(instrumental synthesizer music)
(tape rewinding)
(electronic instrumental music)
- [Voiceover] My father, you see,
interested me in patterns at the very beginning
and then later in things, like we would turn over stones
and watch the ants carry the little
white babies down deeper into the hole.
We would look at worms.
We’d go for walks and we’d look at things all the time,
the stars, the way birds fly.
He was always telling me interesting things.
I mean this story’s a rumor, as far as I’m concerned,
but the story is that before I was born,
he told my mother that,
“If it’s a boy, he’ll be a scientist.”
My father used to sit me on his lap
and the one book we did use all
the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica
and he used to sit me on his lap when I was a kid
and read out of the damned thing.
There would be pictures of dinosaurs and then he would read,
you know the long words, the dinosaur so and so
attains a length of so and so many feet.
He would always stop and he would say,
“You know what that means?
"It means, if the dinosaur’s standing on our front yard
"and your bedroom window, you know, is on the second floor
"you’d see out the window his head standing looking at you."
He would translate everything
and I learned to translate everything,
so it’s the same disease.
When I read something,
I always translate it in the best I can
into what does it really mean.
I can remember my father talking, talking, talking.
When you go into the museum, for example,
there are great rocks which have long cuts,
grooves in them, from glacier
and I remember, the first time going there,
he stopped there and explained to me
about the ice moving and grinding.
I can hear the voice, practically
and then he would tell me,
“How do you think we know
"there were glaciers in the past?”
He’d point out, “That's what we're looking at,
"that these rocks are found in New York
"and so there must have been ice in New York.”
He understood.
A thing that was very important about my father
was not the facts, but the process.
How we find out.
What is the consequence of finding such a rock?
But that’s the kind of guy he was.
I don’t think he ever successfully went to college.
However, he did teach himself a great deal.
He read a lot.
He liked the rational mind
and liked those things which
could be understood by thinking.
So it’s not hard to understand I got interested in science.
I got a laboratory in my room.
We also played a trick on my mother there.
We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels
and another substance, an iron salt,
probably alum, in the soap
and when they come together, they make blue ink.
So we were supposed to fool my mother, you see.
She would wash her hands and then when she dried them,
her hands would turn blue,
but we didn’t think the towel would turn blue.
Anyway, she was horrified,
the screams of, “My good linen towels!”
But she was always cooperative.
She never was afraid of the experiments.
The bridge partners, would tell her,
“How can you let the child have a laboratory?
"He'll blow up the house," and all this kind of talk
and she just said, “It’s worth it.”
I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”
I took later solid geometry and trigonometry.
In solid geometry was the first time
I had any mathematical difficulties.
It was my only experience with how
it must feel to the ordinary human being
a then I discovered what was wrong.
The diagrams that were being drawn
on the blackboard were three-dimensional
and I was thinking of them as plane diagrams
and I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on.
It was a mistake in the orientation.
When he would draw pictures and I would see a parallelogram
and he called it a square,
because it was tilted out of the plane, you know
and I, “Oh God, this thing doesn’t make any sense.
"What is he talking about?”
It was a terrifying experience.
Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling.
But it was just a dumb mistake.
But I suspect that this kind of a dumb mistake
is quite common to people learning mathematics.
Part of the missing understanding is to mistake
what it is you’re supposed to know.
It isn’t the question of learning anything precisely,
but of learning that there’s something exciting over there
and I think that the same thing happened with my father.
My father never really knew anything in detail,
but would tell me what’s interesting about the world
and where, if you look, you’ll find still more interests,
so that later I would say, “Well, this is going to be good.
"I know this has got something to do with this,
"which is hot stuff.”
This kind of feeling of what was important
and that is the key.
The key was somehow to know what was important
and what was not important, what was exciting,
because I can’t learn everything.
(electronic instrumental music)
The thing that I loved was,
everything that I read was serious,
wasn’t written for a child.
I didn’t like children’s things.
Because, for one thing I was very,
very, and still am, very sensitive
and very worried about was that the thing to be dead honest,
that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy.
Details purposely left out
or slightly erroneous explanations,
in order to get away with it.
This was intolerable.
I kind of try to imagine what would
have happened to me if I’d lived in today’s era.
I’m rather horrified.
I think there are too many books,
that the mind gets boggled.
If I got interested, I would have so many things to look at,
I would go crazy.
It’s too easy.
(tape reversing)
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