Now this doesn’t mean that technology is not developing or that they are in some way backward that way, but I’m trying to show that in a country of this kind the development of ideas is doomed.

You have read about the recent phenomenon in modern art. When I was in Poland there was modern art hung in little corners in back streets. And there was the beginning of modern art in Russia. I don’t know what the value of modern art is. I mean either way. But Mr. Khrushchev visited such a place, and Mr. Khrushchev decided that it looked as if this painting were painted by the tail of a jackass. My comment is, he should know.

To make the thing still more real I give you the example of a Mr. Nakhrosov who traveled in the United States and in Italy and went home and wrote what he saw. He was castigated for, I quote the castigator, “A 50-50 approach, for bourgeois objectivism.” Is this a scientific country? Where did we ever get the idea that the Russians were, in some sense, scientific? Because in the early days of their revolution they had different ideas than they have now? But it is not scientific to not adopt a 50-50 approach—that is, to not understand what there is in the world in order to modify things; that is, to be blind in order to maintain ignorance.

I cannot help going on with this criticism of Mr. Nakhrosov and to tell you more about it. It was made by a man whose name is Padgovney, who is the first secretary of the Ukranian Communist Party. He said, “You told us here… (He was at a meeting at which the other man had just spoken, but nobody knows what he said, because it wasn’t published. But the criticism was published.) You told us here you would only write the truth, the great truth, the real truth, for which you fought in the trenches of Stalingrad. That would be fine. We all advise you to write that way. (I hope he does.) Your speech, and the ideas you continue to support smack of petty bourgeois anarchy. This the party and people cannot and will not tolerate. You, Comrade Nakhrosov, had better think this over very seriously.” How can the poor man think it over seriously? How can anyone think seriously about being a petty bourgeois anarchist? Can you picture an old anarchist who is a bourgeois also? And at the same time petty? The whole thing is absurd. Therefore, I hope that we can all maintain laughter and ridicule for the people like Mr. Padgovney, and at the same time try to communicate in some way to Mr. Nakhrosov that we admire and respect his courage, because we are here only at the very beginning of time for the human race. There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers. Man has been stopped before by stopping his ideas. Man has been jammed for long periods of time. We will not tolerate this. I hope for freedom for future generations—freedom to doubt, to develop, to continue the adventure of finding out new ways of doing things, of solving problems.

Why do we grapple with problems? We are only in the beginning. We have plenty of time to solve the problems. The only way that we will make a mistake is that in the impetuous youth of humanity we will decide we know the answer. This is it. No one else can think of anything else. And we will jam. We will confine man to the limited imagination of today’s human beings.

We are not so smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel. I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, and what I am going to emphasize is only an intellectual thing. I don’t want to talk about everything at the same time. Let’s take a small piece, an intellectual thing.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. Thank you.

I was happy, when I got the invitation to give the John Danz Lectures, to hear that there would be three lectures, as I had thought about these ideas at great length and wanted an opportunity not to express myself in only one lecture, but to develop the ideas slowly and carefully in three lectures. I found out that I developed them slowly and carefully, completely, in two.

I have completely run out of organized ideas, but I have a large number of uncomfortable feelings about the world which I haven’t been able to put into some obvious, logical, and sensible form. So, since I already contracted to give three lectures, the only thing I can do is to give this potpourri of uncomfortable feelings without having them very well organized.

Perhaps someday, when I find a real deep reason behind them all, I will be able to give them in one sensible lecture instead of this thing. Also, in case you are beginning to believe that some of the things I said before are true because I am a scientist and according to the brochure that you get I won some awards and so forth, instead of your looking at the ideas themselves and judging them directly—in other words, you see, you have some feeling toward authority—I will get rid of that tonight. I dedicate this lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man as myself can make. I wish, therefore, to destroy any image of authority that has previously been generated.

You see, a Saturday night is a night for entertainment, and that is… I think I have got the right spirit now and we can go on. It is always a good to entitle a lecture in a way that nobody can believe. It is either peculiar or it is just the opposite of what you would expect. And that is the reason, of course, for calling it “This Unscientific Age.” Of course if you mean by scientific the applications of technology, there is no doubt that this is a scientific age. There is no doubt at all that today we have all kinds of scientific applications which are causing us all kinds of trouble as well as giving us all kinds of advantages. And so in that sense it certainly is a scientific age. If you mean by a scientific age an age in which science is developing rapidly and advancing fully as fast as it can, then this is definitely a scientific age.

The speed at which science has been developing for the last two hundred years has been ever increasing, and we reach a culmination of speed now. We are in particular in the biological sciences, on the threshold of the most remarkable discoveries. What they are going to be I am unable to tell you. Naturally, that is the excitement of it. And the excitement that comes from turning one stone over after another and finding underneath new discoveries has been going on now perpetually for several hundred years, and it is an ever-rising crescendo. This is, in that sense, definitely a scientific age. It has been called a heroic age, by a scientist, of course. Nobody else knows about it. Sometime when history looks back at this age they will see that it was a most dramatic and remarkable age, the transformation from not knowing much about the world to knowing a great deal more than was known before. But if you mean that this is an age of science in the sense that in art, in literature, and in people’s attitudes and understandings, and so forth science plays a large part, I don’t think it is a scientific age at all. You see, if you take, the heroic age of the Greeks, say, there were poems about the military heroes. In the religious period of the Middle Ages, art was related directly to religion, and people’s attitudes toward life were definitely closely knit to the religious viewpoints. It was a religious age. This is not a scientific age from that point of view.