Subject: [extropy-chat] Feynman's 1963 Lecture - The Uncertainty of Science

From: "Brett Paatsch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 13:02:01 +1100

[When reading Feynmans lecture over the holidays I was struck by how
many of his themes resonated with recent discussions on the Exi-chat list.

And Feynman was talking about the world as he saw it over 40 years
ago.

I wanted to be able to refer to it but needed it to be available to refer 
to.]

Richard Feynman's lecture - The Uncertainty of Science

April 1963.
-----------

[1]

I want to address myself directly to the impact of science on man's ideas in
other fields, a subject Mr. John Danz particularly wanted to be discussed.
In the first of these lectures I will talk about the nature of science and
emphasize particularly the existence of doubt and uncertainty. In the second
lecture I will discuss the impact of scientific views on political
questions, in particular the question of national enemies, and on religious
questions. And in the third lecture I will describe how society looks to
me - I could say how society looks to a scientific man, but it is only how
it looks to me - and what future scientific discoveries may produce in terms
of social problems.

[2]

What do I know of religion and politics? Several friends in the physics
department here and in other places laughed and said, "I'd like to come and
hear what you have to say. I never knew you were interested very much in
those things." They mean, of course, I am interested, but I would not dare
to talk about them.

[3]

In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field,
one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization
there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two
departments of knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in
one or the other.

[4]

The ideas I wish to describe are old ideas. There is practically nothing
that I am going to say tonight that could not easily have been said by
philosophers of the seventeenth century. Why repeat all this? Because there
are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed
in the history of man, and these ideas do not last from generation to
generation.

[5]

Many old ideas have become such common knowledge that it is not necessary to
talk about or explain them again. But the ideas associated with the problems
of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are
not of the kind that everybody appreciates.It is true that a large number of
people do appreciate them. And in a university particularly most people
appreciate them, and you may be the wrong audience for me.

[6]

Now in this difficult business of talking about the impact of the ideas of
one field on those of another, I shall start at the end that I know. I do
know about science. I know its ideas and its methods, its attitudes toward
knowledge, the sources of its progress, its mental discipline. And
therefore, in this first lecture, I shall talk about the science that I
know, and I shall leave the more ridiculous of my statements for the next
two lectures, at which, I assume, the general law is that the audiences will
be smaller.

[7]

What is science? The word is usually used to mean one of three things, or a
mixture of them. I do not think we need to be precise - it is not always a
good idea to be too precise. Science means, sometimes, a special method of
finding things out. Sometimes it means the body of knowledge arising from
the things found out. It may also mean the new things you can do when you
have found something out, or the actual doing of new things. This last field
is usually called technology - but if you look at the science section in
Time magazine you will find it covers about 50 percent what new things are
found out and about 50 percent what new things can be and are being done.
And so the popular definition of science is partly technology, too.

[8]

I want to discuss these three aspects of science in reverse order. I will
begin with the new things that you can do - that is, with technology. The
most obvious characteristic of science is its application, the fact that as
a consequence of science one has a power to do things. And the effect this
power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution
would almost have been impossible without the development of science. The
possibilities today of producing quantities of food adequate for such a
large population, of controlling sickness - the very fact that there can be
free men without the necessity of slavery for full production - are very
likely the result of the development of scientific means of production.

[9]

Now this power to do things carries with it no instructions on how to use
it, whether to use it for good or evil. The product of this power is either
good or evil depending on how it is used. We like improved production, but
we have problems with automation. We are happy with the development of
medicine, and then we worry about the number of births and the fact that no
one dies from the diseases we have eliminated. Or else, with the same
knowledge of bacteria, we have hidden laboratories in which men are working
as hard as they can to develop bacteria for which no one else will be able
to find a cure. We are happy with the development of air transportation and
are impressed by the great airplanes, but we are aware also of the horrors
of air war. We are pleased by the ability to communicate between nations,
and then we worry about the fact that we can be snooped upon so easily. We
are excited by the fact that space can now be entered; well, we will
undoubtedly have a difficulty there, too. The most famous of all these
imbalances is the development of nuclear energy and its obvious problems.

