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Andres E. Agostini (Arlington, Virginia, USA)
Arlington, Virginia, USA
Dr. Grose at NASA speaking of Systems Approach to Mitigate/Terminate Risks
Ich Bin Singularitarian!
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Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965 by Richard P. Feynman
Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965
The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics
We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.
I realize that a truly scientific paper would be of greater value, but such a paper I could publish in regular journals. So, I shall use this Nobel Lecture as an opportunity to do something of less value, but which I cannot do elsewhere. I ask your indulgence in another manner. I shall include details of anecdotes which are of no value either scientifically, nor for understanding the development of ideas. They are included only to make the lecture more entertaining.
I worked on this problem about eight years until the final publication in 1947. The beginning of the thing was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when I was an undergraduate student reading about the known physics, learning slowly about all these things that people were worrying about, and realizing ultimately that the fundamental problem of the day was that the quantum theory of electricity and magnetism was not completely satisfactory. This I gathered from books like those of Heitler and Dirac. I was inspired by the remarks in these books; not by the parts in which everything was proved and demonstrated carefully and calculated, because I couldn't understand those very well. At the young age what I could understand were the remarks about the fact that this doesn't make any sense, and the last sentence of the book of Dirac I can still remember, "It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed." So, I had this as a challenge and an inspiration. I also had a personal feeling, that since they didn't get a satisfactory answer to the problem I wanted to solve, I don't have to pay a lot of attention to what they did do.
I did gather from my readings, however, that two things were the source of the difficulties with the quantum electrodynamical theories. The first was an infinite energy of interaction of the electron with itself. And this difficulty existed even in the classical theory. The other difficulty came from some infinites which had to do with the infinite numbers of degrees of freedom in the field. As I understood it at the time (as nearly as I can remember) this was simply the difficulty that if you quantized the harmonic oscillators of the field (say in a box) each oscillator has a ground state energy of (½) and there is an infinite number of modes in a box of every increasing frequency w, and therefore there is an infinite energy in the box. I now realize that that wasn't a completely correct statement of the central problem; it can be removed simply by changing the zero from which energy is measured. At any rate, I believed that the difficulty arose somehow from a combination of the electron acting on itself and the infinite number of degrees of freedom of the field.
Well, it seemed to me quite evident that the idea that a particle acts on itself, that the electrical force acts on the same particle that generates it, is not a necessary one - it is a sort of a silly one, as a matter of fact. And, so I suggested to myself, that electrons cannot act on themselves, they can only act on other electrons. That means there is no field at all. You see, if all charges contribute to making a single common field, and if that common field acts back on all the charges, then each charge must act back on itself. Well, that was where the mistake was, there was no field. It was just that when you shook one charge, another would shake later. There was a direct interaction between charges, albeit with a delay. The law of force connecting the motion of one charge with another would just involve a delay. Shake this one, that one shakes later. The sun atom shakes; my eye electron shakes eight minutes later, because of a direct interaction across.
Now, this has the attractive feature that it solves both problems at once. First, I can say immediately, I don't let the electron act on itself, I just let this act on that, hence, no self-energy! Secondly, there is not an infinite number of degrees of freedom in the field. There is no field at all; or if you insist on thinking in terms of ideas like that of a field, this field is always completely determined by the action of the particles which produce it. You shake this particle, it shakes that one, but if you want to think in a field way, the field, if it's there, would be entirely determined by the matter which generates it, and therefore, the field does not have any independent degrees of freedom and the infinities from the degrees of freedom would then be removed. As a matter of fact, when we look out anywhere and see light, we can always "see" some matter as the source of the light. We don't just see light (except recently some radio reception has been found with no apparent material source).
You see then that my general plan was to first solve the classical problem, to get rid of the infinite self-energies in the classical theory, and to hope that when I made a quantum theory of it, everything would just be fine.
That was the beginning, and the idea seemed so obvious to me and so elegant that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.
Then I went to graduate school and somewhere along the line I learned what was wrong with the idea that an electron does not act on itself. When you accelerate an electron it radiates energy and you have to do extra work to account for that energy. The extra force against which this work is done is called the force of radiation resistance. The origin of this extra force was identified in those days, following Lorentz, as the action of the electron itself. The first term of this action, of the electron on itself, gave a kind of inertia (not quite relativistically satisfactory). But that inertia-like term was infinite for a point-charge. Yet the next term in the sequence gave an energy loss rate, which for a point-charge agrees exactly with the rate you get by calculating how much energy is radiated. So, the force of radiation resistance, which is absolutely necessary for the conservation of energy would disappear if I said that a charge could not act on itself.
So, I learned in the interim when I went to graduate school the glaringly obvious fault of my own theory. But, I was still in love with the original theory, and was still thinking that with it lay the solution to the difficulties of quantum electrodynamics. So, I continued to try on and off to save it somehow. I must have some action develop on a given electron when I accelerate it to account for radiation resistance. But, if I let electrons only act on other electrons the only possible source for this action is another electron in the world. So, one day, when I was working for Professor Wheeler and could no longer solve the problem that he had given me, I thought about this again and I calculated the following. Suppose I have two charges - I shake the first charge, which I think of as a source and this makes the second one shake, but the second one shaking produces an effect back on the source. And so, I calculated how much that effect back on the first charge was, hoping it might add up the force of radiation resistance. It didn't come out right, of course, but I went to Professor Wheeler and told him my ideas. He said, - yes, but the answer you get for the problem with the two charges that you just mentioned will, unfortunately, depend upon the charge and the mass of the second charge and will vary inversely as the square of the distance R, between the charges, while the force of radiation resistance depends on none of these things. I thought, surely, he had computed it himself, but now having become a professor, I know that one can be wise enough to see immediately what some graduate student takes several weeks to develop. He also pointed out something that also bothered me, that if we had a situation with many charges all around the original source at roughly uniform density and if we added the effect of all the surrounding charges the inverse R square would be compensated by the R2 in the volume element and we would get a result proportional to the thickness of the layer, which would go to infinity. That is, one would have an infinite total effect back at the source. And, finally he said to me, and you forgot something else, when you accelerate the first charge, the second acts later, and then the reaction back here at the source would be still later. In other words, the action occurs at the wrong time. I suddenly realized what a stupid fellow I am, for what I had described and calculated was just ordinary reflected light, not radiation reaction.
But, as I was stupid, so was Professor Wheeler that much more clever. For he then went on to give a lecture as though he had worked this all out before and was completely prepared, but he had not, he worked it out as he went along. First, he said, let us suppose that the return action by the charges in the absorber reaches the source by advanced waves as well as by the ordinary retarded waves of reflected light; so that the law of interaction acts backward in time, as well as forward in time. I was enough of a physicist at that time not to say, "Oh, no, how could that be?" For today all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr, that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical. So, it did not bother me any more than it bothered Professor Wheeler to use advance waves for the back reaction - a solution of Maxwell's equations, which previously had not been physically used.
Professor Wheeler used advanced waves to get the reaction back at the right time and then he suggested this: If there were lots of electrons in the absorber, there would be an index of refraction n, so, the retarded waves coming from the source would have their wave lengths slightly modified in going through the absorber. Now, if we shall assume that the advanced waves come back from the absorber without an index - why? I don't know, let's assume they come back without an index - then, there will be a gradual shifting in phase between the return and the original signal so that we would only have to figure that the contributions act as if they come from only a finite thickness, that of the first wave zone. (More specifically, up to that depth where the phase in the medium is shifted appreciably from what it would be in vacuum, a thickness proportional to l/(n-1). ) Now, the less the number of electrons in here, the less each contributes, but the thicker will be the layer that effectively contributes because with less electrons, the index differs less from 1. The higher the charges of these electrons, the more each contribute, but the thinner the effective layer, because the index would be higher. And when we estimated it, (calculated without being careful to keep the correct numerical factor) sure enough, it came out that the action back at the source was completely independent of the properties of the charges that were in the surrounding absorber. Further, it was of just the right character to represent radiation resistance, but we were unable to see if it was just exactly the right size. He sent me home with orders to figure out exactly how much advanced and how much retarded wave we need to get the thing to come out numerically right, and after that, figure out what happens to the advanced effects that you would expect if you put a test charge here close to the source? For if all charges generate advanced, as well as retarded effects, why would that test not be affected by the advanced waves from the source?
I found that you get the right answer if you use half-advanced and half-retarded as the field generated by each charge. That is, one is to use the solution of Maxwell's equation which is symmetrical in time and that the reason we got no advanced effects at a point close to the source in spite of the fact that the source was producing an advanced field is this. Suppose the source s surrounded by a spherical absorbing wall ten light seconds away, and that the test charge is one second to the right of the source. Then the source is as much as eleven seconds away from some parts of the wall and only nine seconds away from other parts. The source acting at time t=0 induces motions in the wall at time +10. Advanced effects from this can act on the test charge as early as eleven seconds earlier, or at t= -1. This is just at the time that the direct advanced waves from the source should reach the test charge, and it turns out the two effects are exactly equal and opposite and cancel out! At the later time +1 effects on the test charge from the source and from the walls are again equal, but this time are of the same sign and add to convert the half-retarded wave of the source to full retarded strength.
Thus, it became clear that there was the possibility that if we assume all actions are via half-advanced and half-retarded solutions of Maxwell's equations and assume that all sources are surrounded by material absorbing all the the light which is emitted, then we could account for radiation resistance as a direct action of the charges of the absorber acting back by advanced waves on the source.
Many months were devoted to checking all these points. I worked to show that everything is independent of the shape of the container, and so on, that the laws are exactly right, and that the advanced effects really cancel in every case. We always tried to increase the efficiency of our demonstrations, and to see with more and more clarity why it works. I won't bore you by going through the details of this. Because of our using advanced waves, we also had many apparent paradoxes, which we gradually reduced one by one, and saw that there was in fact no logical difficulty with the theory. It was perfectly satisfactory.
We also found that we could reformulate this thing in another way, and that is by a principle of least action. Since my original plan was to describe everything directly in terms of particle motions, it was my desire to represent this new theory without saying anything about fields. It turned out that we found a form for an action directly involving the motions of the charges only, which upon variation would give the equations of motion of these charges. The expression for this action A is
where
where is the four-vector position of the ith particle as a function of some parameter . The first term is the integral of proper time, the ordinary action of relativistic mechanics of free particles of mass mi. (We sum in the usual way on the repeated index m.) The second term represents the electrical interaction of the charges. It is summed over each pair of charges (the factor ½ is to count each pair once, the term i=j is omitted to avoid self-action) .The interaction is a double integral over a delta function of the square of space-time interval I2 between two points on the paths. Thus, interaction occurs only when this interval vanishes, that is, along light cones.
The fact that the interaction is exactly one-half advanced and half-retarded meant that we could write such a principle of least action, whereas interaction via retarded waves alone cannot be written in such a way.
So, all of classical electrodynamics was contained in this very simple form. It looked good, and therefore, it was undoubtedly true, at least to the beginner. It automatically gave half-advanced and half-retarded effects and it was without fields. By omitting the term in the sum when i=j, I omit self-interaction and no longer have any infinite self-energy. This then was the hoped-for solution to the problem of ridding classical electrodynamics of the infinities.
It turns out, of course, that you can reinstate fields if you wish to, but you have to keep track of the field produced by each particle separately. This is because to find the right field to act on a given particle, you must exclude the field that it creates itself. A single universal field to which all contribute will not do. This idea had been suggested earlier by Frenkel and so we called these Frenkel fields. This theory which allowed only particles to act on each other was equivalent to Frenkel's fields using half-advanced and half-retarded solutions.
There were several suggestions for interesting modifications of electrodynamics. We discussed lots of them, but I shall report on only one. It was to replace this delta function in the interaction by another function, say, f(I2ij), which is not infinitely sharp. Instead of having the action occur only when the interval between the two charges is exactly zero, we would replace the delta function of I2 by a narrow peaked thing. Let's say that f(Z) is large only near Z=0 width of order a2. Interactions will now occur when T2-R2 is of order a2 roughly where T is the time difference and R is the separation of the charges. This might look like it disagrees with experience, but if a is some small distance, like 10-13 cm, it says that the time delay T in action is roughly or approximately, - if R is much larger than a, T=R±a2/2R. This means that the deviation of time T from the ideal theoretical time R of Maxwell, gets smaller and smaller, the further the pieces are apart. Therefore, all theories involving in analyzing generators, motors, etc., in fact, all of the tests of electrodynamics that were available in Maxwell's time, would be adequately satisfied if were 10-13 cm. If R is of the order of a centimeter this deviation in T is only 10-26 parts. So, it was possible, also, to change the theory in a simple manner and to still agree with all observations of classical electrodynamics. You have no clue of precisely what function to put in for f, but it was an interesting possibility to keep in mind when developing quantum electrodynamics.
It also occurred to us that if we did that (replace d by f) we could not reinstate the term i=j in the sum because this would now represent in a relativistically invariant fashion a finite action of a charge on itself. In fact, it was possible to prove that if we did do such a thing, the main effect of the self-action (for not too rapid accelerations) would be to produce a modification of the mass. In fact, there need be no mass mi, term, all the mechanical mass could be electromagnetic self-action. So, if you would like, we could also have another theory with a still simpler expression for the action A. In expression (1) only the second term is kept, the sum extended over all i and j, and some function replaces d. Such a simple form could represent all of classical electrodynamics, which aside from gravitation is essentially all of classical physics.
Although it may sound confusing, I am describing several different alternative theories at once. The important thing to note is that at this time we had all these in mind as different possibilities. There were several possible solutions of the difficulty of classical electrodynamics, any one of which might serve as a good starting point to the solution of the difficulties of quantum electrodynamics.
I would also like to emphasize that by this time I was becoming used to a physical point of view different from the more customary point of view. In the customary view, things are discussed as a function of time in very great detail. For example, you have the field at this moment, a differential equation gives you the field at the next moment and so on; a method, which I shall call the Hamilton method, the time differential method. We have, instead (in (1) say) a thing that describes the character of the path throughout all of space and time. The behavior of nature is determined by saying her whole spacetime path has a certain character. For an action like (1) the equations obtained by variation (of Xim (ai)) are no longer at all easy to get back into Hamiltonian form. If you wish to use as variables only the coordinates of particles, then you can talk about the property of the paths - but the path of one particle at a given time is affected by the path of another at a different time. If you try to describe, therefore, things differentially, telling what the present conditions of the particles are, and how these present conditions will affect the future you see, it is impossible with particles alone, because something the particle did in the past is going to affect the future.
Therefore, you need a lot of bookkeeping variables to keep track of what the particle did in the past. These are called field variables. You will, also, have to tell what the field is at this present moment, if you are to be able to see later what is going to happen. From the overall space-time view of the least action principle, the field disappears as nothing but bookkeeping variables insisted on by the Hamiltonian method.
As a by-product of this same view, I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four velocities - and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron." "But, Professor", I said, "there aren't as many positrons as electrons." "Well, maybe they are hidden in the protons or something", he said. I did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from him as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That, I stole!
To summarize, when I was done with this, as a physicist I had gained two things. One, I knew many different ways of formulating classical electrodynamics, with many different mathematical forms. I got to know how to express the subject every which way. Second, I had a point of view - the overall space-time point of view - and a disrespect for the Hamiltonian method of describing physics.
I would like to interrupt here to make a remark. The fact that electrodynamics can be written in so many ways - the differential equations of Maxwell, various minimum principles with fields, minimum principles without fields, all different kinds of ways, was something I knew, but I have never understood. It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. An example of that is the Schrödinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why this is - it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. A thing like the inverse square law is just right to be represented by the solution of Poisson's equation, which, therefore, is a very different way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what it means, that nature chooses these curious forms, but maybe that is a way of defining simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.
I was now convinced that since we had solved the problem of classical electrodynamics (and completely in accordance with my program from M.I.T., only direct interaction between particles, in a way that made fields unnecessary) that everything was definitely going to be all right. I was convinced that all I had to do was make a quantum theory analogous to the classical one and everything would be solved.
So, the problem is only to make a quantum theory, which has as its classical analog, this expression (1). Now, there is no unique way to make a quantum theory from classical mechanics, although all the textbooks make believe there is. What they would tell you to do, was find the momentum variables and replace them by , but I couldn't find a momentum variable, as there wasn't any.
The character of quantum mechanics of the day was to write things in the famous Hamiltonian way - in the form of a differential equation, which described how the wave function changes from instant to instant, and in terms of an operator, H. If the classical physics could be reduced to a Hamiltonian form, everything was all right. Now, least action does not imply a Hamiltonian form if the action is a function of anything more than positions and velocities at the same moment. If the action is of the form of the integral of a function, (usually called the Lagrangian) of the velocities and positions at the same time
then you can start with the Lagrangian and then create a Hamiltonian and work out the quantum mechanics, more or less uniquely. But this thing (1) involves the key variables, positions, at two different times and therefore, it was not obvious what to do to make the quantum-mechanical analogue.
I tried - I would struggle in various ways. One of them was this; if I had harmonic oscillators interacting with a delay in time, I could work out what the normal modes were and guess that the quantum theory of the normal modes was the same as for simple oscillators and kind of work my way back in terms of the original variables. I succeeded in doing that, but I hoped then to generalize to other than a harmonic oscillator, but I learned to my regret something, which many people have learned. The harmonic oscillator is too simple; very often you can work out what it should do in quantum theory without getting much of a clue as to how to generalize your results to other systems.
So that didn't help me very much, but when I was struggling with this problem, I went to a beer party in the Nassau Tavern in Princeton. There was a gentleman, newly arrived from Europe (Herbert Jehle) who came and sat next to me. Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party. So, he sat by me and asked, "what are you doing" and so on, and I said, "I'm drinking beer." Then I realized that he wanted to know what work I was doing and I told him I was struggling with this problem, and I simply turned to him and said, "listen, do you know any way of doing quantum mechanics, starting with action - where the action integral comes into the quantum mechanics?" "No", he said, "but Dirac has a paper in which the Lagrangian, at least, comes into quantum mechanics. I will show it to you tomorrow."
Next day we went to the Princeton Library, they have little rooms on the side to discuss things, and he showed me this paper. What Dirac said was the following: There is in quantum mechanics a very important quantity which carries the wave function from one time to another, besides the differential equation but equivalent to it, a kind of a kernal, which we might call K(x', x), which carries the wave function j(x) known at time t, to the wave function j(x') at time, t+e Dirac points out that this function K was analogous to the quantity in classical mechanics that you would calculate if you took the exponential of ie, multiplied by the Lagrangian imagining that these two positions x,x' corresponded t and t+e. In other words,
Professor Jehle showed me this, I read it, he explained it to me, and I said, "what does he mean, they are analogous; what does that mean, analogous? What is the use of that?" He said, "you Americans! You always want to find a use for everything!" I said, that I thought that Dirac must mean that they were equal. "No", he explained, "he doesn't mean they are equal." "Well", I said, "let's see what happens if we make them equal."
So I simply put them equal, taking the simplest example where the Lagrangian is ½Mx2 - V(x) but soon found I had to put a constant of proportionality A in, suitably adjusted. When I substituted for K to get
and just calculated things out by Taylor series expansion, out came the Schrödinger equation. So, I turned to Professor Jehle, not really understanding, and said, "well, you see Professor Dirac meant that they were proportional." Professor Jehle's eyes were bugging out - he had taken out a little notebook and was rapidly copying it down from the blackboard, and said, "no, no, this is an important discovery. You Americans are always trying to find out how something can be used. That's a good way to discover things!" So, I thought I was finding out what Dirac meant, but, as a matter of fact, had made the discovery that what Dirac thought was analogous, was, in fact, equal. I had then, at least, the connection between the Lagrangian and quantum mechanics, but still with wave functions and infinitesimal times.
It must have been a day or so later when I was lying in bed thinking about these things, that I imagined what would happen if I wanted to calculate the wave function at a finite interval later.
I would put one of these factors eieL in here, and that would give me the wave functions the next moment, t+e and then I could substitute that back into (3) to get another factor of eieL and give me the wave function the next moment, t+2e and so on and so on. In that way I found myself thinking of a large number of integrals, one after the other in sequence. In the integrand was the product of the exponentials, which, of course, was the exponential of the sum of terms like eL. Now, L is the Lagrangian and e is like the time interval dt, so that if you took a sum of such terms, that's exactly like an integral. That's like Riemann's formula for the integral Ldt, you just take the value at each point and add them together. We are to take the limit as e-0, of course. Therefore, the connection between the wave function of one instant and the wave function of another instant a finite time later could be obtained by an infinite number of integrals, (because e goes to zero, of course) of exponential where S is the action expression (2). At last, I had succeeded in representing quantum mechanics directly in terms of the action S.
This led later on to the idea of the amplitude for a path; that for each possible way that the particle can go from one point to another in space-time, there's an amplitude. That amplitude is e to the times the action for the path. Amplitudes from various paths superpose by addition. This then is another, a third way, of describing quantum mechanics, which looks quite different than that of Schrödinger or Heisenberg, but which is equivalent to them.
Now immediately after making a few checks on this thing, what I wanted to do, of course, was to substitute the action (1) for the other (2). The first trouble was that I could not get the thing to work with the relativistic case of spin one-half. However, although I could deal with the matter only nonrelativistically, I could deal with the light or the photon interactions perfectly well by just putting the interaction terms of (1) into any action, replacing the mass terms by the non-relativistic (Mx2/2)dt. When the action has a delay, as it now had, and involved more than one time, I had to lose the idea of a wave function. That is, I could no longer describe the program as; given the amplitude for all positions at a certain time to compute the amplitude at another time. However, that didn't cause very much trouble. It just meant developing a new idea. Instead of wave functions we could talk about this; that if a source of a certain kind emits a particle, and a detector is there to receive it, we can give the amplitude that the source will emit and the detector receive. We do this without specifying the exact instant that the source emits or the exact instant that any detector receives, without trying to specify the state of anything at any particular time in between, but by just finding the amplitude for the complete experiment. And, then we could discuss how that amplitude would change if you had a scattering sample in between, as you rotated and changed angles, and so on, without really having any wave functions.
It was also possible to discover what the old concepts of energy and momentum would mean with this generalized action. And, so I believed that I had a quantum theory of classical electrodynamics - or rather of this new classical electrodynamics described by action (1). I made a number of checks. If I took the Frenkel field point of view, which you remember was more differential, I could convert it directly to quantum mechanics in a more conventional way. The only problem was how to specify in quantum mechanics the classical boundary conditions to use only half-advanced and half-retarded solutions. By some ingenuity in defining what that meant, I found that the quantum mechanics with Frenkel fields, plus a special boundary condition, gave me back this action, (1) in the new form of quantum mechanics with a delay. So, various things indicated that there wasn't any doubt I had everything straightened out.
It was also easy to guess how to modify the electrodynamics, if anybody ever wanted to modify it. I just changed the delta to an f, just as I would for the classical case. So, it was very easy, a simple thing. To describe the old retarded theory without explicit mention of fields I would have to write probabilities, not just amplitudes. I would have to square my amplitudes and that would involve double path integrals in which there are two S's and so forth. Yet, as I worked out many of these things and studied different forms and different boundary conditions. I got a kind of funny feeling that things weren't exactly right. I could not clearly identify the difficulty and in one of the short periods during which I imagined I had laid it to rest, I published a thesis and received my Ph.D.
During the war, I didn't have time to work on these things very extensively, but wandered about on buses and so forth, with little pieces of paper, and struggled to work on it and discovered indeed that there was something wrong, something terribly wrong. I found that if one generalized the action from the nice Langrangian forms (2) to these forms (1) then the quantities which I defined as energy, and so on, would be complex. The energy values of stationary states wouldn't be real and probabilities of events wouldn't add up to 100%. That is, if you took the probability that this would happen and that would happen - everything you could think of would happen, it would not add up to one.
Another problem on which I struggled very hard, was to represent relativistic electrons with this new quantum mechanics. I wanted to do a unique and different way - and not just by copying the operators of Dirac into some kind of an expression and using some kind of Dirac algebra instead of ordinary complex numbers. I was very much encouraged by the fact that in one space dimension, I did find a way of giving an amplitude to every path by limiting myself to paths, which only went back and forth at the speed of light. The amplitude was simple (ie) to a power equal to the number of velocity reversals where I have divided the time into steps and I am allowed to reverse velocity only at such a time. This gives (as approaches zero) Dirac's equation in two dimensions - one dimension of space and one of time .
Dirac's wave function has four components in four dimensions, but in this case, it has only two components and this rule for the amplitude of a path automatically generates the need for two components. Because if this is the formula for the amplitudes of path, it will not do you any good to know the total amplitude of all paths, which come into a given point to find the amplitude to reach the next point. This is because for the next time, if it came in from the right, there is no new factor ie if it goes out to the right, whereas, if it came in from the left there was a new factor ie. So, to continue this same information forward to the next moment, it was not sufficient information to know the total amplitude to arrive, but you had to know the amplitude to arrive from the right and the amplitude to arrive to the left, independently. If you did, however, you could then compute both of those again independently and thus you had to carry two amplitudes to form a differential equation (first order in time).
And, so I dreamed that if I were clever, I would find a formula for the amplitude of a path that was beautiful and simple for three dimensions of space and one of time, which would be equivalent to the Dirac equation, and for which the four components, matrices, and all those other mathematical funny things would come out as a simple consequence - I have never succeeded in that either. But, I did want to mention some of the unsuccessful things on which I spent almost as much effort, as on the things that did work.
To summarize the situation a few years after the way, I would say, I had much experience with quantum electrodynamics, at least in the knowledge of many different ways of formulating it, in terms of path integrals of actions and in other forms. One of the important by-products, for example, of much experience in these simple forms, was that it was easy to see how to combine together what was in those days called the longitudinal and transverse fields, and in general, to see clearly the relativistic invariance of the theory. Because of the need to do things differentially there had been, in the standard quantum electrodynamics, a complete split of the field into two parts, one of which is called the longitudinal part and the other mediated by the photons, or transverse waves. The longitudinal part was described by a Coulomb potential acting instantaneously in the Schrödinger equation, while the transverse part had entirely different description in terms of quantization of the transverse waves. This separation depended upon the relativistic tilt of your axes in spacetime. People moving at different velocities would separate the same field into longitudinal and transverse fields in a different way. Furthermore, the entire formulation of quantum mechanics insisting, as it did, on the wave function at a given time, was hard to analyze relativistically. Somebody else in a different coordinate system would calculate the succession of events in terms of wave functions on differently cut slices of space-time, and with a different separation of longitudinal and transverse parts. The Hamiltonian theory did not look relativistically invariant, although, of course, it was. One of the great advantages of the overall point of view, was that you could see the relativistic invariance right away - or as Schwinger would say - the covariance was manifest. I had the advantage, therefore, of having a manifestedly covariant form for quantum electrodynamics with suggestions for modifications and so on. I had the disadvantage that if I took it too seriously - I mean, if I took it seriously at all in this form, - I got into trouble with these complex energies and the failure of adding probabilities to one and so on. I was unsuccessfully struggling with that.
Then Lamb did his experiment, measuring the separation of the 2S½ and 2P½ levels of hydrogen, finding it to be about 1000 megacycles of frequency difference. Professor Bethe, with whom I was then associated at Cornell, is a man who has this characteristic: If there's a good experimental number you've got to figure it out from theory. So, he forced the quantum electrodynamics of the day to give him an answer to the separation of these two levels. He pointed out that the self-energy of an electron itself is infinite, so that the calculated energy of a bound electron should also come out infinite. But, when you calculated the separation of the two energy levels in terms of the corrected mass instead of the old mass, it would turn out, he thought, that the theory would give convergent finite answers. He made an estimate of the splitting that way and found out that it was still divergent, but he guessed that was probably due to the fact that he used an unrelativistic theory of the matter. Assuming it would be convergent if relativistically treated, he estimated he would get about a thousand megacycles for the Lamb-shift, and thus, made the most important discovery in the history of the theory of quantum electrodynamics. He worked this out on the train from Ithaca, New York to Schenectady and telephoned me excitedly from Schenectady to tell me the result, which I don't remember fully appreciating at the time.
Returning to Cornell, he gave a lecture on the subject, which I attended. He explained that it gets very confusing to figure out exactly which infinite term corresponds to what in trying to make the correction for the infinite change in mass. If there were any modifications whatever, he said, even though not physically correct, (that is not necessarily the way nature actually works) but any modification whatever at high frequencies, which would make this correction finite, then there would be no problem at all to figuring out how to keep track of everything. You just calculate the finite mass correction Dm to the electron mass mo, substitute the numerical values of mo+Dm for m in the results for any other problem and all these ambiguities would be resolved. If, in addition, this method were relativistically invariant, then we would be absolutely sure how to do it without destroying relativistically invariant.
After the lecture, I went up to him and told him, "I can do that for you, I'll bring it in for you tomorrow." I guess I knew every way to modify quantum electrodynamics known to man, at the time. So, I went in next day, and explained what would correspond to the modification of the delta-function to f and asked him to explain to me how you calculate the self-energy of an electron, for instance, so we can figure out if it's finite.
I want you to see an interesting point. I did not take the advice of Professor Jehle to find out how it was useful. I never used all that machinery which I had cooked up to solve a single relativistic problem. I hadn't even calculated the self-energy of an electron up to that moment, and was studying the difficulties with the conservation of probability, and so on, without actually doing anything, except discussing the general properties of the theory.
But now I went to Professor Bethe, who explained to me on the blackboard, as we worked together, how to calculate the self-energy of an electron. Up to that time when you did the integrals they had been logarithmically divergent. I told him how to make the relativistically invariant modifications that I thought would make everything all right. We set up the integral which then diverged at the sixth power of the frequency instead of logarithmically!
So, I went back to my room and worried about this thing and went around in circles trying to figure out what was wrong because I was sure physically everything had to come out finite, I couldn't understand how it came out infinite. I became more and more interested and finally realized I had to learn how to make a calculation. So, ultimately, I taught myself how to calculate the self-energy of an electron working my patient way through the terrible confusion of those days of negative energy states and holes and longitudinal contributions and so on. When I finally found out how to do it and did it with the modifications I wanted to suggest, it turned out that it was nicely convergent and finite, just as I had expected. Professor Bethe and I have never been able to discover what we did wrong on that blackboard two months before, but apparently we just went off somewhere and we have never been able to figure out where. It turned out, that what I had proposed, if we had carried it out without making a mistake would have been all right and would have given a finite correction. Anyway, it forced me to go back over all this and to convince myself physically that nothing can go wrong. At any rate, the correction to mass was now finite, proportional to where a is the width of that function f which was substituted for d. If you wanted an unmodified electrodynamics, you would have to take a equal to zero, getting an infinite mass correction. But, that wasn't the point. Keeping a finite, I simply followed the program outlined by Professor Bethe and showed how to calculate all the various things, the scatterings of electrons from atoms without radiation, the shifts of levels and so forth, calculating everything in terms of the experimental mass, and noting that the results as Bethe suggested, were not sensitive to a in this form and even had a definite limit as ag0.
The rest of my work was simply to improve the techniques then available for calculations, making diagrams to help analyze perturbation theory quicker. Most of this was first worked out by guessing - you see, I didn't have the relativistic theory of matter. For example, it seemed to me obvious that the velocities in non-relativistic formulas have to be replaced by Dirac's matrix a or in the more relativistic forms by the operators . I just took my guesses from the forms that I had worked out using path integrals for nonrelativistic matter, but relativistic light. It was easy to develop rules of what to substitute to get the relativistic case. I was very surprised to discover that it was not known at that time, that every one of the formulas that had been worked out so patiently by separating longitudinal and transverse waves could be obtained from the formula for the transverse waves alone, if instead of summing over only the two perpendicular polarization directions you would sum over all four possible directions of polarization. It was so obvious from the action (1) that I thought it was general knowledge and would do it all the time. I would get into arguments with people, because I didn't realize they didn't know that; but, it turned out that all their patient work with the longitudinal waves was always equivalent to just extending the sum on the two transverse directions of polarization over all four directions. This was one of the amusing advantages of the method. In addition, I included diagrams for the various terms of the perturbation series, improved notations to be used, worked out easy ways to evaluate integrals, which occurred in these problems, and so on, and made a kind of handbook on how to do quantum electrodynamics.
But one step of importance that was physically new was involved with the negative energy sea of Dirac, which caused me so much logical difficulty. I got so confused that I remembered Wheeler's old idea about the positron being, maybe, the electron going backward in time. Therefore, in the time dependent perturbation theory that was usual for getting self-energy, I simply supposed that for a while we could go backward in the time, and looked at what terms I got by running the time variables backward. They were the same as the terms that other people got when they did the problem a more complicated way, using holes in the sea, except, possibly, for some signs. These, I, at first, determined empirically by inventing and trying some rules.
I have tried to explain that all the improvements of relativistic theory were at first more or less straightforward, semi-empirical shenanigans. Each time I would discover something, however, I would go back and I would check it so many ways, compare it to every problem that had been done previously in electrodynamics (and later, in weak coupling meson theory) to see if it would always agree, and so on, until I was absolutely convinced of the truth of the various rules and regulations which I concocted to simplify all the work.
During this time, people had been developing meson theory, a subject I had not studied in any detail. I became interested in the possible application of my methods to perturbation calculations in meson theory. But, what was meson theory? All I knew was that meson theory was something analogous to electrodynamics, except that particles corresponding to the photon had a mass. It was easy to guess the d-function in (1), which was a solution of d'Alembertian equals zero, was to be changed to the corresponding solution of d'Alembertian equals m2. Next, there were different kind of mesons - the one in closest analogy to photons, coupled via , are called vector mesons - there were also scalar mesons. Well, maybe that corresponds to putting unity in place of the , I would here then speak of "pseudo vector coupling" and I would guess what that probably was. I didn't have the knowledge to understand the way these were defined in the conventional papers because they were expressed at that time in terms of creation and annihilation operators, and so on, which, I had not successfully learned. I remember that when someone had started to teach me about creation and annihilation operators, that this operator creates an electron, I said, "how do you create an electron? It disagrees with the conservation of charge", and in that way, I blocked my mind from learning a very practical scheme of calculation. Therefore, I had to find as many opportunities as possible to test whether I guessed right as to what the various theories were.
One day a dispute arose at a Physical Society meeting as to the correctness of a calculation by Slotnick of the interaction of an electron with a neutron using pseudo scalar theory with pseudo vector coupling and also, pseudo scalar theory with pseudo scalar coupling. He had found that the answers were not the same, in fact, by one theory, the result was divergent, although convergent with the other. Some people believed that the two theories must give the same answer for the problem. This was a welcome opportunity to test my guesses as to whether I really did understand what these two couplings were. So, I went home, and during the evening I worked out the electron neutron scattering for the pseudo scalar and pseudo vector coupling, saw they were not equal and subtracted them, and worked out the difference in detail. The next day at the meeting, I saw Slotnick and said, "Slotnick, I worked it out last night, I wanted to see if I got the same answers you do. I got a different answer for each coupling - but, I would like to check in detail with you because I want to make sure of my methods." And, he said, "what do you mean you worked it out last night, it took me six months!" And, when we compared the answers he looked at mine and he asked, "what is that Q in there, that variable Q?" (I had expressions like (tan -1Q) /Q etc.). I said, "that's the momentum transferred by the electron, the electron deflected by different angles." "Oh", he said, "no, I only have the limiting value as Q approaches zero; the forward scattering." Well, it was easy enough to just substitute Q equals zero in my form and I then got the same answers as he did. But, it took him six months to do the case of zero momentum transfer, whereas, during one evening I had done the finite and arbitrary momentum transfer. That was a thrilling moment for me, like receiving the Nobel Prize, because that convinced me, at last, I did have some kind of method and technique and understood how to do something that other people did not know how to do. That was my moment of triumph in which I realized I really had succeeded in working out something worthwhile.
At this stage, I was urged to publish this because everybody said it looks like an easy way to make calculations, and wanted to know how to do it. I had to publish it, missing two things; one was proof of every statement in a mathematically conventional sense. Often, even in a physicist's sense, I did not have a demonstration of how to get all of these rules and equations from conventional electrodynamics. But, I did know from experience, from fooling around, that everything was, in fact, equivalent to the regular electrodynamics and had partial proofs of many pieces, although, I never really sat down, like Euclid did for the geometers of Greece, and made sure that you could get it all from a single simple set of axioms. As a result, the work was criticized, I don't know whether favorably or unfavorably, and the "method" was called the "intuitive method". For those who do not realize it, however, I should like to emphasize that there is a lot of work involved in using this "intuitive method" successfully. Because no simple clear proof of the formula or idea presents itself, it is necessary to do an unusually great amount of checking and rechecking for consistency and correctness in terms of what is known, by comparing to other analogous examples, limiting cases, etc. In the face of the lack of direct mathematical demonstration, one must be careful and thorough to make sure of the point, and one should make a perpetual attempt to demonstrate as much of the formula as possible. Nevertheless, a very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.
It must be clearly understood that in all this work, I was representing the conventional electrodynamics with retarded interaction, and not my half-advanced and half-retarded theory corresponding to (1). I merely use (1) to guess at forms. And, one of the forms I guessed at corresponded to changing d to a function f of width a2, so that I could calculate finite results for all of the problems. This brings me to the second thing that was missing when I published the paper, an unresolved difficulty. With d replaced by f the calculations would give results which were not "unitary", that is, for which the sum of the probabilities of all alternatives was not unity. The deviation from unity was very small, in practice, if a was very small. In the limit that I took a very tiny, it might not make any difference. And, so the process of the renormalization could be made, you could calculate everything in terms of the experimental mass and then take the limit and the apparent difficulty that the unitary is violated temporarily seems to disappear. I was unable to demonstrate that, as a matter of fact, it does.
It is lucky that I did not wait to straighten out that point, for as far as I know, nobody has yet been able to resolve this question. Experience with meson theories with stronger couplings and with strongly coupled vector photons, although not proving anything, convinces me that if the coupling were stronger, or if you went to a higher order (137th order of perturbation theory for electrodynamics), this difficulty would remain in the limit and there would be real trouble. That is, I believe there is really no satisfactory quantum electrodynamics, but I'm not sure. And, I believe, that one of the reasons for the slowness of present-day progress in understanding the strong interactions is that there isn't any relativistic theoretical model, from which you can really calculate everything. Although, it is usually said, that the difficulty lies in the fact that strong interactions are too hard to calculate, I believe, it is really because strong interactions in field theory have no solution, have no sense they're either infinite, or, if you try to modify them, the modification destroys the unitarity. I don't think we have a completely satisfactory relativistic quantum-mechanical model, even one that doesn't agree with nature, but, at least, agrees with the logic that the sum of probability of all alternatives has to be 100%. Therefore, I think that the renormalization theory is simply a way to sweep the difficulties of the divergences of electrodynamics under the rug. I am, of course, not sure of that.
This completes the story of the development of the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics. I wonder if anything can be learned from it. I doubt it. It is most striking that most of the ideas developed in the course of this research were not ultimately used in the final result. For example, the half-advanced and half-retarded potential was not finally used, the action expression (1) was not used, the idea that charges do not act on themselves was abandoned. The path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics was useful for guessing at final expressions and at formulating the general theory of electrodynamics in new ways - although, strictly it was not absolutely necessary. The same goes for the idea of the positron being a backward moving electron, it was very convenient, but not strictly necessary for the theory because it is exactly equivalent to the negative energy sea point of view.
We are struck by the very large number of different physical viewpoints and widely different mathematical formulations that are all equivalent to one another. The method used here, of reasoning in physical terms, therefore, appears to be extremely inefficient. On looking back over the work, I can only feel a kind of regret for the enormous amount of physical reasoning and mathematically re-expression which ends by merely re-expressing what was previously known, although in a form which is much more efficient for the calculation of specific problems. Would it not have been much easier to simply work entirely in the mathematical framework to elaborate a more efficient expression? This would certainly seem to be the case, but it must be remarked that although the problem actually solved was only such a reformulation, the problem originally tackled was the (possibly still unsolved) problem of avoidance of the infinities of the usual theory. Therefore, a new theory was sought, not just a modification of the old. Although the quest was unsuccessful, we should look at the question of the value of physical ideas in developing a new theory.
Many different physical ideas can describe the same physical reality. Thus, classical electrodynamics can be described by a field view, or an action at a distance view, etc. Originally, Maxwell filled space with idler wheels, and Faraday with fields lines, but somehow the Maxwell equations themselves are pristine and independent of the elaboration of words attempting a physical description. The only true physical description is that describing the experimental meaning of the quantities in the equation - or better, the way the equations are to be used in describing experimental observations. This being the case perhaps the best way to proceed is to try to guess equations, and disregard physical models or descriptions. For example, McCullough guessed the correct equations for light propagation in a crystal long before his colleagues using elastic models could make head or tail of the phenomena, or again, Dirac obtained his equation for the description of the electron by an almost purely mathematical proposition. A simple physical view by which all the contents of this equation can be seen is still lacking.
Therefore, I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions. I think the problem is not to find the best or most efficient method to proceed to a discovery, but to find any method at all. Physical reasoning does help some people to generate suggestions as to how the unknown may be related to the known. Theories of the known, which are described by different physical ideas may be equivalent in all their predictions and are hence scientifically indistinguishable. However, they are not psychologically identical when trying to move from that base into the unknown. For different views suggest different kinds of modifications which might be made and hence are not equivalent in the hypotheses one generates from them in ones attempt to understand what is not yet understood. I, therefore, think that a good theoretical physicist today might find it useful to have a wide range of physical viewpoints and mathematical expressions of the same theory (for example, of quantum electrodynamics) available to him. This may be asking too much of one man. Then new students should as a class have this. If every individual student follows the same current fashion in expressing and thinking about electrodynamics or field theory, then the variety of hypotheses being generated to understand strong interactions, say, is limited. Perhaps rightly so, for possibly the chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unusual point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. I say sacrificed himself because he most likely will get nothing from it, because the truth may lie in another direction, perhaps even the fashionable one.
But, if my own experience is any guide, the sacrifice is really not great because if the peculiar viewpoint taken is truly experimentally equivalent to the usual in the realm of the known there is always a range of applications and problems in this realm for which the special viewpoint gives one a special power and clarity of thought, which is valuable in itself. Furthermore, in the search for new laws, you always have the psychological excitement of feeling that possible nobody has yet thought of the crazy possibility you are looking at right now.
So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it's become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound anymore when they look at her. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a very good mother and she has given birth to some very good children. And, I thank the Swedish Academy of Sciences for complimenting one of them. Thank you.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1963-1970, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
Wernher von Braun Quotations. As follows:
Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there. Wernher von Braun
For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift. Wernher von Braun
I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution. Wernher von Braun
It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. Wernher von Braun
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labor. Wernher von Braun
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. Wernher von Braun
There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further. Wernher von Braun
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. Wernher von Braun
A TRUE STATESMAN AND VISIONARY!!!
Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort
Delivered in person by John F. Kennedy, Houston, TexasSeptember 12, 1962
SOURCE: http://www.dudeface.com/kennedyrice.html (seen on June 12, 2007).
President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:
I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.
I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.
We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation¹s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago.
The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.
Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobile sand airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America¹s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.
Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where the F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.
Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were "made in the United States of America" and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.
The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the the 40-yard lines.
Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.
We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.
To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.
The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.
And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year¹s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year--a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more,from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field,made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control,communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour,causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.
I'm the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [laughter]
However, I think we're going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don't think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.
I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America.
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Thank you.
SOURCE: http://www.dudeface.com/kennedyrice.html (seen on June 12, 2007).
TEXT OF THE LETTERS FROM ALBERT EINSTEIN TO PRESIDENT ROOSVELT. As follows:
Albert Einstein
Old Grove Rd.
Nassau Point
Peconic, Long Island
August 2nd 1939
F.D. Roosevelt
President of the United States
White House
Washington, D.C.
Sir:
Some recent work by E.Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been com-
municated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uran-
ium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the im-
mediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem
to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part
of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring
to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -
through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in
America - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction
in a large mass of uranium,by which vast amounts of power and large quant-
ities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears
almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs,
and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely power-
ful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this
type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy
the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However,
such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by
air.
-2-
The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate
quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia.
while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.
In view of the situation you may think it desirable to have more
permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group
of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way
of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person
who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an inofficial
capacity. His task might comprise the following:
a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the
further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action,
giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uran-
ium ore for the United States;
b) to speed up the experimental work,which is at present being car-
ried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by
providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with y
private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause,
and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories
which have the necessary equipment.
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium
from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should
have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground
that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is
attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the
American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly,
(Albert Einstein)
EINSTEIN'S SECOND LETTER TO ROOSEVELT
March 7, 1940
I wish to draw your attention to the development which has taken place since the conference that was arranged through your good offices in October last year between scientists engaged in this work and governmental representatives.
Last year, when I realized that results of national importance might arise out of research on uranium, I thought it my duty to inform the administration of this possibility. You will perhaps remember that in the letter which I addressed to the President I also mentioned the fact that C. F. von Weizsäcker, son of the German Undersecretary of State, was collaborating with a group of chemists working upon uranium at one of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes - namely, the Institute of Chemistry.
Since the outbreak of the war, interest in uranium has intensified in Germany. I have now learned that research there is carried out in great secrecy and that it has been extended to another of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute of Physics. The latter has been taken over by the government and a group of physicists, under the leadership of C. F. von Weizsäcker, who is now working there on uranium in collaboration with the Institute of Chemistry. The former director was sent away on leave of absence, apparently for the duration of the war.
Should you think it advisable to relay this information to the President, please consider yourself free to do so. Will you be kind enough to let me know if you are taking action in this direction?
Dr. Szilard has shown me the manuscript which he is sending to the Physics Review in which he describes in detail a method of setting up a chain reaction in uranium. The papers will appear in print unless they are held up, and the question arises whether something ought to be done to withhold publication.
I have discussed with professor Wigner of Princeton University the situation in the light of the information available. Dr. Szilard will let you have a memorandum informing you of the progress made since October last year so that you will be able to take such action as you think in the circumstances advisable. You will see that the line he has pursued is different and apparently more promising than the line pursued by M. Joliot in France, about whose work you may have seen reports in the papers.
EINSTEIN'S THIRD LETTER TO ROOSEVELT
April 25, 1940
I am convinced as to the wisdom and the urgency of creating the conditions under which that and related work can be carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale than hitherto. I was interested in a suggestion made by Dr. Sachs that the Special Advisory Committee supply names of persons to serve as a board of trustees for a nonprofit organization which, with the approval of the government committee, could secure from governmental or private sources or both, the necessary funds for carrying out the work. Given such a framework and the necessary funds, it (the large-scale experiments and exploration of practical applications) could be carried out much faster than through a loose cooperation of university laboratories and government departments.
EINSTEIN'S FOURTH LETTER TO ROOSEVELT
112 Mercer StreetPrinceton, New JerseyMarch 25, 1945
The Honorable Franklin Delano RooseveltPresident of the United StatesThe White HouseWashington, D.C.
Sir:
I am writing to introduce Dr. L. Szilard who proposes to submit to you certain consideration and recommendation. Unusual circumstances which I shall describe further below introduce me to take this action in spite of the fact that I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilard proposes to submit to you.
In the summer of 1939 Dr. Szilard put before me his views concerning the potential importance of uranium for national defense. He was greatly disturbed by the potentialities involved and anxious that the United States Government be advised of them as soon as possible. Dr. Szilard, who is one of the discoverers of the neutron emission of uranium on which all present work on uranium is based, described to me a specific system which he devised and which he thought would make it possible to set up a chain reaction in un-separated uranium in the immediate future. Having known him for over twenty years both from his scientific work and personally, I have much confidence in his judgment and it was on the basis of his judgment as well as my own that I took the liberty to approach you in connection with this subject. You responded to my letter dated August 2, 1939 by the appointment of a committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Briggs and thus started the Government's activity in this field.
The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilard is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientist who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy. In the circumstances I consider it my duty to give Dr. Szilard this introduction and I wish to express the hope that you will be able to give his presentation of the case your personal attention.
Very truly yours,
(A. Einstein)
WISDOM FROM PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY.-
President [John F.] Kennedy made sense of it in 1962. Addressing a crowd at Rice University, he exclaimed, "We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and our skills ... we do not know what benefits await us ... [but] space is there and we are going to climb it."
Source:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast30may_1.htm
Introducing the Founder...
Andres E. Agostini (Arlington, Virginia, USA)
Bill Gates and America's Competitiveness in Century 21 (before the United States Congress). >
Bill Gates: U.S. Senate Committee Hearing on Strengthening American Competitiveness
Transcript of Oral Testimony by Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft CorporationUnited States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions"Strengthening American Competitiveness for the 21st Century"Washington, D.C.March 7, 2007
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SEN. EDWARD KENNEDY (D-Mass.): [In progress…] I'd ask Senator Enzi if he would say a word, we'll go to Patty Murray, and then move on to your comments.
SEN. MICHAEL B. ENZI (R-Wyo.): Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this hearing. I think it's at a particularly critical time, and Mr. Gates is an outstanding person to present.
This year marks 50 years since Sputnik went up, and that's the last time that we really had a huge turmoil in this country worrying about engineering. It had a drastic effect on our system of education. It inspired people to be the best.
Since that time, of course, computers came along, and stimulated us. I remember some of the early RadioShack models that kids got to play with, and adults admired. And people were stimulated to write programs. Now, programs have gone to a whole different level from that time, and, in fact, I think one of the things kind of stymieing kids is how far it has gone, how can they possibly do something as complicated as what's out there already.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testifies to members of the U.S. Senate on the need to boost American competitiveness. Washington, D.C., March 7, 2007
Click for high-res version.
Of course, the game industry kind of came along, and that stimulated a few more to do some different things in the computer area, but somehow we've got to have the kind of a revolution that got the minds working in that new area of innovation. We've got to have more kids that are entrepreneurs and risk-takers.
And so, I admire you for what you've done, and you're a great symbol for the country, and an inspiration to kids. I appreciate the effort that you're making through a lot of different programs with your foundation to make that emphasis.
Anything we can do to get more risk-takers and entrepreneurs out there will make a difference, and, of course, we will have to rely on people from other countries, and hope that they come here and become a part of the innovation that later moves to other countries as it becomes old technology.
So, thank you.
I would ask that my full statement be a part of the record.
SEN. KENNEDY: All statements will be part of the record.
Mr. Gates, if Senator Murray doesn't give you a good introduction, we'll make sure we find someone up here that will. (Laughter.) But we're confident that she will. As you well know, she's been one of the great voices in this institution and in our country in terms of supporting innovativeness and creativity and competitiveness.
Senator Murray, we're so glad to have you here.
SEN. PATTY MURRAY (D-Wash.): Thank you, Chairman Kennedy.
SEN. KENNEDY: As well as our veterans, I might add. Thank you.
SEN. MURRAY: Thank you, Chairman Kennedy, ranking member Enzi, members of the committee.
When it comes to making our country more competitive, improving our schools, and preparing our workforce, we face real challenges today. Those challenges require innovative solutions, and that's why I'm so pleased to welcome to the Senate one of the most innovative thinkers of our time, Bill Gates.
We all know about his work launching Microsoft back in 1975 and turning it into one of America's most successful companies. Microsoft software is used here in the Senate, on most of the PCs around the world, and increasingly on servers, mobile phones, and broadband networks.
We're also familiar with his visionary work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has quickly become a global leader in philanthropy, protecting and saving millions of lives around the world.
From my work with him over the years, I've seen firsthand his commitment to making our country more competitive. Over the years, he's tackled these issues from several perspectives. As the leader of a high-tech company, he's familiar with the challenges of finding highly skilled workers. He supported educational programs and training partnerships with schools and the private sector. And he understands how technology can help move us toward a system of lifelong learning that reflects the reality of tomorrow's economy.
As the head of a major foundation, he's invested in education and workforce solutions in the U.S. and around the world. His analysis of our high school system has been provocative and thought-provoking. As someone who helped develop the tools of our knowledge economy, he's working to make sure that all Americans can benefit from the opportunities that technologies offer.
Personally, I can tell you he's done so much to support the economy and workers in my home state where Microsoft and Gates Foundation are pillars of our community.
I am very pleased that he's agreed to share his insights with us here in the Senate today, and I really want to thank him for his leadership, vision, and eagerness to help us address the challenges that are facing our country.
Thank you very much, and welcome to the Senate, Bill.
SEN. KENNEDY: Mr. Gates, we have a rule about having our testimony from our witnesses usually 24 hours. You have broken that rule; you got yours here a week ago. (Laughter.) And we thank you. It gives us an idea, again, about efficiency, and we thank you very much. It's a very extensive testimony, let me add.
BILL GATES: Thank you.
Should I go ahead?
SEN. KENNEDY: You may proceed.
BILL GATES: Thank you.
Well, thank you, Senator Murray, for that kind introduction and for your leadership on education and so many other issues that are important to Washington state and the nation.
Chairman Kennedy, Ranking Member Enzi, members of the Committee, I'm Bill Gates and I am the chairman of Microsoft Corporation. I am also a co-chair, with my wife Melinda, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is an honor for me to appear before you today, and to share my thoughts on the future of American competitiveness.
Any discussion of competitiveness in the 21st century must begin by recognizing the central role that technology and innovation play in today's economy. The United States has a great deal to be proud of in this respect. Many of the most important advances in computing, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and many other fields have originated here in the United States.
