Ok, it's a pleasure to be back at Lindau yet again and talk to you.
It's a great place and I enjoy coming.
It's going to be science lost in translation.
But first is: How did I get here?
In fact, I was once as young and many of us were as young as some of you are, originally.
And I thought I'd show you what happened at school because that's the start of it.
Really I didn't want to be a scientist.
What I really wanted to be was Superman.
And as all scientists know you need evidence and here is the evidence for this.
Flying was difficult so I did other things like play tennis and gymnastics.
And I acted in a play, Henry V, at school and I thought I'd show you these 2 guys.
I'm the handsome guy on the right here just in case you didn't know.
And I tell young people like you: You know, don't become an actor because the guy in front, actually be a scientist, not an actor because he is now 5,000 years old and I'm a lot younger than he is.
Alright, Ian and I were in the same year at school.
Fantastic actor and he came out to stay with us at Tallahassee a couple of year ago.
So those are the sorts of things and also perhaps more important than science for me is art and graphics.
And I did a lot of drawing and at university did posters and things of this nature, designed the cover of the university magazine.
I think it's very important to actually open up those facets of your creative ability.
And in fact my first award was not for science, it was for this design and it got into a national newspaper and I used to look like this.
Now, I'm old and decrepit now and you're going to look, you're beautiful and young now and you'll look like me one day so I get my own back.
So, painting and doing these...
I'm not quite sure what that is so I'll gloss over that.
Basically those are the sorts of things and this is Margaret, my wife, who is in the audience.
And I now do logos and this is my favourite for the Australians here.
Yeah, hopefully you'll be better at soccer than the English, rather than cricket, as we know.
And I always like ideas.
And in fact I designed this Darwin T-shirt and Prishant where are you, are you anywhere around, there you go, there's my T-shirt actually.
It's a secret society, you see, it's Darwin's phylogenetic tree.
Ok, it's my former co-worker.
This is my latest bumper sticker, which I think very importantly.
And, oh, I redesigned the Japanese flag, so hopefully that's good.
The other thing, in the '60s you had to play a guitar or you wouldn't get to parties, so I had to do that as well.
But I think more than anything else what made me a chemist was photography.
And I thought I'd show you what it was like to take a photograph.
I think Doug Osheroff knows something about that of course because he has the biggest camera on the campus.
So you really had to have an incentive to do that.
And I did have one and she's in the audience over there.
But today all you need to do is that, ok.
And you've lost so much.
And it epitomises technology that is so inscrutable and that today it's so hard to know what's going on.
I also had Meccano and in fact I thought I'd show you an advert from those days.
It was basically this one: Meccano boys, and of course today you've got to add the girls in there, are keen, ambitious, inventive.
No boy or girl who follows the Meccano hobby can be a bad boy or bad girl.
But here it is, we used our hands and made things.
And this epitomises what science is.
It's not about running around and enjoying things; it's being totally absorbed in things.
And I used to make things with nuts and bolts and now it's with electrons and atoms.
So basically there's not a lot of difference.
And with my youngest son who is a cartoonist we just produced a book in Japan for children.
The other thing that was important for me was architecture.
I was fascinated by this.
In some ways I think I might have ended up one.
And I drew this drawing of the town hall in Stockholm where the Nobel Prize is awarded long before I knew what the Nobel Prize was
because I was fascinated by the building and by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright's image.
There is some interesting architecture at Sussex where I was for 37 years and I played around with these things.
But the architecture that was most important really was this, Buckminster Fuller's dome which was at expo which we visited.
And it was rather crucial in deciding what the structure of C60 was.
So there it is.
You'd never know when your other ideas might be important.
And I think that's an issue I think today.
Ok, so now let's go to basically science lost in translation.
And I'm dedicating this to Giordano Bruno.
How many of you know about Giordano Bruno?
If you don't, find out because he's...
I'm not a big man for saints but if there is a saint this is the saint of science.
Basically I'm not here to make you feel comfortable.
I'm here to make you think.
And in fact the issue, when I give this lecture I usually quote this one from Don Marquis: "If you make people think, they're thinking they love you.
But if you really make them think they hate you."
Now, it may be the case that you will hate me at the end of this lecture.
But at least I'll have made you think.
So there you go.
I want to start with one of my all time favourite people.
It's the Australian scientist John Cornforth who has been deaf since the age of 18.
And he wrote a fantastic article which you must all read, its "Scientists are Citizens".
It's on my Vega website.
"It may seem odd that a system of knowledge based on doubt could have been the driving force in constructing modern civilisation.
Scientists do not believe, they check.
I'm not asking you to believe anything I say on the scientific matter and I would say on any matter.
Only that there is tested evidence for all of it.
I know the nature of that evidence and I can make a judgement of its worth."
It's a powerful statement.
In the interesting book by Richard Feynman in "The Meaning of it All", I love this book very much, he says:
"The freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and I believe in other fields, it was born out of a struggle, it was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure.
And I do not want to forget the importance of that struggle and by default let it fall away.
If you know that you are unsure you have a chance to change the situation." And I love this line:
"I want to demand this freedom for future generations."
That's for you.
"This is important, because I think it's under threat." Well, what do I think?
There are 3 senses.
Common sense, common sense is interesting because it tells us that the sun goes around the earth.
Who agrees with me?
I should bloody well hope so.
It starts over here and ends over there.
Common sense tells us the sun goes around the earth.
How many agree with me now, yes.
It's uncommon sense which tells us that the earth is turning on its axis and makes it seem like that.
It's the uncommon sense and bravery of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno.
And if you want watch on the internet and you can see Giordano Bruno's film by Carlo Ponte.
You will never forget it because these people fought for you to have the freedom to doubt.
Now, most people have accepted the claim that the earth goes around the sun.
How many accept that?
Almost all of you.
Ok, who knows the evidence?
Not too many, more than usual because there are a few physicists around.
Not many of them know the evidence either.
But what else, and this is the important thing, what else have you accepted without knowing the evidence?
Ok, many people, in fact probably the majority, maybe 90, 95% of people accept claims for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
Think about it.
The Royal Society has a crest, "Nullius in verba", which means:
Take nobody's word for it, don't take my word for it or my colleagues, just because they're Nobel Prize winners.
Listen to what they say but assess it; think of it as a scientist.
The problem is that nonsense is common now.
And I'm going to give you one beautiful example of creativity at the Kentucky Fried Creation Museum in Cincinnati.
$27 million, little children are going in bus loads into this and other groups as well.
Did humans live with dinosaurs?
"God made Adam and Eve on the same day as land animals so dinosaurs and people lived at the same time."
Well, if they did, we obviously put saddles on them and must have ridden them, ok.
What did they originally eat?
"Before Adam sinned, all animals - including dinosaurs - were vegetarian."
You don't need those teeth to eat a lettuce.
What happened to the dinosaurs that didn't go in Noah's Ark?
"The dinosaurs that didn't enter Noah's Ark were drowned in the flood 4,350 years ago and many were buried and preserved as fossils."
I have met teachers in Florida, science teachers, who claim this.
Think about it.
There's Noah's Ark and Noah is there and he's Scottish.
Any Scots around?
You didn't know that, he's got a Scottish accent.
There's a big flood coming and we've got to build a big boat.
So that's the problem.
In my lifetime we've discovered something beautiful and fantastic.
99% of my genes are the same as this guy.
And look at the humanity in the face of it.
It's obviously an Italian football supporter last week.
Mind you it was an English football supporter the week before.
But there you go.
70% the same as this guy and 50% the genes of a fruit fly and the maggots as well.
And this I love; 70% of our genes the same as a pumpkin.
And you only have to look at the average politician to actually see the evidence for that.
There's more evidence for evolution than any other truth we have discovered.
And the attack on evolution is not just an attack on Darwin.
It's an attack on the whole of the sciences because the evidence comes from all of these places.
And we've got to fight it and shove it down the throats of some very stupid people, including some people who want to be president of the United States.
No one has described science better than the great American writer Walt Whitman.
"I like the scientific spirit, the holding off, the being sure, but not too sure."
That's the great writer, the great line, the double take.
The willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against him.
This is ultimately fine.
It keeps the way beyond open.
Whitman has drawn an important...
Attention, something very important here.
"Science is open and moves on inexorably.
All the constructs, all of them, are locked forever, maybe 1,000's of years, in unshakable dogmatic opinion, intrinsically impervious to rational criticism.
You haven't got any way of attacking it.
Even some sciences who should know better do not appreciate this.
That is obvious in what they write.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
You may be surprised who said it.
