 We have, as our title suggests, not just three disparate topics, but three wonderful speakers addressing these fields. What they have in common is not just their talent, of course, but their having been friends and interlocutors of Barry for many years. And second, their own vital scholarship, which has its own commitment to unfolding, to process, to ever-new inquiries. If I were to introduce them properly, our time would be gone, so I would just say a sentence or two about each. Michel Chaudy, our first speaker, is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Indiana. Michel does not waste his time on small topics. He's written a book called The Laboratory of Poetry, Chemistry and Poetics in the work of Friedrich Stegel. He followed that up this last year with a wonderful new book, Thinking with Kant's Critique of Judgment. Now, if you look at just the titles of these books, laboratory thinking, you get a sense of the commitment to process, to sort of the ongoing development of a conversation, of a discourse. Our second speaker, Noah Feldman, teaches us moderators why we should never write up our comments until a few minutes before the panel begins. Because I stumbled down this morning, opened my New York Times, as I always do, to the op-ed page. And there was Noah giving a presentation, a column on social media, especially Twitter and the Bill of Rights. Incisive, nuanced, capturing in a few words the complexity of this problem. Apart from that, he's written a number of books, most recent of which is The Three Lives of James Madison, Genius, Partisan, President. He's advertised by the law school as a constitutional specialist. But we have to take constitutional here very, very broadly, because he's concerned not just with the American Constitution, but with other nations as well, in the theoretical and practical fashion. And his range of learning is prodigious, ranging from biblical to classical Islamic, to all sorts of contemporary fields. He is Alex Fraunkherter, professor of law here at Harvard. Also director of the Julius Rabinowitz program on Jewish and Israeli law, Rabinowitz, excuse me. Our third speaker is the Will E. York, professor of physics here at Harvard. This is Andy Strominger. I don't know whether anyone has ever called him Andrew, I never have. But Andy is remarkable for his work in theoretical physics, especially in string theory, in which we have discourse, as he's patiently tried for the last 25 years or so, to explain this approach to a unified theory of the universe. And he's also worked on black holes. He's developed along the way, and of course his work is very theoretical, very cutting edge, but a marvelous talent for giving public presentations on these subjects. So these are our three panelists. Each will have 20 minutes. That will give us some time for questions and discussions. I'm not prepared to be too ruthless with the clock, because pretty such brilliant people can surely count to 20. I always thought of Barry as leading a kind of poetic existence. And it occurred to me that one important feature of a poetic existence, maybe the most important, is not just to bring forth something new, but to allow others to bring forth something. It is to be a kind of facilitator or inspirer or midwife of others' activity, which is exactly how he was working in my imagination as I was writing. So this talk is really a way of trying to get at this idea of what it means to have a poetic existence and what the relationship is between creativity or creation of oneself and that of others. The title is The Truth Told Urgently, which I chose before I learned of Maria's research, that this idea of urgency is important to you, Barry, that it makes perfect sense. There's a fragment by Friedrich Schägel that has stuck with me for the past 25 years or so, since I came across it as a student. Actually, it's just a line from a fragment, and it keeps returning to me out of nowhere and under unlikely circumstances. For example, while doing sit-ups or fixing lunch. And when it does, I do not quite know what to make of it. It's a line you may know from a collection that Schägel, all of 25 years old, and well on his way to becoming one of the perhaps the leading themes of literature in Germany and possibly Europe, which Schägel published in 1797. In translation, it reads, poetry can only be criticized by poetry. That's it. Poetry can only be criticized by poetry. Poesie kann nur durch Poesie kritisiert werden. And basically, it's just with this one line that I would like to gain some closeness. It puts two terms, Poesie and critique, poetry and critique or criticism in relation to one. It tells us something we already know, namely that critique or criticism orients itself towards poetry. But it also says that this orientation towards poetry must itself be poetic. And here we find ourselves at sea. We are to think of criticism as poetic, but our imagination falters. Are we to think that the work of some of the great critics is a form of poetry, the work, say, of William Emsen or Erich Auerbach of Peter Sandi or any other critic that you may wish to add. As Schägel uses the term here and elsewhere, poetry is not restricted to a genre. Such as the lyric, nor even to verbal artworks in general, but reaches for the essence of productive making itself. Whatever form it might take. Still, was Schägel himself a poet when he wrote about Lessing or Gusset? Is the fragment asking us to change our conception of poetry or of criticism or perhaps of both? Or is Schägel mistaken here? Before we get tied up in knots, let's follow the line. What it says is plain. Poetry can only be criticized by poetry. Poetry is where I set out and poetry is where I end, my dwelling and my destination. Though I may not know its dimensions nor the measure of its boundaries, I do not face in it an alien thing, but rather something with which I maintain an unknown intimacy. I tend to approach it as though it were an unidentified substance that must be probed from a distance with a stick of scholarly analysis. But then I forget that I can know it only if I know it from inside, even when it confounds me. In fact, I forget that its meaning confounds me the way poetry does because I know it from inside. Knowing it from inside does not mean that it harbors no mysteries. It means that poetry is not an object to be studied, dissected, and decoded. It is in fact no object at all. That too is something the fragment intimates. When poetry encounters poetry, the two do not occupy opposite poles. Here I, the reading subject, somehow deploying poetry. They're a poetic object that I approach and seek to understand with criticism somehow coursing between us. If criticism itself is done by poetry, as Shlabel puts it, then poetry is the medium through which I move, not a thing that I hold before me. To do criticism by poetry names something intimate, not a theory or a method, but a form of comportment. What kind of criticism responds to this intimacy in comportment? We know the answer, the way that takes the path of poetry. This is not the poetry exhausted by markers of genre or convention, as I said. It is a more general phenomenon. In one of his lectures, Shlabel describes it as a kind of thinking. There is, he