The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard P. Feynman

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. Besides his transcendent passion for science, Feynman had also a robust appetite for jokes and ordinary human pleasures.

The speaker was Dr. Lene Hau of the Rowland Institute, who had just conducted an experiment that was reported not only in the distinguished scientific journal Nature but also on the front page of the New York Times. In the experiment, she (with her research group of students and scientists) passed a laser beam through a new kind of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (a weird quantum state in which a bunch of atoms, cooled almost to absolute zero, practically stop moving at all and together act like a single particle), which slowed that light beam to the unbelievably leisurely pace of 38 miles per hour. Now light, which normally travels at the breakneck pace of 186,000 miles per second, or 669,600,000 miles per hour, in a vacuum, does typically slow down whenever it passes through any medium, such as air or glass, but only by a fraction of a percent of its speed in vacuo. But do the arithmetic and you will see that 38 miles per hour divided by 669.6 million miles per hour equals 0.00000006, or six-millionths of a percent, of its speed in vacuo. To put this result in perspective, it is as if Galileo had dropped his cannonballs from the Tower of Pisa and they took two years to reach the ground. I was left breathless by the lecture (even Einstein would have been impressed, I think).

Feynman always said that he did physics not for the glory or for awards and prizes but for the fun of it, for the sheer pleasure of finding out how the world works, what makes it tick.

Feynman believed and lived by the credo that science, when used responsibly, can not only be fun but can also be of inestimable value to the future of human society. And like all great scientists, Feynman loved sharing his wonder of nature’s laws with colleagues and lay-persons alike.

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says–“you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting–it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.

He was happy with me, I believe. Once, though, when I came back from MIT–I’d been there a few years–he said to me, “Now,” he said, “you’ve become educated about these things and there’s one question I’ve always had that I’ve never understood very well and I’d like to ask you, now that you’ve studied this, to explain it to me,” and I asked him what it was. And he said that he understood that when an atom made a transition from one state to another it emits a particle of light called a photon. I said, “That’s right.” And he says, “Well, now, is the photon in the atom ahead of time that it comes out, or is there no photon in it to start with?” I says, “There’s no photon in, it’s just that when the electron makes a transition it comes” and he says “Well, where does it come from then, how does it come out?” So I couldn’t just say, “The view is that photon numbers aren’t conserved, they’re just created by the motion of the electron.” I couldn’t try to explain to him something like: the sound that I’m making now wasn’t in me.

Unlike the chess game, though, in [which] the rules become more complicated as you go along, in physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears on the whole to be more complicated because we learn about a greater experience–that is, we learn about more particles and new things–and so the laws look complicated again. But if you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful–that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience–every once in a while we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

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.

The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right so long as it doesn’t attack religion, was the clue that I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn’t attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from modern society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe incorrectly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite. There was in the past an era of conversation on these matters. It was felt by the church that Galileo’s views attacked the church. It is not felt by the church today that the scientific views attack the church. Nobody is worrying about it. Nobody attacks; I mean, nobody writes trying to explain the inconsistencies between the theological views and the scientific views held by different people today–or even the inconsistencies sometimes held by the same scientist between his religious and scientific beliefs.

Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad–but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value–even though the power may be negated by what one does. 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.”

Another value of science is the fun called intellectual enjoyment which some people get from reading and learning and thinking about it, and which others get from working in it. This is a very real and important point and one which is not considered enough by those who tell us it is our social responsibility to reflect on the impact of science on society. Is this mere personal enjoyment of value to society as a whole? No! But it is also a responsibility to consider the value of society itself. Is it, in the last analysis, to arrange things so that people can enjoy things? If so, the enjoyment of science is as important as anything else.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down–by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.

For instance, I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves . . . mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business . . . trillions apart . . . yet forming white surf in unison. 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 the 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.

The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, come again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, but with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries–certainly a grand adventure!

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, tossed out, 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 18th century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of the possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. There are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Mathematics is looking for patterns.

Now energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

Later on, in college, I became interested in dreams. I wondered how things could look so real, just as if light were hitting the retina of the eye, while the eyes are closed: Are the nerve cells on the retina actually being stimulated in some other way–by the brain itself, perhaps–or does the brain have a “judgment department” that gets slopped up during dreaming? I never got satisfactory answers to such questions from psychology, even though I became very interested in how the brain works.

As physicists have probed deeper and deeper into the structure of nature, they have found that what once seemed very simple may be very complex and what once seemed very complex may be very simple.

Applications aren’t the only thing in the world. It’s interesting in understanding what the world is made of. It’s the same interest, the curiosity of man that makes him build telescopes. What is the use of discovering the age of the universe? Or what are these quasars that are exploding at long distances? I mean what’s the use of all that astronomy? There isn’t any. Nonetheless, it’s interesting. So it’s the same kind of exploration of our world that I’m following and it’s curiosity that I’m satisfying. If human curiosity represents a need, the attempt to satisfy curiosity, then this is practical in the sense that it is that.

It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe beyond man, to think of what it means without man–as it was for the great part of its long history, and as it is in the great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of the universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is rarely described.