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Perfectly Reasonable Deviations (From the Beaten Track)Richard P. Feynman |
It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe...
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different plants, and all these atoms with all their motions and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good or evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. So I believe it’s not the right picture.
I think I entered MIT in Math...
I think I entered MIT in Math (course XVIII). After a bit I went to Franklin (then head of Math Department) to ask “what is the use of higher mathematics beside teaching more higher mathematics.” He answered, “if you have to ask that then you don’t belong in mathematics.”
It appears the Greeks take their past very seriously...
It appears the Greeks take their past very seriously. They study ancient Greek archeology in elementary school for six years, having to take 10 hours of that subject every week. It is a kind of ancestor worship for they emphasize always how wonderful the ancient Greeks were - and wonderful indeed they were. When to encourage them by saying yes and look how modern man has advanced beyond the acient Greeks (thinking of experimental science, the development of mathematics, the art of the renaissance, the great depth and understanding of the relative shallowness of Greep philosophy, etc., etc.) - they say, “What do you mean - what was wrong with the ancient Greeks?” They continually put their age down and the old age up, until to point out the wonders of the present seems to be an unjustified lack of appreciation for the past. They were upset when I said that the thing of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia that you can solve a cubic equation - which, altho it is very little used, must have been psychologiclly wonderful because it showed a modern man could do something no ancient Greek could do, and therefore helped in the renaissance which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients - what they are learning in school is to be intimidated into thinking thet have fallen fo far below their super ancestors.
Simple questions with complicated answers are always asked by dull students...
Simple questions with complicated answers are always asked by dull students. Only intelligent students have been trainedto ask complicated questions with simple answers - as any teacher knows (and only teachers think there are any simple questions with simple answers).
In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear...
“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”
I can live with doubt and uncertainty...
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty,” he said. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” He once defined science as belief in the ignorance of experts.