Richard Feynman quotes - page 8
It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out - without putting it in secretly!
Richard Feynman
Well, we're getting a little philosophical and serious, ok? Let's go back to what we're doing. One day we look at a map and this capital is K-Y-Z-Y-L and we decided it would be fun to go there because it's so obscure and peculiar. It's a game. It's not serious. It doesn't involve some deep philosophical point of view about authority or anything. It's just the fun of having an adventure to try to go to a land that we'd never heard of, that we knew was an independent country once, no longer an independent country, find out what it's like. And discover as we went along that nobody went there for a long time and it's isolated made it more interesting. But, you know, many explorers liked to go to places that are unusual. And, it's only for the fun of it. I don't go for this philosophical interpretation of "our deeper understanding of what we're doing."
Richard Feynman
The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong."
Richard Feynman
This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in - a trial and error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
Richard Feynman
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.
Richard Feynman
From a long view of the history of mankind - seen from, say, ten thousand years from now - there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.
Richard Feynman
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity-and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Richard Feynman