Yet when I reflect on the state of American competitiveness, my feeling of pride is mixed with deep anxiety. Too often, it seems we're content to live off the investments previous generations made, and that we are failing to live up to our obligation to make the investments needed to make sure the U.S. remains competitive in the future.
We know we must change course, but we have yet to take the necessary action. In my view, our economic future is in peril unless we take three important steps:
First, we must equip America's students and workers with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in today's knowledge economy.
Second, we need to reform our immigration policies for high skilled workers so that we can be sure our workforce includes the world's most talented people.
And third, we need to provide a foundation for future innovation by investing in new ideas and providing a framework for capturing their value.
Today, I would like to address these three priorities.
First, and foremost, the U.S. cannot maintain its economic leadership unless our workforce consists of people who have the knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation. The problem starts in our schools, with a great failure taking place in our high schools. Consider the following facts:
The U.S. has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the industrialized world. Three out of 10 ninth-graders do not graduate on time. Nearly half of all African-American and Hispanic ninth graders do not graduate within four years. Of those who do graduate and continue on to college, nearly half have to take remedial courses on material they should have learned in high school.
Unless we transform the American high school, we'll limit the economic opportunities for millions of Americans. As a nation, we should start with the goal of every child in the United States graduating from high school.
To achieve this goal, we need to adopt more rigorous standards and set clear expectations. We must collect data that will enable students, parents and teachers to improve performance.
And if we are going to demand more from our students, we'll need to expect more from teachers. In return, we must provide teachers the support they need, and we must be willing to reward those who excel. The Teacher Incentive Fund is an important first step.
Making these changes will be hard, but positive change is achievable. I know this through my work with the Gates Foundation and our education partnerships throughout the country, and through Microsoft's education initiatives, including our Partners in Learning program. I mention several examples of progress in my written testimony, but let me mention three in particular:
The Philadelphia School District joined with Microsoft to create a 750 student "School of the Future", which opened last September. This public high school is rooted in the vision of an empowered community where education is continuous, relevant, adaptive, and incorporates best-in-class technology in every area of learning.
Second, New York City has opened almost 200 new schools in the last five years, with many replacing the city's most underperforming schools. Our foundation supports this effort through advocacy and grant-making. The first set of new schools achieved an average 79 percent graduation rate compared to graduation rates ranging from 31 to 51 percent at the schools they replaced.
Early-college high schools are perhaps the most innovative initiative underway nationally. The approach is to recruit low-performing students to attend high schools that require enrollment in college courses. The results are astounding. Currently, there are more than 125 early-college high schools in operation around the country. So far, more than 95 percent of the first class of ninth graders at the original three early-college high schools have graduated, and over 80 percent of students have been accepted into four-year colleges.
Such pockets of success are exciting, but they are just the start. Transforming our education systems will take political leadership, broad public commitment, and hard work. This committee has done very important work in this regard, and as you consider legislation during this Congress, there are opportunities to build on this work.
The challenges are great, but we cannot put them aside. That is why our foundation has joined with the Broad Foundation to support the Strong American Schools Partnership. This is intended to inspire the American people to join an effort that demands more from our leaders and educators, while ensuring that all of our children benefit from good teachers, high expectations and challenging coursework.
A specific area where we are failing is in math and science education. In my written testimony, I detail concerns about the alarming trends in elementary and secondary schools. We cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless we have citizens well educated in math, science, and engineering.
Our goal should be to double the number of science, technology, and mathematics graduates in the United States by 2015. This will require both funding and innovative ideas. We must renew and reinvigorate math and science curricula with engaging, relevant content. For high schools, we should aim to recruit 10,000 new teachers and strengthen the skills of existing teachers. To expand enrollment in post-secondary math and science programs, each year we should provide 25,000 new undergraduate scholarships and 5,000 new graduate fellowships.
America's young people must come to see science and math degrees as key to opportunity. If we fail at this, we won't be able to compete in the global economy.
Even as we need to improve our schools and universities, we cannot lose sight of the need to upgrade the skills of people already in our workforce.
Federal, state, and local governments and industry need to work together to prepare all of our workers for the jobs required in the knowledge economy. In the written testimony, I highlight some of Microsoft's work during the past decade to provide IT skills training to United States workers, such as our Unlimited Potential program. We're working with other companies, industry associations, and state agencies to build a workforce alliance that will promote the digital skills needed to strengthen U.S. competitiveness.
As a nation, our goal should be to ensure that by 2010, every job seeker in the United States workforce can access the education and training they need to succeed in the knowledge economy.
The second major area, and one I want to particularly underscore today, is the need to attract top science and engineering talent from around the globe to study, live and work in the United States.
America has always done its best when we bring the best minds to our shores. Scientists like Albert Einstein were born abroad but did great work here because we welcomed them. The contributions of such powerful intellects [have] been vital to many of the great breakthroughs made here in America.
Now we a face a critical shortage of scientific talent. And there is only one way to solve that crisis today: Open our doors to highly talented scientists and engineers who want to live, work, and pay taxes here.
I cannot overstate the importance of overhauling our high-skilled immigration system. We have to welcome the great minds in this world, not shut them out of our country. Unfortunately, our immigration policies are driving away the world's best and brightest precisely when we need them most. The fact is that the terrible shortfall in the visa supply for highly skilled scientists and engineers stems from visa policies that have not been updated in more than 15 years. We live in a different economy now, and it makes no sense to tell well-trained, highly skilled individuals – many of whom are educated at our top universities – that they are not welcome here.
I see the negative effects of these policies every day at Microsoft. In my written testimony, I discuss some of the shortfalls of the current system. For 2007, the supply of H1-B visas ran out four months before the fiscal year even began. For 2008, they will run out even earlier, well before degreed candidates graduate. So, for the first time ever, we will not be able to seek H-1Bs for this year's graduating students. The wait times for green cards routinely reach five years, and are even longer for scientists and engineers from India and China, key recruiting grounds for skilled technical professionals.
The question we must ask is: "How do we create an immigration system that supports the innovation that drives American growth, economic opportunity and prosperity?" Congress can answer that question by acting immediately in two significant ways:
First, we need to encourage the best students from abroad to enroll in our colleges and universities, and to remain here when they finish their studies. Today, we take exactly the opposite approach.
Second, we should expedite the path into our workforce and into Permanent Resident status for highly skilled workers. These employees are vital to U.S. competitiveness, and we should encourage them to become permanent U.S. residents so they can drive innovation and economic growth alongside America's native born talent.
Finally, maintaining American competitiveness requires that we invest in research and reward innovation. Our nation's current economic leadership is a direct result of investments that previous generations made in scientific research, especially through public funding of projects in government and university research laboratories.
American companies have capitalized on these innovations, thanks to our world-class universities, innovative policies on technology transfer, and pro-investment tax rules. These policies have driven a surge in private sector research and development
While private sector research and development is important, federal research funding is vital. Unfortunately, while other countries and regions, such as China and the European Union, are increasing their public investment in R&D, federal research spending in the United States is not keeping pace. To address this problem, I urge Congress to take action.
The Federal Government should increase funding for basic scientific research. Recent expansion of the research budgets at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation is commendable, but more must be done. We should also increase funding for basic research by 10 percent annually for the next seven years.
Second, Congress should increase and make permanent private sector tax credits for R&D. The United States ranks 17th among OECD nations in the tax treatment of R&D. Without a renewed commitment to R&D tax credits, we may drive innovative companies to locate their R&D operations outside U.S. borders.
We must also reward innovators. This means ensuring that inventors can obtain intellectual property protection for their innovations and enforce those rights in the marketplace. America is fortunate that our leaders recognize the importance of intellectual property protection at home and abroad. I know I join many other Americans in thanking this Congress and this Administration for their tireless efforts to promote such protection.
The challenges confronting America's competitiveness and technological leadership are among the greatest we have faced in our lifetime. I recognize that conquering these challenges will not be easy, but I firmly believe that if we succeed, our efforts will pay rich dividends for all Americans. We have had the amazing good fortune to live through a period of incredible innovation and prosperity. The question before us today is: "Do we have the will to ensure that the generation that follows will also enjoy the benefits that come with economic leadership?" We must not squander this opportunity to secure America's continued competitiveness and prosperity.
Thank you again for this opportunity to testify. I welcome your questions on these topics.
SEN. KENNEDY: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Gates, and thank you particularly for your extensive testimony. I hope members will get a chance to sort of take that with them. It's a very detailed, elaborate testimony that expands on each of these points with an enormous amount of useful and constructive information.
We'll try and do four-minute rounds. We've got quite a group here. I thought of less than that, if we can do – hopefully we'll have the questions short and have the answers. Let me – so, we'll do four-minute rounds.
Let me ask you, we're going to address a number of these issues on the immigration issue. We had a chance to talk, and we're continuing to talk, and I think the points that you make, make a lot of very, very good sense, and we'll work closely with you when we have an opportunity to get to that.
I'd like to ask you a broader question, and that is about sort of the spirit of innovation and discovery. Your company is the company in the world that really epitomizes innovation and discovery. We have seen this nation at different times, whether it's building the Brooklyn Bridge, or going to the moon, whatever, different times in our country where we had this spirit of innovation and discovery.
I'm interested in what you would say, or what your comment on the broad theme about how you generate that kind of spirit of innovation and discovery, and have it something that's valued by the American people, so that they expect leadership in these areas by those who are going to lead this nation. How do we get to the point where this nation is just not eating seed corn from the past generation, as you kind of referenced, but really is going to be the kind of generation that is going to add an additional dimension to our society, and in all the areas that are out there? I mean, the life science century here in terms of human progress and the human genome and stem cell research; the possibilities are virtually unlimited. How does the nation, what should we expect, what can you tell us and tell the American people about what they ought to expect and what leaders ought to provide?
BILL GATES: Well, the opportunities for innovation in the computer field and in the health field in particular are much greater than I think people recognize. The pace of innovation in those areas will be far more rapid than ever before. And so there will be some wonderful breakthroughs, computers that we can talk to, and continued low cost, even using computers in education in some ways that we've never seen before, so that every kid can access the world's knowledge and find other kids who have similar interests. I think as people see that, there will be a great level of excitement.
The world at large, and these two things that the United States has, we have the world's best universities, the top 20 universities, a list, anywhere from 15 to 19 of those people would say are in the United States. Now, that's recognized by countries overseas, and they're likewise making investments in their universities, but that is a huge advantage.
And even if you look at where the companies that do technological advances, biotech or computer companies, where they've grown up, it's largely where the top universities are, as opposed to just the large population centers.
The other thing that people envy is this is the country that the most talented people in the world want to come and work at. And so if you look at any of the technology companies, which are the ones I know best, they are quite a mix of people who grew up in the United States and foreign born people.
The excitement about these breakthroughs, we definitely need to do more to share that story, because if we look at the enrollment trends in science and math, it continues to decline, and the declines are even more pronounced if you look at women in those fields or minorities in those fields. And so you have this contradiction, here you have Apple, Google, Microsoft, great companies doing neat things, and you'd expect that would draw the young people into those fields, and yet because of the curriculum or the quality of the teaching in those areas, it's not happening here, and that's partly why there is this shortage, and yet other countries are putting the energy into that.
SEN. KENNEDY: Let me just ask, because my time is going to be up, you outlined in particular the areas of education, and it's – and you're noted for accountability. What do you expect of the business community? This would be extensive kinds of investments that you've outlined in terms of the kinds of recommendations. What should we expect of the business community? What role can they play in terms of helping to move in these directions, particularly in the areas of education? Do you see a role for them in there? What should we expect from them, what should we ask them?
BILL GATES: Well, first and foremost, the business community has to be an advocate for high-quality education, that those investments are fundamental to their future. The business community also will be a leader in terms of workforce training. There are some very innovative ways of using online Internet training and skills testing that is starting in the business community, but I think will even start to be used in universities as well.
Businesses like Microsoft that have a particular expertise, in our case software, can provide that to schools, can make sure our employees are volunteering and getting the computer science learning, even down in the elementary schools to be as strong as it can be.
So, I think business is seeing this as a top issue, and wants to get more involved. In some cases coming into the schools and helping out, that's hard for them to do, but I think the desire is definitely there.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Enzi. Thank you.
SEN. ENZI: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I really appreciate your comments about rewarding teachers who excel. We did have in our appropriations a little over $100 million for doing that, but there seems to be some concern about paying a little bit more to somebody who does well, and that got pulled out of the appropriations in the final bill.
A year ago I was in India. We were trying to find out why they graduate so many scientists and engineers. I did have one person that I thought had some great insight. They said that they didn't have any professional sports teams. (Laughter.) So the highest pay and the most prestige that they could get was being a scientist or an engineer or a doctor, something in that kind of field.
We're trying to strengthen America's competitiveness in this global economy, and we know that workers have to know and understand math and science, and once kids drop out of math and science they never seem to get back into it.
So, how do we do that? Do we have to fire them up with fear or just desire of knowledge? How do we get kids interested in the science and math fields?
BILL GATES: Well, one of the positive data points in this area is that there's over a thousand high schools that the Gates Foundation has helped support, that take a bit of a different approach. These are smaller high schools. These are where kids are taking fewer subjects at a time. And a number of those have themes, and the themes are quite varied. Some are early-college, some are high-tech, some are art, construction, aviation, Outward Bound. But it takes the math curriculum, and instead of it just being math for math's sake, they teach it in terms of solving a problem, dealing with a project.
And many of these schools are seeing much higher percentages of kids interested in going into math and science. For example, High Tech High, which there's quite a few of those now, over 30 percent of the kids say they want to go into math and science, and so that's more than double the number that you have out of the typical high school.
And so I think the quality of the math and science teachers, that they are engaged in their field, they can share the love of their field, and some improvements in the curriculum are a very important element to that.
SEN. ENZI: Thank you. There's a first robotics competition that gets kids interested in engineering and some of those things, too. And I've been doing an inventors' conference in Wyoming every year to stimulate kids to think about inventions, not necessarily ones as complicated as computers, just some basic changes, and that's been having some success at getting kids into science.
Since we have a lot of people here, I will go ahead and relinquish the rest of my time. I really appreciate your testimony, and I'll be inviting you to my inventors' conference.
BILL GATES: Excellent. Thank you.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Dodd.
SEN. CHRISTOPHER DODD (D-Conn.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And Mr. Gates, welcome to the committee, and all of us want to underscore the comments of Senator Kennedy and Senator Murray in the opening remarks. We have great admiration for you, what you've done with your company, but also what you're doing with the foundation, and your deep commitment to these issues, so thank you immensely for that.
Vern Ehlers and I have a piece of legislation on voluntary national standards. We emphasize the word voluntary because of the problems with mandated standards. We'd invite your attention to take a look at it. We provide some incentives in there to try and get them, given the fact that we see states dumbing down in too many cases test scores here so that they're allowed to stay in operation but certainly not providing the kind of standardized judgments that we want to make about whether or not we're reaching the goals that we all want to have for us.
And I appreciate you mentioning the university high schools. We had a hearing of this committee at the University of Hartford several years ago, which is one of those institutions you talked about here, where the university has the high school on the campus of the University of Hartford. In fact, Senator Alexander and I had a witness before this committee of a young man who is a student at that university high school who was very compelling to all of us here in the experience he's having as a result of being drawn out and brought into that environment, and making a difference with it.
The United Technologies Corporation in Connecticut, George David, who I think you may know the chief executive officer there, offers to all of their employees worldwide the time, the cost, and the incentive of offering stock to students who get a higher degree, who are employees of United Technologies. The cost to the corporation is obviously a significant amount, but the advantage has been tremendous in terms of retention and productivity of their employees. So, there are very creative ideas that are occurring all over the place.
I want to draw your attention, if I can, to a subject matter -- we've spent a lot on this committee over the years dealing with zero to three. In fact, one of your great pals and friends, Warren Buffett, his daughter, Suzy Buffett, is very involved in this issue as well.
I wonder if you might draw some attention to that question here in response to this idea of early intervention with the brain development. We start identifying – in fact, many people tell you that by the time a student is in the third grade, already if you're not succeeding and moving forward, their ability to succeed and develop the appetites for math and science diminish to a large extent.
And there have been some suggestions of starting things like universal pre-K programs where you really have quality childcare, so that you begin to get that parental involvement early on to develop and nurture the ability of these children to be ready to learn, to then accept the disciplines in math and science.
I know you've done a lot of work in the health related areas, but I wonder if you might just address some of the early interventions that might be made to increase the possibility of students developing these appetites.
BILL GATES: OK, first, in terms of the tests, I think it is important for us to know where we stand. Mathematics is not different in one state versus another state, and so having a clear understanding of where our 4th graders, 8th graders, seniors are in these areas, we're certainly a big advocate of that.
The problem you get into is as soon as you realize how bad the situation is, then it's like a hot potato, people say, well, what's the problem? And I think NCLB, one of the great things is it has pointed out these deficits. There's a lot of discussion about how that can be improved, but I think overall that's a big contribution that people have seen the minority achievement is not where it should be, and various high schools are not where they should be.
In terms of the early learning part, there's varying data on this. If you take the United States at the 4th-grade level, we are still largely at the top in testing of 4th graders. By 8th grade we're in the middle of the pack, and by senior year we're basically at the bottom of rich countries.
And so there's clearly something happening there to our broad student people. We have the highest dropout rate, and that's why the foundation, you know, even though early learning is important, elementary is important, we took high schools as our big focus, particularly because there wasn't a lot going on in that area.
We do in Washington state have a couple of early-learning pilots that are very similar to what Suzy Buffett has done in Omaha, and what a number of people have done in Chicago.
Some of the tracking data suggests those early interventions last, some of the data suggests those early interventions fade in benefit because the environment, both the social and home environment that those kids are in, that within, say, three years a lot of that has gone away.
Some of these tough issues in education like merit systems that teachers will embrace, or curricula that uses technology in new ways, those are some of the issues that in the middle of next year, as I get moved to be full time at the foundation, I want to spend a lot more time sitting and watching what goes on, and learning a lot about.
Early learning has some real benefits, but the numbers are still there's quite a range of opinions about how impactful it is.
SEN. DODD: I appreciate that very much, look forward to that as well.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Gregg.
SEN. JUDD GREGG (R-N.H.): Thank you.
Let me join my colleagues in thanking you for your efforts in putting your dollars behind your language, on the issue of education especially. And I agree with you that the issue is at the high school level. And when Senator Kennedy and I were putting together the No Child Left Behind, we focused on math and science because it was a quantitative event, but we didn't get into the high school, because the federal government really doesn't have a role in high school, we don't fund high schools.
The one place we do have a role is in this area of immigration, which you've mentioned. And I'm also in total agreement with your view, which I would characterize, maybe inappropriately, as going around the world and picking the best and the brightest, and having them come to the United States. And that's what we've done as a culture, and we've been very successful.
So, I guess my first question to you is, do you have a number that you think we need relative to the H1-B visa program? Today it's statutorily set at about 65,000, but we're up to 520,000. Do you think that number should be raised to 200,000, 300,000? What would make America – give us the capacity to get the people we need to come here to take advantage of our society, and we take advantage of their abilities?
BILL GATES: Well, my basic view is that an infinite number of people coming, who are taking jobs that pay over $100,000 a year, they're going to pay taxes, we create lots of other jobs around those people, my basic view is that the country should welcome as many of those people as we can get, because people with those great talents, particularly in engineering areas, the jobs are going to exist somewhere, and the jobs around them are going to be created wherever those uniquely talented people are.
So, even though it may not be realistic, I don't think there should be any limit. Other countries have systems where based on your education, your employability, you're scored for immigration, and so these people would not have difficulty getting into other rich countries. In fact, countries like Canada and Australia have been beneficiaries of our system discouraging these people with both the limits and the long waits and what the process feels like as they go through the security checks.
There are some suggestions about if we could, say, in the green card system not have to count the family members. If you somewhat more than doubled that, you could start to clear the backlog and not have that be a problem.
Likewise, with H1-B, if you had a few categories, like people who are educated here in this country, that you gave an exemption outside of the quota, that somewhat more than doubling would get us what we need.
But to some degree that's sort of like a centrally managed economy, so we'll --
SEN. GREGG: Unfortunately, because my time is going to be up, unfortunately that's what we have here. I agree 100-percent that we shouldn't have a limit on highly skilled people coming into the country, but we do have a centrally managed economy, and right now it's not being managed well.
So, I would presume that if we were to double the number, say, to 300,000, you wouldn't have any problem with that, since you're willing to go to infinity?
BILL GATES: Well, it would be a fantastic improvement. And I do think that there's a draft bill that has provisions that would largely take care of this problem.
SEN. GREGG: We also have something called a lottery system, which allows 50,000 people in the country, simply because they win a lottery, and they could be a truck driver from the Ukraine. And last year I offered an amendment, which would have taken that system and required 60 percent of those to be people with advanced degrees in order to participate in the lottery, so you'd have to be a physicist from the Ukraine before you could win the lottery. Do you think that would be a better approach maybe?
BILL GATES: Well, I don't – I'm not an expert on the various categories that exist, and I don't actually know that lottery system. I know the engineers at Microsoft, nobody comes up to me and says, "Hey, I won this lottery."
SEN. GREGG: Well, that's the problem.
BILL GATES: But there's a lot of different categories in there, and I'm not sure how they should all be handled. But I do know in the case of the engineering situation, we should specifically have that be dramatically increased.
SEN. GREGG: Thank you.
SEN. KENNEDY: Normally, Mr. Gates, we'd have Senator Murray here. She's chairing a veterans committee at this time, and I think we understand the importance of that, particularly at this time. So, she is necessarily absent, and wanted to extend her wishes.
Senator Clinton.
SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D-N.Y.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Mr. Gates. We're delighted to have you.
Senator Enzi made reference to Sputnik 50 years ago, and one of the ongoing results of that event was to really focus America's attention on what we needed to do with math and science education, to try to provide loans for school, the NDEA loans. I got one, even though I was not a math or science person. And I think it's really appropriate that in 2007 we would take another look at what we need to do to be competitive, and to maintain our scientific and technological edge.
You said in your testimony that we should set a goal of making sure every young person graduates from high school, which I agree with, and there are benefits to that; even if the curriculum is not as good as we would want it, or the outcomes, it is still a positive.
And then in your testimony you also talk about the skills of the existing workforce. And I'd like to turn our attention to that for a minute, because clearly we have an existing workforce that we hope can be supplemented both by people coming from abroad, but also by a better pipeline of our own citizens.
How do you see the most effective way of trying to improve the skills of the workforce here? I know you have a couple of programs that Microsoft has used to try to do that. Could you give us a little more detail on what works to improve the IT and computing skills, and how we could perhaps focus on that also from this committee to try to improve the outcomes?
BILL GATES: Many of the Microsoft programs have focused on the areas where you have industries which are reducing the number of employees, and then going into those situations and giving the training – and fairly basic training, this is not high-level engineering, this is training somebody so they'd be effective in a call center environment or an aid type work, which is very good work. And so we've gone to the hotspots where you have, say, a factory shutting down, or significant employment, and made sure that the opportunities to learn are there.
One of our most successful things, that wasn't really intended as a workforce training thing, was actually the libraries program, where we went to all the libraries in the country. The computers were funded by the foundation and Microsoft gave the software. And it's been amazing to see people coming into those libraries who are looking at job opportunities, and then looking at what kind of training can be available.
One of the new trends is that training instead of just being in a classroom, that the videos, great videos and great tests for these things, are starting to become available on the Internet. And so if you're lucky enough to be able to get to a computer, either in a library or a community center or somehow, then you can access all of this great learning material, and even test your skills and even get accreditation.
And so Microsoft, Cisco, and a number of others have created accreditation tests not just for high-level engineering but for like operators and other jobs. And people with those certificates are able then to move into the workforce in a fairly straightforward fashion.
So, we can use technology to improve these training opportunities, we can go after the hotspots, and then just broad infrastructure, going beyond libraries, can give people more access.
SEN. CLINTON: I also think though that some of these programs would be useful in our high schools, and even our junior high schools, because a lot of the data that I'm seeing says that kids are bored, they don't feel stimulated, there's not enough technology in their school environment compared to their outside of school environment.
Finally, Mr. Gates, you made a brief reference to health IT as you made your initial remarks. This is something that Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi and I and others have been working on for a number of years to try to create an architecture for a national system of health IT in the medical field, which we think will have innumerable benefits for patients and providers and others.
Could you say just an additional word about what you see for the future of health IT, and how important it is that we begin go set up some kind of a system so that everybody knows what the standards are, and how we can begin to implement that?
BILL GATES: Well, yeah, the current state of health IT is surprisingly poor. That is, the amount of paperwork, the information that's incorrect, the overhead in the system of just trying to shuffle things around, and we see that, whether it's in the costs or also in the outcomes. If you're away from your normal location, and you're injured, how do they have access to the information? And so far a lot of the things have just made you sign more privacy release statements.
And so I think Microsoft, Intel, a lot of the technology companies are saying we've got to invest more in healthcare. We created ourselves just two years ago a new business in this area, because there's really an opportunity to create the software.
We're also seeing that consumers are interested in looking at their healthcare costs, not for themselves partly but also, say, you have an older relative that you're helping to manage their bills, what's going on; how do you easily see what's going on and make sure the right choices are being made there?
And if we could get some standards, then this idea of having it online and having people make choices, even being able to look at quality data, look at cost data, we'd get more of a market dynamic into the health system, which is a very important thing.
So, there are some initiatives that we're behind, and we've got some of our experts coming out and spending time talking about that. There is more that Congress could do on this, because within the next three or four years we ought to be able to make a dramatic change and reduce those costs, and create the visibility that better choices and incentives are driven into the system.
SEN. KENNEDY: Thank you very much.
Senator Bingaman and Senator Alexander have been particularly involved in this, in competitiveness legislation, as are many members of this committee, and so we acknowledge that effort, and glad to call on Senator Alexander.
SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-Tenn.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, Mr. Gates, thank you for coming.
I'm especially glad that you came, because it calls attention to what Senator Kennedy just mentioned. Two years ago, we asked the National Academy of Sciences a simple question: Exactly what should we do to keep our brainpower advantage? And they gave us 20 specific recommendations in priority order, starting with K-12. Up to 70 senators have been working on that in one way or the other over the last two years. And our two Senate leaders, Reid and McConnell, introduced that on Monday into the Senate with broad support, and it includes most of the provisions that you recommended, or at least many of your recommendations that were in your excellent testimony.
So, your presence here helps call attention, is getting more attention than our announcement on Monday, and I'm glad to call attention to what's going on, and it's not enacted yet.
Also, as Senator Gregg mentioned, the immigration bill that many worked on had several provisions, stapling a green card to the lapel of the PhD or master's degree person, foreign-born person, and there is an opportunity I would say this year as we work on immigration to significantly expand that. I think there's a broad consensus in the senate that we ought to give more preference to highly skilled, foreign-born people. We should be insourcing brainpower, and we just need to think of the ways to do it.
My question goes back to a comment that Senator Enzi made, a reference you made to your work with the foundation. Twenty-five years ago I noticed that not one state was paying one teacher one penny more for being a good teacher. I was governor of Tennessee at the time. Now, I didn't know that until my second term as governor. So, I set about to try to change it. And one of the persons I worked with was Albert Shankar, the late head of the American Federation of Teachers, who said, "Well, if we can have master plumbers, we should be able to have master teachers." But we've made very little progress on that since then, because we haven't been able to find a fair way to reward outstanding teachers and outstanding school leadership.
Yesterday, Senator Kennedy hosted a discussion where every witness talked about the need for gifted mentor teachers, gifted teachers to go into the inner city, gifted teachers to teach gifted students, I mean, exceptional men and women, and yet we dance around the problem that we have no way to reward them for their excellence with higher pay.
Now, the teacher incentive fund you mentioned in your testimony was in No Child Left Behind. It is President Bush as recommended $200 million for next year, but it got cut, maybe by accident, in the confusion between last session and this session. But it basically has a series of programs across the country, Philadelphia and New York, places where you're working, some working with local union leadership to find fair ways to reward outstanding principles in teachers.
So, my question for you is, and my hope would be as you move more into your foundation work, do you think it would be useful the next five years to encourage such efforts as a teacher incentive fund, and private foundation efforts to crack this nut of finding multiple fair ways of rewarding excellence in teaching and school leadership by paying people more for teaching and leading well?
BILL GATES: Yeah, absolutely. Having the incentive system work is very, very important. And one of our challenges is that these two areas, health and education, that are a higher and higher percentage of the economy, bringing the right type of metrics and sort of market-based activities to those has proven to be very difficult. And I think in terms of how teacher evaluation is done, we should encourage lots of experiments and make sure that people who are doing the experiments get some extra funds to go and do those.
This is a great example where we don't know the answer today of what is a merit system that would pay great teachers more, that teachers as a whole would feel is a predictable, well run system. And as we do these experiments, we might have to invest more in teacher remediation or reviewing what's going on with teachers.
Technology can help. The cost of actually seeing what goes on, helping teachers see how they can do better and letting them learn from other teachers, seeing what they do and using their curriculum, the cost of that is coming down quite a bit.
So, we need to make sure that a willingness to try these things that are out there, and that some of the extra money that it requires is there. Simply if you just say we're going to do merit-based today, people don't think the measurement approaches are going to be predictable enough for them.
SEN. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I think the datacenters that Mr. Gates suggested in his testimony might be helpful in gathering the increasing information on student achievement, and relating that to teacher effectiveness.
SEN. KENNEDY: Thank you very much.
Senator Reed.
SEN. JACK REED (D-R.I.): Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Mr. Gates. Thank you.
Your testimony I found was very persuasive, and you said, committed quality teachers are the linchpin of a good education system," and I think many of the questions you're getting today are sort of circling around that issue of how do we get quality teachers into our system. And I'm just very curious in general what are your thoughts of the things we could be doing, things that we could do in partnership with private foundations like your own, what are the impediments that you see from your perspective to getting good teachers technically qualified in the right places?
BILL GATES: Well, I definitely think if you could have an incentive system that allowed good teachers to be paid more, you would draw more people into the field. So, you have this Catch-22 that because there's no good measurement system, you don't have people who like to have that type of approach taken.
And historically we've probably benefited – it was unjust, but because women had less opportunities in other fields, there were super-talented people who went in, even though the economic rewards were not that great. That's changed; a lot of those talented women are now the majority of our business schools, our law schools, and that's a good thing.
SEN. REED: Some of them are sitting right next to us.
BILL GATES: Absolutely.
And so the under-attention to making it attractive to be a teacher, and having measurement systems there, now it's more important than ever.
There are some of these charter schools that we're involved with that have been given permission to certify teachers, and so they're able to take people who are math and science oriented, and who do not have, say, the broad set of requirements that a normal teacher certificate would require, but they're allowed to come in and teach in those areas. And so how much loosening up you could do to let people come in both full time for a number of years, or even in some cases part time to come in and share their enthusiasm and be part of that mix, I think we need a lot more experimentation with that. And the charter structure in many states has allowed us to try some of those things out, and in California in particular it's been quite effective.
SEN. REED: Well, I agree with your insight that the metrics are very important, and hopefully that would be something that you would be working on through your educational issues, and other thoughtful individuals and groups.
And then the second issue, if you've got the metrics right, how do you actually do the compensation? Some thought has been given to using the tax system now, because it might avoid the whole issue of who decides in terms of the pay, is it a local level. And a group of policy people of the Horizon Projects have suggested significant tax breaks for qualified teachers who meet certain criteria.
And it just strikes me is that might avoid some of the fighting we've seen at the local level between this notion of merit pay is distrusted because who's going to distribute it, how are they going to decide, et cetera, and I'm just wondering if you have a thought or comment.
BILL GATES: Yeah, I don't see any technique that avoids the hard fact that a merit-based system involves making judgments about you did a good job, you did not do a good job. It's kind of like in healthcare where you say this expense is reasonable, this expense is unreasonable. Who's willing to stand up and say, yes, I made that choice?
And in terms of saying, you know, to a teacher, no, you need to go under remediation; or, no, you've been in remediation three times, you're not the right person for this career, that's in a political sense very, very difficult. But all these merit-based systems involve those judgments being made. No matter what the source of the money is, that really needs to happen.
And in all these educational things you have to always be careful, because when you create new schools, you often attract, even if you have no criteria for it, the better teachers will just show up there, and the better students will just show up there. And so when you look at these results, you have to be very careful that you're not just seeing that effect as opposed to some new approach.
That's partly why we've gone in the foundation to 1,400, and we'll get up to about 2,000 high schools, a large enough number that it's not just a few good people or that effect. And so there are some big cities, including New York, Chicago and Washington, DC, where we're trying to do things at large scale.
Some things are less controversial, like having the smaller high schools, or having the theme-based high schools. The pay-practice issues have been the toughest. And so although there's been some changes, for example, in New York the mayor took some of the worst things of the seniority system, of people being able to bump other teachers around, and was able to override that. But most of what we're doing is more about curriculum and structure, and so far, although we'd love to have it be about it, it's not been so much about the teacher evaluation.
SEN. REED: Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. KENNEDY: Do you remember who was your best teacher when you were growing up?
BILL GATES: Yeah. I hate to say it, I went to a private high school myself.
SEN. KENNEDY: OK.
BILL GATES: But, yes, absolutely.
SEN. KENNEDY: But, I mean, you remember who the teacher was. Was that person the person with the most degrees, or was it –
BILL GATES: It was a person who understood science, one science teacher, one math teacher, who loved the field. That is, they had a college degree in the subject, but they also were interested in following the subject, and just loved the idea that somebody else was interested in what they were interested in. So, it's that engagement certainly made a huge difference for me.
SEN. KENNEDY: That's good.
Senator Burr.
SEN. RICHARD BURR (R-N.C.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You remember who was the strictest teacher you had? (Laughter.)
Part of the challenge that we've got is that we've got a generation of kids that are relying on us to make the right decision. And I want to thank you for your willingness to come in, and more importantly, I want to thank you and your wife for your passion for education, but also your investment in education.
I think this weekend you might have spent some time with the president of our university system, and your wife's familiarity with Duke University, you know about higher education in North Carolina.
I want to talk about high school, because I think that should be our passion today.
You made a statement in your testimony, "The goal should be that every child should graduate prepared to go to higher education or to work."
And the need to transform America's high schools for the 21st century, let me ask you, do our expectations for high school students limit our ability to transform the system?
BILL GATES: Yeah, absolutely. The low standards we have today allow us to think we're doing better than we are; and they don't challenge the students. One of the most amazing things about these early college schools is they are taking the kids who did poorly and by asking them to do literally more than they were doing in the school they dropped out of, a very high percentage of them rise to the occasion. They were essentially bored, it wasn't hard enough for them in the high school that they were in. And particularly if it's a curriculum that gets connected to this is what you need to do to achieve some job that you're interested in, it works amazingly well.
There's been a move afoot to raise the standards, the state level standards for high schools. North Carolina has been a leader in this to say that you should have three years of mathematics, and that those math classes shouldn't be just balancing the checkbook.
So, in the last couple of years, I think it's almost 30 states now have raised this high school standards. It's still not where it should be.
SEN. BURR: I want to emphasize something that you said, that the boredom, the dislocation of students is not always because they just don't want to be in class and they don't want to learn; in many cases it's because they're not challenged enough. And that's one of the unique things about the Gates high schools. I've found that it engages every student at a different level, and it engages them as a team in many cases.
Should states consider, those that haven't, raising the age that one can voluntarily disengage from high school education from 16 to 18?
BILL GATES: Well, I don't know about that. I mean, the question is, OK, say you raise that age; what are you doing to that 16-year-old? Are you going out and finding them and handcuffing and dragging him in? I mean, this issue of these demotivated students, who just aren't connecting, is a very tough problem.
One of the things that's happened in all the high schools we back is we make them small high schools. And what I mean by small is that the total high school size is about 500 to 600. And that's very different than the big high schools that get up in 2,000 to 3,000.
In those high schools the goal is that every adult knows every student, and so that when you're walking the halls, they say, hey, you're supposed to be over there; hey, I heard you didn't turn your homework in, do you need help? And so if you create a smaller social environment, then it really changes the behavior in the high school. You don't think, okay, I'm just a motorcycle gang guy, I'm not supposed to work hard, and you only end up with this small percentage who are the hardworking students.
So, this small size, although it's still somewhat controversial, looks like it's making a big difference. And the nice thing about that, it's not more expensive. You may need to pool some things for the sports program, but it's not an increasing expense. And so that's one of the few things we've found that we think really does draw the kids in, and create relationships that have expectation that get them to step up.
SEN. BURR: Great, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Sanders.
SEN. BERNARD SANDERS (I-Vt.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Gates, let me add my voice to those of the other senators here in applauding you not just for the huge amount of money that you have provided all kinds of groups, but the innovative quality of your foundation that you and your wife head, and not just in the United States but all over the world. You've done an extraordinary job, and I applaud you.
Now I'm going to take a little different tact than some of my colleagues, and I want to know how you're getting along with your dad. Because when we talk about many of the challenges that we're facing, we have to do it within the context of a country which has an $8 trillion national debt. And I certainly agree with you that we need more innovation in education and a whole lot of areas; they're going to cost money.
So, let me ask you a question. Your dad and Warren Buffett and others have been very loud and articulate in saying that repealing the estate tax, which would cost us about a trillion dollars over a 10-year period, is not a good idea, that some of the wealthiest people in this country are doing just fine, they don't need for their families that additional wealth that repealing the estate tax would provide. Do you agree with your dad that repealing the estate tax is not necessary?
BILL GATES: Well, I think there are very few people who speak out for a tax. Many people come, and like I have today, said, OK, research is more important, we need to spend more on that. Education, although the federal piece is only a small piece of it, there probably needs to be more put into that, and so those things do create budget challenges.
In my dad's case, he's actually saying that there's merit in terms – for a number of reasons, including the revenue raised, that that tax be preserved.
I myself in terms of speaking out publicly have chosen the innovation issues that are key, and trade issues that are key for Microsoft, and the global health and education issues that are key to the foundation. And so that's a lot, and so those are the things where I'm speaking out as much as I can.
I do agree with my dad. I think what he's doing there has got a lot of merit. He, together with a colleague, wrote a book about the issue, which actually after I read that, I thought there were a lot of good arguments in there that I had not heard before.
SEN. SANDERS: I won't ask you what your kids feel about it, but you do agree with your dad that repealing the estate tax is not a good idea, is that what I'm hearing you say?
BILL GATES: Yes. I haven't chosen in terms of speaking out. I've picked global health, education, and some key innovation issues around Microsoft as the ones that I'm developing expertise and really putting the time into, but I think what my dad has done is right, and if I had a vote on it, I would agree with what he's saying.
SEN. SANDERS: Thanks very much.
Let me ask you this, and this is a sensitive issue, and a touchy issue. I think there is no disagreement on this committee or in the Congress that as a nation we're doing a terrible job in math and science, that it is a disgrace how few engineers we are graduating. And you have done a fantastic job in focusing on that issue.
But there is another side of the coin where you and I may disagree, and I'd like your comments on that, and that is the issue of outsourcing. And that is my understanding is that from January of – this is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that from January of 2001 to January of 2006, the information sector of the U.S. economy lost 644,000 jobs, et cetera, et cetera.
Also, I think you would probably agree that many major corporations, including your own, if they can hire qualified labor, engineers, scientists, in India or China for a fraction of the wages being paid in the United States, they're going to go there. And we have quotes from people like Andy Grove and John Chambers, leaders in information technology, who basically predict that the IT industry may end up in China.
Now, how do you address that issue, understanding we are in agreement, all of us are, the need to do a heck of a lot better job in education, high school education, math, science, but isn't there still going to be a lure, unless we get a handle on it, that companies are going to be running to China and India for qualified workers who are often paid a fraction of the wages they are in the United States?
BILL GATES: The demand worldwide for these highly qualified engineers is going to guarantee them all jobs, no matter where they're located. So, anyone in the United States who has these skills, no matter whether they're born here or came here, not only will they have a super-high-paying job, there will be many jobs created around them that are also great jobs. And so we should want to have as many of those people be here as possible, and have those jobs that are created around them.
We've been increasing our employment in the United States, and a limiting factor for us is how many of these great engineers that we can get here. And, yes, that does cause a problem.
The IT industry I guarantee you will be in the United States to the degree that these smart people are here in the United States, and that's why I think it's important to maximize that number.
You know, by and large, you can say is this country a beneficiary of free trade, and the answer is overwhelmingly yes. Why can our inventions, whether it be drugs or movies or software or planes, why can we invest so much in those products? It's because we're able to sell them into a global market.
And by having people of this skill level, we can have an economy that has very high defense costs, very high legal costs, very high medical costs, and yet continue to capture our fair share of the economic improvement that takes place. If we do things that artificially shut off our ability to engage in that trade system, then the impacts on our leading industries would be fairly dramatic.
So, we love these high-paying jobs, and our industry has continued to draw people into these jobs. We pay way above the prevailing wage rate because of the shortage that we see.
SEN. SANDERS: Well, thank you very much.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Isakson.
SEN. JOHNNY ISAKSON (R-Ga.): First of all, I want to thank you. And my company in the 1980s and '90s, I credit you with doubling the productivity of my employees and my agents. Microsoft Windows is just a phenomenal product, and all of us, the whole country has benefited from your innovation.
Which reminds of a quote of Robert Kennedy's years ago when he made a pretty well-known, famous speech during the African famine when he said, "Some people see things as they are and ask why; others see things as they never were and ask why not."
You obviously are a "why-not" guy. I mean, nobody could have envisioned Windows without having had a vision to say, well, why not?
What is it about this country that you attribute contributing to your can-do spirit, and your ability to envision that? This is a great country. We criticize it a lot of times, and I think it's good also to – I don't think you could have done what you did anywhere else in the world but in America, so I'd like to hear from you who did that some of the good things about this country.
BILL GATES: Well, absolutely. The success that I've had and that Microsoft has had has benefited immensely from unique characteristics that this country has. These are characteristics that the country continues to lead in; they're not unnoticed by others. But if we renew those strengths, we can stay in a leadership position.
The quality of our universities is high on that list. You know, I personally went to a great high school. I attended some years at Harvard University. I didn't graduate, but I still had –
SEN. ISAKSON: You're a famous dropout. (Laughter.)
BILL GATES: – some benefit. And then I proceeded to hire lots and lots of people from the great universities. And these were people who were willing to take risks.
It was actually during the 1980s the country was sort of worried about Japan, but that was actually the time when the Internet, which benefited immensely from research funding from the U.S. government, was actually becoming the standard not just for computing but for information sharing and efficiency in the entire world economy. And so certainly in the '90s, and even today we're the envy of the world in terms of how many jobs our economy has created. We have by many measures record low unemployment. Despite some imbalances, our economies continue to do very well.
And when you go out overseas, people look at our university system and they say, "Well, you've got alumni that give money, how do we duplicate that?" When they look at social services, they see that philanthropy is widespread at all levels of income, not just at the highest levels, but philanthropy is a value that is very strong through our citizenship, and other countries don't have that nearly to the degree that we do. And that engages citizens in seeing what the nonprofits are doing, what the government can do better, and gets an active dialogue that allows us to be smart about those things.
Protecting intellectual property, including the patent system, the copyright system, yes, you can read about how people want to reform and improve those things, and we're one of the advocates for tuning those systems, but fundamentally incentives to invent are very strong here. Things like the Bayh-Dole provisions that allow even work done under government-funded research, that there are some royalties for the inventors in the university, other countries have been very slow to match that, and that's benefited us in a great number of fields, particularly in fields related to biology.
So, we build on a foundation of strength in these issues, but when you see us turning away these graduates from these great computer science departments, and force them to go back, you say, wow, is that renewing the magic that's put the country in that top position?
SEN. ISAKSON: Thank you very much.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Brown.
SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D-Ohio): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much.
And, Mr. Gates, thank you for your unprecedented work on combating global poverty, especially infectious disease. Not since a fellow Ohioan – and I think you're a native of Ohio also, if I remember right – a fellow Ohioan, Dr. Henderson, organized a worldwide project to eliminate smallpox, I think your work since then has been the greatest – yours and your wife's and the foundation's greatest contribution to global health of anybody since Dr. Henderson.
I want to shift to something a bit different. When I hear you talk about – and thank you for your comments about protecting intellectual property, I think that's a very important thing that we as a nation need to do. I want to talk about international health a bit. And I think that the strength of our economy in this country over the last century has been that we as a nation have shared in the wealth, the workers have shared in the wealth they've created. We've done that through trade unionism, we've done that through education, we've done that all under the umbrella of a democratic system of government, so people that are productive have shared in the productivity and shared in the wealth that they've created.
Our trade agreements have not worked so well in the same direction, and I know you and I have very different opinions about trade. But I look around the time when you began Microsoft, we had a trade surplus – just a year or so before that we still had a trade surplus in this country; today, we have a trade deficit of approaching $800 billion.
And in terms of what you've done for international health, and what we need to do for international health, when I look at our trade policy, whether it's Mexico or whether it's multilaterally, we simply haven't found a way to help those countries really share – those workers share in the wealth they create. And that means they've not established the healthcare system, they've not been able to bring up standards of living, because those workers without labor standards, without environmental standards, without the kinds of things that we've done in this country – again because of trade unionism, because of the democratic government, because of education – that we've been able to lift people up.
Discuss for a moment how we should revise our trade policy. You talked about – and don't go into the H1, I mean, that's just a whole other issue, but just generally our trade policy, what we should be doing to lift standards in the developing world, so your efforts on healthcare, your efforts from vaccines to combating TB, malaria and AIDS, and all that, can build on a foundation of a better structural healthcare system, and in the developing world.
BILL GATES: Well, in terms of trade, you know, we've seen the results of countries like, say, North Korea, that chose not to engage in the world trade system. And we can put that, compare, say, South Korea and North Korea, one who's a trade-oriented country, one who's a non trade-oriented country, and see what sort of outcomes come out of that.
So, yes, I –
SEN. BROWN: With all due respect, that's an outlier. Let's talk about countries we deal with, poor countries. North Korea is –
BILL GATES: OK.
SEN. BROWN: Fair enough.
BILL GATES: Health conditions in Mexico continue to improve quite substantially. One of the consultants to our foundation, Julio Frenk, who is the secretary of health down there, and they've done a number of very innovative things, including payments to poor families relating to following health practices and keeping their kids in schools. And, in fact, that's an approach that now other countries are looking at where you use economic incentives to get poorer families to engage in these things.
Health statistics worldwide are improving quite a bit. Even with some negative trends – of course, the AIDS epidemic is very negative, drug resistance in the case of malaria and TB are negative things, but despite that, overall health conditions are improving quite substantially. And, for example, measles back in the '70s, before widespread immunization, actually killed 6 million people a year – children – and now it's down under 600,000.
And so I see a very positive picture in global health. It's one that we need to invest more in, and accelerate it in a faster way.
Having there be jobs in those countries and not over-regulate it so they can create jobs in those countries is one of the best things. The commodities boom has been a great thing for a number of African countries. The exports of coffee, even some products like cotton that are extremely distorted by subsidization policies, there have been increases in the exports of those things. And that is a great development, because in the long run you've got to have the agricultural productivity, and that means you've got to have exports. Most countries that have gotten into the virtuous cycle have done it by being allowed to export, and participate in the free trade system.
And whenever we look at the standards for these countries, we should say, okay, when we were at their level of wealth, what were we doing on the comparable things. It's always an interesting comparison to make.
SEN. BROWN: But when we were at their level of wealth, we didn't have an outside economic power with the kind of influence American corporations did playing in our country to the degree that many of them do in ours.
BILL GATES: I'm not sure what you're saying. I mean, the United States economically was way behind Europe in its early days, and it benefited from investment and trade.
I believe in trade, so this –
SEN. BROWN: As I do.
BILL GATES: You know, the Doha round in particular would be quite beneficial to the African countries where our foundation focuses a lot of its efforts. So, I'm very hopeful that something can happen there.
SEN. BROWN: If I can make one more comment, Mr. Chairman, on the question with Julio Frenk in Mexico, the AMA said the area along the U.S.-Mexican border is the most toxic place in the Western Hemisphere, because we had no environmental standards, real enforcement of environmental standards in American companies, and other companies near the Mexican border, south of the border in terms of disposal of waste, and there's no reason we shouldn't – I assume you'd agree with that – no reason we shouldn't build that into trade agreements. That's not a trade barrier any more than intellectual property is a trade barrier, I don't believe.
BILL GATES: Well, when we have a common river like the Rio Grande or something like that, certainly we have a very close interest in it. I'm not an expert on that issue. And some basic environmental things clearly are of global interest.
SEN. BROWN: Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Hatch.
SEN. ORRIN G. HATCH (Utah): Well, Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome back. I just want to make one comment, and that is that you and your wife are very high in my eyes. You've done so much with your wealth that is so good for mankind, that I don't think anybody should fail to recognize that. And I just wanted to be here to tell you that, because I usually don't lavish praise on anybody, but I think you deserve it.
And anybody who can get Warren Buffett to come in with all this, where he's a mutual friend, and I've got to say one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life, as you are.
But I'm just very grateful to you for what you're doing in so many ways.
Let me just say one thing. I'm also pleased with what you're doing with Medstory. You acquired that company, and I think that you can do an awful lot there to help people all over the world.
But I'm not going to ask you any questions. I just wanted to personally express my regard for you, and for your wife, and for Warren, and for what you people are doing, and just really are making a difference in this world. And I agree with virtually everything you've said in your statement. I think that it's a very precocious statement, and very much appreciated by all of us here.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
BILL GATES: Well, thank you.
Medstory, for people who don't know, is about letting consumers find health information. And the interest in that has risen, and they did some very innovative work to make it easy to find medical data, so that's become part of our new investments in that medical area.
Thanks for your comments. You know, Warren has been incredibly generous, and now we have to justify the trust that he's put in us.
SEN. HATCH: I figure that would be a very good combination, but I just raised Medstory because a lot of people don't know about it, and it's an innovative thing that I think can make a real difference in healthcare all over the world. Thanks, appreciate it.
BILL GATES: Super.
[Editors' note, March 7, 2007 – The remainder of this page has been added since original publication to complete the transcript.]
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Roberts.
SEN. PAT ROBERTS (R-Kan.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On page 6, Mr. Gates – and I guess I'm showing my bias if I say mega dittos in regard to all the accolades that have been mentioned to you, and all of them well deserved.
BILL GATES: Thank you.
SEN. ROBERTS: On page 6 you say, "The problem begins in high school, international tests have found our 4th graders among the top students in the world, above average in math; by 8th grade they move closer to the middle of the pack. By the 12th grade we're down at the bottom."
My question to you is why. I think you answered it a little bit – this is the Enzi question – really by saying that your favorite teacher was somebody that made math pertinent or it was relevant, as opposed to math for math's sake. And you could also include science in that category.
Why is it that China and India are getting their students to be so terribly interested at a young age in these academic pursuits, but somehow we can't generate the intellectual curiosity in math and science from our adolescents?
BILL GATES: Yeah, first, to be clear, the comparisons there where we go from the top to the middle to the bottom, those are against the industrialized, the rich countries. So Korea would be part of that, Japan, Singapore, the Nordic countries. Among the top are countries like Korea and Singapore.
India and Japan, as you say, are getting a higher and higher percentage of their students go into science and math. They're the only countries where you see significant increases. Europe, the United States, Canada are all seeing these declines. So whatever we're doing about making the field interesting and attractive and showing the opportunity, there's something shared across a lot of the rich countries.
India and China to some degree, as was mentioned, they don't have – these are the professions that are most admired, and people are most excited about. They don't have, say, the equivalent of Wall Street or other things.
SEN. ROBERTS: Well, how do we generate that excitement here?
BILL GATES: Well, to some degree I'm very surprised we haven't been able to do better in this, because these jobs are very interesting jobs, and perhaps the image of them is that they're not very social, but, in fact, if you're designing a software product, you're working with a lot of people, you're getting a lot of feedback.
We've worked with a number of universities, including a group called the Anita Borg Association, to really go down and talk to high schoolers and ask them what do they think about this field. And the misperceptions are a real problem for this. When we show them examples, particularly examples they can relate to, so showing the women a woman who's very successful, she comes out and shares her enthusiasm, that can make a big difference.
SEN. ROBERTS: OK, pardon the interruption. Senator Reed mentioned teachers. I gave a rant in this committee the other day about the fact that – well, I'll give you the example. You can't teach in the secondary school because you don't have a certification, and it takes five years. And yet I would think you'd be a pretty damn good teacher in regard to science and math, not only because of your reputation, but it would make it real, it would make it pertinent; they could touch it, they could feel it, it would become exciting as opposed to I have to take math courses.
Is there some way that we can arrange to shorten up that certification process to let people like yourself, or in the military or the business world or whatever, to say, well, I've had a career here, I'd like to at least teach, but I can't teach in a secondary school? Now, you could in a university, which I'm sure you do all the time. What's your comment about that?
BILL GATES: Yeah, I definitely think that particularly where we've got this huge shortage, and as you say, the benefit of somebody who's engaged and excited in the field makes such a difference, that perhaps making it simpler for them to come in, either as a full time teacher, or even in some cases come into the schools on a part time basis and talk about the things they do and be part of that teaching process, I absolutely think we need to encourage a lot of more openness and a lot of experimentation in that. We're seeing some of it in some of the charter systems that we're involved with, but that's one of the regulations that even the charter system often doesn't let you get around.
