Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to welcome you all to the 2020 Owen Harry's lecture. I'm Michael Fully Love, the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute and this year's lecture will be delivered by one of the world's most influential political scientists, Dr Francis Fukuyama. This event is part of the Long Distance Lowy Institute, which is how we have been communicating our content and analysis online while we're unable to do it in person. For today's event, we're experimenting with a new format. This is a hybrid event. Dr Fukuyama is joining us from Palo Alto in California. I'm here at the Institute's headquarters on Blyth Street in Sydney with a small COVID safe audience and of course most of our guests are joining us online via Zoom. So a warm welcome to everybody in the room and everyone dialing in from Australia and overseas, including several Lowy Institute board members. Ladies and gentlemen, our friend Owen Harry's passed away in June this year. Owen was a giant of the foreign policy world. In Australia he was an academic, a trusted Prime Ministeral Advisor and our Ambassador to UNESCO. He also spent nearly two decades on the great stage of Washington, DC as the founding editor of the National Interest. For those of us who are starting our careers at the newly established Lowy Institute in the early 2000s, it was our good fortune that Owen and his wife Dorothy decided to retire to Sydney. For many of us, Owen became a friend, a colleague and a mentor. This was during the Iraq War and I was impressed by the realism of Owen's views at a time of American hubris. The same principles that informed his foreign policy thinking, self-control, discrimination and understatement also marked his writing style and I learned from this too, less is more. Finally, I admired Owen's ambition. This Welsh-born Australian had the imagination and chutzpah to believe he could influence the international relations of the most important country in history. Owen always encouraged me to address big central issues in my writing rather than small, marginal ones. If you're going swimming, he often reminded me, swim in the deep water, not the shallows. And when I was appointed director of the Institute in 2012, I recommended to the board that we establish an annual Owen-Harry's lecture on the practice of geopolitics. The Harry's lecture has now been given by many important figures, including the American diplomat Kurt Campbell, one of the authors of the Pivot to Asia, Steve Hadley, National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Ambassador Shyam Saran, the former head of the Indian Foreign Ministry, and Jean-Divide Lavite, the French diplomat and former advisor to three presidents of France. And in the past two years, our Harry's lecturers have been American officials associated with President-Elect Joe Biden. In 2017, it was Jake Sullivan, who was Senior Policy Advisor to the President-Elect. And last year, it was Ambassador Nick Burns, who's been mentioned in dispatches as a possible Secretary of State. We're very pleased today to be able to add Francis Fukuyama's name to this list. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Fukuyama is one of the most important thinkers of his generation. He started his career at Rand Corporation, and he was an official at the State Department when he published his sensational 1989 essay, The End of History, which later became a best-selling book. Since then, Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues including development and politics and international relations. His most recent book, Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics. He's currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. When Owen Harry's died, I appeared with Frank Fukuyama on the ABC program Between the Lines, hosted by Tom Switzer, who's with us today. And that gave me the idea to invite Frank to give the 2020 Harry's lecture. And I'm very grateful to him that he agreed. Let me explain how today's event will unfold. Firstly, Dr. Fukuyama will speak for about 20 or 25 minutes. Then I will have a conversation with him, during which I'll put to him my questions as well as some questions that have been pre-submitted online, and also some questions from our small but perfectly formed audience here at Bly Street. To my colleagues here in the building, if you would like me to pose a question to Dr. Fukuyama on your part, on your behalf, please write it down on the notepad we've provided you with in the next 20 minutes or so and hand it to one of my colleagues. And I'll put as many of your questions as I can to Dr. Fukuyama. And so now, to deliver the 2020 Owen Harry's lecture, let me call on Dr. Francis Fukuyama. Well, thank you very much for that generous introduction, Michael. When Michael suggested that I give the Owen Harry's lecture, I immediately jumped at the opportunity because Owen was a dear friend of mine. And I would say that I wouldn't be invited to give this lecture were it not for him because you would never have heard of me. I would be an obscure academic somewhere or a policy analyst, maybe back in Washington. I met Owen in the spring of 1988. He had been appointed the editor-in-chief of this new foreign policy magazine, The National Interest, and he met me at the Beverly Hills Hotel and asked whether I wanted to write anything for him. I was supposed to give a lecture at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The lecture series was about the decline of the West. And I said, I would like to speak about the victory of the West. And that ultimately led to the article of the end of history with a question mark at the end in the book. And the rest is, so to speak, history. But Owen was a perfect editor, a great mentor, and somebody that encouraged, you know, I was younger at the time, younger writers like me back then, to take risks, intellectual risks. And I think that it's worked out well for all of us. So I miss him greatly and I'm very honored to speak in a lecture series named after him. Now, what I want to do is begin with a little bit of theory about liberalism. Owen and I had differences. Owen was, in a way, a classical realist, closer to Henry Kissinger than, let's say, to Woodrow Wilson in terms of his foreign policy preferences.  And we used to have, you know, regular arguments over the role of the United States in doing things like promoting democracy around the world. With all due respect to Owen's position, I do want to defend liberalism. I want to defend it in theory, and I want to talk about the ways that it is being threatened in the world today and what some of those consequences would be. So let me begin with a little bit of theory about why we have this doctrine called liberalism. I think that there are two justifications for it. One of them is very pragmatic, and the other one is moral. The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is essentially a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf in the late 17th century as a result of the European Wars of Religion following the Protestant Reformation. In the Thirty Years' War, maybe a third of the population of Central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects. And the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends out of political discussion, the final ends defined by religion, and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself and not the good life, not the good life as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion. And therefore, tolerance of diversity of people that don't believe the same thing that you do has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another. In the 19th and early 20th century, the issue had shifted from religion to nation. You had mixed ethnic populations throughout Europe.  And so once again, liberalism was called upon in the aftermath of that war, of the Second World War, to enable Europeans to live together in ethnically diverse societies. That was the origin of the European Union, which was an effort to move beyond nationalism to a new form of coexistence. And I think that that liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress, there was stability, there was human freedom, there was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal and therefore free society. And it also was important because after World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. I think that there is a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage because liberalism was a universal doctrine. Now, that's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one. And this is a more continental European tradition. I believe that liberalism is fundamentally a protection of human autonomy. The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity, out of the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th, 18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Emmanuel Kant, or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is indeed based on human autonomy. In Kant's words, human beings are uncaused causes and therefore have infinite value. And a liberal regime protects that autonomy by giving people rights, by giving them the right to speak, to organize, to associate, and ultimately to have a share of power by being able to vote. And this is really the moral status, the dignity that life in a liberal regime that does respect individual rights gives us. And it is one of the reasons why to this day, people do not want to live in authoritarian countries that do not recognize the fundamental dignity of their citizens. And so for both the pragmatic reasons and for these moral reasons, I think liberalism became the dominant doctrine of the 20th century and should continue to be defended as such. Now, let's turn to the present and the recent years that have brought a number of attacks against that liberal order.  And one of the problems, I think, both on the left and the right is that the autonomy, the individual autonomy protected by liberalism, tends to take more and more extreme versions and therefore in a certain sense become self undermining. And this is evident in a number of developments over the years. Let's begin on the more conservative side. Liberalism has been associated with one particular right, which is the right to own private property. That is one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies. And that right is really what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth. But in the 1980s and 90s, there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in what has now been called movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and at a high brown intellectual level by the Chicago School of Economics, that denigrated in a way the role of the state in the economy that said that private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period. But it also became much more unequal because without adequate regulation and without some effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people that were being left behind even as their societies as a whole grew. And this obviously became one of the triggers for the kind of populism that we've seen arise in many rich countries. The second failing of liberalism comes directly out of the fact that it attempts to lower the horizons of politics. Liberal societies do not want to tell you how to live. They do not want to define the good life because that is the source of conflict. But as a result, liberal societies tend not to satisfy these very deep human cravings for community. Because in fact, there's something wrong with the basic liberal premise that we all start out as self-interested individuals. We're not self-interested individuals. Fundamentally, we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of anomy and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. And we seek community in different ways. There's a right-wing version of this and there's a left-wing version of this. The right-wing version really sees community represented either by again religion or by nation. That these are units that in a sense get dissolved under a liberal world order through globalization, through the movement of people, goods, ideas, and trade between nations. National identity becomes diluted. And that sense of national community that held people together in democratic societies appears to be lost. I think that secularism as well is perceived as a loss by people that have religious faith. They believe that there's a kind of militant form of secularism that is not allowing them to practice their religion. And for that reason, a lot of religious conservatives in places like the United States have turned against that liberal order. And I think that both of these forces are driving illiberal political movements in many parts of the world. So India was a liberal society created by Nehru and Gandhi. But under the BJP and Prime Minister Modi, it's shifted its national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. In Hungary with the rise of Viktor Orban and the Fidesz Party, Hungarian national identity has been redefined. Orban has said Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity, which I will remind you was really one of the reasons that World War II happened because the Germans wanted to define German identity on the basis of German ethnicity. And there were many Germans living in the surrounding parts of central Europe, not in Germany itself. And that was really the trigger that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. And so this has been going on in other countries as well, including in the United States, where there has been a deepening polarization between a red America and a blue America that is defined partly by these feelings of loss of community with regard to both religion and nation. There is a left wing version of this longing for community too, because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality. And therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is essentially hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition and of rights, but it is not delivering on it. And therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to specific groups. And so the liberal world order that emerged, that I believe has these pragmatic and these moral dimensions, has been severely challenged in the last few years. The sources of this challenge are numerous. One is the rise of overtly authoritarian states like China and Russia. They have consolidated their rule. They seem to be stable internally, and they are increasingly seeking to project their power and influence, their model, if you will, across international borders. But there's also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were the leaders of the neoliberal revolution back in the 1980s. And then finally, and I think somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that has taken a while to emerge, but has now been energized and is increasingly vocal, at least in certain quarters of the cultural community in the arts and universities in Hollywood, in the media, and places like that, where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal politics. Now, let me turn to the election that just took place on November 3rd, because I think that it illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. Actually, quite frankly, as an American, it's been impossible to have a discussion about anything other than the election up until November 3rd. And because Donald Trump has not accepted the results, we're still in that discussion. And I'm afraid we're going to be probably until January 20th when the new President Biden is finally sworn in, which I assure you is going to happen. I think that that election was the most important political fight that has taken place in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States, but it is important for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order. The United States has been in a long term decline with its political institutions decaying. I think the single source of that decline is really the pervasive polarization that has occurred within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example of this has been the COVID pandemic, where something like wearing a mask instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones becomes a political statement.  This is really not the way that nations, coherent nations, are supposed to meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic. The polarization has a number of different routes. The economic one I've referred to already, the fact that many working class voters had been left behind by the prosperity of globalization. But I think actually the more important division is a cultural one, and it really does have to do with the feeling on the part of many populist voters that they are not being respected by the elites that are running the country. And here all of the the identity issues that I referred to play themselves out. Identity politics in the United States started on the left after the civil rights era with specific groups like African Americans, women, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, the disabled, every one of these groups felt marginalized and disrespected by the dominant white male society that existed, you know, in the early 1960s. And each one of these groups began to demand recognition, not as part of a generic working class, but rather for their particular form of disrespect.  And so there's obviously a lot to this belief that injustice takes these very specific forms tied to narrow identities. The problem with this is that I think that it began to alienate the traditional working class, which had been the base of the Democratic Party, as of every other left-wing party in the 20th century. And increasingly, working class whites began to abandon that party because they felt the Democrats were no longer catering to their interests. They are the ones that had lost their jobs to overseas competition. They're the ones who are falling behind in terms of status and income and social respect. And that generated a huge amount of resentment against the elites living in big cities that had jobs that were secure, that were comfortable in a multicultural, very diverse environment. If you look at the sociology of populism in the United States, it is tied most closely to population density, which I think is correlated in turn to these kinds of cultural differences. It's correlated to, you know, belief in traditional cultural values and family and religion and the like, and conversely to, you know, belief in immigration diversity as strengths. And this is the fundamental division that's taken hold of the United States. It has been augmented by technology because the Internet has succeeded in basically destroying every other source of authority that used to filter news and facts and information that really formed the basis of a Democratic ability to have political discourse. So today it turns out that red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. There are polls that have come out just in the past week that suggest that a substantial minority of, I'm sorry, substantial majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats basically stole the election and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. And when you don't have a common factual basis, you obviously simply reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people had started to move, started to move into. Now, if we step back a little bit and look at the election, Joe Biden actually won. And I think that's something that is very encouraging. I think that it shows that the American constitutional system of checks and balances ultimately still works. The most important check in our system is an electoral check, and the American people have pretty decisively rejected Donald Trump for a second term in office. Nonetheless, the Democrats did not get what they were hoping for, which was a landslide victory and a total repudiation of Trump with all the down ballot Republican candidates also losing. In fact, something of the opposite happened. The Republicans, the normal or the any Republican that wasn't Donald Trump actually did reasonably well. And they ran ahead of the president, which is a very unusual thing to happen. And what I think many people have been noting with some puzzlement is that Trump did well precisely among those non-white groups that every Democrat had assumed would be voting against him. So he improved his numbers among African Americans, especially among Hispanic voters. But even Muslim voters voted in greater proportion for Trump in 2020 than they had in 2016, despite all of the racist dog whistles that Trump had given out in the course of the last four years. And what that means really is that while Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. And I believe this is something we can talk about more in the Q&A, but I think that the Democrats need to look very, very carefully at those election results, because I think that once again, the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent. And I think that unless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections. Let me just conclude by saying something about foreign policy to get back to Owen's chief interest. Because the president has undisputed authority over foreign policy, President Biden, when he becomes president, president-elect Biden, will be able to reinsert the United States into the international system. He will rejoin the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords. He will go to NATO and reaffirm support for NATO, for our Asian allies, for Australia, for every other country that has depended on American power. But I think that it's going to be extremely difficult to return to the kind of world that we assumed existed before 2016, because America does remain fundamentally divided. That bipartisan support for the liberal international order that we thought was extremely strong is no longer that way. I think that any American ally will welcome Biden as president, will be happy that he was elected, but will be a little bit distrustful because the Republicans could make a comeback in 2022. They could win the presidency again in 2024. Regardless of what happened on November 3rd, there's still a good third of the American public that remain very strong Trump voters. They're very angry and they are not going to go away. And therefore, the ability of the United States to resume its role as the chief defender of the liberal order, I think, is going to be contested both domestically and also by American friends. This leads to more self-reliance on their part. That may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is going to mean a very different kind of world order than the one that I grew up arguing with Owen Harry's about. So with that, I will stop, and thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to the discussion. Frank, thank you very much for a wide-ranging, rich and substantive lecture. One with a bit of theory, which is something we sometimes neglect at the Lowy Institute, but also with some practical thoughts. I think the highest compliment I can pay your lecture is that Owen would have enjoyed it. So thank you very much. Let me ask you three or four questions about some of the big themes that you tackled and then put some questions from our guests and colleagues.  You mentioned COVID a little bit, but given that it's such a global phenomenon, I think it's worth pausing on it for a little bit, especially COVID as it relates to your country, because it does seem to me that COVID is like an x-ray on societies, and it shows up the extent to which they're healthy and the extent to which they're unhealthy, and the results so far have not been good for the United States, not only 11 million cases, a quarter of a million dead, but also the sort of maladies that COVID has revealed in your society. A lot of them are to do with President Trump's maladministration, but many are nothing to do with President Trump, or at least they existed before President Trump, the hyperpartisanship, the polarization, the lack of a universal health care, the poor federal state relations. So let me ask you, first of all, have you been surprised at how poorly the United States has dealt with COVID compared with other countries, both liberal and illiberal, that have done better? And secondly, could there be something positive that comes out of COVID for the United States? We have had, to some degree, a greater sense of social solidarity in the United States and many other countries with a new administration, a new approach based more on science. Could this be, could this strengthen the U.S. social compact? Well, I was surprised in the following respect. Oftentimes, when you are in a highly polarized society, the thing that creates greater national unity is an external threat or shock. We had one in the financial crisis in 2008, and then, well, we had one in September 11th, and then 2008, the financial crisis, and then COVID. And one might have thought that they would be sufficient to actually give Americans a sense, yes, we're all in this together, we need to pull together and cooperate and get over these partisan differences. But every single one of those external shocks actually deepened the polarization. And it's testimony to how deeply it runs. And I suppose I wasn't surprised, but I was very dismayed that that had happened and that the response had become such a partisan issue. And it also speaks to deeper, I think, sicknesses in the American society. For example, the spread of conspiracy theories, like QAnon, that have taken root just in the past year. There's always been a crazy fringe on the far right in the United States and on the far left as well. But there are some polls that indicate that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of this QAnon theory that the Democrats are drinking the blood of children in tunnels under Washington DC. I mean, just totally outrageous stuff that speaks to a level of fear and hatred that is really quite extraordinary. And this is something that certainly I would not have anticipated. I think that you're right that it could lay the basis for policies to fix some of our grave deficits. I think in domestic policy, the most inexcusable lack that we have is of a universal government-mandated health care system, where the only rich country in the world that doesn't have such a system. Obama tried to put it in place. And from that moment on, the Republicans spent every effort to try to dismantle it, which I thought was really quite disgraceful. And again, it's an indication of the polarization because a lot of the, let's say, the poor whites in the rural South that were the biggest beneficiaries of Obamacare continue to vote for Republican politicians that wanted to dismantle it. So they're acting completely contrary to their individual self-interest, which shows you the depths of the partisanship. But there is some possibility that if you have a president that doesn't actually want to widen these divisions, that you may go some distance to reducing them, Biden is certainly going to try. He's going to try to reach out to Mitch McConnell, who suddenly is really the second most important man in Washington. Whether that reaching out is going to do any good, I sort of doubt. But at least we're going to have a politician that's trying to do that rather than turning his back on half the country. And let me push you a little bit on that. You described the election on November 3rd as the most important political fight in your lifetime. What can, and I mean, if we think about Joe Biden, if anyone can bring down the level of craziness, it may be Mr. Biden, after all, his signature move for nearly half a century has been to reach across the aisle to his opponents. But it takes someone else to reach their arm back. So do you think the times will suit Joe Biden, this sort of approach he has, this desire he has to govern from the center, which is how he ran his primary campaign? Or are you concerned that he will fall short as well in trying to bridge the gap? Well, he may fall short. I think that the strategy that he has been following is the only conceivable one, first of all, that will allow a Democrat to be elected given our electoral college. I think that he realized early on that if he didn't appeal to these centrist voters that had been Democrats most of their life, but then switched to Trump and the Republicans in 2016, that he simply couldn't get elected president. And that was impressive. He managed to do that. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, these swing states that had gone surprisingly for Trump four years ago, he managed to win by decent margins. And the only way you could do that is by not espousing the kinds of woke progressive agenda that the left wing of his party was in favor of. So that was sufficient to get him elected, whether it's sufficient to actually do anything, I unfortunately doubt. He's going to have a big agenda ahead of him. Some of the things that he needs to do are actually political reform measures because our Democratic institutions are way out of whack. They're not representative. It's a very minoritarian system because of the Senate and the electoral college that permanently favors a certain minority of the country. It's fundamentally unjust. Republicans have been trying to worsen that by essentially trying to deter Democratic voters from voting by putting up obstacles to their access to the vote. And all of those things really need to be corrected. But because they lead to a partisan Democratic advantage, I don't think that the Republicans are going to permit any of that, assuming that they hold the Senate. And even if they do hold the Senate, even if the Democrats do manage to get to a 50-50 Senate, I think that it's going to be very tricky to do any kind of deep political reform. Without that deeper political reform, I think that we're going to continue this hyperpolarized kind of politics into the indefinite future. One thing I would love to see adopted in Australia is your kind of ballot, rank choice voting or limited preferential ballot, because that would reduce I think the hegemony of the two political parties that have exacerbated that polarization. That may happen on a state level, but again, there's going to be very little consensus for moving in that direction on a national basis. You spoke about identity politics on both the left and the right. Can I ask you how you think those two politics will play out in the next four years? For example, on the left is the kind of woke progressive agenda that you mentioned. Is that baked in, even though there will now be a Democratic administration that will try to govern from the center? And on the right, you've seen the once-proud Republican Party in the last four years really become a sub-brand in many ways of the Trump organization. Is there any chance that the GOP will recover its sort of historical beliefs in fiscal conservatism and strong alliances and probity in personal behavior? Is there any chance, do you think, that the GOP will get its mojo back? Well, again, the signs of that are really not good. I think that if the Democrats had won the landslide that they were hoping for, you could have had the beginnings of a reform of the Republican Party to be a more open and forward-looking party rather than the party of insecure white working-class men. But that didn't happen. I think that's why I think that Trumpism is going to survive Trump, that kind of confrontational angry politics didn't hurt them nearly as much as some people feared. And therefore, the incentives of individual politicians to break from that Trumpist legacy are really not there. And so I'm afraid that it's going to hang around. And I think the left and the right, the forms of identity politics have been playing off each other. So the left has also been energized. There's a substantial part of the progressive left that is convinced that their opponents are just simply racists and xenophobes that are irremediable. And there's really no way of reaching out to them, that there's no point in trying to do that. And therefore, the only thing you can do is to try to mobilize people that think the way you do and win elections on that basis. We've already seen evidence of that in the wake of the election from some progressive politicians. So really the incentives that we're facing, both sides, have not fundamentally changed. And I think you're going to see this identitarian digging in in both parties that will continue for some time. Let me ask you, just while you're on that topic, let me ask you a question that was actually put by somebody in the room, Madeline Neist at the Lowy Institute. And Madeline asked, how will these identities that you're speaking of, how will these identities evolve as we spend more and more of our time online? Well, you know, I think that the thing about identity is that it's a very fluid concept. This is something that's trendy to say in academic circles, but it's socially constructed. You know, there are no fixed identities. Biology doesn't give us a fixed identity. And therefore, it's something that actually can be shaped through politics, through culture, through various instruments that we have available. And if you have a political leadership that is committed to restoring a unifying identity and not simply digging the two sides in deeper into their own different narratives, then I think you can do, you know, you can do something to move the country in that direction.  But he's pushing against very strong headwinds because in fact, the country is unbelievably diverse. And I think the technology really is not conducive to, you know, control over a master narrative in the way that, you know, technologies like television and radio in the 20th century permitted, you know, for good and for ill, these master narratives to be constructed at a, you know, at a national level. In fact, the internet really encourages further fragmentation. So all of that, you know, again suggests that the unifying ideology or the unifying vision of national identity, you know, is yet to be uncovered. Or I'm going to go to the international stage to see if I can find some optimism there, Frank. Let me ask you about Biden's likely foreign policy. To date, I think he's got away with basically promising a non-Trump foreign policy. And he's spoken, as you mentioned, about returning to alliances and the principles of American leadership and so on. But we don't really know the organizing principle of a Biden foreign policy. Is it likely to be great power competition, for example, competing more fiercely with China and Russia? Is it a return to trying to support the liberal international order? Let me ask you what you think about that. And in particular, I saw a good line from Gideon Rackman in the Financial Times this week. And Gideon said, in a world in which power is more evenly distributed, a rules-based order and a US-led order, a US-led world are not the same thing. How do you think Biden will square this circle? Well, I think that there are different domains of foreign policy where he's going to behave differently. So he is a multilateralist, and he will provide American support and reentry into these organizations like the Paris Accords or the WHO that Trump rejected. And in that respect, he'll be very similar to Obama. On great power competition, actually, Russia is going to be a different story. Trump, in a very bizarre way, really seemed to like Putin and Russia, liked Russia better than Ukraine that was a democracy. That's something where he was kind of out by himself. I think most Republicans were really not willing to follow him down that route. They were willing to defend him during the impeachment, but they were not willing to, for example, support a lifting of sanctions against Russia. And Biden, there's no question that he's going to switch support to Ukraine. He'll be much more supportive of embattled American allies like that. And he will take a much tougher stance towards Russia. Now, China is a different story, because there's been an elite shift in the United States in attitudes towards China that actually precedes Trump. I think really the fault for this lies in the kind of China that Xi Jinping has created since 2013. If you're looking for a source of this problem, it's the fact that Xi's China has re-established the control of the Chinese Communist Party over as much of Chinese society as possible, has returned China to a much more assertive foreign policy. And therefore, I think it's inevitable that any American president is going to take a much more confrontational stand towards China, and I don't think Biden is going to be all that different. Where he's going to differ is what you do about that, because I think the foolish thing that Trump did was to simultaneously attack all of America's Democratic allies whose support you would need if you're trying to create a common front against China and go after everyone at the same time. And that obviously is not something that Biden would pursue. I think taking a little bit less hostile rhetorical stance towards China will remove this kind of hesitancy on the part of many Americans to follow Trump in this anti-Chinese crusade, because it was so xenophobic and so extreme that it was kind of embarrassing. And I think Biden will get us to a point where we can stand up to China, but not in a foolishly confrontational way. Michael, if I may say, I've been trying to preach this in every discussion of foreign policy. I think the single biggest challenge that an American president will face in Asia will be what to do about Taiwan. Xi Jinping gave a speech that almost two years ago in which he promised that Taiwan would be reincorporated into the PRC within a decade, and already almost two years of that time have passed. And he said that this would happen if necessary by force. And what's happened in the past year in Hong Kong, in the South China Sea, on the border with India indicates that China is moving in that direction. And I think that if there is a very serious coercive policy started by China against Taiwan, it's going to put the United States in a very, very difficult situation, because I do not think that there is a consensus on our supporting Taiwan in that kind of a struggle. And, you know, frankly, it doesn't matter whether Trump or Biden was president under those circumstances, I would find it very hard to predict what the United States would do. And that obviously is going to have very, you know, serious consequences for, you know, for all of Asia. Let me stay on China and put a question to you from Richard McGregor, the senior fellow here at the Institute on China. Richard asks, as follows, you've said you've been skeptical on the sustainability of China's hard turn under Xi Jinping. Could you expand on this, especially with China coming so strongly out of COVID? Well, I expressed skepticism in the very long term of these, you know, the sustainability of the China model in general. But I think that in the short run, they're in a very good position. And I think that unfortunately, COVID has really accelerated that. They're back to economic growth levels that they were experiencing before the epidemic hit. They looks like they pretty successfully mastered the disease within China, being able to return life to some version of normality. Whereas Europe and the United States are both heading into second or third waves, and that economic divergence is going to continue well into 2021. And so right now, I think that if there's any weakness in the China model, we're not going to see it for some time. That in the short to medium term, the Chinese are going to be doing well. They're going to get a lot of prestige for their having mastered the disease for still being the engines of global economic growth.  I have tried to make this point repeatedly that this does not mean that democracies are necessarily worse than autocracies in dealing with something like the pandemic, because the democratic countries in Asia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, have actually, in a couple of those cases, they've done better than China. So it really is not democracy or authoritarian government that's made the difference. It's state capacity, it's social trust, it's a lot of different things. But I do think that the way that people are interpreting the contrast between the US and China has not been good for the prestige of global democracy because they're seen as the exemplars of these respective forms of government. Frank, let me put a question to you that we've received from one of our audience members online, emeritus Professor Jeffrey Blaney, who's a well-known historian. I've read his books. All right. So Professor Blaney asks, is the world more dangerous now than during the Cold War? I think that probably not, just for the following reason, that during the Cold War, we were seriously contemplating a global war, the possibility of a global war between the world's two largest and most powerful superpowers. And I think that despite what I just said about the dangers posed by Taiwan, the risk of a global confrontation on that scale is really not in the cards, even with the deterioration of US-China relations. I think that's going to play out in other spheres in economic competition and technology and so forth. What you're seeing instead is a lot of other big problems of sub-state violence and political disorder. But in order to have a really disastrous war, you've got to have a big country that's well organized, has lots of resources, and can use those resources to pound the hell out of its rivals. And that's just not the situation that we're close to being in at the present moment. So in that respect, I think we're in a better shape than we were in the Cold War. Frank, I want to put a question to you from Tom Switzer, our mutual friend. And Tom says this, before he died, oh, and Harry's would argue there is more wrong with America than Donald Trump. And I know you agree with that. And Tom says his Harry's close friend and colleague, Irving Crystal, before he died a decade ago, lamented there are clear signs of rot and decadence in American culture. So Tom's question is, given all this, aren't there compelling reasons for America to put its own house in order and become once again a normal nation and give up pretensions of being a global superpower? What do you think? Well, I believe a certain version of that. You know, I have been on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy for almost two decades. This is a taxpayer funded organization that provides support to civil society groups all over the world, trade unions, women's rights groups, you know, human rights defenders and so forth. And I have really come to feel over the last few years that we've kind of lost our moral authority to do this kind of activity because, you know, for example, suppression of journalists that we as Americans criticize when it happens in other countries, you know, that's, we have a president that calls journalists enemies of the American people. And so we're not really at a higher moral plane to be able to project that kind of soft power. And until we fix our internal problems, we're, you know, we're at a severe disadvantage. However, there are still a lot of countries around the world that depend on American power and influence. And if we simply, as a principled matter, decide that we're not going to interfere anywhere, I think that's not going to be good for people. There's a lot of things below the surface where just Americans paying attention to a human rights violation, you know, going on in Serbia or in, you know, in Bolivia. And somebody saying something about it makes a difference because, you know, the United States still exerts a lot of sway, even if the president and it's the State Department really are not in a good position to, you know, to push these sorts of arguments. So I would hope that the United States does not walk away from its allies from countries that are expecting support when push comes to shove in the future. Frank, I want to ask, in the final question, I want to make a little change of pace if that's okay. And I want to ask you about your hobby of woodworking. And I recommend to everyone in the audience, if you haven't read it, there's a beautiful little article in 1843 Magazine, which is put out by The Economist about Frank's woodworking and his love of, I think I've got this right, late 18th century designs, Pembroke tables, Hepplewhite chests and Demi-Loone card tables. I can't visualise all those, but they sound very elegant. It reminded me of an essay that Winston Churchill wrote called Painting as a Pastime where Churchill recommended that people should have hobbies that are very different from their work. So he said, people who work with their hands should not be doing hard physical labour on the weekend. And equally, politicians should not have as a hobby reading political biographies. You should do something completely different, completely different from your day job. So just tell us a bit about woodworking.  Well, I think that there are craft traditions that don't get adequate respect in the modern world. That's part of what drew me to this. There's a strong tradition of this in Japan. I have a lot of Japanese woodworking tools and they do very intricate kinds of joinery. I was trying to create this late 18th century federal style furniture because, you know, my life is completely intellectual. I produce intangible objects and it's extremely satisfying to be able to sit on something that I've made. You know, I built all of the beds that my children slept on as they were growing up and, you know, I figured, well, that demonstrates that I actually am doing something useful. All the articles and books are, I have no idea whether anyone, you know, for all I know, those are doing harm to people. But I can see that my kids have a bed to sleep on and that's something that they need and, you know, I can take satisfaction in that. So I guess that's the way I've approached this hobby right from the beginning. Well, can I finish by thanking you, Frank, for giving a very important lecture? I know it must give you satisfaction that you can make something you can sit on, but let me assure you that we think you're doing something very tangible and useful. I want to thank everybody for joining us online and in the room for the 2020 Owen Harry's lecture. And I want to finish with a little story that might interest you, Frank. A few years ago, Owen Harry's donated to the Institute two letters of congratulations that he'd received from foreign policy luminaries and we display them both upstairs. The first was from the father of containment, George Kennan. The second was a letter from 1997 from Henry Kissinger, the most famous realist of all whom you referred to in your remarks. And Kissinger wrote, I've read your article in the National Review and can't remember when I have read an article in which I've agreed with every word. And Kissinger continues, I'm only sorry I didn't write it myself, but I will plagiarise it liberally. Let me say, Francis Fukuyama, we promise not to plagiarise your lecture, but there is no doubt that all of us here have been influenced by it. So thank you very much, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you everybody here at 31 Blyth Street. Thank you everybody at home. Thank you for joining us and please stay safe and well. Thank you very much.


