Earth, actually…

The Obama administration recently announced that funding will be cut for NASA manned-space exploration projects, including a return trip to the moon in 2020.  Instead, more funding will be directed towards NASA Earth-observation and monitoring missions, in hopes of better understanding our planet and its changing climate.  Thinking back over the history of manned space exploration, NASA has certainly accomplished some astounding feats and helped us to dream of even more amazing possiblities.  But, as with any series of ground-breaking endeavours, there have been great failures along the way.

A new Philip Kaufman (2010) film, Challenger, based on the investigation of 1986 Space Shuttle  disaster, will have as one of its main characters the great scientist Richard Feynman.  He has always been one of the five famous people at my hypothetical dinner table.  I wanted to talk about this amazing guy for a minute, and the concept of science and the bigger picture.

Richard Feynman was an exceptionally brilliant and unusually charming theoretical physicist.  If you’ve read any of his books (Surely you’re joking; Six easy pieces, etc.), then you know that this 20th century physics superstar was not only one of the great researchers, he may also have been one of the best teachers to come along since Socrates.

As a young man apparently aware of his potential genius, his first seminar as a doctoral student at Princeton was attended by Einstein, Pauli and Von Neumann because they had heard the buzz about Feynman’s work.  His early life, PhD studies, and his first wife’s death from tuberculosis were the subject of the book What do you care what other people think? and the 1996 film Infinity starring Matthew Broderick.  This book was Feynman’s final publication, written in telescopic retrospect as he battled cancer near the end of his life.

Because of his shining intellect, he was recruited for the Manhattan project, and admits he was compelled to join only because of the possibility that Nazi Germany would develop the bomb before the Allies.  He later discussed going through a period of depression after the destruction of Hiroshima by the bomb he helped produce.  I think in this period, Feynman realized how intimately connected his actions were (and potentially all of our actions are) with the fate of the planet.

Feynman went on to be professor at Cal Tech, and won the nobel prize for developing a functional integral formulation of quantum mechanics.  He had strong viewpoints on science, life, and the the nature of our universe, and when the national spotlight began to shine on him, his charisma and brilliance captured the attention of the public world.  His other inventions, such as the Feynman diagram have proved to be fundamental components of modern string theory.

Feynman was recruited to advise on the investigation of the NASA challenger explosion, and was the lone voice who testified that NASA failures in management, deficiencies in scientific understanding, and lack of communication where the culprits in the disaster, and suggested a temporary shutdown of NASA shuttle operations.  Though he was credited with finding the O-ring as the cause of the disaster, his advice was not headed and no NASA operational suspensions were inacted.  His fight for the truth in this investigation will be recreated in the upcoming film .

I think the thing that most inspires me about Feynman was his sense that we are all living with the capacity to contribute something amazing from our own viewpoint – from our own current position.  Because of his exceptional genius, he knew that he had an opportunity to breath life into science and set a living example that whatever your position in this world, you will meet much greater success with an open mind and a sense of humor.  He believed that immersion in a subject is the only way to understand it, and that knowledge and the perception of knowledge can itself be limiting in the learning process.  These are some very profound concepts!

Please enjoy some of these exceptional samples of Feynman’s sharp wit and unique prespective…

Some wonderful Feynman quotes:

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

On the contrary, it’s because someone knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance… so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

A poet once said “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

Here we have an extraordinary gem in a set of brief monologues from Feynman from the 1980’s captured on film.  I’ve chosen some of my favorite pieces for presentation here:

1) Feynman on what counts as science and the difficulty of true understanding.  While this is short, I think it is something that all scientists should watch.  Warning: he’s a little harsh on the social sciences…

2)  On the nature of light.  A great example of his mixture of charm and genius…

3) The first in a series of “fun to imagine” conversations, entitled, “jiggling atoms”: