Knowing vs. Seeing: Philosophy and Experience Robert E. Pollack Let me begin with a quotation from Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. It poses the problem I wish to discuss: How may one keep imagination, will, and intellect aligned? This is from a reading in a Colloquium Amy and I are taking this semester at the Heyman Center. … to command that the very professors of astronomy themselves see to the refutation of their own observations and proofs … is to enjoin something that lies beyond any possibility of accomplishment. … Before this could be done they would have to be taught how to make one mental faculty command another, and the inferior powers the superior, so that the imagination and the will might be forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands. What do we do when the will and imagination are being forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary tells us, in his 1962 book on the Prophets: Our sight is suffused with knowing, instead of feeling painfully the lack of knowing what we see. The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know. I arrived at Columbia for the first time almost exactly sixty years ago, when I came in from Coney Island's Stillwell Avenue station by subway for my interview in Hamilton Hall. I entered the dorms as a first‐year student—no, freshman—in the fall of 1957, and graduated fifty‐five years ago, a middling member of the class of 1961. That means my fifty‐fifth reunion will be this June, and it also means that I have spent part or all of seven decades here. Tonight, I would like to take your time consider the matters of how one can avoid simply seeing what one knows; and of how, not always but now and then, I have been able to know what I saw, in those very different decades of my life. So here is one story for each my seven decades here, and then a story at the end that speaks to the future in an unexpected way. If you'll have the patience to see where that story takes us, I know you'll have a lot to tell me when I am done. The 1950s I am a sophomore, a physics major, working in the Physics Department. The laboratory I work in is directed by Charles Townes, and he in turn is part of the intellectual world created in Pupin by Isidore Rabi. So when I am not in class or in my room in Hartley, I am in a laboratory on the 8th floor of Pupin. My research advisor is a graduate student recently arrived from City College, Arno Penzias. Our work involves the newly invented technology of coherent microwave radiation, precursor to the laser. Shades of Galileo, we are building antennas capable of picking up very low levels of microwave and infrared radiations from the moons of Jupiter. Penzias has been allowed by Townes to hire me on a Defense Department grant to the laboratory. The previous year the United States and the Soviet Union had initiated a thaw in relations. That led to, among other things, an exchange program between the Schools of Journalism at Columbia and Moscow University. A visiting Journalism student from Moscow, Oleg Kalugin, is given a tour through our laboratories by the University. I am very impressed to meet him; my parents are hard leftists, and in my house, nothing since the fall of Nazi Germany had made any difference to them in their support of the Soviet Union. I even invite him to visit my parents. He does. Later that semester Kalugin finds me and asks me to have a cup of coffee with him. He tells me that my father has told him that I would be glad to share the details of my laboratory's work with him, because he—my father—very much wants me to do that. First I see what I know: I know my father has put me in a spot...