The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard P. Feynman

FEYNMAN: When we start out, we look at matter and we see many different phenomena–winds and waves and moon and all that kind of stuff. And we try to reorganize it. Is the motion of the wind like the motion of the waves and so forth? Gradually we find that many, many things are similar. It’s not as big a variety as we think. We get all the phenomena and we get the principles underneath, and one of the most useful principles seemed to be the idea that things are made of other things. We found, for example, that all matter was made out of atoms, and then a large amount is understood as long as you understand the properties of atoms. And at first the atoms are supposed to be simple, but it turns out that in order to explain all the varieties, the phenomena of matter, the atoms have to be more complicated, and that there are 92 atoms. In fact, there are many more, because they have different weights. Then to understand the variety of the properties of atoms is the next problem. And we find that we can understand that if we make out that the atoms themselves are made of constituents–in this particular case, the nucleus around which the electrons go. And that all the different atoms are just different numbers of electrons. It’s a beautifully unifying system that works. All the different atoms are just the same thing with different numbers of electrons. However, the nuclei then differ. And so we start to study the nuclei. And there was a great variety as soon as we started experim...