Stargazing Guy

– 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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From an address “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320.

The subject of the address ‘What is science’ is to conference delegates who were all science teachers. Feynman stated that “… I think that “what is science” is not at all equivalent to “how to teach science…”” as he also stated that “… it may seem that I am trying to tell you how to teach science–I am not at all in any way, because I don’t know anything about small children…”.

He uses examples of how his father taught him and talked about their time in the woods and learning that knowing the name of a bird is not the same as knowing something about the bird. He also stated that definitions and the need to learn the name of something is not science. You still, he said, have to learn the names of things, it’s necessary, but it is not exactly science.

The next blog (for week 27) will discover more about Feynman’s view of what science is and is not and, in the meantime, for this blog, I’ll leave you with the view of Brian Keating, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and author of Losing the Nobel Prize, for Prager University, as to what Feynman may have meant by “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” extracted from Keating’s paper warning about the dangers of following the science:

“… a good scientist should always maintain a healthy amount of scepticism. Science is, by its nature, provisional …”

More from Feynman, next time.

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PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

Remember, hope lives here.

Opening image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feynman_at_Los_Alamos.jpg

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