 Well, it's very nice to be here. Thank you all for coming, especially in the rain. And what I want to do today is to talk a little bit about what happens when different forms of local scientific knowledge collide and how they interact. We have a picture that we inherited from the 1920s and 1930s about how knowledge and innovation in science functioned. And it began with a picture that the positivists wanted to use as a cudgel against the metaphysical systems and clericalism of Austria. And they thought they could do this by bringing things down to logic on the one side and to immediate sense experience on the other. And so they thought that innovation and change in science occurred in an accumulative or aggregative way that would minimize the use of theory, which was seen more as a way of codifying the accumulated knowledge and the relationship of sense perceptions through the new Frager-Russell logic that had been developed. And that scientific perception and language would come in bits, little bricks that could be built together of the form smell-o-zone here 8am, and that by using the logical connectives and the immediate sense perceptions, that you would be able to construct something that was out of the reach of metaphysical systems. And so if you wanted to make a kind of schema of this idea, it was the theory changed. But theory was a kind of epiphenomenal thing. It was not of great weight. And what really mattered was observation and its logical connectives. So as time went on from left to right, theories successively got better in being able to grasp a larger and larger percentage of the observed world. And the observed world was getting larger. And this represented the kind of golden thread that went through science and that held it in one piece and gave what they hoped would be a unification project of science its merit. And this got a political cast in the 1930s as it was seen to be a weapon against the vagaries of nationalism and Nazism that were dividing the world and that instead one could ground some language of science which was cumulative and aggregative and would represent a worldview, a way of living and not just a way of doing science. After World War II, and I'm schematizing ruthlessly here, they're developed through the work of Thomas Kuhn and many others, a kind of revolt against this aggregative, a cumulist picture of knowledge. And their view was that in fact theory, far from being secondary, was actually the bedrock. It was the beginning of things. And theory subordinated observation. Attending too much to experiment was a mistake. Instruments were not even in the picture. And the goal was to study through perceptual psychology and the philosophical moves of Wittgenstein and others. Kuhn, Mary Hesse, Gerald Holton, Hanson and others began to see a world of science that was framed to such a degree by theory that what counted as a valid observation itself was dictated from above by the framework of theory. And so you had a picture from experimental, perceptual psychology, for instance, where people had noticed that if you flip through cards rapidly that you wouldn't even notice that one of them was a red card as opposed to a spade. And so it would simply be assimilated to your expectations. This is a simple example. There are others, of course, like the famous duck-rabbit Gestalt switch that seem to indicate for people of this antipositivist generation in the 1960s and 1970s that theory dictated what counted as what. There is no perception of this figure that is simply neutral line. It is either ears or a beak on the left-hand side of the screen. But we never have the view of raw perception outside of the framing conceptual structure of our theories. And that was fundamental for that generation of antipositivists who saw theory as framing the observations to such a degree that science itself fell into islands in Coon's metaphor, these were like ships passing in the night or else where he talks about a conversion experience that could take you from one way of looking at the world to another, which would include or disinclude or exclude certain observations altogether. There was no magic strand that carried through and held science together. Instead, science was fundamentally discreet in this sense. So an example might be special relativity where the positivist saw this as this long sequence of careful experiments that showed to a better and better degree that there was no ether. Couldn't be more than this effect and that effect and so on. And asymptotically, Einstein simply put the capstone on that arch and said, there's no ether. The antipositivist reading was very different. It said that in one world, the Newtonian world, space and time were parts of the sensorium of God. And in the Einsteinian world, space and time was the behavior of rulers and clocks. And there really had very little to do with one another even if in a formal sense, you could show certain correspondence between the equations that the term T or the term X in those equations referred to a different world, one to God and the other to a ruler. And so in the particular case of looking at relativity, Newtonian theory and his picture of the deity in its role in it, shaped observation and Einsteinian theory, shaped Einsteinian observation and never the two should meet. The problem is from the point of view of the history of physics, is that the big breaks of theory, like 1900 with the quantum 1905 with special relativity, 1915 with general relativity, 1926 with non-relativistic quantum mechanics are good breaks in the history of theory, but they don't correspond to much of anything in the change of instrumentation or experimentation. And in fact, a lot of my work has been looking at these different subcultures of physics at the way experiments work and way experimenters see the world at the way instrument makers see the world and at the way theorists see the world. And the question is first to understand the different rhythms and dynamics of the changes within these cultures, how they fabricate knowledge in their domain. And then the question is, how do they put this together? And that becomes the dominant strand of work that has occupied me for a very long time. So if one wanted to make a periodization, again in the same crude cartoonish way as I indicated for the positivist and anti-positivist picture, we would see that there were breaks at the level of experiment, breaks at the level of instrumentation, breaks at the level of theory, but that it was a contingent, not a necessary fact that these should occur at the same time. And in fact, there's good reason to expect they wouldn't occur at the same time. If you have a brand new theory, you're a lot more likely to be able to persuade your colleagues to believe it on the basis of instruments that are known to work rather than saying I have a new theory that's gonna require a new instrument that you don't trust and a new experimental procedure that you've never seen before. So you actually have some incentive in the construction of knowledge to intercalate these different strands. Then the question is, I mean this seems to me more or less a straightforward historical empirical fact that experiments, instruments, and theories don't copuriatize that 1905 doesn't correspond to much of anything in the history of instrumentation or the development of the cloud chamber doesn't instantaneously change theory. And then the question is, how do if it's true that these different subcultures of physics actually parse the world differently, proceed with different rhythms, organize their demonstration strategies in different ways, that is to say have different ways of securing the knowledge, please come in. Then the question is, how do they communicate at all? Doesn't this simply redouble the problem with which we began, namely the Coonian disjunction makes it impossible to understand the felt continuity of science over time by scientists working in these fields and don't actually suddenly fail to talk in 1905. And the question then is, how do these different strands interact? The principal idea of what I've called the trading zone is that we've come to see the development of science as having important local effects, that is to say to understand the development of a new technique in biology or chemistry or physics that we can't treat ideas as if they're freely floating things and that we need to see in fact how in detail the particular circumstances of instruments and related technologies that are available at a certain place or computational techniques and so on. And we need to sort of see the origin of science in its particularity in a particular spot. At the same time, this has been associated or married to a completely non-local idea of language in the work of Kuhn and even much more modern figures in the history, sociology and philosophy of science. In that picture, you go from sort of speaking Newtonian to speaking Einsteinian and it's supposed to resemble the radical difference between trying to translate between say French and German. The problem is that this picture of a local construction of knowledge and a non-local picture of language doesn't go together very well. And we can ask the question, how when say a string theorist wants to talk to an algebraic geometer or a chemist and a biologist want to talk at the beginning of what we come to know as biochemistry, how do they in fact speak to one another? Is it the kind of radical translation that was advocated by the anti-positivists in the 60s, 70s and 80s? And I think that's not what in fact happens. What happens is much more like what happens in Alsace-Lorraine or in the creoles and pigeons and jargons that exist, that are built up at the real thick boundaries in natural language. That is to say, we're quite used to the formulation of specific jargons, a localized set of terms that develop in the coordination, say, between a fishing community and a wheat growing community on the beach of their exchange, so to speak, with pigeons, which are more functional exchange languages that have particular applications. They might be, for instance, a specific trade language and creoles, which are full-fledged interlanguages, which are developed to the point where you can, so to speak, grow up in them. And what's interested me is to take these ideas that come from anthropological linguistics and to look at what happens in the formation of knowledge, especially in the relationship of different scientific domains, whether they're different subcultures within a specific field like physics or between physics and biology or biology and chemistry or one of the sciences and fields outside of the range of the sciences in the more technological domains, whether it's military technology or computational technology. And to look at the way that language is coordinated, language and techniques get coordinated in this thick boundary area and how it develops from very specific coordinations at the level of scientific jargons to scientific pigeons to scientific creoles. And this isn't to make, I think it's important to note that my argument is not that there are pure fields like physics and biology, chemistry, and then hybrid fields. It's in fact, everything is hybrid in this way. Physics that we know today as the pure field of physics is an amalgamation, very complicated one, of different branches of thought that go back a long way, partly from the new experimentation that has owes a lot to crafts in the early modern era to the antique exact sciences that dealt only with static or pure systems from the time of Plato and before and these mixed fields of experimental and mathematical combinations that helped get got formed in what we call the scientific revolution of the 17th century. If one thinks about these trading zones, these co-ordinative zones where techniques and language are built up from say a specific set of shared terms and techniques between biology and chemistry to biochemistry which has journals and meetings and biochemists that this is something that occurs over time. And rather than the picture of translating in a radical way French to English, this idea of a diachronic concept of the coordination of knowledge in both its material and its linguistic form is something that can give us a process. Locality then is also something that can help here because unlike saying English as if it was something universal that we can look at language as associated not with a free floating entity but with particular places in person, something that we can see in its detail and contextuality because scientific technical language has always evolved in the wider world at the intersection for instance in the 20th and 21st century of science and military. So for example, if you want to understand the development of computer simulations, it's impossible not to see that in the context of understanding neutron diffusion in attempts to model the first atomic bomb or the very complicated hydrodynamic and nuclear models that we used to go to hydrogen bomb. And those techniques carry over in a very immediate way into the development of physics in the late 1940s and beyond. A specific example of the way we might see these trading zones would be to go back to the example of special relativity where one of Einstein's great and famous innovations was to say that time needed to be reconsidered to be nothing other than the behavior of properly synchronized clocks. We wanted to know what was simultaneous right here. That's not a problem of the train, Einstein says, arrives in front of my nose at seven o'clock. I mean just that the small hand of my watch is pointing to the seven. But if I wanna say it arrived at the next town over there at seven o'clock, I need some way of coordinating those clocks. And he suggested the simple but profound notion that you should coordinate your clocks by exchanging a light signal between the two clocks, send it on a round trip, see how long it takes, and then setting the distant clock to be half that speed, that half that time difference when it received the