[10]

Is science of any value?

[11]

I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good
thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

[12]

Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a man
said, "I am going to tell you something that you will never forget." And
then he said, "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The
same key opens the gates of hell."

[13]

And so it is with Science. In a way it is a key to the gates of heaven, and
the same key opens the gates of hell, and we do not have any instructions as
to which is which gate. Shall we throw away the key and never have a way to
enter the gates of heaven? Or shall we struggle with the problem of which is
the best way to use the key? That is, of course, a very serious question,
but I think that we cannot deny the value of the key to the gates of heaven.

[14]

All the major problems of the relations between society and science lie in
this same area. When the scientist is told that he must be more responsible
for his effects on society, it is the applications of science that are
referred to. If you work to develop nuclear energy you must realize also
that it can be used harmfully. Therefore you would expect that, in a
discussion of this kind by a scientist, this would be the most important
topic. But I will not talk about it further. I think that to say these are
scientific problems is an exaggeration. They are far more humanitarian
problems. The fact that how to work the power is clear, but how to control
it is not, is something not so scientific and is not something that the
scientist knows so much about.

[15]

Let me illustrate why I do not want to talk about this. Some time ago, in
about 1949 or 1950, I went to Brazil to teach physics. There was a Point
Four program in those days, which was very exciting - everyone was going to
help the underdeveloped countries. What they needed, of course, was
technical know-how.

[16]

In Brazil I lived in the city of Rio. In Rio there are hills on which homes
are made with broken pieces of wood from old signs and so forth. The people
are extremely poor. They have no sewers and no water. In order to get water
they carry old gasoline cans on their heads down the hills. They go to a
place where a new building is being built, because there they have water for
mixing cement. The people fill their cans with water and carry them up the
hills. And later you see the water dripping down the hill in dirty sewage.
It is a pitiful thing.

[17]

Right next to these hills are the exciting buildings of the Copacabana
beach, beautiful apartments, and so on.

[18]

And I said to my friends in the Point Four program, "Is this a problem of
technical know-how? They don't know how to put a pipe up the hill? They
don't know how to put a pipe to the top of the hill so that the people can
at least walk uphill with the empty cans and downhill with the full cans?"

[19]

So it is not a problem of technical know-how. Certainly not, because in the
neighbouring apartment buildings there are pipes, and there are pumps. We
realize that now. Now we think it is a problem of economic assistance, and
we do not know whether that really works or not. And the question of how
much it costs to put a pipe and a pump to the top of each of the hills is
not one that seems worth discussing, to me.

[20]

Although we do not know how to solve the problem, I would like to point out
that we tried two things, technical know-how and economic assistance. We are
discouraged with them both, and we are trying something else. As you will
see later, I find this encouraging. I think that to keep trying new
solutions is the way to do everything.

[21]

Those, then are the practical aspects of science, the new things that you
can do. They are so obvious that we do not need to speak about them further.

[22]

The next aspect of science is its contents, the things that have been found
out. This is the yield. This is the gold. This is the excitement, the pay
you get for all the disciplined thinking and hard work. The work is not done
for the sake of an application. It is done for the excitement of what is
found out. Perhaps most of you know this. But to those of you who do not
know it, it is almost impossible for me to convey in a lecture this
important aspect, this exciting part, the real reason for science. And
without understanding this you miss the whole point. You cannot understand
science and its relation to anything else unless you understand and
appreciate the great adventure of our time. You do not live in your time
unless you understand that this is a tremendous and a wild and exciting
thing.

[23]

Do you think it is dull? It isn't. It is most difficult to convey, but
perhaps I can give some idea of it. Let me start anywhere, with any idea.

[24]

For instance, the ancients believed that the earth was the back of an
elephant that stood on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea. Of course,
what held up the sea was another question. They did not know the answer.

[25]

The belief of the ancients was the result of imagination. It was a poetic
and beautiful idea. Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea?
The world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some
of them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We
whirl around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting. And what holds
us? The force of gravitation, which is not only a thing of the earth but is
the thing that makes the earth round in the first place, holds the sun
together and keeps us running around the sun in our perpetual attempt to
stay away. This gravity holds its sway not only on the stars but between the
stars; it holds them in the great galaxies for miles and miles in all
directions.

[26]

This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge
as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless seas of the other idea - just as
mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic
pictures that came before.

[27]

But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the
imagination of man. No one who did not have some inkling of this through
observations could ever have imagined such a marvel as nature is.

[28]

Or the earth and time. Have you read anywhere, by any poet, anything about
time that compares with real time, with the long, slow process of evolution?
Nay, I went too quickly. First, there was the earth without anything alive
on it. For billions of years this ball was spinning with its sunsets and its
waves and the sea and the noises, and there was no thing alive to appreciate
it. Can you conceive, can you appreciate or fit into your ideas what can be
the meaning of a world without a living thing on it? We are so used to
looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot
understand what it means not to be alive on it. And in most places in the
universe today there probably is nothing alive.

[29]

Or life itself. The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts,
is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected
with all other life. There is a part of chlorophyll, an important chemical
in the oxygen processes in plants, that has a kind of square pattern; it is
a rather pretty ring called a benzine ring. And far removed from the plants
are animals like ourselves, and in our oxygen-containing systems, in the
blood, the hemoglobin, there are the same interesting and peculiar square
rings. There is iron in the center of them instead of magnesium, so they are
not green but red, but they are the same rings.

[30]

The proteins of bacteria and the proteins of humans are the same. In fact it
has recently been found that the protein-making machinery in the bacteria
can be given orders from material from the red cells to produce red cell
proteins. So close is life to life. The universality of the deep chemistry
of living things is indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing. And all the time
we human beings have been too proud even to recognize our kinship with the
animals.

[31]

Or there are atoms. Beautiful - mile upon mile of one ball after another
ball in some repeating pattern in a crystal. Things that look quiet and
still, like a glass of water with a covered top that has been sitting for
several days, are active all the time; the atoms are leaving the surface,
bouncing around inside, and coming back. What looks still to our crude eyes
is a wild and dynamic dance.

[32]

And, again, it has been discovered that all the world is made of the same
atoms, that the stars are of the same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a
question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life come from, or
where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the
earth come from? It looks as if it was belched from some exploding star,
much as some of the stars are exploding now. So this piece of dirt waits
four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange
creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in
the audience. What a wonderful world!

[33]

Or take the physiology of human beings. It makes no difference what I talk
about. If you look closely enough at anything, you will see that there is
nothing more exciting than the truth, the pay dirt of the scientist,
discovered by his painstaking efforts.

[34]

In physiology you can think of pumping blood, the exciting movements of a
girl jumping a rope. What goes on inside? The blood pumping, the
interconnecting nerves - how quickly the influences of the muscle nerves
feed right back to the brain to say, "Now we have touched the ground, now
increase the tension so I do not hurt the heels." And as the girl dances up
and down, there is another set of muscles that is fed from another set of
nerves that says, "One, two, three, O'Leary, one, two, ." And while she does
that, perhaps she smiles at the professor of physiology who is watching her.
That is involved, too!

[35]

And then electricity.  The forces of attraction, of plus and minus, are so
strong that in any normal substance all the plusses and minuses are
carefully balanced out, everything pulled together with everything else. For
a long time no one even noticed the phenomenon of electricity, except once
in a while when they rubbed a piece of amber and it attracted a piece of
paper. And yet today we find, by playing with these things, that we have a
tremendous amount of machinery inside. Yet science is still not thoroughly
appreciated.