John, I'd still like to see you. As you know, we're trying to capture some of ICANN's history. And I want to do it in a kind of interesting way. I'm going to ask you two questions. The first question is the easy one. Say a few words about how long you've been involved, how you got involved, what your broad arc is, and that will just be used to frame the rest of what we're going to talk about. So, for the people watching, I'm John Crane. I'm a British citizen who currently lives in America working for the Internet Corporation for Signed Names and Numbers, but I first got involved in what we call Internet Identifiers back in the early 90s in Europe. It's a place called the Rypen CC. It's what we call a regional internet registry, giving out IP addresses and looking at network designs and seeing how the network was building. And then, you know, so I worked a little bit with IANA and John Pastel because that's where we got our IP addresses from, of course. It might be version four back in those days. And we got involved in the formation of ICANN, basically because John asked us to, in the white papers, in the green papers. And eventually, as ICANN became formed, I got more and more involved. I didn't go to the early meetings. I happily avoided them. And then we needed to sign the memorandum of understanding between the address organizations and ICANN. And for some reason, I got stuck with that job, so I was put on an airplane and packed off to Denver, I believe it was, and it was an Aaron meeting. And myself, Paul Wilson and Kim Hubbard, who at the time was the director of Aaron, sat at a table with Mike Roberts, who was then the CEO of ICANN and we all signed memorandums of understanding. And then a little while after that, I was at my office in Amsterdam, a gentleman who you may well remember called Andrew McLaughlin came by and he said, well, you know, we've formed this thing, we don't really have anybody who actually understands the network. How would you like to come and live in California? And I looked out my window and it was raining and I said, what's the weather like? And he said it's always sunny in Southern California. Yeah, for sure. So I moved. The RIPE NCC seconded me. Back in those days, ICANN didn't have anything called money. In the early days, we were formed on loans and we're still paying back those loans. So the RIPE NCC very generously paid for my time and my flights and sent me off to ICANN and before I know it, I was working there and that was about 15 and a half, 16 years ago. So around 2000. Around 2000. So ICANN had been formed in late 98 and had been limping along without you before that. How did they manage to do that? On the shoestring budget. Very dedicated staff. It was a very small organization. It was amazing how dedicated the early staff were. There was a gentleman called Louis Tuton who was a lawyer and if you get a chance to interview Louis, you should. He was an interesting character because he was basically working pro bono at ICANN and everybody would mock him because he's the lawyer. But he was also the guy that was configuring the routers, doing the websites. Louis Tuton pretty much did all the engineering work for the early ICANN. When I first turned up the server room, if I could call it that, was also the kitchen and we had a rack that stood in the kitchen. It was basically a two-post rack and there was a couple of servers in there and there was a piece of fiber running through a back wall into the university server room and there was a refrigerator in the same room and if you open the refrigerator too hard, you disconnected the network. It was very much startup mode. Small offices and the same building as where John had been. It's ISI and everybody did everything. It was really that startup environment where you just have to do what you have to do. I want to get into some deeper issues but I'm curious, by the time you came in 2000 was it still that slim on operation? Absolutely. We sort of got past the loan situation but not really. I had to take a pay cut to come work for ICANN. I think everybody did. Our meetings, one of the first things I did when I joined ICANN was there was going to be a meeting in Marina Del Ray and I used to run the right meetings or parts of the right meetings so Louis gave me a piece of paper and said, we have a contract with this hotel. Go organize a meeting and the meetings back in those days were a couple of hundred people. If you see today, I don't even know the numbers but I'm pretty sure even at this small meeting we're close to 2,000 people and back then everything was just a lot smaller scale and there's many people still here today who are involved there but also many have moved on. So yes, it was very much everything on the budget, small offices, very long hours and a lot of fun. This session I think is much shorter than I'd like it to be so my view is this is the beginning of a sequence and so let me ask, try to provoke a little bit or bring forth, pick out one or two or three really sort of interesting or meaningful events or sequences of events or threads that run through that stick out in your mind as sort of the essence of what really happened below the surface level of holding a meeting here or going off traveling there. So I think part of what ICANN is or was was this experiment in, I don't want to use the word democracy but maybe management or government models it was something different and I think in those first years we were really struggling with trying to figure out what it was so one of the interesting things we did which had started before I joined but was happening as I got there was we voted for board members based on where they were from and one of the ways of doing this was to actually have a voting system so I think you could say that ICANN had what the first global online voting mechanism in the world where everybody theoretically could vote and I mean everybody and it broke. It didn't work very well, it was a fantastic idea in democracy and when you're a small budget organization trying to do something that even the governments of the world have never tried was really interesting but it was sort of this experiment in trying to be inclusive to include the end user, the user of the internet and it kind of worked and it kind of didn't but it was a very interesting way of doing things it was trying new things, it was all about trying to find this balance of getting representation from all over the internet. So when you say it broke two different things come to mind and maybe it broke in two different ways one is the mechanics of the voting and then the other is whether it did achieve appropriate representation and was fair and so forth. So yes, it broke in both ways. When I first joined there was a lady that was running the program, I believe Jody was her name and in our office were stacks and stacks of envelopes and I said well what are those stacks of envelopes and she said well those are the returns and I'm like what do you mean the returns for some reason everything is getting returned and I'm like oh let me have a look at them and I'm like oh interesting these are all from China why are the addresses written in ASCII Chinese postmen don't read ASCII so they hadn't thought about the idea and now today we talk about IDNs and localised characters they hadn't quite considered the concept of having other character sets so that postmen could read the letters so we got a lot of returns also when everybody had to sign up I think it was one of these things where we thought well there's probably a few hundred people coming to the meeting so maybe there's a couple of thousand people will be interested in this and thousands and thousands of people signed up and that caused issues with the servers but that was also part of the system failure is that these board seats were starting to be seen as political interest and people were campaigning to get their citizens to go and vote so you would see large waves of sign ups from particular areas of the world and you could see that from an organisation of maybe two or three hundred participants in the meetings we were suddenly getting tens and tens of thousands of registrations so it was clear that there was interest in those board positions I think maybe the people designing the system hadn't considered I think it was a bit of an eye-opener there's a lot of experience in political systems way before the internet, way before any automation I have a feeling we probably weighted into an area somewhat naively in a way that's worth some significant recounting and getting the accurate picture what did happen and the different points of view and so forth so let me just bookmark that as something that we want to come back to at length I know that one of the things that you've been heavily involved in and particularly in the early days was the IANA operation itself and my first earliest introduction I found myself as you may remember invited by Stuart Lynn the next CEO after Mike Roberts to look into what was some sort of difficulty involving some of the CCTLDs and it was you and Louie on the one hand and Elizabeth Portanov and Sabina Dolderoll and I think Oscar Robles you want to talk a little bit about that episode well it depends which one you're talking about because there were many so I mean especially in the early days the relationship at times could get pretty strange one of the issues we had was about access to data and I don't know if this is the one you're talking about the question of whether or not the zone files should be transferred to somewhere where they could be not actually sure if we even knew what we really wanted to do with them to be honest but it was can we get access to the zone files from the country codes a lot of the country codes just said no and I suspect in retrospect rightfully so so those early periods we were sort of I think trying to figure out what the relationship was between the country codes which are really something that are as they say within a country and for within the national