We are, in the scientific things, getting into situations in which we are related to the government, and we have all kinds of lack of honesty. Particularly, lack of honesty is in the reporting and description of the adventures of going to different planets and in the various space adventures. To take an example, we can take the Mariner II voyage to Venus. A tremendously exciting thing, a marvelous thing, that man has been able to send a thing 40 million miles, a piece of the earth at last to another place. And to get so close to it as to get a view that corresponds to being 20,000 miles away. Its hard for me to explain how exciting that is, and how interesting. And Ive used up more time than I ought.
The story of what happened during the trip was equally interesting and exciting. The apparent breakdown. The fact that they had to turn all the instruments off for a while because they were losing power in the batteries and the whole thing would stop. And then they were able to turn it on again. The fact of how it was heating up. How one thing after the other didnt work and then began to work. All the accidents and the excitement of a new adventure. Just like sending Columbus, or Magellan, around the world. There were mutinies, and there were troubles and there were shipwrecks, and there was the whole works. And its an exciting story. When it, for example, heated up, it was said in the paper, Its heating up, and were learning from that. What could we be learning? If you know something, you realize you cant learn anything. You put satellites up near the earth, and you know how much radiation you get from the sun . .. we know that. And how much do they get when they get near Venus? Its a definitely accurate law, well known, inverse square. The closer you get, the brighter the light. Easy. So its easy to figure out how much white and black to paint the thing so that the temperature adjusts itself.
The only thing we learned was that the fact that it got hot was not due to anything else than the fact that the thing was made in a very great hurry at the last minute and
a kind of trouble that I hope will continue to develop.
One other point that I would like to take a moment or two to make a little bit more in detail is this one: The problem of moral values and ethical judgments is one into which science cannot enter, as I have already indicated, and which I dont know of any particular way to word. However, I see one possibility. There may be others, but I see one possibility. You see we need some kind of a mechanism, something like the trick we have to make an observation and believe it, a scheme for choosing moral values. Now in the days of Galileo there were great arguments about what makes a body fall, all kinds of arguments about the medium and the pushes and the pulls and so on. And what Galileo did was disregard all the arguments and decide if it fell and how fast it fell, and just describe that. On that everybody could agree. And keep on studying in that direction, on what everyone can agree, and never mind the machinery and the theory underneath, as long as possible. And then gradually, with the accumulation of experience, you find other theories underneath that are more satisfactory, perhaps. There were in the early days of science terrible arguments about, for instance, light. Newton did some experiments which showed that a light beam separated and spread with a prism would never get separated again. Why did he have to argue with Hooke? He had to argue with Hooke because of the theories of the day about what light was like and so on. He wasnt arguing whether the phenomenon was right. Hooke took a prism and saw that it was true.
So the question is whether it is possible to do something analogous (and work by analogy) with moral problems. I believe that it is not at all impossible that there be agreements on consequences, that we agree on the net result, but maybe not on the reason we do what we ought to do. That the argument that existed in the early days of the Christians as to, for instance, whether Jesus was of a substance like the Father or of the same substance as the Father, which when translated into the Greek became the argument between the Homoiousions and the Homoousians. Laugh, but people were hurt by that. Reputations were destroyed, people were killed, arguing whether its the same or similar. And today we should learn that lesson and not have an argument as to the reason why we agree if we agree.
I therefore consider the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, which I have read, to be one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in that encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I dont personally believe, or that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes, in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I dont agree, and I will not ridicule it, and I wont argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and with the duties that the Pope represents as the responsibilities and the duties of people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.