The Classification of Crises
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00:00
PhysiologyNobeliumChemistryConformational isomerismPauling, LinusStructural steelUmweltchemikalieSmoking (cooking)Electronic cigaretteForkhead-GenMan pageSulfur dioxideRespiration (physiology)Germanic peoplesSea levelSchweflige SäureMortality rateSunscreenWine tasting descriptorsOrganische ChemieAlkalinityThermoformingHope, ArkansasBurnPainFunctional groupWursthülleAlkaliNobeliumMaskierung <Chemie>CoalLegierenComputer animationMeeting/Interview
09:00
NobeliumChemistryConformational isomerismPauling, LinusPhysiologySulfur dioxideUmweltchemikalieSea levelSmoking (cooking)ÖlConcentrateRiver sourceBarrel (unit)DeathWaterfallProcess (computing)SunscreenExplosionTransportStream gaugeOceanSpawn (biology)ÖlschieferHope, ArkansasRiverBattery (electricity)Potenz <Homöopathie>Chemical reactionSedimentary rockSchweflige SäureElectronic cigaretteSedimentationWasserwelle <Haarbehandlung>Set (abstract data type)AageGermanic peoplesPatentRadioactive decayChemical compoundHydrocarbonCollectingSeparation processThermoformingGesundheitsstörungTarÖlsandMutilationEnhanced geothermal systemMeeting/Interview
17:40
PhysiologyNobeliumChemistryConformational isomerismPauling, LinusÖlFoodIsotropyProteinDDTInsektengiftChemical plantGesundheitsstörungStickstoffatomAcetoneYield (engineering)SunscreenNaturstoffArtificial leatherExplosionBreed standardPotenz <Homöopathie>Harvester (forestry)Tidal raceSea levelHydrocarbonBaker's yeastDeathWattOrganische ChemieHydrophobic effectOperonAgricultureHope, ArkansasHandelsdüngerPressureStream gaugeCommon landPhenobarbitalNitrogen fixationReaktionsgleichungSterilization (microbiology)Controller (control theory)Meeting/Interview
26:20
NobeliumConformational isomerismChemistryPauling, LinusPhysiologyPotenz <Homöopathie>Medical historyStockfishElectronic cigaretteGoldFrench friesSystemic therapyCell growthProcess (computing)Functional groupCirculation (fluid dynamics)Butter (2011 film)ReaktionsgleichungStorage tankWine tasting descriptorsHope, ArkansasHardnessStop codonNitrogen fixationArtificial leatherLaxativeBottling lineCell (biology)Separation processLecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:15
Mr. Chairman, Count Bernadotte, distinguished dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like
00:24
to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your kind introduction and I would like to say how pleased I am to participate for the first time, but I hope not the last time, in this very enjoyable meeting of Nobel Prize winners.
00:44
I have been associated with the organization of scientific meetings myself before, and at one time I remember I wrote a short article about how you placed your speakers on the program,
01:01
and I said, well, you always look for your most brilliant speaker and you put him last. You put him last for two reasons. First of all, you want to prevent people from leaving the meeting early, and secondly, because he is your most brilliant speaker, he's likely to take much
01:24
longer than the allotted time to show how brilliant he is. So what did I say about the first speaker? Well, I said that you always put your dullest speaker on first, because the
01:41
audience are there to begin with and can't escape. But of course, you have to qualify that by making sure that he is a very reliable speaker, too, and will not take more than the allotted time. I promise you to do the latter, even if I'm not sure about the former.
02:03
This talk was inspired by a letter that I received from some years ago from a number of American sociologists, who wanted me to write an article about how terrible the world was, and how we were suffering from the most dreadful crises that mankind had ever suffered from.