It was Kennedy; it's a great line.
"The comfort of opinion, without the discomfort of thought."
Look around.
Well what about Feynman again, the greatest communicator that I've ever seen.
If you're interested in the ultimate character of the physical world, the complete world, and at the present time our only way to understand that is through a mathematical type of reasoning,
then I don't think a person can fully appreciate or in fact can appreciate much of these particular aspects of the world,
the great depth and character of the universality of the laws, the relationships of things, without an understanding of mathematics.
I think it's just...
I don't know any other way to do it.
We don't know any other way to describe it accurately and well or to see the interrelationships without it.
So I don't think a person who hasn't developed some mathematical sense is capable of fully appreciating this aspect of the world.
Don't misunderstand me, there are many, many aspects of the world that mathematics is unnecessary for such as love.
And which are very delightful and wonderful to appreciate and to feel awed and mysterious about.
And I don't mean to say that the only thing in the world is physics but you were talking about physics
and if that's what you're talking about then to not know mathematics is a severe limitation in understanding the world.
That's from a fantastic film made by a friend of mine, Chris Sykes.
If you get a chance to see it, watch it, amazing piece of sort of science but television.
Well, let's go and think about mathematics.
It certainly goes back to the Indians.
But also Al-Karismi in about the 8th century, 7th or 8th century, wrote this book.
And he formulated the rules of algebra but they were in words, ok.
It was all in prose, no equations, ok.
Diophantus in the second century certainly had equations and here are some...
the way in which it was written and you can disentangle that.
So it goes back a long time.
But the first book in English was written by Robert Recorde.
And it's very interesting because in this book, the first book, he invented the equal sign.
And in fact in this book it tells you how to do subtraction.
So, that was about 1550.
So it goes certainly to do that.
Now there are some people who actually appreciate mathematics and I thought...
And here we have them.
And in fact there's something missing there.
That is wonderful because here we see young people who are prepared to see something beautiful in science and mathematics itself.
I'll gloss over that.
That was LSD just in case you want to synthesise it.
But look at this, Nicole a physics graduate student, she says:
"My tattoo is Taylor expansion of sine.
I consider it the most beautiful thing I have ever learned."
Look at, listen to that.
And believe it or not.
2 years ago we were in the Inselhalle in the garden and that, my favourite tattoo, walked past and Nicole from Stanford was actually here 2 years ago.
And I was actually able to get the full, well not the full because it goes on to infinity, it would have been tricky to, to photograph the whole of it.
But anyway here is Nicole, wonderful student who was here at Lindau in 2010.
Ok, so now let's think about science and how old is it?
It's not actually very old.
Abaelard in the 12th century said basically:
"By doubting we come to enquire and by enquiry we arrive at the truth."
And this is a very profound statement, really about science.
Of course doubt and questioning are intrinsic dangers to those who believe in dogma and use that for their authority.
And Abaelard is somebody who got into hot water and more.
Francis Bacon in this book, which was interestingly titled "Novum Oganum", new instrument, actually laid down the foundations of scientific method basically.
Determining what is intrinsically true, if that's important to you, it's not important to everybody, certainly not some people who shall be nameless.
Observation, hypothesis, supporting evidence and physical law.
If we invert Abaelard's statement, we arrive at the most profound axiom of all time: To determine truth we must doubt and enquire, we must not accept.
This has explosive consequences.
The new instrument intrinsically undermines the assumptions and claims that it had been held sway heretofore for 1,000 years, that fundamental truth was to be found in the Holy Scriptures.
Those who followed this axiom found themselves in conflict with dogma based authority and many were executed, Giordano Bruno for one.
And that's why I need to dedicate this to him.
We owe it to him for the freedoms that we have today to question and doubt.
And if you look around, the one place, the one place or those places where basically natural philosophy has really undermined dogma, there you have democracy and science.
That's an interesting observation.
But who was the first physicist?
Well here's another quotation, I love them very much and this one particularly:
"I seek not the answer but to understand the question", what is physics'.
Anyway I love this quotation very much that I decided to go to Google to find out who actually said it.
And when I got there and put it in I actually discovered it was me.
But if you change it slightly to "know the answers", then you discover it's Kung Fu.
Great, alright there we go.
So probably Confucianism and Taoism.
So it is a question of what physics is.
However, what we need to know is who wrote the first equation of physics.
