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Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

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Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#11

Post by stanrivers »

Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery...

https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard...

Copy / Paste:

"But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital…

And you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example, if you go, “Why did she slip on the ice?” Well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that, no problem. But you ask why is ice slippery? That’s kinda curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It's very interesting. You say, how does it work? You could either say, “I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me. Ice is slippery; that explains it,” or you could go on and say, “Why is ice slippery?” and then you're involved with something, because there aren't many things as slippery as ice...

A solid that’s so slippery? Because it is, in the case of ice, when you stand on it (they say) momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit so you get a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you're slipping. Why on ice and not on other things? Because water expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it. It's capable of melting, but other substances get cracked when they're freezing, and when you push them they're satisfied to be solid.

Why does water expand when it freezes and other substances don’t? I’m not answering your question, but I'm telling you how difficult the why question is. You have to know what it is that you're permitted to understand and allow to be understood and known, and what it is you're not. You'll notice, in this example, that the more I ask why, the deeper a thing is, the more interesting it gets. We could even go further and say, “Why did she fall down when she slipped?” It has to do with gravity, involves all the planets and everything else. Nevermind! It goes on and on."

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#13

Post by dr_dshiv »

stanrivers wrote: post #11

Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery... https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard... Copy / Paste: "But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slippe…

And yet he totally shuts down the question of why positive and negative charges attract… which I’ve always been dying to understand.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-ne...

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#14

Post by oolonthegreat »

golden. his bit about the curt richter's "hope" experiment (the one with drowning rats) is very interesting:

> But then there was a talk by some guy who got up and told about experiments which were supposed to be the effect of stress on rats, on their desire to survive or something — on rats. What he had done was — I mean this is what he’d done — he described it in terms of a cylindrical glass tube, but it was a bottle. He took a jar and he put rats in the jar in water, and he screwed the lid on so that they couldn’t quite come up high enough when they were swimming to get a good breath, and they were drowning — hm? And he watched how long it took them to drown, under some kind of circumstance. Now, if that ain’t a kid fiddling around! There was nothing scientifically measured, in the sense that there was some sense to it, except that the rats got very nervous, you see, and they swam faster, or something. It was the most cruel, unnecessary, stupid thing. It was very much — except it wasn’t human beings — like the stupid kind of Nazi experiments in which they don’t exactly know what they’re doing; they’re just experimenting. Huh? It was just like a kid would experiment, God damn it, in drowning rats. It had no real scientific virtue of any kind.

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#15

Post by amelius »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #13
stanrivers wrote: post #11

Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery... https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard... Copy / Paste: "But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slippe…

And yet he totally shuts down the question of why positive and negative charges attract… which I’ve always been dying to understand. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-ne...

Change your reference frame. Assume both charges are moving at constant speed != 0 in the same direction. From this view they are not charges but opposite currents. We know that opposite currents repel [1]. Therefore, one could conclude that opposite charges repel. It's this kind of question that the interviewer should ask.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-two-wires-with-current-flowing-...

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#16

Post by GDC7 »

stanrivers wrote: post #11

Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery... https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard... Copy / Paste: "But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slippe…

> Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery...

He never looks bored, many people of his level of intellect only have very short moment of real hype when they actually have big wins and are proven right and recognized by peers (Nobel prize, Fields medal...)

Feynman has such a wide interests , also things which people even on here would consider mundane and not special enough to be given the time of the day such as bongos, painting as a hobby, dancing at the Rio Carnival, stripclubs, strippers and sex workers.

Also Tuva which is a territory forgotten by god himself as well as men.

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#17

Post by leephillips »

evanb wrote: post #10
evanb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my collaborators recently wrote a paper about why beer coasters make bad frisbees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08238

It seems this article went into the second-chance pool, which is great! It didn't get much discussion last time around but might spurn a lot of interesting threads. However, something I find a little upsetting: I commented the first time around (about 2 days ago). But currently the comments show that I commented first about 50 minutes ago. That's a little too much rewriting of history, if you ask me. What's funny is…

Thank you, I thought I was losing my mind.

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#18

Post by beezle »

eskathos wrote: post #4

Not the same interview, but a talk also covering his time at Los Alamos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTRVlUT665U

While Feynman is famous for his computational work at Project Y, perhaps his most important contribution was the Bethe-Feynman equation for the efficiency of a nuclear weapon.

Re: Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

#19

Post by rrss »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #13
stanrivers wrote: post #11

Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery... https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard... Copy / Paste: "But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slippe…

And yet he totally shuts down the question of why positive and negative charges attract… which I’ve always been dying to understand. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-ne...

The difficulty is that eventually you reach a level where there are no satisfying answers to this sort of question. There are a lot of interesting levels to explore between “why did aunt Minnie go to the hospital” and fundamental physical principles, but for things like “why do magnets repel?” (or “why do unlike charges attract?”), these questions are getting pretty close to the point where the only answer is “we don’t know, that’s just what we see happens when we watch the universe work.”

You can go farther and get stuff about the action in quantum electrodynamics, but these don’t really provide any more satisfying answers, they just lead to more questions like “why do systems follow trajectories of stationary action?” and “why is the lagrangian for electromagnetism what it is?”

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