Feynman wonder why

His lectures continue to be available in many places , providing a deep, fundamental, intuitive way to understand physics. The Feynman method of thought was developed by a man who refused conventional wisdom at all turns and who sought to build his mental computer from the ground up, starting with an understanding of mathematics at a very young age.

This was how Feynman approached all knowledge: What can I know for sure, and how can I come to know it? Outside of pure physics, such thinking helped him arrived at such counterintuitive results as the solution he derived to the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, which he took part in investigating. His report on the reliability — or lack thereof — of the Space Shuttle is as famous for its incisive analysis as it is for his willingness to offer a controversial finding that placed blame.

Feynman was a ballbuster from an early age, telling stories of picking safes at the Manhattan Project and playing the bongos in Brazil, breaking the image of the buttoned-up physics professor. What we take from Feynman is an absolute, unvarying pursuit of rationality and truth. Feynman was never one to settle for knowing the description of things or the accepted truths of things. Richard P. Feynman was the physicist who could, it seems, also be anything else he chose to be: a musician who played the frigideira in a Brazilian samba group and even performed during Carnaval , a composer who co-wrote and performed music to an award-winning modern ballet , an artist who, as Ofey, had a one-man show , a specialist on Mayan hieroglyphics who lectured on the codexes of the ancients and could spot a fake before the experts themselves —and most of all, always, a profound thinker, who wondered not only about the world around him but about the him the world was around.

Who not only wondered why, but then immediately, why he wondered why, and then, why he wondered that. How did his mind work? How did it get to wherever it traveled, and could he find a way to trace it? Feynman had written his wondering poem in response to an open-ended philosophy theme.

His question of choice: how does the stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep? Not something we typically ask ourselves—and not the easiest or most obvious question to tackle. He was nothing if not a conscientious scientist.

To answer his own query, he began to observe himself as he fell sleep. Each night, he would watch to see what happened, and then in the morning, record his observations. And every afternoon, he would do the same thing, pulling down his shades and observing himself as he napped. At the end of four weeks, he was ready to hand in his theme.

But, he noted, there was a problem: the problem of introspection. What would the end of consciousness be like if he just let it end? There was no way to know. Introspection inherently disturbed the object of introspection itself. At the time, the idea was a radical one. Freud was beginning his work in an era when the study of the mind was focused almost exclusively, in the realm of science, at least, on the study of the brain and its physical structures.

Find how our brains connect, and you find how we think. Ice is extremely slippery. You say, how does it work? Why on ice and not on other things? Because water expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it. It goes on and on. There are other forces involved, connected to electrical forces. It turns out that the magnetic and electrical force with which I wish to explain this repulsion in the first place is what ultimately is the deeper thing that we have to start with to explain many other things that everybody would just accept.

The situation you then have to explain is why, in magnets, it goes over a bigger distance than ordinarily. For example, if we said the magnets attract like rubber bands, I would be cheating you. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.

I learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to Honolulu. In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and then ended his talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would never forget — and I have never forgotten it.

It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion:. To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. What then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that enable us to determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use. Ages on ages before any eyes could see year after year thunderously pounding the shore as now.

For whom, for what? On a dead planet with no life to entertain. Never at rest tortured by energy wasted prodigiously by the sun poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the universe. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know.

But I don't know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science.