Richard Feynman’s Modest Science
When I was 18 and newly arrived in the US, I used to wonder around enjoying new features like the rule of law and great libraries everywhere. Once while bumming out in North Denver I went into the Regis University library determined to read about physics. I had tried that once before, back in my high school, with poor results. As a teenager I had been obsessed with “understanding” physics and chemistry, especially atomic and quantum theory. I didn’t know enough math to study the subjects deeply, but I wanted a conceptual grasp, however incomplete, that was at least half-way consistent and clear.
My high school books and classes left me with the strong feeling that I simply did not get physics. Try as I might, I could not accept the bizarre results of quantum mechanics, wave-particle duality, or how Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle could even be science. I was baffled. When I brought it up with teachers, they had ready-made analogies to “teach” what happened in this sub-atomic world. “Think of the solar system,” “think of springs connected to each other,” “well, it’s like this, suppose you have…” These analogies didn’t help at all. “You think too concretely, that’s why you can’t visualize it,” told me a teacher.
So I’d sit there and try things, think nonverbally, think in wild shapes, somehow think differently to see if I could imagine a sub-atomic particle and “get it.” No go. I wondered whether programming had perhaps damaged my mind by making it inflexible. I went to the school library and found a more advanced physics book, a bit tattered but no matter. I quit reading when I realized the book still assumed the existence of the ether. “Screw this,” I thought. So I flipped off the science bit, kept to my computers, and carried on.
But here I was in the USA, land of opportunity and well-stocked libraries. Looking in the physics section I saw “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” sitting there, three volumes. I had a vague idea of who Feynman was, so I picked up the books and went straight to Volume 3, Chapter 1, Quantum Behavior. In the very first page he comes right out and says:
Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen. (…)
Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone–both to the novice and the experienced physicist. Even the experts do not understand it the way they would like to, and it is perfectly reasonable that they should not, because all of direct human experience and human intuition applies to large objects. We know how large objects will act, but things on a small scale just do not act that way.
I felt a rush of enthusiasm reading this. It was so humble and visceral and honest. This was science in a way I had never seen before, simultaneously more rigorous and human. That first page alone drove a sledgehammer to my worldview and started rebuilding it. Perhaps childishly, I thought of the Hacker’s Manifesto: “we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak.” I had just found one hell of a juicy stake. At one point Feynman asks students to imagine the various electromagnetic fields and waves in the classroom: coming from the earth’s interior, carrying radio and TV signals, traveling from warm foreheads to the blackboard, and so on. Then he says:
I have asked you to imagine these electric and magnetic fields. What do you do? Do you know how? How do I imagine the electric and magnetic field? What do I actually see? What are the demands of the scientific imagination? Is it any different from trying to imagine that the room is full of invisible angels? No, it is not like imagining invisible angels. It requires a much higher degree of imagination (…). Why? Because invisible angels are understandable. (…) So you say, “Professor, please give me an approximate description of the electromagnetic waves, even though it may be slightly innacurate, so that I too can see them as well as I can see almost-invisible angels. Then I will modify the picture to the necessary abstraction.”
I’m sorry I can’t do that for you. I don’t know how. I have no picture of this electromagnetic field that is in any sense accurate. (…) So if you have some difficulty in making such a picture, you should not be worried that your difficulty is unusual.
Volume 2, pages 20-9 and 20-10
Surely you’re joking - you don’t know?? I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had been hoping for a better explanation - a masterful analogy of weights on springs that would allow me to really understand physics. Instead, here was a Nobel laureate telling me that he didn’t really understand it either - not in the definite, make-believe fashion of high school science. Feynman lifted the veil for me - all my sanitized textbooks and uninspired teachers presented science with finality and devoid of context, as if the gods had handed down a few scientific models to us. Analogies that were meant to “help understand” reality had in fact supplanted it; it was not simplification, but a gross distortion of what science really is. This fake teaching would never say that atomic behavior is “peculiar and mysterious” because “human intuition applies to large objects.” No, its entire aim was to pretend that science is not mysterious.
Feynman embraces the whole of science: its beauty, its methods, the history and relationships of its ideas, how our minds react to it, and above all how it stands before the ultimate judge, nature. He’s at once fiercely empirical yet mindful of the crucial human context surrounding scientific ideas. The lectures are not only great technical writing but also a deep look into how we think about the world, into reason and the nature of knowledge. Of course, much of the work is to be done with paper, pencil, and math. Back then I didn’t even know calculus, so I couldn’t really follow all the equations. But the books still gave me what I was looking for, and then some.
Now I have an undergrad in math, which puts me roughly in the 18th century, but better equipped to learn on my own. Some day I hope to take time off and hit physics again. If you want to read more of his stuff, Feynman wrote an insightful essay on engineering and there’s the classic Cargo Cult Science, both online. Amazon has the lectures along with other books, and so might your local library. 
August 24, 2008 at 11:28 pm | Filed Under Culture, Personal
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22 Responses to “Richard Feynman’s Modest Science”
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I’m 350 pages into James Gleick’s book “Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics” and I can barely put it down. It’s a fascinating read and it’s really interesting to know more about him as a person and not only about his scientific contributions.
