CALTECH >presents:1

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Welcome to TEDxCaltech –
Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years!
We invite you to join with us today in a forward-looking celebration of
Feynman’s spirit, curiosity, and broad scientific vision. This event was
conceived in recognition of 50-year anniversaries of both Feynman’s
famous 1959 talk that has long inspired nanoscience entitled There’s
Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and the 1961 inauguration of his iconic
Feynman Lectures on Physics, now well known to students around the
world.

>WELCOME
Today we’ve invited some iconoclastic, visionary, and amusing scientific
and cultural luminaries – both from Caltech and points afar – to help
us explore together the past, present, and future of a few topics that
captivated Feynman.
Please sit back and enjoy the show!

1. The Character of Physical Law: Richard Feynman’s Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, 1964 (The MIT Press,
2001, ISBN-13: 978-02625600301964).

2. From the introduction to Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P.
Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman (Basic Books/Perseus Book Group, 2005).
SESSION
>1
SESSION 1 explores
scientific conceptualization
and visualization. We’ll
draw insights from the
history of knowledge
and information, from
current methods of
visualizing complex
phenomena and multi-
dimensional information,
and from new channels
for communicating it.
Our overarching theme is
identifying optimal ways
of teaching, nurturing, and
employing the process of
conceptualization.
Conceptualization
and Visualization
in Science
“Poets say science takes away
from the beauty of the stars – ‘mere’
globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere.’ I too
can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.
But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens
stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little
eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern
– of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the
meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery
to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is
the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do
the poets of the present not speak of it?” 3
Feynman was a visionary, but he also prided himself
on being a simplifier and communicator. This session
explores the question, “How do scientists conceptualize
complex phenomena?” That is, how do we transcend
current boundaries of knowledge, venture into unexplored
realms, and somehow make sense of it all? When we
arrive, our existing frameworks for understanding – such
as language and mathematics – often fail us; they prove
insufficient. Yet despite our ignorance, there is often
a spark, an intuitive “glimpse beyond” that propels us
forward. This spark is the essential first light into the new
SESSION Frontiers of
Physics
>2 Feynman’s curiosity in physics
spanned topics from fundamental
particles and unification of physical
laws, to macroscopic quantum
coherence in liquid helium, to
“Nature uses only the longest frontiers of computation. His
was often an irreverent view, but
threads to weave her patterns, so that always an interesting one, and his
each small piece of her fabric reveals the chosen path was often far from
organization of the entire tapestry.” 4 the beaten track.

“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and SESSION 2 addresses
doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great
frontiers in physics – in
importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the
answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch part from a historical
as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is perspective, but
pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still
in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance emphasizing some of the
that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance profound opportunities
and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body
of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most before us today.
unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now,
we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted
that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible 4. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The
to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone Best Short Works of Richard Feynman, edited
by Jeffery Robbins (Basic Books/Perseus Book
realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a Group, 2005, ISBN-13: 978-0465023950).
struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was
a very deep and strong struggle. Permit us to question – to 5. What Do You Care What Other People Think?:
doubt – to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do Further Adventures of a Curious Character,
not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have Richard Feynman, edited by Ralph Leighton, p.
28 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, ISBN-13:
gained.” 5 978-0393320923).
SESSION>2

MUSICAL
PERFORMANCES
New technologies have a rich history of enabling
new forms of creative expression. One can argue that
the adoption of new technology in art and music is as old and
well established as it is in the physical sciences. It ranges from the invention of
the first temperas for painting, to the printing press, and the resulting democratization
of the written word, to electronic synthesizers for musical composition, to modern 3-D
visualization. Often, the advent of new technology for the arts initially engenders an
infatuation with the medium itself, characterized by overly saturated, even unbalanced
work that employs it with a lack of nuance. This invariably induces a purist backlash against
the new technology’s adoption. But this exploratory phase always proves to be essential,
and subsequently matures into both heightened aesthetic sensibility and a deepened
understanding of the full potentiality of the new “instrument.”

An unusual partnership gelled during the course of organizing this event, which started
from discussions between TEDxCaltech’s musical/visual performance artists and
scientists at Caltech. Their collaborative efforts have spawned an exploration of what
is possible when the science of nonlinear dynamics – stemming from mathematics and
physical systems manifesting chaotic behavior – is integrated with music.

Previous efforts have translated data streams from nonlinear systems into tones, in
a relatively facile manner; this is not new. On first listen, such efforts can sound,
well, chaotic – in the colloquial sense of “incoherent” and perhaps, eventually,
even “irritating.” The present focus, instead, is on the imposition of harmonic and
SESSION
>3
SESSION 3 celebrates
Feynman’s prescient
vision of nanoscience.
Guided by several of
the principal innovators
in this broad field, we’ll
contemplate Feynman’s
early perspective, view the
present state of the art,
and envisage the next 50
years to come.
Nanoscience and
Future Biology
“What I want to talk about is
the problem of manipulating and
controlling things on a small scale…. 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….
“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.” 8
Just over fifty 50 years ago, on December 29, 1959, future
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gave a visionary, and now,
famous, talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”
The occasion was an American Physical Society meeting
in Pasadena near the California Institute of Technology,
Feynman’s intellectual home. Although he didn’t intend
it, Feynman marked a defining moment in what would
become the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology with
his 7,000 words, long before anything “nano” appeared
on the horizon. The breadth of Feynman’s vision is still
staggering today. In that lecture almost 50 years ago, he
anticipated a spectrum of scientific and technical fields that
are now well established, spanning molecular biotechnology,
atomic-scale fabrication, quantum-effect and spin-based
electronics (spintronics), and nanoelectromechanical systems.