[36]

To give an example, I read Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle, a set of
six Christmas lectures for children.  The point of Faraday's lectures was
that no matter what you look at, if you look at it closely enough, you are
involved in the entire universe. And so he got, by looking at every feature
of the candle, into combustion, chemistry, etc. But the introduction of the
book, in describing Faraday's life and some of his discoveries, explained
that he had discovered that the amount of electricity necessary to perform
electrolysis of chemical substances is proportional to the number of atoms
which are separated divided by the valence. It further explained that the
principles he discovered are used today in chrome plating and the anodic
coloring of aluminum, as well as in dozens of other industrial applications.
I do not like that statement. Here is what  Faraday said about his own
discovery: "The atoms of matter are in some ways endowed or associated with
electrical powers, to which they owe their most striking qualities, amongst
them their mutual chemical affinity." He had discovered that the thing that
determined how the atoms went together, the thing that determined the
combinations of iron and oxygen which make iron oxide is that some of them
are electrically plus and some of them are electrically minus, and they
attract each other in definite proportions. He also discovered that
electricity comes in units, in atoms. Both were important discoveries, but
most exciting was that this was one of the most dramatic moments in the
history of science, one of those rare moments when two great fields come
together and are unified. He suddenly found that two apparently different
things were different aspects of the same thing. Electricity was being
studied, and chemistry was being studied. Suddenly they were two aspects of
the same thing - chemical changes with the results of electrical forces. And
they are still understood that way. So to say merely that the principles are
used in chrome plating is inexcusable.

[37]

And the newspapers, as you know, have a standard line for every discovery
made in physiology today: "The discoverer said that the discovery may have
uses in the cure of cancer." But they cannot explain the value of the thing
itself.

[38]

Trying  to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of
human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes
of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in
predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas
are examples of this.

[39]

The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding
things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the
judge of whether something is so or not.  All other aspects and
characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand
that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.
But "prove" used in this way really means "test", in the same way that
hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the
idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put
another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong". That is the
principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be
proved by observation, that rule is wrong.

[40]

The exceptions to any rule are most interesting in themselves, for they show
us that the old rule is wrong. And it is most exciting, then, to find out
what the right rule, if any, is. The exception is studied, along with other
conditions that produce similar effects. The scientist tries to find more
exceptions and to determine the characteristics of the exceptions, a process
that is continually exciting as it develops.  He does not try to avoid
showing that the rules are wrong; there is progress and excitement in the
exact opposite. He tries to prove himself wrong as quickly as possible.

[41]

The principle that observation is the judge imposes a severe limitation to
the kind of questions that can be answered. They are limited to questions
that you can put this way: "if I do this, what will happen?" There are ways
to try it and see. Questions like, "should I do this?" and "what is the
value of this?" are not of the same kind.

[42]

But if a thing is not scientific, it cannot be subjected to the test of
observation, this does not mean that it is dead, or wrong, or stupid. We are
not trying to argue that science is somehow good and other things are
somehow not good. Scientists take all those things that can be analysed by
observation, and thus the things called science are found out. But there are
some things left out, for which the method does not work. This does not mean
that those things are unimportant. They are, in fact, in many ways the most
important. In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind
what to do, there is always a "should" involved, and this cannot be worked
out from "if I do this, what will happen?" alone. You say, "Sure, you see
what will happen, and then you decide whether you want it to happen or not."
But that is the step the scientists cannot take. You can figure out what is
going to happen, but then you have to decide whether you like it that way or
not.

[43]

There are in science a number of technical consequences that follow from the
principle of observation as judge. For example, the observation cannot be
rough. You have to be very careful. There may have been a piece of dirt in
the apparatus that made the color change; it was not what you thought. You
had to check the observations very carefully, and then recheck them, to be
sure that you understand what all the conditions are and that you did not
misinterpret what you did.

