Way of Thinking by Richard Feynman | The Cosmological Reality #richardfeynman #universe #cosmos

usb of an ordinary person by studying hard would get to be able to imagine these things like i imagine of course i was an ordinary person who studied hard there's no miracle people it just happens they got interested in this thing and they learned all this stuff they're just people there's no talent a special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields that comes without practice and reading and learning and study so if you say you take an ordinary person who's willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics and timeline then he's become a scientist [Music] well when i'm actually doing my own things and i'm working in the high you know the deep and esoteric stuff that i worry about i don't think i can describe very well because what it's like first of all it's like asking a centipede which light comes after which it happens quickly and i'm not exactly sure what flashes and stuff go in the head but i know it's a crazy mixture of partial equations partial solving in the equation then having some sort of picture of what's happening that the equation is saying is happening but they're not that well separated as the words i'm using and it's a kind of a nut nutty thing it's very hard to describe and i don't know that it does any good to describe it and i that is something that struck me that's very curious i suspect that what goes on in every man's head might be very very different the actual imagery or semi-imagery which comes and then when we're talking to each other at these high and complicated levels and we think we're speaking very well and we're communicating but what we're really doing is having some kind of big translation scheme going on for translating what this fellow says into our images which are very different i found that out because at the very earl lowest level i won't go into the details but i got interested in well i was doing some experiments and i was trying to figure out something about our time sense and so what i would do is i would count trying to count to a minute actually say i'd count to 48 it then it would be one minute so i'd calibrate myself and i would count a minute and 48 i think i was count seconds but it's close enough and then it turns out if you repeat that you can do very accurately when you get to 48 or 47 or 49 not far off you're very close to a minute and and i would try to find out what affected that time sense and whether i could do anything at the same time as i was counting and i found that i could do many things i could uh there were some things that not for example i had great difficulty but i was in the high university i had to get my laundry ready and i was putting the socks out and i had to make a list how many socks and it was something like six or eight socks and i couldn't count them because the counting machine was you being used and i couldn't count them until i found out i could put them in a pattern and recognize the number and so i learned a way after practicing by which i could go down on lines of type and newspapers and see them in groups three three three one that's a group of ten three three three one without saying the numbers just seeing the groupings and could therefore count the lines of type i practiced in the newspaper the same time i was counting internally the seconds and so i would come i could do this fantastic trick of saying 48 that's a one minute and there are 67 lines of type you see it was quite wonderful and i discovered many things i could read while i was uh no i excuse me yes yes i could read perfectly all right while i was counting and get an idea of what it was about but i couldn't speak i couldn't say anything because of course i was sort of when i count i sort of spoke to myself inside i would say one two three sort of in the head well i went down to the breakfast and there was uh john tukey was a mathematician down at princeton at the same time and we had many discussions and i was telling him about these experiments and what i could do and he says that's absurd he says he says i don't see why you would have any difficulty talking whatsoever and i can't possibly believe that you could read so i couldn't believe all this but we calibrated him it was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds or whatever i don't remember the numbers now and then he'd say all right he said what do you want me to say barry had a little lamb i can speak about anything blah blah blah blah blah blah 52 it's a minute he was right and i couldn't possibly do that and he wanted me to read because he couldn't believe it and then we compared notes and it turned out that when he thought of counting what he did inside his head is when he counted was he saw a tape with numbers that when clink clink clink the tape would change with the numbers printed on it he could see was since it's sort of an optical system that he's using and not voice he could speak as much as he wanted but if he had to read then he couldn't look at his clock whereas for me it was the other way and that's where i discovered at least in this very simple operation of counting the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they're doing the same thing and so it struck me therefore if that's already true at the most elementary level that when we learn the mathematics and the muscle functions and the exponentials and the electric fields and all these things that the imagery and method by which we're storing it all and the way we think about it could be it really if we could get into each other's heads entirely different and in fact why somebody sometimes has a great deal of difficulty understanding a point which you see as obvious and vice versa it may be because it's a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on now i'm talking like a psychologist and you know i know nothing about this suppose that little things behaved very differently than anything that was big anything that you're familiar with because you see as the animal evolves and so on as brain evolves it gets used to handling the brain is designed for ordinary circumstances but if the gut particles and the deep inner workings were by some other rules and some other character they behaved differently they were very different than anything on a large scale then there would be some kind of difficulty in understanding and imagining reality and that difficulty we are in the behavior of things on a small scale is so fantastic it's so wonderfully different so marvelously different than anything that behaves on a large scale you say electrons act like waves no they don't exactly they act like particles no they don't exactly they act like a kind of a fog around the nucleus no they don't exactly and if you would like to get a clear sharp picture of an atom so that you can tell exactly how it's going to behave correctly i have a good image in other words a really good image of reality i don't know how to do it because that image has to be mathematical we have a mathematical expression strange mathematics i don't understand how it is but we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without actually being able to picture it it would be something like a computer that you put certain numbers in and you have the formula for at what time the car will arrive at different destinations and the thing does the arithmetic to figure out what time the car arrives at the different destinations but cannot picture the car it's just doing the arithmetic so we know how to do the arithmetic but we cannot picture the car no it's not a hundred percent because for certain approximate situations a certain kind of approximate picture works that is simply a fog around a nucleus that when you squeeze it it repels you is very good for understanding the stiffness of material that it's a wave which does this and that is very good for some other phenomena all right so when you're working with certain particular aspects of the behavior of atoms for instance when i was talking about temperature and so forth that they're just little balls it's good enough and it gives a very nice picture of temperature but if you ask more specific questions and you get down to questions like how is it that when you cool helium down even to absolute zero where there's not supposed to be any motion it's a perfect fluid that hasn't any viscosity has no resistance flows perfectly and isn't freezing well if you want to get a picture of atoms that has all of that in it i can't do it you see but i can explain why the helium base as it does by taking my equations and sowing the consequences of them is that the healing will behave as it is observed today so we know we have the theory right but we haven't got the pictures that will go with the theory and is that because we're limited and haven't caught on to the right pictures or is that because there aren't any right pictures for people who have to make pictures out of things that are familiar to them well let's suppose it's the last one but there's no right pictures in terms of things that are familiar to that is it possible then to develop a familiarity with those things that are not familiar on hand by study by learning about the properties of atoms and quantum mechanics by practicing with the equations until it becomes a kind of second nature just like a second nature to know that if two balls came toward each other they'd smash into bits you don't say the two balls when they come toward each other turn blue you know what they do so the question is whether you could get to know what things do without better than we do today you know as the generations develop will they invent ways of teaching and where so that the new people will learn the tricky ways of looking at things and be so trained so well trained that they won't have our troubles with the adam picturing there's still a school of thought that cannot believe that the atomic behavior is so different than large-scale behavior i think that's a deep prejudice it's a prejudice from being so used to large-scale and they're always seeking to find to waiting for the day that we discover that underneath the quantum mechanics there's some mundane ordinary balls hitting or particles moving and so on i think they're going to be defeated i think nature's imagination is so much greater than man's she's never going to let us relax [Music] you

Channel: The Cosmological Reality

Views: 1,358,438

Keywords: way of Thinking, Richard Feynman

Id: Si6NbKqYEd8

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021