A friend was telling me the other day about a class he plans on taking on the philosophy of science. When I hear philosophy of science, I immediately think Richard Feynman. Feynman was, of course, not a philosopher, but a scientist par excellence. His lectures are filled with insights like these:
Feynman addicts like myself were for years limited to the high-priced books of Feynman's various lectures and anecdotes. Now, with the rise of YouTube, you can watch hours of Feynman on the net: documentaries, videos of lectures, news interviews, etc.
A good place to start is with the grainy video of the 1964 Messenger Lectures, which Feynman gave at Cornell and which were turned into his classic The Character of Physical Law:
Feynman was not only a superb scientist; he was also a legendary teacher and lecturer. Essentially all of his books are transcripts of lectures. Thanks to YouTube, you can now watch those lectures instead of just reading them.
There is always the possibility of proving any definite [well-defined] theory wrong; but notice that we can never proce it right. Suppose that you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simple not proved wrong. In the future you could compute a wider range of consequences, there could be a wider range of experiments, and you might then discover that the thing is wrong... We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong.
Another most interesting change in the ideas and philosophy of science brought about by quantum mechanics is this: it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance.... nature, as we understand it today, behaves in such a way that it is fundamentally impossible to make a precise prediction of exactly what will happen in a given experiment. This is a horrible thing; in fact, philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science. The fact is that the same thing does not happen, that we can only find an average, statistically, as to what happens. Nevertheless, science has not completely collapsed. Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong. For example, some philosopher or other said it is fundamental to the scientific effort that if an experiment is performed in, say, Stockholm, and then the same experiment is done in, say, Quito, the same results must occur. That is quite false. It is not necessary that science do that; it may be a fact of experience, but it is not necessary. For example, if one of the experiments is to look out at the sky and see the aurora borealis in Stockholm, you do not see it in Quito; that is a different phenomenon. "But," you say, "that is something that has to do with the outside; can you close yourself up in a box in Stockholm and pull down the shade and get any difference?" Surely. If we take a pendulum on a universal joint, and pull it out and let go, then the pendulum will swing almost in a plane, but not quite. Slowly the plane keeps changing in Stockholm, but not in Quito. The blinds are down too. The fact that this happened does not bring on the destruction of science. What is the fundamental hypothesis of science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test f the validity of any idea is experiment. (Lecture 2, Basic Physics, from the Feynman Lectures on Physics)
Feynman addicts like myself were for years limited to the high-priced books of Feynman's various lectures and anecdotes. Now, with the rise of YouTube, you can watch hours of Feynman on the net: documentaries, videos of lectures, news interviews, etc.
A good place to start is with the grainy video of the 1964 Messenger Lectures, which Feynman gave at Cornell and which were turned into his classic The Character of Physical Law:
Feynman was not only a superb scientist; he was also a legendary teacher and lecturer. Essentially all of his books are transcripts of lectures. Thanks to YouTube, you can now watch those lectures instead of just reading them.
