The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Helix Books)

by Richard P. Feynman

“You see? 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.”*

“Now,” he says, “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.”

You see, one thing is, 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 was always dumb about one thing, I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics; if the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition,

we should disregard authority whenever the observations disagree with it.

we find out something rather pitiful: that the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific.

It is possible to live and not know.

Of all its many values, the greatest must be the freedom to doubt.

The value of science remains unsung by singers, so you are reduced to hearing–not a song or a poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty–some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, “This is it, boys, man is saved!” and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination.