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The
Pleasure
of 
FindingThings
Out
Tbis
is
the edited transcript 
of 
an
intewiew
with Feynman made
for 
the
 BBC 
television program
Horizon
in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode
of 
Nova.
Feynman had most 
of 
his
I$
behind him
by
this time
(3e
died in
1988),
so
he could 
reflect 
on
his experi
-
ences and accomplishments with the perspective not 
o3en
attainable
by
a younger person.
The
result 
is
a candid, relaxed, and 
very
 per 
-
sonal discussion on many topics
close
to
Feynman?
heart: why know
-
ing merely the name
of 
something
is
the same as not knowing any
-
thing at all about it; how he and 
hisjdlow
atomic scientists
of 
the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success
of 
the terribleweapon they had created while
on
the other side
of 
the world in Hi
-
roshima thousands
of 
their311ow
human beings were dead 
or 
dying
from 
it; and why
Feynman
couldjust as well havegotten along with
-
out a Nobel Prize.
 
2
+
The
Pleasure
of 
Finding Things
Out
The Beauty
of 
a
Flower
I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken aview which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll
hold
up aflower and say, “Look how beautiful
it
is,”
and
I’ll
agree, Ithink. And he says
-
“you see, I as an artist can see how beau
-
tiful this is, but you as a scientist,
oh,
take this all apart andit becomes a dull
thing.”
And
I
think that he’s kind of nutty.First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other peo
-
ple and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quiteas refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate thebeauty
of 
a flower. At the same time I see much more aboutthe flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, thecomplicated actions inside which also have a beauty.
I
meanit’s not just beauty at this dimension
of 
one centimeter, thereis also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flowerevolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interest
-
ing
-
it means that insects can see the color. It adds a ques
-
tion: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions whichshows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitementand mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t un
-
derstind
how it subtracts.
Avoiding Humanities
I’ve always been very one
-
sided about science and when
I
wasyounger I concentrated almost all my effort on it.
I
didn’thave time to learn and
I
didn’t have much patience withwhat’s called the humanities, even though in the universitythere were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best toavoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was
3
+
The Pleasure
of 
Finding Things Out 
only
afierwards,
when I got older, that
I
got more relaxed,that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned
to
draw and I reada little bit, but I’m really still a very one
-
sided person and
I
don’t know a great deal.
I
have a limited intelligence and
I
useit in a particular direction.
Tyrannosaurus in the Window
We had the
 Encyclopaedia Britannica
at home and even whenI was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap andread to me from the
 Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and we wouldread, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talkingabout the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurusrex, and it would say something like, “This thing is
twenty-
five feet high and the head is six feet
across,”
you see, and
so
he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. Thatwould mean that if he stood in our front yard he would behigh enough to put his head through the window but notquite because the head is a little bit too wide and it wouldbreak the window as it came
by.”
Everything we’d read would be translated as best we couldinto some reality and
so
I learned to
do
that
-
everything thatI read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s reallysaying by translating and
so
(LAU
G
H
S
)
I used to read the
 En
-
cyclopaedia
when
I
was a boy but with translation, you see,
so
it was very exciting and interesting to think there were ani
-
mals
of 
such magnitude
-
I wasn’t frightened that there wouldbe one coming in my window as a consequence of this,
I
don’t think, but
I
thought that it was very, very interesting,that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why.We used to
go
to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in NewYork and the Catskill Mountains was the place where peoplewent in the summer; and the fathers
-
there was a big group of 
 
4
+
The
Pleasure
of 
Finding Things
Out
people there but the fathers would all
go
back to New York towork during the week and only come back on the weekends.When my father came he would take me for walks in thewoods and tell me various interesting things that were goingon in the woods
-
which
I’ll
explain in a minute
-
but the othermothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderfuland that the other fathers should take their sons for walks,and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhereat first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but hedidn’t want to because he had a special relationship with
me-
we had a personal thing together
-
so it ended up that theother fathers had to take their children for walks the nextweekend, and the next Monday when they were all back towork, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid saidto me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is
that?”
And
I
said,“I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it
is.”
He says,
“It’s
a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your fatherdoesn’t tell you
anything.”
But it was the opposite: my father
had 
taught me. Looking at a bird he says,
“Do
you know whatthat bird
is?
It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portugueseit’s a
. . .
in Italian a
. . .
,”
he says
“in
Chinese it’s a
. .
.
,
inJapanese a
. . .
,”
etcetera.
“Now,”
he says, “you know in allthe languages you want to know what the name of that birdis and when you’ve finished with all
that,”
he says, “you’llknow absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You onlyknow about humans in different places and what they call thebird.
Now,”
he says,
“let’s
look at the
bird.”
He had taught me to notice things and one day when I wasplaying with what we call an express wagon, which is a littlewagon which has a railing around it for children to play withthat they can pull around. It had a ball in it
-
I rememberthis
-
it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticedsomething about the way the ball moved,
so
I went to my
fa-
5
+
i9e
 Pleasure
of 
Finding
i9ings
Out
ther and I said,
“Say,
Pop, I noticed something: When I pullthe wagon the ball rolls to the back 
of 
the wagon, and whenI’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to thefront of the
wagon,”
and
I
says,
“why
is
that?”
And he said,
“That
nobody
knows,”
he said. “The general principle is thatthings that are moving try to keep on moving and things thatare standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them
hard.”
And
he says,
“This
tendency is called inertia but no
-
body knows why it’s
true.”
Now that’s a deep
understanding-
he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference betweenknowing the name
of
something and knowing something,which I learnt very early. He went on to say,
“If
you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of thewagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pullingagainst the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of factfrom the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’tmove
back.”
So
I ran back to the little wagon and set the ballup again and pulled the wagon from under it and lookingsideways and seeing indeed he was right
-
the ball nevermoved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon for
-
ward. It moved
backward
relative to the wagon, but relativeto the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that]the wagon caught up with it.
So
that’s the way I was educatedby my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions,no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.
Algebra
for
the
Practical
Man
My cousin, at that time, who was three years older, was inhigh school and was having considerable difficulty with hisalgebra and had a tutor come, and I was allowed to sit in acorner while
(
L
A
U
G
H
S
)
the tutor would try to teach mycousin algebra, problems like
2x
plus something.
I
said to my
of 00

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thuhuongtcf

minh muon down tai lieu tong hop maketing. ban publish tai lieu do dc khong?

reply12 / 15 / 2009
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