rapes, plus 27 years. 100 years federal time but that is 100 years federal time. this guy got 34 years that a time for doing that. another one, another man who was trying to volunteer to the israelis -- he did this in 2009. this year he pled guilty to 794, big espionage. 13 years for trying to do that. the case broke in 2009. new case of 2011. this was a very interesting case, remarkable that it went to trial. this went on for an activity that went on from 1990 to 2001. it broke in july of this year in washington, d.c.

kashmiri american council, located in washington, d.c. just down from where we are. he had over 5000 meetings with them. he was funneling money from the pakistanis to this organization. more than 4000 times with isi intelligence officers in washington, d.c. at the result was this. >> the isi agent has pleaded guilty to charges of spying for the pakistani intelligence agency, isi. he has pleaded guilty to receiving millions of dollars from the isi for 1990 to 2001. he is charged with illegally lobbying and pakistan to influence u.s. policy in

kashmir. >> it is an interesting one. he whawill probably get 10 years. another one broker in the fall of this year. brian underwood was a consulate guard in china. he tried to spy -- he sent letters to the prc with information on the new consulate being build and the photographs he took inside the consulate. he gets arrested twice in september, because the first arrest, he is questioned by the fbi concerning the contents of the letter and the photographs. what did he do? he lied about it. he committed 1001. arrested on two counts of making a false statement.

that was in september 1st. he is supposed to appear in court, same month in december, and he flees. they arrest him in l.a., and look what the charge is. they charged him with the 794, big espionage. he is facing life imprisonment for espionage if convicted of that, or he pleads guilty of that. that took place in september here in washington, d.c. this is a remarkable case. he is arrested in october 11, 2011, as an agent of the syrian intelligence service. >> quiet role street in leesburg, virginia, residents watched as federal agents raided his home yesterday. according to neighbors, he, his wife, and children rented a house for two years.

no one knew them very well. >> there were a lot of the vehicles up and down the road. obviously, threatening materials, kinds of things. >> he told a federal judge in his first court appearance that he wanted to hire his own attorney. for now, he will remain in federal custody. in a 15-page indictment, soueid had a video and audio of people protesting the syrian government. the indictment describes a recent trip to syria, a meeting between soueid and president bashar al-assad, and a meeting at the syrian embassy in washington, d.c. this is a photograph taken from his twitter page print there are

only five tweets, all from last january. he worked at a friday of car dealerships across northern virginia -- a variety of car dealerships across northern virginia. >> he is going out to demonstrations that have taken place since the crackdowns began in syria. his videotaping them, audio taping them. anti-syrian protesters in the u.s., and eventually syria. he provided to the intelligence service, and that is used to intimidate families in syria. he recruits a network of individuals to help him in the united states to collect information on demonstrators in the united states, the protesters. and then he conspires to provide this information to the syrian intelligence service. these are targets of his demonstrations.

these demonstrations have been going on. maybe you missed them, i'm not sure. the information is sent to an unidentified co-conspirator, and he is providing the reports by e-mail andin -- emailing them to the syrian embassy in washington, d.c. audio recordings, links to web pages for protesters in the united states. a list of who is missing and dead date demonstrations that he is collected. a collection of telephone numbers, email of the protesters in the united states, the kind of information that would be of great value for the syrians to crack down, which they did.

a good example of the things -- the cause and effect -- syrian composer and pianist in washington, demonstrating for protesters in july. and they went into his house, and this is what they did to his mother and father. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] they have actually come to the united states, the mother and father. they are still alive. the violations against protesters, he said, was justified. any methods used against protesters -- these are his words justifying what he is doing. he is acting as an agent of the

syrian intelligence service, and when the fbi goes to talk to him, he lives. he is facing -- he lies. he is facing 40 years. 15 years for arms purchases, which he also made by falsifying his records -- called "piling on." he is facing 40 years for what he was doing in 2011. he must be held until trial. in its first trial, the judge did not to stand -- they let him out on bond, the next judge said no, you cannot be doing that. he is scheduled to go on trial in may 2012. here is another case that broke in october of this year. >> the fbi says a young american soldiers stationed in alaska has been charged with espionage. the 22-year-old is a military

policeman from kentucky. he is stationed at a joint army air force base in anchorage. >> this broke in anchorage. it was real quiet when it started. he is a military police officer, at an air force-army base in alaska, and he volunteers to an unidentified country. his group is called the arctic gladiators. it appears that he may have done this because his unit was deployed in he was left behind. unclear but not much has come out about this particular case, other than that he is under arrest. he tried to translate -- transmit unclassified information to a person he thought was a foreign agent. every so often you see this

service, or someone tries to get a sub-agent. this was his home in kentucky. he had been in iraq previously, and that he was assigned in alaska in of this year, and then arrested in fall of this year. attempted espionage, failure to obey general orders, contact with a foreign official, soliciting statements and communicating defense information. he will be court-martialed, because he is in uniform. interesting to watch how this case unfolds. being investigated -- the three of them are working this case. that is what we have had in national security cases 2011.

nine people involved in the united states in economic espionage cases. a couple of them are particularly interesting to highlight. chinese prc nationals who did not have diplomatic immunity, toward trying -- who were trying to violate the arms control act for munitions list items designed for satellite use. they represented a company in the united states. they were eventually arrested in hungary, but it was an export case. it was extraditable. arrested in september 2010, but returned to the united states in april 2011. chinese nationals arrested here. in june, they pled guilty to smuggling microchips to companies controlled by beijing. that is what they got them on

the crimes forbid they pled guilty, and have yet to be sentenced -- that is what they got them on the crimes for. they pled guilty, and have yet to be sentenced. these were giving information to iran, transportation technology information. they were doing shipping for information they could not send it to iran, but they were sending it to dubai for final delivery to iran. the affidavit said they were using this to purchase millions of dollars worth of laptop computers, going ot dubai and then being diverted. the agent in dubai was arrested himself and sort of gave them up. this is pending trial in the united states. a non-criminal case, but

economic case, a man and his father or conspiring with at packing company against amor packing, using a marketing data to compete against them. that was made of this year. this is interesting because of what he had access to. ethnic chinese in the united states, a senior software engineer, 49 years old, a national. it is not clear to me with the key is a nationalized american --whether he is a natio nalized american or born american, ph.d., worked in commodities trading pit they wanted to set up another company to do commodity trading in

china. he was getting the methodology used by his company to take after the company they were setting up in china. what did he do? he got the information, he downloaded as thousands of files on his thumb drive, transferred these stolen documents to his personal computer. he goes on, puts them on his email, sends them to china as attachments. source codes, proprietary information. he was going to go to china in july. arrested on the first of july. he faces 20 years for doing -- for this economic espionage case. here is another case, with this man from colombia, very polite, involved with citadel investment.

he is criminally charged and federally charged. >> a case that sounds like a spy novel. along with charges of corporate espionage, there are secret informants and scuba divers in canals. how it evolves around and i believe the financial whiz -- around an ivy league financial whiz. >> it is a caper that would rival anything you see in "mission: impossible." 24, a couple of years out of cornell. with billions in assets, citadel is one of the world's biggest hedge fund managers. the firm goes to great lengths to secure its employees and the computer network they use.

the secret trading coats are known as alphas. this employee went out to steal those valuable goods by bypassing the company's intricate security protocols, then transferring the files to external devices. and questioned by his superiors, claiming he was merely downloading academic papers and music files. officials did not buy it, saying that pu was stealing trade secrets. after he was caught, federal agents were told that the 24- year-old computer whiz had come to some of the evidence into a sanitary pan out near the harbor. divers discovered computer equipment in the water here that contained the alphas, the building blocks of the firm's success. >> i want to move to overseas.

if i might, let me go overseas and to show examples of things that are taking place there. first of all, if we look at what happened there, two european cases that are really interesting. one was in the netherlands, and it broke in march of this last year, where a 37-year-old pilot, a jet pilot, he was charged with spying for belarus, the belarus kgb. it was made public in april 2008. our originally, this captain was arrested by the secret service as he was trying to pass state secrets to the belarus kgb. as the case began to unfold, we realized he had been working royal naval air force, no longer working for the service. this is a man who acknowledge that he had financial problems, that he had worked for defense

for 13 years, and he had been on bombing raids in afghanistan. in a war fighter for them. -- he had been a war fighter for them to he wanted to do business with a resident of belarus. by the way, they still call that the kgb. there is a close relationship between belarus and today's russia sbrfsb. it turns out it was a gru case. he was arrested at a meeting with the defense attache for the military. it seems that in august, its services that he had even more circuits -- it surfaces that he had even more secrets that they thought. when he was originally arrested,

they did not say he had this much. he had in this and a container that was being shipped to the united arab emirates. that is where his material was, which was included in files and cd-roms. he attempted to pass the information, $500,000 of euros, and he was convicted in december. he would have given up five more years. i have talked to europeans -- colonials a sensitive test and i should have had great debates about that. -- colonials are sensitive to espionage. i have had great debates about that.

spy scandals -- great britain had won this year. the thought that after the and enchantment case, -- the anna chapman case, they had to have a big one. katia was working for a man in the parliament. it was a big issue in england. >> officials in london have been allowed to contact a young russian woman and arrested almost a week ago on suspicion of spying. she now faces deportation. she was an assistant to a british mp. the uk says she was gathering information on nuclear facilities. providead refuwssed to information about the rest, and had initially blocked access to

the woman. >> she had been called a honey trap, a blond bombshell, and a russian spy working at the heart of british government. who is katia? her family moved to another part of southern russia to escape conflict. she attended this specialist language school, and like many good students, kept in touch with their teacher, said in photographs from our trips and other mementos. >> she was a very hard-working student. i cannot believe it was all about katia until i saw her photo. >> unfortunately for katia, this is the type of story that the british press loves. they dug up every titillating

detail about a woman who loved short skirts and high heels. france report and other side -- friends report another side to katia. >> part of the program was to test the international experts. a bright young woman who has the education, knowledge, loves our country, but is willing and ready to go abroad and share that experience but also gain more experience. >> she had limited access to email in the detention facility where she is being held. she is appealing against the deportation order. >> she was held, there were going to deport her, it was news all this year. december of this year, they added a deportation hearing. >> very happy, thank you. >> katia has always protested

her innocence, and she remains in the u.k. for this appeal. the immigration appeals commission has exonerated katia and overturned the deportation order. the panel found that katia is not, in the woods, a russian spy. -- in other words, a russioan spy. the case was said to be wanting at every stage. >> it must have been very disappointing, with the great anticipation in this case, that it turns out to become according to this hearing, nothing. that is not true with the other one i am going to talk about it there is an ongoing spy war going on in asia.

thailand, cambodia, korean spy wars. if you get involved in working the china issue and you have anything to do with taiwan, you will certainly know the intelligence service. we are still engaged in "a war without gunfire." if you look at what is going on, he is absolutely right. the national security branch, which is like the foreign intelligence service, the military intelligence bureau, and the minister of justice investigation bureau, there counter intelligence bureaus similar to the fbi. that is what constitutes the time and his intelligence service. -- taiwanese intelligence service. they are aggressive, they use official cover, and they

aggressively target prc students in the united states and around the world. the minister of justice investigation bureau is the one countering internal disorder. it does counterintelligence with in time what -- within taiwan. the military intelligence collects military intelligence information -- once again, big deal in china. what you find when you study this by business, cases do not stand alone. each case it gets another case. that is what we see happening here. prc court-martial executed two of its own officers. these were a success with it taiwan intelligence service. spying for taiwan. that is 1999. they had been providing

information on missiles. they were talking about the capability, and information, did not carry warheads at some times. missiles over taiwan has caused a lot of concern for taiwan. a good book to read on this is "assessing the threat." it is out a lot more detail than i have time to talk to about. there have been 14 a very high- profile spies for the prc. look at these individuals, look at their rank, that it would they work. a retired colonel, petty officer, retired colonel from the military intelligence branch, civilian high-tech organization, mib, in essence of

the organization of their intelligence services penetrated, leading up to a case this year. it was almost like a crescendo. in september, a captain and his wife for capturing intelligence for the prc. he is arrested in 2002. they had recorded their son as a decoder for the navy and used them also. this is a family affair, if you would. they used their information to email. son would pass to dad, passes it to prc. the petty officer, when he was arrested for espionage, he got a life sentence. father was arrested on smuggling, released after allegedly agreeing to spy for

china. that is how he became a prc spy. now he is working back against them. he took over $10,000 hong kong, a month. you don't find a lot of money exchanges in prc cases in the united states. you see economic cases i talked about, but you don't see the kinds of high-cost things. but you do in this spy war that's going on. military bank officers were arrested. one was a colonel passing information, the other was a lieutenant colonel passing information. these were the men were compromised the officers that i told you were executed in 1999. these were the sources.

