Kyoto Prize Laureate Symposium Talk at SDSU

[Music]

good morning I'm Nancy Marlin the University Provost and on delighted on

behalf of San Diego State University I'm delighted to welcome all of you to this

first lecture event of the 2005 Kyoto laureate symposium this symposium as I

think most of you are aware from the program is a three-day celebration of

the lives and works of those receiving the Kyoto Prize Japan's highest private

Award for lifetime achievement award Adana Lee to individuals and groups

worldwide in hosting the symposium jointly with the University of San Diego

and the University of California San Diego we hope to provide an opportunity

for an international audience to learn about the current Kyoto Prize laureates

and to contemplate the relationship between their remarkable accomplishments

and the common quest for peace and harmony in our world before we turn to

today's speaker Alan Kay the 2004 Kyoto

Prize laureate in advanced technology I have the pleasure of introducing some of

the esteemed guests who are with us today to share this occasion we have

with us the three 2004 Kyoto Prize

laureates dr. Alan Kay for Advanced

Technology dr. Alfred Knutson for basic

sciences and professors Jurgen Habermas

for arts and philosophy with the three of you please stand and be recognized

[Applause] [Music]

we also are extremely honored to have the founder and chairman emeritus of

Kyocera corporation advisor to KDDI corporation the president of Japan's

Inamori foundation which Awards the Kyoto prize dr. Haas ooh Oh

ena mori there are also several

directors of the Inamori foundation with us and as i college name i would ask

that they stand and that applause be withheld until all have been introduced

dr. hero amaura dr. shinji fuku Korra

mr. Toyama ena ena more a mr. meet Hyo

okano mr. aza Shaughnessy

leading our symposium events from the community we have with us mr. Malin

Burnham chairman of the San Diego's keota symposium organization and also

mr. Tom fat who co-chaired with Malin Vernon last night's wonderful Kyoto

symposium Gala and finally I think we

all are the beneficiaries of the organizational committee here at San

Diego State University and especially the wonderful work of miss Kristen doute

Kristen where did you go she's in the back thank you today madam

Kaneko bishop would like to honor this important occasion through a symbolic

flower arrangement Madame Bishop is professor of the Oh moco sink a school

of tea the Japanese tea ceremony is combined art in which flower arranging

is an integral component she has chosen

the container in the form of a circle to represent the universities and they'll

be Flor flower stems inserted the first

flower stem will be inserted by dr. you

no more anomaly for his great vision and philosophy I will insert the second stem

on behalf of San Diego State University to symbolize wisdom and guidance the

third flower stem will be inserted by dr. Alan Kay for his knowledge and

contribution to humanity and the fourth stem will be inserted by Dean Thomas

Scott for his leadership and inspiration madam Bishop will then add water to

symbolize the symbolic arrangement and nurture it

I have chosen

[Applause] plus them will be inserted by provost

and vice presidency burden for her

wisdom and guidance

[Applause]

knowledge and the contribution to society

[Applause]

in certified in Thomas Scott for his

leadership and is spread

[Applause]

again our additive

to nurse the simple arrangement we are

most honored to participate in this morning me name upon pages I truly

believe that the contribution of these

dedicated people will a better life for

all match our colony may perspective on

this memorial teeny sample desiderata master photos I will coil government

matter for takka takka takka till she

nearly 2nd distr butanol newsela yet upon us

my assistant the Hiroko students will she's the instructor for Soviet school

with school of Alabama and the director

of the San Diego Chapter also me Anna

she's the dis University graduate student

[Applause]

now to give you some perspective on the nature of the ward that Alan Kay

recently received we will show a short video introducing the Kyoto Prize

the Inamori foundation is proud to present the Kyoto prizes each November

10th in Kyoto Japan the Kyoto prizes are presented to individuals and groups

worldwide whose work has shown a significant contribution to the betterment of society and mankind Kyoto

prizes recognize three categories of human achievement advanced technology

basic sciences and arts and philosophy

the Kyoto prizes consist of academic honors a 20 carat gold Kyoto Prize medal

and a cash gift totaling 50 million yen about $450,000 per category

dr. Kazuo Inamori --zz belief that mankind's future depends on the balance

of science technology and the human spirit is reflected in the Kyoto prizes

which promote this balanced development of science and sanity they are designed

to recognize outstanding achievers globally and to inspire people to even

greater achievements the Kyoto Prize ceremonies have long been attended by

members of Japan's Imperial Family the

audience includes international dignitaries and elite representatives of academia science technology the arts

business and government permit me now to convey to you a message

from george w bush President of the United States of America each year

global heads of state offer their thanks and congratulations to the Kyoto Prize

laureates for their important contributions to society these leaders

recognition and support underscore the importance of balancing technology and

humanity especially as we face the challenges of the new millennium Kyoto

Prize laureates are selected from specific fields within the three categories the ena Mori foundations

rigorous nomination process ensures unbiased consideration of the nominees

and the laureates are then selected with the approval of the foundation's board

of directors the Inamori foundation was

created in 1984 with a personal endowment of twenty billion yen from dr.

Kazuo Inamori dr. ana mori is the founder of Kyocera corporation a

multi-billion dollar global enterprise that he established with the equivalent

of just ten thousand dollars in 1959 dr.