[44]

It is interesting that this thoroughness, which is a virtue, is often
misunderstood. When someone says a thing has been done scientifically, often
all he means is that it has been done thoroughly. I have heard people talk
of the "scientific" extermination of the Jews in Germany. There was nothing
scientific about it. It was only thorough. There was no question of making
observations and then checking them in order to determine something. In that
sense, there were "scientific" exterminations of people in Roman times and
in other periods when science was not so far developed as it is today and
not much attention was paid to observation. In such cases, people should say
"thorough" or "thoroughgoing," instead of "scientific".

[45]

There are a number of special techniques associated with the game of making
observations, and much of what is called the philosophy of science is
concerned with a discussion of these techniques.  The interpretation of a
result is an example. To take a trivial instance, there is a famous joke
about a man who complains to a friend of a mysterious phenomenon. The white
horses on his farm eat more than the black horses. He worries about this and
cannot understand it, until his friend suggests that maybe he has more white
horses than black ones.

[46]

It sounds ridiculous, but think how many times similar mistakes are made in
judgments of various kinds. You say, "My sister had a cold, and in two
weeks ." It is one of those cases, if you think about it, in which there
were more white horses.  Scientific reasoning requires a certain discipline,
and we should try to teach this discipline, because even on the lowest level
such errors are unnecessary today.

[47]

Another important characteristic of science is its objectivity. It is
necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you,
the experimenter, might like one result better than the other.  You perform
the experiment several times, and because of irregularity, like pieces of
dirt falling in, the result varies from time to time. You do not have
everything under control. You like the result to be a certain way, so the
times it comes out that way, you say, "See, it comes out this particular
way." The next time you do the experiment it comes out different. Maybe
there was a piece of dirt in it the first time, but you ignore it,

[48]

These things seem obvious, but people do not pay enough attention to them in
deciding scientific questions or questions on the periphery of science.
There could be a certain amount of sense, for example, in the way you
analyse the question of whether stocks went up or down because of what the
President said or did not say.

[49]

Another very important technical point is that the more specific a rule is,
the more interesting it is.  The more definite the statement, the more
interesting it is to test. If someone were to propose that the planets go
around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for
movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an "oomph," this theory could
explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it
not? No. It is nowhere near as good as a proposition that the planets move
around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly
inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory
is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the
result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement
can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place,
and, according to the first theory, you could say, "Well, that is the funny
behavior of the 'oomph.'"

[50]

So the more specific the rule, the more powerful it is, the more liable it
is to exceptions, and the more interesting and valuable it is to check.

[51]

Words can be meaningless.  If they are used in such a way that no sharp
conclusions can be drawn, as in my example of "oomph," then the proposition
they state is almost meaningless, because you can explain almost anything by
the assertion that things have a tendency to motility.  A great deal has
been made of this by philosophers, who say that words must be defined
extremely precisely. Actually, I disagree somewhat with this; I think that
extreme precision of definition is often not worthwhile, and sometimes it is
not possible - in fact mostly it is not possible, but I will not get into
that argument here.

[52]

Most of what many philosophers say about science is really on the technical
aspects involved in trying to make sure the method works pretty well.
Whether these technical points would be useful in a field in which
observation is not the judge I have no idea.  I am not going to say that
everything has to be done the same way when a method of testing different
from observation is used. In a different field perhaps it is not so
important to be careful of the meaning of words or that the rules be
specific, and so on. I do not know.

[53]

In all of this I have left out something very important. I have said that
observation is the judge of the truth of an idea. But where does the idea
come from? The rapid progress and development of science requires that human
beings invent something to test.

[54]

It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations,
and the observations themselves suggest the laws. But it does not work that
way. It takes much more imagination than that. So the next thing we have to
talk about is where the new ideas come from. Actually, it does not make any
difference, as long as they come. We have a way of checking whether an idea
is correct or not that has nothing to do with where it came from. We simply
test it against observation. So in science we are not interested in where an
idea comes from.  We simply test it against observation. So in science we
are not interested in where an idea comes from.

[55]

There is no authority who decides what is a good idea. We have lost the need
to go to an authority to find out whether an idea is true or not. We can
read an authority and let him suggest something; we can try it out and find
out if its true or not. If it is not true, so much the worse - so the
"authorities" lose some of their "authority".