regulations etc and this global body and with the generics it was very clear well firstly there really wasn't generics there was like one and then a few registries but with the CCTLDs the country codes it was really about finding a way and figuring out what the relationship was and it wasn't always friendly I think it was mostly always professional but it wasn't always friendly and yet with all of these people I've always had very good friendly relationships on the personal level but sometimes there was a little bit of conflict there and that made life interesting so yes I'm keenly aware that you have personally a very high reputation very well regarded in ways that are we should try to document and I know that Postel was well regarded and so it's interesting to try to tease out what happened in that transition that interfered in the otherwise smooth operation that had proceeded well I'm an engineer so I like to blame the lawyers I'm not sure if that's the case I think one of the things that happened or one of the changes is John was very light handed so you know I think I met him twice in person to have discussions that would be of the nature we were having with the CCTLDs and that was an RIR that we'd meet with him because we had a problem about something extremely rare because he was very light handed and he believed in letting people do what they do and I think ICAM was this different model or this different mindset and I think a lot of the people that were involved weren't from the engineering background the guys who had worked in building up networks so it was a different style and that caused consternation and a lot of the CCTLD folks probably only met John once and never had to deal with him again on technical issues so people don't like change so in general change brings fear and I think there were misconceptions well maybe there weren't I don't know but I think there were misconceptions that ICAM was trying to control something and I'm not sure that was there but if you've been left alone all this time and then suddenly these people turn up I mean if you talk it to it from the perspective of the DNS root servers for example which is another community which I participate we hadn't even really met each other before this time and then this ICAM thing comes along like well who are these people and one of the things that was often missed and I had to remind people on a regular basis in the early days is all of these people that you're talking to they've been doing this for 10, 20 years they predate ICAM and that was I think something that was lost at times with people It's an interesting thought that a formative period of ICAM may not have been with the greatest of poise and several affairs Well one of the things that of course happened is we lost John Of course and you know I think things may because we don't know You can't run the experiment again You can't run the experiment again but I think things may have been very different if John had been there One would have expected so So the impact is probably not only the most visible things but also a lot of subtle things We need to take a break at this point but identified at least a couple of things that we want to dive into more and I'm sure more will come up So let me thank you very much and let me thank you particularly for years of service You're one of the people that is most appreciated by the people who make things work and probably less well known by the people who like to talk about how things work I'm certainly less appreciated by them Thank you Steve


So far in this course we have talked about free particle, we have talked about particle in a box and then we have talked about tunneling. Today we move to another system which is very important from the point of view of quantum mechanics and this system is there of a harmonic oscillator. It will take 2 or 3 modules to complete the discussion. So today we are just going to introduce ourselves to the problem and we are going to learn a very important concept called ladder operators. Harmonic oscillators of course is something that all of us are familiar with from once again class 11 and 12. We know that a harmonic oscillator is an oscillator that obeys Hooke's law. What is Hooke's law? f equal to minus kx or you can write minus kx equal to m d2x dt2 where x is the displacement from mean position and we might remember the classical examples of harmonic oscillator. Pendulum of a clock is a harmonic oscillator provided the angular displacement is not more than 4 degrees and there are many such examples and oscillatory motion is very closely related to circular motion and that is why we get results that look very similar to what we get in circular motion and we get to work with things like frequency of oscillation and so on and so forth things that we have encountered in rotational motion. So as usual we are first going to remind ourselves of the classical picture of harmonic oscillator and then we will go into the quantum mechanical description. So let us get started. Why should we start why should we discuss harmonic oscillator in a quantum chemistry course anyway? The biggest reason from the point of view of a chemist is that a harmonic oscillator provides an approximate model for a vibrating diatomic molecule and then if you do that then this k that is there the force constant it basically tells us how strong a spring is if it is for a spring. So what we do is we approximate the chemical bond between two atoms in a diatomic molecule to start with as a spring with a spring constant k. So automatically k becomes bond strength. So if we can determine k quantum mechanically or spectroscopically then we get to know the bond strength which is a very important parameter one of the most fundamentally important parameters of chemistry. Now when we try to talk about molecules of course the classical description is not going to be complete and we have to discuss quantum harmonic oscillators. So whenever we go from classical to quantum regime we find that several differences come in discrete energy levels come in we will talk about wave functions and we will see we get one more very interesting concept that comes up. But before going there let us develop the treatment a little bit. First of all let us simplify this Hooke's law a little bit and let us rearrange d 2 x dt 2 is equal to minus k by m x. Now this is a differential form which we can differential equation form which we can try to solve. And the trial solution that we use is x of t is equal to a sin omega t plus b cos omega t. Once again the sin omega t cos omega t is reminiscent of what you would get in circular motion omega here is root over k by m and that as we might know is the angular frequency of oscillation. To see whether this is a valid solution or not what we will do is we will differentiate it twice and we see what we get. So let us find dx dt what is dx dt we have a sin omega t plus b cos omega t. So when we differentiate sin omega t with respect to t omega comes out and sin omega t derivative is cos omega t.  So what you get is omega multiplied by a cos omega t minus b sin omega t. And since we are talking so much about eigenvalue equations it is very obvious that this is not an eigenvalue equation. So this function that we have used is not an eigenfunction of the first derivative. What about the second derivative because second derivative is what we are interested in we want to solve this differential equation.  Second one gives us omega multiplied by b sin omega t and minus sin is already there. So now omega square comes out and d2x dt2 turns out to be omega square minus omega square multiplied by a sin omega t plus b cos omega t see what has happened we have got back x of t in this equation first of all it is an eigenvalue equation. Secondly if you compare this equation with this equation it is very clear that minus k by m is equal to minus omega square or omega is equal to root k by m. So this is something that comes from classical mechanics. If you want to go into the quantum world then what we need to do is we need to write the Schrodinger equation. For that we need to remember that potential energy in this case is going to be half kx square. So this is a parabolic potential and let us also remember that there is a relationship between omega the frequency of angle of frequency of oscillation and the force constant k. So instead of k we might as well write something in omega. So we will write half m omega square x square that is your potential energy. So now we take this and we plug it in Schrodinger equation the first term of the Hamiltonian remains the same it is a kinetic energy operator in place of potential energy we are going to write half m omega square x square.  