Richard Feynman - The World from another point of view

foreign I don't know it's hard to make up a very crazy one day 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're turning around you say let's see what which is do we believe in though what ceremonies do we do every morning we brush our teeth what is the evidence that the brushing of teeth does us any good in cavities you start wondering are we all imagine if it 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 who are doing the same ritual for no good reason just like in the Middle Ages they had other rituals and you've got a 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 can ask you can find out whether it does or it doesn't by trying to find out now you can ask your dentist he says of course and you say how an 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 when I'm trying to argue for is to think about thing from a new point of view thank you see I have had in my life a number of pleasant experiences when the earliest one when I was a kid I invented a problem for myself to some of the powers of the integers and in trying to get the funnest part I developed a certain set of numbers that I for formula for which I couldn't get and I discovered later those were known as the Bernoulli numbers and discovered in 1739 so I was up to 1739 when I was about 14 you see and then a little later I discovered something I'd find out I just they invented a thing called 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 Iraq's book and he had these problems that nobody knew how to solve it would 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 Richard Feynman Nobel Prize winner and his son Carl stepped gingerly down the wet cobbles of Milbank high in the Yorkshire pen eyes Feynman 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 physics Feynman is in the Forefront of one of the oldest and most intriguing games of Hide and Seek in science finding the ultimate constituents of the world in this search Feynman is a celebrated Maverick who is encouraged by his father a New York Clothing salesman to confront conventional wisdom once said that 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 kids said to me say what's that bird what's the name of do you know the name of that person I'm the slightest idea he said well it's a brown-throated crush 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 sort of thrush he says know what the name of that bird it's a Brown tour of the trash in German it's called the freaking plague in Chinese it's called a king long pong in Japanese and so on and 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 though constitute knowledge is to 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 you got the explanation for the fitzclillon experiment I says what what what's that he says you know they take long lived came as and 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're telling 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 we 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 it's uh you got to be very careful not to confuse yourself mold your methods of thinking the way you looked at the world well we had a lot of little games like you would say at the dinner table you'd think of some little problem and if they suppose we were you were a martian you were the Martians and we came down to this earth and we'd look at it from the outside but now I can't explain exactly what he meant but there's a way of looking something Anew as if you never saw it before for the first time and asking questions about it as if you were different for instance if you would ask later I did some a 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 puppy that every day for a certain amount of time had to lie down and become unconscious and then the natural question would be how does it feel to get unconscious what happens to 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 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 martian would look at it sometimes there are lots of things that people did for example Maxwell Put the equations together with the Faraday he formulated the equations mathematically with some model in his hand and then the rack uh got his answer by just writing and guessing an equation and other people got there is like in relativity got the idea by looking at principles of symmetry now all these methods at Heisenberg got his quantum mechanics but I think he only talk about the things that you can measure now all of these ideas we should only talk about things that we can measure try to Define things in terms of only things you measure 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 what 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 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 new way of looking at it it doesn't make any difference it's I I don't care the only thing that the real test in physics is experiment the 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 Feynman 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 he's trying to get answers that they're related to each other the things that make the wind make the waves and the motion of water is like the motion of theirs 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 and then gradually that we ask more questions and then we dig in a little deeper into things that we can just make we need to do a little more complicated experiment to find out about it but it's curiosity as to where we are what we are it's very much more exciting to discover we're on a ball half of the stick and upside down it's spinning around in space it's a mysterious Force which holds us on 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 no but that's much more exciting story to many people then 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 Feynman doesn't have a laboratory and he finds family relaxation helps him to concentrate in recent years he's been concerned with the long-assed 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 Feynman 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 isn't if you were in just a corner where only a few pieces are involved you can work out exactly what should happen and you can 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 the behavior of say me Juan yak yak and you naughty and all this stuff is the result over lots and lots of items all obeying these very simple rules come out that it evolves into such a creature that the 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 start at the beginning which nobody wants to do I mean you come in to me now as in an interview and you're asking me about the latest discoveries that have made nobody ever asked about a simple ordinary phenomenon in a street you know like what about those colors or something I don't have a nice interview explain all about the colors butterfly wings whole big deal don't care about that you want the big final results then it's going to be complicated because I am at the end of a 400 years 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 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 would 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 heavier 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 nuclei this process which takes place in nuclear accelerators is photographed in a liquid bubble chamber take a liquid liquid hydrogen under some other liquid and expand it so there's relate to boil low temperature and your decrease the pressure is ready to boil and it has to form bubbles somewhere and it's any little piece of dirt or any little disturbance that will 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 with electrons are locked off the atoms along its track and we can't see that but when the gas tried to expand when the liquid tries to boil the bubbles form around these charged particles which are left so it leaves a string of Bubbles and then forward then you can take a picture of the bubbles so simple as picture would be the other machine had made fast particles the particles 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 and a kind of a y if it made it's recoil plus some other thing instead of a wire makes a more complicated track 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 it goes along here and then bifurcates into two you know you made a product which integrate into two in less than a 10 billionth of a second so you see it's not very difficult to find out about these things with the right with clever techniques since the wall 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 ten 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 e 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 another little theories by which we can understand these patterns one picture which describes 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 our Quark is an object which comes in three varieties it's either a a type B type or c-type Quark okay and that the particles that we find are two big classes in one class we can understand as 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 at 27 different ways each one being three we find groups of particles in groups of 27 analogously and so on a little more complicated but more subtle but it's like that and then when we allow for their motion around each other we find the higher energy states analogous to the way that that we ought to get and even semi-quantitatively there seems to be a relation between the states the rates at 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 were called barriers the words aren't going to do any good but the other class we have to understand as being made of a quark one quark and one antiquark an antiquark is a negative product with all the numbers all the charge properties the exact opposite of a clock so we make a quark an antiquark put those together we understand the Meson State put three quarks together we understand all the others so we have made a really great progress in analyzing these patterns so much salt 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 barriers we don't understand it quantitative we don't know exactly the laws I mean we do things like I'm just talking to you on a little bit more carefully counting how many states we should get inside but we don't know exactly how they move and exactly what holds them together and so and so on well so there are a number of paradoxes with this Quark picture this picture helps to give us the 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 with very high energy uh it's 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 that doesn't come out right so there's a difficulty furthermore the idea that there just be three particles is self-contradict it's contradictory to the ideas of Relativity and so on which imply the existence 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 it should be not just three but many more so the infinity is not a paradox by itself the three is more of a paradox why is it so simple why can't we get away and understand so much for just three when there should be an infinite number probably in there both theoretically and experimentally another thing uh it's a little technical but very paradoxical is that we've 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 of Relativity though it 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 furthermore some people suppose that maybe these quarks could come apart that would mean the prediction of new states which consists of only one Quark say if there were such a state it would have to have a charge of one-third the normal charges of our objects for example or two-thirds and uh we don't find experimentally any such particles not everybody's looking for them but it looks as if they exist at all they have to be extremely heavy then the problem is very good if they're extremely heavy how compared to a proton say how is it when you put three of them together you get a light object that's not heavy like the proton there are technical ways of erasing it but they're always complicated every the situation is as it always is when we're near the answer it looks much simpler that it has any right to be and we have to understand that Simplicity and why we think it must be more complicated our minds are complicated somehow just like the the orbits of the planets which were supposed to be circles which looked simple and they were experimentally they were in circles so they made circles on circles on circles on circles and more and more complicated it turns out it was really much simpler it was a faucet versus a square the distance which made Ellipsis inside but different way of formulating entirely which was beautiful so now we have our Wheels within Wheels it looks simple in nature is no doubt simpler than all our thoughts about it now and the question is what way do we have to think about it so that we understand its Simplicity that's where we stand now on holiday in the pennines Richard Feynman is paid a neighborly visit by yorkshireman Sir Fred Hoyle the astronomer cosmologist and science fiction writer at First Sight there seems little in common between the study of galaxies and nebulae billions of miles in diameter and millions of light years old and nuclear physics where particles exist for only a million millionth of a second but the formation of stars and galaxies is determined on a massive scale by the behavior of the very nuclear particles Feynman studies Hoyle and Feynman share an interest in the foundations of physics and exchanging ideas in the local pub is always as profitable as it is enjoyable did you think you agree that the quasis are in real trouble that the very big redshifts I think so all right I've had this uneasy feeling now for about five years it looked crazy for a while but it's like not enough of evidence all the time as well which one makes a new problem yeah every piece of evidence is the same problem in the same sense if there were any cause for a redshift as big as that other than recession we'd be all right that's right but in the present physical laws there doesn't seem to be any place and at the same time the same kind of laws predict the kind of peculiar phenomenon in the black holes which really confusing yeah and it could be that either the gravity is wrong or one of the physical laws are wrong too um what's the law that's involved because I'm not arguing at the moment the physical laws are wrong I mean you would agree that one has to push it through along these lines yeah the best way to progress I always think maybe is to try to be as conservative that's what wheeler always said to try to be as conservative about the physical laws as possible and explaining the phenomena if you're continuously fail then you gradually realize you've got to change something but we start up they've got to change something there's so many ways of changing and you don't know how the it's most likely you don't have to change anything most of the time we succeed ultimately and explaining these damn things in terms of the known laws but it's the cases that fail of the interesting one yeah yeah the chat with the uh under the single lamp in the street yes uh where passerby says what you're looking for he says I'm looking for my key and they search for it for a few minutes and at the end of the minute these minutes they pass it by I said are you sure you lost it here and the man said not at all but unless I lost it here I'll never find it because the light's better yeah and yeah we work with Alexa better yeah once I was thinking by analogy that there was a time in the 1900s when the thought that the properties of substances were not physics for example they would be numbers we would find a series of numbers the index of refraction that was physics but the number for the index that glass had an index of 1.543 and so on that salt had another index that those numbers were the properties of substances would come from chemistry or something but that there was it was that time it was considered a different branch then when the quantum mechanical understanding of the atoms was a vowel then we could calculate all these properties and we realize that all these numbers were really part of physics and so copies of substances became a bridge in physics whereas previously it was a sort of chemical brand and I wondered by analogy you know it's always worked by analogy what today do we not consider part of physics which may ultimately be part of physics I see and they didn't realize immediately something we consider at the present moment most people consider that we study the laws of physics that is how things go given a certain condition how the things behave after that but how did they get into that condition is considered another problem in other words we are given the conditions the circumstances and then it evolves you're studying the laws yeah it's as though we're doing a chess game again and we're working on the rules but we're not worrying about how the pieces are supposed to be set up on the board in the first place that's not our business that's the business of History how the world evolved it's astronomical history history cosmology how the the universe exploded or through steady state or whatever it was it's not our business it's interesting that in many other Sciences there's a historical question like in geology the question how did the Earth evolve to the present condition in biology how do the various species evolve and they get to be the way they are but the one field which has is not admitted any evolutionary question is physics here are the laws we say here are the laws today yeah how did they get that way in time we don't even think of it we think of well that is that way from Forever it's always been like that the same laws and we try to explain the universe that way so it might turn out that they're not the same all the time and that there is a historical evolutionary question but how do you see it going yeah it's not it's hard to speculate is it is it a continuous change or is it something that depends on big you're the best you would I think differently I think of the possibilities but I'm afraid to put things in when I see oh but it's the dark I always think of the dark it's too big for me to guess at because yeah it's a guess it's not much use in guessing particular things but but uh you're different than I would like to discuss with you sometimes how do you do that because I'm really a little afraid to make specifications I don't know why you kind of grow up I don't know I'm afraid to make specific guesses because the moment I'm making that guess I can see seven other alternatives and so since I see these other Alternatives I don't know which one to to piddle with well I don't like to spend a lot of energy my choice is is very simple I I don't set any requirement that the answer be right it's just what I'm interested that's the difference yeah if I'm interested in it I'm trying to find out how neat you could be but how nature is see how that's right you see I don't think you've ever find it I said your idea is to find out what nature could be yeah but what I what I think is yeah even if it's wrong common ground is enthusiastically explored but is it only shared experience and knowledge that forms a bond between working scientists and separates them from us the interested Layman or even the artist and his scientific fields of becoming so specialized and they're so varied are you really saying that you have more in common with say a paleontologist or someone in a branch of science very far removed from yours and you would with a playwright or a poet absolutely especially if he's a good paleontologist because he's a good paleontologist he's not just looking at old rocks he's looking at the history of the earth he's looking when he stands and he looks at his own fingers and he knows it's got five bumps and he thinks of how did it evolve with five months he got the same as Wales and so on and we keep talking about the importance of the fact that the thumb of poses then we can start discussing is it really so important to the thumb Expo or is that language that has been involved the system is symbol then or the size of the brain this is a paleontologist I can talk about this stuff that's close to his field dolphins have bigger brains than we are they have a signaling system and you get interested in that and you start to discuss all that they know about Davos and you complain that the way the United States Navy has been doing its experiments is not right and we ought to find out more about that and they go on and on you talk those are things of the day they're just as good but you can go on and on with I talk to a playwright or something I I find because I don't look go to plays or something I don't find that easy to talk to them that I don't get much out of it I was going to say this is because you can talk to scientists in other fields presumably because you read the scientific magazines and hear the scientific gossip rather than you know because we don't have to have magazines or gossip we think originally we think of a new idea we talk to each other and we try to look at something from a new point of view and we Delight each other in a new point of view and when you're talking to somebody else who's trying to think of something new different and he thinks he's thought about the whales or the Dolphins and he had some little thing he's thought of that's a little different than the thing that you've thought of and so when you're talking back and forth he's excited by yours point of view about dreams and you're excited by his little observation that he has made about dreams if he has happened to have thought about that so the point is and our backgrounds Give us a slightly different point of view I mean a scientific way like I specialize in physics to say he specializes in paleontology so his his information on dreams might be more deeper more evolutionary for example he might Molly can't we don't have way of telling I suppose about the evolution of dreams but he might know for example about other animals he might have thought about whether other animals dream and what the signs are and other things that I hadn't thought of I can't make it up now because I'm not the paleontologist but I believe that yes I find always that a good man uh I take it all back I take it all back good man I talked to Good Men in other fields there's certain kinds of men in every field that I can talk to as well as I can talk to a good scientist I met a historian or writer of history from France once and I had a marvelous conversation with it his name was Andrea and then I met an artist Robert Irwin who's a very important artist in Los Angeles in modern art and I could talk to him at the same depth of excitement so I take it all back if you give me the right man in any field I can talk to him I know what the condition is that he did whatever he did as far as he can go that he studied every aspect of it as far as he has stretched himself to the end he's not a dilettante in any way and so he talked deep as far as he can go and he therefore he's up against Mysteries all the way around the edge and or and we can talk about mystery and all that's what we haven't come we're talking a bit about these Fallout periods when things are getting very painful after discussing working problems it isn't at all that Feynman and Hoyle should Savor that most thrilling pleasure of all the moment of Revelation you try all sorts of things and you're hopeful about trying it have you had a moment when in a complicated problem where quite suddenly the thing comes into your head and you're almost sure you've got to be right oh yes I mean this is and then you try to figure out what the conditions were of that moment that you can do it again for example I worked out the theory of helium woods and suddenly saw everything they were struggling struggling for two years and suddenly saw everything remember everything about it by the way it's psychologically funny you can remember the color of the paper you were writing on has that through yeah and then you wonder what's the psychological condition well I know at that particular time I simply looked up and I said wait a minute it can't be quite that difficult it must be very easy I'll stand back and I'll just treat it very lightly I'll just tap it and it'll say and there it was so how many times since then I'm walking on the beach and I said well look it can't be so complicated there's nothing happens you know the lights are great but uh but the secret way is that missing bit in the brain isn't it right something suddenly lights up and yeah and I have no idea I've thought about it because some uh some may have suggested I think about that because if I can only figure out the formula for how what condition to be in to get good ideas yeah and be much more efficient and more happy you know so I wasn't paid attention to what the condition is and have never found any in our relations with anything by the way it's the Delight it's absolutely you just go absolutely wild that drives how does it last for today it's not very short it's a very big moment yeah yeah and then there were lesser Pleasures yeah as you work on both things and more people notice it than the highest about it on the high fig for about three days it's like a supernova I suppose yes that's better yeah but uh I was going to say that it's the the hope of that kind of gold it keeps you going that can keep you going through these doldrums yeah yeah and that I think what I learned when I was a child for my father was that if you did work a little bit at these things there would be a time which should get there yeah yeah and I had to learn that first yeah I'd never been able to do it yeah and then afterwards you wonder why the devil was not so stupid that I didn't see this that's not only two of you it's true of history of the history of the science you can always look at it to the moments history and wonder why they hadn't thought of it 20 years earlier or 10 years there depending on the case it's because we're dubbed somehow it's more mysterious that it just means that however good you may get comparatively compared to uh and we're still very bad at it absolutely yeah yeah we're doing the best we can yeah it's very good yeah this is depressing and sobering thought well it's been fun

Channel: mrtp

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Keywords: Another, World, Some, Richard Feynman (Academic), Documentary (TV Genre), Physics (Field Of Study), Physicist (Profession), Nobel Lauriet, Nobel Prize (Award), Interview, High-definition Television (Accommodation Feature)

Id: GNhlNSLQAFE

Length: 36min 42sec (2202 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2015