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Page 259
then you show the reason it worked out that way, again, almost as if it were a mystery story.
A.: Well, now, I'm glad you said that, because this is not something I have myself spent time thinking of, but I think you're right now that you present it. The way I almost invariably explain anything is historically. I start at the beginning and carefully describe how various people have added elements of knowledge to a particular problem and the way I explain it to myself is that it's important people understand how a problem is solved and exactly the way it was indeed solved, rather than have them think that scientific knowledge is something handed down from Sinai. Furthermore, the easiest way of making sense out of it is to follow the path of what actually happened, because you follow that path along the line of gradual elimination, and there is probably no alternate path that is as illuminating. But that invariably means the unspoken question is how was this discovered? How was this problem solved? And, in fact, in the essay I have most recently written, which is about the neutrino emissions by the sun, I start off saying that I always begin at the beginning and this sometimes annoys my editors but I have written a book on the neutrino in which before I ever said a word about the neutrino I carefully described how the concept of natural laws of conservation were worked out, the significance of it, the apparent violation of no less than three of those laws. The necessity of inventing a particle that could save all three of those laws, and the fact that you could save all three with a single particle, is a very strong suggestion that the particle did in fact exist. And it wasn't until the book was exactly half over that I got to the point where I introduced the particle. And so chapter 7 was entitled "Enter the Neutrino." And Walter Bradbury wrote in the margin "at last." And yet I wouldn't have dreamed of doing it any other way, because it would have spoiled the suspense. In fact, as I said in my autobiography, my dissertation was spoiled for me, absolutely spoiled for me, because my professor insisted I explain what the symbol M stood for, despite the fact that I told him it would spoil the suspense.
Gunn: To go back for a minute to psychohistory, I noticed something in your autobiography that perhaps you may or may not have been aware of the fact that there was a great deal of commentary, kind of footnoted commentary, which suggests a belief in determinism. You make continual references to the fact that as the boy was, so is the man, that "I was imprinted by this at an early age," "because I had to eat hurriedly as a youngster, now I still eat hurriedly," "because I did things that way then, I do them this way now" I wonder if you feel

 
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