Speeches by James Clear, Wolves Forever (ebook reader online TXT) 📖

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

I know that none of this is easy for you. Even if you threw away your cell phones and unplugged your computers, the rigors of your training here keep you too busy to make solitude, in any of these forms, anything less than very difficult to find. But the highest reason you need to try is precisely because of what the job you are training for will demand of you.

You’ve probably heard about the hazing scandal at the U.S. naval base in Bahrain that was all over the news recently. Terrible, abusive stuff that involved an entire unit and was orchestrated, allegedly, by the head of the unit, a senior noncommissioned officer. What are you going to do if you’re confronted with a situation like that going on in your unit? Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?

How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?

These are truly formidable dilemmas, more so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when they’re 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues for yourself—morality, mortality, honor—so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it’s too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.

How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.

What I want to talk to you about tonight is strictly speaking not on the character of physical laws. Because one might imagine at least that one's talking about nature, when one's talking about the character of physical laws. But I don't want to talk about nature, but rather how we stand relative to nature now. I want to tell you what we think we know and what there is to guess and how one goes about guessing it.

Someone suggested that it would be ideal if, as I went along, I would slowly explain how to guess the laws and then create a new law for you right as I went along.

I don't know whether I'll be able to do that. But first, I want to tell about what the present situation is, what it is that we know about the physics. You think that I've told you everything already, because in all the lectures, I told you all the great principles that are known.

But the principles must be principles about something. The principles that I just spoke of, the conservation of energy– the energy of something– and quantum mechanical laws are quantum mechanical principles about something. And all these principles added together still doesn't tell us what the content is of the nature, that is, what we're talking about. So I will tell you a little bit about the stuff, on which all these principles are supposed to have been working.

First of all is matter, and remarkably enough, all matter is the same. The matter of which the stars are made is known to be the same as the matter on the earth, by the character of the light that's emitted by those stars– they give a kind of fingerprint, by which you can tell that it's the same kind of atoms in the stars. As on the earth, the same kind of atoms appear to be in living creatures as in non-living creatures. Frogs are made out of the same goop– in different arrangement– than rocks.

So that makes our problem simpler. We have nothing but atoms, all the same, everywhere. And the atoms all seem to be made from the same general constitution. They have a nucleus, and around the nucleus there are electrons.

So I begin to list the parts of the world that we think we know about. One of them is electrons, which are the particles on the outside the atoms. Then there are the nuclei. But those are understood today as being themselves made up of two other things, which are called neutrons and protons. They're two particles.

Incidentally, we have to see the stars and see the atoms and they emit light. And the light is described by particles, themselves, which are called photons. And at the beginning, we spoke about gravitation. And if the quantum theory is right, then the gravitation should have some kind of waves, which behave like particles too. And they call those gravitons. If you don't believe in that, just read gravity here, it's the same.

Now finally, I did mention that in what's called beta decay, in which a neutron can disintegrate into a proton and an electron and a neutrino– or alien anti-neutrino– there's another particle, here, a neutrino. In addition to all the particles that I'm listing, there are of course all the anti-particles. But that's just a quick statement and takes care of doubling the number of particles immediately. But there's no complications.

Now with the particles that I've listed here, all of the low energy phenomena, all of in fact ordinary phenomena that happen everywhere in the universe as far as we know, with the exception of here and there some very high energy particle does something, or in a laboratory we've been able to do some peculiar things. But if we leave out those special cases, all ordinary phenomena are presumably explained by the action and emotions of these kinds of things.

For example, life itself is supposedly made, if understood– I mean understandable in principle– from the action of movements of atoms. And those atoms are made out of neutrons, protons, and electrons. I must immediately say that when we say, we understand it in principle, I only mean that we think we would, if we could figure everything out, find that there's nothing new in physics to be discovered, in order to understand the phenomena of light. Or, for instance, for the fact that the stars emit energy– solar energy or stellar energy– is presumably also understood in terms of nuclear reactions among these particles and so on.

And all kinds of details of the way atoms behave are accurately described with this kind of model, at least as far as we know at present. In fact, I can say that in this range of phenomena today, as far as I know there are no phenomena that we are sure cannot be explained this way, or even that there's deep mystery about.

This wasn't always possible. There was, for instance, for a while a phenomenon called super conductivity– there still is the phenomenon– which is that metals conduct electricity without resistance at low temperatures. And it was not at first obvious that this was a consequence of the known laws with these particles. But it turns out that it has been thought through carefully enough. And it's seen, in fact, to be a consequence of known laws.

There are other phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, which cannot be explained by this known knowledge of physics here. And it is interesting, however, that that phenomena had not been well-established, and that we cannot guarantee that it's there. So if it could be demonstrated, of course that would prove that the physics is incomplete. And therefore, it's extremely interesting to physicists, whether it's right or wrong. And many, many experiments exist which show it doesn't work.

The same goes for astrological influences. If it were true that the stars could affect the day that it was good to go to the dentist, then– because in America we have that kind of astrology– then it would be wrong. The physics theory would be wrong, because there's no mechanism understandable in principle from these things that would make it go. And that's the reason that there's some skepticism among scientists, with regard to those ideas.

On the other hand, in the case of hypnotism, at first it looked like that also would be impossible, when it was described incompletely. But now that it's