Photography and plan to join us upstairs afterwards for the book signing and king case you are wondering where we pod cast most of these events, there are 1300 broadcasts for you to listen to, tell your grandchildren there are a lot of classics and your kids, they can get some homework done pretty quickly. I am the director of author events and i am pleased to welcome you and our guests this evening. Freeman dyson is an iconoclast, genius and one of the great minds in physics, mathematics and popular science. Everything else you need to know before he takes the stage is either in his books or in the programs in your lap. Tonight since we only have 60 minutes of Freeman Dysons time 59, it would be a waste of final nitrogen and seconds to tell you any more than to say Freeman Dyson will be interviewed by David Goldberg professor of physics at Drexel University and author of the universe in the rearview mirror. Please welcome to the library of philadelphia Freeman Dyson and David Goldberg. [applause] welcome to everyone, welcome to Freeman Dyson. I would like to begin by talking about the title of your latest book which you borrow from the soviet Rocket Scientist constant until, ski lkonstantin tsoilkov tsoilkovsky this is your book the tribute to his vision of space travel . The great thing about him is he was interested in biology more than engineering. Although he actually worked out rocket equations and understood how to do the engineering part he understood that if you really want to go into space seriously, it is much more a problem of biology and engineering. It is not just getting into space, it is what you do when you get there. On that topic, you make an interesting claim early in your book, you say the last century, the 20th century is the century of physics the century of biology. The Nineteenth Century is the century of chemistry. On that topic, from the biological perspective the make an interesting, and with regards to understanding biology, you talk about evolution and make very provocative claim the darwinian interlude has lasted 2 or 3 billion years. After a 3 billion years the darwinian interview is over. A single species, homo sapiens begins to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the Main Driving Force of change. This is a big question if you are up to it. Tell us how in your opinion human beings have changed the nature of evolution. As a side note very interested in hearing how the biologists responded here to your claim. I learned a lot recently from peter grant, biologists who worked in the galapagos islands, they spent 20 years living on one island in the galapagos and got not to know every bird there personally. To understand the inherited characteristics, particularly the beat from one generation to the next. In conclusion, which came as of big surprise to them and thus is it goes very fast he didnt stay long enough to see evolution happening. These species seem to be finches which darwin observed actually do evolve from year to year from decade to decade. Darwin started life as a it geologist, he tended to think in geological terms. Everything had to be slow. He had the notion that evolution was always millions of years but in reality that is not true. As the in a very practical way you can in fact evolve species this is Natural Selection, nothing artificial, variation of finishes from year to year essentials because these islands have a very rapid and quite abrupt fluctuations of climate one year will be wet and the next year will be dry. That makes a big difference to the birds, food is abundant or scarce. What happens is Natural Selection operates on that kind of rapid timescale so it is actually not true that cultural evolution is necessary, biological evolution both sides go fast. So sort of follow up on that. One thing that struck me, you now say it is more of a mix of the two, but darwins day is not necessarily over. Of course is not over. It is true that human domination is a fact. We are in control of the biosphere to a great extent. Is up to us not to mess it up. At the risk of drawing the my knowledge of the biological world one of the lessons we often turn, we underestimate the microscopic world scrutiny engineer individual plants, wheat engineer large animals we carve out large swaths of farmland and things like that but there is a lot going on beyond our control, beyond our everyday interpretations of the bacterial level. Do we miss basically the microscopic world because we have so clearly dominated the world on the macroscopic. I wouldnt say that. Very large amount of biology is concerned with microbes, most of what be learned about fundamental biology comes from studying microbes, viruses in particular. I think we are having at least as big an effect on the microbial as the big animals. In both cases we dont control it but we are certainly disturbing it very seriously. This brings up an important point. You are a physicist. You are a physicists among many other things. As a student, you work in contributions to Quantum Mechanics and quantum field theory in particular but i think it is fair to call you your contributions are fairly extensive. This particular book for those who havent read it yet is a collection primarily of essays and book reviews and one of the remarkable things is how much ground it covers. We discussed a little bit, biology, physics history and so on. Can you describe your process of