The Meaning of It All

by Richard P Feynman

  It turns out that at the time that I asked this question, the difference in the effects was less than the difference between being in a brick and a wooden building. And the difference between being at sea level and being at 5000 feet altitude was a hundred times, at least, bigger than the extra radioactivity produced by the atomic bomb testing.

  Now, I say that if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious, is a hundred times bigger than the background from the bomb, that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes. The situation really is—don’t get frightened if you live in Denver—it’s small. It doesn’t make much difference. It’s only a tiny effect. But the effect from the bombs is less than the difference between being at low level and high level, I believe. I’m not absolutely sure. I ask you to ask that question to get some idea whether you should be very careful about not walking into a brick building, as careful as you are to try to stop nuclear testing for the sole reason of radioactivity. There are many good reasons that you may feel politically strong about, one way or the other. But that’s another question.

  We are, in the scientific things, getting into situations in which we are related to the government, and we have all kinds of lack of honesty. Particularly, lack of honesty is in the reporting and description of the adventures of going to different planets and in the various space adventures. To take an example, we can take the Mariner II voyage to Venus. A tremendously exciting thing, a marvelous thing, that man has been able to send a thing 40 million miles, a piece of the earth at last to another place. And to get so close to it as to get a view that corresponds to being 20,000 miles away. It’s hard for me to explain how exciting that is, and how interesting. And I’ve used up more time than I ought.

  The story of what happened during the trip was equally interesting and exciting. The apparent breakdown. The fact that they had to turn all the instruments off for a while because they were losing power in the batteries and the whole thing would stop. And then they were able to turn it on again. The fact of how it was heating up. How one thing after the other didn’t work and then began to work. All the accidents and the excitement of a new adventure. Just like sending Columbus, or Magellan, around the world. There were mutinies, and there were troubles and there were shipwrecks, and there was the whole works. And it’s an exciting story. When it, for example, heated up, it was said in the paper, “It’s heating up, and we’re learning from that.” What could we be learning? If you know something, you realize you can’t learn anything. You put satellites up near the earth, and you know how much radiation you get from the sun . . . we know that. And how much do they get when they get near Venus? It’s a definitely accurate law, well known, inverse square. The closer you get, the brighter the light. Easy. So it’s easy to figure out how much white and black to paint the thing so that the temperature adjusts itself.

  The only thing we learned was that the fact that it got hot was not due to anything else than the fact that the thing was made in a very great hurry at the last minute and some changes were made in the inside apparatus, so that there was more power developed in the inside and it got hotter than it was designed for. What we learned, therefore, was not scientific. But we learned to be a little bit careful about going in such a hurry on these things and keep changing our minds at the last minute. By some miracle the thing almost worked when it was there. It was meant to look at Venus by making a series of passes across the planet, looking like a television screen, twenty-one passes across the planet. It made three. Good. It was a miracle. It was a great achievement. Columbus said he was going for gold and spices. He got no gold and very little spices. But it was a very important and very exciting moment. Mariner was supposed to go for big and important scientific information. It got none. I tell you it got none. Well, I’ll correct it in a minute. It got practically none. But it was a terrific and exciting experience. And in the future more will come from it. What it did find out, from looking at Venus, they say in the paper, was that the temperature was 800 degrees or something, under the surface of the clouds. That was already known. And it’s being confirmed today, even now, by using the telescope at Palomar and making measurements on Venus from the earth. How clever. The same information could be gotten from looking from the Earth: I have a friend who has information on this, and he has a beautiful map of Venus in his room, with contour lines and hot and cold and different temperatures in different parts. In detail. From the earth. Not just three swatches with some spots of up and down. There was one piece of information that was obtained—that Venus has no magnetic field around it like the earth has—and that was a piece of information that could not have been obtained from here.

  There was also very interesting information on what was going on in the space in between, on the way from here to Venus. It should be pointed out that if you don’t try to make the thing hit a planet, you don’t have to put extra correcting devices inside, you know, with extra rockets to re-steer it. You just shoot it off. You can put more instruments in, better instruments, more carefully designed, and if you really want to find out what there is in the space in between, you don’t have to make such a to-do about going to Venus. The most important information was on the space in between, and if we want that information, then please let us send another one that isn’t necessary to go to a planet and have all the complications of steering it.

  Another thing is the Ranger program. I get sick when I read in the paper about, one after the other, five of them that don’t work. And each time we learn something, and then we don’t continue the program. We’re learning an awful lot. We’re learning that somebody forgot to close a valve, that somebody let sand into another part of the instrument. Sometimes we learn something, but most of the time we learn only that there’s something the matter with our industry, our engineers and our scientists, that the failure of our program, to fail so many times, has no reasonable and simple explanation. It’s not necessary that we have so many failures, as far as I can tell. There’s something the matter in the organization, in the administration, in the engineering, or in the making of these instruments. It’s important to know that. It’s not worth-while knowing that we’re always learning something.

  Incidentally, people ask me, why go to the moon? Because it’s a great adventure in science. Incidentally, it also develops technology. You have to make all these instruments to go to the moon—rockets, and so on—and it’s very important to develop technology. Also it makes scientists happy, and if scientists are happy maybe they’ll work on something else good for warfare. Another possibility is a direct military use of space. I don’t know how, nobody knows how, but there may turn out to be a use. Anyway, it’s possible that if we keep on developing the military aspects of long-range flying to the moon that we’ll prevent the Russians from making some military use that we can’t figure out yet. Also there are indirect military advantages. That is, if you build bigger rockets, then you can use them more directly by going directly from here to some other part of the earth instead of having to go to the moon. Another good reason is a propaganda reason. We’ve lost some face in front of the world by letting the other guys get ahead in technology. It’s good to be able to try to get that face back. None of these reasons alone is worthwhile and can explain our going to the moon. I believe, however, that if you put them all together, plus all the other reasons which I can’t think of, it’s worth it.

  Well, I gotcha.

  I would like to talk about one other thing, and that is, how do you get new ideas? This is for amusement for the students here, mostly. How do you get new ideas? That you do by analogy, mostly, and in working with analogy you often make very great errors. It’s a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific e
ra, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. You have to blow them out with an egg, and so on. Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn’t know he’s got the wrong theory of what happens. If I’m in the tribe and I’m sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn’t know what he’s doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they’ll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course. If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can’t all be there. It’s too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time. However, I remind you that if you’re in the tribe, there’s nobody else to go to.

  And now I can have some more fun, and this is especially for the students of this university. I thought, among other people, of the Arabian scholars of science during the Middle Ages. They did a little bit of science themselves, yes, but they wrote commentaries on the great men that came before them. They wrote commentaries on commentaries. They described what each other wrote about each other. They just kept writing these commentaries. Writing commentaries is some kind of a disease of the intellect. Tradition is very important. And freedom of new ideas, new possibilities, are disregarded on the grounds that the way it was is better than anything I can do. I have no right to change this or to invent anything or to think of anything. Well, those are your English professors. They are steeped in tradition, and they write commentaries. Of course, they also teach us, some of us, English. That’s where the analogy breaks down.

  Now if we continue in the analogy here, we see that if they had a more enlightened view of the world there would be a lot of interesting problems. Maybe, how many parts of speech are there? Shall we invent another part of speech? Ooohhhhh!

  Well, then how about the vocabulary? Have we got too many words? No, no. We need them to express ideas. Have we got too few words? No. By some accident, of course, through the history of time, we happened to have developed the perfect combination of words.

  Now let me get to a lower level still in this question. And that is, all the time you hear the question, “why can’t Johnny read?” And the answer is, because of the spelling. The Phoenicians, 2000, more, 3000, 4000 years ago, somewhere around there, were able to figure out from their language a scheme of describing the sounds with symbols. It was very simple. Each sound had a corresponding symbol, and each symbol, a corresponding sound. So that when you could see what the symbols’ sounds were, you could see what the words were supposed to sound like. It’s a marvelous invention. And in the period of time things have happened, and things have gotten out of whack in the English language. Why can’t we change the spelling? Who should do it if not the professors of English? If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell “friend,” I say to them that something’s the matter with the way you spell friend.

  And also, it can be argued, perhaps, if they wish, that it’s a question of style and beauty in the language, and that to make new words and new parts of speech might destroy that. But they cannot argue that respelling the words would have anything to do with the style. There’s no form of art form or literary form, with the sole exception of crossword puzzles, in which the spelling makes a bit of difference to the style. And even crossword puzzles can be made with a different spelling. And if it’s not the English professors that do it, and if we give them two years and nothing happens—and please don’t invent three ways of doing it, just one way, that everybody is used to—if we wait two or three years and nothing happens, then we’ll ask the philologists and the linguists and so on because they know how to do it. Did you know that they can write any language with an alphabet so that you can read how it sounds in another language when you hear it? That’s really something. So they ought to be able to do it in English alone.

  One thing else I would leave to them. This does show, of course, that there are great dangers in arguing from analogy. And these dangers should be pointed out. I don’t have time to do that, and so I leave to your English professors the problem of pointing out the errors of reasoning by analogy.

  Now there are a number of things, positive things, in which a scientific type of reasoning works, and in which considerable progress has been made, and I’ve been picking out a number of the negative things. I want you to know I appreciate positive things. (I also appreciate that I’m talking too long, so I will mention them only. But it’s out of proportion. I wanted to spend more time.) There are a number of things in which rational people work very hard using methods which are quite sensible. And nobody’s bothered with them, yet.

  For instance, people have arranged traffic systems and arranged the way the traffic will work in other cities. Criminal detection is at a pretty high level of knowing how to get evidence, how to judge evidence, how to control your emotions on the evidence, and so on.

  We shouldn’t only think of the technological inventions when we consider the progress of man. There are an enormous number of most important nontechnological inventions which mustn’t be disregarded. Economic inventions in checks, for example, and banks, things of this nature. International financial arrangements, and so on, are marvelous inventions. And they are absolutely essential and represent a great advance. Systems of accounting, for example. Business accounting is a scientific process—I mean, is not a scientific, maybe, but a rational process. A system of law has been gradually developed. There is a system of laws and juries and judges. And although there are, of course, many faults and flaws, and we must continue to work on them, I have great admiration for that. And also the development of government organizations which have been going on through the years. There are a large number of problems which have been solved in certain countries in ways that we sometimes can understand and sometimes we cannot. I remind you of one, because it bothers me. And that has to do with the fact that the government really has the problem of the control of the forces. And most of the time there has been trouble because the strongest forces try to get control of the government. It is marvelous, is it not, that someone with no force can control someone with force. And so the difficulties in the Roman empire, with the Praetorian guards, seemed insoluble, because they had more force than the Senate. Yet in our country we have a sort of discipline of the military, so that they never try to control the Senate directly. People laugh at the brass. They tease them all the time. No matter how many things we’ve stuffed down their throats, we civilians have still been able to control the military! I think that the military’s discipline in knowing what its place is in the government of the United States is one of our great heritages and one of the very valuable things, and I don’t think that we should keep pushing on them so hard until they get impatient and break out from their self-imposed discipline. Don’t misunderstand me. The military has a large number of faults, like anything else. And the way they handled Mr. Anderson, I believe his name was, the fellow who was supposed to have murdered somebody and so on, is an example of what would happen if they did take over.

  Now, if I look to the future, I should talk about the future development of mechanics, the possibilities that will arise because we have almost free energy when we get to controlled fusion. And in the near future the developments in biology will make problems like no one has ever seen before. The very rapid developments of biology are going to cause all kinds of very excitin
g problems. I haven’t time to describe them, so I just refer you to Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World, which gives some indication of the type of problem that future biology will involve itself in.

  One thing about the future I look to with favor. I think there are a lot of things working in the right direction. In the first place, the fact that there are so many nations and they hear each other, on account of the communications, even if they try to close their ears. And so there are all kinds of opinions running around, and the net result is that it’s hard to keep ideas out. And some of the troubles that the Russians are having in holding down people like Mr. Nakhrosov are a kind of trouble that I hope will continue to develop.

  One other point that I would like to take a moment or two to make a little bit more in detail is this one: The problem of moral values and ethical judgments is one into which science cannot enter, as I have already indicated, and which I don’t know of any particular way to word. However, I see one possibility. There may he others, but I see one possibility. You see we need some kind of a mechanism, something like the trick we have to make an observation and believe it, a scheme for choosing moral values. Now in the days of Galileo there were great arguments about what makes a body fall, all kinds of arguments about the medium and the pushes and the pulls and so on. And what Galileo did was disregard all the arguments and decide if it fell and how fast it fell, and just describe that. On that everybody could agree. And keep on studying in that direction, on what everyone can agree, and never mind the machinery and the theory underneath, as long as possible. And then gradually, with the accumulation of experience, you find other theories underneath that are more satisfactory, perhaps. There were in the early days of science terrible arguments about, for instance, light. Newton did some experiments which showed that a light beam separated and spread with a prism would never get separated again. Why did he have to argue with Hooke? He had to argue with Hooke because of the theories of the day about what light was like and so on. He wasn’t arguing whether the phenomenon was right. Hooke took a prism and saw that it was true.