Now it might be worthwhile to say here that usually what we do is we do not work with m we work with the reduced mass because it is a two body problem when we talk about an oscillator it is a diatomic molecule HCl there are two atoms they are moving with respect to each other and it is difficult to formulate the problem that way. So what we do is we reduce it and instead of m we write mu the reduced mass and that is what we work with but for now we will just write m whenever the need arises will switch conveniently to mu and I am not going through the detail of it because that is something that we must have done earlier in physics classes. Okay so now before going further let us discuss a little bit about why a simple harmonic oscillator would be a more or less valid model for a chemical bond. We know from once again our class element well knowledge that a potential energy surface for a diatomic molecule is something like this it is not really a parabola when the two atoms are very far away from each other then their interaction energy is zero and then when they come closer then the attractive forces predominate and the energy goes down until a minimum point which is the equilibrium bond length and after which the energy increases sharply due to inter nuclear repulsion okay. So it is very clear that this curve that we have drawn the solid curve is definitely not a simple harmonic oscillator but if I try to draw a simple harmonic oscillator and superimpose with it you can see that from for small displacements from the mean position the two curves are more or less superimposable right say up from here to here the two curves are more or less the same and remember simple harmonic motion requires very small displacement from main position anyway. So if you are going to work with small displacements from main position then simple harmonic oscillator model might be a valid model so that is the premise within which we are going to work for now. Later on when you want to do spectroscopy not in this course when you want to do spectroscopy then you have to consider an harmonicity of the oscillator but let that be the story for another day whoever is interested can go through the lectures on our molecular spectroscopy course which are now freely available on YouTube right. So simple harmonic oscillator is a good approximation for small displacements. So we work with the parabolic potential we write it in Schrodinger equation as we already done in fact we have written it in a little more complicated form that we will come back later and then when we solve it we solve it with boundary condition sorry psi is not coming here this is actually psi psi is 0 at x equal to plus minus infinity. If you remember the conditions that arose from Born interpretation the system cannot exist beyond x equal to plus minus infinity right. So for continuity like in particle in a box the boundary condition is the psi equal to 0 at x equal to plus minus infinity not wherever this potential energy surface is and as we are going to see later on right now what I am doing right now is that I am sort of putting the card before the horse and giving you a brief summary of the results later on we will actually arrive at them. The reason why I want to do this is that we are going to do a little bit of mathematical manipulation I would not like us to get lost while doing that I would like everyone to know what lies there at the end right because the end result is what is of use as application in chemistry. So let me give you the end result first so that even if you get confused while we go through the next discussion it is not so much of a problem to understand the application. So when we work it out we will see that energy is quantized energy EV is equal to V plus half into h cross omega but omega once again is the angular frequency of oscillation and V is the vibrational quantum number ranges from 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on and so forth. So this is what you will get we will get discrete energy levels and they are going to be equispaced that is very easy to see we just work out what EV plus 1 is going to be subtract EV from EV plus 1 you will always get h cross omega. So in a simple harmonic oscillator quantum harmonic oscillator we get equispaced energy levels and energy gap between the between two successive levels is always h cross omega that is one quantum of vibrational energy great. Now we will of course get wave functions as well we will work all this out right now I am only giving you a summary of the answers we will work out and we will see that we get wave functions that look some were similar but not exactly similar to what we get for particle in a box but in a very major departure from particle in a box you see that some wave function is there outside the potential energy surface as well and I would like you to take this as an exploratory question I would like you to find out and maybe post on the forum why you think the wave function exists outside the potential energy surface as well of course it dies down pretty fast but let that be a homework for you people great that is one thing. The second thing is that as I said vibrational quantum number ranges from 0 to infinity. So the lowest energy you can get when you put b equal to 0 is half h cross omega. So you see vibration energy for a quantum harmonic oscillator can never be 0 a quantum harmonic oscillator can never be rest even if you lower the temperature to 0 Kelvin you get a minimum energy of half h cross omega this is called the 0 point energy this is a very major departure from a classical harmonic oscillator classical harmonic oscillator can actually be a stationary quantum harmonic oscillator cannot be stationary why because if it does then its position is determined completely uncertainty in position is 0 what is the position x equal to 0 it will be in the equilibrium position and what is the uncertainty in momentum that also is 0 because it is not vibrating anymore so delta p is 0. So delta p equal to 0 and delta x equal to 0 is not allowed it is not allowed because of uncertainty principle that is why a quantum harmonic oscillator can never be at rest 0 point energy is there when we talk about rigid rotor later you will see that a rigid rotor can be at rest even a quantum rigid rotor and we will discuss why that is the case why the departure from quantum harmonic oscillator but for now the very important take home message is that for a quantum harmonic oscillator the lowest allowed energy is half h cross omega and we will work it out in the next module this is called 0 point energy as I said. Okay now let us come back to the earlier slide and let us start trying to find solutions for Schrodinger equation this is our Schrodinger equation minus h cross square by 2 m remember m will be replaced by mu in due course d 2 psi dx 2 plus half m omega square x square psi equal to e psi. Now there are two ways of finding solution of the Schrodinger equation for a harmonic oscillator the first way is a power series method sort of Brute's force method which is of use in many other applications as well I am not very sure whether we want to do it here but we will see the method that will definitely work out is the algebraic method using ladder operators this is a fantastic method and it introduces us to this very important concept of ladder operators as we will see by the way the discussion I am performing is from Griffiths quantum mechanics book I find that this book is very nice reading as well the treatment is nice and it is as if the author is talking to you so you get a good feeling if you read this book but you can study this from any standard quantum chemistry quantum mechanics book that you are comfortable with. So let us go ahead and let us try to learn the algebraic method using ladder operators for finding solutions of Schrodinger equation for a quantum harmonic oscillator. So here is your Schrodinger equation let us see if we can write it in a little bit of simpler form. So first of all if you look at the kinetic energy term first one minus h cross square by 2m d 2 side dx 2 here the operator involved is minus h cross square by 2m d 2 dx 2 that is the kinetic energy operator as we have discussed already of course here we are talking about motion in one dimension only so that is why you do not have this del 2 del x 2 del 2 del 2 del y 2 del 2 del z 2 business. Now kinetic energy is directly has direct relationship with linear momentum and as you know the linear momentum operator is h cross by i d dx or you could write minus i h cross d dx and of course kinetic energy is p square by 2m so you can write this kinetic energy operator minus h cross square by 2m d 2 dx 2 in terms of this p hat operator and it of course is going to be p square by 2m so I can write the first term on the left hand side of Schrodinger equation as p square psi by 2m for the sake of convenience I am not writing the hat anymore but please do not forget that p here is actually an operator it is not a number. So p square psi by 2m is the first term and while writing the second term what we will do is eventually we want to write it in some simple form. So look at the second term we have omega square and x square and we have m so it can very easily become m omega x whole square if I divide it by another m and the good thing is if I do that the second term will also have 2m in the denominator the first term already has a 2m in the denominator so I can take it out outside the bracket. So what I will do is I will write the second term as 1 by 2m multiplied by square of the product m omega x that operating on psi. So I have just rewritten the two terms on the left hand side of Schrodinger equation. So now taking 1 by 2m outside the bracket the equation becomes 1 by 2m p square please do not forget that p is an operator plus m omega x whole square so this together is the Hamiltonian operator that operating on psi gives us e psi. I am saying operator operator operator so many times because it is important that we do not forget that we are not dealing with numbers we are dealing with operators even x here is really the position operator it is a different matter that when position operator operates on the wave function it gives you the eigen value of position multiplied by the same wave function. So now see this is our Hamiltonian 1 by 2m multiplied by p square plus square of m omega x. Now you look at this part p square plus m omega x whole square if there is some way of factorizing it it would be nice of course if the numbers then it is very easy because it is in the u square plus v square form.  So now the issue is these are not numbers as I said these are operators and the problem with operators is that if there are numbers then u into v would be equal to v into u commutation relation would hold u v equal to v u or u v minus v u equal to 0 operators however do not necessarily commute and here we are working with the momentum operator and the position operator we are going to show you in the next module that these two operators definitely do not commute okay if the operators commute then some special property arises again let us take a change take on that but operators do not necessarily commute. So it is not easy to factorize this u square plus v square kind of expression into two products but what we will do is we will still try and see what is the form of this kind of product we will take i into p plus m omega x and we will take minus i into p plus m omega x multiply them together and see what we get and what we get is going to make our life a lot more interesting as far as your harmonic oscillator is concerned. So what we will do is we will try to evaluate i p plus m omega x multiplied by minus i p plus m omega x and to do that what we will do is we are going to write this in a little simplified form once again remember i p plus m omega x is an operator in itself p is an operator x is an operator so the linear sum is also an operator and same holds true for minus i p plus m omega x what we will do is we will construct an operator out of i p plus m omega x and we are going to call it a minus similarly we are going to construct an operator out of minus i p plus m omega x and we are going to call it not very difficult for you to guess now a plus now why this is called a minus why that is called a plus you will see but for now let me just tell you what the form of the operator is a minus is actually 1 by square root of 2 h cross m omega multiplied by i p plus m omega x where did that 1 by 2 root over 2 h cross m omega come from it came from hindsight we are not the first people working this out it has been done many times and people people who did it for the first time actually found out that the subsequent result becomes simpler and more meaningful if we use this factor of 1 by root over 2 h cross m omega as Newton had said if you see further then that is because we stand on the shoulders of giants let us take the advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants that is where this factor comes from it has not fallen from sky right if you did it for the first time you would be perfectly justified in not even writing this factor we write it because we know where we are headed all right similarly a plus is 1 by root over 2 h cross m omega multiplied by minus i p plus m omega x all right so we have defined the factors then what we want to do is we want to work out the product remember these are operators once again I am repeating many times because this is the concept that often does not sink in if I just say it once and go go ahead so if we there are two ways in which we can work out the product of a minus and a plus we can either work out a minus a plus or we can work out a plus a minus okay remember the operator that is on the right operates first on the function operator on the left operates next so what we will do is we are going to evaluate a minus a plus okay I will request you after the module to evaluate a plus a minus yourself because we will use a plus a minus as well okay so this is what we want to do now let us take a break come back and start right from here in the next module


Kia ora koutou, aakoa Emma Fulpart Aho. I'm a content and resource advisor in National Services Te Paerangi. We're a team at Te Papa, which provides support for the museum and gallery sector across New Zealand. We manage NZMuseums.co.nz. It's just one very thin slice of what we do at National Services. This version was launched in 2008. I don't need to tell this audience that the internet has changed a lot in that time. The original intent was to showcase the museums and collections of New Zealand to be both the museum discovery tool and online collection management system for museums. The collection sharing is via a community function and EHEI've collection management software. Paul Rowe from Vernon Systems Limited talked a couple of slides, a couple of talks earlier, which is a product run by Vernon Systems Limited. The collection sharing is a low barrier to online accessibility, especially aimed at those smaller museums who may not have other means to do this. Like Digital NZ, which shares collection from a very broad pool of contributors, collections featured are shared by participating museums and galleries, not by us. The audience of our website is really the audiences for each of those museums and galleries who participate, whether that's providing profiles or collection sharing. So how were we measuring, how well we were doing? We monitored growth. We've now got more than 60,000 items, collection items shared on the website, and we also looked at page views, basically checking in on Google Analytics. We could see that lots of users were looking at lots of pages, but we really didn't know why. We made some assumptions about the types of people probably looking at the site, and we just left it to grow into a really large virtual collection of objects from across New Zealand, for more than a decade. So this presentation isn't about the website, the Yung Shani website that we did next. It's a small insight into why we're surveying users, what we found, and why you should learn about your audience too. We wanted NZ museums to better reflect our sector focus and in turn ensure that we are helping to connect their collections to communities as best we could. A survey would help us with a baseline, and we started with a free pop-up tool called hotjar. So what did we ask? We had a really short survey, two questions, to find out the user's purpose, and one to check their experience was any good, because we didn't even know that, I guess. We knew people were looking, but we didn't know if they enjoyed the experience of looking on our website. So these were the same questions that Tepapa was using on collections online at the same time, using the same tool, and later we checked in benchmarks against hotjar surveys on the main Tepapa website and the Tepapa blog. So 12 months on, we've had 1,600 responses in total, and for this talk I dug deeper into the first six months. And what we found? Both quick validation of our assumptions and an open floodgate of questions. First, looking to validate that the website was allowing users to meet our website's tagline, could they find museums, explore collections, share stories? Yeah, pretty much. This slide here shows the most used words when asked the question what we're using NZ museums for today. The rural results really validate for our audience, for those museums and galleries, that sharing collections is a worthwhile extension to digitisation endeavours. I'm lucky because that's what we encourage. Specific comments showed people looking for places where their parents and grandparents once worked, buildings with connections and communities that they had lived in and visited. It sort of showed that thing of that real personal connection that people are looking for on the internet. I wanted to know something about my heritage, my history, but also there was lots of curiosity around found, unearthed and brought objects. It gave us some insight about this unassuming looking bottle, which has been the most viewed item on NZ museums each year for the last three years. There were comments from people who had found these underhouses in backyards and washed up in beaches. I think it's just really common. Also, about 7% of the data shows people looking to visit a museum. We see NZ museums as an accessible way of sharing opening hours and collection information. Each organisation can change their own information on the website. Unlike potentially some websites that they're involved in, they can do that within the museum organisation. They may not need to go out to the council to do that themselves. So sharing stories, that looks like the gap. Ehive object pages have a comment function, but it's hard to judge how frequently it's used for sharing meaningful information. And unfortunately, our pop-up survey looks a little bit like a chat box. There was an unintended consequence. People were starting to share it directly into it. They provided additional information about collection objects, personal connections and some questions. There was incredibly valuable information for museums holding those collection objects, but for our small team, there was a few flaws with the process. We weren't asking for contact details. No contact details were being provided. And we had really limited resources at our end to follow up or forward responses. There were also questions. Lots of questions. What seemed like a flood gate of unanswerable questions? The thing that really bugs me about this one is someone out there can probably answer this question if only that question was asked somewhere else. But analysing our results further, the percentage of responses wasn't too bad. Note that 6% of survey respondents asked a question and 2% and 3% of those decided not to provide us any contact details. So there was no way that we could actually answer them at all. I just wanted to touch also on negative comments. This is one of the milder ones we received. So in your raw data, negative comments stand out, but a really low percentage actually wasted their time writing something instead of shutting the pop-up window, which is the other alternative. And then looking at the percentages, it's really low and it's also in line with other tipapa survey results. So not that many people were getting annoyed, but keeping that in mind, we need to ensure we're not collecting data for data's sake. So I'm going to go really quickly through these last two. We looked at the audience impact model, go see the tipapa stall and get a copy of this to plug in your own data into it. It's basically how we're categorising types of engagement and to record impact internally. Is it useful to ask? We've got some immediate insights useful for NZ Museums redevelopment. We also will be returned to the audience impact model to help define the next iteration of NZ Museums. We hope to enable good practice digitisation, rich storytelling about collections and prioritisation of acquisitions and deaccessions. We really hope that NZ Museums will continue to have connections with communities wherever they are. If you're not already asking your visitors what they're doing on your website, I encourage you to start as soon as you're back at your desk and before the end-of-glow has faded. Thanks for your time.