SEN. ROBERTS: I understand that on page 10 you say, "I appreciate the vital national security goals that motivate many of these policies." We're talking about immigration. "I am convinced, however, we can protect our national security in ways that do less damage to our competitiveness and prosperity." How? As a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I'd just like to hear your comments.
BILL GATES: Sure. As part of this immigration process, at many, many different points during the process you undergo a security check. The same person many, many times, if they actually go up to Canada briefly, they often can't get back into the United States because these security checks are now taking months to take place. It's done on a very manual basis without many resources. In fact, it's done in a way that one doubts that it's working very well –
SEN. ROBERTS: Yeah, that it's working.
BILL GATES: – at all. And so I think that some of the humiliation and delays that come through the security check process could be eliminated without dropping the goal of being able to check a list or whatever the security concern is there.
SEN. ROBERTS: I appreciate it very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Allard.
SEN. WAYNE ALLARD (R-Colo.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd just like to join my colleagues up here in their accolades for you and your wife and the foundation.
I want to delve into this issue about performance at the high school and elementary. I agree with you that we need to be very concerned about what is happening at the high school level, but I think we have to be careful by saying that because students are performing well, that's where their area of interest is going to be, and that we need to say, well, if you're interested in science, for example, and I'm a scientist, we have to catch their fascination, we've have to somewhere at that point in education they've got to view science as magic or math as fun or wherever.
I happen to think, disagreeing with my colleagues, that even though they're performing well, that starts in the elementary school. I mean, it's the 3rd, 4th, 5th grade that you kind of say, well, because of somebody you know – in your case maybe a teacher, I don't know where your fascination started, but my fascination started in science when I was in 4th and 5th grade because of people I knew and interacted with.
And I think somehow or other we need to get teachers in those grade levels excited about it, so they can share that with their students. And I think we need to figure out a program or something that gets elementary school teachers excited. The reason they teach there, I think science is intimidating. They get into the heavy science courses or heavier science courses in college and high school, and I think the seed needs to be planted in elementary school.
Have you given that any thought, and would you comment on what I just said?
BILL GATES: Well, I agree with you that elementary school is where we start to lose people. It's not where we really lose the bulk of the people, but having teachers at that level who can make the subject interesting and fun, and not have people self-labeled as though I'm not one of those people who likes math, that's a geeky guy over there, that labeling, there's some of that that happens in elementary school but it gets way more extreme in high school.
And I think that thing that characterizes a great elementary school teacher is more about their teaching technique and less about their depth of knowledge in the subject. So, yes, I think there should be a focus there.
The place where we really need people who majored in the subject in college, and have a pretty in-depth knowledge of the subject, that's more as you move up to the higher grades, that if you're going to teach algebra and geometry, that they are very comfortable with the 9 through 12th grade curriculum.
So, I think what's beneficial to teachers to have them keep kids interested is somewhat different at these different levels, and our expertise, because the foundation is focused on high schools, is much more at that level. But you do see a drop off in elementary school, you see it in high school, and then there's a huge drop off, people who enter college thinking they're going into science and math, that starts out at about I think 14 percent, and then it's less than 5 percent follow through on that by the end of the undergraduate four-year period.
SEN. ALLARD: That's very interesting.
I wondered also when coming out of the Sputnik era and science was being stressed and everything, we also I think in the TV programming we had some fun science programs. I never was one to spend a lot of time in front of the TV, but I think we had those sort of programs. And I'm wondering if there isn't some way maybe on the Internet to begin to establish an Internet location where you could have fun science. The fascination for young people today is not TV so much, I think it's more the computer and the computer screen, and if we can somehow or the other reach out to them and make a fascinating program and kind of pull them into this idea of science I think might be something worth thinking about.
BILL GATES: Yeah, absolutely, and Microsoft and others are very involved in getting this started.
I think there are two flavors of that. One is the student who's motivated to actually go out there and say, OK, let me see how volcanoes work or how global warming works or how space flight works. The other thing is to take and gather the material so that a teacher can go to those sites and then draw down kind of the images, the animations, the stories and bring those sort of real-life science neat stories into the classroom. And that ability, some great teachers have always been doing that but they didn't really have a way of publishing and sharing their ideas, and then having other people build in those.
By creating communities on the Internet of these various types of teachers and the material and things they're doing, or even videos of the best practice, there's a lot more we can do to make teaching less isolated, let them benefit from one another. And that spans all the way from the elementary to the collegiate level.
In the extreme case we're actually saying to universities that let's get all the great lectures online, and so, say, a community college wouldn't have to do the lectures in a subject like physics or chemistry, but they would do the study groups, and so they would take the world's best lectures, but then do that. And so education can be more specialized and more efficient as we use the technology.
SEN. ALLARD: Mr. Chairman, thank you, and thank you for your testimony, Mr. Gates.
SEN. KENNEDY: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Mr. Gates, when you were talking about interest in science, I was up at the Museum of Science in Boston not long ago, and they had Mr. Ballard, who was a great oceanographer, found the Titanic and the Bismarck and the Lusitania, and he was conducting, they had this submersible that he was down in the Galapagos Islands, and steering, letting the students steer this submersible through the Galapagos with all of the sea life that was there, and they had 600 inner city children in that auditorium, and you could hear a pin drop, absolute pin drop, the interest these children had.
And then they had – I saw a fellow named (Lessor ?) who was the principal cellist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, talking about the sound, how sound moves through the air when he played his cello in a room with 50 inner-city school children, and the fascination, the opening of the mind, the interest by these children in both music and in technology and science unlimited. How we get that kind of interest is going to be the challenge, but you've reminded us about this.
Let me quickly go into another subject. Mary Robinson, president of Ireland, head of the World Health Organization, met with a number of us. She's very concerned about just the brain drain to the United States, particularly in health and health professions. And she pointed out that the flow, for example, at a time when we have eight or nine applications for every nursing slot in my state of Massachusetts at community colleges, we can get one applicant that will take it because we don't have the training facilities, we don't have the professions for the training of nurses, and we are considering an amendment on the floor now on the Homeland Security bill the increase of the number of nurses on this.
Now, here are some of the countries, Nigeria, we have 2,500 doctors here from Nigeria, and 8,900 nurses. From South Africa we have 1,950 doctors, 877 nurses. In Kenya, HIV rate is 15 percent; 865 doctors, 765 nurses. Ghana HIV rate, doctors 850, 2,100 nurses in this.
Her point was that many of these countries around the world, so many of these doctors and the nurses, health professionals that are so vital in terms of trying to deal with the challenges of healthcare here in the United States or coming to the United States, working in the United States, this is costing these countries, they're training these people, it's an outlay for training them. How do we balance this versus what you've said about sort of the open-endedness in terms of having skilled people be able to come into the United States? What's really – where do we really begin to draw the line? When do we say, well, we're going to try and invest more to develop more opportunities for Americans to become nurses, Americans to become the doctors, if we have qualified people that don't get into our great medical schools or into our nursing, but what's the balance in there?
BILL GATES: Well, when foreign labor comes to the United States, there's this incredible benefit to the country that they come from of the remittances they send back to the country. And that's a huge thing in terms of bootstrapping those economies, letting them send kids back there to school, and having the right nutrition and great things. So, I don't think the right answer is to restrict that ability to come and earn a high wage and have that go into the economy that they came from.
Clearly, when you get shortages like that, the systems like the community college system are usually quite responsive in creating capacity and meeting that demand. I'm not an expert on the nurse situation –
SEN. KENNEDY: That's OK.
BILL GATES: – in this country.
I do know that as we think about global health outside the United States, and people have talked about this, this talent drain, I don't think putting restrictions on letting people come and work would be the way to solve that, because there are other countries that they would end up going to. And what you need to do is deal with the supply.
Also many of the medical inventions that we need, need to be things that don't require an expensive healthcare system, because the reason many of those people are leaving those countries is that the healthcare system doesn't use their talents very well; that is, they don't stock drugs properly, they don't have electricity and a number of these things. So, getting those countries to invest in healthcare, and having things like vaccines that can actually be given without advanced medical training – for example, if we had an AIDS vaccine, which is a very tough thing, we'd greatly reduce the burden on those healthcare systems. In fact, if we had a malaria vaccine, that would have this amazing effect to free up that capacity for dealing with other health problems, because that actually puts more people in these hospitals in many countries than anything else.
So, I'm optimistic about the vaccines coming along, and that those will change, get rid of the unbelievable overload in the health budgets of these countries.
SEN. KENNEDY: Just one additional point. In the H1-B there are provisions in there where they pay a fee into a fund so that they train Americans and upgrade their skills as a part of the H1-B.
Let me just finally ask you this. You've given a number of recommendations on competitiveness and immigration and others, in education. What's your – just if you could summarize your sense of urgency, how much time do we have? I mean, what's the framework, where would you say, as somebody that's obviously thought about this a good deal, has specific recommendations, and is familiar with these forces in other parts of the world, what guidance can you give to us about the sense of urgency? I think for all of us who deal with education think every day that's gone by with a lost child, for a child to lose that opportunity for learning is a day that probably can't be recaptured. There's a sense of urgency in terms of education as years go back and we lose these opportunities. What's your sense just in terms of the country, the competitiveness, and what's happening in other parts of the world?
BILL GATES: Yeah, I think both of these are incredibly urgent issues. Education, because as you say, it takes a long time, and so you've got to get started now improving the teachers and trying out the new incentive systems – even if it's going to take decades, the sooner you get going the better.
In the immigration case it's much more of an acute crisis in that the message is clearly here today that you come to the U.S., go to these great universities, and you go back and not only take your very high paying job, but also all the jobs around it back to another country. And other rich countries are stepping up and showing the flexibility of trying to benefit from the way we're turning these people away. In every way this country benefits by having these very high paid jobs here in this country.
And so if you talk to a student who's in school today, going to graduate in June, they're seeing that they cannot apply until they get their degree, and by the time they get their degree, all those visas are gone. If somebody is here on an H1-B, if you're from India, say, with a bachelor's degree, the current backlog would have you wait decades before you could get a green card, and during that time your family can't work, there are limits in terms of how you can change your job. There was one calculation done that the fastest way you'd get a green card is to have a child who becomes a United States citizen, and then your child sponsors you to become a U.S. citizen, and that's because there's more than 21 years in some of these backlogs.
So, this is an acute crisis. And it's a thing, as you say, there are fees paid, and Microsoft makes no complaint about those fees. We end up paying a lot more to somebody who comes in for these jobs from overseas than we do to somebody domestically. We have every reason – we have 3,000 open jobs right now. We're hiring the people domestically, everyone that we can. In fact, there's a great competition, this wage rate continues to go up, as it should.
And the wage rate for this type of skill set is not that different in other countries. It's escalated very rapidly in India and China. And particularly if you include the tax cost and the infrastructure cost that we pay to support this kid of job in those countries, this is not about saving a ton of money for a top engineer, this is about being able to put them here in this country where the other skill sets around them are the best in the world, and there's not a shortage in those other skill sets. And India and China haven't yet – and it will take them a long time before they're as good at the management, testing, marketing elements that go around those engineers.
So, this is an acute crisis and one that in terms of the taxes these people will pay, the fees that get paid around them is fiscally accretive to the United States immediately in terms of what happens. So, to me it's a very clear one with basically no downside that I can see whatsoever.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Alexander.
SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-Tenn.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Two comments and a question. One is you've been a very eloquent spokesman for what I like to characterize as "insourcing brainpower", and I think helping our country understand that insourcing – we talk a lot about outsourcing jobs, but insourcing brainpower is insourcing jobs, too, which you've said several times today, and which is a point we don't make as well.
The second comment, in our little discussion about teacher incentives where we were talking about this difficult area of finding fair ways to reward teachers and school leaders who excel, and how a good way to do that is not to impose suddenly a big system, but to encourage this effort across the country where communities are – as new leaders for new schools is in Memphis, for example, and they pay a third of the principals $15,000 more if they go to Wharton and learn and they stay a part of the system and learn to be leaders, and the teachers make $6,000 more if they're highly effective teachers, and their low-income kids improve.
So, the point being that one of the big differences between today and 20 years ago is that we now have a number of ways to measure student achievement. Dr. Sanders was at the meeting Senator Kennedy hosted yesterday. And there are other methods. And because we're now able to say this low-income child in a New York school is making great progress because this teacher consistently helps that, then there's perhaps a fair basis for rewarding that teacher or that school leader, because we can see improvement.
So, I hope – the reason I bring that back up, and here's my question, is because that's an area where I think we can hopefully move ahead with the Teacher Incentive Fund, and perhaps you and others in the private sector can do the same over the next five years, and we can work in parallel and learn from one another.
Here's another area. We [have] long lines at two-thirds of the places around our country of people who don't know English, who want to learn English. Now, I'm not now talking about making people learn English, or English only, I'm talking about the huge number of people who live here, who don't speak English, who want help learning English. And the Senate adopted my amendment to give $500 grants to prospective citizens who want help learning English so they could take it to the Puente Learning Center in Los Angeles or other places where for $500 you can learn English pretty quickly.
So, I've had in my mind for many years, and I'm going to put this in legislation, but it will be hard to do in government, that if we had $100 million bank or 200 or whatever amount, and we said that virtually anyone who's living in the United States, if you want help learning English, we'll give you a $500 voucher, which you can then spend at any accredited center for learning English, with the hope that you'll one day pay it back; no strings, just with the hope that one day you'll pay it back. My guess would be that that bank would grow over 5 or 10 or 15 years to be a very big bank that would turn over and over and over again providing an easy way for people who needed a little help to learn English.
So, I wanted to take advantage of you today since you're here by suggesting that idea to you, that I'm going to introduce it in legislation here, but it will run into a lot of problems if we try to set it up with all the government rules and regulations and accounting, as a purely private matter, a bank to help people learn English, which we hope they would pay back, I think would help equal opportunity, it would help improve our workforce, and it would be a big help toward national unity by encouraging our common language, but not in any sort of coercive way.
BILL GATES: Yeah, in terms of the Teachers Incentive Fund, as I said in my comments, I'm a big believer in that, because having the money that lets you try out merit pay be viewed as incremental allows people to go along with it, even if in the early days they think, okay, the system is unproven, and they're worried about that. At least they're not being told from the beginning, hey, it's purely zero-sum-even when the system isn't proven. The fact that during that experimental phase it's incremental, then they see that they are not a loser, and they see, okay, here's federal money that we don't get unless we do a merit-based system, so it will encourage experimentation.
And I do think there are – in these labor practice areas we should have 100 such experiments, because I think 90 of them won't work. You know, we're certainly not at the point where you can test people going into a class, have them take a class, and test them going out, and just pay the person based on, okay, here's the delta in those test results. It's too – the testing is good, we know a lot more, but at that level of granularity it's not viewed as predictable enough to put a huge reliance on it. And so figuring out, okay, how do we supplement that, do we have teachers who come in and do evaluations, anyway, a lot of things that should be tried there.
In terms of English, it is one of the advantages the United States has. English is being adopted as essentially the second language globally. And every country I go to they are saying how they've changed their education system to teach English at a younger age, and they're very proud of the percentage of people in the country who speak English, not as a primary language but as a second language, and so that is helping us.
The demand for English training, as you say, actually demand is very high today. People are moving to do that. There are some things on the Internet that can help with that. There are some self-training courses where the prices of those have come down.
I haven't thought about a way of encouraging people to do that. It would be interesting to think would you actually have a lot more people who would learn because of that incentive and what follow-on benefits might you get from that. Obviously as you think of different age groups it's different. Kids going into school we want them to get comfortable in English very quickly, because that could be a huge challenge to a school system, and in many of these urban school systems it's unbelievable the variety of languages that they have as native languages. It's great, but it's a challenge for them. And so some innovation in that, and encouraging it would be good. For young people it's really actually quite necessary for them to benefit from the education system.
SEN. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. KENNEDY: Senator Sanders.
SEN. SANDERS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And before I ask Mr. Gates a question, I did want to comment that I thought your statement on nurses was right on. My understanding is that we have some 50,000 Americans or so who want to go to nursing school in the midst of a nursing crisis, and can't get in because we don't have nursing educators. And, in fact, that's what I want to talk to you on Friday about the higher education bill.
SEN. KENNEDY: We'll do that on Friday, and I'm sure Mr. Gates will be interested in that. (Laughter.)
SEN. SANDERS: Mr. Gates, I think there is no debate that we have got to focus a lot of attention on urban schools. How minority kids are treated is a disgrace and so forth.
I represent the very rural state, the state of Vermont – and by the way, we'd love you to come up and say hello, visit us. It's only 20 below today, but it will warm up in a few weeks.
In rural America and in rural Vermont we have situations where there are not a lot of good paying jobs. And kids don't really get a sense of why they need an education, because they don't see much in front of them. Kids are dropping out, kids are doing self-destructive behavior, drugs, crime, so forth and so on.
What thoughts do you have about how we might be able to revitalize education and create excitement in rural communities around this country?
BILL GATES: The foundation schools, a very high percentage of them are urban schools, because that's where we've seen where you've got the large minority populations, and you have these super high dropout rates.
I agree with you that the rural situation is not some panacea. In fact, when we first got involved, I said, well, hey, if it's just urban, let's just copy what they're doing in the rural areas. In fact, as you say, it has some particular problems in terms of the breadth of teacher skills. Often for political reasons school districts that should merge together do not want to merge together because that comes down to the point of, okay, we should merge the schools to try to get scale, and that takes some political leadership, because there's a hard choice there about as you have less students how do you create that critical mass. So, I do think there should be a lot of school district mergers take place would help a lot in these rural areas.
There has been some work done by the foundation in rural areas, and I'll get them to write that up and send you and I a copy of it.
SEN. SANDERS: Good.