Well let's look at the simplest, Hooke's law, lectures on spring, Hooke's wrote, that is in words:
"The power of any spring is in the same proportion with the tension thereof.
That is if one power stretch it or bend it one space, 2 will bend it 2 and so forth.
Now the theory is very short so the way of trying is very easy."
So, basically it tells this and basically if you put something else on there, we put that on there and it goes down, ok.
Hooke's law, no equations; who did that?
That's an interesting point.
Christiaan Huygens is supposed to have done it but I haven't actually found it.
He knew something about momentum transfer but I still have to confirm that he wrote the first equations.
Science started with this guy, ok.
And I'm willing to argue it.
This is fantastic equipment and just look at the exquisite beauty of this engraving.
He used that to measure the orbits of the planets.
But it was Kepler who got hold of those data and in this book...
He actually had to develop his own logarithms to do the calculations.
He showed that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse with the sun at one focus.
That was the moment at which science began.
And that is in the Rudolphine Tables.
Newton came along and explained it.
A key guy that I never heard of is Willem 's Gravesande, in this book he writes (reading in French):
Mr Leibnitz was the first to suggest that the force (kinetic energy) of the moving body is not proportional to the velocity, according to ordinary view, but to the square;
so if the velocity is doubled the force (kinetic energy) is quadrupled.
Typical Englishman trying to speak French, but there you go.
But it was Leibniz who showed that kinetic energy is 1/2 mV^2 and Willem 's Gravesande showed that by dropping balls into soft clay.
That was a major point.
And it was Émilie du Châtelet who corrected Newton on kinetic energy because he thought it was momentum.
Calculus was required as you know and basically what you need to do is to be able to integrate that.
And I don't think you can do that in words and what you get then is the beautiful parabolic curve of the harmonic oscillator.
Those are required for the sciences.
And in fact that's important.
Now we move on to an important guy, Einstein.
And Einstein as you know developed the theory of relativity.
And this was attacked by quite a number of people including Cardinal O'Connell who said:
"The theory cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism and befogged speculation producing universal doubt about god and his creation."
A New York rabbi decided to write a telegram and said do you believe in god, Albert?
"I believe in Spinoza's god who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a god who concerns himself with faiths and actions of human beings."
That's an interesting statement.
So who is this Spinoza guy?
He lived in Amsterdam.
He outlined in precise detail his philosophical views backing them with logical argument which he claimed were irrefutable.
The synagogue authorities decided they had no alternative; they had to get rid of him, ok.
A great horn was blown, candles were extinguished one by one.
A curse was read out:
"With the judgment of angels and saints we hereby excommunicate, execrate, anathematise, Baruch de Espinoza.
And cursed be he by day.
And cursed be he by night.
And cursed when he's lying down and when he's rising up and going out and basically coming back in again."
"The lord shall destroy his name under the sun and cut him all for his undoing from the tribes of Israel.
None may speak with him with word of mouth nor by writing now show any favour to him.
Nor be under one roof, nor come within 4 cubits of him, nor read any document by him."
Well you've got to read this guy, right?
With that sort of recommendation.
But unfortunately it's in Latin, ok.
But this is Strathern's book:
"A universal god who can be properly apprehended only by the application of reason to the world around us.
This suggests that Spinoza's religion of disenchantment could in fact be a pressing description of modern science.
A pantheistic universe whose truth we can comprehend only by the use of reason, mathematics and rational experiment."
That's what we're doing here.
I don't have the Higgs boson under there, but maybe we will do one day.
The orderly harmony of what exists.
Let's take the numbers 1, 3 and 5 and look at chemistry because I'm a chemist.
I know I'm an interloper amongst all you physicists but there you go.
The earth orbits the sun; we use classical mechanics.
For an electron orbiting a nucleus we use quantum mechanics.
But according to quantum mechanics the orientations of a spinning object only have certain orientations, ok?
Not all are allowed.
And the quantum number j has the values 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.
And the orientations are termed by a very simple formula 2j+1.Therefore when j=0, 2j+1=1.
When j=1, 2j+1=3 and when j=2, 2j+1=5, ok?
Hence 1, 3 and 5.
Now then I'm going to double that, double that set and double that set, move this to there and that to there.
Double that set, double that set, double that and move this to there and that to there.
And what have we got?
It explains the whole of chemistry, all of life and all the useful bits of physics if any.
