There is a first-grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog, a windable toy dog, and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says “What makes it move?” Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question “What makes it move?” Then there is a picture of a motor bike and the question “What makes it move?” and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about: physics, biology, chemistry. But that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book; the answer I was trying to learn is that “energy makes it move.”
Now energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I mean by that is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea. It is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that “God makes it move,” or “spirit makes it move,” or “movability makes it move.” (In fact equally well to say “energy makes it stop.”)
Look at it this way: That’s only the definition of energy. It should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not “what makes it move is energy.” This is a very subtle difference. It’s the same with this inertia proposition. Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way:
If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move; if you ask an ordinary human being what makes a toy dog move, that is what you should think about. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around. What a good way to begin a science course. Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people, devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, “I don’t think energy makes it move.” Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, “Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.” “Without using the word ‘energy,’ tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.” You cannot. So you learned nothing except the definition. You learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson is that not possibly destructive?
I think, for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others–“gravity makes it fall”; “the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction.” Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction is sad, because it’s not science.
My father dealt a little bit with energy and used the term after I got a little bit of the idea about it. What he would have done I know, because he did in fact essentially the same thing–though not the same example of the toy dog. He would say, “It moves because the sun is shining,” if he wanted to give the same lesson. I would say “No. What has that to do with the sun shining? It moved because I wound up the springs.”
“And why, my friend, are you able to move to wind up this spring?”
“I eat.”
“What, my friend, do you eat?”
“I eat plants.”
“And how do they grow?”
“They grow because the sun is shining.”
And it is the same with the dog. What about gasoline? Accumulated energy of the sun which is captured by plants and preserved in the ground. Other examples all end with the sun. And so the same idea about the world that our textbook is driving at is phrased in a very exciting way. All the things that we see that are moving are moving because the sun is shining. It does explain the relationship of one source of energy to another, and it can be denied by the child. He could say, “I don’t think it is on account of the sun shining,” and you can start a discussion. So there is a difference. (Later I could challenge him with the tides, and what makes the earth turn, and have my hand on mystery again.)
That is just an example of the difference between definitions (which are necessary) and science. The only objection in this particular case was that it was the first lesson. It must certainly come in later, telling you what energy is, but not to such a simple question as “What makes a dog move?” A child should be given a child’s answer. “Open it up; let’s look at it.”
During walks in the woods with my father, I learned a great deal. In the case of birds, for example: Instead of naming them, my father would say, “Look, notice that the bird is always pecking in its feathers. It pecks a lot in its feathers. Why do you think it pecks the feathers?”
I guessed it’s because the feathers are ruffled, and he’s trying to straighten them out. He said “Okay, when would the feathers get ruffled, or how would they get ruffled?”
“When he flies. When he walks around, it’s okay; but when he flies it ruffles the feathers.”
Then he would say, “You would guess then when the bird just landed he would have to peck more at his feathers than after he has straightened them out and has been walking around the ground for a while. Okay; let’s look.”
So we would look, and we would watch, and it turned out, as far as I could make out, that the bird pecked about as much and as often no matter how long he was walking on the ground and not just directly after flight.
So my guess was wrong, and I couldn’t guess the right reason. My father revealed the reason.
It is that the birds have lice. There is a little flake that comes off the feather, my father taught me, stuff that can be eaten, and the louse eats it. And then on the louse, there is a little bit of wax in the joints between the sections of the leg that oozes out, and there is a mite that lives in there that can eat that wax. Now the mite has such a good source of food that it doesn’t digest it too well, so from the rear end there comes a liquid that has too much sugar, and in that sugar lives a tiny creature, etc.
The facts are not correct. The spirit is correct. First I learned about parasitism, one on the other, on the other, on the other.
Second, he went on to say that in the world whenever there is any source of something that could be eaten to make life go, some form of life finds a way to make use of that source; and that each little bit of leftover stuff is eaten by something.
Now the point of this is that the result of observation, even if I were unable to come to the ultimate conclusion, was a wonderful piece of gold, with a marvelous result. It was something marvelous.
Suppose I were told to observe, to make a list, to write down, to do this, to look, and when I wrote my list down, it was filed with 130 other lists in the back of a notebook. I would learn that the result of observation is relatively dull, that nothing much comes of it.
I think it is very important–at least it was to me–that if you are going to teach people to make observations, you should show that something wonderful can come from them. I learned then what science was about. It was patience. If you looked, and you watched, and you paid attention, you got a great reward from it (although possibly not every time). As a result, when I became a more mature man, I would painstakingly, hour after hour, for years, work on problems–sometimes many years, sometimes shorter times–many of them failing, lots of stuff going into the wastebasket; but every once in a while there was the gold of a new understanding that I had learned to expect when I was a kid, the result of observation. For I did not learn that observation was not worthwhile.
Incidentally, in the forest we learned other things. We would go for walks and see all the regular things, and talk about many things; about the growing plants, the struggle of the trees for light, how they try to get as high as they can, and to solve the problem of getting water higher than 35 or 40 feet, the little plants on the ground that look for the little bits of light that come through, all that growth, and so forth.
One day after we had seen all this, my father took me to the forest again and said, “In all this time we have been looking at the forest, we have only seen half of what is going on, exactly half.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “We have been looking at how all these things grow; but for each bit of growth, there must be the same amount of decay, otherwise the materials would be consumed forever. Dead trees would lie there having used up all the stuff from the air, and the ground, and it wouldn’t get back into the ground or the air, and nothing else could grow, because there is no material available. There must be for each bit of growth exactly the same amount of decay.”
There then followed many walks in the woods during which we broke up old stumps, saw funny bugs and funguses growing–he couldn’t show me bacteria, but we saw the softening effects, and so on. I saw the forest as a process of the constant turning of materials.
There were many such things, description of things, in odd ways. He often started to talk about a thing like this: “Suppose a man from Mars were to come down and look at the world.” It’s a very good way to look at the world. For example, when I was playing with my electric trains, he told me that there is a great wheel being turned by water which is connected by filaments of copper, which spread out and spread out and spread out in all directions; and then there are little wheels, and all those little wheels turn when the big wheel turns. The relation between them is only that there is copper and iron, nothing else, no moving parts. You turn one wheel here, and all the little wheels all over the place turn, and your train is one of them. It was a wonderful world my father told me about. [. . .]
What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life to the 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 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 the rate at which learning was increased reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened; things could be learned by one 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 race.
This has been called time-binding. I don’t know who first called it this. At any rate, we have here 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 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 mistaken ideas. It was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The 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 initiio, 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 race 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, which is a deep idea, very strange and wonderful. (Yet, not everything moves because the sun is shining. The earth rotates independent of the sun shining, and the nuclear reactions recently produced energy on the earth, a new source. Probably volcanoes are generally [powered by] a source different from the shining sun.)
The world looks so different after learning science. For example, the 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 trees, 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 it is pseudoscience. 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 and they make lists and they do statistics, but they do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science–like the South Sea Islanders making airfields, radio towers, out of wood, expecting 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, they don’t fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are–experts. You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must 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 it; 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?” Not 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 we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at.
In a field which is so complicated that true science is not yet able to get anywhere, we have to rely on a kind of old- fashioned wisdom, a king 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. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.
Finally, 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 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.
______
*Harvey (1578–1657) discovered the body’s circulatory system. Ed.
*That is, the Greek lowercase letter π.
9
THE SMARTEST MAN IN THE WORLD
Here is that wonderful 1979 interview of Feynman by Omni magazine. This is Feynman on what he knows and loves best–physics–and what he loves least, philosophy. (“Philosophers should learn to laugh at themselves.”) Here Feynman discusses the work that earned him the Nobel Prize, quantum electrodynamics (QED); he then goes on to cosmology, quarks, and those pesky infinities that gum up so many equations.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out Page 18
