I think it's important for all of you to share very intimately with me what I do in the way of conscious disciplining of myself as we meet. I am an experientialist. My grand strategy, which I am discussing with you, of coping with problem solving, is one which has an important name operational, the word operational came to be applied to science, I think, it was an invention of Percival Bridgman at Harvard, a natural philosopher at Harvard, who invented the term early in the century. When Einstein made his first announcement, and Percival Bridgman at Harvard, the natural philosopher, said he was deeply interested in how it happened, science in general was caught so off-guard, so unexpecting of Einstein's kind of an announcement, and the viewpoint that was demonstrated by Einstein. And he became a great student of how all the circumstances surrounding Einstein's developing the thoughts that he had developed. And he, then, found that Einstein was concerned not with just some data discovered in an experiment, but with all the circumstances surrounding the faithful reporting of the immediate local intimate conditions under which the discovery was made. And, I'll come back to that to give a working demonstration of why Einstein felt it was so important to record all the circumstances as well as that which was especially isolated out and discovered. The example that I am going to give you is my own invention, but I did include Einstein and Einstein's philosophy, and my own interpretation of how he came to develop his equation and other of his strategies, in my first book NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON, and because I had three chapters on Einstein, my publishers who were Lippincott of Philadelphia at that time, in the mid-30's, around 1935, said that they found I had three chapters on Einstein. And they were, at that time, there was a general myth that there were only 9 people in the world who could understand Einstein. They said they had looked at all the lists of the people who understood Einstein, and I was not on any of the lists in fact they didn't find me on any list, of any authority, and they felt for me to be writing three chapters on Einstein would make Lippincott be accused of being a partner to charlatanry. That I was just a faker.

And so, I was a little stunned, and still quite young, and so I simply wrote back, in a sense quite facetiously, to Lippincott, saying that Dr. Einstein has just come to America, and was in Princeton at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study. And I suggested that they send my typescript to him that he would be the best authority. I really did not think they would take me seriously about that, and I forgot all about that. And it was about six months later, I had a telephone call from a doctor in New York, and he said my friend Dr. Albert Einstein is coming in to spend the weekend with me, and he has your typescript, and he would like to talk to you about it. And, could I possibly come on Sunday evening to his apartment in New York. So, you can imagine, I didn't have any engagements that would interfere! And I had very few engagements in those days nobody wanted to talk to me. And, I did come then, to the apartment. He was a wealthy man, and he had a large living room, and in more or less dramatic kind of style, people were sitting around the walls of the room, and he was sitting pretty much in the middle. I think they might have later on played music for him. At any rate, when I came in I was brought then to this long room, up to meet him. And I really had, I don't know how much psychological was in me, but I really had the most extraordinary feeling about being in a presence of almost an aura of him.

He immediately excused himself from the company, and took me out to a little library that was just off the main hall of the apartment, and on the library table was my typescript under a light, and we sat down on either side of this desk. And he said that he had been over my typescript and that he was writing to my publishers to say that he approved of my interpretation of his thoughts, and the way I had explained his translation of philosophy. A philosophy of his which had been published in the New York Times Sunday magazine in New Year, 1930, called "The Cosmic Religious Sense," and it was a very, very inspiring piece, and I had asked the publishers if I could quote it in my book, and I did. Having then this chapter on his philosophy, I then had another chapter on the way that I felt he had interpreted it into, how he applied that philosophy to all his own grand personal strategy of life, and how he came about developing his thoughts and his equation.

Then I had a third chapter in which I said that, historically, great scientists, individual scientists, make discoveries the academy doesn't accept right away, but later on they do accept. Then it gets to be in the schools, then it gets to be in the general atmosphere of everybody's thinking. At this point engineers and inventors within that atmosphere of thinking make some invention, and then gradually some industry takes on that invention; and that takes quite a while. There is a lag. Finally, various things are being produced and they bring about a new environment under which social changes have to occur, and politics, then, has to take care of the take up on the new orientation of man all brought about indirectly from the original scientist's thinking. And, I said, again my third chapter was I developed a hypothetical picture of how humanity would be living. It was called "E=MC to the second power equals Mrs. Murphy's Horse Power," and then I was looking at the every-day life of Mrs. Murphy under the circumstances of everybody being completely convinced of the validity of Einstein's thinking.