it led to these two officers being killed. this is a high-tech spy case. 2003. espionage scandals -- one of the biggest espionage of scandals ever in the island. he was released, and he never went to trial for smuggling for the prc. he got away with it. primary research and development institute for the defense and armament range. -- branch. announced that it came to 24 taiwanese -- it had detained 24 taiwanese, and they at all confessed during the same time, high-profile individuals or arrested. this particular one was arrested in 2005, went to trial in 2007, sentenced to death. he, along with his co-

conspirator, who was in china, prc national, who wo had recruited to work for them, they were both executed in 2008. he had graduated from medical school in 1981, said on a scholarship to germany, and he was living in germany, he got his medical degree, retained austrian citizenship, and began to visit the prc on a regular basis. in 1989, he was recruited by the military intelligence branch, soviet natural access to -- so he had natural access to the prc. this was as early as 1989. he developed a network of the main man, spent about $300,000 with his wife setting up a restaurant. it was an important source for

taiwan military intelligence penetrating the prc. he finds the man he knew was a relative of his, and he recruited him. a missile technology expert, and he provided information on strategic missiles. the question became how did they get a compromise. one member of the service made this comment, which i don't necessarily buy into, but he said that the sars outbreak of 2002 was a biological warfare for lemula by the prc. i don't buy that at all, but it is the kind of comment going on between them. who compromised these individuals? this colonel -- he passed the information, and another lieutenant colonel. but military intelligence. they were the sources of these

two men who were executed then you have the counterintelligence service. he retired in 1997, and then recruited a friend of his who was still in the service. not un, and in these chinese cases. the -- were arrested in -- not uncommon in these tiny spaces. they were arrested in 2007. he became a businessman in china. there he was recruited by the prc, went back and recruited one of his friends. this goes on over and over again, people who go back and forth between the prc and china. this one was a section chief of the military intelligence bridge. he went back to china to do

business, record once again. we are seeing it over and over again. is his motivation. china recruited him, saying who do you know in the organization. high level penetration. here is one who worked for the legislative arm, and the one that i find interesting, the adviser, the office of the president was recruited as a source, a former senior adviser to the office of the president. you can imagine what would happen if that was in the united states. the prc has been very successful in penetrating taiwan in this spy war going on, and they had this high level access. >> a high-ranking military official arrested on monday for supplying intelligence to the chinese regime. prosecutors believe this began in 2007. it is the highest case of espionage in taiwan in 20 years.

arrested on charges of supplying intelligence to the chinese regime. the colonel is in charge of building taiwan's spy network in china and the intelligence bureau. he was recruited in 2004 to serve as a source in china. he told prosecutors -- [unintelligible] he returned to taiwan to get information from the colonel. they say trachinese intelligence paid as much as one order thousand u.s. dollars. -- 100,000 u.s. dollars. >> the minister of national defence and covered it.

this has been handed it to prosecutors. mib is doing damage control based on the situation. >> despite the major-general's reassurance, some consider these spies a serious danger. >> that was in the beginning -- end of 2010. the colonel was recruited by his agent. he had been one of his agents. he was part of a network. he had worked for the colonel in 2003, 2005. eventually, the taiwanese thought he might be controlled. paid him off $50,000 for doing it they dropped him as a spy. in july 2006, they went back and

recruited him and asked him to redeem himself, because he is living in china, contact his handler who was in taiwan, which he did. they say they were using the reception operation also. interestingly, because he was paid $46,000 by the prc, what was the end result? the couple posted classified information 12 times, paid $100,000 for his action. he used the information to get himself promoted in his own organization. he ended up getting sentenced to life plus 21 years. it led them to the big one, and this is the big one that took place this year. >> taiwan detained a major

general for allegedly spying for china. officials say he was promoted to general in 2008 but was recruited by china in 2004. >> i taiwanese major general has been detained for handing over military information to china. officials's military confirmed this on a wednesday. he spied for china for at least six years. >> the general was posted overseas from 2000 to-- from 2002 to 2005. he was recruited by china in 2004. >> he says the military court searched his residence last month and detained a major general to provide the risk of him escaping, destroying evidence, or threatening military security. >> at that end of october last

year, 2010, the defense ministry and national security department cooperated to obtain leads in the investigations. >> the defense ministry says that all should be cautious of china's intentions, even with the apparent warming of cross straight ties. taiwan officials say beijing has about 1900 missiles aimed at the island, just 100 miles away. the major-general is the highest-ranking military official to be charged with espionage activities. >> this has been quite a remarkable case, because he had been providing information in 2004, he was a major general since 2008 . hhe turned on information

on apache sales made by boeing, and the optical cable network, which we built for them, was compromised by him. it was in bangkok that he gets recorded by t -- recruited by the prc. in what appears to be a love relationship, he recruits this woman, and his last job, as you can see, is military, electronic, and information department. he had intimate knowledge and privileged access to management systems, electronic codes, crucial military secrets. very significant for the defense of that area. he also had access to joint electronic warfare communications, as well as a special project on technology for encrypting communications with the island. part of the system was built by

lockheed martin. all this information he could compromise. he was recruit -- he recruited a woman, initially pretended to be working in import-export trade, he met her and was recruited as a prc agenet. -- agent. paid as much as a million dollars. china does not pay that kind of money except as it relates to china. he maintained contact with this woman even after he left taiwan, and there was some reporting that she had come to the united states to meet him when he was here. he was not assigned here, but the woman was a high-ranking chinese aged to was station and had contact with him. that is un and aerospace confirmed. in april of this year, -- he got u -- that is unconfirmed.

in april of this year, he got life in prison. in june, another high-tech case -- prc tasking him for information related to military secrets also. >> i taiwanese software engineer has been sentenced to jail for a year-and-a-half after he was caught spying for the chinese regime. we spoke to one at a time when he's lawmaker who said that the prison sentence is too light -- one taiwanese lawmaker who said that the prison sentence is too light. >> the taiwan-cambodia border war -- you may not be aware that this is going on. there is a contentious border that exists between them. in february, a high-profile activist in taiwan's network,

and his secretary, entered into cambodia from thailand, arrested,, unlawful entry, going to a military base, and espionage. he got eight years, she got six months. another one was right on the border, where these three nationals -- thai, cambodia, vietnamese -- got caught spying on the border. there handler, a colonel, apparently was not arrested. the three got two years in jail in september of this year ganother spy war going on. they were providing information that they saw. just military operation. it culminated this year. i want to talk about the spy wars up north and south korea. nobody espies and does things like the north koreans.

two in july, 2010 -- two north koreans who had come into the south were sentenced by the court to 10 years for attempting to assassinate the former secretary of the north korean ruling communist party. this is a man in charge of their communist organization. he himself had defected to the south in 1997. this has been a real problem for north korea. and they said an assassination team to track him down and to kill him. two of them were arrested in july 2010. this particular colonel, a career reconnaissance bureau, was in charge of the assassination operation, and they cut his head off.

they are not pleased with him. a third career and was jailed and given 10 years for plotting to assassinate -- third korean was jailed and given 10 years for plotting to assassinate hthe same man. multiple accounts to track down the head of the communist party and assassinate him. another one took place in september of this year. with the arab spring in bloom, south koreans said that this is something that the north korean- controlled society should know about. the south korean national intelligence service up tdetaind a man on a platform. ark, the main in the photograph, was himself in north

korean defector, he defected in 2000. he is a member of an organization called fighters for a free north korea. there were some 20 members who were sending him helium baloons into the north with propaganda leaflets concerning the arab spring, along with dollar bills and radios. they wanted the north to know what was going on in the world, because the north is so isolated. obviously, the north is getting these plans, and this man was -- getting these baloons, and this man was a defector, so what do they do? they sent an assassination team. he was supposed to meet him at a transition, subway platform, and he was interdicted and arrested. when they arrested him, he was where didoison t, and

the assassin come from? the assassin is also a defector. he had also defected to the south. the north contacted him and said that if you don't carry out this assassination attempt, we are going to kill your family. what am i supposed to do? they are going to kill my family. he was arrested trying to commit this assassination. only in korea would use these kinds of things unfolding. he was trying to carry this out before he was arrested. there was another defector, head of a christian group, they were trying to assassinate. another man with free north korean radio they were trying to assassinate. another man was part of the education center for unification

that they were trying to assassinate. assassination is alive and well. north. defections have been an issue for some time. 22,000 north koreans have been at defected, 200 have been returned. you normally don't see that and other parts of the world, but you do see that there. one last black male case of this year that i want to tell you a -- about. -- one last blackmail case of this year i want to tell you about. he was in bangladesh for a conference in october. he got involved with a woman. they approached him to recruit him. all indications are that he did not work with the pakistanis, but he turned himself in. he went back to india, and they are deciding whether to prosecute him or not.

it became public just before christmas, and it is being done by the best whitby road -- is being done by the investigative bureau for in the ipad espionage is alive and well -- the investigative bureau for india. espionage is alive and well. there is two hours of the beginning of espionage for 2011. i am open to any questions you have in the time have. yes, please. >> who do you think is killing the iranian scientists? >> ok, i have no inside knowledge on that whatsoever. but who has the capability and motivation for doing that? only one organization i think that would have the capability of doing that, the israeli intelligence service.

i do not believe that there would be any americans involved, contrary to what the iranians are saying. it could be iranian dissident organizations who are also upset. they may have been agents acting on their own, or with the support of israelis. i have not seen any evidence to pinpoint a particular country. that would be my educated guess at this point. i retain the opportunity to change my mind. but no one else has the capability or the willingness to do that. when they get you may find interesting -- last year there was an assassination that took place in dubai, and it had all the earmarks of how israel operates. they did the assassinations, and two of them, when they flew out of dubai, flew to iran.

that is like say i can come into your country, leaving our country, and you don't even know. i am. -- and you don't even know i'm doing it. that is my educated guess at this time, with no inside knowledge whatsoever. any other questions you have? >> going back to your definition of espionage, little espionage, big espionage, is a man from what we think we know in the public domain -- assuming what we know in the public domain is true about julian assange and wikileaks, could a case be made against him for espionage? he is not an american, did not commit these acts in the u.s. on the other hand, he released this protected information to foreign powers.

looking from espionage one of you, julian assange, want to sort of riff on that. >> assange and manning -- bradley is going to be charged in a court martial. they just at hearings on that -- article 34 review of the case. i think is going to go to trial. assange is another problem, because even if you wanted to charge him, how would you get him here? theft of government property? he did not steal it, he received it. it also has a huge political dimension to it. that is always a consideration in these cases. tactically, technically, if he was in the united states and he received that information, he could and charged with 793, retention of information.

you have the legal arguments, and if you follow closely, which i am sure you have, the documents that were made in the preliminary hearings, is the case or the following closely in the united states. in practical terms, i do not see him being charged in the united states, because i don't see any way you could practically do anything with the case because it is not in the united states. you have to talk to the department of justice about whether they want to take that case, anyway, because of all the political dimensions. yes, please. >[unintelligible] >> to i think what? do i believe state-owned companies -- >> is there potential there? a potential for state-owned

companies, say they hire a lawyer -- >> oh, those people to register. those people acting for the government -- you have to register. a french company and not related to the government, they do not have to register. there is many people who come to the department of justice and minister. -- and register. lawyers and businessmen of all types and to register. within 10 days you go out and register as an agent of a foreign power. remember jimmy carter's brother billy acting for the libyans? he did not go and register when he was working with the libyans.

it was a bit of a snafu. if it is a state-owned company, you are acting for the state and you have to register. naturally, i would go to my attorney for the final answer. [laughter] how about that? any other questions? >> if i remember correctly, the iranians have a u.s. stealth drone. what are they going to do with that? >> i don't know. what you think? the matter of time you -- of can you spoof it -- i don't think it is a big deal. it. use technology, then you can jus -- you lose technology, then you can change the technology.

yes, it is interesting, and we had a great debate here on what is the difference between selling or getting a drone and getting a fighter pilot? you can make it cheaper, which is one of the issues. but i don't think that is as big a deal in the long term. but that is my personal opinion, don't hold me to. >> thank you so much. it has been a wonderful evening. i think we are allñ?q9b?b?b?l3

>> believe it or not, and i know most people do not, violence has been in decline for a long period of time, and we, today, are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. the decline to violence has not been steady, has not brought it down to zero, and it's not guaranteed to continue. nonetheless, it's a per sis tent

historical development new on scales from my len ya to years, wars and jen sides, to the spanking of children and treatment of animals. this evening, i'm going to discuss six major historical declines of violence, their immediate causes in terms of political historical events of the era that a historian would single out, but also the ultimate causes in terms of general historical forces interacting with human nature. the first major decline i call the passification process. until 5,000 years ago, humans lived in anarchy without central government. what was life like in this state of nature? this is a question on which people have had opinions for many centuries. thomas hobbs in 1561 said in a state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty,

brutish, and short. years later, another countered that in the state of nature nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state. both of the mens spoke from the armed chair and neither knew about what life was like in the state of nature, and today we can do better. there's way to measure death rates in non-state societiesment one is forensic archaeology, a csi method. basically, what proportion of skeletons have trauma like bashed in skulls, decapitated skeletons, arrow heads embedded, fractures on bones -- the fracture you get when you hold up your arm to ward off a blow, and mummies found with ropes on your neck.

this space doesn't accommodate visual, but i have a graph of 20 prehistoric archaeological sites in which they are trying to find skeletons with signs of violent trauma ranging from 0% to 60% with the average of 15%. let's compare that 15% figure with those of some state societies. for example, the united states and europe in the 20th century, the comparable rate of death was about 1%. if we try to get the worst possible figure by throwing in all the war deaths, the death from father and famines, all the death is 23%. the figure for the world in 2005 for the most recent decade on the graph is invisible because it's far less than a pixel.

it's about three tenths of one tenth of 1%. the second way of estimating the rate of violence death in non-state societies is by examining vital statistics. that is, what percentage of people living in recent nonstate societies, tribal societies, die at the hands of their fellow humans? again, the graph i would display, the graph ranges from -- here i spotted them in the criminology scale of violent deaths per 100,000 people a year, and the death rates range from 0 to 1500, but the average is about 500 deaths per hundred

thousand people a year, that is one-half of one percent. again, let's compare that a bit more than 500 with the corresponding figure for states, and, again, we'll stack the deck against states by choosing thee most violence state in the most violent era in the history like germany in the 20th century, the two world wars, the figure is 150, a similar figure to what we have for russia in the 0th century, which had two world wars, a revolution, and a civil war. japan in the 20th century was closer to 60. the united states in the 20th century was less than 3, and the world in the 20th century is about a third of a death per hundred thousand a year. that's the world in the first decade of the 21st century. the world in the 20th century throwing in all of the world

wars, jen no sideses and manmade famines is 60 to a year. what was the immediate cause of this change in rate of violence death? it's the rise and expansion of states. students of history are familiar with those who are posed by an empire, the -- and when a state imposes control over a territory, it tends to try to stamp out tribal rating and feuding. it's not because this comes from a benevolent interest in the welfare of the subject people, but rather all of this raiding and feuding is a nuance to the over lords because they just

settle scores around them and there's a net loss to the lords who just would rather keep the people alive to tax them and just as a farmer has an interest in preventing his cattle from killing each other because it's just a dead loss to him, so emperor or war lord will try to keep the subject people from killing each other at a loss to himself. second historical transition in violent is called the civilizing process referring to the transition between life in the middle ages, and i have a lovely wood cut here of cutting and stabbing and daggers through peasants and the early modern period. in parts of europe, homicide statistics go back hundreds of years to the 13th and 14th century. if you plot statistics over time

over the centuries, you find they plummet from an average rate of 35 per 100,000 a year to the contemporary european rate of one per hundred thousand a year, a decline by a factor of 35. this is one of many graphs that i'm going to ask you to imagine, which consistents of a jagged line that meanders top left of the graph when statistics were kept for the violence and goes to the bottom right of the graft representing the era we're now living which is true for homicide in europe. the immediate cause of the european homicide decline was identified by the german sociologist in the book called "the civilizing process" and namely from the transition of

the middle ages to moo dearnty, there's a states and kingdoms with principalities and thieves. as a result, criminal justice was nationalized, and a life of feuding war lords, called knights, but then war lords, were replaced by the king's justice where a genius had the idea instead of the family of a victim collecting blood money from the family of a killer, if it was the state that collected that money, it would be a constant revenue stream. [laughter] in fact, the king sent a representative to every town to tally the number of homicides so the king could collect compensation from the family of the perpetrator. this agent of the crown was called the corn nor which is why

we still call the official who assesses causes of death the coroner. aside from the transition of states, the moo dearnty saw a growing infrastructure of commerce. institutions like money and finance and contracts that could be enforced and recognized within the boundaries of the newly consolidated states and technologies that lubricated trade such as transportation, better roads, better bridles for horses, instruments of time keeping, and other technologies. the result was that zero-sum plunder where the plunders' gain was the victims' loss was increasingly replaced by positive-sum trade where both parties to a voluntary exchange can benefit. the third major transition can be illustrated by methods that

the early states used to impose on their kingdoms and breaking the wheel where the victim was tied to a wagon wheel and the executioner smashed arms and legs with a sledge hammer at which the victim was hoisted on the wagon wheel left to die of exposure and shock. burning at the stake, sawing in half from the crotch up, impalement through the rectum, and iron hooks. in a narrow slice of time centered in the 18 #th century, torture as a form of punishment was abolished by every major country including the united states in the famous amendment of the cruel punishment, part of a global movement to abolish

torture. the 18th century also saw the abolition of other institutionalized forms of violence that we now consider barbaric like the death penalty and england had 22 capital offenses on the book in the 18th century like poaching, counterfeiting, being in the company of gypsies, and strong evidence of mall las in a child in 7-14 years of age. this was not just theoretical, but was carried out with relish. samuel johnson talked about a 7-year-old girl being hanged for steeling 5 petticoat. the list of crimes was down to four in 1791, basically a high treason murder and other variations. there was an enormous list of crimes in the colonial and

independent period. there's a graph of american executions for crimes other than murder, and it meanders from close to 100% in the colonial period down to pretty much zero. it's the only crimes against people that are punishable by execution other than murder are conspiracy to commit murder. the death penalty itself was on death row starting in the 18th century, and it began a gradual wave of abolitions of capital punishment, nowadays, the united states is the only western democracy that even has the death penalty and even then only in two-thirds of the states, and even to say that the united states has the death penalty is a fiction. if you look at the number of american executions today, proportion of the population, it has been plunging, and so now the graph hugs the floor, and

nowadays about 50 people are executed every year in a country that has close to 17,000 homicides, so even here in a back water of deet penalty abolitions, the death penalty is a shadow of its former self-. others in the humanitarian revolution include witch hunts, religious persecution, dualing, blood sports, debtors' prisons, and, of course, slavery where the end of the 18th century saw the beginning of a wave of abolitions of slavery, and the united states, again, a bit behind the curve, not until the 1860s, but today slive ri is not legal anywhere in the world, and it used to be that slavery was legal everywhere in the world, and, indeed, endorsed as part of the natural order of things by the ancient greeks, by the

bible, and just about by everyone else. what would the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution? i looked at a number of candidate, and the most plausible in terms of something that happened before the humanitarian revolution was advances in printing and literacy. printing was the only industry that showed an increase in productivity prior to the industrial revolution in the 19th century and the cost of printing a book plinged in the 16th and 17th centuries. the result was an exponential increase in the number of books that were published in european countries, and there were more people who could read them in the 18th century and for the first time people were literal. why does that matter? causes that we abbreviate the term the enlightenment. knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance.

those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. as your society becomes smart enough to debunc hogwash like jews poisen wells, witches cause crop failure, children are possessed, africans are brutish, and so on, it's bound to create violence. also, literacy can be part of a general current cosmopolitan and ships that allow the easy movement of mixing of people, and it is plausible as people spend more of their life reading fiction and history and jowrnism, they start to see the world from other people's point of view, and therefore,

developing more empathy and less cruelty. if you try to imagine what it's like to be some other person, maybe you're a little less likely to enjoy seeing them disemanuel bowled. [laughter] -- disimbowled. it's a development that borrowing from the political scientist i call the long piece, and it speaks to the common conception that the 20th century was the most violence in history. interestingly, people who repeat that claim never back it up with numbers, and it's highly likely that claim is fallacious. it is true that the second world war was thee deadliest event in human history in terms of the number of people killed. on the other hand, the world had a whole lot more people in the

20th century than it had in past centuries, and we record and care about war deaths more in the 20th century than those who did in previous centuries. if you try to estimate the death tolls from atrocities in past centuries and you scale them by the size of the world's population at the time, it's not so clear that the 20 #th century was the worst. i've taken figures from several atroughs -- ring atrostologist and he has a book listing horrible things people do, and what happens is world war ii comes in in 9th place, and world war i doesn't make the top ten. atrocities like the african

slave trade, annihilation of native americans, and basically every time a dynasty fell in china there could be tens of millions of people killed, and if you look at the worst atrocities, they pretty much form a cloud. if you zoom in on the last 500 years and rather than just plot atrocity, we can add them up for the centuries, the political scientists jack lee has done that for a particular category of mass violence, namely, great power wars. wars that embroil the 800 pound gorillas of the day, the largest states, and those who do far more damage when they get into a war more than the little wars combined. if you plot the number of years

between 1500 and 2000 in which the great powers of the day fought each other, you see a curve in which for the early centuries, the great powers were pretty much always at war. there are many points on the conserve that hit 100% of the years in a quarter century. now the great powers are virtually never at war. the last great power war was the korean war that ended in 1953. if you plot the duration of wars involving a great power on at least one side, the duration goes down, we used to have things like the 30 years war, the 80 years war, the 100 years war, and in the 20th century, we had the six day war. if you plot the frequency of wars involving a great power, that is how many new wars are started every year, and again, there's a curve working its way downward from 1500 to the present; however, there's one

curve going in the opposite direction. 23 you look for most -- if you look for most history, if you plot the deadliness of wars involving a great power, that is not how many wars that are started, but how many people are killed once a war begins, that goes in the other direction. that goes upward. that is nations got better and better at killing larger and larger numbers of soldiers until 19 # 45 does an abrupt u-turn, and since then, wars have been both less numerous and less deadly per nation year of war. if you then combine these two figures, you combine the numbers of wars by the deadliness of each war, you get a curve, but the crucial point is the last point on the curve represent k the last -- representing the last 25 # years, and the last 50 years hit

all time lows over the last 500 years. this is called the long piece. namely that the last two-thirds of the century, since 1945, there's been historically unprecedented decline in interstate wars, wars between countries. to be exact, and here's some statistics easy to convey. they don't need a graph because they all consist of the number 0. there were no wars between the soviet union and the united states, which may sound unexceptionable today, but every expert predicted world war iii was inevitable. they grew up with the experts assuring us it was just a matter of time before the u.s. and ussr duked it out. now nuclear weapons have been

used and as i mentioned, there's no wars between great powers since 1915, probably the longest span of time without a great power war. there's no wars between western european countries. again, your first reaction might be to say, well, ho, hum, of course that happened nobody expects france and germany to go to war. what a concept. [laughter] or sweden and russia. of course, any student of european history knows this was the rule, not the exception until the precipitous decline of interstate war after 1945. there's been no wars between developed countries. that is the 45 or so countries with the highest gdp per capita. what about the rest of the world? well, there is a fifth major decline of violence i call the new piece that refers to the rest of the world, so what

happens -- what happened if we set aside the great powers, the european countries, the rich countries, what was the rest of the world doing? well, there was a decline in the number of interstate wars where one country declares against another. however, there's been a huge increase in civil wars. it mainly exploding starting in the 1960s when newly independent states where governments were challenged by insurgent movements, and both sides were armed and financed and egged on by the cold war superpowers. however, since 1991, even the number of civil wars has declined with the end of the cold war, and when -- if the number of interstate wars went down, the number of civil wars went up, which killed more people? the answer is very clear. interstate wars kill far more people, or at least they have

since the late 1940s. there's nothing like a pair of great powers chucking artillery shells, bombs cities, sending tanks to do battle to rack up high body counts in a hurry. in comparison, some teenagers armed with ak-47s make life miserable in the area in which they work, but they don't do the same amount of widespread damage. again, i have a graph showing the deadliness of interstate and civil wars over the last 55 years. the number of deaths in interstate war per year of war has plummeted for civil wars, it just is a slight increase followed by a dxz. if you add up deaths from all sorts of war, that is interstate and civil wars, there's a bumpy decline for peaks with the

korean war, the vietnam war, the iran-iraq war, but in the last ten years, the figures hug the floor. they are basically bearing a little strike, just can't see the picture that i'll describe in numbers, but during the worst years of world war ii, the death rate from war was about 300 per 100,000 a year. during the late 1940s and early 1950s, it fell to about 22 per 100,000 a year. in the last -- this past decade, it's been at one-third of a death per hundred thousands people a year. using a constant yardstick of battle deaths, and this is the phenomena. it wiewb a bit -- it would be a bit of an exaggeration to say the dream of the 1960s folk singers is

welcome coming true, and that is the world is almost putting an end to war. what's the immediate causes of the long peace and the new peace? well, one intellectual hypothesis came from one in 1795 in his essay "perpetwall peace" proposing democracy, interstate trade, and an international community would drive down the likelihood of war. lately, a pair of political scientists have tested this hypothesis by measuring these factors showing first of all that all of them have increased in the second half of the 20th century, and all of them are statistic predictors of peace. the number of democracies exceeded hi toke sighs around 1990, and the amount of international trade skyrocketed after the end of the second world war, and the membership in intergovernmental organizations steadily increased throughout

the 20th century, and especially since 1990 there's been a huge increase in the number of international peacekeepers, soldiers with blue he he -- helmets and don't always reignite hostilities, but do more often with no peacekeepers. finally, the sixth historical decline is the right's revolution referring to the targeting of violence on smaller scales against minorities like racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. during the post-war period, the civil war -- the civil rights movement put an end to lynchings which used to take place at a rate of 150 per year. that went down by the 1950s to

zero a year. hate crime murders of blacks have been in the single digits since they were first recorded and have since then plunged to about one per year. nonlethal hate crimes against blacks like intimidation and assault since declined, and the attitudes that in the past would license births of violence like genecides have been in steady decline. if you ask would you move that if a black family moved in next door? do you think the income gap between blacks and whites is due to lower ability or lower productivity? many have fallen so low, the pollsters dropped them from the surveys. the women's rights movements saw

an 80% decline in rape since the early 1970s when the stats were first kept. also a precipitous ce cline in -- decline in domestic violence. namely the killing of wives and husband, although here, i must add the decline has been far steeper for wives killing husbands than husbands killing wives. the women's movement has been very, very good for men. [laughter] the chirp's rights movement has seen a steady decline in the number of american states with corporal punishment or paddling, and a decline in every western country in the agreement of spanking, a decline in physical abuse and sexual abuse of children since stats were first kept, and a decline in school like fighting and notary public-fatal crimes. the gay rights movement has seen

an increase in the number of states that have decriminalized homosexuality, both states worldwide and american states. a decline in anti-gay attitudes like whether homosexuality is morally wrong, should be made illegal, or whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity, and a decline in anti-gay hate crimes. the animal rights movement has seen a decline in hunting, a rise in vegetarianism, and a decline in the percentage of motion pictures in which animals were harmed. [laughter] well, all of this raises a question. why have all of these graphs meandered downward over the course of history? why have there been so many different declines of violence on different scales of magnitude and time? one possibility is human nature changed and somehow people lost inclinations towards violence. i consider this an unlikely

explanation. [laughter] for one thing, toddlers continue to hit, kick, and bite. little boys continue to play fight. grown up boys and many girls enjoy various forms of vicarious violence like murder mysteries, tragedies, video games, ice hockey -- [laughter] and movies starring a certain ex-governor of california -- [laughter] and a number of social psychologists assessed the prevalence of homicidal fantasies and asked people the question have you ever faint sized about killing someone you don't like? well, it turns out about 15% of women and a third of men frequently fantasize about killing people they don't like. [laughter] more than 60% of women and three quarters of men at least occasionally about killing people they don't like, and the rest of them are lying.

[laughter] a more likely possibility is that human nature is extraordinary complex compromises both inclinations towards violence and inclinations that counteract them, what was called the better angels of our nature, to which i took the title from my own book, and historical circumstances increasingly favored our peaceable inclinations, our better angels. well, what are these forces in conflict? fighting it out inside the skull? i think that violence is not a single psychological category. we have a number of psychologically and even neurobilogically very distinct motives that result in violence. there's sheer exploitation, the use of violence as a means to an end when some living thing is an on the -- obstacle in the wayth path of something you want.

very different from that is the quest for dominance, the drive for individuals to climb the pecking order and be alpha male and the drive among groups for ethnic, racial, national supremacy. the very large category of revenge and moral violence which is in rough justice and cruel punishments, and perhaps the biggest category are consistent of violence pursued in quest of an ideology such as militant religions, nationalism, fascism, naziism, and communism because there's a cost benefit analysis. if your ideology holds out the prospect of a future world that is infinitely good forever,

well, what are you entitled to do in order to attain that world? well, you can commit just as much violence as you want, and you're still making the world a better place by this cost benefit analysis. also, imagine that you have been a faith to which there's a utopia of which you can strive, and there's some people who hear of this utopia, but they just stubbornly reject it. well, how evil are they? well, you do the math. arbitrarily evil, and that's why the tails of the distribution of massive violence tend to be pushed outward by utopian ideologies. well, what do we have on the other side to counteragent the motives for violence? what's the better angels? there's self-control, the ability to anticipate the consequences of our behavior and

inhibit violence impulses. there's empathy, the ability to feel others' pain. there's the moral sense, which is a family of intuitions, some of which, like tribalism, authoritarianism, and puritanism can increase violence, but at least one flairve of -- flavor of the moral sense, the drive of fairness is counteract violence, and then there's reason, the cognitive faculty allowing us to engage in analysis. if we have then these inclinations towards violence on the one hand, the against viebles on the other, what's brought out the better angels throughout history? the first possibility was proposed in the book, and it referred to a state and judicial system with a monopoly on the use of violence can eliminate

the incentives for exploited attack by pun european european -- punishing it, and reduce the need for vengeance, circumvent the biases in which both sides in dispute always believe they're on the side of the angels and that the other side is wicked or stupid, stubborn, or all three. people we know in social psychology research say the adversary's benevolence and exaggerate their own innocence that can start cycles of revenge unless there's an objectionable third party who decides. the force consists the first two transitions that i talked about, the passifying and civilizing of states and we can watch movies

in reverse where violence can re-erupt bike -- like the wild west, in failed states, collapsed empire, and mafia and street gangs dealing in contraband and cannot settle the disputes using the state, file a lawsuit, or dial 9-1-1, because of the nature of the work they do, and so they use rough justice resulting in the vendettas. other evidence at the international scale includes the effectiveness of international peacekeepers. the second historical force that draws out our better angels, i suggest, is gentle commerce, the idea that plunder is a zero-sum game, but trade is a positive-sum game in which everybody can win. over the course of history, as technology improves and allows the trade of goods and ideas

over longer distances, among larger groups people at lower cost, more and more humanity becomes more able to alive rather than dead. there's not a lot of affection between the united states and china these days, but it's not terribly likely they'll go to war. among other things, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money. ..

unfortunately, by default we quiet only to a narrow circle of friends and family that over the course of history you can see these circle of empathy expanding to embrace not just the family, but the village and the klan, the tribes in the nation and then extended to other races, to both sexes, two children and eventually to other beings, other species. this begs the question of what expanded the circle and as i hinted earlier, technologies that increase cosmopolitanism may have that effect. the growing appreciation of history, literature, media, journalism, growing opportunities for travel and we we know from the social psychology laboratory that if you get a person to adopt a perspective of some other real or fictitious person, they are more sympathetic to that person and they are more sympathetic to

the category of people that individual represents. historical evidence includes the fact that in the 17th and 18th century, there was an expansion of literacy and travel, the so-called republic of letters which preceded the humanitarian revolution. it may not be a coincidence that the second half of the 20th century, which had their race revolution was also the era of the electronic global village and it's often been speculated that the rise of internet and social media has assisted the color revolutions and the arab spring. the final historical force i called the escalator of reason. the possibility that the growth of literacy, education and public discourse has encourage people to think more abstractly and more universally. they get into the habit of rising above their parochial

vantage point, which makes it harder to privilege her own interests over the interests of others. it in courage is you to replace a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence and increasingly to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be one. what is the evidence? well, one intriguing piece of evidence is that abstract reasoning abilities as measured by iq tests, believe it or not come increased over the course of the 20th century. throughout the 20th century and all over the world iq increased by about three points a decade, the so-called flinty effects. how could this have affected violence? other studies have shown that people and societies with higher levels of education and a measured intelligence holding all else equal, commit fewer

violent crimes on average, cooperate more in experimental games, have more classically liberal attitudes such as opposition to racism and sexism, and are more receptive to democracy. why have i ended up with this list of four very different, seemingly different forces? why are they'll pushing the same direction towards less violence? the closest i think we can come to an overarching theory is that violence is what game theorists call a social dilemma. that is, it's always it tempting to an aggressor to engage in predatory or exploited violence but on the other hand it is quite ruinous to the victim. in the long run all parties are better off if violence is avoided and our dilemma as humans, our pickle, is how to get the other guy to refrain from violence at the same time as you do. if you are the only one tube

beat your source into plowshares then you are a sitting duck for invasion by the bad guys. one can see these forces as cases in which human experience and human ingenuity gradually solves this problem, just like other scourges of nature like petulance and hunger that we have dealt with, and that all of these forces have increased the material emotional and cognitive incentives of all parties to avoid violence simultaneously. regardless of the correct explanations for violence, think its implications for understanding the human condition are profound. for one thing, they call for a reorientation of efforts toward violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an empirical mindset. instead of asking, why is there were? you might be better off asking, why is there peace? instead of, what are we doing wrong? you might ask, what if we been

doing right? because we have been doing something right and it sure would be good to find out exactly what it is. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much, stephen pinker. this was a fantastic presentation. already people are lining up for the questions. i am going to ask again, i know i'm never successful but i'm going to still keep trying. i would like you to keep your questions really brief, and so everyone gets a chance and steve and i would like to keep your answers brief. [laughter] so it works both ways, and if you are comfortable, please say your name. >> i am dr. caroline poppel is. my question is germany.

it was the most cosmopolitan, the most highly educated, society arguably in europe, and they did the most horrible crime. >> well, it's a little misleading to say it is there were sectors of germany that indeed were cosmopolitan and educated. there were also sectors of germany that were more tribal in their mindset, deeply anti-semitic. even among the german elite, there was a widespread rejection which was dismissed as that french business and rather than an acceptance of the idea of universal rights and an emphasis on being flourishing individuals there was a lot of primitive blood and soul -- soil by tribalism and granted you are certainly right, there was a flourishing of cosmopolitan

sentiment in some sectors of the german population. the problem is, they were all murdered. so the general answer is that, when it comes to an entire society, it's important to see how dynamics can lead to competition among the various sectors and it's only if you have a robust democracy, which the cosmopolitan people are not murdered, that it can affect society as a whole. >> first i commented then a question. i think they -- was the great spanish filmmaker and perhaps the cleverest of all. as he was dying he said in his autobiography, if only in 10 years i could get up out of the grave and get a newspaper and keep in touch with what is going on in the world. your presentation, in terms of overt violence, is extraordinarily impressive. on the other hand, there is a

containment in one sense in the proliferation of violent games starting with kids as young as two and three and a tremendous compulsive preoccupation with violence in all the media, in football and so forth. i would call it a kind of externalization, not a sublimation. but contained, and part of it i think is, freud spoke of the pervasive violence and its aggressive drive. and you can kind of identify with people who are suffering and say thank god it isn't me. but even more important, murder mysteries. i can fantasize that i have done this murder, but somebody else

is going to be discovered and i can go conscience free. >> i agree that pleasure taken in violent entertainment is a great constant of human experience. i don't believe that violent entertainment causes violence. the huge expansion of violent video games has been accompanied by the great american crime declined in the early 1990s. i'm also not convinced by a hydraulic model that if you get your violent urges out through violent entertainment you are less likely to commit it in real life. i think that it's a guilty pleasure that people of all eras have had. if you look at titus andronicus, if you look at the dreadful's, the old testament, you look at the lives of the saints, there is a lot of really gruesome stuff in there. people enjoy for interesting reasons i think including the ones that you mentioned.

>> i would think very few people watch an execution in terms of the total population and now it's a large part of populations. >> well people came out and brought her whole family to watch really stomach turning public executions, burnings and breaking zen strangulations and disembowelment so in the past it was possible for an entire population to be overcome by a collective sadism. >> one last comment, notice there was laughter in twitter when we talk about disembowelment. >> folks we have a long line, and i would like everyone to get their chance. >> good evening and happy new year sue those where it is applicable. i wanted if any -- [inaudible]

the question and is this an by the way it was very much impressed by your presentation. i have always wanted to meet you. no bizarre fantasies -- fantasies here. [laughter] believe me i'm very passive but the question is this. do you think some people are actually biologically have a tendency to be inherently evil. they look as there is a fear of clowns, little children holding scissors behind their backs -- pretty little girls, want to play, want to play? if you get too close, watch out, the scissors will be a nice dagger in your gut. and no matter how you raise them come even if they are adopted by the nicest, kindest people, is

intellectually brilliant, there something about them that they like to see others suffer. be the answer is that there is a substantial heritable component to antisocial tendencies and the extreme violence anti--- within a population the troublemakers, the more callous, more impulsive people, they get that way in part be for genetic reasons because thanks to real-life research that carries out methodic experiments you mentioned, namely compare a adopted children to their biological parents and their adoptive parents so there is some statistical tendency. most extreme are psychopaths. a few percentage points of the population seem to be without the ability to develop a conscience that counts the interest of others. so among individuals, there does seem to be some heritability.

>> you never know. >> ethnically need to move on. it's only fair that everyone get a chance. >> hi, my name is noah, and my question is about the backroom boys. is a phrase that was referred to by the engineers at dupont to develop the napalm do a great effect in the war against indochina. and so in reviewing the records, the backroom boys, noam chomsky, he remarks that there is a distant effect from their actions that these backroom boys in their very technological occupations at. he mentions that this institutionalized violence by rationalism largely technological means had its roots in the prolonged genocidal

conflicts that you mentioned have evaded. at that time 30% of the czech republic had just perished by the effects of that war and conflict killed by the -- have declined precipitously. but the institutions seem to remain with us and particularly this reasonable objective countenance the of extreme violence like these backroom boys at dupont in the 1950's developing napalm and other. effect effective killing agents. >> what i would really be concerned with is when these agents have been deployed and it's interesting bad as contrary to what i often hear, namely as we develop high-tech pushbutton forms of warfare, or that circumvent the inhibitions we have against hands-on violence and therefore would that lead you to expect violence to go way up? i don't think that is consistent with the process of history.

those were carried out by pipe men which -- with weapons and bayonets and so on. i think people can very easily overcome their resistance to hands-on violence and in fact it's often the most high-tech forms of violence that are deployed most gingerly, nuclear weapons being an example which have often been used since not a sake so i think that correlation is much less than people think because it is so easy to commit hands-on violence. >> on this historical link between the technology of violence and that particular you know, patterned, particularly in northern europe, kind of a technologically very rich and devoted culture of violence. you have reviewed this history of violence. how clear is that connection? >> the highest technology of any culture is typically applied to

weapons of war, so the mongolian horseback had amazingly -- that could do vast amounts of damage very quickly so that is something that tends to bring out people's ingenuity. >> i am paul steinberg, a psychiatrist here in town and i am wondering if you could just comment on, you may be dismissing a change in human nature a little too quickly in the sense that jeans are always in a dance with the environment and i know you cite, and i haven't read your book that i know you cite glenn clark and his research is remarkable looking at what happened starting in the 13th century with the royals just being much more fertile than the lower classes, and rate of bourgeoises

but it took 500, 600 years for the industrial revolution to happen so we have more people in england who had attention surplus disorder and fewer people with attention deficit disorder, less impulsivity, greater concentration, greater self-control and when a society moves in that direction you reach a critical mass, that may actually change the way, it certainly is certainly fuels just a change in the culture. >> yes, and i discussed that possibility at length in the book. i end up not embracing at the not objecting it, for one thing lack of evidence. it makes the prediction for example that englishmen, regardless of their culture, should be genetically less prone to impulsivity and violence ban people from other cultures and races. this isn't a possibility that i'm eager to set -- test anytime

soon but moreover it may be unnecessary. it is very early in the investigation of the biological evolution but given that some of the developments that i discussed occurred far too rapidly to be attributable to genetic evolution such as the plunging of the crime rates in 1992 or the rights revolution. something must have happened that was not genetic that could account for that plummeting so on grounds of parse no make -- . >> i am a huge fan so i will try to keep it together. i'm curious about people's relationship and a representative democracy with civilian law enforcement and it is really interesting to hear about declining rates of violence but it seemed -- of the at the same time things like permalink there he fully sourcing and swat teams have gone way beyond their original intention for hostage situations

and even famously last year someone breaking into people's homes over college loans etc., so if rates of violence are really defining people, why are the civilian law enforcement seeming to be flexing their muscles in a way that doesn't correlate with the decline in violence? >> well, we have to look at figures over overtime of government violence portrayed against its own civilians and i suspect that there hasn't been much at all of an increase compared to earlier decades and centuries. and bringing in the leviathan from keeping people from each other's throats, that first transition was a tough bargain because it did lower the rate of violence but then he gave you these bloodthirsty despots to deal with. the democratic revolution and indeed the continuing battle for democracy and civil liberties is

an attempt to find that sweet spot where the government is powerful enough to deter predation by one citizen over another but not so powerful that it becomes a menace to its own citizens and that is something that i suspect we are always going to muddle through. c. i'm going to make sure that everyone in line gets to ask their question and that will be our limit tonight. >> hi, my name is gregory was. i have really been looking forward to reading this book ever since seeing a speech he gave three or four years ago at the ted conference on the same topic. i was however wondering if you could comment on some allegations made in a book i recently read called, i'm going to blank on the name, sex add-on, the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality in which those authors allege that some of the data you present about

rates of violence among hunter gatherer cultures, what you call the -- peoples tonight is erroneous. they allege for example that the date at the time it was collected, these people had contact with modern society for many decades, that they are not in fact nomadic, they are settled peoples. i've just been curious ever since reading that to hear your response to some of those allegations. >> i'm not sure about those allegations but the data that i present our, many of them are from people who definitely had no contact with any europeans such as samples of skeletons from pre-columbian native americans. many of them are also from hunter gatherer and hunter horticulturist people who also had no contact so i don't no, can't respond to these allegations without knowing what they are but certainly the sources that i have consulted make it very clear that there has or has not been contacted,

and they span a range. there are some societies that don't have measured rates of homicide or deaths in war, but on average, the rates are way up there and they are from many many societies of different kinds. what they have in common is government, and that seems to uniform money, i shouldn't say uniformly because there are some in the distribution but on average higher rates of violence and from what i can tell from the archaeological literature, that is a solid conclusion. eyesight many surveys that have the numbers, but they back up that claim. >> thanks for your stimulating presentation. i guess when you are listing factors to the decline of violence in our society, everything from the death penalty to rape, one exception

that stood out in my mind would be incarceration. a very high level of incarceration. of course there are violent people that deserved it, but there are also non-violent crimes with huge sentences, people thrown into a situation where in fact prison life is not getting less violent and so i was wondering how you factor into that the larger picture? >> in historical terms modern american prisons as horrible as they are are much less violent than prisons several hundred years ago where you we could have say prisoners shackled to the floor or wearing iron spiked college -- callers and their family would have to pay for easement to iron so the spiked caller could take it off when there were higher rates of death from disease and starvation in the prisons. this is not to defend american prisons by any means but historically it would be inaccurate to take the current american prisons and say nothing has improved. now the american prison culture of the last 20 years partly was

a way of reducing the counteracting, the enormous increase in street violence and violent crimes of all types that had overtaken the united states from the 60s through the 1980s. the homicide rate more than doubled in those decades. the rate of rape, the rate of assault and so as a rather clumsy countermeasure there was an increase in incarceration, which in part was responsible for the fact that the violent crime rates have plunged back to earth in the 1990s, not entirely because there were a number of other causes of bringing violence to decline but most statisticians attributed at least part of the decline to the increase in imprisonment. in the united states, as with many other of the trends that i have been listing it's a little misleading. is the country on the best and we tend to think of it as representative of western democracies but it's really an

outlier, and a lot of the trends that i have mentioned are true for every western democracy but the united states which is kind of pulling up the rear. it's true homicide, churck capital punishment, it's true of willingness to engage in wars and is true of imprisonment where we draw disproportionately large proportion of our population in prison compared to other western democracies. but certainly in the century scale, which is no comparison between today's prisons and those of the 19th and 18th centuries. >> i was wondering if you could share with us a bit about the methods you used to arrive at the numbers that you talked about tonight? did you do kind of independent testing of statistics, to kind of look at this kind of cost? did this factor caused x to

change these things and could you share with us the source of your numbers and how you arrived at them? >> for different periods of history and different kinds of violence, the numbers have different sources so for the state and nonstate contrast, came from ethnography's of accidents tribal peoples and forensic archaeology. for history of homicide in europe, came from historical criminology such as the unearthing coroners records for every year of a particular town in europe going back to the middle ages. in the case of war, depends on the period. since 1946 there have been meticulous statistics kept in death of armed conflict by scandinavian organizations. before 1946 there was a war project which looked at that from the largest wars, from 1816 to the present. prior to 1816 it becomes, as you

can imagine, the farther back you go the fuzzy are the statistics get that there is a line of historians, quantitative historians, that have tried to triangulate on estimates of the death tolls from various wars to come up with best guest estimates. for homicide, more recently, the fbi keeps reasonably good statistics, least they have since the 1930s. for crimes other than homicide like rape and assault, the best data our victimization surveys which aren't contaminated by people's willingness to report a crime to the police. for still others like child abuse and domestic violence, there are victimization surveys or other social science methodologies so it all depends on the decline in violence. >> do you think the new approach is analyzing the approach? >> in general what i did was i took the data sets in their entirety from other researchers and never second-guess the

criteria, either the start date or the stop date, what gets included, what gets excluded because they didn't want to do any cherry-picking to try to favor this hypothesis. so the data sets that i used in -- vary in their quality but none of them were selected to show a decline or manipulated to show a decline. even when i knew that some of the conclusions were dodgy for various reasons i gave myself the freedom of cherry-picking them. >> thank you. >> hi, i was just wondering, putnam finds a social capitalism has been declining in the united states, interconnection community and i would have thought that would lead to me being more violence, more crime but it seems like we have had a decline in crime despite you know those kinds of maybe troubling figures.

have you given any thought to that it had any ideas why the putnam results might be going in a different direction from your results in crime in this country? >> it's a good question because there are other data sets that would seem to suggest that the rate of violent crime depends on the degree of social interconnectedness and trust in institutions. when i refer to the civilizing process, that was 100,000 per year to about 10 per 100,000 per year and that occurs everywhere the government extends its tentacles, but the further decline that we see in europe and parts of the united states, about 10 down to the single digits, low single digits, seems to depend not on the presence of government but more nebulous process of accepting the legitimacy of the social order that indeed, as you suggest, you expect a correlate of with communal institutions.

.. in cultural attitudes that could filter down to law enforcement to push these up or down. but we are retelling stories post top. >> last question. >> and ms rich potter. i can't wait to read this book. it's a fascinating subject.

i am interested in, why is the perception that we live in such a dangerous and violent era? why's that so pervasive? it is amazing how discordant that is. >> is indeed an intriguing question. i think one reason is what the media reports and what they're getting better and better at reporting. not only is there the programming policy. media programmers know that just as people enjoy violent entertainment, people enjoy violent news. we are better and better at finding thailand's. now anyone on the planet with a southbound canteen video footage of violence all over the world. and psychologists note that the human mind estimates risk and likelihood by the ease with which we can collect samples. if you can think example, they

must be dangerous. were not as good as calculating denominators. and the medium of courts to report to nominators. millions of people alzheimer's and cancel in heart attacks. if vladimir was doing it killed over from a heart attack, there isn't a camera crew filming it. if vladimir gets shot by a two-inch postal worker, then it will be on the evening news. the final reason is they care more about violent now. a lot of things that didn't even counter violence, now we consider to be heinous crimes. the most poignant example is genocide. it's all over the old testament that it didn't seem to be a problem with anyone. there were many colonial ministers and politicians who thank god for wiping out the news. there's a change in sensibility that has gone further and further down the scale to isolate behaviors that before

were okay. my favorite example being the recent targeting of bulleting. no less than the president than the president of the united states give apostasy and chest on what to do about oil and playground. 25 years ago this would have been an episode of the simpsons. it would have been absurd. boys will be boys. how are kids going to grow up to if you turn them into, but now i think of life from the point of view of the bullied child. there are many, many accounts of the suffering of the tons of bowling and now there's a new

her talk at politics & prose bookstore in d.c. is an hour. >> folks, good evening. we'll get started. if you're just coming in there are some seats up here to my left or you can stand off to the corners or find an open seat towards the back. welcome to politics & prose. thank you all for being here. i'm mike giarratano. i want to start by welcoming you and saying thanks for being here on behalf of our new owners, bradley graham

and lisa muscatan. the staff here, collective thanks for supporting bookstore and events series being mere for lisa randall and her second book, "knocking on heavy general's door quote. we're excited about her talking about the book. if you're new here, welcome. i will quickly go over the format. lisa will present her book. talking about her book using some visuals as well. what we're going to do is leave the lights up because we're recording so if you do want to kind of get to the corners you will have a pretty good view of it. but the talk will go about 45 minutes or some we'll have a little time for q&a, from you of course. we look forward to your input. because we're recording as i said we'll take questions from our audience microphone here in the middle aisle. if you can get to that, that would be a help and we'll field questions from there. afterwards we'll have a book signing up here.

lisa will sign both her books, "knocking on heaven's door" and they are available at front of the store. always good to silence telephones and that's how we'll go. so again, really above all, want to say thanks. this is nice turnout and a great crowd and welcome to politics & prose. welcome to lisa randall. her new book is "knocking on heaven's door". how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world. she is a physicist in harvard university. she one of the most highly cited an influential theoretical physicists. appeared in discover, the economist, "newsweek", "scientific american" among many others, many other publications. she has been one of "time" magazine's 100 most influential people. as i said, "knocking on

heaven's door" is her second book. her first booked warped passages about the universe is hidden dimensions. knocking on heaven's door is talking about the large hadron collider and author's investigation into elementary particles and cosmology into modern physics. from the core knowledge of the smallest objection the outer boundaries the larger outer threshold beyond understanding. this is her book to present. and we're happy that she is here to do that. and, again, thanks to you for being here. please have me welcome to politics & prose, lisa randall. [applause] welcome. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here. so first of all i want to make clear that i don't necessarily see this book as just a book about the large hadron collider. i really think it is a book about the nature of science.

the large hadron collider and physics i do is about the science i talk about. i try to explain a little bit more, what are the elements, what are the elements of thinking that go into science? that is not to say i don't spend a lot of time talking about the large hadron collider and science going on there and what is going on cosmology and dark matter searches for example. there is lot of more general elements and it's funny because i haven't been to politics & prose before. am i supposed to give a political talk? i mean i do speak in prose so that part i have covered. but, really, and i do think even in that sense i just think it's really important for people quite generally to start thinking a little bit more scientifically and to understand really what it means in terms of what the role of uncertainty plays in terms of what it means to be right and wrong, in terms of the role creativity plays in what we do. in terms of a lot of things we don't often associate with science. we often think something we

plug something in and get the answer but there is a lot more going on than that. when science is happening there is lot more back and forth is going on and understanding uncertainty is really important as well as many other aspects what i'm going to talk about. because it is only a short talk and we don't have time to go through the entire book i actually have two different talks i've been giving or that i'm going to be giving. one is more about the large hadron collider and physics happening there. another is about one of the concept that is really important in physics and that is the concept of scale. so i'm going to begin the talk by talking about scale. in the process we'll see some of the exciting physics along the way but keep in mind, really what i want to get across why thinking in terms of scale is important not just for physics but all of science and really more generally. so, with that i will actually begin the actual talk. and again, thank you for having he mere -- here.

the title is "knocking on heaven's door". my friends polled or enemies polled nine out of 10 like the title. really what i wanted to get across with the title is really what we're doing. i wanted a way to convey the fact we have this very established base of knowledge but we're really trying to go beyond it. we're trying to probe those edges. we're trying to get beyond that and that is what science is doing trying to get a little it about beyond. that is what i had in mind. when i say how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the modern world i have in mind just that it is really physics for understanding the nature of our universe but scientific thinking has much more broader applications and worth people's understanding. . .

>> it has the eiffel tower in the b.c., a kiosk advertising performance, and it has cars in the street, which is very typical, so it's a typical paris scene. so what do i want to get across here? well, the thing i want to get

across is what you see depends on how you look at things, what resolution you have, what scale you choose to focus on. if you think about the eiffel tower, you can look at it from far away, like if you had a map of france, it would not be a way to know about the eiffel tower. you won't know about the aspects like physics until we zoom into the scale. of course, i could look very close and would see nothing that surveys the beauty of the entire structure, but if i wanted to study the tower, that's an appropriate scale for that, and when used, i don't want to take into account all the little details. of course, i cowrld -- could zoom in closer, but that's not relevant. what i really wanted you to see

in the slide, which is, of course, much more important is if you zoomed in, you can see my name on it. [laughter] i'm getting to the point of understanding how my name, i'm a particle physicist, ended up in paris. >> if you look -- >> if you look there, there's my name. okay. we'll come back to that at the end of the talks. let's think about the scale. one of the reasons i wanted to focus on this is when i talked about war passages. i think a lot of people, even those extremely interested in the science i do, i think there's a misconception sometimes about how does this relate to the kinds of things we see, these exotic ideas of extra dimension, but how is there a

continuous transition from the exotic idea that apply to tiny scales and what we see on human scale, and our intuition, of course, is guided by what we see on human scales. when we think -- when we think of other types of physical -- people think it's magical or not real because it's not what they see in their daily live, but anyone who saw an optical illusion knows you can't always trust your eyes. in fact, you can trust things that are measure and recorded and consistently done so and get the same answer. it's not intuitive in the sense of it's not what you see when you walk down the street, but that doesn't mean it's not there. it's just not obvious to us as human beings. that's important to get across that the physics described in the world whether or not we as human beings see it, and our challenge is to get that information out, to be able to interpret things you can make as technology advances to understand what's going on. in the slide is vision.

there's a visible light spectrum. it's relatively narrow, and, of course, if you go to scales that are smaller than the few hundred meters we're talking about, if you go to scales smaller, you're not going to be able to literally see something. visible light will not have the sensitivity to see things. when we see things, we're not seeing it in the way we traditionally do. it's something we consider a more indirect measure. . the history of measurements from direct to indirect measurements is interesting. even at the time of galileo, it's the first time people used lenses, not using the eyes directly even if measurements before were not. since then, we've had more and more distance, but there's nevertheless a rigid connection of what the devices are measuring and what we see. in fact, the physical universe

has a broad range of scales far broader than what we wrap our heads around. there's many interesting scales and things happening on them. before we go on, there's a brief tour of the scales so we can set the landscape just to know what we're talking about. of course, we could start by the large scales. in principles, scales to could be large. we have no idea how big it is, but we set a size to it by talking about the size of the known universe, the visible universe, the universe we see given the speed of light and length of time the universe existed, and that's the ten to the 27 meters. talking about the universe, be careful because there's two ways things could be smaller. you could be looking into the earlier universe, and on that side, the universe -- radiation was emitted when it was smaller, but we had many objects in the

sky, and those objects are various sizes. we can talk about the solar system, talk about the earth's orbit, sun, there's many different sizes, and it's spanning a huge range of scales. one thing that's really interesting, though, about all of the scales is that it's really the same laws of physics applying over those scales. we're not finding we have to adjust the laws of physics as we go to different scales. i mean, density, we might need to use general relativity, but basically it's the laws of gravity, and laws that we're all familiar with. it's a little bit different in principle if you look at smaller scales because we think of going up -- but you can also did inside. of course, a lot of that is much, much harder to visualize these small scales, and that is the challenge to me as a writer to try to convey what's going on in small scales because it's not as intuitive, and you need ways to think about it. what's also interesting is that you can see -- you're going --

you actually vary the scale, you have human scales we're familiar with, but then you get to scales where physics is a better description or quantum mechanics is a better description so you change the nature of how you describe things. i'm using classical physics to quantum physics. i want to get across what that means. is one right and the other wrong? what's going on there. one scale i want to focus on is the measurements -- if you wonder, it's a big ring underneath the ground. we'll come back to that later, but that picture is representing the lower collider, and that's the frontier scale in terms of what we can actually look at with experiments. that is the frontier emergency scale for experiment, and that's 10 minus 19 meters, far smaller than we can imagine seeing, but we're about to learn about the distance scales from high energy

experiments performed there. in the chart, i talk about some other scales, and they are smaller than the scales of the explorer. there's many smaller scales you can think about. those are not being experimentally explored in the near future as far as we know, but there could be interesting physics happening there, and, in fact, there's probably a limit to the scale we can talk about, to the distance scales we talk bow. i'll explain that later. there's an enormous range even below -- we're probing a small scale now, 10 minus 19 meters, but that's not even near the end of scales that we might in principle explore. one question to keep in mind is how do you talk about these things with all of these unknowns? how do you reference it with all this stuff not yet known? there's a few striking things

there. one is that that's there a lot of information. we're covering the scale. how request we wrap our heads around it? furthermore, there's classical mechanics for some scale, quantum mechanics for others, and if we keep going down, it could be quantum gravity, and it's in a way that works over the entire range of scales. what's going on? what do we mean by this? we really want a theoretical tool for organizing the information, and that's what we as physicists do. we have a tool for organizing information. it's known as an effective theory. i want to get across to you what i mean by eskive theory. -- effective theory. what do we mean? well, the solution sounds obvious? some sense. there's all this stuff out there, but let's just track what we need to track. let's keep track of the effective quantities relevant to

observations. that's to say, if i can't measure something, maybe i don't need to use that in the description, just absorb it, bundle it into the quantities that i can measure, and that turns it into a problem where you are not caught with unnecessary details. so, i think, this is kind of a generally obvious concept that you use all the time without realizing it. you know, if you're in politics and prose, starting from far away, first find washington, have a map where politics and prose is not showing up on the map on the left. that's a different scale you're looking at there than on the right hand side when you want to know what to do when you're on military road. what you want to do is focus in. in some cases, you keep track of each individual street, but in that description, you're not. you just keep track of the

larger, more global structure. that's how we can do it. if we tried to fibbed our way across the country using a street map, that's impractical, but we use the map on the left, but when we need to, we can zone in on the map on the right. i think i'm sure many of you come from different backgrounds, and it's a very general way of thinking; right? you identify the scale for the problem at hand. if you're doing literature, you know, you might do close reading focus on individual words and what's going on there, or just the big picture, the big story. in biology, i mean, we're now seeing that some people will do molecular biology, but you have to connect that into a larger bigger picture. there might be a system in biology and psychology and every motive thought, you focus in on individual elements or try to put it together in a big picture.

it wouldn't hurt to think about what's going on in the world today. let's just take a physics example, the easiest. suppose a throw a ball and i want to figure out where the ball lands. i'm in the going to think of the ball in terms of its atomic structure, and i'm not going to worry about the corks, but i'll think about of as a ball, and that works. that's how physics work. you do effective theory without knowing it. he didn't say i'm going to be clever and ignore structures hidden inside. i mean, he just figured out what would happen if you throw a ball and the measurements made at the time would never distinguish the fact it's a ball from the fact it's an atomic structure. it would be ire irrelevant, and now that we know about the underlying structure, we don't use it. if we have atoms, we'll use quantum mechanics, but not to find the trajectory of a ball.

it doesn't make sense. in a sense, boapt theory -- both theories are correct. quantum is the theory, that's what's going on, and in principle, classical physics is an approximation of quantum physics, but it could be creak in the uses you want to do, and there's the moon using classical physics, so it works. it's effective. if you don't actually measure anything that tells you the difference, then you're not going to need to use it, but, of course, the history of physics is making progress, so what happens is you finally come to a point where it breaks down, where you do need something different, and that's how you advance. what happens when you do that is the old theory absorbs into the new theory, it's not necessarily wrong, but it doesn't apply to the entire regime of perimeters you can think about. that's how it works. in this, what's important is stating when you make a

measure. -- measurement. what's the accuracy and what regime does it apply? it's the uncertainty leftover where there's room for something new. if you don't have the measuring tools and you're not looking, you might not care, but at some point, you'll get there, and that's the way physics progresses. think of the physics we do in that context. the scale, distance scale is essential as an organizing tool. it's the way to make calculations. again, you never want cocalculate the tray geek tear of the ball based on physics. you'd never, ever get the answer. so -- the effective theory idea is the key to progress. actually, everyone is using effective theories all the time, just physicists give it a name,

and we know we are using it. it helps. it's a very systematic thing. we can say what the uncertainty is, what that allows, a finite number of parameters, make prodictions within the effective theory and tell when it's going to break down. it's a very systematic way in doing way we all do intuitively. as i said, sometimes the theory on the smaller scale is gone in which case you can derive what's in the effective theory for more fundamental physics and other times it's not, and then you yows work in terms of quantities themselves. always keep the old ideas as long as they are correct. sometimes things could just be wrong, but if you have ideas that have to be published over time making several correct prediction, they are right in a sense, and then you can advance when you find something new and when they cease to apply. in this case, a smaller distance scale. so we said atoms inside a ball,

but, of course, even within the atom, and this is also -- make sure you know what's inside an atom, there's smaller structures. when you probe inside an atom, it's not fundamental. we know it's made out of nuclei with electrons around it, and those nuclei are not fundamental either. they are protons and neutron, and the protons and neutrons are fundamental. they are octobers called quarks that are inside the protons and new trons that are held together through a force known as the strong force, and that's what we have when we have a proton or a neutron. just a quote to point out. when i wrote my first book, i decided to glance through others to see what people do. i looked at one book, and there was funny and it was written in 1947, a good book, but there's a quote in it that's great, and

i'll let you think about it for a minute to see why it's so fantastic. instead of a large number of atoms, we are reft with three essentially different entities, protons, electron, and knew -- neutrinos thus it seems we hit the bottom of which matter is formed. i hope you see the irony. they thought, okay, wref the answer. we found the smallest scale. it's very unlikely, i would say, that we are living at the time when we really got to all the answers and we end. as we develop tools to look inside, we find that there's new structure, and that keeps happening. it would be rather incredible it we were at the bottom, and so i do find it ironic at a time he was so excited about finding the new structure, he dismissed the idea there could be further

structures that we just didn't have the tools yet to find. of course, as we know, i mean not only are there neutrons, but there's quarks inside. quarks are interesting because there's theoretical motivation, but they were verified by experiment. that's the other important thing that gets lost because physics seem remote. it sounds obstruct, we believe when there's a connection between the theory and the experiment, and we have a unifying framework for which we make many predictions that work. that's what the particles of physics does telling you about quarks, the electrons, and the forces of which they interact, and there's many ways it's been tested at a high level of precision. we're looking now to go beyond that. how do we go beyond it? we're on the new energy scale now, looking at something called the large hedge collider, lhc.

large means large, and he was a strong force like protons colliding together to bundle protons at various speeds, and it's colliding them, and that's why the collider. it's not a pretty name, but it is the name, and it's the large hadron collider, the lhc. you have a huge underground tunnel. actually, there's 27 kilometers in circumference with a few rings. the protons are accelerated in excessive waves and then collide together at high energies in the collider. my book i joke that i don't like to use sue perlative, but you're forced to referring to the lhc because it's the highest energy, highest intensity machine, and it's the coldest extended place on earth. it has amazing vacuum, everything about it is reaching extremes to try to get to as high energy and high intensity as we can do with the available

technology. on an industrial scale. i'll show you a little bit about what happens through a video. it comes into the accelerator, goes around rings, the lhc ring, and then the tunnel. this tunnel you can walk in it. i have, you go into the -- here the protons enter a collision region, and around that region, they have experiments, and when the protons collide, they go out through the experiment, and the various layers that as you go out transversely measure various aspect, and so not only is the lhc an amazing machine, but within it, there's amazing detectors. the ones i'm most interested in are known as atlas and cms, general purpose detectors with the idea if there's something new, they'll find it and know what it is. they have as much information

about the particles to measure charge, and energy, and that's what the detectors do. we're excited about what's going on there, and this is the frontier energy scale. #we know about the standard model. we're trying to answer questions that go beyond this model. what are the questions? what do we think we might learn there? well, one of the things that we're pretty sure we will learn is how do particles acquire mass? fundamental elementary particles acquire mass. we just think of thinks having mass, but turns out in the description of particles, if you didn't have the extra mechanism that you might have heard of called the higgs mechanism, you would make nonsensical predictions at high energies. it wouldn't make sense. the theory can't be that simple theory. there that has to be something

more interesting going on, and that's called the higgs mechanism that i won't explain in detail here, but i have a chapter in the book explaning what it means in terms of particles acquiring mass. in addition to that, there's another puzzle, which is, okay, particles get their mass, but why are they are what they are? what sets the scale for the masses? in fact, it's a real puzzle if you just use quantum field theory, which is what we used to combine together specific relativity and quantum mechanics to describe it, which we do and believe it's right, but if you calculated how heavy you think the masses should be, you would find a discrepancy of 16. to make the theory work, it looks like you have to do a fudge or fine tuning as we call it. [laughter] now, i mean i'm glad you laugh at that. we think it's laughable to. we think there's got to be more

interesting structure there, and that more interesting structure is something i talked about in the previous book and it could be something in extension based on semitry known as super semime try, and we could have evidence of that if masses are what they are, there should be testable consequences at the lhc. those are the things we think it will do is one understand the higgs mechanism, what implements it? is there the particle? what is it that gives particles the mass? it seems it's likely to be something rather breasting. rather interesting. we have interesting aspects to tells more about the nature of spate time. the other thing it might do at the large hadron collider is learn about dark matter.

that's not necessarily true, but what it dark matter? it's stuff like we have. it aggregates, it clumps, but it doesn't interact with light. it interacts gravitationally, but not with light, which, of course, makes it hard to see. we call it dark mat e but it's really transparent matter because we see dark thing, they absorb light. dark matter doesn't interact with light at all. that's the distinguishing feature of dark matter. new hampshire, maybe it has -- nonetheless if it has a mass we're talking about that the lhd is exploring, it looks like we might have the right amount of dark matter, and there's experiments looking for that thing, looking for dark matter with the mass being explored at the large hadron collider. it has the potential to tell us quite a bit about the nature that's out there.

it's not just looking for particles, but looking for forces and descriptions that's interesting. what are the fundamental actions that govern the operation of our universe. of course, many of you have also heard about other questions, and i want to emphasize, they are questions that won't necessarily be explored experms, and we don't know how to explore them in most cases, but people nonetheless study through theory, and the question is what would be a consistent theory to combine together quantum mechanics and gravity? now, i say it's a theoretical puzzle for the following reasons. any of the experiments we do we do without answering this question. again, we're going back to the effective field theory idea. street theory is not necessarily any impact on the any experiments we're doing because it's this fundamental underlying structure we're not yet measuring. that means that we can use quantum mechanics. we can use relativity to predict things depending on whether it's

large or small scales. it's only when we get to the very tiny distance scales which is far beyond the centimeters the lhc is exploring. nonetheless, the fact that we don't know how to make predictions there tells us, at least, that there's a theory underlying what we see. there's a puzzle, a question to be answered, but it's not a question that will necessarily have effects at the e peermts we're doing, which, in fact, it's this very invisibility that makes it hard to see, the fact that a theory can't tell the difference between fundamental strings or particles. it's hard to measure, but we can do an experiment and interpret them in terms of our effective theory, which you all understand now.

there could be a final short distance frontier because we explored all the distances. at this point there's a distance scale called the plain scale, and it's often a scale associated with quantum gravity, but we don't know in principle how to go, even with a thought experiment, how do i make a measurement at a scale smaller than this scale, the plank scale? ordinarily when we think of going to small distance scale, we think about high energies. why that? because if you think about a high energy wave, it isolates a lot. there's many oscillations. if there's a short wavelength, you can probe small structure. there's variation on a scale in order to be able to probe that structure. if you had low energy in a big wave length, you wouldn't be able to measure anything within it, so generally, we think that

going to high energy we probe short distance structures. at the plank scale breaking down, and it breaks down for an interesting reason. if you were to go to a high enough energy to be able to problem smaller than the plank scale, you already put so much energy inside such a small scale that you would have a black hole, and you have a black hole and you add more energy, it just gets big and bigger. in principle, we don't know how to study short distances. it's not relevant to anything going on today, but it's very interesting that it seems there's a limit where there could be a limit to where we would talk about the space in conventional terms. completing the story of scale, i should tell you that little nugget. let's go back to what we're doing today. #we know how the standard model works, but we expect there's more that lies beyond. there's questions we don't know answers to necessarily, how to particles acquire mass, why are masses what they are? we hope that by studying at

higher energies, a new regime we have not yet explored, and a greater precision, reducing uncertainty, we'll be able to see telltale signs that tell us what lie beyond the standard model. so effective theories, what's known as the tev scale, the scale that the large hadron collider is exploring. there's electron volts, a unit of energy we choose to use, and maybe there's a more fundamental description or sub structure we have not yet explored. the challenge is to measure precisely enough that we see the effective theory field, and that's when we understand the theory when we understand what its true limits are and reveal a more fundamental dryings or evidence for that -- description or evidence for 245. so, i'm just going to say one near ri i've -- theory i've worked on, but in order to do that, i want to talk

more on scale and give you a picture of an exciting thing we hope to learn at the large hadron collider, and then i'm beginning to go back and tell you why i ended up here. okay. the first question because we're talking about scale, there's an absolute distance scale, and there's general relativity, and before einstein's theory, we talked about energy differences, probably what you learned about in high school, but the absolute value of energy is important because it tells you about the nature of space time, and it tells you about the nature of space time by telling you about the metrics, and so let's think. metric giving meaning to scale. basically, you have a ruler; right? if i say that something is two apart, that wouldn't mean anything. do i mean two miles, two kilometers, two centimeters, what do i mean? if i have a ruler, it establishes units that i can tell you. metrics sort of tells you what the number means in terms of an actual distance.

there's something else going on with metric. the metric tells you about the curvature of space and the ang 8s between things. is there like a sphere? a saddle on a horse? is it just flat like the table top? that's -- it's a very important information. of course, it's very hard to picture the curvature of three dimensional space, so i don't recommend you do that necessarily, but we can think about what curvature means by going down a dimension and two dimensional services because we can embed them and see what they look like so you can see negatively and positively flat surface, and three dimensional space can have curvature which is important because it tells us about the nature of gravity. we can think about particles going through a curved sphais and following the most sufficient path within the curved space and that mimics of

effects of gravity. if i had something coming in, it's naturally attracted to the center. we understand that in warping the space time around the planet, for example. the curvature, basically energy warps the space or giving curve to the space, and that curvature tells you how gravity effects something moving in space time. that's what this is showing. if you had some ball for example, it's going to -- again, it's a two dimensional analogy. it's not really what's going on, but gives you a flavor for what's going on. if something comes through, of course, it's attracted to the center. how attracted it is depends on how heavy it is. if there's a high mass neutron star, it's curved more and has higher gravitational attraction, and if it's a black hole, it could be even more. so the thing i'm going to tell you about briefly and probably a little confusing because i had

to write a whole book to explain it, but just to give you a flavor. what we considered is the idea that there could be not just the three dimensions we know about, but actually an additional dimension of space we don't see. why we don't see it could be many different reasons, but the most intuitive is that it could be very tiny. in this case, it could be so warped we don't see that additional dimension. nonetheless, it could have physical effects on our universe, and it could tell us something very interesting about gravity. it could be that space time itself is watch -- warped or curved in such a way that how you measure things depends on where you are, and that's what i want think about what scale is. things could be heavy so gravity would have a big influence if i'm on what's called the gravity brain here, but moving through the extra dimension, it could be that the scale changes. that's what the metric tells me, and that's what we found.

