The Feynman Series – Beauty (Part 1)
Posts tagged Richard Feynman.
How I’m rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. “The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth.” I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part — perhaps my stuff is was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the /why/? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, must be silent?
Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, 59-60, footnote. via { olena }
••••••
Reblogging, from “1 year ago on June 07, 2011”.
I like that hurri[k]anes reblogged this, and tsunamis followed. :D
(via tsunamis)
Uncredited Photographer
Theoretical Physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman
1959“…will you understand what I’m going to tell you? …No, you’re not going to be able to understand it. …I don’t understand it. Nobody does…. The scale of light can be described by numbers—called the frequency—and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can’t see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It’s still light… Light is something like raindrops—each little lump of light is called a photon—and if the light is all one color, all the ‘raindrops’ are the same color… Every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering that the same thing: light is made of particles…” Richard Feynman, “QED : The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” 1985
“Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn’t mean all bets are off.” Murray Gell-Mann
••••••
These two are my favorite.
Gell-Mann’s { The Quark and the Jaguar } is possibly the best, most clarifying book I’ve read, about quantum physics (and systems, to date).
Feynman was one of the first to truly open my eyes to the incredible nature of this world, via { The Meaning of it All }.
- A { Quantum Chess } set inspired by Feynman’s { analogy } for understanding Nature’s laws.
(via fuckyeahquantummechanics)
The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
The Meaning of it All
Richard P. Feynman
The next aspect of science is its contents, the things that have been found out. This is the yield. This is the gold. This is the excitement, the pay you get for all the disciplined thinking and hard work. The work is not done for the sake of an application. It is done for the excitement of what is found out. Perhaps most of you know this. But to those of you who do not know it, it is almost impossible for me to convey in a lecture this important aspect, this exciting part, the real reason for science. And without understanding this you miss the whole point. You cannot understand science and its relation to anything else unless you understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time. You do not live in your time unless you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting thing.
Do you think it is dull? It isn’t. It is most difficult to convey, but perhaps I can give some idea of it. Let me start anywhere, with any idea.
For instance, 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? The world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some of them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We whirl around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting. And what holds us? The force of gravitation, which is not only a thing of the earth but is the thing that makes the earth round in the first place, holds the sun together and keeps us running around the sun in our perpetual attempt to stay away. This gravity holds its sway not only on the stars but between the stars; it holds them in the great galaxies for miles and miles in all directions.
This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless sea of the other idea—just as mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic pictures that came before.
But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
••••••
Emphases, mine.
If you’re going to read an introductory book to science, read this one.
If you were standing at arm’s length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons, the repelling force would be incredible. How great? Enough to lift the Empire State building? No! To lift Mount Everest? No! The repulsion would be enough to lift a “weight” equal to that of the entire earth!
Richard Feynman (via physicsphysics)
A double-feature on { SVA portfolios } at Behance today:
My re-designed chess set / sculpture { Quantum Chess }
+ the { Terrarium Typeface }.
Thank you!
We can tell our children that school is important until we’re blue in the face, they’re not stupid. They see the loudest applause is for the kids on the field. They know teachers are paid poorly and don’t drive fancy cars. They know people plan Super Bowl parties but mock the National Spelling Bee. In other words, they see the hypocrisy, and we can’t expect society to correct itself. If we want to have any lasting influence on the way our kids approach education — the way future generations approach education — then we have to grab our pom-poms and paint our faces and celebrate intellectual curiosity with the same vigor we do their athletic achievements.
Why I’m raising my son to be a nerd - CNN.com
We also don’t believe in the value of education, culturally — we just like to say we do because as citizens of an industrialized nation, we’re supposed to.
(via chameli)
••••••
But it’s more than this — it’s more than athletics vs academics. The other problem is, you’re told “it’s important” again and again, and maybe you’re told it’ll get you a job, it’ll get you into a good school, it’ll solve your financial issues. But these things make education out to be something secondary — just do enough to get you somewhere. They don’t inspire, they don’t provoke curiosity. They don’t appeal to our intrinsic complexity, our sense of wonder about our world. To say, learn and get a job and do the thing… it’s really boring. Why not expect more? It isn’t like we’re incapable of it.
(via paleblued0t)
A Deathbed Story I Would Never Tell ›
We all tell stories. That’s how we share. That’s how we remember. Storytelling is what humans do. It’s part of our nature — but natures, I’ve noticed, differ. I am not a scientist. I don’t have a mind for what they do, which is to stick, doggedly, to hard facts, keeping emotion out of the room. It’s a discipline for them, a way of being, that makes them, well, scientists.
…
Here he is, describing a moment of enormous significance, and he won’t allow a Signifier.
(via physicsphysics)
The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 26
How I’m rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. “The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth.” I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part — perhaps my stuff is was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the /why/? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, must be silent?
Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, 59-60, footnote.
Brief Inquiry into Vice, Balance, Motion
Why is Nature predisposed to indulging in vices? We hold on to that which gives us pleasure, even though it subtracts from our physical life. A system seeking life most pertinently would not engage in activities that negate it, so life doesn’t seem to be the top priority for our system. In looking to Physics for an answer, it’s deductible that the pleasure vice grants is actually excitement, which is energy — motion.
That means that vice puts the system into a state of instability; why would we seek instability? Instability, as the motion of energy as physical matter, is simply energy transfer, meaning that energy cannot be concentrated in one place for too long. If energy is concentrated, it “brews”, it creates an extremely volatile center which is another kind of instability. Therefore, is it possible to say that instability cures instability? That there is no stagnant state of balance, only ever a balancing act. There must always be motion within our Universe system.
Olena Shmahalo, Quantum Chess, 2010
Fired white clay, ~16 x 16 x 4 in.
