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Richard P. Feynman |
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Review:
What do we mean by "understanding" something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes "the world" is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so; but we may be able at least to find all the rules. Actually, we do not have all the rules now. (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we still do not understand.) Aside from not knowing all of the rules, what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we "understand" the world.
Review:
The 1964 Messenger Lectures, Cornell University
There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
-- Chapter 6, "Probability and Uncertainty"
Rating: 2.5
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth reading | passes the time | waste of time | unfinishable ]
Rating: 2.5
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth reading | passes the time | waste of time | unfinishable ]
Review:
Most people who write books about computation starting at the level
of assembly language would then work up from there; Feynman works
down, covering lots of the fascinating nitty-gritty stuff that he,
as a physicist, is interested in. So there is lots of material here that
is rarely found in computing texts, and certainly even more rarely found
in as accessible a form as this. And the lectures that are right down in
the physics -- on thermodynamically reversible computation and quantum
computing -- are some of today's hot topics: Feynman, as usual, was way
ahead of his time.
This is a write-up of a series of lectures Feynman gave at CalTech in the mid 1980s, transcribed from tape recordings. So the chapters capture the flavour of the great man's lecturing style, and the informality of the spoken word. But although I am a great admirer of Feynman's, I don't think the change of medium works too well in this case. I'd love to hear these lectures, but when reading, I would prefer a deeper and more polished form.
Contents:
Rating: 3
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth reading | passes the time | waste of time | unfinishable ]
reviewed 23 March 1999
Review:
This slim book publishes for the fisrt time three of Feynman's public
lectures, given in 1963.
In The Uncertainty of Science he talks about what makes science fun, and the contrast between scientific and unscientific reasoning. His real enthusiasm (if that is strong enough a word) for science shines through.
Then in The Uncertainty of Values, how important it is to adopt a doubtful, questioning approach. Although his example of the opposite is Russia (and particularly Lysenkoism), the sentiment in today's world is just as relevant:
... we are here only at the very beginning of time for the human race. There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers. Man has been stopped before by stopping his ideas. Man has been jammed for long periods of time. We will not tolerate this. I hope for freedom for future generations---freedom to doubt, to develop, to continue the adventure of finding out new ways of doing things, of solving problems.
Why do we grapple with problems? We are only in the beginning. We have plenty of time to solve the problems. The only way that we will make a mistake is that in the impetuous youth of humanity we will decide we know the answer. This is it. No one else can think of anything else. And we will jam. We will confine man to the limited imagination of today's human beings.
We are not so smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel. ...
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
The final lecture, This Unscientific Age, is less well-structured. Feynman himself admits that he got through all his material in the first two! It is more a sequence of small anecdotes of how unscientific our age is, and how dangerous that can be.
It is interesting to see how much is the same 40 years later, how many of his predictions have come true, and which ones have not. One of the few not so true is plentiful cheap fusion power. (One day, one day.) But most of the scientific predictions have panned out, especially that new advances, in space, in biology, will also cause new problems.
Rating: 4
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth reading | passes the time | waste of time | unfinishable ]
reviewed 11 February 2006
Review: