Meine Damen und Herren, Ladies and Gentlemen:
Today I'm going to tell you something different. Not about sea level, not about new instruments, not about a new solution of an old equation that you know more about than me. I'm going to tell you how it was to be a student forty years ago and you may relate your experience right now to the things I am going to tell you. I could start "once upon a time", but I don't want to do that because I don't want to tell you a fairy tale. I could also tell you about the "good, old time", but I think the term "good, old time" is an illusion. The "good, old time" is when you're young and you're vigorous, when you have alot of energy, when you have little responsibilities and few obligations. And, by the way, your "good, old time" may be right now.
There is of course a reason for giving that talk. And, the reason is that one year ago, I got on a committee of NOAA that would decide, and subsequently oversee, how NOAA is structuring its program on Climate and Global Change. Here we come to change. Meanwhile that panel has met a few times, and there's also a corresponding activity going on in NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and we were about to distribute a budget of $50M to various NOAA activities. A few days ago, the budget allocation came through and it was only $9M. But nonetheless, the effort was worthwhile and it will continue, the hope is that this program of global change will eventually get an annual budget in the order of $200M. After the first few sessions, I was somewhat disappointed, because all the discussion in the panel was about climate and not about global change and if I think about it, and I believe, if you are thinking of global change, then you are thinking of pollution, of deforestation, of shortages in water, and first of all, of course, of population explosion. And I think this is the worst of all problems, and for that reason I'd like to show you here the world population.
In 1925, when I was born, we had less than 2 billion people on this earth, and during the short time of my life so far, a little over 60 years, we have increased to 5 billion, a factor of 2.5. Now this is global change, please remember that. I think climate change is a very minor part of global change, probably rather insignificant.
Global change, of course, caused me to think a little bit about change and what change is. How do we recognize change? The mathematician will of course tell you that it is a linear trend and that's quite correct, and that's the way we recognize it. Now, the question is how soon do you observe change? And, I found out in discussion with people, that young people don't recognize change; they don't see anything changing because they are in the process of learning. First, they go to elementary school, then to high school, then they get the first time out of their home town, then they make the first trip to a foreign country, then they go to university. It's always a learning process, it's something new; it is not change. So they don't really have, when you talk to young people, a concept of what is changing because they have no experience of it, and I think it is only after a while when you are settling into a behavioral pattern, get a job and have a family that you start to perceive the subject of change, that you really see how things do change. When you come back the first time into your childhood town, where you went to elementary school, then you see change.
Now, of course that brings me to another very important aspect and this is the physics of change and in particular the second law of thermodynamics. Shall I say, the second law of thermodynamics doesn't tell you very much specifically, but it tells you things very generally, it doesn't tell you how the apple falls to the ground, or how an airplane flies. It tells you other things. First of all, we age, that means time moves only in one direction. That's very fundamental, we believe we know it, but I think it is a most important thing. It tells you also that things deteriorate, are subject to dissipation and friction, that is the second law of thermodynamics. Things go down the drain! On the positive side, we must mention that things develop and that is what biologists know under the term - evolution. And I wonder whether biologists have made the connection between the second law of thermodynamics and Darwin's theory of evolution. There should be a very, very strong link. Evolution is obviously a one-way street, since time goes only that way. So change is a necessary part of our environment, we cannot avoid it. The second law of thermodynamics tells you exactly that the state of affairs tomorrow will be different from the state of affairs today and it goes only in one and only one direction.
I will tell you now after this rather lengthy introduction, how it was to be a student some forty years ago. When I was fourteen, I knew exactly what I would be and what I would be doing. I wanted to become a naval architect and I wanted to design aircraft carriers. It was as clear as anything. It didn't happen that way. Since my good mother was a widow, my father died when I was four years old, and she was not of very great means, I chose the simple way out. I enlisted with the Navy and hoped that the Navy would send me to university where I would study shipbuilding and then design the aircraft carriers. By the way and to mention it, my mother never implanted the idea into my mind that women are inferior to men, I must say. By the time I went to high school and when I was seventeen years old, we were called to the Navy before we got our high school certificate and so I didn't have to make final examinations in high school, and I will come back to the problem of examinations later on. We were given a little piece of paper that said you have passed your high school obligations and the teachers thought, "Well, most of them aren't going to come back anyway". So this was it. And so let me skip a little bit of time and tell you what happened in 1945 after the war.