BILL GATES: We do think that some of these technology things where you can go and get great courses over the Internet and have even rural areas sharing with each other where one is very good at one thing and one is good at another thing, that those can be quite advantageous, because in Vermont you have good broadband connectivity, most of the schools are hooked up, and so it should be very possible.
SEN. SANDERS: OK, thank you.
SEN. KENNEDY: Just finally, we have – Mr. Gates, we have 77,000 jobs that are waiting in my state of Massachusetts, probably 300,000 people are unemployed, and we get 24 applications for every job slot existing today. I mean, under our existing – you know, listening to you talking about upgrading our training programs and the education and ensuring people are going to be upgrading and the skills, there's a lot of work for us to do.
This has been an enormously helpful hearing. You've raised all of our sights, and raised our spirits as well. We're going to be busy concentrating and learning from that extensive testimony, and absorbing those recommendations. And I think you've seen that members of the committee have been enormously appreciative of you taking the time to join with us, and we look forward to keeping in touch with you as we move forward on many of these initiatives. We'll value very highly your ideas and recommendations, suggestions, and we have benefited immensely this morning. We thank you very much for taking the time, and the committee stands in recess.
BILL GATES: Thank you.
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/billg/speeches/2007/03-07Senate.mspx
“VERNOR VINGE: THE SINGULARITY.” /
“VERNOR VINGE: THE SINGULARITY,”
Vernor Vinge
Department of Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
(c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge
(This article may be reproduced for noncommercial
purposes if it is copied in its entirety,
including this notice.)
The original version of this article
was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium
sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and
the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.
A slightly changed version appeared in the
Winter 1993 issue of _Whole Earth Review_.
To see this article, log onto:
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/doc/vinge.html
As per Lloyd’s of London (U.K.) and Risk Management....
What is risk definition and language?
High level definitions of what is meant by risk definition, category (or group) and language.
Risk definition – a detailed articulation of identified risks, designed to give a clearer understanding of the risks.
Risk category (or group) – risks identified can be grouped or categorised in order to facilitate monitoring and reporting. High level risk groups or categories (such as operational risk, credit risk etc.) are often broken down further into lower level sub-groups or sub-categories to facilitate monitoring and reporting, for example, the "risk of fraud" could be considered a sub-category or sub-group within "operational risk".
Risk language – details standard risk terms, vocabulary and abbreviations used across an organisation.
What is risk appetite?
A brief description of what risk appetite is and its relationship to risk capacity.
Risk appetite reflects the amount of risk taking that is acceptable to an organisation. As a result, risk appetite refers to the organisation’s attitude towards risk taking and whether it is willing and able to tolerate either a high or a low level of exposure to specific risks or risk groups.As the diagram below illustrates, risk appetite first and foremost is a function of the organisation’s capacity to bear risk and of its attitude towards managed risk taking. Risk appetite can also be viewed as assigned or allocated risk capacity.
Last updated on 21 Jun 2006
SOURCE:
http://www.lloyds.com/Lloyds_Market/Tools_and_reference/Risk_Management_Toolkit/Risk_definition_and_language/What_is_risk_definition_and_language.htm
"Transformative Risk Management" Methodology by Andres Agostini
Arlington, Virginia, USA
A PHOTO
Dr. Grose at NASA speaking of Systems Approach to Mitigate/Terminate Risks
CURRENT TENURES:
1.- Executive Associate for Global Markets at OMEGA SYSTEMS GROUP INC., Arlington,Virginia, USA. Responsibility: "Consulting on Systems Risk Management for Enterprises."
2.- Worldwide Board of Directors Advisor at ACC INSURANCE BROKERS GROUP (New York City, London, Miami, Caracas. Responsibility: "Organizational Strategy" applied to the companyserved.
3.- Independent Contractor (Organizational Strategy, Enterprise Transformative RiskManagement), both as consultant/analyst and manager.. Responsibility: See "Links" and "Lines of Practices."
PREFERRED, INTELLIGENT ANIMALS
UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY (USGS) AND RISK MANAGEMENT.
As follows. To assess whether chemical stressors/contaminants in South Florida harm wildlife, it is important to study animals that are potentially exposed and appear sensitive to contaminants. Little is known about the effects of environmental contaminants on invertebrates, however, invertebrate species have been recognized as important environmental sentinels and serve as models for a wide variety of toxicity tests that utilize mortality and lethality as the endpoints of significance. A complete ecological risk assessment requires hazard identification, documentation of adverse effects, demonstration of exposure, and knowledge of dose-response relationships. Evidence of adverse effects, cause and effect relationships, or dose-response relationships has not yet been documented for specific contaminants or mixtures. It is critical that potential exposures and subsequent adverse effects be assessed for wildlife in South Florida to enable a complete ecological risk assessment as well as an assessment and evaluation of proposed restoration strategies.
Results from these studies are expected to provide evidence of significant wildlife exposures to chemical stressors/contaminants in South Florida and adverse effects as a result of these exposures. Effects characterization will focus on non-lethal effects such as decreased health status, altered reproductive success, and endocrine disruption. In addition, it is likely that we will be able to demonstrate population and community level effects, primarily decreases, for sensitive species in sites with significant hazard of exposure. From the complementary findings of field studies and experimental exposures, we expect to be able to demonstrate convincing evidence as to the causal role of specific chemicals and/or mixtures. Finally, we expect that studies comparing responses of these selected species will provide major insights into the basis of the interspecies differences in sensitivity to contaminants.
Source: http://sofia.usgs.gov/projects/eco_risk/
Los Alamos National Laboratory and Risk Management
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY AND RISK MANAGEMENTProject risk analysis, like all risk analyses, must be implemented using a graded approach; that is, the scope and approach of the analysis must be crafted to fit the needs of the project based on the project size, the data availability, and other requirements of the project team. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has developed a systematic qualitative project risk analysis technique called the Risk Factor Analysis (RFA) method as a useful tool for early, preconceptual risk analyses, an intermediate-level approach for medium-size projects, or as a prerequisite to a more detailed quantitative project risk analysis. This paper introduces the conceptual underpinnings of the RFA technique, describes the steps involved in performing the analysis, and presents some examples of RFA applications and results.
NOT THIS ANDY! (YET)
Andres Agostini is not a scientist. He does feel a great respect and admiration for the scientific establishment, particularly that one that leads the technological ‘multiverse’. Andy, however, has over 27 years of the ever strongest and progressive ‘starvation’ for leading-edge knowledge. He more than likes the challenge (in continuum). To be brief, Andy will go to any length to get the scientific knowledge and skill right.
NASA and Risk Management
ONE
Risk can be defined as the probability that a program/project will experience undesirable consequences. These undesirable consequences can be something as simple as missing a schedule milestone by two weeks or overrunning the budget by a small percentage. However, they can also be catastrophic, i.e. program cancellation, loss of human life, a major schedule delay, or a large cost overrun. It is the manager's duty to assess all these risks and develop the appropriate course(s) of action for each.NASA Risk Management Procedures & Guidelines, NPG 8705, documents the Agency's Continuous Risk Management (CRM) Program. Although all team members must participate in CRM, it is ultimately the program/project manager's responsibility to assure that an effective CRM plan is put forth and implemented. Risk management includes the identification, assessment, mitigation, and disposition of risk throughout the program/project formulation, approval, implementation, and disposal phases.
TWO
SCOPE AND SIGNIFICANCE:: Risk management is "An organized, systematic decision making process that efficiently identifies, analyzes, plans, tracks, controls, communicates, and documents risk to increase the likelihood of achieving program/project goals."
THREE
A “risk-informed” approach to regulatory decis!onmaking represents a philosophy whereby risk insights are considered together with other factors to establish requirements that better focus licensee and regulatory attention on design and operational issues commensurate with their importance to health and safety.
Source: www.nasa.gov
MAXIM #2 (to us)
"To think and act driven by the omni-science perspective in everything is done." ---Commentary: 12 years of teaching/mentoring of Dr. Vernon Grose (D.Sc.) are not in vain.
MAXIM #1 (to us)
“Everything is in everything else and is part of ourselves and the surrounding cosmos and beyond.”
Who is Andy Agostini, founder of "The Andres Agostini Times"?
ANDRES AGOSTINI, Andres E. Agostini, is Executive Associate for Global Markets at Omega Systems Group Incorporated (Arlington, Virginia, USA). He is also Charter Member of the Advisory Board of ACC Group worldwide (New York, Miami, London, Caracas), who reports chiefly to the chartered board he serves.
He has 25 years of applied, professional experience. He has two majors on insurance from the Broward Community College (US). Previously, he took some courses on "Mechanical Engineering Technology" at Montreal's Dawson College (Canada).
Furthermore, crossed training and technical indoctrination are in due place.Mr. Agostini is a corporate, cross-functional strategy consultant/manager with a multidimensional vista of the world of risk and its concurrent administration.
He has addressed major advisory services to high-ranking executives from GE (General Electrics) and Abbot Laboratories, both in the U.S. In a persistent, recursive search for cutting-edge, applied knowledge --consistent with this new era of swirling change (chaos), researching these topics has been a major, prevalent endeavor of his everyday activities.
He has also been engaged in independent consultancy services pertaining to (i) business innovation, (ii) management transformation, (iii) performance enhancement, (iv) organizational strategies, (v) systems thinking, (vi) outsourcing, co-sourcing, in-sourcing, strategic sourcing, (vii) transformational risk management, (viii) change stewardship, (ix) crisis and emergency administration, (x) scenario planning, (xi) organizational effectiveness, (xii) healthcare systems (delivery), and (xiii) intercultural counseling.
In addition to those aforementioned, Mr. Agostini has had institutional/corporate clients such as the World Bank, Toyota, and Mitsubishi Motors plus Lloyd's of London (London, U.K.), Williams & Company [U.S.].
Other clients include, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA, Citgo's parent company), and its subsidiary companies. It can too be mentioned LAGOVEN (formerly EXXON in Venezuela), MARAVEN (formerly SHELL in Venezuela), CORPOVEN (a fully integrated petroleum company, stemming from the merger of several American and British oil producers), INTEVEP (PDVSA's R&D), BARIVEN (PDVSA's trader, based in Caracas and Houston), CARBOZULIA (PDVSA's coal company), PALMAVEN (PDVSA's agribusiness company), INTERVEN (PDVSA's division for the internationalization expansion of the group of companies), and PEQUIVEN (PDVSA's petrochemical operation).
His relationship with PDVSA (CITGO's parent company), not only in Venezuela, also extends to London (formerly PDV Europe), the trader unit in Houston, and some U.S. operational units/divisions that were all merged into Citgo.
His professional experience has been mainly gained within the U.S. and the U.K. and through British corporations as well as those from Japan, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, and Indonesia. He has devoted himself to the advancement in new practices of management per se and holistic, transformative risk management.
He has published some of his works on the World Wide Web. He is dedicated to implementing many "knowledge/skill transfers" events as per his lines of practice.To Mr. Agostini, a "solution" is in no way a "quick fix," but a "fundamental, on-going, evolutionary, optimum solution."
A more fundamental solution is even a more holistic one, especially when it is practiced/rendered systematically. Some people mistakenly associate "solutions" (optimum and on-going) to "quick fixes" (sub-optimum and always uncontinued). His global sophistication allows him to walk across several complex frameworks (disciplines, industries, practices, cultures) to get the client a set of unique, effective responses to his/her expectations.
Beyond methodologies such as Total Quality Assurance, Kaisen, Six Sigma, 'Juran Prescription' and other Multidimensional approaches, Mr. Agostini believes that corporate strategies must be reinforced--at all times-- with applied, evolutionary "Systems Thinking," and other novelties from the "organizational learning" stance.
http://www.geocities.com/agosbio/a.html
CRUCIAL, STUDIED SUBJECTS (CURRENTLY)
- Advanced, Cross-Functional Risk Management (insurance, co-insurance, reinsurance, expressly excluded).
- Security Risk Management
- Change, Chaos, Order
- Socio-Technological Singularity
- Geopoliticts
- Reliability Engineering
- Systems Approach
- Outsourcing, Off-shoring
- Complexity (especially that of intangibles. Also that of the subtle realm of business processes).
- Mental Map (farther along)
- Skills and Knowledge Transfer
- Strategic Planning (thoroughly)
- From "Human Error" into friutful, beyond "leadership" (applied)
- Cross-Cultural Counseling (Fortune 100)
- Organizational Transformation
- Performance Enhancement
- Due Dilligence
- Corporate Laws of Governance
- Impact Management
- Holistic Thinking (Disruptive Discerning into Agressive Future Practicing)
- Healthcare Plans/Systems
- Systems Industrial Safety
- Systems Security (corporate-plus)
- Scenario Planning
- "Gray Area" Management (through fuzzines of thinking)
- Quality Assurance (Six Sigma, Juran Prescription)
- Serendipity (post Fleming and without epiphany).
PREFERRED BRAINY PEOPLE
- Dr. Robert Goddard
- Peter Drucker
- Warren Buffett
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Ghandi
- Princess Diana
- Mother Theresa
- Peter Senge
- Steve Jobs
- William Gates III
- John Paul II
- Werner von Braun
- Martin L. King
- Gary Hamel
- Ronald Wilson Reagan
- John F. Kennedy
- Leonardo Da Vinci
- Albert Einstein
- Eric Drexler
- Vernon Grose
- Amadues Mozart
- Ray Kurzweil
- Seth Lloyd
- Stephen Hawking
- Richard Feynman
- Winston Churchill
QUOTES
- "In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality." -Karl Popper
- "Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and importance, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction."- Margaret Thatcher
- "Advice is seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least." - Lord Chesterfield
- "There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further."- Werner Von Braun
- "I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose." - John F. Kennedy
- "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." John F. Kennedy
- "The 'good old times' - all times when old are good." -Lord Byron
- "Adversity is the first path to truth."- Lord Byron
- "Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. " -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- "Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever. " -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- "All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is exclusively my own." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential." - Winston Churchill
- "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." - Winston Churchill
- "All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses." -Friedrich Nietzsche
- "Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate."-Alvin Toffler
- "You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment."-Alvin Toffler
- "The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn." - Toffler
- "Technology feeds on itself...Technology makes more technology possible." - Alvin Toffler
- "Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock." -Alvin Toffler
- "Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time." - Alvin Toffler
- “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”--Nikola Tesla
- “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” --Richard P. Feynman
- “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem”. --Albert Einstein
- "An eye is not an eye because you see it." -Machado
MENTORS/TUTORS
- John Stephen Fancher
- Christopher Robinson (Lloyd's)
- Walter L. “Nardi” Suydam
- Peter Suydam
- John L. Settles
- Linda Ann Smith
- Dr. Carol Bilsborough, PhD.
- Dr. Vernon L. Grose, D.Sc.
Books and Other Publications
- 2020 Vision: Transform Your Business Today to Succeed in Tomorrow's Economy
- 9/11 Commission Report
- As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez
- Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technologies by Joseph Bar-Cohen (ISBN-10: 0849331633).
- Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Benyus (ISBN-10: 0060533226)
- BLUR by Davis
- Brain: From Fuzzy Arithmetic to Quantum Computing by Freitas
- Competing for the Future by Hamel
- Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory….by Greene, (ISBN: 0375708111).
- Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by Eric Drexler
- Enterprise Risk Management: From Incentives to Controls by ames Lam
- Fantastic Voyage by Kurzweil
- Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition by Richard Feynman
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Future Wealth by Davis
- FUTURO ACTUAL (The As-Of-Now Future) by Andres Agostini
- Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence by Peter Schwartz
- Leading The Revolution by Hamel
- Lessons from the Future: Making Sense of a Blurred World from the World's Leading Futurist
- Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology by J. Storrs Hall
- Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation by Eric Drexler
- On Competition by prof. Michael Porter
- Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
- Quantitative Risk Management: Concepts, Techniques, and Tools byAlexander J. McNeil
- Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- And What It Means To Be Human by Joel Garreau
- Reimagine by Peters
- Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Albert Einstein
- Science But Not Scientists by Grose
- Seeing What's Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
- The Age of Spiritual Machines by Kurzweil
- The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz
- The Last Lion on Winston Churchill
- The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving
- The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer
- The Wisdom Paradox: The New Science of Wisdom and How the Mind Can Grow Stronger as We Grow Older
- To Differentiate or Die by Trout
- Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall (ISBN: 0060531096).
- Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics by Paul Ormerod
- Why We Want You to be Rich by Trump
- World as I See It by Albert Einstein
- World as I See It by Albert Einstein (ISBN: 0806527900).
The Andres Agostini Times
Ich Bin Singularitarian!
The Andres Agostini Times
- The Andres Agostini Times
- An ongoing, world-class knowledge repository on advanced, cross-functional Risk Management.
The Founder and Editor
Photo of Andres Agostini (Executive of Global Markets at OMEGA SYSTEMS GROUP INC.)
Music (Classical)
- Tschaiskowsky
- Brahms
- Bach
- Schubert
- Lizt
- Wagner
- Beethoven
- Hayden
- Schumann
- Chopin
- Mozart
Movies
- Minority Report
The Andres Agostini Times (objective)
Everyone is important to us. This publication is mainly designated for the incumbent from the vanguard of the state-of-the-art in terminating and mitigating risks (enterprise-plus). Nonetheless, everyone is more than invited.
The founders of "The Andres Agostini Times" are also the founders of a new approach to STOP/MITIGATE disruption potential. By the way, we'd like to inspire and instill hope, not otherwise. That method is currently known as "Transformative Risk Management".
To this end, people from this all-encompassing discipline MUST verify and learn about almost everything. To give one an example, "The Andres Agostini Times" is committed with 'scenario planners' (beyond the three plausible ones), and profesional futorology (as per the optimal scientific standards).
In many ways, we hope to pay a well-deserved tribute to the 'lingua franca' and hence the English-speaking world. We expect to enforce freedom of speech, clarity, and global values.
Please also visit:
www.geocities.com/agosbio/a.html
the.andres.agostini.times@gmail.com
Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
Founded on May 17, 2007.
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