to leave her husband
after he abused her,

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and then, for many years later,
spoke about him with affection.

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So how does one reconcile
these different worlds,

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these seeming contradictions?

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Well, now having lived
in two communities,

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the community of scientists
and the community of artists,

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for many years -

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I've worked both as a physicist
and as a novelist -

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I have tentative answers
to some of these questions.

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So I wanted to tell you this morning
a little bit about what I've learned

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about the different ways that scientists
and artists approach the world -

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their different versions of truth
and also some of the many similarities.

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A big distinction that I have found
between physicists and novelists

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or, I should say, more generally,
between scientists and artists

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is in what I will call
"the naming of things."

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Roughly speaking,

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the scientist tries to name things

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and the artist tries
to avoid naming things.

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To name a thing,

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you've gathered it, you've distilled it,

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you've purified it,

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you've put a box around the thing

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and said what's in the box is the thing

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and what's not in the box
is not the thing.

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Consider, for example,
the word "electron,"

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which is a type of subatomic particle.

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As far as we know,

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all of the zillions of electrons
in the universe are identical;

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there's only a single kind of electron.

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And to a modern physicist,

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the word electron
means a particular equation -

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it's called the Dirac equation.

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And that equation summarizes everything
that we know about electrons:

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the precise energy of electrons in atoms
as they orbit the nucleus,

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the deflections of electrons
in magnetic fields -

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all of that can be predicted
to many decimal places

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with great accuracy by the Dirac equation.

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Every object in the physical universe

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the scientist wants to be able to name
with this kind of precision.

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For scientists,
it's a feeling of comfort,

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a feeling of power,

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and a sense of control

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to be able to name things in this way.

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The concepts that the artist
deals with cannot be named.

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The novelist might use a word
like "love" or like "fear,"

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but those words don't really convey
that much to the reader.

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For one thing, there are
a thousand different kinds of love:

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there's the love
that you feel for a mother

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who writes you every day
your first summer away from home

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at summer camp;

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there is the love that you feel for a man
or a woman that you've just made love to;

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there's the love
that you feel for a friend

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who calls you right
after you've split up from your spouse;

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and on and on.

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But it's not just
the many different kinds of love

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that prevent the novelist
from truly naming the thing,

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it's that the particular situation

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that creates the particular ache of love.

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That particular situation
must be shown to the reader -

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not named but shown
through the actions of characters.

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And if love is shown rather than named,

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then each reader will experience it
in her own individual way,

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each reader will draw on her own
adventures and misadventures with love.

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Every electron is identical,
but every love is different.

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The novelist doesn't want to try
to eliminate these differences,

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doesn't want to try to distill
the meaning of love

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so that there is only a single meaning,
as in the Dirac equation,

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because such a distillation is impossible

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and even an attempt at such a distillation

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would destroy that magical, delicate,
participatory creative act

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that happens when a good reader
reads a good book.

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In a sense a novel is not completed
until it is read by a reader

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and every reader completes the novel
in a different way.

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Well, there's another phenomena
that's closely related to naming,

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and that is framing problems
in terms of questions with answers.

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We scientists work by breaking the world
down into smaller and smaller pieces

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until we have what we call
well-posed problems

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that have clear and definite answers.

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It might take five years, it might take
a hundred years to find the answer,

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but at any given moment of time,

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each scientist is working on something

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that he or she feels
has a definite answer;

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for example, one such question might be:

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Where in a living organism
are the instructions stored

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to create a new organism?

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This is a well-posed problem
with a definite answer;

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it was answered in the 1800s and 1900s.

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But artists often don't care
what the answer is

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because often answers - definite answers -
don't exist in the arts;

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the arts are complicated

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by the intrinsic ambiguities
and self-contradictions of people.

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This is one of the reasons

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why the characters in a good novel
can be debated endlessly,

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why God held the apple in front of Eve
and then forbade her to eat it.

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In the arts,

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there are many, many interesting questions
that don't have answers,

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such as "Does God exist?"
or "What is the nature of love?"

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or "Would we be happier
if we live to be a thousand years old?" -

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and I'm grouping the arts
and the humanities together here.

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These are very interesting questions;

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they provoke us,
they stimulate our imagination,

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but they don't have clear
and definite answers

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or maybe no answers at all.

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As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,

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"We should learn to love
the questions themselves

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like locked rooms and like books
written in a very foreign tongue."

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And I have finally come to believe
that we need both kinds of questions:

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we need questions with answers
and we need questions without answers -

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that both kinds of questions
are part of being human.

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Well, I've been speaking
about some of the differences

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between the sciences and the arts -

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let me say a little bit
about some of the similarities.

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The folklore

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is that artists make up everything
and scientists don't make up anything.

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Well, both views are false.

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The imagination has always been important
in a great scientist.

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And Albert Einstein
had a phrase that he used -

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he called it "the free invention
of the mind" in the sciences,

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and by that, the great scientist meant

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that we cannot discover
all of the truths of nature

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simply by observation and experiment,

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that sometimes we have
to start with mental constructions

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and then only later test those
against experiment.

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And one of the greatest examples
of Einstein's "free invention of the mind"

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was his work on time,
called "the theory of special relativity."

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And in that work, Einstein
begins with the stunning postulate

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that a light ray passes us
at the same speed

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whether we're running
towards the light ray

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or away from it -

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it makes no sense based
on our day-to-day experience,

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it violates common sense,

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and yet Einstein realized
that our common sense could be in error

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when it comes to the very
high speeds of a light ray,

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and he made this leap of the imagination.

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But scientists can't make up everything
even when they're developing new theories;

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I mean, you can't put forth
a new law of gravity

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that says apples fall up instead of down -

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there's still a large body
of known experimental evidence

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that we have to accord with.

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And I would argue that in the same way,

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there's a body of experimental evidence
that the artist must accord with -

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it is the large catalog of known behavior
in psychology of human beings

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called human nature,

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and those are the facts
that the artist must accord with.

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And let me give you an example
of what I'm talking about there.

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Suppose a novelist
has created a character:

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a man about 40 years old,
married with two children,

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who's just attended a Christmas party.

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Just for the sake of referring to him,
let's call this fellow Gabriel.

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Well, we learn at
the beginning of the story

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that Gabriel is not too sure of himself -

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he worried when he first got
into the Christmas party,

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he worried that he had insulted
the housekeeper's daughter,

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and a little bit later,

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he's worrying that his after-dinner speech
is going to be condescending.

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Well, anyway, the party ends.

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Gabriel and his wife Greta have left
their two children with a babysitter;

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they've decided to spend the night
at a nearby hotel.

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Greta's been very quiet
during the evening.

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So they walk out of the house,

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and they begin walking on a path

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towards their hotel
in this little village.

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It's well after midnight now;
it's beginning to snow.

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Gabriel looks over at his wife
and admires her

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and hopes that she still feels
in love with him

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00:14:03,877 --> 00:14:07,712
even though she's had the drudgery
of house work and children.

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So they reach their hotel,

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and they walk up
this narrow curving stairway

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that's lit only by candlelight,

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and they enter their room,

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and by this time, Gabriel is feeling
a lot of desire for his wife, Greta.

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And instead, she turns away from him
and she begins weeping.

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And he asks her, "Why are you crying?"

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And she says that there was a sad song
sung at the Christmas party

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that reminded her of a boy

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that she used to know
long ago in her youth,

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a boy with large brown eyes.

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They used to go walking together.

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Gabriel feels a dread in his stomach,

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and he asks his wife,
"Were you in love with this boy?"

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And she says, "Yes,
we were great together at the time."

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And then Greta says, "He died at age 17."

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"What did he die of
so young?" asks Gabriel.

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"I think he died for me," says Greta,

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and she begins sobbing all over again
and throws herself to the bed.

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Well, this scene that I've just described,
as some of you know,

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is the last scene of James Joyce's
famous story The Dead,

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00:15:26,920 --> 00:15:30,168
and the question is:
How will Joyce end the scene?

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What will be Gabriel's reaction
to his wife's confession?

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Suppose that he shows no reaction -

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would we as readers with our
life experience believe that reaction?

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No, it would ring false.

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00:15:45,256 --> 00:15:52,124
Or suppose Gabriel feels superior
to this boy of the distant past,

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this long dead boy,
and dismisses his wife's pain -

246
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would we believe that reaction?

247
00:15:57,870 --> 00:16:00,031
No, we wouldn't believe that either,

248
00:16:00,031 --> 00:16:04,877
because we know that Gabriel
is too insecure a character for that.

249
00:16:05,477 --> 00:16:08,975
The ending that Joyce
actually writes is this:

250
00:16:10,375 --> 00:16:15,941
Gabriel realizes that his wife
has always loved this long dead boy

251
00:16:15,941 --> 00:16:20,042
more than she's ever
loved him, her husband,

252
00:16:20,322 --> 00:16:23,513
and he also realizes
that he's never loved any woman

253
00:16:23,513 --> 00:16:28,577
with the passion that she has just
demonstrated for this boy.

254
00:16:29,557 --> 00:16:33,219
And all he can do after these realizations

255
00:16:33,869 --> 00:16:36,931
is sag against the windowpane,

256
00:16:36,931 --> 00:16:40,357
listening to the breathing
of his wife as she sleeps,

257
00:16:40,357 --> 00:16:45,929
watching her as if he and she
had never been man and wife.

258
00:16:46,519 --> 00:16:51,655
We believe this ending;
we know that it's true even in fiction

259
00:16:51,655 --> 00:16:54,987
because it accords
with our life experiences,

260
00:16:54,987 --> 00:17:01,068
with our understanding of human nature,
and it causes us anguish.

261
00:17:02,748 --> 00:17:07,561
Both the scientist and the artist
are seeking truth.

262
00:17:08,311 --> 00:17:09,430
In seeking truth,

263
00:17:09,430 --> 00:17:12,679
both the scientist
and the artist must invent.

264
00:17:12,679 --> 00:17:15,594
Both kinds of invention are important.

265
00:17:15,594 --> 00:17:20,401
Both kinds of invention must be tested
against experiment.

266
00:17:20,401 --> 00:17:25,499
The tests of the scientist's invention
are more definitive;

267
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no matter how beautiful
a scientific theory is,

268
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it has a terrible vulnerability -
it can be proven false.

269
00:17:32,783 --> 00:17:39,304
A writer's characters or story
cannot be proven definitively wrong,

270
00:17:39,634 --> 00:17:45,194
but they can ring false
and thus lose their power with the reader,

271
00:17:45,194 --> 00:17:49,623
and in this way, the novelist
is constantly testing his fiction

272
00:17:49,623 --> 00:17:53,744
against the accumulated
life experiences of his readers.

273
00:17:57,784 --> 00:18:01,209
The scientists and the artists
that I have known

274
00:18:01,209 --> 00:18:04,800
have at least one more thing in common:

275
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they do what they do because they love it

276
00:18:07,561 --> 00:18:11,310
and because they cannot imagine
doing anything else -

277
00:18:11,770 --> 00:18:13,413
this is a compulsion.

278
00:18:13,413 --> 00:18:16,706
This compulsion is
both a blessing and a burden.

279
00:18:16,706 --> 00:18:17,744
It's a blessing

280
00:18:17,744 --> 00:18:20,663
because the creative life
is a beautiful life

281
00:18:20,663 --> 00:18:22,871
and it's not given to all of us,

282
00:18:23,161 --> 00:18:26,204
and it's a burden
because when the call comes,

283
00:18:26,204 --> 00:18:30,772
it can be unrelenting
and it can drown out the rest of life.

284
00:18:31,382 --> 00:18:33,823
This mixed blessing and burden

285
00:18:33,823 --> 00:18:37,840
must be the sweet hell
that Walt Whitman referred to

286
00:18:38,130 --> 00:18:42,503
when he realized at a young age
that he was destined to be a poet -

287
00:18:42,503 --> 00:18:46,012
"Never more shall I escape,"
wrote Whitman.

288
00:18:46,462 --> 00:18:48,981
This mixed blessing and burden

289
00:18:48,981 --> 00:18:53,782
must be why a visitor
to the young Einstein's apartment in Bern

290
00:18:53,782 --> 00:18:58,983
found the physicists rocking
the cradle of his son with one hand

291
00:18:58,983 --> 00:19:02,364
and doing mathematical
calculations with the other.

292
00:19:02,364 --> 00:19:03,927
Thank you.

293
00:19:03,927 --> 00:19:05,272
(Applause)