This is an old favourite of mine. As I look through my old blog posts, I found a post and a link to this story in a post dated almost 2 years back, along with other great horror stories I could find online. After blowing the cyber-dust off the story, here it is reposted:

The Night Wire by H. F. Arnold

“New York, September 30 CP FLASH

“Ambassador Holliwell died here today. The end came
suddenly as the ambassador was alone in his study….”

There is something ungodly about these night wire jobs. You sit up here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in to the whispers of a civilization. New York, London, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore — they’re your next-door neighbors after the streetlights go dim and the world has gone to sleep.

Alone in the quiet hours between two and four, the receiving operators doze over their sounders and the news comes in. Fires and disasters and suicides. Murders, crowds, catastrophes. Sometimes an earthquake with a casualty list as long as your arm. The night wire man takes it down almost in his sleep, picking it off on his typewriter with one finger.

Once in a long time you prick up your ears and listen. You’ve heard of some one you knew in Singapore, Halifax or Paris, long ago. Maybe they’ve been promoted, but more probably they’ve been murdered or drowned. Perhaps they just decided to quit and took some bizarre way out. Made it interesting enough to get in the news.

But that doesn’t happen often. Most of the time you sit and doze and tap, tap on your typewriter and wish you were home in bed.

Sometimes, though, queer things happen. One did the other night, and I haven’t got over it yet. I wish I could.

You see, I handle the night manager’s desk in a western seaport town; what the name is, doesn’t matter.

There is, or rather was, only one night operator on my staff, a fellow named John Morgan, about forty years of age, I should say, and a sober, hard-working sort.

He was one of the best operators I ever knew, what is known as a “double” man. That means he could handle two instruments at once and type the stories on different typewriters at the same time. He was one of the three men I ever knew who could do it consistently, hour after hour, and never make a mistake.

Generally, we used only one wire at night, but sometimes, when it was late and the news was coming fast, the Chicago and Denver stations would open a second wire, and then Morgan would do his stuff. He was a wizard, a mechanical automatic wizard which functioned marvelously but was without imagination.

On the night of the sixteenth he complained of feeling tired. It was the first and last time I had ever heard him say a word about himself, and I had known him for three years.

It was just three o’clock and we were running only one wire. I was nodding over the reports at my desk and not paying much attention to him, when he spoke.

“Jim,” he said, “does it feel close in here to you?”

“Why, no, John,” I answered, “but I’ll open a window if you like.”

“Never mind,” he said. “I reckon I’m just a little tired.”

That was all that was said, and I went on working. Every ten minutes or so I would walk over and take a pile of copy that had stacked up neatly beside the typewriter as the messages were printed out in triplicate.

It must have been twenty minutes after he spoke that I noticed he had opened up the other wire and was using both typewriters. I thought it was a little unusual, as there was nothing very “hot” coming in. On my next trip I picked up the copy from both machines and took it back to my desk to sort out the duplicates.

The first wire was running out the usual sort of stuff and I just looked over it hurridly. Then I turned to the second pile of copy. I remembered it particularly because the story was from a town I had never heard of: “Xebico.” Here is the dispatch. I saved a duplicate of it from our files:

“Xebico, Sept 16 CP BULLETIN

“The heaviest mist in the history of the city settled over
the town at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. All traffic has
stopped and the mist hangs like a pall over everything. Lights
of ordinary intensity fail to pierce the fog, which is
constantly growing heavier.

“Scientists here are unable to agree as to the cause, and
the local weather bureau states that the like has never occurred
before in the history of the city.

“At 7 P.M. last night the municipal authorities…

(more)
That was all there was. Nothing out of the ordinary at a bureau headquarters, but, as I say, I noticed the story because of the name of the town.

It must have been fifteen minutes later that I went over for another batch of copy. Morgan was slumped down in his chair and had switched his green electric light shade so that the gleam missed his eyes and hit only the top of the two typewriters.

Only the usual stuff was in the righthand pile, but the lefthand batch carried another story from Xebico. All press dispatches come in “takes,” meaning that parts of many different stories are strung along together, perhaps with but a few paragraphs of each coming through at a time. This second story was marked “add fog.” Here is the copy:

“At 7 P.M. the fog had increased noticeably. All lights
were now invisible and the town was shrouded in pitch darkness.

“As a peculiarity of the phenomenon, the fog is accompanied
by a sickly odor, comparable to nothing yet experienced
here.”

Below that in customary press fashion was the hour, 3:27, and the initials of the operator, JM.

There was only one other story in the pile from the second wire. Here it is:

“2nd add Xebico Fog.

“Accounts as to the origin of the mist differ greatly.
Among the most unusual is that of the sexton of the local
church, who groped his way to headquarters in a hysterical
condition and declared that the fog originated in the village
churchyard.

“‘It was first visible as a soft gray blanket clinging to
the earth above the graves,’ he stated. ‘Then it began to rise,
higher and higher. A subterranean breeze seemed to blow it in
billows, which split up and then joined together again.

“‘Fog phantoms, writhing in anguish, twisted the mist into
queer forms and figures. And then, in the very thick midst of
the mass, something moved.

“‘I turned and ran from the accursed spot. Behind me I
heard screams coming from the houses bordering on the
graveyard.’

“Although the sexton’s story is generally discredited, a
party has left to investigate. Immediately after telling his
story, the sexton collapsed and is now in a local hospital,
unconscious.”

Queer story, wasn’t it. Not that we aren’t used to it, for a lot of unusual stories come in over the wire. But for some reason or other, perhaps because it was so quiet that night, the report of the fog made a great impression on me.

It was almost with dread that I went over to the waiting piles of copy. Morgan did not move, and the only sound in the room was the tap-tap of the sounders. It was ominous, nerve- racking.

There was another story from Xebico in the pile of copy. I seized on it anxiously.

“New Lead Xebico Fog CP

“The rescue party which went out at 11 P.M. to investigate
a weird story of the origin of a fog which, since late
yesterday, has shrouded the city in darkness has failed to
return. Another and larger party has been dispatched.

“Meanwhile, the fog has, if possible, grown heavier. It
seeps through the cracks in the doors and fills the atmosphere
with a depressing odor of decay. It is oppressive, terrifying,
bearing with it a subtle impression of things long dead.

“Residents of the city have left their homes and gathered
in the local church, where the priests are holding services of
prayer. The scene is beyond description. Grown folk and
children are alike terrified and many are almost beside
themselves with fear.

“Amid the whisps of vapor which partly veil the church
auditorium, an old priest is praying for the welfare of his
flock. They alternately wail and cross themselves.

“From the outskirts of the city may be heard cries of
unknown voices. They echo through the fog in queer uncadenced
minor keys. The sounds resemble nothing so much as wind
whistling through a gigantic tunnel. But the night is calm and
there is no wind. The second rescue party… (more)”

I am a calm man and never in a dozen years spent with the wires, have I been known to become excited, but despite myself I rose from my chair and walked to the window.

Could I be mistaken, or far down in the canyons of the city beneath me did I see a faint trace of fog? Pshaw! It was all imagination.

In the pressroom the click of the sounders seemed to have raised the tempo of their tune. Morgan alone had not stirred from his chair. His head sunk between his shoulders, he tapped the dispatches out on the typewriters with one finger of each hand.

He looked asleep, but no; endlessly, efficiently, the two machines rattled off line after line, as relentlessly and effortlessly as death itself. There was something about the monotonous movement of the typewriter keys that fascinated me. I walked over and stood behind his chair, reading over his shoulder the type as it came into being, word by word.

Ah, here was another:

“Flash Xebico CP

“There will be no more bulletins from this office. The
impossible has happened. No messages have come into this room
for twenty minutes. We are cut off from the outside and even
the streets below us.

“I will stay with the wire until the end.

“It is the end, indeed. Since 4 P.M. yesterday the fog has
hung over the city. Following reports from the sexton of the
local church, two rescue parties were sent out to investigate
conditions on the outskirts of the city. Neither party has ever
returned nor was any word received from them. It is quite
certain now that they will never return.

“From my instrument I can gaze down on the city beneath me.
From the position of this room on the thirteenth floor, nearly
the entire city can be seen. Now I can see only a thick blanket
of blackness where customarily are lights and life.

“I fear greatly that the wailing cries heard constantly
from the outskirts of the city are the death cries of the
inhabitants. They are constantly increasing in volume and are
approaching the center of the city.

“The fog yet hangs over everything. If possible, it is
even heavier than before, but the conditions have changed.
Instead of an opaque, impenetrable wall of odorous vapor, there
now swirls and writhes a shapeless mass in contortions of almost
human agony. Now and again the mass parts and I catch a brief
glimpse of the streets below.

“People are running to and fro, screaming in despair. A
vast bedlam of sound flies up to my window, and above all is the
immense whistling of unseen and unfelt winds.

“The fog has again swept over the city and the whistling is
coming closer and closer.

“It is now directly beneath me.

“God! An instant ago the mist opened and I caught a
glimpse of the streets below.

“The fog is not simply vapor — it lives! By the side of
each moaning and weeping human is a companion figure, an aura of
strange and vari-colored hues. How the shapes cling! Each to a
living thing!

“The men and women are down. Flat on their faces. The fog
figures caress them lovingly. They are kneeling beside them.
They are — but I dare not tell it.

“The prone and writhing bodies have been stripped of their
clothing. They are being consumed — piecemeal.

“A merciful wall of hot, steaming vapor has swept over the
whole scene. I can see no more.

“Beneath me the wall of vapor is changing colors. It seems
to be lighted by internal fires. No, it isn’t. I have made a
mistake. The colors are from above, reflections from the sky.

“Look up! Look up! The whole sky is in flames. Colors as
yet unseen by man or demon. The flames are moving; they have
started to intermix; the colors are rearranging themselves.
They are so brilliant that my eyes burn, they they are a long
way off.

“Now they have begun to swirl, to circle in and out,
twisting in intricate designs and patterns. The lights are
racing each with each, a kaleidoscope of unearthly brilliance.

“I have made a discovery. There is nothing harmful in the
lights. They radiate force and friendliness, almost cheeriness.
But by their very strength, they hurt.

“As I look, they are swinging closer and closer, a million
miles at each jump. Millions of miles with the speed of light.
Aye, it is light of quintessence of all light. Beneath it the
fog melts into a jeweled mist radiant, rainbow-colored of a
thousand varied spectra.

“I can see the streets. Why, they are filled with people!
The lights are coming closer. They are all around me. I am
enveloped. I…”

The message stopped abruptly. The wire to Xebico was dead. Beneath my eyes in the narrow circle of light from under the green lamp-shade, the black printing no longer spun itself, letter by letter, across the page.

The room seemed filled with a solemn quiet, a silence vaguely impressive, powerful.

I looked down at Morgan. His hands had dropped nervelessly at his sides, while his body had hunched over peculiarly. I turned the lamp-shade back, throwing light squarely in his face. His eyes were staring, fixed.

Filled with a sudden foreboding, I stepped beside him and called Chicago on the wire. After a second the sounder clicked its answer.

Why? But there was something wrong. Chicago was reporting that Wire Two had not been used throughout the evening.

“Morgan!” I shouted. “Morgan! Wake up, it isn’t true. Some one has been hoaxing us. Why…” In my eagerness I grasped him by the shoulder.

His body was quite cold. Morgan had been dead for hours. Could it be that his sensitized brain and automatic fingers had continued to record impressions even after the end?

I shall never know, for I shall never again handle the night shift. Search in a world atlas discloses no town of Xebico. Whatever it was that killed John Morgan will forever remain a mystery.

There will be a special tab set up just below the title bar, along side the other interesting but forgotten stuff like the Phoenix and Wordle tabs, I’ll be updating the page as my ISM progresses, so if you want “follow” the development, be sure to check that page often.

Until the next post, take care.

PS: Don’t know what the Overheard is? Shame on you, get out from under that coconut shell by clicking any one of these links:

1) Overheard at the National University of Singapore

2) Overheard at the Singapore Management University

3) Overheard at Nanyang Technological University

4) Overheard at Singapore Institute of Management

There are three things that should not be brought up in small talk: Religion, Politics and Finances

I agree with the third point, nothing drives people crazier than a fee hike. Just some random yet disturbing thoughts floated through my mind as I’m planning on how to begin writing my ISM (Independent Study Module) Paper. I need to take the trash out and drain the sceptic tank before I start, especially since the paper deals with matters too close to our hearts.

Singapore is well and truly going through an interesting time, with a young generation torn between two paradigms, one of conformity, and the other of breaking free. It’s interesting when I examine what my paper deal with, and I notice that the conclusions I have (or rather, I will) draw doesn’t well and truly reflect the true situation on the ground. We laugh at non-conformists, I argue, but deep down inside, I know what we truly want, we want to be free. To go with the norm, or to deviate… why the seemingly paradoxical behaviour.  But, there are stormclouds in the horizon, perhaps signally the winds of change brought by a more liberal generation, but change… is a scary thing.

And so I eavesdrop to learn about the grumblings, oh, the Overheard, what has thou done to me… When you learn things about what (metaphorically) happens in the parents’ bedroom, you get pretty disturbed. I’m a pacifist by nature, unfortunately, and when I hear the reverberations of the shouting and screaming behind the closed door, and the rumbling from flying projectiles, I get pretty unnerved.

Information is a powerful and dangerous thing, and I hope the grapevines have been truthful, and at the same, perhaps only a harbinger of something bad but not brutal. The eye of the storm may be approaching, but people, like the winds are chaotic, and a small change could divert the path, sending the typhoon to a forgotten death. But, I will still sandbag the door, and hope that the torrential rain of inanity and human emotion, combined with the lightning bolts of politics, and the thunderclaps of argument and endless debates, will go away, without washing away my sanity and faith in human beings.

…..

PS: Oh well, I rant in metaphors, because they somehow ease the brutality of the human condition, and the acerbic description that I am most tempted to use. They somehow cover the hot cinder below, leaving only the heat above, without the fiery glow. Ah, to indulge in an endless stream of metaphors is beautiful, conveying what you want to say, to perhaps only those who understand the context, and at the same time, expressing what I need to say in a suitably ambiguous manner, that will not implicate myself in any way. But, the purpose is fulfilled, as my issues are now stored extra-somatically, and no longer within the deep recesses of my already world-weary mind.

The following is an exchange between two SMU students. How I got hold of it… well, let’s just say that the more erm… irritated of the two parties decide to make their exchange known to the whole class in an email CC, and the Interwebs took over from there.

So, here goes…

From: XXX
Sent: Wednesday, 3 March, 2010 8:42 PM
To: ALL GRP MEMBERS
Subject: Report

I am fine with you guys writing the report. I will not be writing a separate report which might divide the group. I was already prepared to write the report for the group, except that you guys will be getting the grade instead. I was not going to do it out of charity, but because any divisiveness in the group will pull down the group final grade regardless of quality (trust me, I had an experience before), and I am after all a law student with some strength in writing papers. I do not know what you have heard from the ‘whole law faculty’, but I was truthful when I said my research paper grades are above average. I will not however want to waste time changing your mind.

Since we are still a group report-wise, I request that you keep me in the report emails amongst yourself and any report emails to Prof (with drafts/articles attached). I understand you want to write the report yourself, so I will not contact Prof about the report. However, I want to attend any report consultations with Prof as well, so let me know in advance the meeting dates. On the rare occasion that I feel that something is so strongly off in the draft (in my capacity as a law student), I will send you guys a courtesy email. After all, the grade will be shared. If after reading my email you think my advice will not make the report better, you may disregard it and I will bear no grudges for that.

All this said, my only concern is, and I hope yours are too, is to obtain the best possible grade for the report. If I have to sit out the report for this to happen, I am fine with it. Since the grade is our mutual concern, where if you guys need help, I will render it where possible. As it is, I am awaiting the law librarian to reply on a article on censorship. Once she gets back to me on that, I will send you the articles I already downloaded from the law websites. You may choose to use them or not, and may indeed find them useful for writing the paper, in addition to the ones I had previously found from Google. I am working on the premise that the report grade is shared and will be the same for all three of us, so I do not expect any backstabbing/belittling of anyone’s contribution to the Prof (this sometimes happens in the law school; and I sincerely hope it does not happen with you guys).

Regards,

XXX

School of Law

Singapore Management University

———————————————

From: XXX
Sent: Wed 03/03/2010 23:01
To: ALL MEMBERS
Subject: RE: Report

Do acknowledge this email so that I know that while we have our past differences, there is at least an understanding here. If you choose to remain silent I will not be able to know what your thoughts are, and you cannot expect me not to write my own report in my own interest.

Regards,

XXX

School of Law

Singapore Management University

———————————————

From: ANNOYED GROUP LEADER
Sent: Thursday, 4 March, 2010 1:13 AM
To: ALL MEMBERS
Subject: RE: Report

Your email is noted. Expect a lengthier reply soon.

———————————————

From: XXX
Sent: Thu 04/03/2010 11:23
To: ALL MEMBERS
Subject: RE: Report

Look, I don’t intend to engage in unnecessary and lengthy exchanges. We all have better things to do. I think what I have stated below is what you already wanted, and is fair to me as well. If you decide now the both of you are not confident in writing the report and want to revert to me doing it, you can just tell me now, I will afford you the same respect and treatment below. I am not one to backstab, however you may think of me, so rest assured Prof will not think the both of you have not contributed to the report at all.

Regards,

XXX

School of Law

Singapore Management University

———————————————

From: XXX
Sent: Thu 04/03/2010 11:26
To: ALL MEMBERS
Subject: RE: Report

Just to be clear, I am expecting to attend a consultation with Prof together with you guys soon. Let me know when, otherwise I have no choice but to take it that you do not intend to keep to the email below.

Regards,

XXX

School of Law

Singapore Management University

———————————————

From: VERY ANNOYED GROUP LEADER
Sent: Thursday, 04 March, 2010 2:52 PM
To: XXX
Cc: AMUSED CLASSMATES
Subject: RE: Report

Dear XXX,

I have to express my astonishment at your talent. After witnessing your historic contribution to our group presentation, I do not believe it will be equalled, ever. You are so accomplished people flee at sight of you – a pair of our group mates ran away. Perhaps you are a reincarnation of the Great Khan.

Extraordinary was the fact that you managed to whip up your presentation slides in the three hours before the presentation, while you were having lunch – amazing. Even more extraordinary was the fact that you deleted someone else’s slides while standing there before the class. Of course that does you no justice, for it is but a mere fraction of your remarkable work with our group.

I am glad you are fine with us writing the report – that is how I imagined it would happen anyway.

I am awed you were prepared to write the whole report yourself. I am also awed by pigs flying across blue moons.

I know you are a law student; that is even more awe inspiring. But I am not – shame on me.

I know you get As for your writing with uncanny regularity. But I do not – shame on me.

I acknowledge the grade is indeed shared and we will all receive what we deserve – or not. I wish for justice but alas time is short.

You made yourself clear, but evidently I did not make myself clear yesterday afternoon. Let me repeat:

You will have NO part in this report.

You will NOT attend meetings.

You will NOT send any rare and occasional courtesy emails.

You will, however regrettably, have your name on the report and the consequent grade.

It is a delicious fantasy of mine that you do not exist, let me at least pretend that is true. Humour me.

And let me make the next point equally clear. I have never spoken ill of you to the Professor. But in the interests of fairness, and because I so hate speaking behind people’s backs, I’ve copied the entire class in this email. Now they all know my position and they know yours. Hopefully they will be so kind as not to gloat at me.

To summarise should you be unclear. You are out of the project – completely. You will get the grade we all get but not all deserve. Maybe it will not be the A+ you will surely obtain since you’re a lawyer, and an awesome one at that, but we will try our best.

I hope I was clear.

Sincerely,

VERY ANNOYED GROUP LEADER

The 1974 Caltech Commencement Address, or the lecture known as “Cargo Cult Science”

by Richard Feynman, 1974

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas — which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked — or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn’t realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?”

I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, “I’m, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?”

“Sure”, she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, “What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!” He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it”, he says. “I feel a kind of dent — is that the pituitary?”

I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!”

They looked at me, horrified — I had blown my cover — and said, “It’s reflexology!”

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That’s just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn’t do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down — or hardly going up — in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress — lots of theory, but no progress — in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way — or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing”, according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school — we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will — including Wesson oil. So it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That’s why the planes don’t land — but they don’t land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of — this history — because it’s apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong — and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves — of having utter scientific integrity — is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. “Well”, I said, “there aren’t any”. He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind”. I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing — and if they don’t support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this — it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person — to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there’s a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else’s experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on a different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn’t get time on the program (because there’s so little time and it’s such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn’t be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying — possibly — the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms — and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments — they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the para-psychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated — that you can do again and get the same effect — statistically, even. They run a million rats — no, it’s people this time — they do a lot of things are get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don’t get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?

This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure to only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent — not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching — to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

For those who don’t know, I was requested to give a talk on the joy of Physics to the USP 1st-years, and this was the script I prepared:

The things I Love in/about Physics

Up to the middle of this week, I was still not very sure what to talk about. I agreed to do this because I thought it would be a great opportunity, to say, explain the Special Theory of Relativity to a bunch of people, but I decided that nobody would really be interested in listening to Physics lecture on a Friday night, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to convince anyone to take up Physics by doing just that, or in fact, talking about any other Physics principle.

What perhaps is the goal of this is, at the very least, an opportunity to share about the joy that I derive from yakking endlessly about the strangeness of quantum mechanics in Chatterbox. Whether or not I’m going to get any new juniors in my course from this, is secondary. Speaking of strange things…

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

-Sir Arthur Eddington-

Eddington, by the way, was responsible for making Einstein a “superstar”, by providing the first experimental proof for relativity. Details of what he actually did aside, what this comes to show is that, the laws that govern our universe, our very existence are subtle. It would seem that Nature does not yield her secrets easily, and even when she does, she gives all of us a nasty surprise. Take for instance, the act of shooting electrons through a double slit. We all expect electrons to behave just like particles, and when we shoot particles through a double slits, we expect two bands to form, but that doesn’t happen. This happens instead:

Wave Diffraction Pattern as electrons pass through a double slit

This, by the way, and not Schrodinger’s Cat, was my first taste of quantum mechanics. I was well and truly baffled, and it sparked something that I believe is still in me until today. It began a foray into something that is perhaps so marvellously beautiful, interesting, and I must confess, painful at the same time. So then, what is it about Physics that makes it have all the traits I just listed? I will now show you something that a colleague and I talked about over tea just two days ago, and I took a liberty of translating the ideas into a diagram. These are what I call the three jewels of Physics:

The Three Pillars of Physics

This diagram probably needs some expounding, but I’ll approach it from my personal perspective. Many of the people in my course do take a deep preference for one of the three, but we acknowledge that they are all equally important.

Predictions are hard to make, especially those about the future

-Neils Bohr-

Well, let’s start with the predictions that the ideas make. Yes, of course, perhaps the most important and fun part of explaining a theory to someone is telling them what it does. If I went up to you and told you that string theory says all particles are made up of vibrating strings, you would reply, “so what?” If I told that to my mum, she’ll think that we people have nothing better to do than to come up with silly ideas like this. But I would be able to pique your interest if I went on to say that it predicts hidden dimensions, and parallel universes and things like that. Now, this perhaps the “Wow!” part of physics and what all popular science is all about. I was once in this realm and drew much inspiration from here, but I guess, by being where all the “action” is, harping on the results won’t get you anyway and that’s because I have to personally get my hands dirty. And, guess what, that brings us to the next gem:

“Nature laughs at the difficulty of integration”

-Pierre-Simon Laplace-

People tend to avoid Physics like the plague because of the Maths involved. But there are still some who find that the meaning of the whole of Physics lies in the maths, I understand why, the whole of physics has one main cog in the machine, and that is the equations. And so, they place a lot of love in the equations, and make sure that each and every one of them is in perfect logical order. I agree, but somehow, my slight lacking in mathematical skill seem to hamper slightly my appreciation in this department and in the end, I have developed this perception that they are merely tools to craft an idea, like the algorithms to complete a Rubik’s Cube. I recently said that it is perhaps a tragic irony in the progression of Physics, that as the ideas become simpler and more elegant, the equations become more complex, and I know of no reason why this must be so. It’s sad, really, but I will give the math some credit, as the joy you get when you solve a equation is an “integral” part of the fun in physics. But what is more fun is the ideas…

If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it

-Albert Einstein-

I find that the ideas and concepts that come from Physics the most wonderful… indulgence… if I may use that word. You see, if one looks at the thing that creates the revolutions in science, one finds that it is the rise of a strange new idea, an idea which has not been thought of before to explain a phenomenon. It is not so much about someone finding a flaw in the maths. In fact, it’s never about the maths, it’s so self-consistent, anyway, or a new prediction or solution to a problem, but because of a flaw in an old idea, and the rise of a new one. I can tell you the tales of the debates about the atoms, the developments leading up to special relativity and the discourse that led to quantum mechanics, explaining the pertinence of each idea to our understanding and I could go on for hours. A lot of effort goes into understanding why a concept of such and such must be true, and the arguments, assumptions and axioms that underlie it. Nowadays, I do it on a weekly basis, in what we have fondly come to call, “staring at the equations”. But it is truly worth it, I always view understanding the argument and equations as a puzzle, just like solving the Sudoku in the newspaper, and the satisfaction derived from these two activities are equivalent. And then, I too, derive a lot of joy in explaining these wonderful new personal discoveries to others who are interested or are in need of some form of understanding, and that is the fragment of the joy that most of you would have perceived, which probably led me to standing here talking to you about this. Well, what can I say, it’s like showing your friends your completed Rubik’s Cube, the one you spent a whole day twisting and turning.

There is one final part of Physics, and I think it is the most important asset that any physicist, scientist and in fact anyone, should have. The heart of Physocs, is the trait we call curiosity.

Curiosity is a powerful fuel, and most of us spent the better part of our lives learning new things about the world. But there comes a point, I fear, that school begins to interfere with your education. strangely, there were times when all of us were simply reduced to rote learning, memorising line after line of text. I find that all of this really takes away the joy of learning: spoonfeeding teaches us nothing more than the shape of the spoon.