His equation had not as yet been validated, as it was later, by fission, at the time that I was writing. Anyway, he said he did approve of those two chapters of my chapter explaining how his philosophy was interpreted into his action and thinking. But he said, the third chapter about Mrs. Murphy's horse power and his words were I'll imitate him, because I can remember this so very well. And he was very gentle, and he said of this third chapter: "Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive of anything I have ever done having the slightest practical application." And he went on to explain that he had evolved his thoughts as possibly being useful to the astronomers, to the astro-physicists, to the cosmogeners and the cosmologists, but that it would have any practical application none. And, at any rate, he did approve, and they did go on with the publishing of the book. This was very interesting, because this meeting occurred about a year and a half before Hahn and Stresemann discovered theoretical fission. And then there was a whole set of events which followed this which people are very familiar with. And then the German Jewish scientists getting the word as quickly as they could out of Germany, because they thought it would be used immediately for armaments in Germany, and the word did come to America. And there were theoretical studies, and then came the conclusion of the scientists that fission was actually possible. So, there was the quandary of the scientists because politicians don't listen to scientists on how to get word to President Franklin Roosevelt. So they all decided that Einstein was by far the most highly accredited of the scientists. So they asked him to go see Franklin Roosevelt. And Franklin Roosevelt did appropriate what was at that time an incredible amount of money, $85 billion for the great Manhattan project. And then through the Enrico Fermi pile and all the history which most of you know.

But, what was interesting to me was that I heard from this man, two years before the theoretical fission is envisaged, that he didn't have the slightest idea of anything that he had ever done having even the slightest practical application. Because the first practical application of the Enrico Fermi pile completely validated his theory of the amount of energy that was being stored in a given mass. So, it was the very essence of what was going on. So the first practical application was Hiroshima. And having heard that from that man just before it occurred, I realized the unhappiness and the consternation that he experienced when the first practical application was Hiroshima. In fact, his last days were spent greatly devoted to trying to get the scientists to realize their responsibilities, and how they were being exploited. And his consternation brought about the development of the Association of Atomic Scientist, and the publishing of the ATOMIC SCIENTIST BULLETIN, and so forth.

And he expressed himself very vigorously about his great unhappiness about this. But to have heard from that man before he realized that there would be a practical application, it would come into the political field, was a very extraordinary experience.

But, I do have the personal confidence, then, that when I interpret Einstein, and talk about him, which I do very frequently, I did have his personal approbation of my capability to do so. I am giving you then, a hypothetical example of what Einstein employed as a strategy of thinking which brought about Bridgman's development of the word "operational."

Now, I am going to give you then a man in a railroad train going west across the desert. And his train is going very fast. And he leans out of his window and drops a flaming apple, and he has, there is a friend with him and so forth, and they have a sextant to measure angles, and they have stop watches and so forth, and he observes what he sees in a total azimuth of observation of the angle in which this light forms. Obviously, the flaming apple goes the opposite direction from him, and he sees it doing that, and he records with the stop watch exactly what angle of motion there was sum totally as he looks back at it, going back like that and a little back towards the track and he has a stop watch reporting exactly how long it was in each of those positions at the various azimuths of observation.

Then, we have another man who at the same time was standing way to the north of the train which was going west in the desert, and he had his observation instruments, his angle measuring devices and his stop watches, and he sees the flaming apple go west instead of east. And he sees, it actually goes down a little towards the track, towards the land, and he makes all his measurements, exactly what it did, and he describes that in his total frame of reference.

Then we have another man who was standing on the track, way to the west as the train approached, and all he saw was this flame hesitate like this, and go in towards the earth in just a straight line going like that towards the center of the earth. And he measured everything with his angle azimuth and his stop watches.

There is another man standing, it happened that the train was going over a trestle, and there was another man standing below the trestle, looking up and really seeing this whole thing, and he makes his observation of what he sees. You'll find out the total angles of observation, all the timing, everything came out, each one was really very, very accurate, AND THEY ALL CAME OUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY.