Stargazing Guy

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“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work …” (This is a year of Feynman – week 25 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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The opening lines of Feynman’s address to the Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 December 1965, called “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics“, which describes his story of the development of the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics and the fact that he believed there is nothing to be learnt from it! He notes “It is most striking that most of the ideas developed in the course of this research were not ultimately used in the final result”, using the example of the idea he fell in love with ie “… first solve the classical problem, to get rid of the infinite self-energies in the classical theory, and to hope that when I made a quantum theory of it, everything would just be fine” and the fact that in the end it gave birth to an idea that was awarded a Nobel prize.

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