Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method

When it comes to backward, mystical, conspiratorial, pseudoscientific thinking, I'm actually pretty forgiving of people in the past: apart from  a small intellectual elite, most people didn't always have the technological and conceptual tools necessary to separate reasonable ideas from the bat-shit crazy. Today, however, when we have such easy access to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom humanity has accrued over the past few thousand years, all of which can be easily accessed through our phones, there is no longer an excuse for science illiteracy. Today, if we are ignorant, much of that is by choice.

By science literacy I'm not talking about keeping up with the details of all the latest studies and experiments published in the latest and most prestigious science journals. I'm talking about a basic understanding of the thinking and methods involved in adjudicating competing claims, whatever their source and whatever their nature. And who better to give you an idea of this kind of thinking, if you're not already familiar with it, than the inimitable and hilarious Richard Feynman? :)

Share with your friends. This is a gospel worth spreading :)

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Hexaflexagons to Blow Your Mind

Whether you are particularly fond of it or not, you have to admit that when math gets involved in origami, amazing things start to happen (as we've seen in this previous TEDTalk presentation).

So imagine what would happen when origami and math meet Vi Hart's quirky style to make mathematical concepts accessible and interesting: pure awesomeness. Thanks to the following lesson on the hexaflexagon, you'll never think of hexagons the same way again...

And as if that weren't awesome enough, here's a second part:

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Richard Feynman - The Essence of Science (in one minute)

I'm shamelessly stealing this from Robert Krulwich's blog, and verbatim at that (remember, shamelessly), but simply because the original is so eloquent and poetic that I would not presume to improve upon it:

"Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964.

Think about what he saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.

The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."

This view is based on an almost sacred belief that the ways of the world are unshakeable, ordered by laws that have no moods, no variance, that what's "Out There" has no mind. And that we, creatures of imagination, colored by our ability to tell stories, to predict, to empathize, to remember — that we are a separate domain, creatures different from the order around us. We live, full of mind, in a mindless place. The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.""

View with a Grain of Sand 

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched,
and that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world,
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelssly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news
but that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

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Adam Savage - How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries

We live in a world in which we presuppose as a given that great scientific discoveries require the existence of great, expensive technological equipment: lasers, the Large Hadron Collider, microscopes, computers, the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, synchrotrons, super-duper cameras, you name it...

But more than great technology, the real secret to discovery is creativity, because creativity helps you make good use of whatever tools are actually available to you, even if they happen to be, as in the case of Eratosthenes, two sticks on the ground. In the following TEDTalk animated presentation, Myth Buster Adam Savage recounts a few examples (starting with Richard Feynman, moving on to Eratosthenes,  Galileo, and Armand Fizeau's toothed wheel to measure the speed of light,) about how small ideas can give rise to mind-blowing ideas and revolutionary discoveries.

And if Carl Sagan is more your style, you might be interested in his take on Eratosthenes.

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The Richard Feynman Series - Beauty

Beauty is one of those tricky concepts to define because although most of us have an intuitive sense of instances of beauty, and can usually recognize it when we see it, we can't come up with an overarching theory about why all the things we consider to be beautiful are considered beautiful while other things are not.

Still, one thing about which many people agree is that science and philosophy strip the world of beauty by reducing it to a bunch of cold, abstract theories and equations. But as the late Richard Feynman makes clear in the following stunning video (which is itself an excerpt from the documentary The Pleasure of Finding Things Out), that prejudice is based on a embarrassing mischaracterization of the nature and the motivation behind serious investigation.

I know exactly what you're thinking... tell me I'm wrong :)

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50 Renowned Academics on God

The title kind of says it all. The following video shows excerpts from presentations, lectures, interviews and debates in which world-leading intellectuals (scientists and philosophers mainly, including various Nobel Laureates) speak on their thoughts concerning the existence of God or the supernatural.

And as you might be able to predict, intellectual sophistication and education is normally inversely proportional to religious belief :)

The speakers, in order of appearance:

1. Lawrence Krauss, World-Renowned Physicist
2. Robert Coleman Richardson, Nobel Laureate in Physics
3. Richard Feynman, World-Renowned Physicist, Nobel Laureate in Physics
4. Simon Blackburn, Cambridge Professor of Philosophy
5. Colin Blakemore, World-Renowned Oxford Professor of Neuroscience
6. Steven Pinker, World-Renowned Harvard Professor of Psychology
7. Alan Guth, World-Renowned MIT Professor of Physics
8. Noam Chomsky, World-Renowned MIT Professor of Linguistics
9. Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel Laureate in Physics
10. Peter Atkins, World-Renowned Oxford Professor of Chemistry
11. Oliver Sacks, World-Renowned Neurologist, Columbia University
12. Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
13. Sir John Gurdon, Pioneering Developmental Biologist, Cambridge
14. Sir Bertrand Russell, World-Renowned Philosopher, Nobel Laureate
15. Stephen Hawking, World-Renowned Cambridge Theoretical Physicist
16. Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel Laureate in Physics
17. Ned Block, NYU Professor of Philosophy
18. Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Laureate in Physics
19. Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford Professor of Mathematics
20. James Watson, Co-discoverer of DNA, Nobel Laureate
21. Colin McGinn, Professor of Philosophy, Miami University
22. Sir Patrick Bateson, Cambridge Professor of Ethology
23. Sir David Attenborough, World-Renowned Broadcaster and Naturalist
24. Martinus Veltman, Nobel Laureate in Physics
25. Pascal Boyer, Professor of Anthropology
26. Partha Dasgupta, Cambridge Professor of Economics
27. AC Grayling, Birkbeck Professor of Philosophy
28. Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in Physics
29. John Searle, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
30. Brian Cox, Particle Physicist (Large Hadron Collider, CERN)
31. Herbert Kroemer, Nobel Laureate in Physics
32. Rebecca Goldstein, Professor of Philosophy
33. Michael Tooley, Professor of Philosophy, Colorado
34. Sir Harold Kroto, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
35. Leonard Susskind, Stanford Professor of Theoretical Physics
36. Quentin Skinner, Professor of History (Cambridge)
37. Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Laureate in Physics
38. Mark Balaguer, CSU Professor of Philosophy
39. Richard Ernst, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
40. Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge Professor of Anthropology
41. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, Princeton Research Scientist
42. Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Laureate in Physics
43. Hubert Dreyfus, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
44. Lord Colin Renfrew, World-Renowned Archaeologist, Cambridge
45. Carl Sagan, World-Renowned Astronomer
46. Peter Singer, World-Renowned Bioethicist, Princeton
47. Rudolph Marcus, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
48. Robert Foley, Cambridge Professor of Human Evolution
49. Daniel Dennett, Tufts Professor of Philosophy
50. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics

Bet you were expecting Dawkins and Hitchens in there, weren't you? :)

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Richard Feynman - Cargo Cult Science

There is no denying that Richard Feynman was an eccentric genius, even by eccentric genius standards. It is just a cold fact of life that most of us will never be quite that creative or productive. Still, that doesn't mean that we couldn't train ourselves to be more like him. To begin with, a substantial percentage of what made him stood out was his refusal to just accept any proposition given to him as obviously true. It doesn't matter if we're talking science, philosophy, art, social mores, etiquette, etc. You don't have to be doing quantum electrodynamics to be like him. If you think anything is obvious in any of the familiar realms above, you're already failing to question and become inquisitive, to ask yourself why such propositions are accepted as true.

And when you combine that curious nature with his scientific integrity: his wholehearted commitment to honesty and the discovery of truth, you end up with a fascinating and thought-provoking little lecture like this:

Check out Feynman speak about his love of the pleasures of discovery.

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