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.
It comes at about the middle of this interview excerpt:
A man of science. Not a religious man, but one who was smart enough to recognize that
…science [cannot] disprove the existence of God; I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God — an ordinary God of religion — a consistent possibility?
One thing I am [pretty] sure of is that Richard Feynman would find the contemporary invocation of, and reliance on, “settled science” to be deeply disturbing. He said:
It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.
That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty… Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth.
“Oh Brave Old World, that had such people in ‘t!”
It makes me want him to have said what started out to be my Quote of the Day, but the provenance of which I can’t back up, although it’s attributed, all over the place, to Richard Feynman:
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned.
If he didn’t say it, he should have. Curious character, Mr. Feynman.
So. What do you think of the actual, or putative, quote of the day? (It’s not a trick question. And no answer is out of bounds.)
Richard Feynman, perhaps the greatest American theoretical physicist of all time, was born on May 11, 1918, and died thirty-six years ago today, on February 15, 1988. He had the knack, as so many of his ilk did not, of speaking to the layman in ways that communicated difficult ideas in easily-understandable and sensible ways, in language which punctured the pompous, and which dismissed the ersatz intelligentsia of the time.
RIP.
My own “Richard Feynman” might have been Rupert Emerson, a professor of Political Science and International Relations at Harvard University for about half a century, through his retirement in 1970. When my family and I emigrated to the United States in November of 1963, so that Dad could take up a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs (he reported directly to Henry Kissinger, the Center’s Deputy Director), Rupert Emerson became a great family friend.
I was in the fourth grade at the time, so I don’t remember all that much about Rupert, other than his willingness to get down on the floor and crawl around with me as I puzzled and struggled over the idiotic “new math,” (something I’d never heard of or encountered) and its insistence that I–somehow–should find different and non-traditional ways to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
I’ll always be grateful to Rupert Emerson for teaching me that–as long as I got the correct answer–the method I used to get there really wasn’t anyone else’s business.
Thank the Lord he died when he did. Because if he’d lived long enough to see people asserting that getting the right answer to a mathematical (or any other sort of) question or conundrum was a symbol not of “intelligence,” but merely of “whiteness,” or “white privilege,” I think he’d have rolled over in his grave long before he actually got there.
I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Super-proud recent moment? The one where my stepdaughter told me that she and my 15-year old granddaughter were going to see Oppenheimer. I wasn’t in the least surprised that my stepdaughter wanted to see it. But the fact that she told me that my granddaughter wanted to see it because “Richard Feynman” was in it, made my heart sing.