diving into a new field, biology, ecology, evolution economics, so on. If you could describe your process, described what you learned and if it is not too much maybe your sense of how daunting it can be to go into a world where other people have generated expertise and developed expertise yourself. I would say, this normal development is getting old. Get broader and broader and shallower and shallower. Like a river of reaching the ocean. Anyhow. And of course writing books is a congenial activity for an old gentleman. It can be done on time. Of course i have had the enormous advantage of living in a community at princeton which is sort of bright young people. I had the opportunity to get to know people. That is why i find it easy to get into it in a lot of different subjects just because i get to know a lot of very exciting people and i have this wonderful situation of being a member of the club where most of the other members are 70 years younger. Of course one of the exciting things is i have known you as a thinker for number of years. I met you when i was a student at very briefly. In your book you write about some of your heroes, you write very lovingly about Richard Feynman in a chapter devoted to tree to biographies of him but you begin the chapter with a general discussion of sort of scientists, the scientist with a capital s perhaps, as personality, you put einstein and Stephen Hawking on one side one category and people like Richard Dawkins and carl sagan on the other. To me, feynman comes across as a scientific hero to you. As the side note he is one of my own as well. What draws you to him as a thinker . There are so many important physicists in the 20th century, why the reputation, enduring reputation of fineman as a physicists hero to so many Young Students even now . Came from england to this country as a graduate student at cornell. Data was already across tremendous pieces but what was even more amazing when is this young guy named fineman i had never heard of who was right there, got to know him in the first weekend immediately, couldnt have been luckier and a clown, search and listen to all kinds of famous so it was obvious, an enormous opportunity just to get to know him. And the process of understanding Quantum Mechanics. And what was quite different from everybody else. Writedown and equations and solve it. That was a normal way of doing science and with fineman who just wrote down the solution, he just wrote down the equations. And he did that by drawing pictures, it was astonishing how well this worked. Got all the right answers and nobody understood why. I made that my task. Just to understand feynman and explain him to other people is what i did. One of i thought it was interesting when i contrast that your essay on fineman to your peace on paul durac who is influential on our understanding of the unification, Quantum Mechanics generally, but the unification of Quantum Mechanics and einsteins theory of special relativity. They are too numerous to list but durac doesnt have this sort of enduring it miss those around him in the way that fineman does and his contributions are among the most important of the 20th century. Using your peace as a launching point if you could comment on why that is. The answer is very simple that feynman just enjoy it to play up to the public, he liked to fool around and that was quite opposite of durac. Durac always wrote as few words as possible and if asked a question he would usually answer yes or no and that was it. So it was quite normal that the public would respond to feynman because feynman responded to the public. That to me was quite a surprise. I knew feynman as a scientist and also as a friend but i did not think of him as a public figure in those days. What i think is wonderful is the public does have good taste. The public understood how great he is and that came as a surprise. Yesterday i wrote another book, max planck who was a contemporary of einstein and they were very Close Friends and they had the same contrast the einstein was a great physicist, Everybody Knows about him, planck was equally great as a scientist, planck was the father of Quantum Mechanics, he was an enormously powerful scientists and an admirable human being in all sorts of ways but he was like durac, he kept quiet. Everybody admirers einstein very few admire planck. The reason is exactly the same. Planck wasnt happy in front of the microphone, einstein was. To turn it around on you a little bit, you have of this lengthy career, you have written all of these books, how do you see your own role in the pantheon of scientists as personality . You never know what you will end up being famous for. The main thing is i dont take myself too seriously. I have always had a short attention span. I love to jump around from one thing to another. And angela exwife. I have been happy to have a big, family second, life second, work third. Im not a worldclass scientist. I just enjoy life. No comment on that. You are an observer of not just physics but all sciences but i am curious, as somebody a little older than i would like but certainly early enoughs in my career, opportunities to tackle new problems, and i am curious what you think are the biggest remaining problems in physics. I talked mostly to astronomers not so much to particle physicists and other kinds of physicists. The big mystery is dark matter and dark energy. Those are overwhelmingly the biggest parts of the universe and we dont understand them at all. It is amazing how little we understand, but we are observing dark matter in great detail and every year learning more about it and we will come to observe dark energy as time goes on. But still i would say those to me are the two most astounding mysteries. I wanted to one of the most interesting, i think, qualities of your work is you are very willing and very excited to take on controversial viewpoints. Is that a Fair Assessment . Oh yes. You have a chapter on Climate Change in this book. You point out that the work of science is never finished, there should never be an orthodoxy that cant be challenged. You describe proponents of Global Warming and environmentalism generally as being part of a religion. I like this quote even though i dont entirely agree with it the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. Tomorrow happens to be earth they given the we have days to celebrate theres a point taken their. Here is my question. You put the idea forward that we should be skeptical, willing to challenge science but there comes a time when further study is in a sense a rhetorical device meant to postpone action potentially in definitely. Much of the urgency from the Environmental Movement is intended to counter claims that might be funded by the Energy Industry for example. At what point should society and the Scientific Community make the equivalent of pascals wagered . That there is enough information to act . That is a question of judgment. I happened to have worked at oak ridge, that is where i learned what i know about climate. That is the National Laboratory to in those days run by weinberg. They had a group it was called i think Energy Analysis for something. Group of people who were concerned with energy on a large scale and it included experts on forests experts on vegetation, experts on soil and microbes that live in soil. It was heavily into the ecology. Also people who understood a bit about meteorology, climate, so it was balanced. I think we understood that all these things have to be taken as part of the big picture and it only makes sense to start making recommendations to the government about policy. If you look at all points of view especially ecological point of view ecology is what it is really all about. Climate to my mind is a minor issue compared with the ecology. That is the basic difference between the and the majority. Is not a question so much as a fact, question of the emphasis that i would put far more emphasis on the biological aspects and much less on fluid dynamics. If you look at the climate what is called Climate Science is actually just fluid dynamics. That is all it is. They do big computer models of the atmosphere and the ocean which are all just fluid dynamics but they dont have much else. The real world is enormously more complicated. The real world doesnt come into their models at all really. Somehow or other this fluid Dynamics Community has become dominant. It has tremendous political punch. And that is why i disagree with it. I think the emphasis is wrong. I believe ecology should come first. Thinking about how much you can trust any particular scientific model, one thing i thought was interesting is william nordhouses question of balance with the the question of Global Warming and Climate Change is based relies heavily on economic simulations. I would make the argument that there is a lot of black box computing going on the we dont really know what goes on inside the black box. Can we do this if we can understand the atmosphere moving into a century into the future can we understand Human Behavior a century into the future . Of course not. I wouldnt say that doesnt necessarily is what is really the practical question. The practical question is, do we actually know whether we are doing more harm than good when we take some action, for example to try to limit the emissions of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere . Do we understand the effects on the ecology well enough to know whether we are doing good or doing harm . That to me is the question i dont know the answer to or anybody else knows the answer either. A specific question, do you feel there are other areas where the scientific orthodoxy or any of the orthodoxy is off base . I dont think anything at this moment. Undoubtedly i would say most of the time dealing with political questions rather unscientific questions. A slightly lighter topic, i know you are not crazy, i know you are not crazy about the naming convention but one of your major and legacies intended this way in the realm of Science Fiction. And the 1960s you propose what is known unto others as the dyson sphere which i have heard you are not crazy about the naming convention but you propose it as a possible signature for supercivilizations, looking out there for intelligent life, the construction is basically a giant sphere at the earths distance from the sun around a star and increase your liveable area by quadrillions. In principle all the energy going in, we could look for infrared signature is as a way of looking for supercivilizations. I am wondering more generally, if you could comment on the interface between science and scientific proposals and Science Fiction and potentially how they are used or misused in Popular Culture . I love sciencefiction. I wrote a piece for the week magazine, books, four Science Fiction books i was recommending all of them concerned with religion in one way or another. That is what is important about Science Fiction, it is about human people it is about emotions, real problems of human life. Is not about science. It doesnt matter whether the science is right or wrong. The important thing is whether the people are well drawn and present a serious point of view. The four books i was recommending all of them were written by friends of mine. [laughter] octavia butler, the parable of the talent, two written by mary russell, the sparrow and children of god, they are all wonderful stories but people primarily concerned with religion than science and that is the truth, religion goes far deeper into history, goes far deeper into our way of thinking than science so i am an advocate of Science Fiction not because it has anything to contribute to science but because it has a lot to contribute to wisdom. Guest it goes both wise, but certainly not so it doesnt certainly might be just sort of work remarking about the story and the whole point is that if you really want to live in space which these aliens do, you have to be different from humans. Theres no way humans could be happy wandering around on mars. We have to change biologically. We have to adapt to wherever were living rather than trying to adapt the surroundings to us. Theres no future for humans living in little tin cans on mars. Not going to be attractive to anybody. Have to about out there in the open. We have to have some way of surviving in an inhospitable environment, and the way to do it is by evolution. Host so, looping back to the discussion about the speed of evolution, and thinking perhaps about our future in space what sort of time scale do you think before we really get out there and colonize space . Guest i would say it is not so much thinking of we. Im thinking of life as a whole. Its not human beings are never going to do very well by themselves. But as part of a spreading of life we can do very well, and you have to think of life spreading as the universe the same way it spreads here, from the ocean to the land, and it takes time. It takes clever inventions. The creatures that came out of the ocean on to the land had to invent lungs when we go into space, we have continue vent something equivalent have to invent something equivalent so we can use sunlight as a source of energy to keep alive and so we have to to transform ourselves as imagined into what he calls animal plants, animal plants are creatures which are both animals and plants, so they have brains and muscles to move around like animals. They also have leaves and branches to take nourishment from the sun. So thats the sort of way you have to think about the future in space. Host this is during the century of biology. Which brings to minds one of other question related to all of that. We talk about colonizing space and moving into space and perhaps changing our physical form or that of our descendents. I think you exemplify this. Were breaking down the barriers between disciplines. I say from inside academia, interdisciplinary work is one of the big catch phrases of the day, and im very curious as to whether you see a real future in sort of pure disciplines or whether the expectations sort of for making future progress in science and elsewhere is going to come primarily from this interdisciplinary approach, one that you have sort of exemplified in your thinking. Guest you need both, of course and i would say its not so different if you take music to compare with science. I mean, many different kinds of musicians. Some which who are just enormously skilled at one instrument and that is their life to just to aentire to acquire and practice this skill to play the violin better than anybody else, or the trombone as the case may be. And other kind of musicians who join all sorts of activities. They do a bit of conducting a bit of composing a bit of teaching a bit of performing, and essentially equally good at anything and must have been plenty of those too. Somebody like bach or handell were of that kind. They did everything well. So we certainly need both kinds and its a question of taste which you have to prefer. Host fair enough. So i think we have time for a couple more questions. So i guess my big question for you i see two big themes in your book. I was conderring if you could comment on them collectively. One is the role of challenging orthodoxy, and the other seems to me you can credible me if you feel im off base the role of the thicker in society. A lot of your essays are based upon the great thinkers, great thoughts. I was wondering how you see those two intertwining, basically. Guest i see myself as practicing my skill as a writer, but the subject matter is given to me by the magazine i write for and host jew dont you dont choate your own . Guest notice. Love to work for the new york review of books because i dont have to suggest books to them. They send me books and all i do is to say yes or no, and i find that much more congenial. So in fact, books that they send tend to just have that emphasis on science as a part of the public life, as societys public figures and as thinkers who influence the public. So that is not so much my choice as theirs. But anyway, it suits me very well. Host so, you say yes or say no. How do you decide if theres something that you just, as ambitious as you are as much of an eclectic thinker you are you cant tack the subject. Anything that might have been your dream topic that just didnt feel like you were up to the task . Guest no. Thats not the problem. [laughter] host understood. Guest the ones say no to are generally just books which i consider bad. [laughter] host so if you guest theres no joy in rewriting a review just to say dont read this book. Host on that note. Thank you professor dyson. [applause] there are microphones going around. Well now open up the discussion. Wait until you have a microphone to ask your question. And until i call on you. So who else is a microphone bearer . Thank you for coming and sharing your wit and wisdom with us. You raised as two great remaining mysteries dark holes and dark energy. From your vantage what is the best current speculation or understanding or what would you expect we will ultimately find that they are . Guest well the whole point is that is an unanswerable question. We have absolutely not the faintest idea what they are and but we can find out and thats what makes it exciting. There are to very Different Things dark heart ande dark energy because dark mart is observable in considerable detail. So we do have some real facts there as to which may in fact be a clue to what it is, but dark, in were much further away. But it makes no point at all to guess at the moment. The last Century Nuclear weapons, the dangers of that sort of thing were lurking in the century of biology to all sorts of creating types of life that could take on a life of their own perhaps out of control, nano robots. What about the responsibility of scientists to consider the consequences of what they discover . Guest well i must say theres a difference here between the way the physicist behaved and the way the biologist behaved. This physicists rushed into building bombs without any public discussion. They immediately, as soon as fission was discovered, mideast immediately started thinking about how to build bombs and went ahead and did that. I would say a totally irresponsible way. The biologists in contrast have been very cautious. Just a few weeks ago they had a conference in napa in california, to impose a moratorium on certain types of manipulation of human germ cells. Until the consequences can be worked out nobody should do such experiments. That was generally agreed. That the biology has work that way. Thats happened 40 years ago with the conference when dna was discovered. They had a moratorium which lasted for a year while the consequences were considered and in the end they agreed on guidelines which have worked very well for the last 40 years. The biologists have shown us how to do and it we roo respect that and try to do as well with physic as we did with biology. Certainly the buying biological consequences are deal and biologists are aware of that. Whether cultural evidence luigs or biological evolution is holding sway today looking around the globe does anything give you optimism for the future of the human species . Guest oh,ey, of course. I had the great good luck to grow up in the 1930s when all the problems that were looking at today were far worse. It was in the 1930s england was far more polluted than it is now, and unemployment was far worse than it is now. The economic depression was far worse. Hitler was on the horizon. World war ii was coming. That was far worse than anything we are contemplating at the moment so i would say having survived the 30s i couldnt help being an optimist. [laughter] [applause] im associated with a Theater Company here in philadelphia that produced qed about richard simon, and this fall were going to produce a play about roslyn franklin. Id love to hear your advice on who are another two or three scientist that both by temperment and the drama of their scientific quest deserve that kind of treatment. Guest well i think of leeza mighter mighter in d i never met her. Dont know what she was like but i read a biography which has a lot of information about her and she was of course a very close friend of plank all his life some we probably be number one on my list. I dont know why thinks why one thinks of women always. They generally are somehow they have some kind of Human Understanding which we males lack. Raftlift [laughter] thank you very much for being here. I first saw you in berkeley, and that was 40 years ago so i have to congratulate you on your persistence. Einstein complained that Quantum Mechanics must be incomplete because of the unsuspected correlation over great distances, and even the collapse of the weight function is generally a super resumeinal. Do you think anything has any progress has been made . Do you still feel do you agree with einstein its incomplete for that reason . Guest no. Quantum mechanics works amazingly well, and of course the problem with Quantum Mechanics is it takes mathematics to explain it. You cant really explain it in words. Our language is entirely concerned with the classical level of things we can see and touch, and Quantum Mechanics is different. It has this mathematical language which is amazingly beautiful and i would say amazingly complete. Its of all the parts of science in a way its the most perfect. So i would say the opposite of what einstein said. If anything, its the existence of the classical world which may be is not completely understood. [laughter] once or twice in the course of the last 45 minutes or so, the word roy religion has been mentioned and i wonder where you come out with regard to how religion might factor into the things you have been working with or spirituality or a purpose that drives the universe. Guest actually i take a a separation of science from religion as to me absolute. To me science is just a bunch of tools which happens to work spectacularly well for dealing with certain kinds of problems. But it is just a set of tools. Religion is to thely religion is totally different. Religion is a way of life or a community, a great literature architecture music all kinds of other things. I dont think it has anything to do with science. First off, thank you im a ph. D candidate in physics. Thank you very much for your work in proving oner hanger wrong. This helps when we were doing parttle physics in the fall. Me question is more of a entry level scientists to ask someone such diverse talents what is the biggest thing you have learned over your career that could that kind of keeps you going in looking at new Different Things. Guest mostly just talking to people and ive always been a follow ther more than a leader. I talk to people and when theyre doing something i get involved. Thats my way of working. I dont think i ever started anything by myself. That is something that is beautiful bat science. It is a collaborative life. Its very different from pure mathematics. Pure mathematicians seem to work much more alone but in physics and biology we work almost always together in groups, and to me thats much more satisfying. My question is on a similar line. Ill be entering graduate school in the summer, and i greatly admire your generation of physicists and look up to them. But the question id like to ask is to think about young scientists entering their careers today and what has changed or how my career as a scientist over the next so many years might be different from the career you have taken. Guest the obvious thing that has changed of course, is computers. The tools that are available are very largely based on computing and thats true in all branches of science. Biology or in Climate Science or in particle physics or astronomy. Everybody usings big data. Everybody uses essentially the same tools to handle data. So the consequences is much easier today to switch from one field to another than it was 50 years ago. So i think thats a big plus. So if youre a young scientist today, you dont really have to decide in advance which branch youre going to do. If youre well equipped with computing and a certain amount of skills in writing and reading, thats good enough. You can do almost anything. And so you can decide to be a neurobiologist and then you dont do very well, you can switch to climatology. [laughter] other questions. Guest i dont say you should go to wall street. [laughter] mr. Dyson what was john neuman really like and what obtained in the last 50 years that would have shocked him the most. Guest he was a very cheerful kind of i didnt know him personally so much. I just listened to him talk and he was running the computer problem at princeton. The first programmable computer with its own stored programs so it was a pioneered a ven tour and worked pioneer adventure. The main thing that would have surprised him was the fact that computers got smaller and smaller as they got more powerful. He always thought of them as very expensive and belonging to big corporations. In fact of course they became cheaper and smaller and more user friendly and ended up as toys for threeyearolds. [laughter] guest really would have been surprised if heed known that. Science is increasingly being funded for big science projects and the discovering the the genome and huge teams of researchers. Do you think that will affect how science is done and there will be less standouts like einstein. Guest well, the public of course is has the distorted view because the big expensive projects always are the ones that get attention from the media, and its not accidental. If you have a big expensive project, you need attention from the media to survive. So if you take, for example the large collider in geneva, its enormously hoped and they have to hype it because its so expensive. The same, of course, was true of the Hubble Telescope and various other big projects. Theyre doing good science but not as great as they pretend. If you look at the real world there are lots of Small Projects going on that people dont hear about. Thats still true, and its true in all branches of science. Physics in particular. Theres a lot of of very good physics going on, on quite small scales. Of course you dont hear about it. And i hope that will remain so. I think the balance is certainly too far in the direction of big projects. The big projects tend to get me money more easily. They get more votes in congress. Because they essentially are welfare programs for the industry. But in spite of that, the small science is still surviving quite well. Professor dyson its a pleasure having you here. My question is simple. You ever met allen tourin and claude by any chance . Guest no. Too bad. Neither of them in fact. Well be accepting all yesno answers. Another one back there. I was wondering if you would comment on to what extent you think Human History is an extension of the biological evolutionary process and that societies are like species they come and go, depending upon their environments. Guest