Forty Two? (The Meaning of It All - Richard Feynman)

Member Name: mattygroves10

Product:	The Meaning of It All - Richard Feynman
Date:	27/10/05 (188 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A slim volume that simply yet eloquently discusses science, belief and uncertainty

Disadvantages: Some might find the discussion of faith and religion uncomfortable

Well...maybe not. But Richard Feynman does try to work out The Meaning of It All...

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Recap
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For those of you unfamiliar with this fascinating man, Richard Feyman was a Nobel Prize winning Physicist. He shared the prize in 1965, having worked on the theory (and, to a large extent, rebuilt it) of quantum electrodynamics.

Feynman didn't just stick to physics. He was a true polymath, who dabbled in bongo drumming, biology, painting and safecracking. He was also a bit of a philosopher, and certainly a thinker, as the Danz Lectures he gave in 1963, re-printed for this slim volume, show.

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The Book - Structure
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Feynman gave three lectures at the University of Washington in April 1963 - these were the 'second' (and, depending on how you look at it, third and forth...) of the John Danz Lectures. The series Feynman gave, he entitled 'A Scientist Looks at Society.'

The three lectures form the three sections of the book - 'The Uncertainty of Science', 'The Uncertainty of Values,' and 'This Unscientific Age.' There is also an index and a brief biography (he was born in 1918, he was a great physicist and did all sorts of clever things, and he died in 1988 - just background information.) I will, naturally, concentrate on the three lectures.

At the back of the book, the poster/invitation for the lectures is re-printed, and in it, it says that Feynman 'explores problems in the borderline between science and philosophy, religion and society.' And boy, does he. It's amazing how much you can get into such a slim volume (133 pages all inclusive - paperback - cover price £5.99, though you may be able to get it cheaper on Amazon and the like).

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The Book - Overview and My Thoughts
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I am putting this section before an overview of the individual sections. I am finding this quite hard to write concisely (and, in fact, I failed) - what I WANT to do is to give each and every one of you a copy of this, and have you read it for yourselves. It's THAT good and THAT important. I can't possibly summarise and convey Feynman's style, wit and good, scientific sense without resorting to heavy quoting (which will no doubt come later).

He examines what science is, and what it isn't. He discusses the difficulty of keeping a scientific objectivism for a religious man (which Feynman wasn't, by the way). He talks about beliefs in things like UFOs and ESP, and shows, through common sense and through application of the scientific METHOD (as opposed to blinding you with equations), why the experiments attempting to prove these things are flawed. He emphasises that a scientist is NEVER sure. That uncertainty is GOOD, and that if you are absolutely, 100% certain; you hold a belief or faith, rather than a scientific theory or viewpoint.

That's why this is so hard for me. I believe passionately in everything he says (although bits ARE dated - he discusses Soviet Communism, and the difficulty of being a scientist under the Soviets in the early '60s). I think this should be required reading.

Anyway, let me try to talk about the lectures themselves, one at a time. I warn you, I will be quoting on more than one occasion.

(Note - the crux of the review is finished - the rest is detail. Proceed at your own risk)
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The Uncertainty of Science
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"What is science? The word is usually used to mean one of three things, or a mixture of them...Science means, sometimes, a special method of finding things out. Sometimes it means the body of knowledge arising from the things found out. It may also mean the new things that you can do when you have found something out, or the actual doing of new things. This last field is usually called technology..."

He goes on to discuss the 'good' or 'evil' of science (and technology), and concludes that science itself is neither good nor evil - it is the application that can be either. As Feynman relates, a Buddhist monk said, "'to every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of Hell...and we do not have any instructions as to which is which gate."

Feynman then talks about the second aspect of finding things out - the things found out - and, crucially, the imagination involved. As Feynman's explains "…the ancients believed that the earth was the back of an elephant that stood on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea. Of course, what held up the sea was another question. They did not know the answer. The belief of the ancients was the result of imagination. It was a poetic and beautiful idea. Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea? [he then goes on to describe, in simple language, how it really DOES work, as far as we know]...see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man..."

He then moves on to his most important aspect of his three-fold definition - the method. This is where the uncertainty from the title of this section comes in. He talks about where ideas come from, and, crucially, that they have to be tested against observation. He also mentions that the originator of the idea is, in good science, unimportant. What IS important is whether the idea, the theory, holds up when experiments are carried out. Does what is observed match the idea? Hand in hand with this is what makes a good observation. That things must be tested, and retested - and that you make sure that you are not allowing your ideas to skew the observations.

I am going to finish the discussion of this section with yet ANOTHER quote - and this is the crux of the section. It is uncertainty - how important it is to ALWAYS remember you are uncertain:

"When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, "This is the way it's going to work, I'll bet," he is still in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognise this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas."

It's the freedom to doubt - that in the Middle Ages the church gave no-one the freedom to doubt, and so science was but in its very early infancy.

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The Uncertainty of Values
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(Oh, gosh - this is getting long. Note to self...the op does NOT have to be as long as the book!)

