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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This is part of a lecture by Feynman from his 1964 Lecture on Physics, from lecture 2. The full quote goes:

“What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so.”

volume I; lecture 2, “Basic Physics”; section 2-1, “Introduction”; p. 2-1

One of the reasons, I think, why many people struggle with ‘science’ is that it describes things that are far beyond the normal everyday experience of the ‘man on the street’, who tends to be wrapped up in their own world of domestic activity and life. This is also why science communicators and popularisers are so important in bringing science to life and relating it to the ‘real’ world. People like Feynman and Carl Sagan and Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox and Alice Roberts and Judith Hann and Magnus Pyke and David Bellamy and Patrick Moore and Hannah Fry and Jim Al-Khalili and Richard Dawkins and many others bring scientific facts to life – we need more!

More quotes taken from The Feynman Lectures on Physics 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://www.deviantart.com/bytor137/art/Reddit-Request-Richard-Feynman-369759437

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