full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Kary Mullis: Play! Experiment! Discover!


Unscramble the Blue Letters


I'll just start tailnkg about the 17th century. I hope nobody finds that offensive. I — you know, when I — after I had invented PCR, I kind of neeedd a change. And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started linivg down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in. They usually talk about the 17th century. You know, they get a real bad rap in the world. People think they're sort of lowbrows. One day, somebody suggested I read this book. It was called — it was called "The Air Pump," or something like "The letvhaain and The Air Pump." It was a real wierd book about the 17th century. And I realized, the roots of the way I sort of thought was just the only natural way to think about things. That — you know, I was born thinking about things that way, and I had always been like a little scientist guy. And when I went to find out something, I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised, you know, when they first told me how — how you were supposed to do science, because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever. But it didn't — it never occrrued to me that it had to be invented and that it had been invented only 350 years ago. You know, it was — like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy sort of all at the same time. And the sroty of that, I thought, was really fnscaintiag. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do. And it's, it's a kind of — You know, Charles I got beheaded somewhere early in the 17th century. And the English set up Cromwell and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever, and not the kind of Republicans we had. They changed the gvmerenont, and it didn't work. And clehars II, the son, was fainlly put back on the throne of England. He was really nervous, because his dad had been, you know, beheaded for being the King of England And he was nervous about the fact that csonranevitos that got going in, like, bars and stuff would turn to — this is kind of — it's hard to believe, but people in the 17th century in England were starting to talk about, you know, philosophy and stuff in bars. They didn't have TV sreecns, and they didn't have any football geams to watch. And they would get really pissy, and all of a sudden people would spill out into the sreett and fight about issues like whether or not it was okay if Robert Boyle made a decive called the vuacum pump. Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II. He was a Christian guy during the weekends, but during the week he was a scientist. (Laughter) Which was — back then it was sort of, you know, well, you know — if you made this thing — he made this little device, like kind of like a bicycle pump in reverse that could suck all the air out of — you know what a bell jar is? One of these things, you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal, and you can see inside of it, so you can see what's going on inside this thing. But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there, and see what would hpaepn inside there. I mean, the first — I think one of the first eitmepexrns he did was he put a bird in there. And people in the 17th century, they didn't really usrdntenad the same way we do about you know, this sfutf is a bunch of different kinds of molecules, and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that. I mean, fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air. But both started exploring it. One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out, and the bird died. So he said, hmm... He said — he cellad what he'd done as making — they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time. Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum. Right? And imaemtiedly, he got into trouble with the loacl clergy who said, you can't make a vacuum. Ah, uh — (Laughter) aioltsrte said that nature ahorbs one. I think it was a poor translation, probably, but people relied on authorities like that. And you know, Boyle says, well, shit. I make them all the time. I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird — and I'm calling it a vacuum. And the reoluiigs people said that if God wanted you to make — I mean, God is everywhere, that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere. And a vacuum — there's nothing in a vacuum, so you've — God couldn't be in there. So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know. And blyoe said, bullshit. I mean, you want to call it Godless, you know, you call it Godless. But that's not my job. I'm not into that. I do that on the weekend. And like — what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens when you suck everything out of a compartment. And he did all these cute little experiments. Like he did one with — he had a little wheel, like a fan, that was sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself. He had another fan ooseppd to it that he had like a — I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a rbeubr band, and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan. I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings. It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside after he got the vacuum ebhistlased, and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it, the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right? Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are — it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that, but that was what was going on at the time. And like, there was big aegrtmnus about it in the — you know, the gin hsoeus and in the coffee shops and stuff. And Charles started not liking that. Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that — let's make a place where you can do this stuff where people don't get so — you know, we don't want the — we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so — because when they started talking about religion and science and stuff like that, that's when it had sort of gotten his father in tlruboe. And so, Charles said, I'm going to put up the money give you guys a building, come here and you can meet in the building, but just don't talk about religion in there. And that was fine with Boyle. He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings. And anybody who wants to do siccnee is — this is about the time that iaasc Newton was starting to whip out a lot of really iiseretnntg things. And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society, they called it. You had to be dressed up pertty well. It wasn't like a TED crfennocee. That was the only citirera, was that you be — you looked like a gtelamenn, and they'd let anybody could come. You didn't have to be a mbmeer then. And so, they would come in and you would do — Anybody that was going to show an enirexmpet, which was kind of a new word at the time, dretsmntoae some pirclnpie, they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it. So they were — the really important part of this was, you were not supposed to talk about final causes, for instance. And God was out of the picture. The actual nature of reality was not at issue. You're not sspuepod to talk about the absolute nature of anything. You were not supposed to talk about anything that you couldn't demonstrate. So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine wkros, here's what we do, and then here's what happens. And seeing what happens, it was OK to graeizlene, and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime we make one of these things. And so you can start making up some rules. You say, anytime you have a vacuum state, you will discover that one weehl will not turn another one, if the only connection between them is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing. Candles can't burn in a vacuum, therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either. It's not clear; actually sparklers will, but they didn't know that. They didn't have sparklers. But, they — (Laughter) — you can make up reuls, but they have to relate only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate. And most the dionoaetntmrss had to do with visuals. Like if you do an experiment on stage, and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky. I mean, reailty is what you can see. That wasn't an eilpxict rule in the miteneg, but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices, and they can't see and associate it with somebody, that person's probably not there. But the grneael idea that you could only — you could only really talk about things in that place that had some kind of experimental basis. It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local psipehhloor, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes. What's happening here, in the mdldie of the 17th century, was that what became my field — science, experimental science — was pulling itself away, and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here, but it was also what — it was an amnaizg thing that happened. Science had been all ikeoentrlcd with theology, and ppoihsolhy, and — and — and mathematics, which is really not science. But exiatmernepl science had been tied up with all those things. And the mathematics part and the experimental science part was pulling away from philosophy. And — things — we never looekd back. It's been so cool since then. I mean, it just — it just — untangled a thing that was really impeding technology from being developed. And, I mean, everybody in this room — now, this is 350 short years ago. Remember, that's a short time. It was 300,000, probably, years ago that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room came up out of Africa and turned to the left. You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those in the Japanese ttaisoalrnn. But that happened very — a long time ago compared to 350 short years ago. But in that 350 yeras, the place has just undergone a lot of changes. In fact, everybody in this room probably, especially if you picked up your bag — some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags — but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room has got in their pocket, or back in their room, something that 350 years ago, kings would have gone to war to have. I mean, if you can think how important — If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites, it's not going to be much use. But, like — but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system in the 17th century some king would have gotten together an army and gone to get it, you know. If that person — Audience: For the tddey bear? The teddy bear? Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah. But — all of us own stuff. I mean, individuals own things that kings would have definitely gone to war to get. And this is just 350 years. Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff. You know, the important people — you can almost read about their lives, about all the really important people that made advances, you know. And, I mean — this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff came from that separation of this little sort of thing that we do — now I, when I was a boy was born sort of with this idea that if you want to know something — you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot, and my mother didn't really know much science, but I thought if you want to know something about stuff, you do it — you make an experiment, you know. You get — you get, like — I just had a natural feeling for science and setting up experiments. I toghuht that was the way everybody had always thought. I thought that anybody with any binras will do it that way. It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people — You know, I was one of those scientists that was — got into trouble the other night at dinner because of the post-modernism thing. And I didn't mean, you know — where is that lady? Audience: Here. (Laughter) KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument so much as just a lively discussion. I didn't take it personally, but — I just — I had — I naively had thought, until this surfing encerexipe staertd me into the 17th century, I'd thought that's just the way people thought, and everybody did, and they recognized reality by what they could see or tcouh or feel or hear. At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this — I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma — This is about the time that George Dyson's dad was starting to blow nuclear — thinking about blowing up nuclear roktecs and stuff. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs — little frogs — had aspirations of space taverl, just like people. And I — (Laughter) I was looking for a — a ppriuosoln system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of sghit and then I wanted this little prtchuaae to come back with the frog in it. And — I — I — I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (lgethaur) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of — now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to — and how is it going to work. And we didn't have — like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any pffus of smoke out there, she'd lean out and asmondih us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her — You know, that was kind of the wrsot thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it. It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage. (Laughter) So, I went to the drug store and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals. Nowadays, it's no ma'am, check your shoes. And like — (Laughter) But then it wasn't — they didn't have any, but the guy had — I said, what kind of sltas of patuoissm do you have? You know. And he had potassium nrittae. And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is. I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that maunal. And so I — I did some experiments. You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire. Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together. And it — they burned. It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell, cmrepoad to other rocket fuels I had tried, that all had suulfr in them. And, it smelt like burnt cdany. And then I tried the mnleitg business, and I melted it. And then it mteeld into a little sort of syrupy liquid, bowrn. And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance, that when you lit that, it went off like a bat. I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down — you'd lihgt it, and it would just start dancing around the yard. And I said, there is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go. (Laughter) So I started developing — you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my bterohr. But I — it took me about — it took me about, I'd say, six months to finally figure out all the little things. There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by — what I just— you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly biuld up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was — I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not — I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of nisoe, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the dturcioestn of the peanlt. I hadn't heard about the 10 ways that we should be afraid of the — By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never — the frog would have died, you know. At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal — I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it. So, so I've got something else that's not personal. But that... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I — sometimes you do that, if you're going to witre a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea — like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides, and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going — I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I herad from all my friends who were molecular biologists — I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an aurhottiy figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the rsetlus of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to cnhage everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't — you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage. And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all — you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm blclisaay honest. I have a fairly bad meromy, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like — so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally iuivitqnsie, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. Now, let's see... I've got another five minutes, right? OK. All scientists aren't like that. You know — and there is a lot — (Laughter) There is a lot — a lot has been going on since Isaac neotwn and all that stuff hpneaepd. One of the things that happened right around wrold War II in that same time period before, and as sure as hell afterwards, government got — realized that scientists aren't srangte dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. They made ftsear things. They made bigger guns to sooht them down with. You know, they made drugs to give the ptolis if they were broken up in the pescros. They made all kinds of — and then finally one gnait bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invset in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people wnorkig in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got ienvvlod in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of snitsictes who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into busseins — I mean, there are waves of — going into your high sohocl, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not aonrmye. You want to be rich, you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the pewor and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think — they don't — they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth. And the people I'm talking about are people that like — they say that they're a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on cltiame Change. And they — and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we're going to — how we're going to clniutlnoay prove that the planet is getting warmer, when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. I mean, if you actually mrauese the temperature over a poierd — I mean, the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years — lgoner than that it's been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and reocrds have been kept for 50 or 60 years, and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up. It's like, the aeavrge temperature has gone up a tiny little bit, because the nighttime temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. And it's that the wtaeher stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And most responsible people that measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime, and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know — the first guy — the first guy that got the idea that we're going to fry ourselves here, actually, he didn't think of it that way. His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which he thought might — this is in 1900 — the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like, you know, like a ctlopemely insulated thing with no stuff in it, really, just energy coming down, energy lnevaig. And so he came up with this theory, and he said, this will be cool, because it'll be a longer growing soaesn in Sweden, you know, and the surfers liked it, the surfers thought, that's a cool idea, because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and — but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know. But nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean, the temperature as measured — and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASAs records, and all the Weather Bureau's records, and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the trepuetmrae has just — the nighttime temperature measured on the sacurfe of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up about .7 degrees in this cenrtuy. But in fact, it was just coming up — it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up. So — and Arrhenius' theory — and all the global wrmears think — they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too, if it's the gnhsreueoe effect. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean — but ppoele don't like things like this, so — most — I mean, you don't get all eitecxd about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It's a paper that came out in frrubaey, and most of you probably hadn't heard about it. "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." exsuce me. Those papers were pielhubsd by NASA, and some scientists at Columbia, and viklii and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these — the conclusion in both of these papers, and in also the Science editor's, like, dponcrtesiis of these papers, for, you know, for the quickie, is that our thieoers about gloabl warming are completely wrong. I mean, what these guys were doing, and this is what — the NASA people have been saying this for a long time. They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up — it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And in this pepar, they show something much more striking, and that was that they did what they call a radiation — and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy — we know how much that is — it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount. When it gets warm it generates — it makes redder energy — I mean, like infra-red, like something that's warm gives off infra-red. The whole business of the global warming — trash, really, is that — if the — if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to epcase won't be able to get out. But the heat comnig from the sun, which is mostly down in the — it's like 350 nreteanmos, which is where it's ceeerntd — that goes right through CO2. So you still get haeetd, but you don't dissipate any. Well, these guys measuerd all of those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff, and you can write these lrage rorepts, and you can get government money to do it, but these — they actually measured it, and it turns out that in the last 10 years — that's why they say "decadal" there — that the eegrny — that the lveel of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. Like, the amount of imbalance — meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out that you would get from having double the CO2, which we're not anywhere near that, by the way. But if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would be increase the energy budget by about — in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out. So the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study — these two studies by two different teams — that five and a half watts per square meter had been coming in from 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer. So the theory's kuapt — it's nothing. These papers should have been called, "The End to the Global Warming ficsao," you know. They're concerned, and you can tell they have very gdarued cuocloinnss in these papers, because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said, you know what? There isn't a perolbm with global warming any longer, so we can — you know, they're funding. And if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened... if they — if they — if they actually — if they actually said that, I'm getting out. (Laughter) I'll stand up too, and — (Laughter) (Applause) They have to say that. They had to be very cautious. But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted, because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly pfirsenoosal — really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking, was the global ctraicuilon model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor. It's not by a small one. They just — they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth — there's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it's big and horrible — and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about. So I mean, the reason I put those things all together, OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science — some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity. And there's a lot of things like global warming, and ozone hole and you know, a whole bcunh of scientific public issues, that if you're interested in them, then you have to get down the details, and read the parpes called, "Large Decadal Variability in the..." You have to fgiure out what all those words mean. And if you just lesitn to the guys who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it, you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things. rebmemer the 10 things that are going to get you. The — one of them — (Laughter) And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean, you've got to wcath out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here. (Applause)

Open Cloze


I'll just start _______ about the 17th century. I hope nobody finds that offensive. I — you know, when I — after I had invented PCR, I kind of ______ a change. And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started ______ down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in. They usually talk about the 17th century. You know, they get a real bad rap in the world. People think they're sort of lowbrows. One day, somebody suggested I read this book. It was called — it was called "The Air Pump," or something like "The _________ and The Air Pump." It was a real _____ book about the 17th century. And I realized, the roots of the way I sort of thought was just the only natural way to think about things. That — you know, I was born thinking about things that way, and I had always been like a little scientist guy. And when I went to find out something, I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised, you know, when they first told me how — how you were supposed to do science, because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever. But it didn't — it never ________ to me that it had to be invented and that it had been invented only 350 years ago. You know, it was — like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy sort of all at the same time. And the _____ of that, I thought, was really ___________. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do. And it's, it's a kind of — You know, Charles I got beheaded somewhere early in the 17th century. And the English set up Cromwell and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever, and not the kind of Republicans we had. They changed the __________, and it didn't work. And _______ II, the son, was _______ put back on the throne of England. He was really nervous, because his dad had been, you know, beheaded for being the King of England And he was nervous about the fact that _____________ that got going in, like, bars and stuff would turn to — this is kind of — it's hard to believe, but people in the 17th century in England were starting to talk about, you know, philosophy and stuff in bars. They didn't have TV _______, and they didn't have any football _____ to watch. And they would get really pissy, and all of a sudden people would spill out into the ______ and fight about issues like whether or not it was okay if Robert Boyle made a ______ called the ______ pump. Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II. He was a Christian guy during the weekends, but during the week he was a scientist. (Laughter) Which was — back then it was sort of, you know, well, you know — if you made this thing — he made this little device, like kind of like a bicycle pump in reverse that could suck all the air out of — you know what a bell jar is? One of these things, you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal, and you can see inside of it, so you can see what's going on inside this thing. But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there, and see what would ______ inside there. I mean, the first — I think one of the first ___________ he did was he put a bird in there. And people in the 17th century, they didn't really __________ the same way we do about you know, this _____ is a bunch of different kinds of molecules, and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that. I mean, fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air. But both started exploring it. One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out, and the bird died. So he said, hmm... He said — he ______ what he'd done as making — they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time. Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum. Right? And ___________, he got into trouble with the _____ clergy who said, you can't make a vacuum. Ah, uh — (Laughter) _________ said that nature ______ one. I think it was a poor translation, probably, but people relied on authorities like that. And you know, Boyle says, well, shit. I make them all the time. I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird — and I'm calling it a vacuum. And the _________ people said that if God wanted you to make — I mean, God is everywhere, that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere. And a vacuum — there's nothing in a vacuum, so you've — God couldn't be in there. So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know. And _____ said, bullshit. I mean, you want to call it Godless, you know, you call it Godless. But that's not my job. I'm not into that. I do that on the weekend. And like — what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens when you suck everything out of a compartment. And he did all these cute little experiments. Like he did one with — he had a little wheel, like a fan, that was sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself. He had another fan _______ to it that he had like a — I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a ______ band, and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan. I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings. It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside after he got the vacuum ___________, and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it, the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right? Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are — it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that, but that was what was going on at the time. And like, there was big _________ about it in the — you know, the gin ______ and in the coffee shops and stuff. And Charles started not liking that. Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that — let's make a place where you can do this stuff where people don't get so — you know, we don't want the — we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so — because when they started talking about religion and science and stuff like that, that's when it had sort of gotten his father in _______. And so, Charles said, I'm going to put up the money give you guys a building, come here and you can meet in the building, but just don't talk about religion in there. And that was fine with Boyle. He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings. And anybody who wants to do _______ is — this is about the time that _____ Newton was starting to whip out a lot of really ___________ things. And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society, they called it. You had to be dressed up ______ well. It wasn't like a TED __________. That was the only ________, was that you be — you looked like a _________, and they'd let anybody could come. You didn't have to be a ______ then. And so, they would come in and you would do — Anybody that was going to show an __________, which was kind of a new word at the time, ___________ some _________, they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it. So they were — the really important part of this was, you were not supposed to talk about final causes, for instance. And God was out of the picture. The actual nature of reality was not at issue. You're not ________ to talk about the absolute nature of anything. You were not supposed to talk about anything that you couldn't demonstrate. So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine _____, here's what we do, and then here's what happens. And seeing what happens, it was OK to __________, and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime we make one of these things. And so you can start making up some rules. You say, anytime you have a vacuum state, you will discover that one _____ will not turn another one, if the only connection between them is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing. Candles can't burn in a vacuum, therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either. It's not clear; actually sparklers will, but they didn't know that. They didn't have sparklers. But, they — (Laughter) — you can make up _____, but they have to relate only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate. And most the ______________ had to do with visuals. Like if you do an experiment on stage, and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky. I mean, _______ is what you can see. That wasn't an ________ rule in the _______, but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices, and they can't see and associate it with somebody, that person's probably not there. But the _______ idea that you could only — you could only really talk about things in that place that had some kind of experimental basis. It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local ___________, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes. What's happening here, in the ______ of the 17th century, was that what became my field — science, experimental science — was pulling itself away, and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here, but it was also what — it was an _______ thing that happened. Science had been all ___________ with theology, and __________, and — and — and mathematics, which is really not science. But ____________ science had been tied up with all those things. And the mathematics part and the experimental science part was pulling away from philosophy. And — things — we never ______ back. It's been so cool since then. I mean, it just — it just — untangled a thing that was really impeding technology from being developed. And, I mean, everybody in this room — now, this is 350 short years ago. Remember, that's a short time. It was 300,000, probably, years ago that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room came up out of Africa and turned to the left. You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those in the Japanese ___________. But that happened very — a long time ago compared to 350 short years ago. But in that 350 _____, the place has just undergone a lot of changes. In fact, everybody in this room probably, especially if you picked up your bag — some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags — but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room has got in their pocket, or back in their room, something that 350 years ago, kings would have gone to war to have. I mean, if you can think how important — If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites, it's not going to be much use. But, like — but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system in the 17th century some king would have gotten together an army and gone to get it, you know. If that person — Audience: For the _____ bear? The teddy bear? Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah. But — all of us own stuff. I mean, individuals own things that kings would have definitely gone to war to get. And this is just 350 years. Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff. You know, the important people — you can almost read about their lives, about all the really important people that made advances, you know. And, I mean — this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff came from that separation of this little sort of thing that we do — now I, when I was a boy was born sort of with this idea that if you want to know something — you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot, and my mother didn't really know much science, but I thought if you want to know something about stuff, you do it — you make an experiment, you know. You get — you get, like — I just had a natural feeling for science and setting up experiments. I _______ that was the way everybody had always thought. I thought that anybody with any ______ will do it that way. It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people — You know, I was one of those scientists that was — got into trouble the other night at dinner because of the post-modernism thing. And I didn't mean, you know — where is that lady? Audience: Here. (Laughter) KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument so much as just a lively discussion. I didn't take it personally, but — I just — I had — I naively had thought, until this surfing __________ _______ me into the 17th century, I'd thought that's just the way people thought, and everybody did, and they recognized reality by what they could see or _____ or feel or hear. At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this — I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma — This is about the time that George Dyson's dad was starting to blow nuclear — thinking about blowing up nuclear _______ and stuff. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs — little frogs — had aspirations of space ______, just like people. And I — (Laughter) I was looking for a — a __________ system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of _____ and then I wanted this little _________ to come back with the frog in it. And — I — I — I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (________) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of — now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to — and how is it going to work. And we didn't have — like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any _____ of smoke out there, she'd lean out and ________ us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her — You know, that was kind of the _____ thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it. It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage. (Laughter) So, I went to the drug store and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals. Nowadays, it's no ma'am, check your shoes. And like — (Laughter) But then it wasn't — they didn't have any, but the guy had — I said, what kind of _____ of _________ do you have? You know. And he had potassium _______. And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is. I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that ______. And so I — I did some experiments. You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire. Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together. And it — they burned. It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell, ________ to other rocket fuels I had tried, that all had ______ in them. And, it smelt like burnt _____. And then I tried the _______ business, and I melted it. And then it ______ into a little sort of syrupy liquid, _____. And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance, that when you lit that, it went off like a bat. I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down — you'd _____ it, and it would just start dancing around the yard. And I said, there is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go. (Laughter) So I started developing — you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my _______. But I — it took me about — it took me about, I'd say, six months to finally figure out all the little things. There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by — what I just— you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly _____ up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was — I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not — I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of _____, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the ___________ of the ______. I hadn't heard about the 10 ways that we should be afraid of the — By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never — the frog would have died, you know. At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal — I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it. So, so I've got something else that's not personal. But that... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I — sometimes you do that, if you're going to _____ a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea — like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides, and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going — I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I _____ from all my friends who were molecular biologists — I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an _________ figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the _______ of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to ______ everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't — you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage. And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all — you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm _________ honest. I have a fairly bad ______, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like — so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally ___________, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. Now, let's see... I've got another five minutes, right? OK. All scientists aren't like that. You know — and there is a lot — (Laughter) There is a lot — a lot has been going on since Isaac ______ and all that stuff ________. One of the things that happened right around _____ War II in that same time period before, and as sure as hell afterwards, government got — realized that scientists aren't _______ dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. They made ______ things. They made bigger guns to _____ them down with. You know, they made drugs to give the ______ if they were broken up in the _______. They made all kinds of — and then finally one _____ bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to ______ in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people _______ in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got ________ in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of __________ who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into ________ — I mean, there are waves of — going into your high ______, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not _______. You want to be rich, you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the _____ and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think — they don't — they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth. And the people I'm talking about are people that like — they say that they're a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on _______ Change. And they — and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we're going to — how we're going to ___________ prove that the planet is getting warmer, when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. I mean, if you actually _______ the temperature over a ______ — I mean, the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years — ______ than that it's been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and _______ have been kept for 50 or 60 years, and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up. It's like, the _______ temperature has gone up a tiny little bit, because the nighttime temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. And it's that the _______ stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And most responsible people that measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime, and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know — the first guy — the first guy that got the idea that we're going to fry ourselves here, actually, he didn't think of it that way. His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which he thought might — this is in 1900 — the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like, you know, like a __________ insulated thing with no stuff in it, really, just energy coming down, energy _______. And so he came up with this theory, and he said, this will be cool, because it'll be a longer growing ______ in Sweden, you know, and the surfers liked it, the surfers thought, that's a cool idea, because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and — but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know. But nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean, the temperature as measured — and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASAs records, and all the Weather Bureau's records, and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the ___________ has just — the nighttime temperature measured on the _______ of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up about .7 degrees in this _______. But in fact, it was just coming up — it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up. So — and Arrhenius' theory — and all the global _______ think — they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too, if it's the __________ effect. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean — but ______ don't like things like this, so — most — I mean, you don't get all _______ about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It's a paper that came out in ________, and most of you probably hadn't heard about it. "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." ______ me. Those papers were _________ by NASA, and some scientists at Columbia, and ______ and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these — the conclusion in both of these papers, and in also the Science editor's, like, ____________ of these papers, for, you know, for the quickie, is that our ________ about ______ warming are completely wrong. I mean, what these guys were doing, and this is what — the NASA people have been saying this for a long time. They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up — it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And in this _____, they show something much more striking, and that was that they did what they call a radiation — and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy — we know how much that is — it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount. When it gets warm it generates — it makes redder energy — I mean, like infra-red, like something that's warm gives off infra-red. The whole business of the global warming — trash, really, is that — if the — if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to ______ won't be able to get out. But the heat ______ from the sun, which is mostly down in the — it's like 350 __________, which is where it's ________ — that goes right through CO2. So you still get ______, but you don't dissipate any. Well, these guys ________ all of those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff, and you can write these _____ _______, and you can get government money to do it, but these — they actually measured it, and it turns out that in the last 10 years — that's why they say "decadal" there — that the ______ — that the _____ of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. Like, the amount of imbalance — meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out that you would get from having double the CO2, which we're not anywhere near that, by the way. But if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would be increase the energy budget by about — in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out. So the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study — these two studies by two different teams — that five and a half watts per square meter had been coming in from 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer. So the theory's _____ — it's nothing. These papers should have been called, "The End to the Global Warming ______," you know. They're concerned, and you can tell they have very _______ ___________ in these papers, because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said, you know what? There isn't a _______ with global warming any longer, so we can — you know, they're funding. And if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened... if they — if they — if they actually — if they actually said that, I'm getting out. (Laughter) I'll stand up too, and — (Laughter) (Applause) They have to say that. They had to be very cautious. But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted, because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly ____________ — really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking, was the global ___________ model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor. It's not by a small one. They just — they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth — there's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it's big and horrible — and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about. So I mean, the reason I put those things all together, OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science — some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity. And there's a lot of things like global warming, and ozone hole and you know, a whole _____ of scientific public issues, that if you're interested in them, then you have to get down the details, and read the ______ called, "Large Decadal Variability in the..." You have to ______ out what all those words mean. And if you just ______ to the guys who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it, you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things. ________ the 10 things that are going to get you. The — one of them — (Laughter) And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean, you've got to _____ out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here. (Applause)

Solution


  1. century
  2. involved
  3. greenhouse
  4. years
  5. circulation
  6. puffs
  7. finally
  8. completely
  9. philosophy
  10. continually
  11. immediately
  12. local
  13. understand
  14. aristotle
  15. supposed
  16. rules
  17. worst
  18. longer
  19. leaving
  20. invest
  21. paper
  22. arguments
  23. measured
  24. salts
  25. viliki
  26. build
  27. talking
  28. memory
  29. fiasco
  30. conference
  31. device
  32. large
  33. light
  34. interesting
  35. melting
  36. weather
  37. reports
  38. newton
  39. looked
  40. destruction
  41. general
  42. sight
  43. touch
  44. shoot
  45. manual
  46. average
  47. weird
  48. experience
  49. climate
  50. occurred
  51. middle
  52. philosopher
  53. guarded
  54. science
  55. planet
  56. results
  57. living
  58. rockets
  59. period
  60. teddy
  61. happened
  62. propulsion
  63. happen
  64. works
  65. faster
  66. surface
  67. warmers
  68. experimental
  69. season
  70. street
  71. centered
  72. houses
  73. change
  74. amazing
  75. started
  76. melted
  77. meeting
  78. religious
  79. noise
  80. isaac
  81. descriptions
  82. nanometers
  83. demonstrations
  84. people
  85. excited
  86. charles
  87. screens
  88. anymore
  89. member
  90. escape
  91. authority
  92. established
  93. government
  94. write
  95. called
  96. principle
  97. parachute
  98. thought
  99. potassium
  100. interlocked
  101. brother
  102. energy
  103. brains
  104. generalize
  105. vacuum
  106. temperature
  107. basically
  108. world
  109. translation
  110. stuff
  111. brown
  112. experiment
  113. story
  114. nitrate
  115. candy
  116. global
  117. theories
  118. explicit
  119. games
  120. strange
  121. demonstrate
  122. business
  123. giant
  124. papers
  125. abhors
  126. measure
  127. working
  128. pretty
  129. process
  130. criteria
  131. needed
  132. inquisitive
  133. bunch
  134. leviathan
  135. pilots
  136. conversations
  137. listen
  138. problem
  139. scientists
  140. power
  141. compared
  142. experiments
  143. kaput
  144. fascinating
  145. conclusions
  146. published
  147. figure
  148. reality
  149. trouble
  150. remember
  151. sulfur
  152. heated
  153. admonish
  154. watch
  155. coming
  156. level
  157. heard
  158. rubber
  159. gentleman
  160. school
  161. boyle
  162. february
  163. opposed
  164. laughter
  165. professional
  166. travel
  167. wheel
  168. records
  169. excuse

Original Text


I'll just start talking about the 17th century. I hope nobody finds that offensive. I — you know, when I — after I had invented PCR, I kind of needed a change. And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started living down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in. They usually talk about the 17th century. You know, they get a real bad rap in the world. People think they're sort of lowbrows. One day, somebody suggested I read this book. It was called — it was called "The Air Pump," or something like "The Leviathan and The Air Pump." It was a real weird book about the 17th century. And I realized, the roots of the way I sort of thought was just the only natural way to think about things. That — you know, I was born thinking about things that way, and I had always been like a little scientist guy. And when I went to find out something, I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised, you know, when they first told me how — how you were supposed to do science, because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever. But it didn't — it never occurred to me that it had to be invented and that it had been invented only 350 years ago. You know, it was — like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy sort of all at the same time. And the story of that, I thought, was really fascinating. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do. And it's, it's a kind of — You know, Charles I got beheaded somewhere early in the 17th century. And the English set up Cromwell and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever, and not the kind of Republicans we had. They changed the government, and it didn't work. And Charles II, the son, was finally put back on the throne of England. He was really nervous, because his dad had been, you know, beheaded for being the King of England And he was nervous about the fact that conversations that got going in, like, bars and stuff would turn to — this is kind of — it's hard to believe, but people in the 17th century in England were starting to talk about, you know, philosophy and stuff in bars. They didn't have TV screens, and they didn't have any football games to watch. And they would get really pissy, and all of a sudden people would spill out into the street and fight about issues like whether or not it was okay if Robert Boyle made a device called the vacuum pump. Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II. He was a Christian guy during the weekends, but during the week he was a scientist. (Laughter) Which was — back then it was sort of, you know, well, you know — if you made this thing — he made this little device, like kind of like a bicycle pump in reverse that could suck all the air out of — you know what a bell jar is? One of these things, you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal, and you can see inside of it, so you can see what's going on inside this thing. But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there, and see what would happen inside there. I mean, the first — I think one of the first experiments he did was he put a bird in there. And people in the 17th century, they didn't really understand the same way we do about you know, this stuff is a bunch of different kinds of molecules, and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that. I mean, fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air. But both started exploring it. One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out, and the bird died. So he said, hmm... He said — he called what he'd done as making — they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time. Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum. Right? And immediately, he got into trouble with the local clergy who said, you can't make a vacuum. Ah, uh — (Laughter) Aristotle said that nature abhors one. I think it was a poor translation, probably, but people relied on authorities like that. And you know, Boyle says, well, shit. I make them all the time. I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird — and I'm calling it a vacuum. And the religious people said that if God wanted you to make — I mean, God is everywhere, that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere. And a vacuum — there's nothing in a vacuum, so you've — God couldn't be in there. So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know. And Boyle said, bullshit. I mean, you want to call it Godless, you know, you call it Godless. But that's not my job. I'm not into that. I do that on the weekend. And like — what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens when you suck everything out of a compartment. And he did all these cute little experiments. Like he did one with — he had a little wheel, like a fan, that was sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself. He had another fan opposed to it that he had like a — I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a rubber band, and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan. I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings. It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside after he got the vacuum established, and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it, the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right? Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are — it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that, but that was what was going on at the time. And like, there was big arguments about it in the — you know, the gin houses and in the coffee shops and stuff. And Charles started not liking that. Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that — let's make a place where you can do this stuff where people don't get so — you know, we don't want the — we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so — because when they started talking about religion and science and stuff like that, that's when it had sort of gotten his father in trouble. And so, Charles said, I'm going to put up the money give you guys a building, come here and you can meet in the building, but just don't talk about religion in there. And that was fine with Boyle. He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings. And anybody who wants to do science is — this is about the time that Isaac Newton was starting to whip out a lot of really interesting things. And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society, they called it. You had to be dressed up pretty well. It wasn't like a TED conference. That was the only criteria, was that you be — you looked like a gentleman, and they'd let anybody could come. You didn't have to be a member then. And so, they would come in and you would do — Anybody that was going to show an experiment, which was kind of a new word at the time, demonstrate some principle, they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it. So they were — the really important part of this was, you were not supposed to talk about final causes, for instance. And God was out of the picture. The actual nature of reality was not at issue. You're not supposed to talk about the absolute nature of anything. You were not supposed to talk about anything that you couldn't demonstrate. So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine works, here's what we do, and then here's what happens. And seeing what happens, it was OK to generalize, and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime we make one of these things. And so you can start making up some rules. You say, anytime you have a vacuum state, you will discover that one wheel will not turn another one, if the only connection between them is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing. Candles can't burn in a vacuum, therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either. It's not clear; actually sparklers will, but they didn't know that. They didn't have sparklers. But, they — (Laughter) — you can make up rules, but they have to relate only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate. And most the demonstrations had to do with visuals. Like if you do an experiment on stage, and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky. I mean, reality is what you can see. That wasn't an explicit rule in the meeting, but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices, and they can't see and associate it with somebody, that person's probably not there. But the general idea that you could only — you could only really talk about things in that place that had some kind of experimental basis. It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local philosopher, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes. What's happening here, in the middle of the 17th century, was that what became my field — science, experimental science — was pulling itself away, and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here, but it was also what — it was an amazing thing that happened. Science had been all interlocked with theology, and philosophy, and — and — and mathematics, which is really not science. But experimental science had been tied up with all those things. And the mathematics part and the experimental science part was pulling away from philosophy. And — things — we never looked back. It's been so cool since then. I mean, it just — it just — untangled a thing that was really impeding technology from being developed. And, I mean, everybody in this room — now, this is 350 short years ago. Remember, that's a short time. It was 300,000, probably, years ago that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room came up out of Africa and turned to the left. You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those in the Japanese translation. But that happened very — a long time ago compared to 350 short years ago. But in that 350 years, the place has just undergone a lot of changes. In fact, everybody in this room probably, especially if you picked up your bag — some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags — but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room has got in their pocket, or back in their room, something that 350 years ago, kings would have gone to war to have. I mean, if you can think how important — If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites, it's not going to be much use. But, like — but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system in the 17th century some king would have gotten together an army and gone to get it, you know. If that person — Audience: For the teddy bear? The teddy bear? Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah. But — all of us own stuff. I mean, individuals own things that kings would have definitely gone to war to get. And this is just 350 years. Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff. You know, the important people — you can almost read about their lives, about all the really important people that made advances, you know. And, I mean — this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff came from that separation of this little sort of thing that we do — now I, when I was a boy was born sort of with this idea that if you want to know something — you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot, and my mother didn't really know much science, but I thought if you want to know something about stuff, you do it — you make an experiment, you know. You get — you get, like — I just had a natural feeling for science and setting up experiments. I thought that was the way everybody had always thought. I thought that anybody with any brains will do it that way. It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people — You know, I was one of those scientists that was — got into trouble the other night at dinner because of the post-modernism thing. And I didn't mean, you know — where is that lady? Audience: Here. (Laughter) KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument so much as just a lively discussion. I didn't take it personally, but — I just — I had — I naively had thought, until this surfing experience started me into the 17th century, I'd thought that's just the way people thought, and everybody did, and they recognized reality by what they could see or touch or feel or hear. At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this — I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma — This is about the time that George Dyson's dad was starting to blow nuclear — thinking about blowing up nuclear rockets and stuff. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs — little frogs — had aspirations of space travel, just like people. And I — (Laughter) I was looking for a — a propulsion system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of sight and then I wanted this little parachute to come back with the frog in it. And — I — I — I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (Laughter) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of — now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to — and how is it going to work. And we didn't have — like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any puffs of smoke out there, she'd lean out and admonish us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her — You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it. It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage. (Laughter) So, I went to the drug store and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals. Nowadays, it's no ma'am, check your shoes. And like — (Laughter) But then it wasn't — they didn't have any, but the guy had — I said, what kind of salts of potassium do you have? You know. And he had potassium nitrate. And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is. I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that manual. And so I — I did some experiments. You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire. Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together. And it — they burned. It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell, compared to other rocket fuels I had tried, that all had sulfur in them. And, it smelt like burnt candy. And then I tried the melting business, and I melted it. And then it melted into a little sort of syrupy liquid, brown. And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance, that when you lit that, it went off like a bat. I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down — you'd light it, and it would just start dancing around the yard. And I said, there is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go. (Laughter) So I started developing — you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my brother. But I — it took me about — it took me about, I'd say, six months to finally figure out all the little things. There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by — what I just— you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly build up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was — I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not — I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of noise, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the destruction of the planet. I hadn't heard about the 10 ways that we should be afraid of the — By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never — the frog would have died, you know. At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal — I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it. So, so I've got something else that's not personal. But that... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I — sometimes you do that, if you're going to write a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea — like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides, and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going — I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I heard from all my friends who were molecular biologists — I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an authority figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the results of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to change everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't — you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage. And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all — you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm basically honest. I have a fairly bad memory, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like — so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. Now, let's see... I've got another five minutes, right? OK. All scientists aren't like that. You know — and there is a lot — (Laughter) There is a lot — a lot has been going on since Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II in that same time period before, and as sure as hell afterwards, government got — realized that scientists aren't strange dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. They made faster things. They made bigger guns to shoot them down with. You know, they made drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process. They made all kinds of — and then finally one giant bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got involved in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into business — I mean, there are waves of — going into your high school, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not anymore. You want to be rich, you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think — they don't — they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth. And the people I'm talking about are people that like — they say that they're a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. And they — and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we're going to — how we're going to continually prove that the planet is getting warmer, when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. I mean, if you actually measure the temperature over a period — I mean, the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years — longer than that it's been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years, and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up. It's like, the average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit, because the nighttime temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. And it's that the weather stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And most responsible people that measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime, and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know — the first guy — the first guy that got the idea that we're going to fry ourselves here, actually, he didn't think of it that way. His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which he thought might — this is in 1900 — the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like, you know, like a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it, really, just energy coming down, energy leaving. And so he came up with this theory, and he said, this will be cool, because it'll be a longer growing season in Sweden, you know, and the surfers liked it, the surfers thought, that's a cool idea, because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and — but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know. But nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean, the temperature as measured — and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASAs records, and all the Weather Bureau's records, and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the temperature has just — the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up about .7 degrees in this century. But in fact, it was just coming up — it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up. So — and Arrhenius' theory — and all the global warmers think — they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too, if it's the greenhouse effect. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean — but people don't like things like this, so — most — I mean, you don't get all excited about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It's a paper that came out in February, and most of you probably hadn't heard about it. "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." Excuse me. Those papers were published by NASA, and some scientists at Columbia, and Viliki and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these — the conclusion in both of these papers, and in also the Science editor's, like, descriptions of these papers, for, you know, for the quickie, is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. I mean, what these guys were doing, and this is what — the NASA people have been saying this for a long time. They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up — it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And in this paper, they show something much more striking, and that was that they did what they call a radiation — and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy — we know how much that is — it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount. When it gets warm it generates — it makes redder energy — I mean, like infra-red, like something that's warm gives off infra-red. The whole business of the global warming — trash, really, is that — if the — if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to escape won't be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the — it's like 350 nanometers, which is where it's centered — that goes right through CO2. So you still get heated, but you don't dissipate any. Well, these guys measured all of those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff, and you can write these large reports, and you can get government money to do it, but these — they actually measured it, and it turns out that in the last 10 years — that's why they say "decadal" there — that the energy — that the level of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. Like, the amount of imbalance — meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out that you would get from having double the CO2, which we're not anywhere near that, by the way. But if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would be increase the energy budget by about — in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out. So the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study — these two studies by two different teams — that five and a half watts per square meter had been coming in from 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer. So the theory's kaput — it's nothing. These papers should have been called, "The End to the Global Warming Fiasco," you know. They're concerned, and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers, because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said, you know what? There isn't a problem with global warming any longer, so we can — you know, they're funding. And if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened... if they — if they — if they actually — if they actually said that, I'm getting out. (Laughter) I'll stand up too, and — (Laughter) (Applause) They have to say that. They had to be very cautious. But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted, because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly professional — really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking, was the global circulation model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor. It's not by a small one. They just — they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth — there's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it's big and horrible — and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about. So I mean, the reason I put those things all together, OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science — some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity. And there's a lot of things like global warming, and ozone hole and you know, a whole bunch of scientific public issues, that if you're interested in them, then you have to get down the details, and read the papers called, "Large Decadal Variability in the..." You have to figure out what all those words mean. And if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it, you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things. Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The — one of them — (Laughter) And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean, you've got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
global warming 5
long time 3
experimental science 3
vacuum pump 2
charles ii 2
isaac newton 2
short years 2
gps system 2
important people 2
potassium perchlorate 2
drug store 2
potassium nitrate 2
world war 2
war ii 2
weather stations 2
decadal variability 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
world war ii 2


Important Words


  1. abandoned
  2. abhors
  3. absolute
  4. actual
  5. admonish
  6. advances
  7. advantage
  8. afraid
  9. africa
  10. agree
  11. ah
  12. air
  13. airport
  14. alive
  15. amateur
  16. amazing
  17. amount
  18. amounts
  19. amplify
  20. ancestors
  21. answer
  22. anymore
  23. anytime
  24. applause
  25. argument
  26. arguments
  27. aristotle
  28. army
  29. arrhenius
  30. aspirations
  31. associate
  32. asteroids
  33. atmosphere
  34. attached
  35. authorities
  36. authority
  37. average
  38. bad
  39. bag
  40. bags
  41. band
  42. bars
  43. base
  44. based
  45. basically
  46. basis
  47. bat
  48. beach
  49. bear
  50. beheaded
  51. bell
  52. bicycle
  53. big
  54. bigger
  55. biologists
  56. biology
  57. bird
  58. bit
  59. blow
  60. blowing
  61. bomb
  62. book
  63. born
  64. bottom
  65. bowl
  66. boy
  67. boyle
  68. boys
  69. brains
  70. break
  71. breathe
  72. bring
  73. broken
  74. brother
  75. brown
  76. budget
  77. build
  78. building
  79. buildings
  80. built
  81. bullshit
  82. bunch
  83. burn
  84. burned
  85. burnt
  86. business
  87. businessman
  88. buy
  89. calculated
  90. call
  91. called
  92. calling
  93. candles
  94. candy
  95. car
  96. care
  97. carefully
  98. causing
  99. cautious
  100. centered
  101. centimeter
  102. century
  103. change
  104. changed
  105. charles
  106. check
  107. chemicals
  108. chemist
  109. chlorate
  110. christian
  111. church
  112. circulation
  113. clergy
  114. climate
  115. coffee
  116. cold
  117. columbia
  118. coming
  119. committee
  120. compared
  121. compartment
  122. completely
  123. complicated
  124. concerned
  125. conclusion
  126. conclusions
  127. concrete
  128. conference
  129. connection
  130. continually
  131. contract
  132. contrary
  133. conversations
  134. cool
  135. cooled
  136. copies
  137. couple
  138. criteria
  139. cromwell
  140. curiosity
  141. curious
  142. cute
  143. dad
  144. dancing
  145. day
  146. daytime
  147. decadal
  148. degrees
  149. delighted
  150. demonstrate
  151. demonstrated
  152. demonstrations
  153. descriptions
  154. destruction
  155. details
  156. developed
  157. developing
  158. device
  159. died
  160. dinner
  161. discover
  162. discovered
  163. discussion
  164. dishonesty
  165. dissipate
  166. dna
  167. dominant
  168. double
  169. drawings
  170. dressed
  171. driving
  172. drug
  173. drugs
  174. dudes
  175. dummy
  176. early
  177. earth
  178. easy
  179. economic
  180. editor
  181. effect
  182. energy
  183. england
  184. english
  185. envision
  186. escape
  187. established
  188. establishment
  189. evidence
  190. excited
  191. excuse
  192. expected
  193. experience
  194. experiment
  195. experimental
  196. experiments
  197. explanation
  198. explicit
  199. exploring
  200. explosion
  201. eye
  202. eyes
  203. fact
  204. factor
  205. facts
  206. falls
  207. fan
  208. fans
  209. fascinating
  210. faster
  211. father
  212. february
  213. feel
  214. feeling
  215. feet
  216. fiasco
  217. field
  218. fight
  219. figure
  220. final
  221. finally
  222. find
  223. finds
  224. fine
  225. fire
  226. fish
  227. football
  228. fort
  229. freaky
  230. friend
  231. friends
  232. frightened
  233. frog
  234. frogs
  235. fry
  236. fuel
  237. fuels
  238. fun
  239. funded
  240. funding
  241. games
  242. garage
  243. gel
  244. general
  245. generalize
  246. generates
  247. gentleman
  248. george
  249. germany
  250. giant
  251. gin
  252. give
  253. global
  254. goal
  255. god
  256. goddamn
  257. godless
  258. good
  259. government
  260. gps
  261. grant
  262. greenhouse
  263. growing
  264. guarded
  265. guess
  266. guns
  267. guy
  268. guys
  269. happen
  270. happened
  271. happening
  272. hard
  273. hear
  274. heard
  275. heat
  276. heated
  277. heating
  278. hell
  279. hide
  280. high
  281. hmm
  282. hobbes
  283. hold
  284. hole
  285. honest
  286. hope
  287. horrible
  288. houses
  289. hyping
  290. idea
  291. ii
  292. imbalance
  293. immediately
  294. impeding
  295. important
  296. inching
  297. increase
  298. individuals
  299. industrial
  300. inquisitive
  301. instance
  302. insulated
  303. interested
  304. interesting
  305. interlocked
  306. internet
  307. invented
  308. invest
  309. involved
  310. ironing
  311. isaac
  312. issue
  313. issues
  314. italy
  315. ivory
  316. japanese
  317. jar
  318. job
  319. jolla
  320. kaput
  321. kary
  322. keeping
  323. kid
  324. kills
  325. kind
  326. kinds
  327. king
  328. kings
  329. knew
  330. la
  331. lab
  332. laboratories
  333. lady
  334. large
  335. laughter
  336. lead
  337. leads
  338. lean
  339. learned
  340. leaving
  341. left
  342. level
  343. leviathan
  344. light
  345. liking
  346. lines
  347. liquid
  348. listen
  349. listened
  350. lit
  351. lively
  352. lives
  353. living
  354. local
  355. long
  356. longer
  357. looked
  358. loosely
  359. lot
  360. lots
  361. lowbrows
  362. machine
  363. mad
  364. magazine
  365. making
  366. man
  367. manual
  368. mathematics
  369. matter
  370. meaning
  371. means
  372. measure
  373. measured
  374. measuring
  375. mechanisms
  376. medical
  377. meet
  378. meeting
  379. meetings
  380. melted
  381. melting
  382. member
  383. memory
  384. met
  385. meter
  386. methods
  387. middle
  388. miles
  389. military
  390. minutes
  391. misinformed
  392. misinterpreted
  393. missile
  394. missing
  395. mixed
  396. mixture
  397. model
  398. molecular
  399. molecules
  400. money
  401. months
  402. mother
  403. moved
  404. naively
  405. names
  406. nanometers
  407. nasa
  408. nasas
  409. natural
  410. naturally
  411. nature
  412. needed
  413. nervous
  414. newton
  415. nice
  416. night
  417. nighttime
  418. nitrate
  419. noise
  420. nowadays
  421. nuclear
  422. observations
  423. occurred
  424. ocean
  425. offensive
  426. oklahoma
  427. oligonucleotides
  428. opposed
  429. overheated
  430. ozone
  431. panel
  432. paper
  433. papers
  434. parachute
  435. part
  436. pcr
  437. people
  438. perchlorate
  439. period
  440. permission
  441. person
  442. personal
  443. personally
  444. philosopher
  445. philosophy
  446. physical
  447. pick
  448. picked
  449. picture
  450. piece
  451. pilots
  452. pissy
  453. place
  454. places
  455. planet
  456. pocket
  457. poke
  458. poor
  459. position
  460. potassium
  461. power
  462. powerful
  463. precise
  464. predict
  465. presided
  466. pretty
  467. princeton
  468. principle
  469. problem
  470. process
  471. professional
  472. prohibited
  473. proportions
  474. propulsion
  475. prove
  476. public
  477. published
  478. puffs
  479. pulled
  480. pulling
  481. pump
  482. pumped
  483. purpose
  484. put
  485. puts
  486. quickie
  487. radiation
  488. radiative
  489. rap
  490. rate
  491. read
  492. readily
  493. real
  494. reality
  495. realize
  496. realized
  497. reason
  498. reasons
  499. recognized
  500. records
  501. redder
  502. relate
  503. relied
  504. religion
  505. religious
  506. remember
  507. reports
  508. reproduceably
  509. republicans
  510. request
  511. responsible
  512. results
  513. reverse
  514. rich
  515. ridiculous
  516. robert
  517. rocket
  518. rocketeers
  519. rockets
  520. room
  521. roots
  522. royal
  523. rubber
  524. rule
  525. rules
  526. salts
  527. satellites
  528. scared
  529. school
  530. science
  531. scientific
  532. scientist
  533. scientists
  534. screens
  535. seal
  536. season
  537. send
  538. sensations
  539. separation
  540. set
  541. setting
  542. shield
  543. shit
  544. shoes
  545. shoot
  546. shops
  547. short
  548. show
  549. sight
  550. sill
  551. skyline
  552. slow
  553. slowly
  554. small
  555. smell
  556. smelt
  557. smoke
  558. society
  559. solution
  560. son
  561. sort
  562. space
  563. sparklers
  564. spectacular
  565. spill
  566. spin
  567. square
  568. stage
  569. stand
  570. start
  571. started
  572. starting
  573. state
  574. stations
  575. stepped
  576. store
  577. story
  578. strange
  579. street
  580. strengthening
  581. striking
  582. studies
  583. study
  584. stuff
  585. substance
  586. suck
  587. sudden
  588. suddenly
  589. sugar
  590. suggested
  591. sulfur
  592. sun
  593. supposed
  594. surf
  595. surface
  596. surfers
  597. surfing
  598. surprised
  599. sven
  600. sweden
  601. swedish
  602. syrupy
  603. system
  604. talk
  605. talking
  606. teams
  607. technology
  608. ted
  609. teddy
  610. temperature
  611. temperatures
  612. test
  613. theology
  614. theories
  615. theory
  616. thinking
  617. thomas
  618. thought
  619. throne
  620. throwback
  621. tied
  622. time
  623. tinker
  624. tiny
  625. told
  626. touch
  627. towers
  628. town
  629. toy
  630. translation
  631. trash
  632. travel
  633. tricky
  634. tropical
  635. trouble
  636. true
  637. truth
  638. tube
  639. turn
  640. turned
  641. turns
  642. tv
  643. uh
  644. undergone
  645. understand
  646. unreasonable
  647. untangled
  648. upstairs
  649. vacuum
  650. variability
  651. viliki
  652. visuals
  653. voices
  654. waited
  655. waiting
  656. walk
  657. wanted
  658. war
  659. warm
  660. warmer
  661. warmers
  662. warming
  663. watch
  664. water
  665. watt
  666. watts
  667. wave
  668. waves
  669. ways
  670. weather
  671. week
  672. weekend
  673. weekends
  674. weird
  675. wheel
  676. whip
  677. wife
  678. window
  679. wonderful
  680. word
  681. words
  682. work
  683. worked
  684. working
  685. works
  686. world
  687. worried
  688. worrying
  689. worst
  690. write
  691. wrong
  692. yard
  693. yeah
  694. years