signal. So if it takes two seconds, these are far away towns, to go back and forth and then we know that it could take one second to go one way. And so I flashed my signal at 12 and you set your clock at 12 plus one second. And for Poincare, who was also working on similar problems in the late 19th century, he began by being head of the Bureau of Longitude in Paris and his job was to figure out how to synchronize clocks all over the world through the French telegraphic network which was going to give him a way of determining the longitude of places like Brazil, which was rather important if you didn't want your ships to all sink. So, and then he came to understand that this was a routine matter in finding longitude and coordinating clocks and he began to use that as part of his arguments within the philosophy of science about what it meant to talk about simultaneously at all. So in that intersection between philosophy, this burgeoning field of philosophy of science that he helped create and the technology of time synchronization, this notion of clock coordination became very important which I've marked in the red square marked T. And then in 1900, he realized that there was actually a kind of triple intersection, kind of, this is a very minimal trading zone. This is what's in common between these fields of the electrodynamics of moving bodies and his relativity theory, the technology of time synchronization and making maps of the world and the philosophy of time was simply this notion of how to coordinate clocks. So this notion of coordinating clocks stood at the intersection, if you say, is it really part of relativity, really part of longitude finding or really part of the philosophy of time that doesn't make much sense. It's like asking whether which road the intersection is in. The intersection is defined by the crossing of those different roads. And this sort of thing is what's interested me in many different contexts during World War II. For instance, the atomic bomb project looked like it was going to grind to a halt. Wigner wrote the president of the United States, Smosevelt, a letter saying that if the engineers and the physicists and the theorists didn't start doing things in coordination, Hitler would win the war and Compton came down and drew this chart about how the engineers, the development people, the theorists, the physicists, and the chemists had to speak to one another and they had to develop languages to make that coordination. And now we see in the current world all sorts of places where these local coordinated trading zones occur. We see that, for instance, in the nanotechnology building just around the corner where surface chemists, electrical engineers and atomic physicists have to sometimes very laboriously learn to be able to coordinate their terms. How each of them uses the term nanotube, for example, is somewhat different and yet there's enough in common for them to begin to construct first a jargon, then a pigeon, then ultimately a creole. In string theory, at the high end of abstraction, the geometers, the algebraic geometers and the field theorists had a very hard time for speaking to one another and they too have had to develop commonalities not only in the objects they're talking about but the nature of intuitions and demonstrations and so on. And simulations, as I've mentioned, cross many different scientific fields. This is the nano building. This is an example of a simulation but these Monte Carlo simulations wander back and forth among many different domains. Statistics, physics, nuclear weapons, astronomy. And even in particle physics, or especially in particle physics, one begins to see ways in which the myriad of different industrial and scientific groups have to coordinate the different parts in a big detector like this which was never built, analogous ones were built at CERN, just about to start up. Each of these different colored parts of the detector is actually owned by different groups around the world and the coordination of the knowledge that they produce in these different sectors is actually fundamental to demonstrating anything at all. So, in a way, these are the kinds of concerns that interest me. What are, not to say something like there is symbiosis between fields, not to say there's collaboration, that seems to me a little bit like Moliere's famous, it puts you to sleep because of its dormative powers. I know they're collaborating, that's the problem, not the answer. Interdisciplinarity doesn't tell you anything. That just labels the site where we need to dig. And what I think we should be digging for is to understand quite precisely what are the shared techniques, what are the shared instruments, what are the shared theoretical notions, how do they work, how do they expand, how do they relate to the larger context of use in the constituent subcultures that are trying to trade, what works in the co-ordinative zone, what doesn't work, or systematically you could ask, for instance, what characteristically, when chemists and physicists or chemists and biologists, what characteristically comes from each of these domains? So, for example, during World War II, the radio engineers and the physicists had to coordinate their work at MIT and at Harvard. And the physicists said, oh, we have this complicated device, so we're not gonna solve that, we just use our green functions and we'll solve it. And the engineers said, sure, yeah, solve it. And the physicists came back a couple of weeks later, these are some of the best physicists in the world, and they said, we have no idea how to solve this. And the radio engineers said, well, how about this? What we do when we have a problem like how does a loudspeaker function in a circuit is we don't try to do the physics of the loudspeaker, we say, what comes in, what goes out? Now let's solve, ignore what happens in the black box. The physicists said, oh, that's interesting. The engineers said, make us a black box. So the physicists began to learn a coordinate of, coordinate their work with the engineers, the physicists providing certain fundamental notions about microwaves and so on, and the engineers providing a whole algebra and way of understanding black box circuitry. So then you can say, okay, so the syntax, so to speak, is coming from the radio engineers and the vocabulary, the semantics is coming from the physicists. How does that work and what comes out of that as it begins to be produced? In other words, what I want to push on is what exactly is the coordinate of process? How does it change over time? And what does that tell us about the way non-localized knowledge gets produced? About the way from different local settings and different local scientific cultures, we produce something that isn't reliant in its entirety on any one of its constituent groups. Let me stop there. Totally wonderful, totally great. And very much, who would like the first? I was really happy to hear the radar lab example come up because of course there's been a decent amount of research done on how cybernetics sort of emerged as if not a quill coming out of it, but at least a sort of a shared language for us. My approach into this whole world is that the most ignoble, which is coming out of the venture capital and technology community. And I'm wondering to what extent have people looked at trade languages between the engineering community and the business community as have sort of come out of the innovation communities in Silicon Valley, Route 128, so on and so forth. Are we seeing any of these sort of same phenomena come out of that meeting of the scientific language and the commercial language? I think that's a very interesting problem. There's been a little bit of work on it, not a huge amount, but it seems to me a very important area of research and you can see the impact of it in all sorts of ways. For instance, even in the architecture, when a biology lab is built, or when any laboratory is built, it reflects certain ideals about where that knowledge sits in the world. Does your laboratory resemble a church? Does your laboratory resemble a factory? Does your laboratory represent, I mean, these things altered radically. So when laboratory architecture shifted in and after World War II to be these traveling cranes and large bay areas, and it took on the ethos of a large scale factory, not accidentally. I mean, these were techniques of architecture and design and production that came out of building the bombers and other things for World War II. And when the people came out of the atomic bomb project and the radar project, they began to see themselves as functioning in what they considered to be the non-precious academic, but rather the, an industrial scale sense of who they were and what they were doing. And they began to say, okay, we can imagine building laboratories the size of cities. We're gonna build Fermilab and we're gonna build Brookhaven and their model was this industrial one, which comes out of economic industrial production. And it began to shift how scientists worked and the kinds of equipment that they used, the scale and scope of their ambitions. It went, Harvard's budget was in the physics department went from 20,000 to millions between 1939 and 1936. It was a changed sense of who they were. And in the venture capital inflection of this story, when you begin to see biology or nanolabs built with lacquered wood and wall-to-wall carpeting. And I mean, you have to say, look, you're gonna bring in venture capitalists to come and talk about patenting and moving beyond the laboratory. They don't wanna go to PS101 circa 1956. That's not what, that's not who they expect you to be. That's not who they are. And the, or for instance, at a more abstract level or more conceptual level, if you're old enough, you can remember presentations in the sciences, scribbled on overhead projector sheets and put on the, flashed on the screen too fast to read and then power points and there's been a sort of escalation. And the idea of presentation in both its venture capital in economic sense and presentation in its academic sense begin to merge because if you're gonna present things, the visual language that you use requires not just a generic sophistication but address a certain visual idiom that's the people are used to. So that also, and then there's lots of things in between the laboratory and the presentation but in all sorts of ways, I think the role of the industrialization of the sciences and then this new world of venture capital and startup has begun to alter not just the biological or biochemical but also the relationship between engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology is serious. That's all the cookies. I don't know. He's inviting you to become a lead user in dessert technology. So, this is interesting related to something we're struggling with which is that we have people who speak different languages. Can you guys hear Eric back there? I can't hear. Sorry, so we're doing work on what we call, so we have users innovating and they have to deal with manufacturers of a different language. And so what we do is we try to create a toolkit in the middle. Now, each time you approach, for example, a website, you know, like Matlab or Fidelity Investments or something like that, you go in with your language and you're saying, well, I expect bonds to be over here. And traditionally what's happened is that site is totally rigid and one side figures it out. But now, you know, with equivalent methods like Google Search and so on, what's happening is they say, oh, you think a bond is up. Something or other, huh? Well, we can figure the site. So, the point is that what you're studying over a period of time, we actually have to deal with it in minor ways every day. Yes. And so the principles here, you know, of adaptation and efficient adaptation are gonna be enormously powerful. I mean, that's really important all around. It is. It seems to me very closely related to what interests me and an interesting specific model of this case. I mean, the analog in physics might be when the physicists were used to telling the engineers what to do, right? So Louis Alvarez, Nobel Prize winner of particle physics, wanted to build something. He hired engineers, cryogenic engineers, electrical engineers, civil engineers, and he said, build me this and here's what I want. And that sort of was fine. It seemed like very big physics at the time. These were a million dollar bubble chambers. But then that, you know, add a zero and another zero. You're talking a hundred million dollars machines. And this started to be a big fraction of the Department of Energy's budget. So now you have the physicists saying, okay, well, I changed my mind. We want this shifted and the engineers said, sure, that's gonna cost 30 million dollars. And they said, yeah, do what we say. This is a better way of doing it. And eventually the project spiraled out of control. It threatened the whole of the high energy physics program. It threatened the Department of Energy. And finally the physicists had to go to the engineers and say, you have to learn to say no to us. It's this sort of Hegelian master slave moment right where the slave with his feet on the ground has to tell the master what's real. And, but the physicists eventually, I mean, their feet were to the fire, understood that. And it's a little bit like the top down fidelity site that wasn't responsive to the way the users are working. You know, the engineers and the physicists aren't exactly user and innovator, but they're, it's a unilateral move that turns out to be very destructive in the limit. And that was only fixed when they learned how to have something that was more dialogic and to create something that was not quite either physics or engineering. And eventually in the 1983 event, even the Nobel Prize Committee, not the most radical organization I've ever heard of, split the Nobel Prize between an engineer and a physicist because the world had changed. Another dilemma is here. So in effect, if you think about IBM coming into some company