02:26
Well, I'm not a pessimist myself, I am in fact an optimist. As far as I'm concerned, the world is in a better shape than it's ever been before, and I am optimistic about its future, and therefore I was pleased to write an article, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that
02:45
that article was never published, because I just did not agree with these sociologists. Now, I think I can recognize a crisis when I see it. I was born during the First World War,
03:02
I grew up during the years of the Depression, I survived, sometimes rather narrowly, the Second World War, and here I am today. Now, I recognize three crises there, two wars and one very profound economic depression.
03:23
I don't recognize any comparable crisis since. But there is, however, a new factor, in the world today which was not present when I was a young man, and I will talk about that, because I think it is the most important factor in facing mankind's future.
03:44
I like to classify crises according to three different groups. The imaginary crises, the artificial crises, and the real crises. And these are the only three words I will write on the
04:03
blackboard. So may I now take some of the crises that the world press tells us we are suffering from and analyze them in terms of these classifications. Let us start with
04:23
pollution. Pollution is something that interests very much the young, and we are said to be suffering from a crisis of pollution. Now, I know a flagrant example of pollution. It comes from the United Kingdom, and I hope you will excuse me if I use United Kingdom
04:45
examples in my lecture. This is simply because I know the background in the United Kingdom better than I know it in any other country. Anyone who has read Dickens or has read the adventures
05:00
of Sherlock Holmes will remember the thick yellow London fogs. These thick yellow London fogs still existed when I was a boy and a young man, and they were a very remarkable phenomenon. They were full of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid. They were not only very dirty, but they
05:23
also killed people. The mortality rate during a week of London fog was several times higher than a week without London fog. And there was a famous time in 1952, the last of the London fogs,
05:41
when the London fog happened to coincide with a cattle show, and more than half the animals which were at the cattle show died of respiratory complaints. So you see, I think a London fog was a case of real pollution. Now, for the last
06:01
10 to 15 years, we have not had a London fog. We have fog, but it's no longer yellow and toxic. We have a white fog like other people should have. What is the difference? How have we managed to solve this grave problem of pollution, which was actually killing people? Well, it was done, first of all, by detecting that there
06:25
was a problem. That was obvious. Secondly, by passing a law, the so-called Clean Air Act. Under this law, it was forbidden to burn. It is forbidden to burn bejuminous coal in London, and it is forbidden for factories to emit smoke. The application of this law could not,
06:47
of course, be imposed once. It was imposed district by district. But as it was imposed, so the quality of the air in the winter improved. Until today, we have, I think, London air, which is comparable with the air of any other city. Of course, we have had to pay
07:06
a price for that. The suppression of smoke from factory chimneys costs something. The burning of fuels, which are more expensive than bejuminous coal, also costs something. But it is a price
07:20
which has been well worth paying. Now, in case you think that's the only successful story about pollution in the United Kingdom, let me say that in the last century, the alkali industry started to pollute the landscape in Cheshire. And the government passed a law to prevent this, this is in the last century, not this century, and establish what was called the
07:45
alkali inspectorate. And the duty of the alkali inspectorate was to go around and make sure that the provisions of the alkali act were obeyed. The alkali inspectorate still exists, but now it goes around controlling all kinds of pollution, including this London fog problem,
08:06
which has now been cured. Well, from these two stories, and I'm sure others that I could find, I believe that the pollution problem is an imaginary one. It doesn't exist.
08:22
Because we have the means to detect pollution at a very sensitive level, we have the means to prevent it, the technology to know how to do it, we have only to pass the law, enforce the law, and pay the bill. Now, there is one aspect of pollution, however, which is not solvable so easily.
08:44
And that is illustrated by the following story. I mentioned how the British had managed to solve the fog pollution problem by passing a law. And one of the provisions of the law controls the amount of sulfur dioxide that can be detected at ground level.