says, there is a kind of thinking that produces something. He calls this thinking the making of poetry. The German word is just das Stichten, which, as he says, creates its material itself. Seeing this way, the key characteristic of poetry is not beauty, not truth, not pleasure, though all of these may well be involved, but it is a productivity in thinking itself. Productive thinking we now see must also be the mark of any form of criticizing that seeks the intimacy of poetry. Criticism, then, is poetic when its way of thinking produces something, when it makes something new, some new speech. Even if it has been uttered before, such an act of speaking will be something unheard of. Ideas that have grown flaccid gain fresh vigor, like a muscle that one learns to feel in you. Yet this speaking emerges not out of thin air, but follows upon another act, this an act of hearing, an act as daring as the speech to which it is rise. For to hear poetically, to hear that I may speak as Emerson puts it, demands of me to open not my ears alone, but also myself, to allow myself to be exposed to what speaks to me, unshielded by my usual armaments, with effects I cannot foresee. This self-exposure, this becoming vulnerable, lies at the core of poetic criticism, I think. At first it is difficult to see where this space may be found in which criticism would unfold its productivity. Since reeling later, one can get the sense that the artwork has so thoroughly commandeered all creative force that little more is left for criticism to do than recapitulating, re-experiencing, reflecting on the work done by the artwork. Wittgenmeister, one of the great novels by Guter, Wittgenmeister Schlegel claims his exemplary essay on this novel, and I quote, fortunately is one of those books that judge themselves. It stands to reason, then, that it is also a book that, as Schlegel writes, one can learn to understand only through itself. In that case, there does not seem to be much room left to the critic, though, as I say this, doubts arise. The German leaves it open whether the understanding is realized in the work itself or in the reader. This book, which one can learn to understand from itself, allows for both options. It could be a book that one can learn to understand only through itself, or else a book that one can learn to understand only through one's own self. The way to resolve this issue is to recognize that understanding entails both reader and work, and that what appears split into two locations guided by distinct formal principles, the critic or reader or subject on the one hand, the work or object on the other, is in fact one and the same process involving the two. We can look to the romantic archive for more textured ways of describing this logic. Thus there is another fragment by Schlegel that states in part, what is essential is to be able immediately to idealize and at the same time to realize objects, to compete them and in part to carry them out within oneself. To compete them translates against them, which literally means to make whole. Why is this essential? Again, we know the answer for the fragment has pointed the way this time with its own form. The work stands in need of being made whole because it is incomplete, it is not fully realized, it is fragmentary. This idea is best known in its mirrored version, another well-known fragment, sings the praises of what Schlegel calls infinitely progressive universal poetry, and it is easy to see why the expression of such an exalted idea would become the most frequently cited text in Vienna for early romanticism. But the idea of infinite becoming is just the flip side of never becoming, of irredeemable incompletion. There is within the infinity of the work of art an opacity, a point at which the work is insufficient to itself and therefore calls to the reader to carry it out, to make it whole. No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. That's T.S. Eliot, a little more than a century after the writings I've been using as my point of departure and a little less than a century before our own novel. What this font means for the critic, we learn in an especially concise way from Novalis, ordinarily less shrewd than his collaborator Friedrich Schlegel. The true reader he notes must be the enlarged author. The true reader must be the enlarged author, which leads the critic, Walter Benjamin, to conclude that, quote, for the Romantics, criticism is much less the evaluation of a work than it is the method of its completion or of its fulfillment. Benjamin refactions the concept of criticism instead of judging the work criticism who completes it. That's interesting, but even that may be promising too much. If the criticism of poetry can only be accomplished by poetry, then the opacity that we noted in the work of art, its essential incompleteness, will also be a feature of criticism, the enlarged author, too, does not have his complete meaning alone. Benjamin makes it sound as though completions join to form a completion. But I do not set out with a hold in myself and then seek something, a poem say, that might help plug it up, nor do I spot a lack in a work that I then rush to fill. It's not up to me to mend a fragment nor to make a mensfort. On the contrary, the fact that I fail to have my complete meaning alone is not a knowledge that I possess. Rather, it is only revealed to me as I work to understand the book, a fragment or a painting through itself. That is what opens the way to practicing reading as a form of self-exposure or of becoming vulnerable. How to imagine this practice of becoming vulnerable? It may help to shift to another art form and another medium and recall how certain paintings ask of the viewer to take a certain stance or a certain distance and a certain relation to light. I can, of course, decide to stand inches from the canvas, but in that case I see brush strokes, not the painting. Or I gaze at it from the far end of the hall and then I recognize the vague arrangements of shapes and colors. Part of what I do in a gallery, as I move about, I fix on a painting is to find out where it wants me to stand. Sometimes I find it right away. At other times it takes several approaches and then there are times when the spot eludes me for which I often blame the painting. Would it make sense to say that giving myself over to a work, looking to become the enlarged author, seeking to carry out the work in myself, describe ways of searching for a place for which I can read the work and it can read me? I think it does. Criticism involves, above all, not a way of uncovering a hidden meaning in an object, but rather a process in which I experience something that exceeds my own capacities. Becoming vulnerable means not a voluntary ecstasy, but a process involving a change that may endure and exact outlines may remain obscure to me for a long time, perhaps forever. The true force of a reading, the most profound way in which it occasions a change in my world is often not transparent to myself, which is why the phrase from a poem or a fragment, the patch of light in a painting for a line of music can come to haunt me. It may seem as though reading a book as a practice of becoming vulnerable could only happen in a sudden flash. When I think that I may be seized by an artwork or that I find myself hauled to it, I seem to encourage the idea that it is the sort of thing that simply and unaccountably happens, like love at first sight or a slap in the face. It's a notion that somebody like Franz Kafka furthers in the well-known letter that he writes a childhood friend. Let me read you a portion from this remarkable letter. In general, Kafka writes, in general I think we should read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us like a blow to the skull, why bother reading the book so that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all. Books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. This is Kafka writing. What we need are books, he continues, what we need are books that hit us like a misfortune that pains us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods far from any human presence, like suicide. And he concludes, the book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. The passage is, I find it very difficult to resist. Itself, the blow to the skull, it gives voice to a longing for an experience of reading whose raw intensity flares up in an instance. The images Kafka conjures helped us because they flatter art for its force and does also ourselves for craving and feeling that force. But they understate my work in opening myself to receive such a blow. How to describe the intermediate zone in which I'm neither fully passive nor fully active, which is just the zone of vulnerability to the sense or to what I make. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers an analogy apropos of a different experience. What happens, he asks, when I try to fall asleep? Other than in exceptional circumstances, I am not felt by sleep against my volition. Nor can I, as Insomniacs can attest, simply will its arrival. Instead, I put myself into a position in which I may receive sleep. True, I do not put myself to sleep, but rather fall asleep, which registers this loss of willing and control. Yet, I do not usually fall asleep the way that a brick falls to the ground. Rather, I allow myself to fall, I put myself into a position so that this falling can befall me. This getting into the right place or getting into position is itself not something that just happens to me, but is rather something that I need to learn. In fact, it can take years of practice of finding the right rituals, clutching the right objects, drifting into the right reveries to learn to do something as seemingly simple and natural as falling asleep. Some of us, perhaps most of us, never master it. The phenomenology of falling asleep is an apt analogy, I think, for criticism, because it gives contour to the murky zone between activity and passivity that characterizes the emphatic experience of reading. It also reveals how much elaboration and cultivation, how much learning is required to unfold such an experience. If we think of reading as a way of rendering oneself vulnerable, then we should think of this vulnerability neither as something I just suffer, nor as something I will, but as something I achieve, something I carry out in Schindler's terms. Self exposure, while not subject to hard and fast rules, is also not an arbitrary process. I don't merely stumble around the gallery or the text, hoping somehow to hit the right spot. Rather, my movements have been shaped by learning and practice, which do help me, though there is no guarantee of success. Being struck down by a passage in Schlegel can result from inattention or incomprehension or stupidity, but it may also happen after years of study. In that case, the muteness will have a different texture, sharper and more baffling. I'll conclude by saying something about the personal pronoun I, which I've used liberally. Saying that an authentic criticism I, the reader have to put myself at stake may make it sound as though criticism must be confessional, but that's not what I mean. In fact, quite the contrary. Self exposure is not the same thing as self confession or self discovery. It may be closest to self annihilation, a term Schlegel often uses, though I don't feel I quite understand what he means by it. One of the effects of exposing myself to the work of art, of rendering myself vulnerable to its force, is that prompts me to give up my idiosyncratic tendencies, my likes and dislikes, my appetites and wants, laying open something impersonally. And here too, the work demanded of the critic is like what the poet performs. Emerson says of the poet that I quote, the deeper he dives into the privatist secretist pre-sentiment to his wonder, he finds this is the most acceptable, the most public and universally true. For Elliot, poetry and I quote again, is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. And being Elliot, he adds, but of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things. The poet, Paul Celan, renders the thought in the most concise form I know. Art creates ego distance. Art creates ego distance. Kunst schafft ich Ferne. What is impersonal in me is most public and universally true, not in the way science or Wissenschaft aspires to be public and universally true, but by laying bare those moments where I'm stranger to myself, where what I feel and understand and say remains opaque to myself. If a literary work is worth reading, it's worth losing one's way in. We write and give talks and teach and in all this busyness, we allow to forget that there are real risks involved. The serious writer must play with fire, Iris Murdock has said. If that's right, then it cannot be the task of serious readers to play the part of the firefighters or to confine themselves to measuring the temperature or classifying the flames. They must hit close. Otherwise why bother? Thank you for your attention. So what I would like to do today is to speak about a concrete problem. It's concrete in an institutional sense, because that's what I do when I do constitutional law, but it derives from an abstract question connected to the nature of truth itself which is very much the kind of question that Barry and I were struggling with in the class. So to do that, let me just start with a passage that is probably familiar to many of you. It goes like this. Let truth and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter? Thus far, John Milton in his very famous and influential essay, Aria Petitiva. Now I thought about subtitling my talk John Milton meet Vladimir Putin. Because this claim that in a free and open encounter between truth and false truth will not be put to the worse is open to at least two obvious different interpretations. In one interpretation it's an empirical claim about the world. And if it's an empirical claim about the world it contains within it also an institutional recommendation. Indeed that is how Milton presents it in context. If you think that when truth and false contend the truth will emerge as the victor that is an argument for precisely the free and open encounter that Milton is suggested. Namely we should value institutionally a norm of the freedom of speech as the derivative conclusion of an initial proposition about the world, empirical and in theory perhaps testable that when truth and falsehood grapple the truth will win. Now that's