to tell them how to automate their process, right? This is an event that happens every day. They have totally different languages. So they have a person in the middle who is every day having to learn the language in effect and make rough translations. And what would be an enormous help to think about really, and we've been sort of thinking about, well, can we get these things to common primitives or what's the story here? Would be to make this more efficient. The way they are now doing this, or the way we all speak to each other is sort of a guess and by gosh thing. So it really is, you know, the things that you talk about over decades, we're negotiating every minute, right? So now what are the underlying sort of principles you can imagine instilling from this that would allow us to say, oh, okay, I can do this in 20 minutes. Not a hard task. It's not like your project. I mean, one thing seems to me to try to characterize what it is that the constitution, so it may be that there isn't a generic solution to this problem and that what one needs to do is to look in the potential coordination which I prefer to the term collaboration, but in the coordinate of process, what is it that's characteristically coming from the different groups? And I gave the example of radar because there's a place where actually you can say something quite specific about what it was. It was not just any old bit of radio engineering and any old bit of physics. It really was characteristic that the radio engineers had a very good engineering toolkit. And when they took a problem, they said, multi-gen, multi-jowl, amperage in, amperage out. You know, they line these up and these equations and take it into a matrix, solve it, and this is what they did every day. And they said, we want this. This is what we need to do to be able to build these radars if we're gonna have any chance of saving England from the Battle of Britain. And so the physicists, after much resistance, because they really didn't, this was not the way they thought about problems, they had to give something up and they had to give up some very sophisticated tools to dig back to and say, okay, what do we have that the engineers don't that we can contribute to this problem and how can we make that work with their toolkit? So what is it from what we do? For instance, let's give up what happens in the limit in some corner of a copper tube, of a copper junction. We can, because you know, physicists, you say, well, let's solve it completely. Figure it out exactly. Got the analytic solution and the engineers could care less. They want to know what comes in, what goes out. So now I'm gonna be the engineer. I'm saying- Last one, Eric. I'm sorry. No, no, go, go follow up. Okay, now I'm gonna be the engineer and say, okay, raise level of abstraction of it. What is the principle here so that I can do it faster next time? So, I don't know, in a generic way, the only thing I can say is, in the case, say, of IBM with these various companies, more generally than asking for just a facilitator who is good man for all jobs, I would say try to figure out what characteristically IBM is contributing to these things and what is part of their culture that actually is fairly irrelevant to these interactions. And it turns out that there's a lot of irrelevant stuff. If I trade this for that, you and I do not have to agree that this is for coffee. You can use it as a paper way. It is not relevant to the trade. So part of understanding the dynamics of exchange is knowing what doesn't matter. That's a great insight. That's a great insight. What can you throw away? Hallie, then Judith. Hi, just one really quick- Awesome, one for customer going and then- Okay. So Hallie, Judith, David. When you talk about new language, you mean created like biochemistry coming together, is it predictive? If there are many new words that this is a bigger, larger, amazing leap in plot, is the language connected? You want an empirical research? I guess I want- It's a little more of a study. And I'm thinking of course, because I'm a net person, all the crazy terms and words we've had to come up with quickly to try and describe what the heck is going on here. But in a more reasonable place, bio and chemistry, is there a war of words where a combo word won't do and a new word must be created and does that? Is that predictive? Is it telling you something about this is thought that's much bigger than we anticipated? I think that one place that there's a sorting out of this is that in these thick, what I'm calling the thick boundary. So you might think that a boundary is like a mathematical line of one-dimensional object, but part of what I think is important to see here is that boundaries are always dimensionless. They're always thick. They're always like the biochemistry in the beginning years or geographically, right? The Bosque region is not a line. It's a region that exists on the boundaries between France and Spain. And I think that in these thick regions of exchange, a lot of the vocabulary that was produced by these individual fields gets thrown out because it's sort of endogenous to the originating culture. And they can proliferate vocabulary as they wish, but it turns out that when other people start to, when you have user-innovator relationships or exchanges, that there's a stripping away. And so in some ways, I think the acid test for the vocabularies is what happens in these boundary regions. That's wonderful. I'd like to thank the Berkman Center as a thick region of exchange on top of what I did in society, so we'll have to start stripping away extraneous language. Judith and David. I know more about IBM than I know about. Judith, do you know Peter Galsen? You should do so. MIT Media Lab professor. So, but I think, I was looking to your exchange. I think one of the interesting pieces is when, for instance, I'll use IBM as an example. But when you have something like a consulting company where a lot of what they are, there's a different type of cooperation while they may be trying to cooperate with their cooperative cooperation. And a great deal of what they're trying to do is use a new language to convince them that they have something new there. And so you see a new language, a new technology. They're very, very, they're very fashionable companies in the world of management. And it's a lot of it is about kind of trying to promulgate a new way of looking at things, because a lot of it is that if it was too easily understood, there wouldn't be something to sell. And a lot of it is telling this notion that they're going, that there's lots of management books that come out every year that are about keeping the same very simple concepts and putting a very complex vocabulary around them so that you feel like you've achieved something new. And so I think the more general point that may be interesting is also part of it is the question of how much is your seeming cooperation about a competition and it's a competition in the world of information dominant. And I think you see situations like that information in a relatively different way, not necessarily about cooperating as much as it is about jockeying from leadership. Well, I think there are two points you make that both seem to be very important. One is that a complexification can sometimes be obfuscation, right? And not making more precise the terms. And I think this is something, whether it's unintentional in the case of aspects of internet vocabulary, and there's also a kind of intellectual property, everybody, nobody can write a PhD thesis without introducing new vocabulary that they hope will become a new thing. And that, so there is a kind of incentive to obfuscate or to proliferate. And then the second aspect is that competition and cooperation are often closer together than we think. Boyd once said that ambivalence is the base emotion and not the lowest emotion, but the ground state emotion. And I think that we may see that here and that when people coordinate, they may have many different motives. In a way, what I'm trying to do is in some ways to pull away from an intentionalist account and to sort of say at a very minimal level, what is being coordinated? It's a sort of reduced question, a simpler question than you might wanna ask where you to try to say, well, is one side motivated by the desire for fame or the desire for fortune or the desire for symbolic capital in the world of academics? I mean, in a way, I wanna sort of bracket that and say, what is it when people are making these sorts of coordination goes into that? And then you can ask, there is a world of other questions you can ask about how these things relate to the starting culture, the endogenous questions. What does it mean within the physics community to be doing this? What does it mean within the chemistry community to be making this coordination? But I wanna hold that in a sense bracketed while we ask how the coordination works. And then we can sort of build up from there. Oliver, that may be all we get to, but we'll see depending on how long the questions are and the good responses. I would love just to drop a quick note though on the term intellectual property which you and Judith laced over, but throughout their temptingly to us as IPR lawyers in the event that Wendy doesn't raise the question very well as a professor of intellectual property. I would love to hear some of your thoughts on whether or not the best of what you're talking about is either promoted by the current electric property regime or blocked by it or otherwise. I realize that might fall in the motivation range that you're trying to bracket, but they said that you have insights that might help us think about this core area of our work in the grid. But that's more of a just kind of, if we get to a kind of question. David? Can we just get to it? Well, no, I'd love to. Can you give me a second? Bad, dude, bad, bad. No, no, I thought you had any answer to that question. I see it by time to the gentleman. That wasn't actually me to hijack the process. I just want to make sure we didn't miss this in the entire hour. So I will put the point to the question. I'll keep that in mind if you want to ask a question. I can't integrate. And Wendy will ask something on this zone, so I don't have to worry. This is just a clarification round question. So when two fields are, we negotiate these sorts of understandings all the time at a macro level so that I'll just pick on Ethan. So when Ethan says groovy, which he doesn't say, but if he were to say groovy, when Ethan says groovy, I understand these things are casping. So it's a little micro thing. Groovy. When two cultures, well, two cultures in your sense are negotiating in the thick zone, does the language that they come up with, are there primitives behind it? So the language is a simplification of what's being said, which would require that there be some sense of primitives. Or do they, and which also might mean that their own internal senses of what they're doing has changed, because now they've seen that somebody else is calling it this, the two fields are calling it intellectual property, and suddenly the users who start calling it intellectual property say, oh, it's property. It changes things. So does it strip away? Is it a reduction? Does it affect each of the theories, so to speak, the theoretical space of each of the fields? Or do they translate back into their original own terminology where the term is richer and thicker and more ambiguous and has more semantics to it? OK. This is a very interesting question. And I think, so I want to make a distinction between regularization and simplification. And here's what I have in mind. When we humans have the capacity to change register in the way we speak. We know how to speak to children. We know how to speak to foreigners. We know how to speak to technical people. We know how to, I mean, we have different. You can speak to the Berkman Center class. There are people who use it. We know how to do things. Now, in a kind of metaphorical way, when one of the things that you do in language, so below the level of the kind of conceptual high-level structures that we're talking about is, in English, you can regularize the subject verb object. This SVO structure is, we don't always speak in subject verb object. What we can do is much more complicated things in English than that. But that's something that we do. Now, does that mean that the idea where we take, phonetically, a consonant vowel is much simpler to communicate with? Or I shouldn't say that. It's easier to grasp. In some ways, for a non-speaker than consonant-consonant, some very complicated structure constants. And semantically, too, there are ways that we regularize things. And so the regularization doesn't, however, mean that you're simplifying the ideas. It used to be a whole 19th century linguistics was dominated by also the Dutch thought that the Dutch language was the superior language. It could explain serious ideas in a German book. You can only philosophize in German or you're wasting your time in the English. And the French each had their own views, right? So there are plenty of tracks that will tell you that every major imperial European language was the only language to do X-ing. Nobody believes that anymore. And I think that if you look at, or a more technical example would be when two famous physicists, Bjork and Andrell, wrote a book on quantum field theory, they wrote a second volume for experimenters. And you say, oh, this is gonna be simple. It's for their poor cousins, the experimenters. And it's true, there were all sorts of interest theoretical connections that were dropped out and regularizations of the rules that were used to calculate things, but the calculations got more complex because now the experimenters really wanted to know what happened when a spinning electron hit a substance. And whereas the theorists, you know, they just wanna know the framework and whether something old, I mean, they went more abstract, endogenous theoretical questions. So this is an example of something that is, along one axis, more regular, but more complex in calculational terms. I think that's actually what happens a lot. So that when we take a field and we're speaking to another field, we try to regularize things. We try to not deal with the relationship between terms in our own field so much, but rather to look at the connective tissue to the other field. So the answer to your question is this simplification, I would say, careful. Because simplification can occur along, simple is not a simple concept. And there are different axes. You could, and the example that I gave, there's simplification in terms of endogenous theoretical connections. Yes, it got simpler along that. In calculational dimension it got more complicated. And so what I would say is the outspeak becomes regularized. Then your second part of your question was, does this feed back into the originary, one of the originary or constitutive parent languages or parent cultures in science? And I think the answer is yes. And that's actually what interests me most. The sort of dog bites man's story to me is physics teaches chemistry, teaches biology, teaches psychology, you know, this sort of Comtean story that doesn't grab you much, right? This sort of pyramidical notion of knowledge. I'm much more interested in the man bites dog story, like the radar story where the physicists learned by their interaction with the radio engineers, then they went back and Schwingert rewrote the most fundamental kind of physics quantum field theory using this black box attitude towards, so that happens. And so I think, yes, that's particularly interesting to me when the very fact of the coordinate of activity begins to shift to back form the originary scientific culture. I think that happens all the time and it's really, really interesting. And it's what happens in the analogous structure. Here would be if, what if Fidelity actually learned something, not just how to sell their stuff, but they actually learned about how to think about their instruments, their financial instruments on the basis of their interaction and that must happen occasionally. But the top-down picture not only is bad business, but it actually keeps you from learning things. Just as one editorial comment, this is an awesome question. And the thing most striking about it is that our university or other universities seem not even to get the dog bites man story with us, so I think it's wonderfully right here. Some of us don't need to do some more work back here, I think. Well, despite being an intellectual property attorney and despite being interested in your question, that wasn't the direction I was thinking of either. I was thinking about from the direction of an attorney who goes out and learns lots of different disciplines and is called on or in a former life, was called on to litigate in different disciplines and to go in and learn a little bit and then go out and present that back to partners or judges or clients. So I was going to ask about the role of formal education in different disciplines versus the sort of learning on the job that you get from working with someone in a technical field and learning from them what they're doing. Some law firms would go out and hire biochemists to go and talk to the biochemistry clients and others would go out and hire generally interested people and send them in to go and learn. My thinking tends to be that the generally interested people would learn more that was then helpful to explain it to a non biochemist, judge, jury and senior partner. I wonder if that's anything. Sorry, I didn't understand the very last bit. You said it's more useful to. That when you're trying to then go back and explain to people outside of the specific discipline that someone who learns it from the ground up can then go and teach others and in the process learn something for their own disciplines as well. Versus somebody who's gotten the formal education in a different field, may know different silos but not the way they fit together. Well, you know, I think there's a pedagogical confusion that is visible in our writing in our culture about science that's very related to this which is it seems to me that people often think that what's wanted in a book or an article or an explanation about science is to make it stupider. And that seems to me empirically wrong. That is to say people actually are pretty smart. I mean a broad range of people are quite smart. Our culture has a lot of technical people or who deal with technical things whether they're in the medical field or whether they're engineers or the numbers are very, very large actually. And we write about science in explaining it as if we're talking to stupid people and even people who are not in technical fields deal with very complicated concepts. And it seems to me that pedagogically what we need to do is to develop ways of speaking about technical scientific ideas in ways that are not weighed down by jargon that don't require prior knowledge but that recognize the sophistication of conceptual reasoning that the audience is in fact capable of. And we don't do that very well. And it has terrible consequences. It means that if you go to an art museum, you go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and some great art historian like Svetlana Alpers is organizing a Rembrandt show, it's written for adults. If you go to a science museum, it's written for children. And I'm not saying you should have an exhibit that requires people to be able to solve a partial differential equation or they won't understand what's going on. That's stupid. But you don't have to address people using one syllable words and assuming that the entire audience wants to climb on the exhibit. I like climbing on the exhibit. But it seems to me that a lot of times that what goes wrong in the interaction between the scientists and the non-scientists is that the scientists or people writing in their name think that the translation dimension, the translation mechanism is making it conceptually stupid. And that's just ridiculous. We don't do it in other places in the world. If you pick up art forum or something like that, which has got a gigantic circulation or the New York Times arts page or the New York Times book review section or even the way people describe, you listen to the radio and you hear the arguments about what Petraeus is saying. I mean we have pretty sophisticated discussions but suddenly when it comes to science, we feel like we mistake on the one side jargon or technical manipulation of on the other side the sophistication of an argument. And I think if we could get that right, it would allow people to bring back this information in the whether it's in the legal or the ethical or the other domains. I mean some of the things that I've been talking about here, I have come up with in political contexts where groups that are as interested say, and there's one group in Switzerland where the soil scientists and the farmers were ready to kill each other. And the soil scientists wanted to regulate