09:05
Well, there are two ways then to reduce the concentration of sulfur dioxide at ground level. One is to take it out of smoke, and the other one is to build much higher chimneys, so it goes up in the air. And the power generating stations have, on the whole,
09:22
chosen the second alternative. They don't take the sulfur dioxide from their smoke. Instead, they build a very tall chimney and hope that it'll go up into the air and not come down again. Well, it doesn't come down again in the United Kingdom. It goes up across the North Sea, and it comes down as sulfuric acid rain in Scandinavia. And I think it's not
09:49
surprising that our friends in Scandinavia are concerned about this, because the pH of their locks and rivers is falling, and their fish are not reproducing themselves so well as they did.
10:02
Now, who is going to do something about this problem of pollution? The British like to think that it's not their problem, but of course it is really. What we need, therefore, is some means whereby the costs which would be considerable to take out the sulfur dioxide from the smoke
10:23
can be borne, either entirely by the United Kingdom, if that is to be done, or else to be shared in some way. We have absolutely no way of treating this problem at the present time. That is, pollution that is made in one country, but is delivered to another one.
10:42
We talk next about the energy crisis. How would I classify that? Well, the energy crisis happened suddenly just a few years ago, as you know, and it was provoked by the establishment of an international monopoly, which arbitrarily
11:01
increased the price of oil by a large factor. It is said that the cost of finding and producing oil in Saudi Arabia is only about 25 cents a barrel, but it sold for $12. You can only do that. That can only be done, of course, because this international monopoly
11:22
exists. I don't in any way believe in monopoly. I think monopoly is most regrettable, except under conditions of a patent, of course, which is for a short time and is given as a reward for special inventiveness, but there's of course nothing we can do about it. If this
11:44
sudden increase in the price of oil had not taken place, then we would have looked for oil as Saudi Arabian oil. The cheap oil were exhausted. We would be looking for oil elsewhere. The price would arise gradually and society would have had time to adjust itself to this problem.
12:06
I myself believe that the cries that go up that oil is just about to be exhausted are no more true than they were in the 1930s. I have lived long enough to remember reading articles in the 1930s that we would not have any more oil in the 1970s.
12:26
This is totally untrue. It's untrue because we continue to find oil. Oil is found in sedimentary rock. 80% of the sedimentary rock in the world is under the sea. I conclude, therefore, that 80% of the world's oil is yet to be found,
12:42
and there's no question of running out of oil in this century. It will surely last until the end of the next century, but of course it will be much more expensive to produce because it comes from under the sea. Likewise, I am quite in agreement with the theory that because there
13:02
is plenty of coal, we have for several centuries plenty of hydrocarbons. The excellent Fischer-Tropsch process, a German process which was used very successfully in the last war, is available, and in fact of course it is operated in South Africa with success. Again,
13:21
it just produces oil at a price which is still greater than the monopoly price of $12 or so a barrel. There are lots of other sources of oil, shale, tar sands, and I don't see why we should be pessimistic about our capacity to get oil from these sources again at a price. What is
13:47
I think contributing work in this direction is that one cannot be sure that the OPEC monopoly will continue forever. If it did not exist, then as I have indicated, the price of oil would come
14:03
back again to $2 or $3 a barrel, which would mean that anyone who had invested in oil from under the sea or in oil from shale or tar sands would lose their capital, they could no longer compete with the real price of oil.
14:22
Other sources of energy for the generation of electricity are geothermal steam, sunlight, wind, and wave power. They are abundant, and the problems there are problems of collection. They are in energy in a relatively diluted form, and it costs again money to collect
14:45
them. But if someone invented solar cells, which only cost 10% of what the present ones do, or perhaps 1% would be better. If we found some organic compound that did it at that price level, then just sunlight can be calculated to solve easily our energy problem.
15:08
If superconductivity could be used, if we had a material which was superconducting at room temperature, again our energy crisis would just disappear overnight. I see no reason why these sort of things shouldn't happen. And I come last when discussing the energy crisis
15:29
to nuclear energy. This is a problem which seems to face you particularly in Germany, where there is almost hysterical reaction to the proposal to build nuclear power stations.
15:44
As far as one can tell, nuclear power stations are an exceedingly safe way of generating electricity. No one has been killed, as far as I know, in a nuclear power station accident. Very little radioactivity is emitted compared with ordinary power stations.
