“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood.” (This is a year of Feynman – week 34 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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This is part of a lecture by Feynman from his 1964 Lecture on Physics, still from lecture 3. The full quote goes:

“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”

– volume I; lecture 3, “The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences”; section 3-7, “How did it get that way?”; p. 3-10.

“There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.” More poetry from Feynman, in the way he uses words and to explain the mystery of life on Earth, asking one of the key questions “How did it get that way?”.

More quotes taken from The Feynman Lectures on Physics next time – which won’t be until 2025 as we take a break until Easter next year.

Please bear with me due to some time-constraints coming up for several months.

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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

Contact Stargazing Guy for any copyright-related requests or queries @ stargazer1@stargazingguy.co.uk

“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood.” (This is a year of Feynman – week 34 of 52)

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