Richard Feynman was invited to give a talk to elementary and high school teachers on science. He was a physicist, after all, who had won a Nobel Prize in science. So he should know what science is, right?
Not so fast.
Feynman was not only smarter than anyone else in virtually any room he was in, and knew it from demonstration after demonstration, but he was one of the world's most modest and self-deprecating of humans. He knew that Nature was smarter than he was.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are," he said, and 'you' included him.
You could ask the engineers who allowed the space shuttle Challenger to lift off in freezing weather with rubber O-rings that had lost resiliency, allowing explosive fuel gases to escape, about that.
Feynman demonstrated this O-ring problem during the investigation hearing where he was one of the investigators. He dipped a piece of O-ring in a cup of the ice-water furnished to the panelists to drink. He showed that the O-ring turned to rock. On TV. It no longer filled the gap.
On the booster rocket, gas came out. Suddenly the whole country realized what made Challenger explode on take-off, losing all hands, in 1986.
Odd how shuttle Columbia came apart years later, the result of technical compromises made by smart people, causing the safety skin to be pierced, admitting super-heated gas to enter and destroy all aboard, on re-entry.
"Nature cannot be fooled," Feynman wrote. Certainly not by smart people. They're not that smart. This he knew.
Richard Feynman was careful never to present himself, or allow others to assume, that he knew more than he knew because, just because he was a big-shot in science.
He would hate being called, or viewed as, a big-shot.
That's why he delighted in doing things that were the opposite of Big-shot-dom. Such as joking around and playing the bongo drums, which he loved, but weren't like playing a violing sonata in terms of prestigious elevation above the common stock of mankind who may think anyone can beat on a drum with his bare hands. That is easy to do, of course. But making it sound like something good was another story, and Feynman was always interested in the other story, not what everybody assumed about something. He turned himself into a good bongo player.
Feynman distrusted common assumptions and thought hard about uncommon ones relied on by smart experts.
Feynman took Nature's side, every time.
Feynman's position strikes me as being analogous to taking the side of the First Amendment when it comes to freedom of expression.
Frequently the person claiming the right of free expression is an uncommonly unpleasant person saying an uncommonly unpleasant thing that we do not wish to hear. We wish he would shut up this instant. We might even ask government to put a gag in his mouth.
But if we wish to preserve our own right to say what we think, we have to protect the right of hateful people with whom we disagree.
The awful part is that we must protect the hateful lunatic fringe to protect the mainstream. That's why Nazis were permitted to march in Skokie. So I can write this.
Long live the lunatic fringe. Without them we'd have no First Amendment law, and First Amendment law provides you the protection you need to live, breathe, think, write, dance, and speak.
Sometimes the lunatic fringe has a point.
Abolitionists of slavery, for example, were the lunatic fringe of the day when most people tolerated slavery because most people weren't slaves.
Ditto Jim Crow.
It was easy to be tolerant of the little foibles of other when you weren't on the wrong end of the lash.
Those hateful, intolerant critics of slavery and Jim Crow, of course, were lunatics, totally opposed to the natural order of mankind, which holds that it's okay to take advantage of the less powerful so long as you're making out all right. This is sort of the opposite of "Do unto others..." another idea sometimes seen as lunatic.
Perhaps human nature cannot be fooled either, or not for very long.
Hence the Civil War and such progress as we have made since, with some way to go.
If there were a flaw in an argument, Feynman wanted to find it before Nature did, before someone got killed. He was uncommonly good at this.
Feynman knew that despite all he knew, there was a lot more that he didn't know. He didn't want to get the two confused. Moreover, he didn't want you to get them confused either. So he was always looking for explanations that made sense to him and the people he was talking to, in their language level.
His talk to a group of grade and high school science teachers at a teacher's convention where he was invited to speak was called "What Is Science?"
He began by explaining how his father introduced him to what we call science, whatever that is. You can look this part up yourself on the FeynmanOnline.Com web site, under the entry "What Is Science," where the following comes from. It is very interesting.
Towards the end of his talk, Feynman tries to say what science is. Highlit below is the final part, where he does that. I like that he doesn't come right out and say what science is. You could look that up in a dictionary and find a definition. Whether the dictionary definition encouraged you to think or stopped you from thinking is another problem altogether.
Feynman is being hesitant, equivocal, in saying what science is, and not what it is, but only what he, this ordinary human, really, thinks it may be something like, because what science is may be somewhat harder to get your head around than a dictionary definition which he could have looked up if he'd wanted, in which case his talk would be over and he could've done something else.
But thinking about what things were and then passing the correct information on, to the extent he was capable of figuring out what that was, was the most important thing in Feynman's life.
He refused to accept any position, and there were many opportunities, that did not include teaching what he'd learned. This was the most important thing, passing it on. If you learn something and fail to pass it on, what good is it? You might just as well not have taken the trouble to learn it. Feynman spent his life trying to learn, figure out, new things. Then he shoveled it along, just as I'm now trying to do. It's fun to watch a guy and then see what you can do to act like him. I don't play bongoes.
You can see below, perhaps, why Feynman seems to think this is so important, learning and passing the good ideas forward into the future.
What is at stake in this is the future of the human race. This is a big responsibility. But that's what teachers are doing. Passing the better ideas into the future, while identifying the bad ones that deserve to be left behind. This is Constitutional Law, in science and in civic affairs.
Here's Feynman:
What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent.
I don't mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience--like cats. But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience.
They gradually develop, until some animal [primates?] could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did. So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.
The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventors?
So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species [humans?] the rate at which learning was increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened: things could be learned by one individual animal, passed on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race.
Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the [human] race.
This has been called time-binding. I don't know who first called it this. At any rate, we have here [in this hall] some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from the other.
This phenomenon of having a memory for the [human] race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world -- but it had a disease in it: it was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The [human] race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable.
So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.
Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered.
This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio [from the beginning] again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down.
And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race['s] experience from the past.
I see it that way.
That is my best definition.
I would like to remind you all of things that you know very well in order to give you a little enthusiasm.
In religion, the moral lessons are taught, but they are not just taught once, you are inspired again and again, and I think it is necessary to inspire again and again, and to remember the value of science for children, for grown-ups, and everybody else, in several ways; not only [so] that we will become better citizens, more able to control nature and so on.
There are other things.
There is the value of the worldview created by science.
There is the beauty and the wonder of the world that is discovered through the results of these new experiences. That is to say, the wonders of the content which I just reminded you of; that things move because the sun is shining. (Yet, not everything moves because the sun is shining. The earth rotates independent of the sun shining, and the nuclear reaction recently produced energy on the earth, a new source. Probably volcanoes are generally moved from a source different from the shining sun.)
The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree, and in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air that came from the solid earth, instead. These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.
Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true.
You must here distinguish--especially in teaching--the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, "We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that." You can copy that form exactly.
But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders.
In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders' airfields--radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are.
[But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts.
As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly.
Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it.
If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask,
"How does science show it?
How did the scientists find out?
How?
What?
Where?"
It should not be "science has shown" but
"this experiment, this effect, has shown."
And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.
In a field which is so complicated [as education] that true science is not yet able to get anywhere, we have to rely on a kind of old-fashioned wisdom, a kind of definite straightforwardness. I am trying to inspire the teacher at the bottom to have some hope and some self-confidence in common sense and natural intelligence.
The experts who are leading you may be wrong.
I have probably ruined the system, and the students that are coming into Caltech no longer will be any good. I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television--words, books, and so on--are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.
Finally, with regard to this time-binding, a man cannot live beyond the grave.
Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race--now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable--does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.
It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill.
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.
So carry on.
Thank you.
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Here's an item pulled from the web by Googling on the notion of "Time-binding."
The originator of the concept of time-binding, or the labeler and developer of it is Alfred Korzybski. (pronounced, I think, "Kosh ib' ski" or "Kor shib' ski")
Here is Steven Lewis's account of how the term "time-binding," which applies to the way humans progress, as opposed to Korzybski's related term, "space-binding," which applies to how animals do not seem to progress, was developed:
His experiences during the war [WWI] led Korzybski to contemplate the causes of the periodic bloodbaths that afflicted civilization. Eventually this led him to ponder the differences between humans and animals.
He observed that animals by nature were mere hunters and gatherers or "space-binders" in their pursuit of food, whereas humans practiced agriculture, reflecting a human capacity to anticipate needs, learn from experiences and readily transmit these experiences as symbols to succeeding generations.
He labelled this unique human behavior "time-binding" and noted that the rate of growth of human knowledge resembled a geometric (exponential) progression.
Korzybski felt that teaching humans animalistic or mythological theories about themselves helped create and perpetuate such episodes as the recent war.
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I'm glad to have come upon Feynman's effort to say what science is, because I had come up with my own idea of what science is which was a little different. Of course. What would you expect? Did I win a Nobel Prize in Physics? No.
But as Feynman is quick to note, science is for everyone, not reserved just to those who win prizes for doing it well. I've been required to have some familiarity with the use of science in court. Evidence it's called. Forensic medicine. Investigations.
I won a multiple poison-murder-conspiracy case, called Foxglove, in which my client was jailed for over two years and looking at life-in-prison behind a tenth of a nanogram per millileter of alleged digoxin in a bloodstream where it was not prescribed by the man's physician, based on some familiarity with science and its sub-discipline of statistical inference.
That's a tenth of a billionth of a thousandth of a liter of what I might call science, but it was enough to force the Medical Examiner for the prosecution to admit that he could not say that what he at first reported was the presence of a poison was true.
Dismissal of Foxglove was my Nobel Prize. I hadn't invented anything, but I did have a prepared mind that was open to help, which I obtained, and I knew how to run the ball downfield against opposition, where it counted, in my arena, the court.
I awarded my son, Ted, his Nobel Prize, when, at age seven or eight, he came to breakfast proclaiming with what seemed a mixture of triumph and sadness that he'd disproved the existence of the Tooth Fairy.
How?
By not announcing the loss of a tooth, which he'd put under his pillow as he had the others, where there had been an announcement.
Result?
No dollar.
He'd wondered, doubted, conceived and executed the perfect experiment, for a person of any age, and announced his result for the world to see.
Teddy had disproved the Tooth Fairy, to his, and my satisfaction, and the jocular consternation of his mother, who tried to get him to recheck the pillow after she'd stuck the buck underneath it. After the revelation, of course.
Teddy wasn't buying.
That was worth a Nobel Prize anywhere, for my money, and we still proudly bring it up to encourage Ted and his brothers to do as well as they go on.
Science is as much mine as it is Dr. Feynman. And yours. It belongs to you now, as he, sadly, passed on in 1988. He passed on the good part if what he'd learned.
He wanted us to use it as best we can. So we try.
Had someone asked me what science was (they didn't), I would have said that as near as I can tell, science is a process in which we wonder about something that puzzles us and then start asking questions, looking around, finding evidence that we think supports what we think the answer might be, or really is.
"Is" means "what's real."
That's why it was so funny to hear President Bill Clinton try to slice words by saying, in answer to an inconvenient question, "It depends what "is" means." There may have been something to it.
We use the word 'science' to apply to at least two things, and probably a lot more.
The first is the process of wondering, looking, finding out, and proposing answers to whatever prompted us to do all this work in the first place.
We also use the word 'science' to apply to all the accumulated answers that come from such a process that find their way into a science book.
More than these two possible answers to the question of what is science, there is this, that underlies both.
Science, perhaps more than anything else, is an attitude.
Science is this questioning attitude toward the words of wisdom of authority. This questioning attitude is not a rebellion against any authority, for we could not live together in society if we had no respect for all authority whatever.
It's an attitude that makes us want to find out how and why what "the truth," as proclaimed by someone who is over us as an expert or other authority, really is the truth and how he knows it.
Sometimes we have to look where we're not supposed to be looking, and this may cause problems.
But this looking is in the tradition of science. It's called "investigation." We have investigators all over the place.
The only question is whether they're any good or not. Scientific, medical, accounting, police, engineering, etc. If they perform with integrity, or as Feynman puts it, leaning over backwards to see if you might be wrong and showing the results, then we have a chance at getting closer to this thing we call the truth, which is supposed to set us free, when it doesn't put a small percentage in jail or the nation at war.
Under my definition, even babies are scientists, in a sense, because they have an attitude of wanting to see for themselves. Babies learn from touching a hot stove not to touch it again. They're good scientists, too, rarely making that mistake twice. They build on that to generalize not to touch hot other things, such as a burning log in the fireplace. Otherwise they don't get to grow up successfully into competent adults. They die.
But sometimes we tell children BS and that stops them from trying to continue to try to figure things out. They stop trying to find out.
By providing young people with certainty, we eliminate the doubt that drives the finding-out process that we like to call science. 'Science' does sound grander, doesn't it?
Maybe most people didn't have the time to wonder and have fun ("play") like this, doing science, because they had to hunt, gather, fish, plant potatoes, or harvest wheat, to live.
But a few people must have made the time to avoid doing all this work in order to deal with the question of :
I'm hungry and the kids are starving.
How could we make the hunt or harvest better and more productive?
Those were our first scientists.
"Those" were probably some wife returning from a patch of ground into which she'd dropped a few seeds, in the expectation she'd somehow put together that they would grow for her, en route to her cave, because she's heavily pregnant and cannot join in the hunt with the men, this time.
All we've done is what we usually do. We've broken the effort down into specialties and called it a profession.
Perhaps this makes you think you are smarter than your Grandmother, the Cave-lady.
How would you feel about placing a modest bet on this proposition?
I fully agree and thank you very much for the welcome comment, Mike.
The more-or-less rational finding-out process that we call science is a useful tool, just like any other tool.
We look to additional traditions for the answer to the question whether it's a good idea to use this tool either to nurture or kill each other. The value traditions, we could call them: religious, moral, ethical, educational, cultural, historical, political, legal, etc.
Apparently we need a judicious mix of all to make any civilization, such as it is, work properly, or better.
This, of course, takes some doing.
Sometimes we focus on one category or another to say something about it. It might then appear that the others are being ignored. It's important not to be misled by appearances. Good of you to point that out, what I left out.
We have to shine the flashlight into all corners.
Bob
Posted by: rs | February 24, 2005 at 11:08 AM
I concur with what I understand to be your main point, that we must search for truth, that part of that search is the willingness to question even our basic assumptions from time to time. This is the scientific method. (Also the pre-scientific Socratic method.)
However, at the same time I feel compelled to say something about the proper place of science. It has a good place and a respectable place, but there are certain things it cannot do for us.
The constitution was not written by scientists! (Thank God!) The Founding Fathers (some at least) were broadly educated, well acquainted with the great ideas and great books of western civilization. It was this broadly based exposure and education (as well as courage and integrity) that helped produce such an enduring document.
My point is this, those who search for truth in general or in constitutional law situations in particular are well served by a broad education and engagement with the great thinkers and ideas and history of our civilization. Science doesn't have all the answers.
Mike Cheek
Posted by: Mike Cheek | February 24, 2005 at 10:46 AM