Feynman here talks about the difficulties of uncertainty - that ignorance is important and crucial for ideas to be developed, and for new things to be found out. And so, he discusses the relationship between science and religion (never one to shy away from a controversial topic). Feynman certainly believes that there IS a conflict between science and religion, that 'religion is more or less defined that way.' Because belief in God is meant to be absolute, and yet there are no absolutes in science, that the two, in a thinking person, must inevitably clash. Doubt is necessary in science, yet anathema to religion.

He doesn't, however, say that all scientists are atheists, or must be atheists. Only that the ideas of science with the certainty of religion can be difficult to reconcile. He says that with the wonders of nature and science at the scientist's fingertips, "The God of the church isn't big enough." (Though he does go on to add, "Perhaps. Everyone has different opinions" - uncertainty again!)

Having talked about the difficulty of religion's propensity to try to describe natural phenomena, he then moves onto religion and its role in ethics, and science and ITS role in morality.

He concludes that morality is difficult to subject to scientific scrutiny. You can look at an action, and say 'if I do this, this is likely to happen,' but ultimately, an ethical judgement has to be made - do you want this to happen - is it a good thing that this happens. Feynman says that he does not 'see how by knowing what will happen alone it is possible to know if ultimately you want the last of the things. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to decide moral questions by the scientific technique."

Finally, in this section, he talks about the inspirational aspects of religion. Feynman asks the question - if a belief in God is uncertain, is it possible to obtain inspiration from "working for God, from obeying his will, and so on"? He asks the audience, since he admits he does not know the answer. He makes the distinction between the Judeo/Christian ethical code, and the absolute faith in religion. And he leaves that at that, more or less.

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This Unscientific Age
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"...in case you are beginning to believe that some of the things I said before are true because I am a scientist and according to the brochure that you get I won some awards and so forth, instead of looking at the ideas themselves and judging them directly - in other words, you see, you have some feeling toward authority - I will get rid of that tonight. I dedicate this lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man as myself can make"

Remember, Feynman, in his first two lectures, told us not to take what an 'authority' says at face value, just because the man is an authority. Rather, it is uncertainty that makes a scientific age, and a scientific person.

What Feynman argues in this section (possibly the most important and pointed lecture) is that we are NOT living in a scientific age. Oh, we think we are. We have the products of science - the technology. But we do not think scientifically.

Again, remember what Feynman means by 'scientific'. He is not talking advanced maths, or quantum physics. He is talking about the methods and the mode of thought. Of never being sure; of ensuring that your observations are true, and that you are not blinded by certainty.

Feynman is not worried that there are unscientific THINGS, like art and literature and so forth. But rather, fuzzy and woolly thinking. Unreasonable certainty.

He gives quite a few examples of this fuzzy thinking - including 'studies' into telekinesis, flying saucers - "...they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not. Whether it's probably occurring or not, not whether it could occur." And he gives more examples of this problem, including that of faith healing...but you'll need to read the book, at this point, I feel!

Feynman talks about the problem of coincidence - that one cannot draw conclusions from coincidence - when his first wife died, the clock by her bed stopped at the exact time of her death. Sound spooky? Not if you know that Feynman remembered picking up the digital clock when she was declared dead, to check the time (the old style mechanical digital clocks - the sort that was shown on Groundhog Day!), and something had clearly jogged loose when he did so.

So you can't draw conclusions from one or two occurrences of an event. Everything has to be checked, and re-checked, and checked by someone else and so on.

His subject matter is vast - he discusses advertising, education, journalism...and, indeed, his own previous two lectures. Always making the point that doubt and uncertainty is vital for scientific thinking.

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Final Thoughts
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Well, I gave my overview earlier, to save you the trouble, if you so wish, of reading this far. Like I said, I firmly believe this should be required reading in schools - the writing is succinct and simple enough that most people should understand and (I hope) appreciate the points Feynman makes.

Though the language is simple, the ideas are not. Oh, to some, they may seem obvious, but really, they are not. How many 'documentaries' on television rely on coincidence and anecdotal evidence? How many papers carry horoscopes? And what about the psychic faires that seem to be more and more popular?

Take, for example, the recent controversy on the MMR vaccine. The reports of a link with autism are anecdotal. There is no doubt that some children who have had the MMR vaccine have developed autism. But that doesn't mean the link is causal. By the same token, I could say tomatoes will kill you, since everyone who has eaten a tomato has, eventually, died (or will eventually die, if you're not dead yet).

Nearly all longer term studies do not support a causal link between MMR and autism. But since there will always be people who will say 'my child was fine before the jab, but isn't now', and will believe that, there will always be parents who are afraid to protect their children, because of anecdotal evidence. (Do a search on Google for 'MMR autism link study' - the search reveals that the most recent studies, disprove a link between MMR and Autism.) HOWEVER, it is not wrong that someone thought there MIGHT be a link - it was investigated, and it seems that it is not the case. It is, however, a shame that many people prefer to rely on the emotive, anecdotal evidence, rather than the hard scientific evidence.

Well, now that I've introduced my own controversy into the fray, I feel I will stop. Read the book. Draw your own conclusions. Be uncertain.

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The End
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Dr Feynman and I share the same sentiment - "Thank you very much. I enjoyed myself"

Summary: Feynman explains simply yet superbly the value and importance of science and scientific thinking