In retrospect, I realise that I had just one gift, and that is a deep love for the discovery of new things:

“Curiosity is… the pleasure of finding things out”

-Richard Feynman-

What most people see as a bunch of facts, I see a wealth that is worth accumulating and sharing with others. and so I spent my time stumbling into new pieces of information and trivia, and when I first encountered Physics, I realised I had found a treasure trove of knowledge, one that dealt with the very fabric of our universe, our very existence. Beginning with perhaps the day I encountered the double slit experiment, I began to peer deeper and deeper into the many facets of Physics, and promised myself that at the end of it all, I could fully comprehend the beauty and secrets of the universe. So here I am today, still exploring a strange realm not many dare to venture into, and in the words of Robert Frost: “Two roads diverge in the yellow wood, I’ve taken the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

In the end, what do I truly expect to get from it all? Is it fame, recognition, or even the Nobel Prize? Nah, I just want to leave this place knowing how beautiful nature is, and the joy I had unraveling her mysteries. And there is no better way to do then than to see the world from the shoulder of Newton’s Giant, and pass on the joy to those who are interested. But there’s one last thing I must say: that even with all I have described above, I still know that there are things out there I can never hope to find out. Physics is a humbling experience in this way, and I hold on to this quote from Shakespeare:

“There are more things in ths heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt of in your philosophy”

-From Hamlet, by Shakespeare-

Thank you.

]]> http://ambiguitytheories.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/264-three/feed/ 0 cyazhar Diffraction Triangle http://ambiguitytheories.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/263-serendipity/ http://ambiguitytheories.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/263-serendipity/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:24:58 +0000 cyazhar http://ambiguitytheories.wordpress.com/?p=752 ]]> With this essay, I have successfully completed one of my modules this semester. A great thank you to every one who taken their time to read this (nearly) 5000-word story.

A special shoutout to Maple, who was actually the first person to read and proofread the story (strange but true: I didn’t read the story myself after typing it). Also, a thank you to everyone else that subsequently read it and gave their comments, too, including my project group mates (listed in the email in the previous post) and my Physics friends, Leonard (who added a couple of  hilarious remarks into the paper) and Hai Bee.

So, this is it, a story of my homeland (both in fiction and in reality). I knew I always had something for that paddy field state.

A Story of Serendvipa, Serendipity and Spices

As the sun set over the straits, we watched the glow of the fires lit at the top of the mountain come alive. While we marvelled at these beauties of our land, I began my story:

“These are the beacons to the traders who have set sail from lands afar to trade in this humble settlement some call the Valley of the Dragon, or Bujang Valley. From these merchants, I have heard many stories; stories of bravery, mystique and adventure in the lands beyond these shores. I truly envy them, for it takes much courage to have risked life and limb for the things that they treasure and sometimes, I wonder whether that is the life I would want to lead. After much thought, I realise that I am but a simple man, with no skills other than that to work off the land and the forests that have fed my family for generations. You may have heard many incredible tales of shipwrecked sailors and sea monsters, all of which I heard myself too, but this story, I promise, is different. It is a story of a simple man who could only dream of such adventures, but whose life is subtly entwined with the ways of the sea.

This story begins in earnest about 30 years ago, when I was a precocious little boy and my father would frequently take me and my brother down the river on the family’s wooden perahu, filled to the brim with trade goods such as paddy, rattan, coconuts, resin, honey, camphor, tin and lime[1] to trade for other essentials, such as cloth and pottery. The small river, which flows near our home, empties into a deep, wide river lined with attap and nipah swamps on both banks. The large river, my father would tell us, led to a greater expanse of water, so large that one could sail for days and still would not see land. Yet, there were many boats which were much larger than any that my village people had, and they entered our lands from this place[2]. Some were so large that even if all my village people boarded the ship at the same time, it would not even come close to sinking. As we passed some of these imposing vessels on our rowing boat, I could catch a faint whiff of a strange aroma and hear the voices of men shouting and giving orders in a language that I could not understand. Several of these men had very dark skin, like the colour of a burnt pot, while there were some with fair skin. They worked tirelessly on the ship, usually either raising or lowering large pieces of cloth. These large pieces of cloth were hung from atop a tall pole, and strung to the lower part of the pole by many ropes. “What were the  large pieces of cloth for?” I asked, and I was amazed when I found out that these boats were blown across the waters by wind, unlike our perahu which requires rowing, a technology which I have never seen before. I always dreamt of owning one of these ships one day, and setting sail towards the lands in the direction of the setting sun, but my father would discourage me by telling me of the dangers of a journey on one of these ships, dangers that the men of the sea have told him over the years.

“Where were all the ships heading towards, then? What was centre of attraction for all these merchants?” I wondered, and I got my answer soon enough. After rowing up the large river, we would then go upriver along one of the river’s tributaries. At a promontory by the riverbank, was a large settlement at the foothills of the large mountain that stands guard over our land. It is a place of trade and commerce, where men, like my father, would visit to trade goods with the traders who seek the produce of our land, and rest after a long journey from the other ports throughout the region, while waiting for the winds to become favourable. It was a prosperous settlement with a bustling market and a population of a few thousand people. There were a few hundred buildings and most of the buildings were made of hardwood, harvested from the dense jungle that covered most of our lands with roofs made from the dried leaves of the attap palm. The focal point of the town was the marketplace, the liveliest part of the town where all the trade activities took place. Adjacent to the marketplace was the jetty which was at the banks of the river. We did not moor at the jetty, because the smaller boats, like ours could easily be brought directly to the riverbank and beached, but the bigger boats which required deeper waters were docked at the jetty. It was a wondrous place, and I do not know how to begin describing this place… Well, let me begin with the jetty[3].

While my father unloaded the goods off the boat, my brother and I would walk towards the jetty, which was a long wooden structure built on stilts that led out into the river. We would watch the men who were busy loading and unloading large earthenware storage jars[4] and wooden containers on and off the large ships. Some of these men were the sailors of the ships while others were local villagers hired by the traders, who would carry the goods to the market. Being the curious and carefree kids we were, we would make up silly games to pass the time such as trying to guess the contents of these containers.. Some of these containers gave out strong, fragrant smells, which piqued our interest. To satiate our curiosity, we would follow the workers to the marketplace where they would put their goods up for sale or to the godowns which were located just outside the settlement for storage. We patiently waited for the moment the containers were left unattended, and we would look into some of the containers and take a sample or two of their contents. In these containers, we found a most interesting variety of these strange-smelling products, and they came in all shapes and sizes. There were brown irregularly shaped roots, eight-pointed dried “fruits”, cylindrical rolled tree barks, dried small nail-shaped flower buds and yellow powder amongst many others, each with their own distinctive smells[5]. It did not take us long to be able to identify each of them just by its smell, as containers filled with them were carried past us by the jetty. But, there were more than just these things we call spices that were present at the market…

The market was a lively place, where men from throughout our land mingled with merchants and sailors from foreign lands to trade, discuss matters of the lands and the sea and exchange stories of adventures and politics. Never was there a moment of boredom as we walked through the crowd. From our short stature, it was not unlike walking through a constantly billowing curtain of silk robes, cotton sarongs and selendangs. Most of these traders here had arrived here by the sea-route, on the large ships that were moored by the river. However, there were some traders who arrived with elephants and other beasts of burden via the land routes that run deep into the hinterland to the fabled Kingdom of Langkasuka, where I was told that there was a great port that dealt with the goods from great lands of the Tang Dynasty. They would usually bring gold, rolls of smooth silk and fine ceramics, which would be sold in exchange for spices, which I observed, could fetch a rather high price. “What is it about the ceramics of the Tang that I’ve heard so much about?” you ask.

The ceramics of the Tang were unlike anything the earthenware that the women of the village could ever dream to make. The ceramics were smooth, and they were coated by a nearly transparent layer which was of unique colours, such as green, ochre, black and a shade of white-grey. Some of these ceramics had beautiful floral patterns painted on them, while others had other motifs, such as Chinese characters and animals. Not many of the locals could afford these beautiful bowls, plates and water containers, and they were usually bought by the traders from the Arab and Hind. In exchange, the Arab merchants would trade fine rugs from the land of Parsi, coloured transparent wares of many colours (which, I was told, made from melting sand) and small beads of all shapes, patterns and sizes. The Indian merchants, on the other hand, would trade spices, a yellow-coloured wood, which produces the sweetest smell when burnt[6] and a waxy grey substance that emits an odd musky smell. Occasionally, the headman, who oversaw the trade and collected the trade taxes on behalf of the ruler of the lands, would survey the wares, and procure a bowl or two for his own collection.

Ah, the market was truly a meeting place, not only of men of different origins, but of the trades of the land and the sea, and the customs, languages and goods of the East and the West! Never could one imagine such an exchange of culture anywhere in our lands, but then again, I have never been far from my shores. Of course, the market was not lively all day, and as the sun began to set, the sailors trudge back to their quarters in the ships, and the merchants settle down for rounds of toddy drinks. We would return to the perahu and head back to our village, leaving this wonderful melting pot behind. This is the story of the market as seen from the eyes of a naive child who has just seen the wonders of the outside world for the first time. The story about a day at the market ends here, but there’s still more of this story to be told.