Thanks for another great post.
/Claes
Great post.
OK, off to Amazon to buy this, and the book Claes recommends above…
Feynman talking about confusion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lytxafTXg6c
@Claes: Cool, I’m glad you mentioned this book, I’ll add it to the queue! I read Gleick’s book about Newton and it was a fun read. I am pretty ignorant about Feynman’s life actually, most of the stuff that I read from him was on science, and I didn’t read books about him. Thanks for stopping by.
@TJIC: Thanks, and enjoy the lectures!
@David: great clip. That is the Nova program with Feynman isn’t it?
I’ve been trying to keep my blog posts small, so I kept stuff out of the post that I wanted to say real quick, so I figure I’ll post it in a comment. Here’s another quote from The Character Of Physical Law that I really like, p.127:
“There is no reason why we should expect things to be otherwise, because the things of everyday experience involve large numbers of particles, or involve things moving very slowly, or involve other conditions that are special and represent in fact a limited experience with nature. It is a small section only of natural phenomena that one gets from direct experience. It is only through refined measurements and careful experimentation that we can have a wider vision. And then we see unexpected things: we see things that are far from what we would guess - far from what we could have imagined. Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which _are_ there.
(…)
It will be difficult. But the difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, ‘But how can it be like that?’ which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will _not_ describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it.
(…)
On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relay and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
There are many other interesting bits as well, for example the discussion on how Maxwell relied on physical analogies and an imagined medium to build his EM theories. In fact, the text of Maxwell’s books is available online, and they’re fascinating to read. Maxwell’s books are second probably only to Newton’s in the history of physics, and that such a brilliant guy had to resort to physical analogies is illuminating and, in a way, comforting
Reading old science books in general is pretty instructive, maybe I should have stuck with the ether book after all.
It was reading Feynman that I understood that science is limited to how, not why. Coming from computers it was hard because you can _really_ understand _why_ it all works the way it does (given enough time, of course, and there’s way more than we can know, but it’s possible to know why for a subset if you are so inclined).
Not so in science. We have to be happy with _how_ it works, and often the how is an equation that cannot be readily rendered into English. Why is it like that? How _can_ it be? Out of scope. Just how, and enjoy it.
Finally, there are plenty of good teachers and textbooks that approach science in good ways. In compsci this is pretty common, this sort of humility and full context, I think, like Djistra’s “The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.” Plenty of other authors follow this line, and enthusiasm is definitely common. Also Einstein’s stuff is really good and ofter raw like Feynman, and others. There are many good authors, I don’t mean to say that Feynman is the only one, though he is unique in certain ways.
Awesome post. Like your many others. I first found your blog when the Feynman software engineering post got slashdotted, and I’ve been a regular reader since. I have a mixed background of physics and engineering, though if I were to choose now, I’d think I’d choose physics, because I really miss it. For more than once I wanted to buy that set of books from Amazon, but it’s price (together with the amount of time I could dedicate to it) was always a deterrent. Like you, I also hope that changes in the future.
The point you make here about modesty in science is one that should be explicitly taught in science courses, but unfortunately continues to be something that we hope students get by “osmosis” (Feynman himself remarked this several times). Writings like this one might help to change that.
Anyway, these are my two cents. Congrats for the blog and keep up the good writing!
I happen to be a Feynman fan too, having watched an interview-movie called “The pleasure of finding things out”, I switched to a book called “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” - written by himself (http://www.spirit-tracker.org/details.php?id=3847&hit=1).
He is a great person, if more teachers were like him, pupils\students would be less scared of the stuff they study, and more likely to venture into the unknown.
The reason I am reading that book is not because I am interested in physics, but because I like his personality. The book starts with several good ideas on how to educate a child, he goes on to talk about different ways of handling life situations, etc. There is also a chapter in which he writes about the investigation of the shuttle accident.
Watch the first of these lectures by Feynman, from about 15 minutes in, to about 35 minutes in.
http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8
Feynman gives a terrific exposition on “understanding”, and how nobody, not grad students, not professors, nobody, really “understands” quantum mechanics.
Another great author is Kary B. Mullis. He has several things in common with Feynman: he is a scientist, he won the Nobel prize, he wrote a fun and informative book very much like Feynman’s “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman” titled “Dancing naked in the mind field” and … well I could go on a little bit, indeed, but it’s up to you to discover the rest!
By the way … Great blog, Gustavo!!!
@Oscar: I’m not sure if a career in physics is a good option though. There are a lot of issues you know… endless postdocs, hard-to-get tenure, grueling advisors, abuse, etc. As much as I think the science is beautiful, I’m not sure if I’d be happy doing it professionally. My personal plan is to live modestly so that I soon will have more time to dedicate to learning, and not have to wait until retirement
Thanks for reading, I’m glad /. brought you guys over.
@Alex: good suggestion. I’ve added the book to the queue as well. By the way, cool blog you have, I want to read your article on corruption more closely, being from Brazil I’ve spent some time thinking about that as well.
@Alan: great video, I love his accent hahah.
@milkyway: sweet, more books. This post was well worth it already. And thanks for the feedback!
As always a very good post. I can understand your state of mind when you say you didn’t understand physics or were afraid that you were unable to imagine things as teachers were trying to convey. I’ve gone through the same. And I’ve also read some Feynman lectures. I remember reading the text in the Feynman book that you’ve put in the comment(especially the last section). His words really encourage students, because they know they are not alone in it, its not difficult for them alone, everybody feels the same difficulty. I remember how I fell in love with mathematics. The day I realized that matrices were simply an array of numbers arranged in a rectangular pattern and stopped asking myself the question ‘But how can it be like that?’ I started liking matrices. Suddenly matrices were easy. This experience later lead me to like calculus and maths in general.
It’s great to hear another person disturbed by the simple-mindedness of popular culture. Feynman also wrote brilliantly about how uncertainty is a part of life and should be embraced (not knowing for sure how the world works — it’s OK). This is something your teachers, as most people, didn’t learn.
I red his book, “Surely, you’re joking Mr. Feynman”, at the beginnig of this year and enjoyed it very much that I did not want it to finish. It was like an honest friend describing the truth and with its encouragement, I did not do physics but I could finish the most important parts in my thesis in computer science. I recommend that book to know more about Feynman.
The Nova documentary “The pleasure of finding things out” as Alex describes was also great. The book I described was also based on it.
Besides science, I know that Feynman was very good at drawing and bongo playing.
Thanks for the post, I enjoyed it very much…
I feel your pain. I read Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” a long time ago, which is supposed to be written for the layman. I was doing pretty well until about halfway through. At that point, I was lost. I finished it, but the words didn’t really mean anything anymore. As a young adult, I also read “Surely, you’re joking Mr. Feynman”, and loved it. He was quite a character.
@İsmail: You’re welcome, I feel much the same way as you do toward the books.
@Keith: yea, I tried reading the Universe in a Nutshell by Hawking but hated it. I thought it was the sort of stuff you get in science magazines, where they gloss over stuff and do some hand-waving to “simplify” it, with the result that it becomes impossible to understand.
When I have some time, I hope to hit up some traditional quantum textbooks + ol’ Feynman and learn some of this stuff for real, at least get to the point where they were in the 20s and 30s.
How do I list all your past blog posts by the title? Clicking each month on this right side menu, and scrolling all the way down through this month’s posts to search an interessant title is not cool… I’d like to find a list like the “Recently Written” one that showed ALL the posts - not only the recent ones.
Sorry for using the comments to ask this. I couldn’t figure out other way to do it.
I really enjoyed your posts, by the way! Congratulations!
@Rodolfo: thanks a lot for the feedback, and no worries about using the comments for this.
Sadly, there’s currently no way to do what you want in my WordPress template. I agree this sucks badly, it’s a must have feature. I hope to replace this template within a month or so and fix several problems, among which this one is top priority.
Sorry about that.
Hi-Great post. I love reading Feynman, even though i dont really understand a word of it!
I tried reading Genius by James Gleick after finding an old copy laying in my attic.. after reading “Surely You’re Joking” and “What Do You Care About What Other People Think?” I found his writing style to be too slow for me
I’ll keep trying though.
I can relate a lot to the author; I am in the same situation.. I’ve read Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, and Feynman since my freshman year and I find that I just need to put down the science books and learn math because I can’t do anything with the concepts any more (I’m a junior in high school now) like I could with gravity and E=mc^2.
I love Feynman.
Yeah I know he’s dead, but he talked to his students and to PEOPLE like he was human too, he realized towards the end of his life too, that everything in life is connected, it’s not all just science or art, it’s everything.
I read all of the collected stories about him, the lectures I want to own before I get into them, I’m an Engineering Physics, Computer Science, and Math major (who also plans on getting a degree in Art). Not yet in school but I know I will be in the future, physics fascinates me and has always fascinated me since I was little; but the only scientist that has ever earned my respect has been him, not Einstein, not Bohr, not even Marie Curie [I'm female] because the way he lived life was the way he saw Physics.
And let me add I don’t consider him a god or something, I simply consider him a human, just like everyone else, who gave it his all for something that he loved doing. I’m no Feynman, I am not a genius, but I am intelligent, and I will do what I can to pass on what he started [and what he also continued], hopefully helping the world out in the process.
It is great to see that someone has some enthusisasm left in their bones. Yay!
I am a big Ofey fan myself, although I prefer volume 1.
Thanks for the reference to Feynmann. I viewed his video lectures on the internet. Like you, I appreciate his no-nonsense approach to teaching physics. Like you, I try to understand it and fail. So I shall stick
to the macroscopic world. But being an electrical engineer, I will continue to dabble in the realm of semiconductor physics and chemistry. If you want a no-nonsense approach to epistemology (the study of what we know and how we know it), I recommend “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” by Ayn Rand. It is a good nonfiction introduction to epistemology. No math at all. Epistemology is the bedrock foundation of all the phyical sciences.