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“… all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” (This is a year of Feynman – week 16 of 52)

– Richard P. Feynman (11 May 1918 – 15 Feb 1988)

From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation, the physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman loved to shoot down what he called “lousy ideas.” Today, the world is awash in lousy ideas — so maybe it’s time to get some more Feynman in our lives?

Credit: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-curious-mr-feynman/

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In 1961, Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this question to a group of undergraduate students: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

The above quote was his answer.

His conclusion was:

“In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

The Feynman Lectures on Physics; volume I; lecture 1, “Atoms in Motion”; section 1-1, “Introduction”; p. 1-1

“… all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” (This is a year of Feynman – week 16 of 52)

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