As I grew up, I began to learn to tend the family lands and the rituals and superstitions of the forest. One of the more memorable experiences was that of collecting honey from the tualang tree. The tualang is a massive tree, so big that its circumference measures more than 10 men’s arm spans, and its height is equivalent to the height of 40 men combined[7], This imposing tree guards its own liquid treasure as the honey bees would construct their hives on the highest branches and from below, their hives seem to look like circular pieces of cloth left to hung to dry on a piece of rope. Despite the seeming impossibility of reaching the top of the tree and the imminent danger of getting stung by the bees, men had invented methods most ingenious to collect the honey. A man would climb the tree on a moonless night with a torch, and once at the top of the tree, he would knock the torch against the trunk of tree, releasing a shower of embers falling towards the ground. The bees, tricked into thinking that the embers are the attackers, would follow them and fly towards the ground, leaving the hive unguarded. A substantial amount of honey could be collected from a single tree, and a trip to the market would usually entail a successful honey harvest.

By now, I have already made countless trips to the marketplace and I had learnt the tricks of the trade. It was not long before I began making my own trips to the market to sell the family harvests. As I interacted with the foreign merchants, I began to learn more and more about the maritime trade that formed the lifeline of the community of the Bujang Valley. These merchants usually stayed for a few months, and those headed towards the lands of Hind and Arab would stay until the end of the rainy season and set sail during the dry season while the merchants headed down the selat and towards the lands of the Tang Dynasty would set sail at the end of the dry season. These merchants, who were fluent in numerous languages, would sometimes share their incredible tales of their travels and the villagers, longing for some form of diversion from the banalities of everyday chores would gather in crowds to listen to them. This was one of the many recounts I’ve heard during my days at the market:

“If one sailed many days from here, heading in the direction of the setting sun and do not stray off course, he would reach a group of small islands. These islands are inhabited by a group of people who are to be feared, for they ferociously attack passing ships in their small boats. They are ruthless cannibals, always hungering for the flesh of other men. They sometimes fought with tribes of the other islands, but occasionally attacked trade ships. Any sailor ill-fated enough to have been stranded near these islands, whether due to the misfortune of a bad wind, or shipwrecked due to the storms that plague those seas, will most certainly be captured by them and meet death in their hands. We would pray for deliverance from these barbarians, hope for excellent weather and cooperative winds. Many have perished in these islands, but I have been lucky to have survived many journeys past these islands.
However, if one braves the dangers of these isles, and continue towards the setting sun for many more days, one would be greeted by a place of great beauty. At the end of the journey through this great expanse of water is an island known as Serendvipa, ruled by a Buddhist King. It is a kingdom most prosperous, resplendent with great treasures, learned men of Buddha and a leader most wise. The island is famous for the spice known as the sweet wood and men would search for these trees in the forest, chop the tree down and harvest the bark. The aroma emitted by the tree is so strong, any ship downwind from her shores could surely smell it, and ships from around the world moor at her harbour to purchase the wood, and resell it at a great profit at other ports. The wood was sometimes burnt as incense in temples, or added into food as a sweetener. But, this sweet spice is not the only thing that this great island offers.
Men who live in the mountains of the isles have found stones of every colour of the rainbow. When polished, they glow with a light most brilliant, and these stones have become renowned throughout the world. Kings and rajahs would send envoys to the island just to procure these gems. Not many common men could ever wish to own such stones for they were rare and priceless, and many a trader have given up the ways of the sea and headed up to the mountains to make a fortune for himself. However, the journey is perilous as the jungles of the island are filled with dangers, and there are stories of a great number of lions, tigers, giant carnivorous birds and other wild creatures that spare neither man nor beast. The things that the prospect of riches could make a man do are truly limitless…”

“Sweet wood…” I thought as I immediately recognised the spice the merchant was referring to from the days of my childhood spent at the jetty. Men, wearing cloth around their heads would order local men to unload wooden containers filled with a brown, cylindrical sweet smelling spice and would sell them at the marketplace. The local villagers, traders and the errand boys of the Buddhist monks from the temples in the hills would flock to the stalls to purchase the spice, and the haggling would be intense. They offered goods such as tin, resin and betel nuts in exchange for the spice. Some of the richer traders would purchase a large quantity of the spice, by offering large quantities of gold, porcelain, and the finest silk from China and bring them to their godowns, to be resold to other merchants or to the locals from the surrounding villages. It truly was a lucrative trade, and one could amass a fair amount of fortune from the trade. Being a young man, and wanting to make a fortune, I was attracted to the prospect of the trade of sweet wood. However, the tales of the dangers of the oceans discouraged me from obtaining the spice from the land of Serendvipa directly. So, I had to devise an alternative method to obtain the spice without having to risk my life in the seas of unimaginable dangers.

One day, while I was working on the family farm, it occurred to me that I could attempt to plant the sweet wood tree in my own lands, and sell the spice myself. It was an excellent plan, but how could I obtain the seeds of the tree? Therefore, I set about to find out more about this spice. During my next trip to the market, I asked about the prospect of obtaining the seeds of the sweet wood tree. Many of the merchants from the lands of Hind and Arab were reluctant to obtain the seeds for me and I was told that it would be a futile effort as the Kingdom of Serendvipa monopolised the trade of sweet wood and the men who harvested the trees would never reveal their location. Some said that the tree would not survive in the weather and soil conditions here, but I suspect all of these were excuses that most of the merchants made as they were afraid that if I could produce my own sweet wood, it would compete with their imported spice and deprive them of a source of income. However, I persisted in my search and a few weeks later, I finally found someone who was willing to perform the task. My brother was interested in seeking his fortune at sea and I managed to convince him to try to obtain the seeds of the sweet wood tree from the island of Serendvipa.

On the day he was to leave for the West, we both made our way down to the settlement together and headed to one of the few Buddhist shrines which were located around the settlement. It was a custom amongst the Buddhist seamen to pray for deliverance and safe journeys to their destinations at these shrines, and the richer merchants would make lavish offerings of sandalwood and camphor to the Buddha figures at the temples. The construction of these shrines was funded by the Buddhist traders, who have come from the land of the Cholas, Palas and Hind, but the construction work was carried out by the locals. These shrines were relatively larger than the average house and are roughly cross shaped. Unlike the local buildings, it has a foundation were made of bricks made from the local red soil, and the pillar bases were made from granite found upstream. The pillars were made out of hardwood and they supported a domed roof. The Buddhist figures were placed in the centre, and a flight of stairs led up to the altar.

We prayed for my brother to have a safe journey, and we made an offering of some rice. After that, we returned to the jetty, and I bade him farewell. It was quite an emotional event, seeing a member of your family head off into the unknown, knowing that this could possibly be the last time you see him. Perhaps, this was why my father was so swift to dash any of my hopes of going to the sea when I was younger. Surely, the possibility of having to part with your children for a prolonged period of time along with the chance of never being able to meet him again is far too much pain for a parent to bear.

As the Arab ship sailed down the meandering river, and out into the open sea, I realised that the ships that sail across the great seas not only carried the goods of physical values, but also a priceless cargo: the hopes and dreams of people, be it those who were onboard, or those waiting impatiently at the harbours. That day was the first time I let my dreams set sail, but like any ship sailing from one port to another, there would always be a chance that it is wrecked before its purpose is fulfilled.

Several months later, during the wet season, I was watching the strong winds blowing from the sea bend the coconut palms to almost breaking point and the rain falling in sheets across the fields, I was reminded of the story of the ship that sunk further south along the straits during a storm like this one. It was a very tragic loss, and as the news spread across the marketplace, it was met with the shaking of heads and downcast faces. Some of the traders, I knew, lost their cargo on that ship, but the sea is unpredictable and cruel to both the lives of men and fate. I thought of my dear brother who may have suffered a similar fate out at sea. Alas, all I could do was to confine such thoughts to the recesses of my mind, and continue to wait patiently. Life had to go on as usual while I wait and that was something that I had learnt in the days after his departure…

At last, he did return, about two and a half years later, emerging at the doorstep of the family home almost as sudden as his departure felt to us. There was much rejoicing among the family members and the folk of my village. Indeed, he made a fortune from his journeys, but amassed an even larger wealth of knowledge and experiences. For many days after his return, those curious about his adventures would visit and he would spend hours recounting the tales of the people and the places he saw. He even brought back a most ornate Arab oil lamp, which provides light to the house as darkness falls and it is still used even now. But, we shall keep the stories of his adventures for another day. As for now, I know you must be wondering, “what about the seeds I asked for?” Ah, yes, about the seeds…

He did bring back a few seeds of the sweet wood tree, and I knew it would be long before I could ever dream of owning a sweet wood plantation. Nevertheless, I was extremely grateful because he confirmed what I was told by the merchants: the collectors of the sweet wood were forbidden to reveal the location of the trees, and my brother had to brave the jungles to search for them, and smuggle the seeds out of Serendvipa. He told me of the methods that the men used to extract the bark of the wild sweet wood tree[8]. So, I planted one of the precious seeds in my orchard to see whether the conditions were right for the growth of the tree. Unfortunately, like any tree, it takes quite some time for the tree to germinate and reach maturity, and so, I had to wait patiently for the result of this botanical experiment, just as I had waited for my brother to return.

The results were encouraging, and in less than two years, the seed had grown into a tree of a decent height of about five times my height. However, as I was about harvest my first crop of sweet wood, I was literally “struck” by strange twist of fate. One rainy night, which, as usual, was accompanied with flashes of lightning, and thunderous booms, I heard a loud crackle from the orchard. Startled, I headed to the orchard, and I found that the tree I had planted was struck by lightning and was on fire. It was truly an infelicitous event, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I still had several seeds left. So, I heavy-heartedly cut down the remains of this tree, and I set about to plant the remaining seeds I had in the orchard, knowing that I now had a new, albeit delayed, source of income, to supplement that which I already had. But, after this event, I made a most amazing discovery!

While surveying the trees I had planted a few months later, I noticed that there were shoots growing out of the stump of the old tree which I had felled a year earlier. At first, I thought they were weeds, but upon closer inspection, I realised that they were indeed young shoots of the sweet wood tree, and they were growing as fertilely as the ones which I had planted directly from the seeds. It was a trait of trees which I had observed before, which I had forgotten but today,  it has proven to be a technique most useful in the cultivation of sweet wood. You see, most trees require maturity, which takes many years, to produce fruit, but in the case of the sweet wood tree, it is the bark that one harvests, and it is usually harvested from the branch shoots. Hence, one does not have to cut the entire tree down during harvest. Harvesting the shoots from the old tree stump is therefore an easier alternative, and provides a longer lasting supply of sweet wood. With this discovery, I had probably become the first cultivator of this spice in my village, and perhaps, even in our land…

That, my son, is the story of how your father made his living. As I said at the beginning, I know that it is a tale without any adventures out in the open oceans, harrowing ordeals on deserted islands, or fighting the huge creatures of the sea. However, I must say, some of us make our living through more mundane means, but together, the people of the land and the people of the sea form a bigger picture, a complex network of cooperation. We depend on the people of the sea for objects and luxuries we could not otherwise enjoy, and they too, depend on us to supply commodities which are not available in their homeland. This interdependence, as someone once beautifully described, is like the relationship between the birds and the fruit trees, the trees need the birds to spread their seeds, and the birds need the fruits for sustenance. You should be asking by now, “Why am I telling you all this?”

My tale has gone a full circle, and once again, a young boy stands at the entrance to a world of riches and unknown dangers. Tomorrow, you will be taking this first step into this world of infinite possibilities, just as I did 30 years ago, and you will learn to make a living for yourself and your family. I hope this story has succeeded in providing inspiration and aspiration; torches that I sincerely wish you can help pass on to the generations to come.”

With that final sentence, I took his hands and we walked through the orchard, with the scent of the sweet wood tree to lead us home through the darkness that had already enveloped our land.

[2] I actually snuck into one of these ships once, and to my surprise, I found that the insides were hollow. Most of the ship’s supplies and cargo were kept inside the ship. The ship’s crew slept there, too.

[3] Locals call this a Pengkalan or Pangkalan, which refers to any place where ships could moor. Hence, we call the town Pengkalan Bujang

[4] They call these jars, Dusun jars. I never knew why their names were called such, though.

[5] These spices were called ginger, star anise, sweet wood (kayu manis), cloves and turmeric, respectively. Of course, we did not know their names back then. Sometimes, some of them were ground up into powders and sold in small quantities at the market.

[6] Once, during a visit to a Buddhist temple, I realized that this wood was primarily burnt in temples when during meditation rituals and offerings to Buddha. This wood, known as sandalwood, is extremely rare, and can only be found in the land of the Cholas

[7] Some say the trees were so tall, that from the top, you could see the meander of the wide river that led to sea, and it is a most beautiful sight to behold. It’s a shame, really, because I’ve never seen this sight before, and the reason is obvious… I almost always climb the tree on a dark night.

[8] According to what I was told, the shoots of the tree are cut, and the outer bark, leaves and twigs are removed, leaving a thin strip of the inner bark. The stripped bark is then placed in layers, and rolled up into cylindrical tubes and dried.

Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 3:31 AM
Subject: 5th floor security alarm (sorry prof)

Hello Prof,

I’d just like to let you know that the Kota Cina group was staying back in the space outside the CyberArts studio on the 5th floor to work on our museum exhibit and we ended up setting off the security alarm a few times through the night.

What happened was we started at about 6+pm and were working on the exhibit till we lost track of time. At about midnight we set the alarm off and I then went to look for campus security to find out how to disarm it. Two officers from campus security came up later to disarm it. They saw that we were doing the project and gave us a chance to stay and finish it, adding that we call them before we leave so they could rearm the security alarm.

However, the alarm went off a few more times throughout the night and campus security came to disarm it a few times. USP admin may come to you to clarify that there is such a project going on there so I am letting you know in advance.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused =( .

Thank you.

Regards,

Felyna

on behalf of

Cui Ying

Joanna

Zachary

Calvin

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Sent: Wed 11/4/2009 10:52 AM
To: Lee Hui Chay Felyna
Subject: RE: 5th floor security alarm (sorry prof)

Hi, Felyna. According to other correspondence I received about this matter, you have been sent a reminder next time to inform security and the office if you plan to stay late. It also seems that the door itself may be faulty since the alarm kept going off at intervals without being triggered. No damage has been done; and of course everybody is probably secretly happy that you spent so much time working on your project (I assume you were working the whole time). So, no need to fear; extremism in pursuit of virtue is no sin!

I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman, in designing a way to obtain higher pressures, opened up another new field and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind.
I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense of, “What are the strange particles?”) but it is more like solid-state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most important is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications.

What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.

As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing; that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.

Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?

Let’s see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch—that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter—32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

Furthermore, it can be read if it is so written. Let’s imagine that it is written in raised letters of metal; that is, where the black is in the Encyclopedia, we have raised letters of metal that are actually 1/25,000 of their ordinary size. How would we read it?

If we had something written in such a way, we could read it using techniques in common use today. (They will undoubtedly find a better way when we do actually have it written, but to make my point conservatively I shall just take techniques we know today.) We would press the metal into a plastic material and make a mold of it, then peel the plastic off very carefully, evaporate silica into the plastic to get a very thin film, then shadow it by evaporating gold at an angle against the silica so that all the little letters will appear clearly, dissolve the plastic away from the silica film, and then look through it with an electron microscope!

There is no question that if the thing were reduced by 25,000 times in the form of raised letters on the pin, it would be easy for us to read it today. Furthermore; there is no question that we would find it easy to make copies of the master; we would just need to press the same metal plate again into plastic and we would have another copy.

How do we write small?

The next question is: How do we write it? We have no standard technique to do this now. But let me argue that it is not as difficult as it first appears to be. We can reverse the lenses of the electron microscope in order to demagnify as well as magnify. A source of ions, sent through the microscope lenses in reverse, could be focused to a very small spot. We could write with that spot like we write in a TV cathode ray oscilloscope, by going across in lines, and having an adjustment which determines the amount of material which is going to be deposited as we scan in lines.
This method might be very slow because of space charge limitations. There will be more rapid methods. We could first make, perhaps by some photo process, a screen which has holes in it in the form of the letters. Then we would strike an arc behind the holes and draw metallic ions through the holes; then we could again use our system of lenses and make a small image in the form of ions, which would deposit the metal on the pin.

A simpler way might be this (though I am not sure it would work): We take light and, through an optical microscope running backwards, we focus it onto a very small photoelectric screen. Then electrons come away from the screen where the light is shining. These electrons are focused down in size by the electron microscope lenses to impinge directly upon the surface of the metal. Will such a beam etch away the metal if it is run long enough? I don’t know. If it doesn’t work for a metal surface, it must be possible to find some surface with which to coat the original pin so that, where the electrons bombard, a change is made which we could recognize later.

There is no intensity problem in these devices—not what you are used to in magnification, where you have to take a few electrons and spread them over a bigger and bigger screen; it is just the opposite. The light which we get from a page is concentrated onto a very small area so it is very intense. The few electrons which come from the photoelectric screen are demagnified down to a very tiny area so that, again, they are very intense. I don’t know why this hasn’t been done yet!

That’s the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin, but let’s consider all the books in the world. The Library of Congress has approximately 9 million volumes; the British Museum Library has 5 million volumes; there are also 5 million volumes in the National Library in France. Undoubtedly there are duplications, so let us say that there are some 24 million volumes of interest in the world.