what the farmers farmed and the farmers said, you don't know what you're talking about. Or the lobster men in Maine, they think lobsters do X and Y and Z and the Bureau of Fisheries says no, no, no, that's not what lobsters do. And so in a way, and what some of these groups have been talking with me about is how to find ways of talking that sit between where the soil scientists and the farmer could actually coordinate what they're saying, not because the farmers are gonna suddenly become soil scientists or the soil scientists are gonna take out a farm, but rather that there is enough, one can build up enough common language and experience to be able to speak to one another. Oh, the last question. Actually, it logs in the answer, so I will cede my time if you would like to make it there. All right, I didn't mean to teeter at such a question. I'll make it slightly more precise, which was just to sort of be the Berkman Center interest in IP generally speaking, you have plenty of ways in which what you've said already is obviously quite relevant to our work, but to take Patent as just one example of intellectual property, one might argue based on what you've suggested that the notion that we see in individuals often, the exclusive rights to do something with an idea or a set of ideas over a period of time is a bad idea. It's a bad idea because there are a bunch of conversations that might be going on in cooperative modes that in fact would make something more innovative for society and that the lockup that we achieved into my property is a bad idea in fact. Others might say, no, in fact, one of the great things about the patent system, for instance, is the forced disclosure. At some point in the process, you need to dispose a certain amount of information about your innovation or you might say, in fact, Patent is a regime that helps to organize groups of people who are working together on innovation and they collectively can hold this in life. So you can see people making multiple arguments for whether or not your findings or at least the implications of the questions you are asking might be supportive of or suggest that IP is wrong and thought about in the context of patent. I just wondered if you had thoughts on that. Well, it's a really interesting question and so let me just take, I mean, it's a gigantic question. So let me just take two aspects of it. One is I actually think the idea of completely individual innovation was sort of mythopoetic in some way, right? Does anybody believe? No. I mean, in science, but we have institutions that are constantly trying to recuperate it. The Nobel Prize is the best example, sorry, to pick on Stockholm, but we have experiments that are starting now with... You can still give them one, you guys. You're listening. Over 2,000... It's very nice and sparkly. With over 2,000 people on an experiment, right? And that's just the people who are signatories. That doesn't include all the engineers and the technicians. What does that mean? If you, eventually, one of these experiments will get a Nobel Prize and they'll give it to two people or the legal limit, three. But it's really trying to imagine ourselves back to a non-existent, idenic past, which never really, you know, it was always, we've always been just after the fall, right? In the 19th time, there was always a time when things were more individual and so on, but it's like chasing the sunset or something. And so I think that in science, as in engineering, innovation always has aspects of collectivity, which is not to say that individuals don't make identifiable contributions, but it never has the pure crystalline form that our institutions often demand to make promotions to hire people to reward them to give them grants. I mean, we have a large-scale structure on the academic symbolic side, or not so symbolic side, but tenure, and that a reward system that tries to recuperate and isolate and draw a sharp line around the individual. And in the patent and then the engineers are much more experienced, they're much more integrated with the engineering world, with the patent world than the scientists. And it's interesting to see what happens when these paths cross. For instance, in the beginning of Silicon Valley, Route 128 time, there was intense efforts to try to get all these new radar devices, which the beginning of 128 is, and Silicon Valley also, to try to get patents out of this. And there were tensions because, for instance, the companies wanted the scientists to do all the variations possible. Okay, so you've made this kind of resonator, well, it can be modified this way, or that way, it can exclude this, and it can use a different substance, and different voltage. I mean, so the patent people were pushing them to do a kind of intellectual work that the physicists didn't want to do. They found the thing, now they wanted to plug it in and use it, or something else. But so that's a case where there is tension there. On the other side, I think you're quite right. And one part of your question is saying that the patents can be an enormous incentive. And as engineering and science grow closer together, which I think is the characteristic ethos of this time, in the nano world, for instance, questions of the existence of something is less important than its robustness and its being able to produce it in molar and not molecular quantities. And so, I mean, there's a kind of engineering ethos that has begun to back form in the sciences. So, my colleagues over here in physics, begun more and more to be able to think more like engineers in certain respects along these lines. And I think the patent and intellectual property and the possibility of startups and so on has an incentive and does pull people together and who you need to do what. And also tends to make us maybe a little bit less interested in the classical philosophical, ontological questions that have been such a part of physics certainly since Newton and maybe since Lucretius and more thinking like engineers. And I don't say that in a wistful, elegiac way. I mean, I just think that's a fact that that is shifting the way physics feels in some ways. And I think that's happening across many scientific disciplines. So, the patents and intellectual property play a very complicated role in the changing ethos of the relationship between science and technology. I'm sure that I am speaking for everybody here, but this was a remarkable, remarkable tour de force in this area. And your comment about not dumbing science down too far, I was actually gonna close by saying just, and there's this tradition of, I guess it's Richard Feynman and others who have found ways to speak to non-scientists in your field truly intelligently. And I feel like though I was afraid at the beginning, I would not know what you're talking about. In large number of new words, as it went along, that you've made it, these true insights, extraordinarily accessible for those of us with less specialized knowledge in your field. So, thank you, many, many thanks for coming.