Richard Feynman Enthusiastically Explains How to Think Like a Physicist in His Series Fun to Imagine (1983)

“It’s inter­est­ing that some peo­ple discover sci­ence really easy, and oth­ers discover it sort of boring and dif­fi­cult,” says Richard Feyn­man on the start­ning of his 1983 BBC sequence Enjoyable to Imag­ine. “One of many issues that makes it very dif­fi­cult is that it takes a variety of imag­i­na­tion. It’s very arduous to imag­ine all of the loopy issues that issues actual­ly are like.” A real sci­en­tist accepts that noth­ing is because it appears, in that noth­ing, whenever you zoom in shut sufficient or zoom out far sufficient, behaves in a method that accords with our each­day expe­ri­ence. Even the nec­es­sary scales — wherein, for examination­ple, an atom is to an apple as an apple is to Earth itself — are dif­fi­cult to con­ceive.

Regardless of his much-cel­e­brat­ed bril­liance as a physi­cist, Feyn­man additionally admit­ted to seek out­ing the quan­ti­ties with which he needed to work unfath­omable, no less than when examination­ined out­aspect their par­tic­u­lar con­texts. On the atom­ic lev­el, he explains, “you’re simply suppose­ing of small balls, however you don’t strive to think about precise­ly how small they’re too usually, otherwise you get sort of a bit nut­ty.”

In astron­o­my, “you have got the identical factor in reverse, as a result of the dis­tance to those stars is so enor­mous.” All of us have an concept of what the time period “mild yr” means — assum­ing we don’t mis­un­der­stand it as a unit of time — however who amongst us can actual­ly envi­sion a galaxy 100,000 mild years away, not to mention a mil­lion?

Feyn­man dis­cuss­es these mat­ters with char­ac­ter­is­tic underneath­stand­ing and humor throughout Enjoyable to Imag­ine’s 9 seg­ments, which cov­er phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na from fireplace and magazine­nets to rub­ber bands and practice wheels. Those that know their physics will appre­ci­ate the vivid­ness and con­ci­sion with which he explains this mate­r­i­al, appar­ent­ly proper off the highest of his head, and any­one can sense the delight he feels in mere­ly placing his thoughts to the behav­ior of mat­ter and ener­gy and their rela­tion­ship to the world as we all know it. And the way­ev­er a lot plea­certain he derived from underneath­stand­ing, he additionally bought a kick out of how a lot mys­tery stays: “Nature’s imag­i­na­tion is a lot better than man’s,” he says towards the tip. “She’s nev­er going to allow us to chill out.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Life & Work of Richard Feyn­man Explored in a Three-Half Freako­nom­ics Radio Minis­eries