we just solved the equation of general relativity in this context of an extra dimension beyond what we see and three dmengal worlds at the end of it. the brains at the end, and brain stands for membrane. it's a slower dimensional surface in higher dimensional space, and we live on the weak brain. it looks 3-d to us, but gravity could extend throughout the other dependence. that could explain why masses are what they are. we could be living in the portion of extra space where masses are what they are, and not the much bigger value we calculate in using quantum field theory. it should be confusing. don't feel badly if it's confusing. it's an exciting possibility when we consider the field of extra dimensions. as exotic a and as crazy as the

idea sounds because it answers this question about mass that the large hadron collider is exploring, really have a chance of knowing whether this is right by doing measurements at the large hadron collider even something as exotic as this fourth dimensional theory. this is just to say why do we bother considering extra dimensions in the first place? why have we got there? as long as we're on the spirit of inquiry, babies in cribs explore the two dimensions, but my older sister tried to climb out of the crib because they wanted to explore other dimensions. that's orve it's there, but there could be other dimensions, other dependences we don't see. only going to know about them if we explore them. we adopt know for sure they don't exist. we can only find out if they do by entertaining the possibility they exist and say what would happen if they did. in fact, einstein's theory of

gravity works for any number of dimensions, not just three dimensions of space. we already know how to do the calculation, and it doesn't tell us how many dimensions there are. another reason is string theory. string theory combines quantum mechanics and gravity, but it's only consistent if there's extra dimensions in space. if you're a string theorist, you are forced to consider the possibility there's extra dimensions, but the other reason is the one i just gave you. it has the possibility of explaning connections amongst physical parameters in our universe, and that makes it worth exploring. maybe it's so hard to find the answer. people have been looking for the answer to the question about mass, and smart physicists have been looking for the answer for a few decades now, and we don't know still. there's no theory that's so simple and beautiful, and so it was worth considering a slightly more exotic possibility and telling the experimenters how to look for it. that's the role we play.

if this is the answer, this is what you should find. these experiments at the large hadron collider are tough. it's good to have targets and have what it is they need to look for. this is, again, the idea that gravity could be very strong on the gravity brain and very weak on the weak brain where we live, and you know that because my cousin is there. that's where we live. gravity could be weaker than it is on the gravity brain. here's the experimental signal to show i'm not cheating you. there's part -- particles that could be traveling in the extra dimension. we don't see that dimension. what would we see? particles with properties we know about, but they would seem to have a bigger mass because we interpret the momentum as mass because we don't see the dmemtion. these expermits are looking for particles with properties like what we know about, but they are

heavier. looking for heavier particles. how heavy should they be? again, just the right mass for the large hadron collider to explore because it is answering the questions about particle masses we know about, so in the particular scenario, if it's answering this question, the large hadron collider should find these particles known as kk particles. these are a lot of ideas. that's a lot of stuff. i think for me it was important to say how the more conceptional ideas about scale combined together with what we do all the time when we're doing science. i think it's really important, and maybe we'll show it to be real, and it's certainly the fruit of creative endurance. i'll end the talk about talking about other applications with these ideas in art projects because it was a lot of fun. i think it's a good time to think bows the intersection of

art and science. not all of it is great, not all is terrible, but it's interesting. it absorbs the culture of the time. it's all scientific ideas and it's interesting to do them. i'll briefly mention a gallery show that i co-cure rated. co-cureuated. you either take art and try to make some science thing look artistic or have an artistic idea and say is there science in it? take a theme we both can think about and scale is one of them. i mean, it's very central to the way artists are thinking, and it's very central to the way scientists are thinking, and so what we work for with the los angeles art association, we put out a call, and we asked them to try to incorporate ideas in art

and also what a scientist thinks about. one of the really important ideas is that idea we saw earlier that if you look at small scale, things can look different than on large scales. when i look at the table, i see a table, not atoms, yet if i probed inside, i would see something different. here's a couple samples briefly. one is just looking at the tree itself. that's what barbara did. look at the bark on the right, it doesn't give you the feel of that large tree. it's like the eiffel tower when i started off. i just find this fantastic. they had old books so taking books to scale and carving the pictures, cutting them to become one big thing. you have to thing that's integrated union of all the little pictures. there's individual picture, but then it turns into something

different when all put together, and one more, the it looks like just some pop art thing, but if you zoom in close, which i don't have here, it's pictures of her face, so it looks like someone's staring at you if you look close. it's all integrated from various features. you see something different from the tiny scale, and if you have the resolution to see that, which we don't in this light, unfortunately, and there's other scales and pieces of art, too, that were fantastic. the other thing i want to tell you about is what we call the projective opera that we had -- hang on. okay, so when i wrote my first book "war passages" it was an extra dimension of space. he read it, and he was a composer working at air com, and he wanted to do something with the intersection of art and science and use science as

innovation and he liked the idea of working with this physical theory, and you know, i just wrote this book, and i tried hard to organize ideas, and it was such a liberating thought to be able to say you can have many different voices, music, art, words, and just try to just give an idea. you're not teaching a lesson, but to try to give an idea of what physics is about, but also as important to me is why are we doing this? why explore? systematic do we think -- why do we think there's more out there? we had this opera at the center, and it was this question of the difference between someone who thinks they have all the answers, who lives in a 3-d world and another who thinks there's more, who couldn't finish the music and went out to the 3-d world. i'll just end by playing this because it's actually kind of fun.

so it was actually a stage reading, and they moved around a little, and she's able to explore the extra dimension, and he is in the lower dimensional world, and her voice is different than his, and that's what he wanted to explore, be able to go and explore, and he did this, he has a bridge image to use, and so the tone is really in the lower dimensional world, and she impose out to ex-- goes out to explore, and he doesn't understand why she would want to do that. it's about experiments and the difference of someone who can go out and explore someone and another who stays home seeing things indirectly, and how can they piece that together to get more information and believe it when they can't go and explore. ..

to put together the story. fcc, she was visibly explained this extra dimension he can't get to. he's just home. i may actually want to be equation. i was uncomfortable, says that if you want to pick out

equations, i'll put it in there. so he picked out which one he wanted. so actually one of the things that's interesting about that is a lot of the time when you see me sick about scientists, they rarely actually show them doing science. so it was fun to actually have, even an abstract way, an idea of what the science is that is going on. so i'll just conclude, i will let it play out by saying that i think it's pretty clear and this is really one thing i like to get across. why do you think there is more there? because every time with what we find more there. it would be unlikely that there isn't. we have these definite questions that we know there should be answers to. it's a very exciting time because the hydrant collator is his work on exploring energies.

dark matter science is improving or trying to fit it all together and that's what makes it so exciting. so this picture one time i saw them as there. i like it because it embraces the dimension world and this rich three-dimensional world that could be out of there and this rich world that was fair. and actually did not the time, but the pictures that really the château de leon, which is near the collator, so it seemed appropriate. i will just let it play out and maybe you can stop it and say thank you. [applause] >> so, thank you, lisa. [inaudible] >> tanks, lisa.

in a recent new scientist, lisa grossman talks about the small unexplored range at the lac between 1:15 and 1:45. even electron volts. >> you're talking about the hague searcher clicks >> takes turns out not to be there, does that affect your thoughts on a theory with an extra dimension or two? >> well, i tried to separate out these issues. there's two issues going on. one is what is the critical mass? one thing that is interesting -- the leverage is focused on this issue first. what does it mean? right now people are worried really think they were getting worried because her cozy night on the mass range. that's what the large hedge on collator is designed to do. this has only one mass if it is out there and it's supposed to find out what it is. if you have people before they

turn on the large hydronic collator what they thought tenacity, most thought would be of value not yet tested. without any additional data, they would've said, so if you really believed i was right and you wouldn't be at all disturbed now. you say this is not the mass i thought it should be and i haven't explored it yet. and so we have experiments, no one really knows the answers. so you can say, i think the mass might be 116 ged, but you know, i could be wrong as it may be i'll feel safer america be more values. the fact is a lot of those values are now not possible. so it is out in another region we think is interesting. over the course of the next year we might actually know the answer to whether the conventional, the simplest convention of the hague since they are. why are we doing a search? we don't actually know even if the higgs mechanism that's right, we don't know what it is

that implements that mechanism. it could be the simplest model that gives predictions we can really know very well because they higgs interacts with massive in its interaction is very precisely with heavier particles because they have more mass. but it could be something a little more settled that has to do with underlying this mechanism. if that is the case, it's not clear that the sophia would be testing it. it could be something different or a bit heavier and actually has stronger interaction. so i view it that we are learning about the nature of what hicks could be. right now we could say -- i could pretend that we don't find it be and what it is that can give particles have mass. no one has an answer to it. i think a lot of people really think the higgs mechanism is ray. but the question is what it is precisely. >> if i can ask another one, in

the future if at some point the lhc will probably run out of things to look for, what will be the argument for building a later excelerator? >> okay so right now i myself would feel much more sanguine that would appeal to answer all these questions about the extra dimensions if we had three times the energy. i mean, it's a very rough argument. we know basically everything should appear. press as theorists, it's sort of the same theory. from experimenters point of view coming, from her machine we can definitely find that come into a regime we don't have any hope at all. the large hydronic collator will do a lot of exploration, but it's not clear they will actually explore everything because you need a lot of energy.

so the large hydronic collator when we started making that 25 years ago. since then, we've learned a lot that things are heavier than people might have guessed in the theater and that they really could be. the real answers might be higher energy. all of the desert of the same generation and it just technology doesn't talk a lot about in my book. it is the tunnel that existed, that determined that the energy would be for the large hydronic collator, consistent with magnets had to keep protons rotating around in those rings. but the sse, they said that is the energy based on theory? what is the energy we really would like to study? they said were going to build a ring that's big enough with existing to get there. so it was a compromise between what we wanted to do and what we could do with technology. and so, that is the argument that there could be very

exciting things right around the corner. >> i have a hard time conceptualizing anything small or short as 10 to the minus 17410 to the minus 19, so what is a physicist and she's looking at when something is so small and dimension? >> so i guess the first thing is let's stop using the word look because we are not looking. we are not seen with our eyes. we are making indirect measurements that tosa properties are what's there so we can conceptualize and work it out mathematically. i can describe it in words, but that is different from cnet. a lot of people tend to think is silly to understanding, if you see it. i'm very happy to just have everything be consistent and understatement to the fact that their predictions outwork an even worse to describe it.

>> the average person is going to think -- >> well, you're wearing glasses, so you're actually seeing someone indirectly. the question is where you draw the line quite you're talking me and to a microphone. so we're used to that we think. but it doesn't mean it's not real. it just means we have to be careful when we interpret it. as we know now and understand biology better and better, our eye on certain some sense a form of type algae, too. so we think of it as something much is happening in getting processed by by our brain. some of its deceptive in fact. so again, our intuition is guided by what we see them as we try to get at the beginning. there is a lot of stuff out there that's real, that we just don't have our intuition for her.

>> high, as the mother of my daughter who is an engineer and grandmother of three daughters, wendy sardi expressed an interest in being a scientist, could you speak to women in the field of science. are they going into that field in larger numbers? >> i think they are your family. >> s. president obama says, what do you think is going to be the outcome if we fail to do more investment in education and science as well as suggest research and science is a country? >> well, that's an easy question to answer. we couldn't even figure it out scientifically because we can look around the globe and see what happens in this country is that they don't invest in science and education? most of us would not like those results. so i don't think we even have to

do that. in many cases they can do the measurements and see what happens. i think it's incredibly important we do that. i think there are more. i think in physics it still hasn't changed is not just in some other field. and i don't have a great answer to why that is. i didn't know i wasn't supposed to do it. so i think to the extent that people don't know they're supposed to do it that's very hopeful. as long as you're not properly socialized to do really well. i don't really have an answer. >> what would you say encourage you to go? >> i liked it. i was good at it and i liked it. but they said, i didn't know i wasn't supposed to do it, so i did it. >> t.j. maxx. >> hi, i was just wondering, has there been anything that the

lhc, anything new that you know now since it started working? >> mostly what we knows a lot of things are wrong. and this is important because when you do experiments, they really do have to be relative. even galileo knew when he first started doing experiments that you can verify a theory, but it's important to progress as ruling out theories. in some cases it's actually without ideas in some cases it will so various regimes of parameters, massive, interaction strengths. but all that is progress because it is telling you can't get away with just anything at all. so we know a lot more. it should be borne in mind people don't all seem to it. it's not running at full energy and full intensity. it's going to close down for a year or so. so right now, we are not yet at the energies we were completely confident. it's actually remarkable how much it is done given the energy that it has given the way it's

going. the fact i will deal to cover the entire regime is a real -- at least as a possibility is really a surprise in some ways. it's doing incredibly well. one is a higher energy, will it