Ok, we chemists have to get back at the great champions of the sciences.
Of course physics is the overall arching of the sciences.
But chemistry is that massive part of physics that pertains to you, the everyday world, to biology and all these things.
And it's based on the numbers 1, 3 and 5.
That is science, something so elegant and beautiful.
And the value to the human race is also important.
I want to show you what it was like to have an amputation without an anaesthetic.
No IPhones to measure these things; just have a good look at it.
Ah yeah, that was what it was like.
People died in shock.
There can be no more humanitarian contribution to the human race than anaesthetics from chemistry ok.
Penicillin, this simple molecule is really a miracle, you don't have to pray.
This little girl in 1942 was cured in 3 weeks.
She would have died a year earlier.
And one of the heroes is this person who is almost unknown.
The future bacteria are evolving with an immunity to antibiotics.
Think about it, we need you brilliant young people to solve the problems of the future.
And there's misplaced credit for these things.
This is a very interesting story of a man in Tallahassee where we live 9 months a year.
Alan Cross has spent 24 years in a Florida jail for a crime he did not commit, ok.
He got out; he said:
"It's been a long time coming, I thank god for this day."
His faith kept him going.
Incredible guy, but science got him out.
And who was the person?
Alec Jeffrey's from Leicester University developed DNA fingerprinting.
Science is a humanitarian construct.
And what is it?
Well, we've talked a little bit about it and I'm going to come to my analysis of it.
There are aspects of science.
One is it's a body of knowledge, another one is the application of that knowledge; it's technology.
Another one, very important, is that way that scientific knowledge is actually uncovered.
But there's something much more important.
And really because science is so useful, people have forgotten what that is.
They don't understand what it is.
Basically politicians have no idea; they think that you only do science because it's useful.
Before science was useful it had another name and it was called natural philosophy.
And by far the most important aspect is that natural philosophy is the only philosophical construct we have devised to determine truth with any degree of reliability.
Now I'm going to define it, I'm going to say: We have a construct.
That construct is the construct that determines truth with any degree of reliability and that I'm going to define as natural philosophy.
And the ethical purpose of education must involve the teaching of young people how they can decide what they're being told is actually true.
I'm sure we must agree on that.
If we don't, we've got problems.
Thus the teaching of a sceptical, evidence based assessment of all claims without exception is an intellectual integrity issue that all teachers must address.
Without evidence anything goes.
Think about it, look around and see that that's the fact.
Let me go back to this fantastic article by "Kappa" (John W. Cornforth), great Australian guy and close friend.
Australians you want to be proud of this guy, he's such a great man.
In this article "Scientists as Citizens" he says:
"The discipline of science generates a special relationship with truth.
There is what I call public truth, the obligation to record what you have done as accurately as you can,
never fabricating, never distorting and never suppressing findings unfavourable to your conclusions.
Private truth is even more important.
As a scientist interacting with your experiments, you receive an education in the implacability of truth.
And your own capacity to be deceived by your expectations, your hopes or just your stupidity that is unlike any other experience I know.
I know scientists who are able to go through this and just overlook these things.
They should know better."
I won't go on, there's a lot more there.
You can see it on our website.
Now my view is that knowledge cannot guarantee good decisions but common sense suggests that wisdom is an unlikely consequence of ignorance.
And why...
what do we need?
Well, we really need education.
We can teach young children at the age of 6, 7 and 8 algebra.
And I do that with young children all over the world.
Ok, in Japan, Santa Barbara, Mexico, Malaysia, by internet to Iceland, across the whole of Australia.
And when I show this sometimes in England there are screams of young woman in the background.
But it's not me, it's the bloke on the left that they're sort of...
he was at Manchester United.
Oh, I love this guy; he's the only guy who has found a use for C60 molecule.
But this is my favourite image which shows that science can bring people together from totally different races and that's important.
In fact the best reason for being a scientist, that it's the only truly international family.
And the reason is we're not personal; it's the universe that is our task master.
And here you see the group with my 2 colleagues who aren't here, our group in the UK.
And here's another group and you see the internationality of the group in Florida State.
Prishan is in the audience here from India or was there.
Actually Paul Dirac never comes in at all, never mind.
But he was, I mean I don't know, I just would like him to come because we do have some problems that he might be able to solve.
So, I set up the Vega Science Trust many years ago to make programs for television and we got Max Perutz, we got fantastic programs by Feynman which were given to us from Auckland.
And we had pioneered a new concept in TV debate and that's that participants should actually know something.
They're on that website.
However, something has happened.
Something fantastic has happened.
How many of you have looked at an encyclopaedia?
This week?
Yes that's what we were faced.
But you have a revolution.
I call it basically the "Goo You Wiki World".
And it's a fantastic revolution ok.
If you want an image, you used to have to go to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
That was not too imaginative but if you go to the Google image browser and put all those in,
what you will get are pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and you will even get rotating buckeyballs.
Now, that's very difficult to get in Encyclopaedia Britannia.
It's a triple revolution, a fantastic revolution, a paradigm shift in seeking, finding, accessing information in seconds.
You can create your own material, you can be creative, you can add to that knowledge.
And Wikipedia I think is one of the greatest things ever invented.
Half a million people contributing their knowledge, their passion, what they're interested in for you, altruistically and anonymously.
We're creating something a little bit associated, a global cash of your own links, and you can help.
It's GYWW 2.0; I call it GEOSET, Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology.
We use a capture station.
We're using the technology that's going on here.
You've got to see it is exactly the same thing; we're doing it as well.
But we're enabling you to do it, not just bloody Nobel laureates, you can do it yourself.
And we can show you how to do it.
And we're doing that with our students.
It's the future of broadcasting basically.
John Cornforth who is an Australian, he hated Murdock and he sent him a question, he says:
"Did you lose..."
John hated him 15 years ago; he's an Australian.
He was ashamed that Murdoch was an Australian.
And he said: "Did you lose your respect for the truth gradually or did you never have it?"
That was Rupert Murdoch, 15 years ago.
I'm going to show you what our students are doing.
I've got to show you this because they're just fantastic.
Hi, my name is Kerry Gilmore and I am a graduate student here at Florida State University.
I work for Doctor L. Coogan as an organic chemist.
Now, I love organic chemistry because it provides you the opportunity to go through and be an architect, an engineer, builder, because you can go through and you can really look at designing...
I'm going to have to cut it off because there are just a few things I want to say.
But our students are doing fantastic work.
Just google GEOSET, you'll see something on wolves and secret agents and if you want to know what I'm doing here, you'll find it.
We've revolutionised the résumé, ok.
Basically we've put you on top of the pile.
If you want a job, you can get it by working in this way.
Assessment, basically instead of that I can do this and I can assess you drinking a glass of wine, ok.
Hall of fame, our students are getting jobs and scholarships.
Fully a Fulbright, we got a rich media award.
Prishan, 4 tenure-track offers, got into medical school, got a job, got a scholarship, got into vet school, got a Gold Water Scholarship, got a job at NHK.
This is the important one, Sino in Japan, a postdoc sent her presentation to India and she got a job at the Mahatma Gandhi University.
So these are the people that are associated and someone who knows where we are is my wife Margaret over here.
I don't have time for this.
I've got 2 other things I want to say.
The first is about attitude.
Basically they tell you that you should enjoy things, it's not quite the same as that.
Basically just do things, give it your best shot.
Don't do anything second rate.
Just don't do it if it's second rate.
If second rate doesn't satisfy you, don't do it.
Only be satisfied yourself, not the teacher or something else, not whoever you're working for, if you do that you'll really do well.
My favourite poster I want to show you this.
Basically I'm an alien creature.
I was sent from another planet with a message of goodwill from my people.
The message says:
"Dear earth people, when you finally at least destroy your planet you can come and live with us and we will teach you how to live in peace and harmony.
And we will give you a coupon for 10% off all deep dish pizzas too.
Sincerely, Bob."
3 things, destruction of the planet, we've heard, we've got problems.
Peace and harmony, I'm sure about this.
Isn't it incredible that our politicians can't solve problems without sending young people like you to go and kill each other?
We've got to solve that problem, that's the first important one.
But there's a sense of humour in pizza.
Without the pizza I don't think I could go on living, ok.
Leonard Cohan said in Rolling Stone:
"I don't consider myself a pessimist.
I think of the pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain and I feel soaked to the skin."
Me I'm an optimist, I'll be well out of here when the shit hits the fan.
Science only tells you how to think, all other constricts what to think.
Think about it.
If you're interested in this contact me.
Thank you very much.
Applause.