the case we have to deal with the Putin problem which is just a shorthand for the problem that I think we face much more broadly in this country and elsewhere today. Namely it's very doubtful whether it is an empirical matter this claim is accurate. Under many conditions truth and falsehood appear to grapple and falsehood appears to win. Now there's another way out of this problem which is to say Milton must have meant something different. Milton was of course a deeply religious person a deeply religious writer and he may not so much empirically descriptively as idealistically normatively. He may simply be hoping or aspiring or believing as a matter of faith that in this encounter truth will win and he may be appealing to an audience that was also deeply religious and therefore found it easier to commit itself to claims like this without worrying so much about whether they were empirically testable. I think the latter is very possibly important in context but today I'm going to focus on the first possible approach to Milton namely the empirical and institutional vision because it turns out that Milton's idea has been crucially formative in our ideas about the freedom of speech and that's my real topic today. So first I'm going to say a few words trying to explore why someone might believe Milton's view empirically and then I'm going to turn to three modern roughly speaking attempts to answer the question of when and how speech should be regulated in order to assure that it is free in such a way that the truth wins. And just to set the stakes clearly the reason this matters is that if we look around the world today I take it that everyone in the room has a prior intuitive preference for freedom of speech and maybe that's a false assumption but I'll take it, I'll be charitable and take it and I take it also that many of us are genuinely worried about what to do in a world where the conditions that are meant to facilitate truth emerging from freedom of speech seem not to be producing that result in a range of different contexts. Okay, so first the exploration. So why might one think that when truth and falsehood grabble truth will win? Well one possibility is that one is defining truth in that context as the monster of truth. That is to say the kind of thing that is susceptible to rational demonstration that would have to be accepted by every other rational person. And we can imagine domains of proof that work this way my mathematics might well count as a domain in which a rational demonstration correctly performed by a rational person presented to other rational people that have the appropriate tools ought to yield the same results. So juxtapose false reasoning that is to say fallacious reasoning with accurate true reasoning and you ought to eventually produce a victory for the view that counts as demonstrative truth. If we were solely dealing in the realm of purely demonstrative truths that might be enough and one way to understand Milton's name is to say that he's talking about realms like that and maybe he also believes that moral truth functions in the same way that demonstrative truth functions. You might actually hold a view like that. Today it's hard to hold that view. Even moral theorists who believe very much in right answers to moral questions typically don't think that the right answer to a moral question is true in the same sense that the right answer to a mathematical problem or even a problem in physics would be. I should say parenthetically the other panels they have all been models of useful interaction communication. I don't know how well we'll do on our panel but I will try since I'm sandwiched in the middle between philosophy and physics I will try to make a few points that are at least oblique to each. So here I would just give you the example of the great philosopher, the late great philosopher Ronald Dworkin's attempt to explain why moral truth is a little different from truth in state physics. And he said what would if truth were made up of moral truth or made up of particles what would you call that? He said, well the idea of morons maybe leaves him up. So but Milton may have believed that moral truth was demonstrable in something like the way we think of mathematical or physical truths. But again to contemporary thinkers certainly those more inclined Dworkin was himself a moral realist and even he did not think it was the same sort of truth. And the demonstration of brightness was the same sort of demonstration that would take place in the mathematical or physical sciences. Others who inclined towards more relativistic conceptions of truth and I'm going to talk about a few of those in a moment certainly don't think the truth can function in the same sort of way. And so for them again it becomes much more difficult to assume that in the dispute between truth and falsehood truth will always come out the winner. So let me now introduce three institutional solutions that have been proposed. Each of which is tied to a theory of speech and each of which is I think also tied to a theory of truth. These are all products of the 20th century although they start pretty early in the 20th century. The first theory is associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. the great Supreme Court justice and post-contemporary both of Benjamin Perce and of William James and a fellow traveler in their different versions of pragmatism, small p philosophical pragmatism. Holmes introduced a metaphor in a Supreme Court opinion which we know as a marketplace of ideas. And Holmes's idea in essence was that if one treats ideas as objects for sale in a marketplace then the market will clear that is to say the true view will be the one adopted by the greatest majority of people in the market. Now Holmes even in this opinion left a crucial ambiguity between two different versions of this marketplace metaphor and it's an ambiguity that actually still exists in treatments of this metaphor to date to this day and I should say that this metaphor is regularly invoked in judicial opinions to this day even though it's all coming up on a century old. The ambiguity is between a view that says that it is the way marketplaces work and consistent with a small p pragmatist account of truth plus life is an experiment as Holmes says in the same opinion we will experimentally abandon ideas that don't work for us come up with the ideas that do work for us and therefore the probability is very high that we will converge on something that looks like the truth. That's the modest version of Holmes's pragmatism in the marketplace of ideas. There's a more radical relative version according to which Holmes might actually be saying a little bit sub-rosa that it's useless to speak of truth with a capital T at all. All we can do is look at a given society and see what it converges upon in believing is the truth and that's the best we can ever do and that's the truth and so the marketplace is then a self-fulfilling picture in a way that sometimes the idea of natural selection is described as tautological. That idea which has survived is the most fit is itself the truth and that's all we can ever say about truth. That's a more radical relative picture of the freedom of speech. Notice that that view is already very far from Milton's. The former view though the former version of Holmes's view might be seen as a real-world empirical empiricist pragmatist attempt to explain why we should believe the truth will win. Because conversation to connect to the theme of today at the end of the week functions a bit like an experiment. We put out the good ideas we knock out the bad ones and eventually we narrow it down to a view on which we converge. Now on that view when is it appropriate to regulate the conversation? What speech should not be allowed? Well the simplest answer is that if our dominant metaphor is that of a marketplace we should regulate when the market seems to fail. And there are a whole set of circumstances in which we know that markets fail. In a monopoly market fails. So we ought to make sure that we're not in a monopolistic situation where only certain ideas are being offered as in a totalitarian government. Another very important example and directly significant for Holmes is the circumstance where we're not thinking clearly where to use more very psychological terminology. The wrong system of thought is being used hustling us to the bad outcomes rather than thinking slowly, calmly and rationally. So on this view Holmes famously said that when there is a clear and present danger posed by a certain form of speech that speech should be prohibited. So clear and present danger is originally formulated by Holmes as an exception from free speech rules that is clear and present danger. There is a danger that a crowd a mob, that's what he's picturing will as one and without thinking rationally engage in some form of dangerous collective action. His great concrete example is when someone falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater under those circumstances no time to be rational, no time to reason just gotta go to the exits. So Holmes says that is a kind of speech that can be prohibited or ought to be prohibited. So the way to think about this is if you think that truth is obtained through this conversational experimental marketplace model you must block those forms of speech that break the model of rational conversational radiocination. Really thinking things through. You're not really thinking things through then that's problematic and should be regulated. Second account This is an account that is actually first in the United States introduced by Holmes's contemporary Justice Louis Brandeis but Brandeis attributed this view to the founding fathers with sort of some plausibility not terribly much plausibility and it's also a view that was expressed in a much richer form much more complex form later by philosophers like Anna Hart. This is the view that ultimately imagines the polity in civic republican terms as a group of citizens who come together to deliberate on common forms of political action. This is a very action oriented way of thinking about speech. It doesn't primarily focus on ascertaining philosophical truth in the abstract sense, it focuses on ascertaining action oriented political truth. According to this civic republican view the point of the freedom of speech is to create the conditions of a community that resolves its most serious questions and debates by conversation, by speaking. And that's the point of the freedom of speech to create a common conversation where we can deliberate, the keyword here is generally deliberate, and then of course also vote at the end of that deliberative process. Now, under this view, when is it appropriate to regulate? The answer is you regulate when any condition obtains they would block some of the citizens from participating in a genuine conversation. So imagine that some participants in the conversation are through hate speech or intimidation or other mechanisms blocking other participants in the conversation from fully participating and from fully having their voices heard. Under those circumstances you can imagine the civic republican say that speech can be blocked. Roughly speaking, I should say this is the view adopted by most western european democracies in their crafting of freedom of speech. And that's why most such countries prohibit hate speech prohibit racist speech prohibit various forms of incitement to violence and racism. This is not restricted to western democracies I should say, but it's liberal constitutional democracies around the world typically adopt this view. The United States is a radical outlier, partly because we're more closely connected to the marketplace than we are to the civic republican idea. Last the last and competing idea emerged in the United States in the supreme court's doctrine really only in the late 1960s and early 1970s but the origins of the idea actually go back to romanticism and actually resonate nicely with certain elements in Michelle's presentation. This romantic view of the freedom of speech thinks that the purpose of freedom of speech is not so much to facilitate collective experiment or to enable political conversation as to enable the self-realization of the individual human. It's to facilitate self-action and as Michelle was speaking I was jotting down some terrific passages that actually perfectly captured this. Emerson, I hear that I may speak just taken directly from Michelle's talk. Notice I hear I'm listening to everybody else that I may speak but I hear that I may speak I am expressing myself through that form of speech Novalis, the true reader is the enlarged author again from Michelle's talk. That's exactly it I'm reading, I'm consuming other texts really produced so that I may be the enlarged author that is the author of my own realization so this is the romantic ideal and it is deeply connected to the self Michelle closed by mentioning the self deeply connected to the self. This has come to be the dominant strand in contemporary American constitutional thought almost unacknowledged. Now here's the puzzle, I'm very close to wrapping up here. If you hold a romantic view of the freedom of speech, when is it proper to regulate speech? If ever it's a problem. Because if I am engaged in hate speech that may be necessary to me to be an enlarged author that may be necessary to my self realization certainly no review of the canon of western literature would be complete without many many texts that include all sorts of sentiments that are harmful to others that are nasty Books that hit us like a misfortune Michelle said Kafka is asking for and if a book really hits me like a misfortune that might limit or happen my ability to speak. You're suing but such a book nevertheless has to be able to be produced under this romantic account Similarly if I speak falsely under the classic marketplace idea we might actually regulate that under certain circumstances not under the self expression theory but under the romantic theory. Falsehood is no bar I ought to be able to speak falsely and indeed several years ago before fake news where at least before the phenomenon we identify as fake news fake news has always been with us the Supreme Court actually held in a remarkable case called us against Alvarez that false speech is protected by the Constitution. In that case Alvarez was a serial liar pathological liar who declared he'd won the Congressional Medal of Honor and there was a federal statute that said he'd won the Congressional Medal of Honor when you hadn't and the court struck down the conviction and reversed the conviction saying that the government lacks the authority under the freedom of speech to criminalize lying about pretty straightforwardly factual matter. Either Congress gave you that medal or they didn't but under this romantic account the self creation aspect was just as valid if the self creation was a creation through a falsehood and we can all certainly appreciate that certainly those of us who love poetry and fiction and those of us who believe that you know as was saying this morning or was referred to saying this morning that what she says is true and what she says is not true so from that formulation perspective it would be absurd to criminalize falsehoods so that is the source of our present predicament we are typically so in meshed in an idea of romantic freedom of expression that we can't work out what would authorize prohibitions on speech that are intended to preserve some account of the truth now I would love to say it by another 20 minutes I would now solve this problem for you and then unfortunately time is going time is running out it's a good deal more complicated than that but I will just leave you with a final thought here one possible it's not an answer but one possible institutional approach to a solution is to divide the world into different realms in some realms it might never be appropriate for the government to regulate at all in the true public square for example it might never be appropriate for the government to regulate but there might be some circumstances where it's appropriate not for the government to regulate but for private actors in certain conversational spaces a university for example would not want to regulate what was said by people who were marching in the yard because that would seem like a public square where we want to see different views including false views expressed but it might want to have guidelines for what can be said in science center B where we think it's appropriate to distinguish between certain utterances that are true or false or certain utterances that are inclusive or exclusive or certain utterances that facilitate a common conversation now if that's right the very easy part is the public space that's easy if we get to absolutism there we never have to worry about making the rules they can be simple, anything goes inside is where things get much more complicated where we have to work extraordinarily hard in a very nuanced, detailed and case sensitive way to try to make sure that we facilitate the kind of speech that we need to achieve forms of self-realization the kind of speech we need for self-governance and the kind of speech we need for the pursuit of truth including the possibility of identifying certain views as false or less good than other people while simultaneously not going too far in our restrictions and locking ourselves into modes of conversation that failed to provide the space that we need ultimately to seek after our truth thanks since very interested in everything I'm going to talk about something I'm very interested in self especially black holes in the information paradox and I would also like to add the relevant black holes are true and they're also very poetic so let me start with what is a black hole? on the earth it's a little harder you have to be able to get up to 11 kilometers per second but once you've done that you've reached escape velocity and you can go away from the earth forever without using any more rock or fuel or energy however if you have too big about too much mass then the escape velocity becomes of the order of million kilometers per second which is the speed of light and nothing can get out and that's because I'm centralist that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and you can't get out you can't either so that's a black hole now that was actually discovered in the previous transparency was discussed already in the 19th century but then Einstein or Schwarzschild discovered that the Einstein equation has some solutions which are now recognized as black holes but the solutions were so subtle it's kind of hard to grasp this but the solutions were so subtle and the properties of the black holes so confusing and perplexing that it took 60 years to understand them and one of the spectacular realizations of this is a paper which Einstein wrote in 1939 saying that black holes didn't exist which he would flunk out of any modern general relativity course for having said this but it's not he was a very smart character just that black holes are really hard to understand but now we think we do understand them classically and moreover we think there are millions of them up in the sky and there's one in the middle of the galaxy that's a million kilometers across and at this moment we are all in a grand orbit around them so according to Einstein's theory of general relativity in which they were described it's a theory in which space is curved and the description of a black hole is the space becomes curved and then it ends and then there's nothing and when I say nothing I don't mean like this is empty space there's actually air here if I get away from the earth but the vacuum is actually a rather lively place there's lots of stuff in the vacuum I mean that there is nothing there's not even space inside a black hole there's nothing in there and moreover there were theorems proved that there's no information at the boundary here though the theorems were subtly flawed and there was a slogan just John Wheeler who was a student of Einstein invented that black holes have no hair meaning they have no distinguishing features they're all the same every empty hole is the same well that was all fine so in the 70s 60s and 70s people really began to understand that black holes existed they proved Penrose and Hawking and others proved theoretically that they had to exist in the real universe though the astronomical evidence was yet to emerge and then our department recently departed dear friend Stephen Hawking in 1974 asked the question what happens if you think about black holes in the real world in which things are quantum nobody can escape the laws of quantum mechanics even black holes and he derived in a breathtakingly elegant analysis which seemed to depend on almost nothing that black holes radiate at a temperature now known as the Hawking temperature which is given by Planck's constant divided by Newton's constant times the mass of black hole so this is the formula for what the temperature photons everything comes out of them at a certain temperature what the temperature is is a function of the mass now formulas like how the temperature depends on the mass the main subject of studies of physicists for several centuries in the 18th and 19th century they took all the materials and studied how the temperature changes if you add some heat or you change the volume or whatever they do and they developed what are called the laws of thermodynamics and then in what is really one of the most beautiful developments in the history of thought Boltzmann said what if everything is made of molecules there was a very controversial theory back then I can derive the behavior of all fluids and gasses by just statistical reasoning and a key ingredient in his statistical reasoning was looking at how many configurations were possible if the energy was fixed in a certain way or the volume was fixed in a certain way or the density was fixed in a certain way and it was a spectacular thing that all the laws of thermodynamics follow from the laws of mathematics sorry the assumption of molecules in the laws of mathematics in other words mathematics isn't regarded among physicists as an extra assumption so we reduced one set of laws to a very simple assumption now applying this reasoning to Hawking's argument gave a very famous formula which is closely going to go on Hawking's gravestone that the entropy or the information content inside a black hole is given by the area of the edge of the black hole the area of the horizon divided by four times Newton's constant times Planck's constant now this is a very strange formula usually we get when electromagnetism was discovered we have an equation that describes electromagnetism Newton gave us an equation for gravity Einstein gave us another equation for gravity we have equations for the standard model this is an equation which pulls together all the different areas of physics quantum mechanics gravity statistical mechanics and there's a four here which means it includes math and let me tell you that four is the most important part of the formula there's not a single line here there's an equal and there's a four and I can't tell you how many times somebody has come up and said I can explain this formula I understand where it comes from and then you say did you get the four and then they look down at their shoes and usually the answer is no so it's a very hard formula to understand in a fundamental way but let me just pause and say that it's huge so the information content in all the Google data banks could fit inside a black hole which is 10 to the minus 24 millimeters it's a huge number a lot of information in a black hole and many of us have heard about Moore's law which says that the amount of information that you can put on a computer chip of fixed size doubles every three years and if you calculate it you find that in 300 years if Moore's law continues that computer chips will have more storage capacity of a black hole could we believe that's impossible so at that point computer chips will have more black holes so if you were paying attention I said two things which were completely opposite from one another I told you that black holes was the simplest thing in the universe they had no features whatsoever and then I told you that they were the most complicated thing in the universe and this is the basis of what we call the black hole information paradox in here we have in trying to understand this we have the struggle between truth and falsehood and we believe that this one is truth and that this one is falsehood that black holes are fundamentally complex objects but many people are still arguing their numbers are diminishing in fact there are only two left Stephen Hawking himself wrote a famous paper which he said this was truth and this was falsehood but he retracted that paper about 20 years later but there's still some people are cling to this but we can't really for sure say they're wrong but we've learned an awful lot about the problem so people stared at this and tried to understand how you could store vastly more than the google data banks in a whole of nothingness without even any space so they sat that problem sat for 25 years people tried various methods and then string theory came along so a quarter century later string theory so the advantage of string theory for this problem is string theory has very concrete equations and lots of methods for solving them so you could sit down and you could say this looks like a really hard problem but I'm just going to plow my way through it and see if I can find where all the complexity lies in a black hole it was a very algorithmic thing to do and we did it and we found an answer that agrees exactly with Hawking's result not just at leading order but in the whole infinite series and if we hadn't got that result that would have been the end of string theory that would have shown that it was inconsistent but we did do that description and the question is how did string theory manage to store stuff in a hole of nothing well basically the black hole has another description in which there's kind of a holographic plate that surrounds it so it's a little bit like a hologram where you have pixels on a holographic plate and you shine an image through it and you get some, you shine laser light through it you get a three dimensional image and a black hole is something like that where all the information can be thought of as living on the horizon and the three dimensional space time inside the black hole can be reproduced and the maximally simple and maximally complex descriptions of black hole were shown to be complementary but perfectly compatible descriptions so the idea that you can have completely equivalent descriptions of two things is of course ubiquitous in mathematics they're very simple ones like 4 equals 3 plus 1 equals 2 plus 2 and then they're insanely complex ones like the Langlands program which relates all of number theory to everything in number theory is everything in geometry which is still a conjecture so there's some very deep ones and there's some very simple ones and the one we needed to understand black holes was a pretty was a one that had really been fully discovered at the time and it involves properties showing that it all works perfectly involves one of the various probably as many favorite objects but when he talks to me, his favorite object is Mach-Modular forms he probably has a different favorite object when he talks to everyone but he loves Mach-Modular forms so it involves Mach-Modular forms as shown in this all makes sense now this is some progress but we don't know if the world is described by string theory and we'd like to see if something similar can be seen once you get the idea of how it might work from using string theory you can see how much of it is operative in the real world and for that we turned to a special kind of black hole which is a simple kind of black hole they're up there in the sky Bill, can you tell me what time I started in theory have four more minutes four more minutes, okay so extreme curved black holes are very simple because they're spinning around at the speed of light and there's a maximum amount that a black hole could spin around at and there's a lot of these up in the sky here's a picture of one and this black hole has a symmetry in this region very near the horizon that is the same symmetry that we used in the stringing case so we were able to see some of the features in the real world enough of the features in the real world that we could see a kind of a hologram appearing and there's a video here there which I'm going to skip that right here we see the emergence of a symmetry near the horizon of a black hole which enables us this conformal symmetry was the key piece of the string theory analysis the emergence of this special symmetry right at the boundary of nothingness there's a symmetry which emerges and some very interesting things happen there and so we found the same symmetry for these rapidly spinning black holes and now I'm going to go off in a different direction this is symmetry which is important for understanding this puzzle of black hole but just at this moment observational astronomers they're getting more and more pixels on the sky so just like your TV said every year you get 10 times pixels now the biggest black hole on the sky is the size of an orange in the moon there's two of them Sagittarius A star in the middle of our galaxy and M87 which is a thousand times bigger and a thousand times further away and all of a sudden we're getting more and more pixels so this year is the year that we're going to have enough pixels that we can image a black hole and we're expected to get 20 pixels the data's been taken it hasn't been analyzed or displayed yet so we're going to get 20 pixels of the biggest black holes up in the sky and in order to do that you need to make a telescope the size of the Earth and they did that by synchronizing all the radio telescopes on Earth they had to use a product clocks but they're synchronizing the big web of them and they've been taking data with this it's all very exotic there's a picture of it one of the six this is in the Atacama desert in Chile and here's the black hole I'm interested in the farthest one because we know it's spinning at 1% of light speed so the symmetry I'm seeing that we're talking about we'll see it there so the problem now is for the theorists on Earth before the data and the image is released sometime in the next year, January is their day to make predictions for what's going to be seen and what the predictions are of this conformal symmetry so there have been a number of papers on this but here's our picture beautiful mathematics goes into constructing this picture and let it using the symmetry I'm just going to explain this picture that I'm going to end this is how big the black hole is but you don't see any stars behind it out to this radius because if they get too near the black hole they get sucked in these lines but if you have some light near the black hole some glowing gases near the black hole they can escape so we can see stuff it's near the black hole not behind it, but near it this is the north pole that we're looking down on where it's spinning and the symmetry predicts that the polarization of it will form spirals like this and this line oddly enough is the south pole of the black hole and the reason you can see the south pole is because the gravity is so strong some light rays come out they skim up the surface of the black hole and then come up okay then this next thing what's the next thing well the next thing is when the light rays come and they wind around and then come up so we get an infinite number of windings an infinite number of copies of the black holes you know the resolution of the drawing stops here, but there's an infinite number of sequences of images of the black hole from light rays that wound any number of times now this van der Rijswald telescope is only going to have 20 pixels there's no way to be able to resolve all of that but we're hoping that they see some of it so what about black holes that don't spin so we're in some work with Hawking and Malcolm Perry we've found some interesting structure near the rise of the black hole some different morphisms that act non-trivial and we're very excited about that program but haven't completed it yet and the adventure continues thank you okay we do have time for a couple of questions the three papers were absolutely fascinating and I wouldn't have wanted as Russian poet Vladimir Myakovsky said to step on the throat of their songs but if anyone would have a question or a comment I will certainly entertain it and the answer is that there's been very little formalization of papers analyzing this there is discussion however of the relationship to the idea of externalities and the metaphor both positive externalities which are significantly relevant here for example if everyone is speaking the same language or if everyone is on a similar platform and negative externalities specifically negative externalities of certain forms of speech where it gets hard and I'll just say it very briefly where it gets hard is that all speech has negative externalities from the standpoint of a person who disagrees with that speech I mean it's a negative externality that my comment might seem to refute your comment or yours mine and then there's another form of externality which is the externality of someone who has the subjective but real experience of feeling marginalized by the content of what I've said again possibly because of the substance maybe it's directed at that person, maybe it isn't and so a lot of these approaches grapple with but haven't really been able to get beyond the problem that this marketplace metaphor was developed at a time when externalities was not part of the Delman's economic picture and so externalities taken in their full sense are very threatening to the libertarian component of the metaphor and for some people that's great and for other people who like the metaphor it's kind of scary I think to the approach the non-american approach it's really almost every constitutional democracy in the world except the United States which tends to prohibit certain forms of racist or hate speech like the speech of the Nazis in Skokie the general view is something like the negative externalities of the speech and the way that they outweigh the benefits that might be accomplished from it but that of course puts you in a realm of having to make an express cost benefit analysis and that in turn puts you in a position of arguably having to ask about the truth of the speech which is exactly what the marketplace metaphor wants you not to do so there's a potential deep tension between those approaches well you're completely right that the civic republican conversational metaphor does assume first of all cohesiveness as the goal the idea is that we'll have a conversation and reach some plausible consensus and I agree it also requires us to have some trust in the institutions that would make these determinations again maybe that's one reason why western european democracies are more inclined to adopt these because there is more of a tradition of trusting the governmental decision maker with respect to the pure marketplace idea in its original formulation it was equivocal about this because on the one hand the idea was that we should just trust the outcome and on the other hand that potentially leads to extreme consequences and one of the things that Holm said in a provocative mode was if the people wish to establish after freedom of discussion the dictatorship of the proletariat they should be free to do so and of course the problem of that view is if you do that then that's the end of the free speech experiment Holm's view was at least rhetorically that he was prepared to fight the bullet and that's what the classic free marketplace view sort of says if it's an experiment we're running this experiment that's our ground principle but if through that experiment we abandoned that principle so be it