16:04
And the safety precautions which are imposed by law and by the inspectorate, because there's a very powerful inspectorate involved, should prevent any possible accident. A lot of the problem, I think, is caused by the fact that the general public
16:22
confuses nuclear explosions with nuclear power stations, and thinks that a nuclear power station could explode by a nuclear reaction. Of course, it can't. You can only have a thermal explosion, and that should be contained within the power station itself. There is, of course, some risk, but there is some risk in everything we do in life.
16:43
And if you argue that we must remove all risk from life, which you may wish to do, think of what you have to do. The greatest killer by accident is, of course, the private motor car. That private motor car kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, and maims hundreds
17:02
of thousands of people every year. If we forbade the private motor car, and made everybody travel by public transport, we would save most of those hundreds of thousands of lives, and most of those hundreds of thousands of maimed people. Shouldn't we then, therefore,
17:21
instead of attacking nuclear power stations, which seem to be quite safe, go and sit down and attack the automobile manufacturers, the factories where they're building automobiles, because they're much more dangerous. Also, there's an interesting United Kingdom statistic, which I don't know if it applies elsewhere in the world. The second most prevalent cause of
17:45
accidental death in the United Kingdom is falling down stairs. Now, of course, we can very quickly deal with that one. We just don't have any staircases. We have houses or flats on one level.
18:00
Shouldn't we, therefore, forbid the building of houses with staircases? You see the paradox that there is in this protest against the construction of nuclear power stations. Now, I haven't said how I classify this energy crisis. I classify it, and I think you will have realized what I'm going to say,
18:22
I classify this as a number two crisis, an artificial crisis, which has been provoked by the oil monopoly. Number three crisis, food. A few years ago, there was a meeting in Rome, and you will well remember the tremendous publicity that came out of that
18:43
about how the whole world was shortly going to be starving. Now, in the meantime, a few good harvests seem to have restored completely the world's reserves of food. Some places there's an ombre de richesse, too much food. And in fact,
19:04
there isn't any food crisis in the world at the present time. There's some problems of distribution, of course, which is another matter. If you just let the land produce food without doing anything to it, you would not get nearly enough food to feed the human race.
19:23
But if you cultivate it according to good agricultural practice, that is to say using the right fertilizers, the right pesticides, and the right herbicides, you can multiply the natural production of food by at least a power of 10. If all the land in the world
19:43
were subject to good agricultural practice, then the food supply could be at least doubled. So we have at least that factor available to us without doing anything that isn't known at the present time. But of course, the plant geneticists continue to breed for us
20:01
new and improved kinds of plants, which double sometimes the yield that you can get. And there is, of course, the fascinating proposition, not so far away perhaps, of persuading the bacteria that fix nitrogen to grow on other plants than the luminous plants.
20:20
So I'm personally not at all concerned about this problem of food. I think it is a problem at the present time of distribution, and I'd like to put it amongst the artificial problems which is dreamed up by the world press. If we did really have a problem of producing enough food,
20:41
of course you realize that now we have excellent yeast organisms that convert hydrocarbons into protein and do it very efficiently. And it's been calculated that a factory of just a few square kilometers making, converting hydrocarbons by yeast into protein
21:02
would feed the whole world. I'm not saying that you would want to eat that yeast protein. At the moment, one's thinking only of giving it to animals. But if you were really hungry, of course, you would be very happy to eat it. Now, next crisis, population.
21:21
Again, everybody is telling us about how dreadful the world is going to be to live in in a hundred years' time. And if we wait just a few hundred years, we'll all be standing on each other's shoulders. Now, clearly, that cannot happen. And the fallacy that people make
21:41
in analyzing population is to suppose that population goes on increasing exponentially in the way that it's been doing recently. I don't believe that does happen. I believe that when the population gets to a certain level, there are factors which control it. Certainly, the desire for a reasonable standard of living seems to control population. In Western
22:05
Europe, I don't think we have anymore any population problem. The population is more or less static. And this applies to the countries of the East, communist countries. It applies particularly to China. They've had a marvelous success there in controlling their population.
22:23
It applies, of course, also to Japan. We have all the technical methods available for population control, methods of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. And really, it's a matter of sociology to persuade people not to reproduce themselves as much as they seem to want to do
22:42
in some countries. And of course, to take away in those countries the economic incentive to reproduce in that way. I can't help but be amused, however, by the fact that one of the reasons why the population explosion has taken place, and it has taken place almost exclusively in tropical countries, is because of the practical removal of the problem of
23:07
malaria. The great population explosion in tropical countries, I think, is due to the removal of the disease of malaria. And of course, what's responsible for that? Well, the much-maligned DDT. I don't want to defend DDT, because I think we really should move on to
23:25
a more sophisticated insecticide. But at least we should recognize that the hundreds of millions of extra people living in the world in the tropics today owe their existence to this compound. There are philosophical problems involved in the population crisis. How great should the world
23:45
population be? Nobody seems to have decided that. Obviously it should not be greater than the food supply, but who is to define that? Again, it is a matter of international problem. So I think the population problem doesn't exist yet. At the present time it's artificial. It might become
24:05
real in the future, but I really don't believe so. Next crisis, economics. The economic crisis. If you're an unemployed person in Europe, well, today I'm sure you feel that the economic crisis
24:23
is a very real crisis. However, the situation is not nearly as bad as it was in the 1930s. In the 1930s, the percentage of unemployed was much greater and social security
24:41
was very, very much less, so it was very painful to be unemployed. The cause of this economic crisis, I think, goes back to our discussion of the energy crisis. It's been provoked by the rapid, enormous increase in the price of oil. What that means,
25:01
of course, is this increase in the price of oil, is that real capital has to be moved from the producing countries and becomes the surplus that those producing countries have acquired. So we have to become poorer. I wish some politicians would be more honest and tell
25:23
people, Western Europe or anywhere, that because of the existence of the oil monopoly, they have to be poorer. The consequence of the economic crisis, the present one, is rapid inflation. The one economic crisis in the 1930s was quite different. It was
25:45
characterized by deflation. The inflationary process, I think, ought to be much easier to control because inflation is caused by the printing of too much money by governments. It has been so-called ever since the beginning of the printing of money, which goes back to the
26:05
French Revolution, where the French revolutionaries printed so much money that they completely destroyed capital. How do you stop governments printing money? Well, of course, most countries
26:21
are controlled by their balance of payments, and there's only one country which can print as much money as it likes at the present time, and that, of course, is the United States. Now, I hope you're not going to think that I am in any way anti-American in what I say next, because I regard America as my second or third country, France being the other one, and
26:47
I'm not in any way anti-American. I think America is a marvelous place. But I don't really think that they ought to be allowed to print money indefinitely because that then circulates around the world and causes inflation in every other country.
27:03
Now, we had a perfectly good economic system which prevented that happening, the Bretton Woods system, which was a Bretton Woods agreement, which you remember was signed in the end of the last war, and worked excellently for 20 years and led to a steady growth and prosperity. And I think that we should go back again to the Bretton Woods agreement.
27:26
That means, of course, that the US government has to fix the price for gold, and that the gold and the dollar have to become interconvertible again. That imposes monetary discipline. I know that no economist will accept this, of course, because all
27:42
economists don't believe in that sort of thing anymore. But of course, I don't believe that economists really know anything about the economy, because if they did, they would all be predicting what was going to happen economically, and they would all become millionaires, because they would go to the stock exchange and use their predicting powers. And I'm not
28:04
aware that economists are much more successful financially in life than their corresponding scientists. So is the economic problem a real crisis, or is it artificial? I think it's half artificial and half real. I think it has an artificial origin, but if we're not careful,
28:24
we don't do something about it, it's going to become a real crisis. I hope something will be done. Now, I've left for last the crisis that really does concern me, what I think is the only real crisis. And I expect you know what I'm going to say. The dangers of nuclear war.
