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PARTISAN REVIEW
geometry. It's hard to imagine that an educated person should have no
understanding of these terms and as a result no appreciation of some of
the ideas that the human mind is capable of pondering.
Much of the split between the two cultures is due to the inability of
people to distinguish between pure science and technology. Mention
quantum mechanics and relativity, and most people think of atomic
bombs. Mention electromagnetic theory, and most people think of tele–
vision. In fact, the situation got so bad two years ago that the senator who
was overseeing the funding for the National Science Foundation insisted
that at least sixty percent of its resources be allocated to "relevant" re–
search, namely the sort of research that can have immediate impact on the
bottom line. I am reminded of the time when an interviewer asked Fara–
day to what his discovery of mathematical induction could be put. He
replied that he had no idea but the government would almost certainly
find a way of taxing it. You can be sure that Newton did not search for
immediate relevance when he set out the laws of planetary motion. Nor
did Maxwell look for relevance when he set forth the basic equations for
electromagnetism. In this century, there have been two great intellectual
revolutions which have overturned our basic notion of how the world
around us functions. The first of these was relativity. Einstein set out to
understand the fact that Maxwell's equations contained within them a
constant that was equal to the velocity of light in a vacuum. This constant
did not change when we rewrote the equations in another coordinate
system moving with constant velocity with respect to the first system.
This result was completely counter-intuitive.
The applications began to take hold in the fifties and beyond. The
transistor, superconductivity, and a whole host of other practical applica–
tions flowed from the days when people began to understand the nature
of physical laws. Those who work in the pure sciences search for the fun–
damental rules of the game. They look for the overriding principles
whereby the world operates. Biology may be an attempt to understand
memory and consciousness; chemistry is often the search for the basic
structure of molecules and how they interact. In physics, it is often a
search for the most basic characteristics of physical laws. The last half–
century of physics research has been in large measure concerned with
symmetry. The laws of physics are beautiful to behold, and amazingly
symmetrized in nature. For example, prior to 1956 it was thought that
the laws of physics had no handedness; that is, if we were to deduce these
laws by looking at the world in a mirror rather than directly, we would
come up with the same set of laws. Then, Professor
c.
S. Woo, at the
suggestions of T. D. Lee and
C.
N. Yang, showed that in the so-called
weak interaction the symmetry principle was violated. Furthermore, if the