Inamori created the foundation in reflection of his philosophy he has long

said that human beings have no higher calling than to strive for the greater

good of humankind and all the world with

dr. Inamori subsequent donations the foundation's net assets by 2004 total

more than 64 billion yen or about 600 million dollars for 20 years the

foundation has awarded the Kyoto prizes to recognize outstanding contributions

to scientific progress cultural advancement human achievement the Kyoto Prize

laureates are people completely devoted to their work they hold a deep reverence

for the human spirit they've dedicated

their lives often with little recognition or encouragement to creative

work that benefits all humankind their

continued devotion to learning to excellence and their outstanding

accomplishments for the common good

establish them as truly deserving of these awards to build a future based on

a balance between science technology and the human spirit to encourage balanced

development of mankind's cognitive and spiritual sides to help ensure peace and

prosperity we honor our laureates for their extraordinary efforts and

outstanding contributions to humanity

this is the mission of the shadow prize

[Music]

[Applause]

I'm Thomas Scott Dean of the College of Sciences at San Diego State University

December 6th 1962 was the last day of classes in the

first semester that I spent at a rarefied Eastern University and that the

time when the semesters work really began the tradition was to have a 12-week semester followed by a two-week

reading period during which we were given an independent assignment in each

of our five classes to carry out during that ensuing two weeks in anticipation

for the final exams that came in January and the assignment that I was given in

my mathematics class was to write a computer program in Fortran that could

be used to calculate the fourth root of my University store number what would

correspond to a read ID today which seemed a rather daunting task the 12 of

us in the class were taken somewhat ceremoniously to be introduced to the

awesome adjudicator of whether or not we had met with success in our in our

attempts and this was an IBM I believe 79 T though I've probably repressed the

numbers and mangled them in some way and

it was a hallowed occasion the computer

occupied a thousand cubic feet in its

own larger room it was all encased in glass temperature controlled humidity

controlled all set on Springs to guard against the violent upheavals of central

New Jersey and we were told that it had

cost the university three million dollars which was about the price of a major building in those days we all

pressed our teenage ears against the glass and listened to the humming of

this mechanical mind and our instructor

said to us gentlemen it was an all-male University at that time gentlemen in a

tone that he had of respect that he had never shown for any human being during

the semester this is the future of

computing he didn't know that Alan Kay was on the loose

at that time with the the breeze of

Moore's law at his back Allen set off to create a computer that you didn't have

to have an appointment to meet a computer that you could take with you a

personal computer he unveiled his

concept as the Dynabook in 1972 such a 70s name this was followed by the alto

as in Palo Alto Research Center which

defined much of the progress that was subsequently made in the production of the Macintosh computer and the Windows

operating system Allen helped create a high-speed

Ethernet over which computers could be connected in local area networks which

then on steroids became the Internet the

Mac Windows the Internet this was truly

a paradigm shift such as the world sees only occasionally several weeks ago four

of us from San Diego State drove up to Glendale where Allen's laboratory is to

visit this shifter of paradigms we

discovered a casual sociable

intellectually vibrant thoughtfully

opinionated man who seemed not so much to notice all that he had accomplished

but rather to concentrate on what he still had to do to use computing power

as an educational tool always in the service of intellect in the service of

imagination as Allen noted during our

discussions you get about 30,000 days you've got to use them well Allen's only

used perhaps not even 24,000 of his and yet the world is already a better place

I'm honored to introduce Alan Kay whose

Kyoto lecture title has been before you for nearly half an hour now

understanding powerful ideas and how computers can help

[Applause]

thank you very much it's wonderful how stories improve in the telling 10 years

from now I will have reached back and

done be credited with everything that Babbage did as well but actually people

in our field work in a community and so

the citations for awards in our field

are really a tacit way of acknowledging

many many people who work together in

our fields a practical field and that in theory you're supposed to build your

claims and one person doesn't get to

build very many claims and so the

unusual thing about technology is the way it sort of combines ideas about the

real world that we think of as having to do with science and ideas from the world

of art and story which we think of as

being more in internal and in fact the the root of the Greek word for

technology means things that people make and some of the some of the ancient

Greeks thought of it as being the same word word with the same meaning as Epis

team which is loosely translated as having to do with knowledge and other

Greek writers and philosophers thought

of the technique as being rather

different as being a having to do with practical arts and and so forth

so what I'd like to do as soon as we can

get bill to cooperate here is to talk a

little bit about why we might be

interested in computers beyond the simple practicalities of recreating the

world of physical representations in the world of bits and recreating the world

of accounting in the worlds of bits and actually most important idea is that the

computers actually bring something new to the table and it's not easy to

explain at least I haven't found it easy to explain just just what that is

so the Kyoto Prize gave an opportunity to come up with many lectures and so

each lecture i've tried to take a slightly different slant on this to

explain why i think this is vitally important for the future especially of

children and the human race so my

conversion went from having worked on

this desktop computer with my friend Edie Cheadle which we thought of as

being like a kind of advanced tool or maybe even a vehicle like a car for

doing things with information and because we intended it to be a personal

computer for professionals millions of

professionals we started looking around at people who are not computer

professionals but we're professionals and other fields and during that process

I ran into Seymour Papert who was actually working with children about age

12 in those days and papper was a mathematician and my background was in

mathematics and biology and I saw papper

do something just astounding on that visit in 1968

and he was trying to get children

you are

programs see more challenging property

circle of course to a high school student a circle analytically is a

circle our fans interesting to document high

school students and their teachers see if they actually understand what that

actually means and that means America most people have no idea what

experiments monsters are so

[Music] mathematician deity circle did not have

to have her concordance back we

restructure his drawers

[Music]

and the language that Packard helped

originate called logo going a little as forward five turning a little is turn

five over and over as repeat if you tell the turtles to do that with the pen down

[Music] why it will draw a circle notice it

draws it without reference to where the center might be this warmer mathematics

main forms of animal science today

differential geometry vectors and Patricks genius was to realize that this

thing that is so easy to do on a computer actually is also in

psychological children whose mathematics is much easier for children to learn

then the arithmetic we tried to teach them in school and it's much more powerful so it's actually quite possible

to teach children the powerful ideas of the calculus to carry out the

implications of that so that was one of the greatest shocks I've ever had in my

life because my image of what the computer was went completely from

thinking of it as a tool or a vehicle to

something cosmic something more like the printing press or something like the

invention of science itself a new way of looking at things that could have a

tremendous positive benefit earlier age

with a very different as high schoolers with a less like a person with briefcase

where they actually have some [Music]

all those things flashed in my mind and I'm the plane going back to have this

idea that children could actually learn alcohol I guess by making their own

models in this enormous

games but games about reality is a mic

so that was going to grant me [Music]

well I don't want to do that I know I know so Bridget then we have the chance

of a lifetime to go with a bunch of

wonderful colleagues and one of them's here tonight Ted Cael are raised in

Hanover there many many years ago but

about two dozen people not me two dozen

of us together made a lot of the

fundamental inventions and personal computing today it was actually rather

easy and it was a heck of a lot of fun it was easy in part because the

technology had turned an important corner right around 1971 was easy partly

because this group was supremely well set up for doing it and the funding was

perfect and that the scientists were allowed to

follow their own noses on these projects and were able to work well with each

other and had a strong sense of destiny so that was a lot of fun but the

interesting question is what are of all

of the practical and Monday names we could have for this new set of

amplifiers what what are some of the more interesting ones and the thing I

thought would be really interesting was if we gave this machine to children with

a way of making things on it'd be very interesting to see if we could actually

get them not just to learn mathematics which is relatively easy but to learn

science which is much harder because of

its partly because of the three pounds of messed up porridge we have between

our ears that persists in seeing the

world not from the standpoint of reality but from the standpoint of ourselves as

human beings and so the that became an

interesting challenge and one of my favorite lines about science

is niels bohr who said science is not there to tell us about the universe but

to tell us how to talk about the universe in other words as human beings

we have representation systems physically in our brain and we have

invented various kinds of languages and ways of using that we use to reason with

but those have no necessary connection with what's out there and so science is

actually a relationship between what's out there and what we can talk about and

reason about you can think of this as a different way of critiquing the notion

of pure reason I also like Professor Xavier mosses much more subtle approach

so I'm hoping you will all go to his lecture because the the tricky thing

about learning how to reason little is it leads people to think that they can

reason a lot and even the Greeks got

caught up with us they thought for a long time that God must have must be a

mathematician because math was so neat and therefore you should be able to

deduce the struct the physical structure of the universe by just using

mathematical reasoning it turned out not to be the case at all and yet math has

been tremendously useful in representing ideas as we find them out another way of

looking at this is dr. in a more ease

approach which we heard the other day in the business lunch and to paraphrase

what he said he said the more talent ability and knowledge we have the more

careful control is needed and he calls this he says this control is what we

call character so character development is critical in any of the hundred

thousand years that humans have been on earth but it's absolutely critical now

that we're much more powerful than it than a cave of us with a club I think of

science as something that is philosophically interesting in fact it

is a part of philosophy because of this peculiar self-questioning nature it has

about its own methods and the fact that messy human beings are involved so

somehow science tries to find a way of saying reasonable things using a set of

materials including including us that are not terribly reasonable and we

should use that approach I believe much

more in dealing with social situations and understanding ourselves so here's an

example of something interesting about

real human beings this was a visit to a different East Coast University Harvard

University which prides itself on being a top place right after graduation about

ten years ago NSF took a camera person

and an interviewer and ran around interviewing the graduating seniors

their parents and some professors and here's what happened

we ask these recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy

consider for example that the cause of the seasons is a topic taught in every

standard curriculum okay I think the seasons happen because as the earth

travels around the Sun it gets nearer to the Sun which produces warmer weather

and gets farther away which produces colder weather and that's and hence the seasons how hot it is or how cold it is

at any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the earth to

the Sun during the seasonal periods the earth goes around the Sun and and it

gets hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder when we get further away from the Sun these

graduates like many of us think of the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated

ellipse even though the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular with distance

producing virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us the strong

incorrect belief that changing distance is responsible for the seasons I took

physics planetary motion and relativity

background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've

gotten very far without having it I had quite a bit of science in high school

yeah through physics want first year in

two years of chemistry regardless of their science education 21 of the 23

randomly selected students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed

misconceptions when asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the

Moon when it's further away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth position

interferes with the reflection of the Sun against the moon

[Music] so does anybody we recognize his Rickett

where his regalia is from Harvard mm-hmm

this guy has probably never been off the quad so now I think that people have

people who are familiar with this know that this can be done randomly almost

anywhere and you get about the same results I kept on waiting for NSF to ask

the next obvious questions but on this video they didn't but a few weeks after

I first saw this video I was giving a talk over at UCLA and found out that my

audience was mostly seniors and a few first-year graduate students so I asked some of them to come out on the lawn

after the talk so I could try these

questions out on them and I got about the same result about 95% had severe

misconceptions on one or both of the seasons and the phases of the Moon but

of course I got to ask the next obvious question so let me ask the audience here

what is the next obvious question about the seasons that you would ask anybody

yeah so I asked them I said when it's winter up here in North America what's

the season down below you know southern part of the earth and every single one

of them said it was the opposite season every single one of them remembered that

but of course they had no idea why [Music]

and then there's this interesting process of about 20 seconds when they

gradually realized that the the opposite

seasons answer completely contradicted there but none of them were able to come

up with that thing that they that fact that they knew when they were answering

the original question and same thing what about with the phases of the Moon

what's the next obvious what what should we ask this professor as the next

obvious question this is a trickier one

so the no good one is to ask them have

you ever seen the Sun and the moon in the sky at the same time have you as the

moon sometimes been in phase so they're

not at opposite ends of the horizon the moon is always in phase and again the

twenty second pause as they realize there is no pseudopod sticking up from

the earth that could be causing that

shadow so so this is an Internet so this

is not a science problem and we should be very happy because the NSF people

actually would not have made this video if the kids had remembered the right

answer because that's all they're asked

to do today but the so this is actually

a thinking problem because in both of these cases the people who have

misconceptions actually had a way of

doing something about their misconception which is they had a counter example for their theory and yet

they couldn't find that counter example there was not in their set of heuristics

for thinking about anything to search for counter examples so it's kind of

interesting and

but it's not unusual in fact it could not be more natural when anthropology

first started studying differences of cultures and they then they started

finding out that cultures underneath the next level underneath the culture had

many many similar characteristics every culture had a language every culture

used stories as a way of thinking and

communicating and remembering and so forth many different things called

cultural universals and then there's

also another collection of things that are not found universally upon cultures

around the world so things like reading and writing that's not built into us in

any direct way it had to be invented agriculture had to be invented the math

and science that we have even the idea of equal rights is not found in

indigenous cultures somebody invented that and boy it's a hard idea to learn

and the discouraging thing perhaps is that the things that are natural to us

don't have any particular correlation with what we call civilization and the

these very very hard to come up with and

hard to learn inventions in various ways of thing no ways of thinking that are

not particularly natural to us are things that we tend to think of as being

part of the process of trying to put together a civilization and per my

opinion is that what's cool is about if we should have school at all is to try

and teach these hard to learn ideas and

in fact human beings are not only easily easy to

fool and shakespeare pointed out but we love it we have stories and theater and

magic and a whole bunch of other

activities that are enormous fun in which we want to be fooled so we go into

situations where we want to suspend our belief in order to have a transcendent

experience of some kind and actually with us today is one of the great

teachers in America today Betty Edwards who wrote the drawing on the right side

of the brain books I didn't see Betty but I'm pretty sure hey there you are

so we learned so much from Betty and one

of the things she does when she teaches drawing is to explain to the class first

thing that the problems that they're having with drawing don't have anything to do with whether they can move their

arms around with a pencil in them the

problems they have with drawing are largely to early perception of the forms

out in the world and not enough attention paid to the actual shapes of

the forms so this is an illusion that she uses in which she tells the class

for example the size and shape of these

two tabletops is exactly the same and

everybody says no that can't be and Betty does this with cardboard but I

have expensive digital cardboard here so

she takes one tabletop here and brings

it over to the other tabletop and rotates it

and puts it on there like that and I've

done this hundreds of times and I still can't see that they're the same size and

shape

and neither can you however you can

satisfy yourself if they are I don't really have time enough to leave it on much longer but the way an artist would

deal with this situation an artist is a person in part who's willing to admit

that they're blind so in it if you think

about it you can't learn to see until you until you admit you're blind and

this applies in science as well so if you admit you're blind you say okay I'm

going to use an instrument and what they do is to measure off the exact

substantial of the angle from the eye to the object and then transfer over to the

other object and they notice oh yeah this is exactly the same length I just

can't see it my brain can't deal with it directly and it turns out the whole

universe is like that so if you want to teach somebody about science a good

start is teaching them to draw because drawing forces the suspension of

perception and the attention to the more

microscopic details in which many many interesting things lurk and another one

that's good that if we have more time I do this works very well with oranges if

you take two quarters and put one twice

as far away as the other you can see by

the diagram here that the farther away

quarter compared to the near quarter should look like that

so those quarters should be tiny but in fact unless you do this very carefully

what you see is that the one that's twice as far away is only about eighty

percent the size and it's fun to actually take the quarters and fix them

in place so you can control them exactly and in fact you still get that illusion

until you exactly close one of the eyes and look very very carefully with the

other eye and you can start see that this one is actually much much

smaller than your brain wants to make out of it and this is called size

constancy and it's one of the problems that plagues artists you know probably

for the last 10,000 years you have to have some way of defeating it so seeing

shouldn't be believing that brings us to what school systems want children to

learn with regard to science and math

and I'm confining the discussion about understanding here just the science and

math for this talk it's a large subject

here's as of last Sunday and for the

previous 10 or 12 years the standard 1 be in the 5th grade science content for

California has this interesting sentence students know all matter is made of

atoms which may combine to form molecules now anybody have a reaction to

that well ok so one question is what do

they mean by know given that atoms are still controversial 100 years ago but

even more the people in the physical sciences here will know quite well that

science today does not think most manner in the universe is made of atoms not

even a majority of the matter in the universe is made of atoms and what's

interesting about this standard is this has been pointed out to the state of California for more than a decade and

they have not changed the standard all I have to do is make a change matter to

elements and get something more like if

in fact the reason they won't change it we found out is because this standard is

taken from a textbook and they don't want to try to go through the process of

changing the textbook the other way of looking at it is that

this standard implies that nothing that is important about science has to be

taught to children in order to succeed in teaching science in California

nothing about what science actually is nothing about how you do it nothing

about the difference in meaning of the word no math is similar so the overlap

of school math with real math is almost non-existent perfect example example is

this the idea of invert and multiply used to be called cross multiply when I

was in school it's taught to children as a principle to be applied not as

something to be understood the children don't have enough algebra and 5th grade

to do the manipulations that will derive and very multiply and thus understand

what it is and where it came from and what they do have algebra in 8th grade

this is not revisited because in simple

the school system absolutely does not care what the children understand the stuff at all the math is taught as

really as an arithmetic or calculation using case based patterns and science is

taught as a new catechism for a secular religion and both of these are both

quite natural because if you think about

how life was 80,000 years ago we didn't

have the grand principles and abstractions and processes people were

trying to find out what would work to keep them alive and so it's quite

natural that the dominant way of dealing

with ideas in our brain is like a cookbook full of recipes and in fact

that is why the children that you saw in

the movie could not retrieve the related facts they are off on a different page

of the cookbook which you could prompt them to get to but in fact they were not related

in any systemic way and of course we

still do this everything is done cookbook style but now we have

additional processes that want to look beyond the simple particulars to try to

find if there are unifying forces and in fact the Greeks were among the first

people on earth to want to reduce the many to the few and so a longer talk

along these lines could pick any or all of these words and talk about how their

meaning has changed over the years the people who invented science I think

we're not worrying about whether reusing old words for with new meanings would

actually cause confusion but in fact I believe that people would have been much

better off if they'd simply made up new words for it instead of using knowledge

or know over again make up a different word for it instead of using theory over again make

up a different word for it that has the modern meaning attached to it

and when I was about 10 or 11 one of my

favorite my hero was irritant ease and

this is an often told story you'll find it in hundreds of different forms on the

internet and in most books on elementary

science about how irritant is who was the librarian of Alexandria at the time

had heard about a well sign here is

where as one is today so about 500 miles south there is a well and on a

particular day of the year the sunlight would go straight down the well and be

reflected back up and on that day Eratosthenes stuck a staff in the ground

or use the Tower of the lighthouse to see that the shadow was

cast and to look at it in slightly more detail here he the angle he measured was

around seven degrees and that is about a

50th of a circle and so multiplying the distance to a swan which is 500 miles by

50 gives you about twenty five thousand miles and they had a pretty accurate

value for pi by then in 240 BC Archimedes was about 48 years old so and

he had done a good value and so they're able to get to the earth was about eight thousand miles in diameter I just love

this story when I was a kid and when I was 14 I encountered it again

and all of a sudden I realized hey wait a minute is that really could that

possibly be so what about this case what

if the earth is flat and the Sun is near and small then of course the Sun will go

straight down the well and of course that will cast my 7° shadow 500 miles

away so why didn't they tell me that in

the story and the answer is it's a story stories do not have to be true in order

to sound good that's the problem in fact they rarely are true and in fact nowhere

on the internet could I find this case

this is taught as here's how are Eratosthenes did it but not revealing

how it was actually done so when I was 14 or so I set off to find well how did

Eratosthenes actually do it him I'm going to show you as quickly as I can

how this actually happened so the two things we need to find out is is the

earth round or flat and is the Sun near

and small or large and far Aristotle who

lived before Eratosthenes had remarked that if you're on land you can see the

sails of a ship before you can see the hull and I think it was a landlubber

because Mariners actually have crow's nest up on the top and they know that

they're the ones who really care about seeing land and if you ever been on a

sailing ship you do not look for land while you're standing on the deck you get up to the highest possible mask and

the reason is is that you get to see further further over the horizon you

have a chance of seeing the island that where you're trying to go

so that was one indication they had that the earth might be round and somewhat

somewhat large more interesting one was

noticed by several people including another hero of mine Aristarchus of

Samos and that is if you look carefully at a lunar ellipse this is where the

Earth's shadow is doing something to the moon you can actually see the curve of

the Earth's shadow indicating Oh something that we are on when you put a

big Sun behind it is casting a circular shadow so the earth is probably round

then the question is where is this where

is the actual Sun and in order to understand that we have to look at

something that most chill is one of the areas where most children check out in

fifth or sixth grade because they're

told that similar triangles have proportional sides but they're never given a reason for it so this is one of

those simple simple elementary things that remains a mystery for most people

one way of looking at this is if you take a triangle and measure it with a

particular ruler here you get 60 180 and

then the thing that Greeks realize one of their greatest inventions was to

realize that the gods don't care what ruler you use they could not care less

and so if you make a different ruler that is gradated the same way you can

measure off the same distances 180 here

and 60 and you have your creating the same triangle and because

you're creating the same triangle the angles have to be the same it is the same triangle this is one of the great

it's amazing to think of being able to

understand this and what you once you get this many many other things can can

help and now we have this interesting idea of because we because we know about

seeing similar triangles we can actually

do something really interesting simple one to do with the child is to first

take a diamond a quarter now we're not trying to see if they're the same size

we're trying to find the distance where the the dime occludes the quarter so we

get something like this and if we measure the distant distance in dimes

it's about seven dime diameters and because this large triangle is similar

to this one the dot the distance to the quarter is seven quarter diameters and

we can do that without having to measure the quarter that's the key because you

can't go out there and measure the moon so somebody in Alexandria

maybe Aristarchus took an Alexandrian

coin here and did this with the moon

it's a way to do this with your kids has put put the thing when the moon can be

seen through a window scotch tape a dime to the window and then back up until the

dime is exactly the including the moon and then measure that distance and

you'll find it's a hundred and ten dimes and what that means is the moon's

distance is a hundred and ten times the

diameter of the moon amazing is to me

because these guys are reaching out to a place that they can't go to so it's a

hundred to ten away and

we have this little idea here let's

measure this a little more carefully so

they would do it by drawing a picture let's make an earth is here that that

looks like it fits pretty well if we measure that carefully it's about two

and a half times the size of the moon that helps right because if we could

just allow Eratosthenes to do his work then we'd know how big the earth is we

know how big the moon as we know how far the moon is way and to give you an idea

of the what we're looking at here is one

of Aristarchus is great ideas so he said

ok the Sun could be near and small and

what I really want to do is look at this Sun as when the moon is actually half

full so I have this relationship the Sun is pointing in this direction and then

if I measure this this is when the moon and the Sun are in the sky at the same time so if I measure this angle here I

will get some sense of where the Sun actually is and so the angle was not

sixteen or eighteen or twenty or 58 or

63 Aristarchus star kiss actually measured 87 so the Sun is way the heck

out there and large how do we know it's

large because the moon occludes it so

the Sun has to be a hundred and ten Sun diameters away and the actual state of

affairs here is this if you measure it accurately today it's eighty nine point

eight degrees way out there much further than Aristarchus thought but getting it

out there is sufficient to go back and say okay let's get rid of that guy now

we get twenty five thousand miles around eight thousand miles in diameter

and because of that we should be able to start thinking about what the actual

size of the moon is now the important thing to realize here is that the Sun is

not infinitely far away it's not infinitely large so the shadows taper

and Aristarchus realize this so this is

out of scale here because member of the moon is a hundred and ten moon diameters away this helps us see and here's a

blown-up picture of it and notice that the parallel lines that are the size of

the earth and the size of the moon here give us an indication that we should be

able to take half of this moon shadow

notice the moon shadow tapers down to nothing that's why it occludes the Sun

so we can the angle of that moon shadow just goes perfectly in there and the

angle of the moon shadow goes perfectly in here and these are complementary

angles and that means this is the same angle as this and that means I can copy

this guy and just flip him over like

this and put them in here okay and I can

copy this guy and flip him over

and put him in here and we can see that

approximately the Earth's shadow tapers one moon diameter to produce its image

on the moon and we should worry a little bit about the four thousand miles of

difference here for where the shadow starts doesn't go all the way out here

but the real state of affairs is this remember the moon is 110 diameters and

so the four thousand miles difference here allows us to say yeah it's just about one moon diameter and just to give

you here if we wait

but what the [Music]

here so this is the earth weight so it's

worthwhile thinking that these scales are bigger than we think and the angles

are much much smaller than we think but that allows us to go back and say okay

we actually have to we have to add one

moon diameter here so let's do this

calculation again here right about like

that and by adding one here we see that the three it's really 3.5 it's about

2200 miles in diameter let's go back to

Aristarchus diagram of the moon earth system put in plug in 2200 here and so

it's about 240,000 miles away this is done without telescopes this is done

just by attitude and change your perspective and constructing a chain of

reasoning from the simplest things you can do with tiny physical objects this

is why the triumph of this way of thinking is so astounding that it can be

done at any time in history it could have been done a hundred thousand years ago but nobody thought to do it okay and

then now the Sun is a hundred and ten Sun

diameters away what does that actually mean and

[Music] hold up and what he's holding up is not

the earth but the orbit of the moon the

earth is about one hundredth the size of the Sun so the earth is actually the

size of a pinhead in the center of that

93 million miles away see pixels are not

enough for getting an idea of these huge

scales you can't really show it on it on a screen okay thank you

just to give you an idea of what we were comparing there is the Sun and the earth

is about this size and this is the orbit of the moon that Ted was holding up there

so we had this interesting thing in history that the Greeks could make

fairly accurate this is actually Eratosthenes map of the world another

thing that he did so in 235 BC or so

they had a pretty good sense of the explorable world in a way that was

actually useful to people 1,500 years

later the maps in the Middle Ages where stories again that essentially showed

the world as it had to be that is the

Garden of Eden is right here in the center and is very very hard on these

maps to see that this is actually Italy here and this is Greece and England is

squeezed out here in the corner and this is Jerusalem here so these are maps that

were made from deduction about what had

to be true according to what the beliefs were a few hundred years later we start

seeing maps looking like your itas Sinise because people were starting to explore the world again and they needed

maps that were not about the way the world had to be they needed maps that

were more like the world actually was it was this change into map making that an

exploration and maybe even the physical dangers involved that got people

thinking again about how to get past our

perceptions and how to get past our stories to understand much more about

what might actually be there this is a nice map of India as it was mapped in

the 19th century by a series of interlocking locking triangles very

similar to the way the Greeks map the Sun Moon and Earth system and then in

our time we're back a little bit in a story world for most people this is

Tolkien's middle-earth and the important

thing to realize that it is not possible to look at any of these maps and know

without other knowledge whether these maps are depictions of reality or

depictions of stories so maps are just stories and whether a map is useful for an

explorer or not depends on the science involved that is the relationship to the

to the real world and in the 18th

century people carried around little globes in their pocket that when they

were having coffee they would take the globes out and they could see what the

world would look like from space two hundred years later we went out there

and took a picture and it looked very very much like what the 18th century

thought so science is like that it's kind of a way in which the maps it makes

are never entirely accurate but the important things about the maps are that

we understand quite a bit more about what what the inaccuracies are about and

so we don't have to completely understand in the biblical sense of

truth and falsity what molecules and atoms are in order to make insulin to

save a 12-year olds life who has infant onset diabetes so the triumph of science

is by giving up old ideas about truth

and falsity it actually finds a way of splitting false into a thousand

varieties of false some of which are incredibly useful and important now just

to give you a glimpse of how this relates to children the probably the

most astounding thing to many adults

particularly when they consider what is actually being done in most schools is

how capable young children are so here's

an example of a very unusual teacher with six year olds and she did these are

after they've been in her classroom for about three or four months and this teacher was an unusual first-grade

teacher in that she had a very very strong feeling for mathematics

she loved math she thought math she was a mathematician and she loved first

graders and kindergartners so the idea here is pick a shape that you like and

make the next larger shape just out of those shapes and make the next larger

shape and make the next larger shape you can see trapezoids are somewhat

challenging you have to twist them around so the kids all do this

independently then one of the things this teacher did is kind of interesting

is to treat mathematics in this grade as

a an empirical science so the kids are making artifacts they make the artifacts

and then they look to see what they did so and they do this by not using the

tiles directly but making a representation of what they did so here's the diamonds made out of

cardboard now then they look to see what is actually happening in the process

when they did this and here's six-year-old Lauren said okay the first

one took one tile and they're a total number of one next one took three more

tiles and there were total number of four the next one took five more tiles in there a total number of nine seven

sixteen and up to about 25 or maybe 36

the child could see that well these are all the odd numbers so I'm just adding

two to get from here and these are the

square numbers probably not sure about seven times seven at this age but these

are the square numbers and the progression here is incremental we build

on the thing that we had before and then

the teacher had all the children bring their projects up to the front of the

class and put them on the floor and

everybody went or at least I did holy

shit

because they suddenly realized that the

shapes were different but the growth law was exactly the same every child had

made a table like this and they realized that what they had discovered was a way

of making things larger out of things in a progressive way and the materials that

you used were used in a very very simple way this whole thing can be generated

simply by taking the number that's here adding 2 to it get that and then add

these 2 to get this 1 add 2 to it and so forth just keep on adding your way down and

the scientists and mathematicians in the crowd will recognize this as a first

order discrete differential equation and they'll recognize this as a second order

discrete and the people who likes physical science here will realize that

an enormous amount of physical science is just handled by this kind of math and

you don't this is a form of calculus that doesn't involve continuous

functions and it's a form that children can actually deal with so what does this

mean so an example of what children do

is to essentially make toys things that

they like to do on the computer and they

play with these toys they can make these toys do things and so for example they

will draw a little car here

just do this quickly put some wheels on

it

and so far it's just a picture but this picture can have properties for instance

it has a let's call it car here so one

of the properties here is where is it pointing it's pointing to North now but

if I change this number over here you can see it counting up and the car is turning if I turn the number here the

those numbers will change here's a behavior go forward

here's another behavior turn if I want to combine those I can write a little

compound expression here that combines these guys and click on the clock and

get it going and to see what it's doing

I can actually drop a pin down because

these are logo turtles in disguise and

so we see it's actually drawing a circle

here and in fact I can change this so if

I change the angle of turn here to make it something like three kids always

wonder is this going to spiral but in fact if you think about if the numbers

stay constant then it will have constant curvature and circles are all of the

things that have constant curvature so you're always going to get circles okay

another interesting idea is how can I

make my car go down the middle of the road here's a script done by these two

kids the idea is that I'm going to ask whether this blue guy sees the road if

so I'm going to go forward if I see one curb I'm going to turn in if I see the

other curb the yellow color I'm going to turn out and so you get something like

this notice this can deal with very sharp curves because it does not go forward

until it makes a turn so they made a little robot car using the principle of

feedback which is found both in human technology and in nature so this is the

kind of math that these kids do I'm gonna need some sound here

here's Jenny who had an artistic temperament but it was also a terrific

mathematician it looks like it's a rough

time today the pink thing crashing into the wall I'll watch her tell me what

speed they're going oh and the blue pigs coming in the lead

I have my own head I named it Jackson

and is catching up so one of the neat

things she did was you know how do you keep the pigs in the lane well you saw

previously kind of how they did in she and she thought oh I can use the

nostrils the colors of the nostrils on my pigs to sense whether I'm going to go

out of the lane or not and turn back in so that's how so that was that was fun

for them to do and then the idea is to think about well what is it that we just did so we look at this where the cars

speed is always going to be 30 and we're going to increase our horizontal

position by whatever the car speed is we let it go we get something that looks

like this with dropping little dots and

we can see these dots are evenly spaced or 30 apart and that's a way of thinking

about what velocity means looked at in the history another thing I could do is

to for example put a random tile in

there I'll generate some random numbers maybe from 0 to 40 and see what that

looks like and of course this is more

fun for races because not clear how

these are going to generate out and so you get some uncertainty in what's

actually going on and another thing I

could do here is to try increasing the

cars speed by something let's suppose I increase the cars speed by 15 so each

time now the cars speed is going to count up by 15 and I'm going to go that distance and we set that off we get a

pattern that looks like this takes off

really fast so this is a pattern that we associate with the acceleration and the

children learn their ideas about velocity and acceleration by playing

with the computer and then the question is what do these

things mean in the out in the outside world so I want to finish by just

showing you a science experiment done by fifth graders and this is about the

400th anniversary of this Galileo did this about 400 years ago and the objects

that you think will fall to the earth at the same stopwatches

the softball just really don't work when did he let it go we didn't actually get

okay I think we should do the shot and

the sub balls because they're two totally different weights and if you

drop them at the same time but maybe they'll drop at the same speed drop

yeah so we found that in every class of about 30 children there'll be one

Galileo child it's an interesting ratio

so the the estimate of scientific

literacy in the United States not just counting scientists but people are scientific literate is about five

percent so that says you should find one Galileo child in each class of about

thirty and so she just cut to the chase realizing hey forget about measuring it

we're interested in the result that we

can listen for the result just as Galileo did but if you want to look at

it closer today we have inexpensive handheld video cameras and so we can

actually take a video of what actually

happened and we see right away that even

single stepping and it's kind of hard to see what's going on but we can extract

the frames from the film this is every fifth frame from the video and we can

even stack them up and as soon the kids see this what do you think they say

acceleration what kind of acceleration well let's measure so one of the ways of

measuring is taking the these translucent rectangles and adjusting the

height of the rectangle so they're measuring from the bottom of one ball to

the bottom of the next ball so this is kind of what they do it's hard hard to

do it really accurately when I'm giving a talk but and this is kind of what they

do then you have this nice thing where

you don't have to do arithmetic you can do it geometrically by just stacking up

these guys and just a little thought

says okay each one of the heights of these things is the velocity and that time interval and what I'm seeing here

is the difference between one time interval to the next that difference looks equal and remember what the first

graders did difference there was two here the difference is minus four point

seven so you make a simulated ball do the same program

we had with the car just a few months ago there but how do we know that we

actually are looking at nature so let's

take a look at what Tyrone did here and to make sure that I was doing it just

right I got a magnifier which would help me

figure out if the size was just right after I'd done that I would go click on

the little basic category buddy and then a little mini would pop up and one of

the categories would be geometry so I click on that and here it has many

things they have to do with the size and shape of the rectangle so I would see

what the Heidi and I kept going along the process until I had them all lined

up with their height i subtracted the smaller one from the big one to see if there was a kind of

pattern anywhere there could help me and my dentists weren't so in order to show

that it was working I decided to leave a dot copy so that it would show if the

ball was going at the exact right speed acceleration is that cool so anybody who

doesn't have tears in their eyes right now you don't understand what's going on

because 70% of college students fail to

understand this particular set of ideas part of it is because the math that

they're portrayed in in college and in high school is a not the best form of

math for thinking this way this is a better way of thinking about it but part

part of it is because this is not an easy thing to do and yet the 5th graders

because they have a much more appropriate form of math in which to

think have plenty of brain power to do this Lily McDermott here is a physicist at

the University of Washington who has studied high schoolers and college

students for more than 25 years and their difficulties in learning these

idea these new ways of thinking about the world that were invented just a few hundred

years ago so when we think about

education in the 21st century we have to

pay heed to two important things one is

that it's not just the way it was eighty thousand years ago and trying to teach

things as they were taught a thousand

years ago or five hundred years ago may not be appropriate if we want children

to understand them we have to heed the fact that children's minds are set up

differently than adults but they're no less able than adults they just think

differently so we have to find the frameworks that the children can think

in and the children in fact can learn a form of calculus that allows these ways

of thinking about them Newtonian dynamics of various kinds to be dealt

with in a way that most college students can't today the key to this is that the

computer is happy to add up millions and

millions of little quantities and so must much of the thinking here in this

different form of calculus can be done looking directly at the differential

equations in their discrete form and simply thinking of what's going on as

incremental addition which in fact seems to be the way the real world handles

most of these things this changes tremendously the kinds of things that we

can hope to do with children and it also opens the door for thinking that

children might grow up to think in a very very different set of ways in

addition to the normal ways that their brain is bringing about so maybe the

next time you think about technology think about it perhaps not as just all

the practical things that can do for you but think about technology as a kind of an amplifier that when used properly

these amplifiers make us much much

smarter than we seem to be and in fact the the difference between the kinds of

things we can do and the kinds of things that were done 20,000 years ago is not

in a change in IQ as far as anybody can tell it's actually in a change of

perspective and a change of point of view that allows us to think in a new

way thank you very much

okay [Music] [Applause]

in this Kyoto marathon that our awardees

are entered in the next event that Alan has is a lecture at the Rotary Club

downtown at noon so we are limited to just a couple of minutes for questions

graph the house lights up please thank you a couple of minutes for

questions do we have some yes

of course that's always the interesting question

and ever since Montessori a lot has been known about how to deal with children

differently and to get tremendous changes compared to ordinary schooling

and the the plea I usually make at the

end of a talk and I certainly will at the rotary thing is that in in many ways

the the prime need is to help the

helpers so we have many people who have dedicated their lives to helping

children but because they are embedded

in the same system that doesn't teach this stuff most of the people that are

helping the children are not invested in

these other ways of thinking and so you get this rather long drawn-out seemingly

conservative approach so the idea has

changed much faster than the system's ability to take them up

but there are a couple of approaches to the one of the most important things

something that we have tried a couple of times haven't quite found the right

place is that just like you need to

start earlier with the children why not start earlier with the teachers if you

want to find a busy person look at a teacher in a classroom then ask yourself

how they're going to learn something that is even more foreign than a foreign language while they're doing all this

other stuff so maybe a better place to do it is to at least go to the teachers

colleges maybe a school district could give preferential hiring to the teachers

in the teacher College who have been willing to go through a special program

to learn this stuff but again the the

the printing revolution in many ways

certainly was a big factor in the Reformation certainly was a big factor

in the sixteenth century but the full power of what the printing press

catalyzed is seen in the 17th century now is about 150 years

after the technology was actually introduced into Europe so the this is

not unusual for these long legs as soon as you can get a larger

percentage of children who understand the stuff some of them will become

teachers and immediately starts working so one way of short-circuiting the

process is do peer teaching fifth

graders and seventh graders love to help second graders this has been studied

quite a bit why not do much more of that why not do more things over the internet

why not do more things in after-school programs where you don't have to worry

about state legislators and random ideas

about education and so forth there's a lot of things that need to be done and basically the parents and the concerned

citizens of a community can make the change in spite of the difficulties in

the state and the nation about this stuff someplace just has to make a stand

and the idea would be to pick a place that's large enough to have for instance

like here that has a major source of

teachers who most of which wind up in the school system here that is a recipe

for success so that's one set of ideas

but the other way of looking at is I've been doing this for more than 35 years

and it is not easy for instance even convincing the National Council of

teachers of mathematics that this is mathematics because unfortunately the

NCTM is not full of mathematicians it's full of math teachers which is

absolutely not the same thing yes

there's a fella named John Bradshaw you don't have folks that programs it was

big in the late eighties young grad probability he talks about the

dysfunctionality to someone else with a dry Martin back

[Music] about the white country

chuckling the laggy credits to keep out the events where they eat it and of

course no doubt and as we discussed in college what the wagons except jargon the

mathematics for physics on premises where faculty and literally opera states

any understanding of outside I couldn't

really more in for instance the you know

just a good one of many candidates to bypass is trick because what's important

about trick can be done just by thinking about triangles and you really don't

need all of the jargon of trig when you're doing the formation any other

questions no more okay thank you

[Applause]

thank you for sharing your insights with us Alan I would like to express our

universities thanks to the Inamori foundation to Inamori sensei for their

continued support of San Diego State University and for the San Diego and to

the San Diego community to the representatives of University of San

Diego UCSD and our representatives from

our sister institutions in Mexico and finally thanks to the members of the

Curia the Kyoto laureates symposium planning committee the San Diego State

University planning committee Kaneko Bishop and all the volunteers

have provided their expertise and support there our SDSU volunteers

waiting outside the lecture theatre to escort you back to your cars if you came

in one thank you very much for joining us this morning [Applause]

[Music]