28:45
The danger of nuclear war has not disappeared. We just talked about it so much in the 1950s, I think, 60s, that we got tired of talking about it, and we haven't talked about it lately. But we ought to do so, because there are perhaps 100,000 nuclear devices in the world
29:05
distributed around in various stores at the moment. Perhaps there are several hundred thousand, perhaps there are even a million, nobody knows. But everybody knows that it's quite enough to kill off the population of the world several times. And if we look back over history,
29:23
we will see that there have been times, for example, in the 19th century, when wars were relatively rare, but that on a statistical basis, there's always been at least one or two major wars every century. Have we the right to believe that suddenly history of mankind is going to
29:45
change? Now I don't count really the Korean and Vietnam wars as wars, because they were fought without using all the weapons, modern weapons that were available. They were fought without nuclear weapons. And we haven't had a real war, we only had occasionally the threat of one.
30:06
But we can't hide from ourselves that while the three superpowers may be mutually so afraid of each other that they won't use nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon technology is going to spread throughout the world. And we can't stop that, because the way of how to make
30:25
nuclear weapons is available to anyone who has enough dedicated technologists and is prepared to spend enough money. So we're going to come sometime to a situation where a country in a last defense will use nuclear weapons, or when some mad dictator will get hold of them
30:47
and will use them in his madness. What are we going to do about it? Well, you will be surprised to learn that I am modestly optimistic, because I think for the
31:08
first time I've given up some of their sacred national sovereignty. The idea of sacred national sovereignty is something which seems to have existed ever since we had nations.
31:21
That is, a nation is always right, a nation must do what it thinks is best for its people and not care about any other nation. Now we've a situation in the world where nine countries have given up a little bit of their national sovereignty, and of course I'm talking about the common market. In the United Kingdom nowadays it's not usually customary to say
31:46
anything nice about the common market. You always usually blame it for the price of butter or something like that. Well, I think that they are completely overlooking what the
32:02
EU has to offer. We do have a European court which is in the process of trying two of the countries in the common market, and has already tried a number of companies. We have a European court which will even deal with the complaints of individuals. And that's a marvelous thing, of course, provided that the guilty parties will accept their guilt. I also am very
32:30
impressed by the fact that we're going to have an elected European Parliament. That is, for the British, a really major thing, a major event. And it is, I think,
32:41
also for the French. Presumably when we have our elected Parliament we will again have some responsibility. Each nation will be giving up a little more of its national sovereignty in return for the benefit of all. Well, you will see that I'm coming to the point that nation states
33:00
ought to have morality, just in the same way that individuals have morality. I am not supposed to be a selfish person, or not a very selfish person. I may be slightly selfish, but I have to pay my taxes to show that I'm unselfish. And I do so, I'm glad to do so. And I think that we
33:21
are coming to the point where the nations will have to work together in the same way as individuals work together to make up a family group, or make up a town, or make up a nation. So we may have the chance to evolve in this way. I'm not advocating world government at all. I'm advocating groups of nations associating together. And I'm particularly advocating
33:47
that nations should obey international courts of law who will administrate laws. Now, I have come to the time for which I should speak. And I know that I've said lots of things
34:02
which the audience will not agree with. I think you've been very polite in not all walking out at various times when I've told you that things that you think are sacred are not sacred. We are not going to have a discussion right now. This is normally when I give this talk, which I've done a number of occasions to university students. At this point, I stop,
34:24
and then everybody tells me how wrong I am. And everybody asks me extra questions, and we all have a nice, excited debate. We can't do that today. But I shall be here, of course, for the rest of the week and this evening and on Thursday afternoon or any other time. If you would like to come and tell me how I've got it all wrong, please do so. Thank you very much.