[56]

The relations among scientists were at first very argumentative, as they are
among most people. This was true in the early days of physics, for example.
But in physics today the relations are extremely good. A scientific argument
is likely to involve a great deal of laughter and uncertainty on both sides,
with both sides thinking up experiments and offering to bet on the outcome.
In  physics there are so many accumulated observations that it is almost
impossible to think of a new idea which is different from all the ideas that
have been thought of before and yet that agrees with all the observations
that have already been made.  And so if you get anything new from anyone,
anywhere, you welcome it, and you do not argue why the other person says it
is so.

[57]

Many sciences have not developed this far, and the situation is the way it
was in the early days of physics, when there was a lot of arguing because
there was so many observations. I bring this up because it is interesting
that human relationships, if there is an independent way of judging truth,
can be unargumentative.

[58]

Most people find it surprising that in science there is no interest in the
background of the author of an idea or in his motive in expounding it. You
listen, and if it sounds like a thing worth trying, a thing that could be
tried, is different, and is not obviously contrary to something observed
before, it gets exciting and worthwhile. You do not have to worry about how
long he has studied or why he wants you to listen to him. In that sense it
makes no difference where the ideas come from. Their real origin is unknown;
we call it the imagination of the human brain, the creative imagination - it
is known; it is just one of those "oomphs."

[59]

It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in
science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the
artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have
never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been
seen, and is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must
be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.

[60]

Incidentally, the fact that there are rules at all to be checked is a kind
of miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law
of gravitation, is some sort of miracle. It is not understood at all, but it
leads to the possibility of prediction - that means it tells you what you
would expect to happen in an experiment you have not yet done.

[61]

It is interesting, and absolutely essential, that the various rules of
science be mutually consistent. Since the observations are all the same
observations, one rule cannot give one prediction and another rule another
prediction. Thus, science is not a specialist business; it is completely
universal. I talked about the atoms in physiology; I talked about the atoms
in astronomy, electricity, chemistry. They are universal; they must be
mutually consistent. You cannot just start off with a new thing that cannot
be made of atoms.

[62]

It is interesting that reason works in guessing at the rules, and the rules,
at least in physics, become reduced. I gave an example of the beautiful
reduction of the rules in chemistry and electricity into one rule, but there
are many more examples.

[63]

The rules that describe nature seem to be mathematical. This is not a result
of the fact that observation is the judge, and it is not a characteristic
necessity of science that it be mathematical. It just turns out that you can
state mathematical laws, in physics at least, which work to make powerful
predictions. Why nature is mathematical is, again, a mystery.

[64]

I come now to an important point. The old laws may be wrong. How can an
observation be incorrect? If it has been carefully checked, how can it be
wrong? Why are physicists always having to change the laws?  The answer is,
first, that the laws are not the observations and, second that experiments
are always inaccurate. The laws are guessed laws, extrapolations, not
something that the observations insist upon. They are just good guesses that
have gone through the sieve so far. And it turns out later that the sieve
now has smaller holes than the sieves that were used before, and this time
the law is caught.  So the laws are guessed; they are extrapolations into
the unknown. You do not know what is going to happen, so you take a guess.

[65]

For example, it was believed - it was discovered - that motion does not
affect the weight of a thing - that if you spin a top and weigh it, and then
weigh it when it has stopped, it weights the same. That is the result of an
observation. But you cannot weigh something to the infinitesimal number of
decimal places, parts in a billion. But we now understand that a spinning
top weighs more than a top which is not spinning by a few parts in less than
a billion. If the top spins fast enough so that the speed of the edges
approaches 186,000 miles a second, the weight increase is appreciable - but
not until then. The first experiments were performed with tops that spun at
speeds much lower than 186,000 miles a second. It seemed then that the mass
of the top spinning and not spinning was exactly the same, and someone made
a guess that the mass never changes.