In late fall of that year, many German universities started to open up their doors again. And we as young people were running up and down the Rhine searching for admission to one or the other university because we wanted to get in. So I traveled from Heidelberg to Frankfurt to Giessen to Marburg to Gottingen and back down to Karlsruhe and Darmstadt to find an admission at a University. By that time, I knew that aircraft carriers were out, so I changed my plans and I wanted to study harbor engineering or waterway engineering or something like that. In Germany, there are the known universities and there are what we call "technical" universities that in earlier times were called "technical high schools". But I wasn't successful to get into Karlsruhe or Darmstadt, but I was admitted in Marburg. Now how did this happen? Well, you went to the registrar at that time and said you wanted to study and you showed them the little slip that I had from high school telling them that I had passed high school and he would say "Yes, what do you want to study?" and I said "Mathematics and physics" and he gave me the names of two professors I had to see. I went to these two professors and they asked me in about fifteen minutes a few questions and they found that I should be admitted. A very subjective process.
When it comes to describe a university at that time in Germany, you should know that the little town of Marburg had 30,000 inhabitants before the war, and right after the war, it had about 60,000, of course, swelled by all the refugees from the east. And the town of 60,000 had a university of 3,000 students. Three thousand was a full size university at that time. The University at that time had 5 faculties -- Theology, Philosophy (what you know as Arts and Sciences), Medicine, Law and Economics. People who wanted to become elementary school teachers, accountants, nurses and so on, did not go to university. They went to professional schools that gave them their education in that particular profession. Only students who really wanted to make an M.D., Ph.D. or doctor of law, or so went to a university. When you sign up you get what is called a study book. Here's the study book that I got, and you go to the registrar and you enter the classes you want to take and you pay your fees. In my first year, I paid 180 marks; that doesn't tell you much. I could live at that time under rough conditions for about 150 marks a month so you paid for your university tuition about one month's worth of your living expenses per semester.
Now, I will show you what I signed up for. I copied that from the study book today, put it in a word processor and I thought I had to show it to you. The table gives you an idea of the courses I took, and you see that all the same things that you have now were offered then. The first was the Winter semester in 1945-46. And you see, I took what one usually does, these are the class hours and these are the laboratories attached to it. And this was all that was offered. Next came the Summer semester 1946 and you will see the increasing number of courses reflecting the increasing offers and you may think how in the world can you get 37 hours of commitment in a week. Well, easy enough. First of all, the week was 6 days long so the physics lab was all of Saturday. And on Wednesday there were two other labs; Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday were the classes and you went to every one. But this is not the real difference, the real difference is that you don't get any grades. You don't have any examinations. I have never in my whole university career made an examination except the one for my Ph.D. And that gives you the freedom to learn, whenever you feel to learn, whenever you like to learn, whenever you don't. This is a big difference, a fundamental difference, I would say, to the system all of you are used to. You have the complete freedom not to go to the class because you don't ask for a grade. All that you get is a signature from your professor at the beginning and a signature at the end. And they willingly give that, no problem. You see that in the first year of my studies, it was essentially all mathematics and physics; I took many courses that were way over my head and I think these were the most valuable courses I ever took. Because I learned something about what I might learn later on, it gave me ideas which way I really should go or not. Why not listen to something you don't understand about atomic physics if it makes you interested in the subject? I think there's nothing wrong with that. Now, let us continue.
All the time I was studying physics and mathematics during 1946, I was really looking for something different and you see that I started to become interested in climatology and geography. I took a few classes and in doing so, I found that a field called meteorology existed and by reading a few text books on meteorology I discovered oceanography. That was about in 1947.
Now I must tell you a little story, before I go on to speak more about oceanography. Of course, the University had second thoughts about our ability and about having been given a little slip which said you passed high school, and so they said: "Well, everybody in the natural sciences has to take a course in German literature," and everybody in the fine arts had to take something in the sciences like Ocean 201. So, I had to go to a seminar in German literature and that was about an obscure novelist. We were supposed to read about a dozen of his novels. And when it came to examination time, I had read exactly none, and that was of course a disadvantage because there were twelve of us students sitting around the table with the instructor in the middle and he started with the first one and asked him about the first novel, and the second one about the second novel, the third one about the third novel. I was sitting in the middle and I got itchy. So, I said "Well, attack is the best defense", I interrupted and discussed with him the ethics of the knights for a while, a good discussion, and then he went to the fourth, the fifth, and skipped me. It was all done. See, this is the way you can pass. I finally got a little slip, and it said "good" and that was it.
So, you may say that I did not study seriously. Yes, of course we were studying at the time, or I was studying, I became more interested in other subjects and so I started to study oceanography. There were nice books like "Dynamic Oceanography" by Defant that came out just a few years before the war and Ekman's Theory and similar things. They were all in the library and I really got interested in oceanography.
There's one other item, that I'd like to tell you about. There were of course a number of student clubs that were springing up and I happened to join one about German-Canadian things probably because there were a few nice girls there, but that may not have been the only reason. And we got into correspondence with a few Canadians, and these people asked us what we would like to have, and it was just the time when the Bible of Oceanography, "The Oceans" by Sverdrup, Johnson and Fleming, came out published in 1946 and so I asked them for a copy of it and this book arrived in Marburg one day from a gentleman, Mr. Lawrence in Saskatchewan. And I still have it here. And that was before I even started to become an oceanographer. So this is the way it went. Look through that Study Book, you will see that you basically find all the courses that belong to a mathematics/physics curriculum and you will be wondering that in the second year I was already taking many advanced courses at a very, very rapid rate. Of course, the reason is that you don't have to go to exams. You can absorb all that and you can study the way you wish to study and not be forced into a very rigid curriculum and into working for examinations. In the last semester at Marburg, which was the fifth one, I took a little bit more of geography and some other things that related to it before I went to Kiel. Now, actually in the summer of 1947, I went up to Kiel, and in Kiel, on the Baltic, when I was looking for the Institute of Meereskunde, I came up to a little villa and the little villa was the Institute of Geology, and it also housed the Institute for Meereskunde, which actually was Professor Wüst's little apartment, just under the roof.
When he let me in, I told him my story, that I wanted to study oceanography. He just had a little bedroom, a little study, and a small kitchen and that was the whole institute in 1947. And after I told him my story, he said, "Oh, how nice, now I have a student." He arranged for a student exchange, at that time one could do that, one could switch admission places, and I went from Marburg up to Kiel the following summer. Now if you think of the university there, an institute was the same as a department here. It is called institute and at my time, when I arrived in 1948, there were 4 professors: Wüst was the physical oceanographer; Hoffman was a botanist; Friedrich, a zoologist; Kandler, a fishery biologist. Then we had one docent, what you would call here an associate professor, and that was Krey and he was a chemist, and we had one assistant which you would call an assistant professor, and he was a meteorologist. And there were about 4 or 5 students. Well, that was in 1948, of course. Other things were a little different too: On the door of your professor, you would see a sign that said "Visiting Hours - Thursday, 11:00 - 12:00". The rest of the week, no way, unless he calls you. Of course, when you arrive at the new institute, you start to continue your curriculum and I will show you what I took then. And you will see a big change. Of course I took all the things that are familiar to you, that is the sixth semester, Summer `48, you see in my Study Book the Physics of the Ocean, Physical Oceanography, Meteorology, Zooplankton, Fishery Biology. There were 4 professors and you went to every ones' lectures. And, particularly if the lectures were only 1 hour. Of course, they are only one hour long if you only have two students. So, then you have Resources of the Sea, Limnology, Ocean Colloquium, and I took some Geography because I was still interested in that subject in many ways. And then comes the winter semester, apparently nobody wanted to teach very much and what you see in the Study Book was all that was offered and that you could take.
And then comes the next step in the progress as a student. One day you have to go up to your professor and ask whether you may become a doctoral candidate. And what usually happened is that the good, old man will look at your study book, open it, look through and will say "Oh, I think you should take this and that and in a year, come again". That can happen, happens very often. It is in some way or another, a rather arbitrary decision because if he doesn't take you, you'd better go to another university. There's no way you can complain. If he doesn't like you, you'd better move on and find the next one who might take you.
But, I was accepted and Wüst being very pragmatic, told me "Well, we have to find a subject for your thesis". He said, "This is easy". During the war, the people at the German Hydrographic Institute were designing instruments to measure light in the ocean. They wanted to design mines that would be triggered by the shadow of a ship. Of course, the mines would be triggered by the shadows of the clouds too. Anyway, a fair amount of research was being done and instruments were developed to measure light in the sea, sunlight as well as the transparency of the water. And Wüst told me that the German Hydrographic Institute would loan us one of these instruments and I could take that instrument and go out to sea and measure. And there's an old rule "If you measure more often and more frequently in time and space, you are bound to discover something new -- basic law of science". He was very pragmatic about it and he said "Well, Dr. Krey, who is a chemist in the Institute and has worked with these instruments will explain how to use them." So, I went to Krey and Krey gave me a 2-hour lecture on colloid chemistry of which I didn't have the slightest idea. He gave me also 3 books, each one bigger than a telephone book, and I walked out of his office somewhat depressed. But I took rapid action, I put these 3 big books in the lowest drawer of my desk and I never opened them until after I had my Ph.D. And I think that was a good move, because the whole thing would have sidetracked me. I did not want to know the chemistry of the dirt in the ocean, but I wanted to know how the dirt behaves in the ocean environment.
So, Wüst arranged for me to go to a light vessel that is anchored at Fehmarn Belt, that's a strait between Germany and Denmark, which has very strong currents, a very strong thermohaline structure and there was a light vessel anchored in about 30m of water. This place of the ocean is unique, there is no doubt. At the surface, you have water of 10 per mil, in the lower 10 meters, of 25 per mil. At the surface the temperature's 15 degrees and in the lower layer 4 degrees. The upper layer moves with 2 knots one way, the lower with 1 knot the other way. So this is quite a structure.
And there was a light vessel sitting and since decades before the war, light vessels in Danish waters, Germany, England and so on had taken daily observations of temperature and salinity, sometimes of currents, and a huge observational material was available. But, the old story, you measure more closely in time and space and you will find something new. So we measured every 4 hours, and every meter instead of every five. And we had a new instrument, the instrument that would measure the transparency of the water. It was quite a big piece of equipment and we rigged up the winch on the light vessel so that actually one man could operate it, I could myself operate the whole thing slowly up and down. And I was reading a little voltmeter every meter of depth as the meter wheel was ticking away and made my observations. I did that for 4 weeks, came back, evaluated, and went out a second time. I went to other light vessels, together with a biology student, Max Gilbrecht and he was studying detritus in the sea by means of an inverted microscope and he was counting out and found out that most of the stuff is dirt and not life, that wasn't known at that time. And we tried to put together counts of the particles, counts of the plankton with the vertical distribution of turbidity, and we found that in this rapidly moving current system there were water bodies that were only a few miles long, a few meters high, that were rushing by --clear water, turbid water, clear water again -- and so on. We observed that storms would stir up the dirt into the water column and that the settling would happen in the discontinuity layer, and all such things. It was a rather exciting time.
Instruments were, of course, a problem at that time. Have you ever had a sensitive voltmeter, an ordinary primitive voltmeter, and tried to read its needle on a moving boat? -- it's impossible. We didn't have digital displays. And we tried to get companies to design instruments that would work at sea. I remember one case where an engineering company from Hamburg said they had the right instrument. It was a big machine that was writing with a stylus on wax paper, giving a continuous record, and the stylus was held by fist-sized magnets so that it wouldn't move too much. It was very hard to govern that stylus with an electronic tube amplifier, and very primitive by our standards. And I remember they tried it out in the lab, decided it works perfectly until we took them out into 15-foot waves in a small research vessel that rolled heavily, and they were totally seasick. Four weeks later, we had a working instrument. That gave them a good lesson; they knew then what the environment for this instrument really is.
A few years later, I was in the German Hydrographic Institute and I shared an office with an old captain who was doing time-stepping of differential equations on a hand calculator with ten-digits turning a handle at each time-step. And he used the old method by Defant -- time-stepping of tides in tidal estuaries. And he was grinding out differential equation, time-stepping, delta-t and all on a mechanical calculator. You don't really know what you have with your computer systems.
Now, on the matter of publications. When I was a student, every few months a journal came in. It was very exciting to see, for instance, Stommel's theory of 1946 on the general ocean circulation and other things. But it came in at such a slow rate, that I as a student was reading every paper in oceanography that was being published. Today you can read perhaps 2% in your particular field. At that time, you did read everything that was published. The Journal of Marine Research came out every 4 months or so and there was of course the German Hydrographic Journal, there was a British journal, there was the Journal de Conseil from Copenhagen, this was all that there was. Now, of course we have the information explosion. How much can you possibly read? I don't know.
I always admired Wüst. When you came to him and talked about something -- Indian Ocean, south of Madagascar, "Oh yeah", he would say and would pull out the drawer in his desk in which he had cards, file cards, in which all the deep hydrographic stations ever taken in the world were registered. He would say "Oh, this is the station south of Madagascar". That was it and he had it. There were only about 600 to 800 deep stations around the world, and he knew every one and could dig it out of the file. So, one might say with fewer data, more thought was probably devoted to the interpretation of the data and more care was given to make data valid and to get something out of them, to make a real effort to interpret the data. Today, if somebody gets a thousand XBTs in the Pacific in a month, he says "Oh, that's not enough, I should have 4,000". And he doesn't make an effort to get something out of the thousand first; that's very often the case.
I told you already a little bit of what I did for my Ph.D., namely the turbidity clouds, the time changes, the rate at which dirt was stirred up by storms from the bottom, the rate at which it settled, the fact that it didn't settle through the thermocline, and such things. The relationship between the dirt and the biology in cooperation with the other student. Now, comes the next step, and like you do it, you would write a Ph.D. thesis that has to go through the committee. The committee at that time consisted of three professors so I had Wüst for oceanography, I had a physics professor and a mathematics professor. That was a standard at that time. You had to have 3 subjects and they gave you about an hour of examination each, after they had approved your thesis. And when it was over, you had your Ph.D. and were ready to be released to the world. Now you see, that in my case, from high school or from entering the university to the Ph.D., it was 5 years and that was nothing unusual at this time. That's not an unusual case, I'd like to emphasize that. I have the feeling that today we are going too slowly. The demands on the student are just too big. I don't think we get students that are any brighter when we keep them three years longer. They probably can acquire some of the knowledge or some skills later on in their profession. They need to learn how to do it, how to think, how to formulate scientific problems. They don't have to solve all the problems before their Ph.D. Now, I think I'll tell you a little bit more, even if I go over the time here for a few minutes.
It was after my Ph.D., that I was of course looking for a job. Looking for a job is difficult, you can be lucky, or not be lucky. I was lucky because the father of my best friend during the war was the Director of the German Hydrographic Institute. But it was not that easy; German bureaucracy was very tight. But there was another twist: my first employer was Her Majesty the Queen. How did it happen? After the war, a British admiral by the name of Carruthers was put in charge of securing all the oceanographic information that was available in Germany. And of course, in order to do that, he needed a German assistant and that assistant was Dietrich, a well-known name. Dietrich was working with Carruthers for about 4 or 5 years, from 1946 about to 1950 and at that time Dietrich got a university position. But the position at the British Navy under Her Majesty the Queen was still open for half a year and so I, as the youngest oceanographer was pushed into that position. I had to supervise in some way under the hands of Admiral Carruthers, the German oceanography and I had a nice office one floor above the Director of the German Hydrographic Institute who was father of my best friend. And occasionally the phone would ring and he would say "Herr Wyrtki, please come down you have to sign something on behalf of Her Majesty". So that was my first job in oceanography. And after the six months, the funds that were allocated for that position ran out. I succeeded in getting a post-doctoral fellowship from what you would call the National Science Foundation and I worked there for 3 years as a post-doc in Kiel, studying the water exchange between the Baltic and the North Sea and some related problems.
Now, let me close and give you a little summary of what I have been talking today. First of all, we started with the problem of change. I don't think the students have changed. Many other things have changed. The university environment has changed. And most of all, the universities are, what I think, too large. We are withdrawing into a sphere in which we are really only concerned about our own institute, no longer with the university. I remember the time in Marburg with 3,000 students, there was in one semester a professor of philosophy and she gave an introduction to philosophy that had to be given twice -- Monday and Tuesday -- from 8:00 - 10:00 in the evening in the biggest auditorium because there were a thousand students in each session that wanted to hear her. And afterward, after her lectures, we went to the next wine cellar or beer cellar and you had a night-long discussion. There was another year, in which a young associate professor gave a lecture with the title "The Struggle for God in German Literature". And it was so fascinating that again every student at the university was there from 8:00 - 10:00 in the evening. This is something that I feel is a little bit missing today.
On the other hand, you have enormous advantages over what we had. The first thing I want to mention are computers. I think your ability to handle problems, data crunching, data processing and mathematics, in general, is probably -- if I should give an estimate -- increased by three orders of magnitude. If it comes to instrumentation, that means to the precision and to the value that you get out of measurements, to the ease of effort, then I would say that probably you have an improvement of one and a half orders of magnitude in this short time-span of forty years. When it comes to the availability of data, things have totally changed; we are accumulating data whether this is deep ocean drilling, or XBT surveys, or satellite pictures, at such an enormous rate that at my time we couldn't even dream about it.
Last but not least, I think on the negative side is the information explosion. You're creating more and more specialists. I still knew a lot about the North Sea herring at the time I was a student, though we didn't know much about the climate or the chemistry of the world as a whole. It was definitely an exciting time and I enjoyed it very much. But on the other hand, I must say, with the prospect of global change, I don't really envy you.
