The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard P. Feynman

we see Feynman as he was, always playing with ideas but always serious about the things that mattered to him. The things that mattered were honesty, independence, willingness to admit ignorance. He detested hierarchy and enjoyed the friendship of people in all walks of life. He was, like Shakespeare, an actor with a talent for comedy.

That’s why scientists persist in their investigations, why we struggle so desperately for every bit of knowledge, stay up nights seeking the answer to a problem, climb the steepest obstacles to the next fragment of understanding, to finally reach that joyous moment of the kick in the discovery, which is part of the pleasure of finding things out.”

I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and so he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.” Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that–everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating

When my father came he would take me for walks in the woods and tell me various interesting things that were going on in the woods–

“you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”

one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it–I remember this–it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon,” and I says, “why is that?” And he said, “That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding–he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t move back.” So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right–the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I ...

what I did–immorally I would say–was to not remember the reason that I said I was doing it, so that when the reason changed, because Germany was defeated, not the singlest thought came to my mind at all about that, that that meant now that I have to reconsider why I am continuing to do this. I simply didn’t think, okay?

I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it [my work]–those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.

I don’t believe in honors, it bothers me, honors bother, honors is epaulettes, honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it, it hurts me.

When I was in high school, one of the first honors I got was to be a member of the Arista, which is a group of kids who got good grades–eh?–and everybody wanted to be a member of the Arista, and when I got into the Arista I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around to discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group that we are–o...

When I became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I had ultimately to resign because that was another organization most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to join,

The whole thing was rotten because its purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor–okay? I don’t like honors.

There are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we’re able to do so many more things than apparently animals can do, and other questions like that, but those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answer to them, and so altogether I can’t believe these special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial.

another thing has to do with the question of how you find out if something’s true, and if all the different religions have all different theories about the thing, then you begin to wonder. Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong. Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong.

With the scientific view, or my father’s view, that we should look to see what’s true and what may be or may not be true, once you start doubting, which I think to me is a very fundamental part of my soul, to doubt and to ask, and when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

is a part of the adventure of science to try to find a limitation in all directions and to stretch the human imagination as far as possible everywhere. Although at every stage it has looked as if such an activity was absurd and useless, it often turns out at least not to be useless.

it was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, and remembering what the other fellow said, having paid attention, and so that at the end the decision is made as to which idea was the best, summing it all together, without having to say it three times, you see? So that was a shock, and these were very great men indeed.

one of the greatest dangers to modern society is the possible resurgence and expansion of the ideas of thought control; such ideas as Hitler had, or Stalin in his time, or the Catholic religion in the Middle Ages, or the Chinese today. I think that one of the greatest dangers is that this shall increase until it encompasses all of the world.

I believe most assuredly that the next science to find itself in moral difficulties with its applications is biology,

There will be serious social problems when we find out how to control heredity, as to what kind of control, good or bad, to use.

Suppose that we were to discover the physiological basis of happiness or other feelings, such as the feeling of ambition, and suppose that we could then control whether somebody feels ambitious or does not feel ambitious.

And, finally, there ...

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue a...

there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that that terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. Anyhow, you can see that there will be problems of a fantastic magnitude coming from biology.

our knowledge is in fact universal is something that is not completely appreciated, that the position of the theories are so complete that we hunt for exceptions and we find them very hard to find–in the physics at least–and the great expense of all these machines and so on is to find some exception to what is already known.

information about the world which they don’t know. Now we are working on something way out, and at the limits of scientific knowledge. And the things that appear in the newspaper and that seem to excite the adult imagination are always those things which they cannot possibly understand, because they haven’t learned anything at all of the much more interesting well-known [to scientists] things that people have found out before. It’s not the case with children, thank goodness, for a while–at least until they become adults.

the human mind evolved from that of an animal; and it evolves in a certain way [such] that it is like any new tool, in that it has its diseases and difficulties. It has its troubles, and one of the troubles is that it gets polluted by its own superstitions, it confuses itself,

The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it.

And if you do, you tend to find evidence to support what you believe and dismiss evidence to the contrary... Cofirmation bias.

it’s not right to pick only what you like, but to take all of the evidence, to try to maintain some objectivity

As long as it’s possible, we should disregard authority whenever the observations disagree with it.

the recording of results should be done in a disinterested way.

it doesn’t really work very well, for example, in the social sciences. For example, my own personal experience–as you will realize, there is an awful lot of studying of the methods of education going on, particularly of the teaching of arithmetic–but if you try to find out what is really known about what is the better way to teach arithmetic than some other way, you will discover that there is an enormous number of studies and a great deal of statistics, but they are all disconnected from one another and they are mixtures of anecdotes, uncontrolled experiments, and very poorly controlled experiments, so that there is very little information as a result.

the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific.

“I noticed that Jupiter was a ball with moons and not a god in the sky. Tell me, what happened to the astrologers?”

It might be true that if you go to the dentist on the day that Mars is at right angles to Venus, that it is better than if you go on a different day. It might be true that you can be cured by the miracle of Lourdes. But if it is true it ought to be investigated. Why? To improve it. If it is true then maybe we can find out if the stars do influence life; that we could make the system more powerful by investigating statistically, scientifically judging the evidence objectively, more carefully.

You may laugh, but if you believe in the truth of the healing, then you are responsible to investigate it, to improve its efficiency and to make it satisfactory instead of cheating.

And another thing that bothers me, I might as well mention, are the things that the theologians in modern times can discuss, without feeling ashamed of themselves. There are many things that they can discuss that they need not feel ashamed of themselves, but some of the things that go on in the conferences on religion, and the decisions that have to be made, are ridiculous in modern times.

in the judging of evidence, the reporting of evidence and so on, there is a kind of responsibility which the scientists feel toward each other which you can represent as a kind of morality.

this is a useful thing, that this is a thing which helps each of us to understand each other, in fact to develop in a way that isn’t personally in our own interest, but for the general development of ideas, is a very valuable thing. And so there is, if you will, a kind of scientific morality. I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word.

Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life, that you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing.

one of the important reasons to increase the contact of scientists with the rest of society is to explain, and to kind of wake them up to this permanent attrition of cleverness of the mind that comes from not having information, or [not] having information always in a form which is interesting.

other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosing leaders–in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth and lying in order to develop a product. This wasn’t the original idea. They are supposed to discuss situations and not just make up slogans. It’s true, if you look in history, however, that choosing political leaders in the United States has been on many different occasions based on slogans.

I kept saying that the science was irrelevant.

for people who believe in astrology there is no relevance, because the scientist never bothers to argue with them. The people who believe in faith healing have not to worry about science at all, because nobody argues with them.

You don’t have to learn science if you don’t feel like it. So you can forget the whole business if it is too much mental strain, which it usually is. Why can you forget the whole business? Because we don’t do anything about it. I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view.

by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in a...