And

that's the sort of, the whole thesis of them is this idea.

He says in the first lecture, he says, it is my thesis that generally, the new things we've learned in science, and specifically, what we have learned in atomic physics, do provide us with valid and relevant and greatly needed analogies to human problems lying outside the present domain of science. And i think that's the interesting thing. He recognizes at the start that it would be naive to claim that tis should run the world. That's not what he's sang at all. He's not say, you just think like us, then the world will be great. He's saying, it's extremely difficult to run a society and to run a world, but there are lessons in the way you are forced to think about science that can be used to run the world more effectively.

And one of the things that he picks up on this is the idea of complimentarity. Yes. And it's an the

students of physics grapple with this. It's something you teach at the first yhear undergraduate level. It got all the way back to the beginning of quantum theory and neil's bore and unopenheim er actually used as an example, a very simple example, is the way you are forced to think about a particle like an electron. So a single sub atomic particle, what is the description of the way that thing behaves? Well, sometimes it is ay and appropriate to treat it as a little particle spot the way we often think of that particle like a little billiard ball or a marble, whizzing around and bouncing into things. But in other circumstances, you have to think of it as a wave. It exhibits behaviour like a wave, interference effects, and like water waves, the way waterways move round on a pond, it behaves a bit like that. And what oppenheimer points out is that neither of thosecip s are absolutely right or absolutely wrong. They are both necessary. So in order to think about the way that nature is, you have to hold to pictures or ideas in your mind at the same time, which appear mutually exclusive at first glance. And so if you relate that to community, as oftenheimer calls it, or politics, saying is that, for example, we might think about individual rights verses the collective rights or the needs of society.

We cannot in any sense, be both observers and actors in any specific instance, or we shall fail properly to be either one or the other. Yet we know that our life is built of these two modes. Is part freead part inevitable. Is part creation and part discipline, part acceptance, part effort. We have no written rules that assign us to these ways, but we know that only folly and death of the spirit results when we deny one or the other, or when we erect one as total and absolute and make the others derivative and secondary. So

the idea of individual freedom balanced against the need to get along and have rules to run a coherent society. Are those two things mutually exclusive? Well, offenheimer cautions us and says, well, this is where you can learn from physics, because you have to have both o those ideas in your mind at the same time in order to get a complete picture, in one case, physics, or anothe another case, to develop a complete idea for how you should run a society.