Incredible Scientist - Richard Feynman (excerpt from Talks)

Incredible Scientist - Richard Feynman (excerpt from Talks)

Scientific way questioning and observations only add to beauty of the object in consideration, I don’t know how they subtract in any possible way.

I have always been an one sided man, interested in science. I have spent most of my time learning it, so no big deal. I have a limited intelligence, and I have used it in a particular direction.

When my father used to explain me things, whatever we read we tried to relate it to something in reality. So, I started to do the same thing when I read, I tried to relate things and understand what does it mean.

My father had taught me. Looking at a bird, he says You know what bird it is? It is branford trush, in portugese honterabele, in taiwan chuterapikita, in chinese sochalongtha. Now you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of bird is, but you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the bird. You only know about humans at different places and what they call that bird. So, let’s look at the bird, what it is doing. He had taught me to notice things.

that is that nobody knows, he said the general principle is, the things which are moving will keep on moving, and things that stand still will tend to stand still unless pushed upon by external force. This tendency is called inertia, but nobody know why it is true. And that’s a deep understanding. He didn’t gave me just a name. He knew the difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something. That was how I was educated by my father. Those kind of examples, discussions, and no pressure; just lovely interesting discussion.

Another thing that my father taught me other than physics was to disrespct the respectable. I mean, don’t respect the person just for uniform or grade; only when they have done real things which are admirable.

It was my life’s desire to take time off to do this, which I felt I should do in order to protect civilization.

What I had done immorally I would say, is that I forgot the reason why I was doing it in first place. So, when that reason changed, that’s when Germany got defeated, not even a single thought came to my mind that I must reconsider why I am doing this. I simply didn’t think.

But they expected me to wonderful after having done a job like this. But I was not wonderful. And therefore I realized a new principle: I am not responsible for what other people might think that I may be able to do. I don’t have to be good just because they think I am going to be good. And somehow I could relax by having this thought. I thought to myself I have not done anything important, and I am not going to do anything important. But I enjoyed mathematics and physics. I didn’t think they were important, rather I did it for fun of it. So I decided, I will do things for fun of it.

Was it worth the Noble prize? I don’t know anything about the noble prize, I don’t understand what its all about, and what’s worth what? and if the people in the Swedish academy decided X, Y or Z wins a noble prize, then so be it. I wouldn’t have to do anything about Noble prize, it is a pain in neck.

I don’t like honors, I was appreciated for the work I did, and also there are physicists who use my work. I don’t need anything else, I don’t think there is sense to anything else, I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in Swedish academy decides that this work is Noble enough to receive the prize. I have already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of the people use it, those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me, I don’t believe in honors, honors bothers me, they are applets, they are uniforms, my papa brought me up this way, I can’t stand it, it hurts me.

It in one way fun to understand what we are trying to do to understand nature. Just imagine, gods are playing a game like chess, and you don’t know the rules of the game. You are allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, and from a little corner perhaps, and from these observations you try to figure out what are the rules of the game. Like how the pawns move. For ex. you first identify that bishop maintains the color, and later you figure out that bishop always moves diagonally. Which would explains the law you earlier found that it maintains its color. That would be analogous to we find one law, and later find a deeper understanding of it. All laws are good, everything is fine; but all of a sudden a strange phenomenon occurs in some corner. So, you are keen to investigate it, then you find its castling, something that you didn’t expect it. We are always, by the way, in fundamental physics always trying to investigate things which we don’t understand completely.

The thing that doesn’t fit is the one that is most interesting. Everything will be going according to rule, but suddenly one day you find that bishop changes color, you investigate further and find that it was a pawn in from bishop which finished its march till last row of board, so now has capacity of a queen. That can happen, but you didn’t know it. This way, by observing the conditions under which bishop changes color, strange phenomenon happen, gradually you learn the new rule that explains it more deeply.

When you are doing real good physics work, you do need absolute solid slice of time. When you are putting ideas together, its very hard to remember. Its like building those houses of cards, each of the card is shaky, and if you forget one of them, whole thing collapses together. You don’t know how you got there, you need to build up again. And if you are interrupted, you are half-way, and you forgot the idea of how you went there - cause and the result, its easy to slip. It needs a lot of concentration, a solid time to think.

Now you ask me, how should I best teach them? my theory is, the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, is to be chaotic, to be confusing, in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. That’s the only way I see to answer it.

Because of the success of science, there are many new emerging psuedo-sciences I would say, for ex. social science. But in real they don’t do the science. They don’t get any laws, they just collect data and process it. All these market surveys, statistics, predictions, they just collect data and present it in some way. I might be completely wrong in saying that they don’t have right data. But I have the experience with how hard it is to know something, how careful you must be in checking experiments, and how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something. And therefore I can see how they get those information, and I can believe that they haven’t done the work necessary, the checks necessary, and then the care necessary. I have a great suspicion about the whole process. There is this myths and psuedo-science at every place in the name of science. And further, they are intimidating people, by projecting false data, wrong calculations, and utterly wrong predictions.

The way I see it, what we are trying is to exploring, we are trying to know as much as we can about the world. People ask me, are you looking for ultimate laws of physics. My answer is No, I am not. I am just trying to find out more about the world. And if it turns out that there is a simple, ultimate law that explains everything, then so be it. That would be very nice to discover. If it turns out like an onion with millions of layers, and we are just sick and tired looking at it, then that’s the way it is. But whatever the way it comes out, the nature is there, and she is going to come out the way she is. And therefore, while going to investigate, we shouldn’t pre-decide what we are trying to do, except that find out more about it. But if you thought you are going to find more about it so that you could get anwer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you cannot get an answer to that particular question by knowing more about the nature.

The same way that you asked, if the science is true, and I said I don’t know, I am trying to find out, everything could be possibly wrong. And start similarly on religion by saying everything possibly is wrong and then see. Probably then you start sliding down on the edge, which is hard to recover from. Once you start doubting and asking, it becomes even more harder to believe.

You see, one thing is, I can live without an uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing, than having answers which might be wrong. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose; which is the way really it is, as far as I can tell possibly.