[66]

How foolish! What a fool! It is only a guessed law, an extrapolation. Why
did he do something so unscientific? There was nothing unscientific about
it; it was only uncertain. It would have been unscientific not to guess.
It has to be done because the extrapolations are the only things that have
any real value. It is only the principle of what you think will happen in a
case you have not tried that is worth knowing about.  Knowledge is of no
real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is
necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow if you do something - not only
necessary, but fun. Only you must be willing to stick your neck out.

[67]

Every scientific law, every scientific principle, every statement of the
results of an observation is some kind of a summary which leaves out
details, because nothing can be stated precisely. The man simply forgot - he
should have stated the law "The mass doesn't change much when the speed
isn't too high." The game is to make a specific rule and then see if it will
go through the sieve.  So the specific guess was that the mass never changes
at all. Exciting possibility! It does no harm that it turned out not to be
the case. It was only uncertain and it does no harm in being uncertain. It
is better to say something and not be sure than not to say anything at all.

[68]

It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all of
the conclusions, are uncertain, because they are only conclusions. They are
guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen,
because you have not made the most complete experiments.

[69]

It is curious that the effect on the mass of a spinning top is so small you
may say. "Oh, it doesn't make any difference." But to get a law that is
right, or at least one that keeps going through the successive sieves, that
goes on for many more observations, requires a tremendous intelligence and
imagination and a complete revamping of our philosophy, our understanding of
space and time. I am referring to the relativity theory. It turns out that
the tiny effects that turn up always require the most revolutionary
modifications of ideas.

[70]

Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. This
experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of
very great value, and one that extends beyond science. I believe that to
solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the
door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not
have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you had made up your mind already, you
might not solve it.

[71]

When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant
man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is
uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and
he tells you, "This is the way it's going to work, I'll bet," he is still in
some doubt.  And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress,
that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt,
we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the
development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone
but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

[72]

If we were not able to did not desire to look in any new direction, if we
did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas.
There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true.
So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of
varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are
nearly sure; but none are absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this.
Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they
mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How do you get to know is
what I want to know.

[73]

This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe,
in other fields. It was born of struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted
to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the
struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a
responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory
philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a
philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a
responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt
is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a
new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have
a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand that freedom for future
generations.

[74]

Doubt is clearly a value in the sciences. Whether it is in other fields is
an open question and an uncertain matter. I expect in the next lectures to
discuss that very point and to try to demonstrate that it is important to
doubt and that doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of very great
value.

---- 

Posted to the list by  Brett Paatsch 

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---

From: Robin Hanson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 22:50:23 -0500

On 1/20/2005, Brett Paatsch wrote:
>many of his themes resonated with recent discussions on the Exi-chat list. ...
>
>... So in science we are not interested in where an idea comes from.
>"authorities" lose some of their "authority". ...
>is so. ...
>long he has studied or why he wants you to listen to him. ...

Dear Richard had to be pretty caught up in his rhetoric to say these whoppers.
Scientists most definitely pay attention to the people pushing an idea,
including how long they have studied.  There are in practice more ideas
proposed than people have time to evaluate in much detail.  So most are
rejected (regarding publication, funding, jobs) without knowing whether
those ideas conflict with observations or not.  There are definitely
authorities who decide to reject or not, and they most certainly pay
attention to where the advocate comes from when making this decision.
And dear Richard knew this full well.

Robin Hanson  [email-masked]  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323

---

From: Robin Hanson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 20:42:46 -0500

I just wrote:
>Feynman was a great physicist, as well as a great salesman and entertainer.
>He sold many on an idealized vision of himself and his social institution.
>As a graduate student at Caltech, where Feynman talk for many years, I learned
>that many quite unflattering tales of him are told there.

I had meant to add:  While I enjoyed the Feynman Lectures along with everyone
else, those people I have known who have tried to use it as their primary text
had found themselves stumped when they actually try to solve concrete problems.
There's a reason the standard textbooks are structured the way they are.