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  • (instrumental synthesizer music)

  • (tape rewinding)

  • (electronic instrumental music)

  • - [Voiceover] My father, you see,

  • interested me in patterns at the very beginning

  • and then later in things, like we would turn over stones

  • and watch the ants carry the little

  • white babies down deeper into the hole.

  • We would look at worms.

  • We’d go for walks and we’d look at things all the time,

  • the stars, the way birds fly.

  • He was always telling me interesting things.

  • I mean this story’s a rumor, as far as I’m concerned,

  • but the story is that before I was born,

  • he told my mother that,

  • If it’s a boy, hell be a scientist.”

  • My father used to sit me on his lap

  • and the one book we did use all

  • the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica

  • and he used to sit me on his lap when I was a kid

  • and read out of the damned thing.

  • There would be pictures of dinosaurs and then he would read,

  • you know the long words, the dinosaur so and so

  • attains a length of so and so many feet.

  • He would always stop and he would say,

  • You know what that means?

  • "It means, if the dinosaur’s standing on our front yard

  • "and your bedroom window, you know, is on the second floor

  • "you’d see out the window his head standing looking at you."

  • He would translate everything

  • and I learned to translate everything,

  • so it’s the same disease.

  • When I read something,

  • I always translate it in the best I can

  • into what does it really mean.

  • I can remember my father talking, talking, talking.

  • When you go into the museum, for example,

  • there are great rocks which have long cuts,

  • grooves in them, from glacier

  • and I remember, the first time going there,

  • he stopped there and explained to me

  • about the ice moving and grinding.

  • I can hear the voice, practically

  • and then he would tell me,

  • How do you think we know

  • "there were glaciers in the past?”

  • He’d point out, “That's what we're looking at,

  • "that these rocks are found in New York

  • "and so there must have been ice in New York.”

  • He understood.

  • A thing that was very important about my father

  • was not the facts, but the process.

  • How we find out.

  • What is the consequence of finding such a rock?

  • But that’s the kind of guy he was.

  • I don’t think he ever successfully went to college.

  • However, he did teach himself a great deal.

  • He read a lot.

  • He liked the rational mind

  • and liked those things which

  • could be understood by thinking.

  • So it’s not hard to understand I got interested in science.

  • I got a laboratory in my room.

  • We also played a trick on my mother there.

  • We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels

  • and another substance, an iron salt,

  • probably alum, in the soap

  • and when they come together, they make blue ink.

  • So we were supposed to fool my mother, you see.

  • She would wash her hands and then when she dried them,

  • her hands would turn blue,

  • but we didn’t think the towel would turn blue.

  • Anyway, she was horrified,

  • the screams of, “My good linen towels!”

  • But she was always cooperative.

  • She never was afraid of the experiments.

  • The bridge partners, would tell her,

  • How can you let the child have a laboratory?

  • "He'll blow up the house," and all this kind of talk

  • and she just said, “It’s worth it.”

  • I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”

  • I took later solid geometry and trigonometry.

  • In solid geometry was the first time

  • I had any mathematical difficulties.

  • It was my only experience with how

  • it must feel to the ordinary human being

  • a then I discovered what was wrong.

  • The diagrams that were being drawn

  • on the blackboard were three-dimensional

  • and I was thinking of them as plane diagrams

  • and I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on.

  • It was a mistake in the orientation.

  • When he would draw pictures and I would see a parallelogram

  • and he called it a square,

  • because it was tilted out of the plane, you know

  • and I, “Oh God, this thing doesn’t make any sense.

  • "What is he talking about?”

  • It was a terrifying experience.

  • Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling.

  • But it was just a dumb mistake.

  • But I suspect that this kind of a dumb mistake

  • is quite common to people learning mathematics.

  • Part of the missing understanding is to mistake

  • what it is youre supposed to know.

  • It isn’t the question of learning anything precisely,

  • but of learning that there’s something exciting over there

  • and I think that the same thing happened with my father.

  • My father never really knew anything in detail,

  • but would tell me what’s interesting about the world

  • and where, if you look, youll find still more interests,

  • so that later I would say, “Well, this is going to be good.

  • "I know this has got something to do with this,

  • "which is hot stuff.”

  • This kind of feeling of what was important

  • and that is the key.

  • The key was somehow to know what was important

  • and what was not important, what was exciting,

  • because I can’t learn everything.

  • (electronic instrumental music)

  • The thing that I loved was,

  • everything that I read was serious,

  • wasn’t written for a child.

  • I didn’t like children’s things.

  • Because, for one thing I was very,

  • very, and still am, very sensitive

  • and very worried about was that the thing to be dead honest,

  • that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy.

  • Details purposely left out

  • or slightly erroneous explanations,

  • in order to get away with it.

  • This was intolerable.

  • I kind of try to imagine what would

  • have happened to me if I’d lived in today’s era.

  • I’m rather horrified.

  • I think there are too many books,

  • that the mind gets boggled.

  • If I got interested, I would have so many things to look at,

  • I would go crazy.

  • It’s too easy.

  • (tape reversing)

  • Subtitles by the Amara.org community

(instrumental synthesizer music)

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