A Curious Mind W(o/a)nders

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

from Feynman archives...

We want [knowledge] so we can love Nature more. Would you not turn a beautiful flower around in your hand to see it from other directions as well?

Of course, men want knowledge for many other purposes also, to make war, to make a commercial success, to help the sick or the poor, etc., motives of various values. These obvious motives and their consequences the poets do understand and do write about. But the emotions of awe, wonder, delight and love which are evoked upon learning Nature's ways in the animate and inanimate world, together (for they are one), is rarely expressed in modern poetry where the aspect of Nature being appreciated is one which could have been known to men in the Renaissance.

And the crassness of our time, so much lamented, is a crassness that can be alleviated only by art, and surely not by science without art. Art and poetry can remind the mind of beauty and gradually make life more beautiful.

My lament was that a kind of intense beauty that I see given to me by science, is seen by so few others; by few poets and, therefore, by even fewer ordinary people.

The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, come again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still ...It is true that few unscientific people have this particular kind of religious experience. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe?

The value of science remains unsung by singers, so you are reduced to hearing about it -- not a song or a poem, but an evening lecture about it....Perhaps one of the reasons is that you have to know how to read the music.

For instance, the scientific analysis says, perhaps, something like this: "The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?It means that the phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat (and also in mine, and yours) is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago, but that all of the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced, and the ones that were there before have gone away.

So what is this mind, what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! That is what now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago -- a mind that has long ago been replaced.That is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms, to note that the thing that I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, then go out; always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday....


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