What would happen if I print all this down at the scale we have been discussing? How much space would it take? It would take, of course, the area of about a million pinheads because, instead of there being just the 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia, there are 24 million volumes. The million pinheads can be put in a square of a thousand pins on a side, or an area of about 3 square yards. That is to say, the silica replica with the paper-thin backing of plastic, with which we have made the copies, with all this information, is on an area of approximately the size of 35 pages of the Encyclopaedia. That is about half as many pages as there are in this magazine. All of the information which all of mankind has every recorded in books can be carried around in a pamphlet in your hand—and not written in code, but a simple reproduction of the original pictures, engravings, and everything else on a small scale without loss of resolution.

What would our librarian at Caltech say, as she runs all over from one building to another, if I tell her that, ten years from now, all of the information that she is struggling to keep track of— 120,000 volumes, stacked from the floor to the ceiling, drawers full of cards, storage rooms full of the older books—can be kept on just one library card! When the University of Brazil, for example, finds that their library is burned, we can send them a copy of every book in our library by striking off a copy from the master plate in a few hours and mailing it in an envelope no bigger or heavier than any other ordinary air mail letter.

Now, the name of this talk is “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom”—not just “There is Room at the Bottom.” What I have demonstrated is that there is room—that you can decrease the size of things in a practical way. I now want to show that there is plenty of room. I will not now discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle—in other words, what is possible according to the laws of physics. I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Information on a small scale

Suppose that, instead of trying to reproduce the pictures and all the information directly in its present form, we write only the information content in a code of dots and dashes, or something like that, to represent the various letters. Each letter represents six or seven “bits” of information; that is, you need only about six or seven dots or dashes for each letter. Now, instead of writing everything, as I did before, on the surface of the head of a pin, I am going to use the interior of the material as well.
Let us represent a dot by a small spot of one metal, the next dash, by an adjacent spot of another metal, and so on. Suppose, to be conservative, that a bit of information is going to require a little cube of atoms 5 times 5 times 5—that is 125 atoms. Perhaps we need a hundred and some odd atoms to make sure that the information is not lost through diffusion, or through some other process.

I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide— which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don’t tell me about microfilm!

This fact—that enormous amounts of information can be carried in an exceedingly small space—is, of course, well known to the biologists, and resolves the mystery which existed before we understood all this clearly, of how it could be that, in the tiniest cell, all of the information for the organization of a complex creature such as ourselves can be stored. All this information—whether we have brown eyes, or whether we think at all, or that in the embryo the jawbone should first develop with a little hole in the side so that later a nerve can grow through it—all this information is contained in a very tiny fraction of the cell in the form of long-chain DNA molecules in which approximately 50 atoms are used for one bit of information about the cell.

Better electron microscopes

If I have written in a code, with 5 times 5 times 5 atoms to a bit, the question is: How could I read it today? The electron microscope is not quite good enough, with the greatest care and effort, it can only resolve about 10 angstroms. I would like to try and impress upon you while I am talking about all of these things on a small scale, the importance of improving the electron microscope by a hundred times. It is not impossible; it is not against the laws of diffraction of the electron. The wave length of the electron in such a microscope is only 1/20 of an angstrom. So it should be possible to see the individual atoms. What good would it be to see individual atoms distinctly?
We have friends in other fields—in biology, for instance. We physicists often look at them and say, “You know the reason you fellows are making so little progress?” (Actually I don’t know any field where they are making more rapid progress than they are in biology today.) “You should use more mathematics, like we do.” They could answer us—but they’re polite, so I’ll answer for them: “What you should do in order for us to make more rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better.”

What are the most central and fundamental problems of biology today? They are questions like: What is the sequence of bases in the DNA? What happens when you have a mutation? How is the base order in the DNA connected to the order of amino acids in the protein? What is the structure of the RNA; is it single-chain or double-chain, and how is it related in its order of bases to the DNA? What is the organization of the microsomes? How are proteins synthesized? Where does the RNA go? How does it sit? Where do the proteins sit? Where do the amino acids go in? In photosynthesis, where is the chlorophyll; how is it arranged; where are the carotenoids involved in this thing? What is the system of the conversion of light into chemical energy?

It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! You will see the order of bases in the chain; you will see the structure of the microsome. Unfortunately, the present microscope sees at a scale which is just a bit too crude. Make the microscope one hundred times more powerful, and many problems of biology would be made very much easier. I exaggerate, of course, but the biologists would surely be very thankful to you—and they would prefer that to the criticism that they should use more mathematics.

The theory of chemical processes today is based on theoretical physics. In this sense, physics supplies the foundation of chemistry. But chemistry also has analysis. If you have a strange substance and you want to know what it is, you go through a long and complicated process of chemical analysis. You can analyze almost anything today, so I am a little late with my idea. But if the physicists wanted to, they could also dig under the chemists in the problem of chemical analysis. It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; all one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor. (Later, I would like to ask the question: Can the physicists do something about the third problem of chemistry—namely, synthesis? Is there a physical way to synthesize any chemical substance?

The reason the electron microscope is so poor is that the f- value of the lenses is only 1 part to 1,000; you don’t have a big enough numerical aperture. And I know that there are theorems which prove that it is impossible, with axially symmetrical stationary field lenses, to produce an f-value any bigger than so and so; and therefore the resolving power at the present time is at its theoretical maximum. But in every theorem there are assumptions. Why must the field be symmetrical? I put this out as a challenge: Is there no way to make the electron microscope more powerful?

The marvelous biological system

The biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired me to think of something that should be possible. Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it. A biological system can be exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all kinds of marvelous things—all on a very small scale. Also, they store information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want—that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level!
There may even be an economic point to this business of making things very small. Let me remind you of some of the problems of computing machines. In computers we have to store an enormous amount of information. The kind of writing that I was mentioning before, in which I had everything down as a distribution of metal, is permanent. Much more interesting to a computer is a way of writing, erasing, and writing something else. (This is usually because we don’t want to waste the material on which we have just written. Yet if we could write it in a very small space, it wouldn’t make any difference; it could just be thrown away after it was read. It doesn’t cost very much for the material).

Miniaturizing the computer

I don’t know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements—and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting—if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features.
If I look at your face I immediately recognize that I have seen it before. (Actually, my friends will say I have chosen an unfortunate example here for the subject of this illustration. At least I recognize that it is a man and not an apple.) Yet there is no machine which, with that speed, can take a picture of a face and say even that it is a man; and much less that it is the same man that you showed it before—unless it is exactly the same picture. If the face is changed; if I am closer to the face; if I am further from the face; if the light changes—I recognize it anyway. Now, this little computer I carry in my head is easily able to do that. The computers that we build are not able to do that. The number of elements in this bone box of mine are enormously greater than the number of elements in our “wonderful” computers. But our mechanical computers are too big; the elements in this box are microscopic. I want to make some that are submicroscopic.

If we wanted to make a computer that had all these marvelous extra qualitative abilities, we would have to make it, perhaps, the size of the Pentagon. This has several disadvantages. First, it requires too much material; there may not be enough germanium in the world for all the transistors which would have to be put into this enormous thing. There is also the problem of heat generation and power consumption; TVA would be needed to run the computer. But an even more practical difficulty is that the computer would be limited to a certain speed. Because of its large size, there is finite time required to get the information from one place to another. The information cannot go any faster than the speed of light—so, ultimately, when our computers get faster and faster and more and more elaborate, we will have to make them smaller and smaller.

But there is plenty of room to make them smaller. There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages.

Miniaturization by evaporation

How can we make such a device? What kind of manufacturing processes would we use? One possibility we might consider, since we have talked about writing by putting atoms down in a certain arrangement, would be to evaporate the material, then evaporate the insulator next to it. Then, for the next layer, evaporate another position of a wire, another insulator, and so on. So, you simply evaporate until you have a block of stuff which has the elements— coils and condensers, transistors and so on—of exceedingly fine dimensions.
But I would like to discuss, just for amusement, that there are other possibilities. Why can’t we manufacture these small computers somewhat like we manufacture the big ones? Why can’t we drill holes, cut things, solder things, stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like your wife’s wrist watch, have you said to yourself, “If I could only train an ant to do this!” What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make.

Consider any machine—for example, an automobile—and ask about the problems of making an infinitesimal machine like it. Suppose, in the particular design of the automobile, we need a certain precision of the parts; we need an accuracy, let’s suppose, of 4/10,000 of an inch. If things are more inaccurate than that in the shape of the cylinder and so on, it isn’t going to work very well. If I make the thing too small, I have to worry about the size of the atoms; I can’t make a circle of “balls” so to speak, if the circle is too small. So, if I make the error, corresponding to 4/10,000 of an inch, correspond to an error of 10 atoms, it turns out that I can reduce the dimensions of an automobile 4,000 times, approximately—so that it is 1 mm. across. Obviously, if you redesign the car so that it would work with a much larger tolerance, which is not at all impossible, then you could make a much smaller device.

It is interesting to consider what the problems are in such small machines. Firstly, with parts stressed to the same degree, the forces go as the area you are reducing, so that things like weight and inertia are of relatively no importance. The strength of material, in other words, is very much greater in proportion. The stresses and expansion of the flywheel from centrifugal force, for example, would be the same proportion only if the rotational speed is increased in the same proportion as we decrease the size. On the other hand, the metals that we use have a grain structure, and this would be very annoying at small scale because the material is not homogeneous. Plastics and glass and things of this amorphous nature are very much more homogeneous, and so we would have to make our machines out of such materials.

There are problems associated with the electrical part of the system—with the copper wires and the magnetic parts. The magnetic properties on a very small scale are not the same as on a large scale; there is the “domain” problem involved. A big magnet made of millions of domains can only be made on a small scale with one domain. The electrical equipment won’t simply be scaled down; it has to be redesigned. But I can see no reason why it can’t be redesigned to work again.

Problems of lubrication

Lubrication involves some interesting points. The effective viscosity of oil would be higher and higher in proportion as we went down (and if we increase the speed as much as we can). If we don’t increase the speed so much, and change from oil to kerosene or some other fluid, the problem is not so bad. But actually we may not have to lubricate at all! We have a lot of extra force. Let the bearings run dry; they won’t run hot because the heat escapes away from such a small device very, very rapidly.
This rapid heat loss would prevent the gasoline from exploding, so an internal combustion engine is impossible. Other chemical reactions, liberating energy when cold, can be used. Probably an external supply of electrical power would be most convenient for such small machines.

What would be the utility of such machines? Who knows? Of course, a small automobile would only be useful for the mites to drive around in, and I suppose our Christian interests don’t go that far. However, we did note the possibility of the manufacture of small elements for computers in completely automatic factories, containing lathes and other machine tools at the very small level. The small lathe would not have to be exactly like our big lathe. I leave to your imagination the improvement of the design to take full advantage of the properties of things on a small scale, and in such a way that the fully automatic aspect would be easiest to manage.

A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs) suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and “looks” around. (Of course the information has to be fed out.) It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately-functioning organ.

Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can’t handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the “hands” there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely.

Most of these devices are actually made rather simply, in that there is a particular cable, like a marionette string, that goes directly from the controls to the “hands.” But, of course, things also have been made using servo motors, so that the connection between the one thing and the other is electrical rather than mechanical. When you turn the levers, they turn a servo motor, and it changes the electrical currents in the wires, which repositions a motor at the other end.

Now, I want to build much the same device—a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the “hands” that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway—the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands.

Well, you get the principle from there on. It is rather a difficult program, but it is a possibility. You might say that one can go much farther in one step than from one to four. Of course, this has all to be designed very carefully and it is not necessary simply to make it like hands. If you thought of it very carefully, you could probably arrive at a much better system for doing such things.

If you work through a pantograph, even today, you can get much more than a factor of four in even one step. But you can’t work directly through a pantograph which makes a smaller pantograph which then makes a smaller pantograph—because of the looseness of the holes and the irregularities of construction. The end of the pantograph wiggles with a relatively greater irregularity than the irregularity with which you move your hands. In going down this scale, I would find the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph shaking so badly that it wasn’t doing anything sensible at all.

At each stage, it is necessary to improve the precision of the apparatus. If, for instance, having made a small lathe with a pantograph, we find its lead screw irregular—more irregular than the large-scale one—we could lap the lead screw against breakable nuts that you can reverse in the usual way back and forth until this lead screw is, at its scale, as accurate as our original lead screws, at our scale.

We can make flats by rubbing unflat surfaces in triplicates together—in three pairs—and the flats then become flatter than the thing you started with. Thus, it is not impossible to improve precision on a small scale by the correct operations. So, when we build this stuff, it is necessary at each step to improve the accuracy of the equipment by working for awhile down there, making accurate lead screws, Johansen blocks, and all the other materials which we use in accurate machine work at the higher level. We have to stop at each level and manufacture all the stuff to go to the next level—a very long and very difficult program. Perhaps you can figure a better way than that to get down to small scale more rapidly.

Yet, after all this, you have just got one little baby lathe four thousand times smaller than usual. But we were thinking of making an enormous computer, which we were going to build by drilling holes on this lathe to make little washers for the computer. How many washers can you manufacture on this one lathe?

A hundred tiny hands

When I make my first set of slave “hands” at one-fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of “hands,” and I wire them to my original levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred “hands” at the 1/16th size.
Where am I going to put the million lathes that I am going to have? Why, there is nothing to it; the volume is much less than that of even one full-scale lathe. For instance, if I made a billion little lathes, each 1/4000 of the scale of a regular lathe, there are plenty of materials and space available because in the billion little ones there is less than 2 percent of the materials in one big lathe.

It doesn’t cost anything for materials, you see. So I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously, drilling holes, stamping parts, and so on.

As we go down in size, there are a number of interesting problems that arise. All things do not simply scale down in proportion. There is the problem that materials stick together by the molecular (Van der Waals) attractions. It would be like this: After you have made a part and you unscrew the nut from a bolt, it isn’t going to fall down because the gravity isn’t appreciable; it would even be hard to get it off the bolt. It would be like those old movies of a man with his hands full of molasses, trying to get rid of a glass of water. There will be several problems of this nature that we will have to be ready to design for.

Rearranging the atoms

But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately—in the great future—we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them (within reason, of course; you can’t put them so that they are chemically unstable, for example).
Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on a large scale with them, and we hope to get a pure substance with just so much impurity, and so on. But we must always accept some atomic arrangement that nature gives us. We haven’t got anything, say, with a “checkerboard” arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly arranged 1,000 angstroms apart, or in some other particular pattern.

What could we do with layered structures with just the right layers? What would the properties of materials be if we could really arrange the atoms the way we want them? They would be very interesting to investigate theoretically. I can’t see exactly what would happen, but I can hardly doubt that when we have some control of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of different things that we can do.

Consider, for example, a piece of material in which we make little coils and condensers (or their solid state analogs) 1,000 or 10,000 angstroms in a circuit, one right next to the other, over a large area, with little antennas sticking out at the other end—a whole series of circuits. Is it possible, for example, to emit light from a whole set of antennas, like we emit radio waves from an organized set of antennas to beam the radio programs to Europe? The same thing would be to beam the light out in a definite direction with very high intensity. (Perhaps such a beam is not very useful technically or economically.)

I have thought about some of the problems of building electric circuits on a small scale, and the problem of resistance is serious. If you build a corresponding circuit on a small scale, its natural frequency goes up, since the wave length goes down as the scale; but the skin depth only decreases with the square root of the scale ratio, and so resistive problems are of increasing difficulty. Possibly we can beat resistance through the use of superconductivity if the frequency is not too high, or by other tricks.

Atoms in a small world

When we get to the very, very small world—say circuits of seven atoms—we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc.
Another thing we will notice is that, if we go down far enough, all of our devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies of one another. We cannot build two large machines so that the dimensions are exactly the same. But if your machine is only 100 atoms high, you only have to get it correct to one-half of one percent to make sure the other machine is exactly the same size—namely, 100 atoms high!

At the atomic level, we have new kinds of forces and new kinds of possibilities, new kinds of effects. The problems of manufacture and reproduction of materials will be quite different. I am, as I said, inspired by the biological phenomena in which chemical forces are used in repetitious fashion to produce all kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author).

The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.

Ultimately, we can do chemical synthesis. A chemist comes to us and says, “Look, I want a molecule that has the atoms arranged thus and so; make me that molecule.” The chemist does a mysterious thing when he wants to make a molecule. He sees that it has got that ring, so he mixes this and that, and he shakes it, and he fiddles around. And, at the end of a difficult process, he usually does succeed in synthesizing what he wants. By the time I get my devices working, so that we can do it by physics, he will have figured out how to synthesize absolutely anything, so that this will really be useless.

But it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible (I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. Give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed—a development which I think cannot be avoided.

Now, you might say, “Who should do this and why should they do it?” Well, I pointed out a few of the economic applications, but I know that the reason that you would do it might be just for fun. But have some fun! Let’s have a competition between laboratories. Let one laboratory make a tiny motor which it sends to another lab which sends it back with a thing that fits inside the shaft of the first motor.

High school competition

Just for the fun of it, and in order to get kids interested in this field, I would propose that someone who has some contact with the high schools think of making some kind of high school competition. After all, we haven’t even started in this field, and even the kids can write smaller than has ever been written before. They could have competition in high schools. The Los Angeles high school could send a pin to the Venice high school on which it says, “How’s this?” They get the pin back, and in the dot of the “i” it says, “Not so hot.”
Perhaps this doesn’t excite you to do it, and only economics will do so. Then I want to do something; but I can’t do it at the present moment, because I haven’t prepared the ground. It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope.

And I want to offer another prize—if I can figure out how to phrase it so that I don’t get into a mess of arguments about definitions—of another $1,000 to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor—a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64 inch cube.

I do not expect that such prizes will have to wait very long for claimants.