yes, i think so. And of course i read jarred diamond and various other people and who put forward this point of view, of looking at the history of evolution leading up to humanity, as part of the same picture. I think it is largely speaking true. Many of our characteristics can be understood much better as a consequence of evolution and at the kind of creatures we evolved from. One of the things that is the most characteristic of evolution this is expressed by a writer who is not well known, very one of the most insightful biologists. Ursula looked at different genomes all over the all the way back to seaweed and up to chimpanzees and humans, and she found theres two kinds of genes, which everywhere are very rapidly mutating in all species. That was quite surprising. We know theres one kind. Thats the immune system. The immune system has to mutate very fast so your immune reaction can quickly be mounted against an alien invader so that the genes actually have to change in order to adapt to whatever it is that is invading the body. So the immune system is rapidly mutating but in addition to that she found theres another set of genes that retain that mew that mutate rapidly and that is mating systems. Mating systems that came as a surprise. Why should mating systems change rapidly in . The answer is also ursula understood that thats natures way of driving evolution. That in order to resolve to any great extend you have to have new species and the only way you can have new species is to change your mating system. So you have two creatures who are different from the others, who like to mate together, so the chance of survival is actually very small since theyre so unlike the majority, but if they do survive they start a new species. So thats natures way of driving evolution. I think thats the way we evolved, too. If you look at Human Evolution in the last five million years huge number of species. Were not just descended from one species like the chimpanzees. Theres been 30 or 40 species in the last four our five million years. Wire the one that survived. That probably going to be true in the future. So look forward to rapid evolution whether we drive it ourselves or not. Hi. I was kind of going back to the idea of big science and the problems that can be associated with that. There have been a lot of critiques of specifically think ago wynnberg. What do you think the best way of avoiding the science for avoiding the problem for big science, project managers, researchers . There are so many projects now that arguments have been made need a big science approach to be tackled appropriately. Guest well i have seen this going on in the domain of astronomy where they Haven Institution called the decadal study. Every ten years astronomers come together and decide on what theyd like to have for the next ten years. So they have big plans of course for new times of telescopes space missions, and also a lot of small instruments on the ground which are much cheaper, and the problem is to establish the priorities so that the big and the small dont compete with each other. If the big and she small come the small compete in the same Funding Committee the big projects always get more votes. But that buy biases the system in the direction of big projects. Sow you have to have a division into big medium and small. So you have to decide on one third small one third medium, one third big then you make the political choices then only inside the three divisions. That has worked reasonably well and thats the way the astronomers do it. I think it could be applied in other parts of science in the same fashion. Doesnt always work because unfortunately the big projects very often get too much support and they go behind the decadal recommendations and get enough votes in congress and of course the thing gets supported but anyway thats the way to do it is to arrange so it that the fraction of the funding going to Small Projects is fixed first and then you make the choices. Time for one more question so lets make it a good one. Okay. Thank you very much. I very enjoyed your presentation. I have always enjoyed your comments in new york review of books, and many other occasions. This i think it would not be a complete discussion if we didnt introduce sock a tease into the discussion in 399bc asked a question of plato and that that can he was, hoss does one person and one person become two persons. I do not understand. By the mere juxtaposition of whereas they were separately one person and one person each, how do they become two. Has that question been answered . Guest i dont know. Sounds more like a question of words than a question of substance. And on the note of criticize plato,. [applause] thank you very much for a very enlightening discussion. [applause] [inaudible conversations discussion] [inaudible conversations] boom tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. Tweet us, twitter. Com book tv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook book tv. Up next, sally kitch talks about the experiences of professional afghan woman and the plight in the country following years of civil war and strife. She is joined by two of the women profiled in the book. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon everyone. My name is michael could you goleman. I am the senior associate for south asia with the asia program. Thank you all for coming. Before i forget, just want