The content explores the essence of scientific inquiry and original thinking, emphasizing the importance of questioning assumptions, seeking deeper understanding beyond mere labels, and embracing curiosity to uncover the fundamental truths of the universe.
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you take any crazy idea uh well I don't
know it's hard to make up a very crazy
one they witches or something like that
you tell about what people used to
believe in witches and of course nobody
believes in witches now and you say how
could they believe in witches then you
turn around you say let's see what
witches do we believe in now what
ceremonies do we do every morning we
brush our teeth what is the evidence
that the brushing the teeth does us any
good in cavage so you start wondering
are we all imagine in the
the as the Earth turns on the orbit
there's an edge between light and dark
and along that edge all the people along
that edge and we doing the same
ritual for no good reason just like in
the Middle Ages they had other rituals
and you try to Picture This Perpetual
line of toothbrushes going around the
earth it's to take the world from
another point of view now it may be May
well be that brushing teeth is a very
good thing because it gets rid of
cavities and you're going to ask you can
find out whether it does or it doesn't
by trying to find out now you're going
to ask your dentist he says of course
and you say how evidence I have not
found the evidence from dentists because
they just learned it in school now I'm
not trying to argue that it's good or
bad to brush teeth what I'm trying to
argue for is to think about thing from a
new point of view [Music]
[Music]
you see I have had in my life a number
of uh Pleasant experiences when the
earliest one when I was a kid I invented
a problem for myself the sum of the
powers of the
integers and in trying to get the
formula for it I developed a certain set
of numbers that I for formula for which
I couldn't get and I discovered later
that those were known as the boli
numbers and discovered in
1739 so I was up to 1739 when I was
about 14 you see and then a little later
I discover something I find out I just
may invented a thing called uh which we
now call uh operated calculus and that
was invented in 1890 something you see I
was gradually I was inventing things
that came later and later but the moment
when I began to realize that I was now
working on something new was what I read
about Quantum electrodynamics at the
time and I read a book and I learned
about it for example I read the rxs book
and he had these problems that nobody
knew how to solve it were described
there I couldn't understand the book
very well because I really wasn't up to
it but there in the last paragraph at
the end of the book it said some new
ideas are here needed and so there I was
some new ideas were needed okay so I
started to think of new ideas [Music]
[Music]
Richard feineman nobbel Prize winner and
his son Carl stepped gingerly down the
wet cobbles of Milbank high in the
Yorkshire penines feeman professor of
physics at the California Institute of
Technology retreats to this remote
Village near his wife's home for a
special purpose it's here he finds the
time and Solitude to sift the ideas that
have made him the most feared and
original mind in modern [Music]
physics feineman is in the Forefront of
one of the oldest and most intriguing
games of hid and seek in science finding
the ultimate constituents of the world
in this search Fineman is a celebrated
Maverick who was encouraged by his
father a New York Clothing salesman to
confront conventional wisdom
one Sunday all the kids were all walking
in little parties with their fathers in
the woods then the next Monday we were
playing in a field and the kid said to
me say what's that bird what's the name
of do you know the name of that bird I
says I have the slightest idea he said
well it's a brown throated thrush he
says your father doesn't teach you
anything but my father had already
taught me about the names of birds he
once we walked and he says that's a
brown Thro of thrush he says know what
the name of that bird it's a brown Thro
of thrush in German it's called a
f in Chinese it's called A in Japanese
a and so on and it when you know all the
names in every language of that bird you
know nothing but absolutely nothing
about the bird then we would go on and
talk about the pecking in the feathers
so I had learned already that names
don't constitute knowledge if knowing
the name of
something that's caused me a certain
trouble since because I refuse to learn
the name of anything so when someone
comes in and says uh you got any
explanation for the Fitz cloning
experiment I says what what what's that
he says you know that the long lived
keson disintegrates into two pies oh oh
yes now I know but I never know the
names of things what he forgot to tell
me was that the knowing the names of
things is useful if you want to talk to
somebody else so you tell them what
you're talking about but the basic
principle of knowing about something
rather than just knowing its name is
something that you stuck to is it yes of
course it's you have to learn these are
kind of disciplines in the field of
science that you have to learn that to
know when you know and when you don't
know and what it is you know and what it
is you don't know and it's uh you got to
be very careful not to confuse
yourself how else did he try and
progress mold your methods of thinking
the way you looked at the world well we
had a lot of uh little
games like he would say at the dinner
table you'd think of some little problem
and he'd say suppose we were you were a
martian we were martians and we came
down to this earth that and we look at
got it from the outside and that I can't
explain exactly what he meant but
there's a way of looking something a new
as if you never saw it before for the
first time and asking questions about it
as if you were different for instance uh
if you would ask later I did some little
amusing research for a paper in college
on sleep but it started with a question
of his kind suppose you were a martian
who never slept they didn't have sleep
you didn't have to sleep and you came
down to this earth and you saw these
people had this funny flppy that every
day for a certain amount of time have to
lie down and become unconscious and then
the natural question would be how does
it feel to get unconscious what happens
do you ideas run along and suddenly they
stop or do they just run more and more
slowly but what happens to your ideas
how does it feel to become unconscious
so I tried to answer the question what
happens when you become unconscious but
do you find that these days you still
when you're faced with a particularly
difficult problem when you're absolutely
stuck you tend to say let's look at it
like a Maran would look at it sometimes
there are lots of things that people did
for example Maxwell Put the equations
together the farad he formulated the
equations mathematically with some model
in his head then dur uh got his answer
by just writing and guessing an
equation and uh other people got their
answer like in relativity got the idea
by looking at principles of
symmetry now all these methods and
Heisenberg got his Quantum mechanic by
thinking only talk about the things that
you can
measure now all these ideas we should
only talk about things that we can
measure try to Define things in terms of
only things you measure or let's
formulate the equation mathematically or
let's guess the equation or all these
things are tried all the time look for
symmetries all that stuff is tried all
that stuff when we're going against the
problem we do all that that's very
useful but we all know that that's what
we learned in the physics classes how to
do that but the new problem where we're
stuck we're stuck because all those
methods don't work if any of those
methods would have worked we would have
gone through there so when we get stuck
in a certain place it's a place where
history will not repeat herself and
that's more makes it even more exciting
because whatever we're going to look at
at the other the method and the trick
and the way it's going to look is going
to be very different than anything that
we've seen before because we've used all
the methods from before
before so
so
uh therefore a thing like the history
of the idea is an accident of how things
actually happen and if I want to turn
the history around to try to get a a new
way of looking at it it doesn't make any
difference it I I don't care the only
thing that the real test in physics is
experiment and history is fundamentally
irrelevant the most enduring Legacy from
his father was not just learning to
question the physical world but an
enthusiasm for the inquiry which at 54
Fineman still shares today it has to do
with curiosity it has to do with people
wondering what makes something do
something and then to discover that if
you try to get answers that they're
related to each other that things that
make the wind make the waves and the
motion of water is like the motion of
air is like the motion of sand the fact
that things have common features turns
out more and more Universal what we're
looking for is how everything works and
how everything is what makes everything
work and uh what happens first in the
history is we discover the things that
are on the face of it obvious and then
gradually that we asks more questions
and then we dig in a little deeper to
things that we can just make we need to
do a little more complicated experiment
to find out about but it's a curiosity
as to where we are what we are is it
very much more exciting to discover
we're on a ball half of it sticking
upside down it's spinning around in
space there a mysterious Force which
Hold Us side it's going around a great
big glob of gas that's burning by a fuel
by a fire that's completely different
than the fire any fire we can make well
now we can make that fire nuclear fire
now but uh that's much more exciting
story to many people than the tales
which other people used to make up who
worried about the universe that we were
living on the back of a turtle or
something like that they were wonderful
stories but the truth is so much more
remarkable and so what's the pleasure in
physics is that to me is that as it's
revealed the truth is so remarkable so
amazing and I can't I have this disease
and many other people who have studied
far enough to begin to understand a
little of how things work are fascinated
by it and this Fascination drives them
on to such an extent that they've been
able to
convince governments and so on to keep
supporting them in this investigation
that the race is making into its own
environment as a theoretical physicist
Fineman doesn't have a laboratory and he
finds family relaxation helps him to
concentrate in recent years he been
concerned with the long asked almost
childlike question what are things
really made of what makes up the world
we see around us have we at last come to
the foundation stone from which we can
make anything a tree a human being or
must we go on looking at smaller and
smaller pieces and going deeper and
deeper into a bottomless pit pinan is
trying to knit together our scattered
knowledge of the smallest pieces of
matter to see whether they fit a pattern
the problem although fundamentally
important to all branches of science
seems far removed from everyday reality
the world is strange the whole universe
is very strange but see when you look at
the details and you find out that the
rules are very simple of the game the
mechanical Rules by which you can figure
out exactly what's going to happen when
the situation is simple it's again this
chess game business if you were in just
a corner where only a few pieces are
involved you can work out exactly what
should happen and you could always do
that when there's only a few pieces and
so you know you understand it and yet in
the real game there's so it's so many
pieces you can't figure out what's going
to happen so there was a kind of
hierarchy of different complexities it's
hard to believe it's incredible in fact
most people don't believe that uh the
behavior of say me W yak yak and you
nodding and all this stuff is the
result of lots and lots of atoms all
obeying these very simple rules come out
that that it evolves into such a
creature that a billion years of life
with its experiences has produced the
thing with prongs that stick out like
this and so
on the real there's such a lot in the
world there's so much distance between
the fundamental rules and the final
phenomena that it's almost
unbelievable that the final variety of
phenomena can come from such a steady
operation of such simple rules but
you've had to build the most complex
scaffolding to find out the simple rules
but it is not complicated it's just a
lot of it and if you'd start at the
beginning which nobody wants to do I
mean you come in to me now as an in an
interview and you're asking me about the
latest discoveries that have made nobody
ever asks about a simple ordinary
phenomenon in the street oh like what
about those colors or something like
that we have a nice interview explain
all about the colors butterfly wings
whole big deal don't care about that
want the big final result then it's
going to be complicated because I am at
the end of a 400 years is a very
effective method of finding things out
about the world in the search for the
ground rules of the physical world John
Dalton worked out a comprehensive
explanation over 150 years
ago he assumed that everything we see is
made out of tiny atoms that they are
immutable and indestructible and that
atoms of different chemical elements
like lead or copper have different
weights too small to be observed the
atoms combine with each other to form
complicated molecules and vast
collections of these molecules are
recognizable to us as tables trees or
whatever but in the final analysis atoms
were to be the smallest constituents of
matter ultimate and
unchangeable at the turn of the century
we evolved our present picture of the
atom light electrons surrounding a heavy
Central core or nucleus once the atom
was shown to be destructible attention
turned to the nucleus and during the 30s
it was found that bombarding one nucleus
with another led to a release of energy
and the breaking up of the nuclear
this process which takes place in
nuclear accelerators is photographed in
a liquid bubble chamber you take a
liquid liquid hydrogen or some other
liquid and expand it so it's ready to
boil low temperature and your decreased
de pressure it's ready to boil and it
has to form bubbles somewhere and it's
any little piece of dirt or any little
disturbance it'll form a bubble in that
condition if a particle comes flying
through from some machine it leaves a
track it tears up the atoms along where
electrons are knocked off the atoms
along its track
and uh we can't see that but when the
gas tries to expand when the liquid
tries to boil the bubbles form around
these charged particles which are left
so it leaves a a string of bubbles are
then formed then you can take a picture
of the bubbles so simplest picture would
be if you had a machine that made fast
particles particle go through and you
see a string of bubbles but if the
particle on the way through hit the
nucleus of another atom then you see a
string of bubbles in a kind of a y if it
made its recoil plus some other thing
instead of why you may see more
complicated tracks three or four coming
out and then one of them going along and
going into two then you know that some
particle went along and disintegrated
now these things are going nearly at the
speed of light and so if you can see a
short distance a few centimeters that's
corresponds to a tenth of a billionth of
a second that is if a track comes out
goes along here and then Bates into two
you know you made a particle which
integrated into two in less than a 10
billionth of a second so you see it's
not very difficult
to to find out about these things with
the right with clever techniques since
the war with evidence from bubble
chamber photographs like this physicists
have explored the nucleus of the atom
the results have been spectacular and
confusing the harder the nuclei were
bombarded against each other the more
they disintegrated into even tinier
particles until literally hundreds were
known in the last 10 years some order
has been made out of seeming chaos by
arranging the particles into patterns
each pattern has eight or 10 members
related by nuclear properties like Spin and
Mass to the physicist patterns like this
imply the possibility of even smaller
particles not yet identified but already
named the key to the question of what
makes up the physical world then lies in
the understanding of the nature of these
nuclear patterns we're getting close
because we have a number of little
theories by which we can understand
these patterns
one picture which descries what
particles you're going to find rather
well is that all these particles are
made of out of something else which we
happen to call quarks and now Quark is an
an
object which comes in three varieties
it's either a type B type or C type
Quark okay and that the particles that
we find are of two big classes and one
class we can understand is being made
out of three
quarks and depending on the different
proportions how many A's B's and C's and
how they're moving around each other if
we count how many states we would get
from putting three objects together
could be made in so many ways in 27
different ways each one being three we
find groups of particles and groups of
27 analogously and so on a little more
complicated but it's more subtle but
it's like that and then when we allow
for their motion around each other we
find the higher energy states anal to
the way that that we ought to get and
even even semiquantitatively there seems
to be a relation between the states the
rates that which one turn into another
so it looks like they're made out of
just three quarks then there's this
other class of particles which are
called mesons the first class we called
Barons the words aren't going to do any
good but the other class of mesons we
have to understand is being made of a
quark one quark and one antiquark an
antiquark is a negative partic with all
the numbers all the charge properties
the exact opposite of a Quark we make a
quark and an anti Quark put those
together we understand the meeson states
put three quarks together we understand
all the others
so we have made a really great progress
in analyzing these patterns so much so
that it looks very much as if to me at
least that we're very close to
understanding this part of physics this
strongly interacting
system but what's the main barrier still
to well the quarks have well the main
barrier is we don't understand it
quantitative we don't know exactly the
laws I mean I we do things like I'm just
talking to you only a little bit more
carefully counting how many states we
should get and so on but we don't know
exactly how they move and exactly what
holds them together and so on so on also
there are a number of paradoxes with
this Quark
picture this picture helps to give us a
behavior at low energies of the what
kinds of particles to expect but then
you'd expect that a particle would be
made out of only three parts but we've
done some experiments at very high
energy hitting a proton with an electron
which can only be
interpreted by supposing that the number
of particles inside is really infinite
if there are particles inside it can't
be done with just
three you can calculate it doesn't come
out right so there's a difficulty
furthermore the idea that they're just
B3 particles is self-contradictory to
the ideas of Relativity and so on which
imply the exist of particles and anti
particles and when there are three there
should be possible for the forces to
produce pairs of particle anti particle
in various numbers so there should be
not just three but many more so the
infinity is not a paradox by itself the
three is more of the Paradox why is it
so simple why can we get away and
understand so much with just three when
there should be an infinite number
probably in there both theoretically and
experimentally another thing uh that's a
little technical but very power
paradoxical is that we had a rule back
for atoms that no two electrons can
occupy the same state it's called the
Exclusion Principle and we thought we
understood that that was necessary
according to quantum mechanics and
relativity you know has to
be and with the quarks we find the exact
opposite rule two particles tend to
occupy the same state the exact opposite
seems to be contradictory with
principles there are ways of escaping
this all the time only by complicating
the picture but the simplest picture
just three which explains everything is self-contradictory
