(This is a follow-up to what I was trying to get at with yesterday’s post.)
The first quote, below is from an address given by Richard Feynman, What is Science? delivered to the National Science Teachers’ Association in 1966:
… During walks in the woods with my father, I learned a great deal. In the case of birds, for example: Instead of naming them, my father would say, “Look, notice that the bird is always pecking in its feathers. It pecks a lot in its feathers. Why do you think it pecks the feathers?”
I guessed it’s because the feathers are ruffled, and he’s trying to straighten them out. He said “Okay, when would the feathers get ruffled, or how would they get ruffled?”
“When he flies. When he walks around, it’s okay; but when he flies it ruffles the feathers.”
Then he would say, “You would guess then when the bird just landed he would have to peck more at his feathers than after he has straightened them out and has been walking around the ground for a while. Okay; let’s looik.”
So we would look, and we would watch, and it turned out, as far as I could make out, that the bird pecked about as much and as often no matter how long he was walking on the ground and not just directly after flight.
So my guess was wrong, and I couldn’t guess the right reason. My father revealed the reason.
It is that the birds have lice. There is a little flake that comes off the feather, my father taught me, stuff that can be eaten, and the louse eats it. And then on the louse, there is a little bit of wax in the joints between the sections of the leg that oozes out, and there is a mite that lives in there that can eat that wax. Now the mite has such a good source of food that it doesn’t digest it too well, so from the rear end there comes a liquid that has too much sugar, and in that sugar lives a tiny creature, etc.
The facts are not correct. The spirit is correct. First I learned about parasitism, one on the other, on the other, on the other.
Second, he went on to say that in the world whenever there is any source of something that could be eaten to make life go, some form of life finds a way to make use of that source; and that each little bit of leftover stuff is eaten by something.
Now the point of this is that the result of observation, even if I were unable to come to the ultimate conclusion, was wonderful piece of gold, with a marvelous result. It was something marvelous.
Suppose I were told to observe, to make a list, to write down, to do this, to look, and when I wrote my list down, it was filled with 130 other lists in the back of a notebook. I would learn that the result of observation is relatively dull, that nothing much comes of it.
I think it is very important — at least it was to me — that if you are going to teach people to make observations, you should show that something wonderful can come from them. I learned then what science was about. It was patience. If you looked, and you watched, and you paid attention, you got a great reward from it (although possibly not every time). As a result, when I became a more mature man, I would painstakingly, hour after hour, for years, work on problems — sometimes many years, sometimes shorter times — many of them failing, lots of stuff going into the wastebasket; but every once in a while there was the gold of a new understanding that I had learned to expect when I was a kid, the result of observation. For I did not learn that observation was not worthwhile.
You can find that within the collection, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman on Google Books (limited preview).
Below is from the beginning of a talk Feynman gave to an audience of scientists at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, in 1964; What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society (also found in the collection linked to, above):
I am Professor Feynman, in spite of this suit-coat. I usually give lectures in shirtsleeves, but when I started out of the hotel this morning my wife said, “You must wear a suit.” I said, “But I usually give lectures in shirtsleeves.” She said, “Yes, but this time you don’t know what you’re talking about so you had better make a good impression … ” So, I got a coat.
Another anecdote — that I will not post here because this post has gotten too long — is the subsection titled Epaulettes and the Pope from a 1981 interview with the BBC. Scroll down the linked page to find it.
-Julie
