Richard Feynman and the Philosophy of Science

In this episode, Rik calls attention to a very special Earthling, Richard Feynman.  Feynman's contributions to the science of physics by itself were enough to place him in the same category as Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.  

And this fascinating human also made a huge contribution to the philosophy of science, even though he claimed to be not much interested in the philosophical side.  He has been quoted as saying words to the effect that the the philosophy of science is as much use to a scientist as ornithology is to a bird.  

But by word and deed, he showed that he did in truth reflect upon the philosophical side of the scientific endeavor.  And Earthlings everywhere can benefit from, and be entertained by, a look at his life and his way of thinking.

Transcript

 Richard Feynman

Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth:  to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.

 I would like to say a few words today about the philosophy of science, and about the thoughts of an especially good philosopher of science, Richard Feynman.  

 The scientific method which has evolved on your planet is one of your most precious cultural artifacts.  

 Notice that I said “scientific method” and not “science”.  These terms could be used interchangeably by those with deep understanding, but for the benefit of those Earthlings who are still swimming in shallower water, it is important to preserve the distinction.

 The distinction is this: “science” is often thought of as a “body of knowledge”, and that is in fact how science is defined for the benefit of children first being introduced to science.  For example, one speaks of geology as the body of knowledge that has been collected about Earth’s physical structure and substance, and how it got that way; about chemistry as the body of knowledge that has been collected about atomic and molecular structures and processes; and so forth.

 The problem with trying to understand science as a body of knowledge, though, is that today’s body of knowledge is not the same as the body of a year ago, and not the same body it will be one year hence - it is continuously in flux.  

 The body is in constant flux, and we are trying to talk about as if it were a snapshot rather than a video if we conceive of science as a body of knowledge.

 So to move from a shallow conceptual waters to deeper waters, we need to focus on and try to understand the principles of change.  How are the energy flows that occur in individual human brains, as they do science, directed so as to contribute to a more-or-less coherent evolving superconsciousness?  Why is the result not more of a patchwork?

 And this is where it’s crucially important to think of science, not as an established body of knowledge, but rather as a method of investigating reality that is more likely than any other method we presently know of to produce results that are reliable and replicable.

 If two scientists are performing the same experiment with rigorous controls, they usually obtain the same results. The fact that they are both following scientific method, and that they are both exploring an objective reality, explains why.

 And that brings the discussion to the eminent 20th century physicist Richard Feynman.

 Feynman’s career as a physicist alone was remarkable enough, but there was much, much more to this man’s life and legacy.  Perhaps even more valuable than his contributions to the science of physics was his contribution to explaining scientific method.

 And he led quite an interesting personal life, as stories in his popular publications reveal.  After his wife died at an early age, he became quite enthusiastic about appreciating the beauty of young women to the fullest, and they flocked around this handsome and charismatic man until the end.

 He writes in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” about his experiences in Las Vegas, where he stayed for a time due to his involvement as a consultant for nuclear testing programs.  His curiosity led him to investigate social interactions, particularly between showgirls and patrons in casino lounges, as a behavioral anthropologist would have.  He referred to it as the “economics of flirtation and expectation”.

 Let’s begin with an outline of his scientific career.

 His father, Melville Feynman, was an important influence on his early development.  He was not himself a scientist by profession – he was a salesman; but he had a sense of curiosity, wonder and enthusiasm for science that rubbed off on his son.

 Dad taught young Richard to look beyond names and appearances to understand how things work.  

 He taught him to question everything, even what he heard from his teachers and what he read in books.  

 He taught him to treat scientific understanding as comprehension of causes and consequences, not just as memorization of facts.

 He also taught him how to handle a schoolmate who was messing with him.  He told his son to hit the bully as hard as he could right on the end of the nose.  Richard followed his Dad’s advice and soon gained a reputation as “that tough Jewish kid”.

 As early as high school, Feynman was already exhibiting extraordinary capabilities, especially in math and physics.  He won the New York University Math Championship in 1933 when he was still a 15-year-old, scoring more points than the next two competitors combined.

 Commenting later on his reasoning ability, he said that it was due more to the time and hard work that he put in than to any native ability.  That cannot be entirely true, of course.  He stands out in the field of those who have put in the time and the hard work, so there was clearly something special with him.

 Interestingly, his IQ score was measured at a fairly modest 125, less than the usual threshold for an invitation from MENSA, an invitation MENSA extended to him anyway, but which he declined because he didn’t want to participate in rule-bending.

 After high school, he was admitted to MIT, where he first studied electrical engineering but soon changed his emphasis to physics.  It was here that he first encountered quantum mechanics.

 From 1939 to 1942, he studied for his PhD at Princeton University, and furthered his exploration of quantum electrodynamics, or QED, the study of the interaction between electrons an photons.

 While still working to complete his PhD at Princeton, he worked on the Manhattan Project as part of the theoretical physics team, at the Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico, and made valuable contributions to its success.  

 It was during this period when his beloved wife Arline Greenbaum Feynman, whom he had met as a teenager, and with whom he shared a very special intimacy, died from tuberculosis at the age of 25.  

 For a revealing look at the depths of emotion he experienced after she was gone, look up the text of the letter he wrote to her a few years after she died (and have some Kleenex handy), but which he never mailed because, he said, he didn’t have her forwarding address.  

 They found this letter among his personal effects after his death.  

 From 1950 until his own death, from cancer, in 1988 at age 70, Feynman was a professor of physics at CalTech in Pasadena CA.  

 In 1965 he was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in physics. Feynman's key contribution was the development of a new and highly intuitive method for performing calculations in QED using what are now called Feynman diagrams. These diagrams provide a way of visualizing, as well as a calculational tool, for understanding and computing interactions between the photons and the electrons.

 This work was praised for helping to resolve earlier inconsistencies in quantum field theory, and laid the groundwork for much of modern particle physics.

 Feynman was among the first to propose a quantum computer, which is orders of magnitude faster than our current digital computers for certain types of problems, for example for factoring large numbers, and for simulations with a lot of variables.  

 And a quantum computer is better for cryptography, because it can detect eavesdropping, thereby potentially making an encrypted message completely secure. 

 He was the first to explain superfluidity, which is flow without resistance.

 And he was not only an exceptionally marvelous researcher and theorizer, he was also a brilliant teacher.  

 While at Caltech, he created the Feynman lectures on physics in the early 1960’s, which he developed as an introductory course for freshmen and sophomores, and which created an enduring legacy.  

 His remarkable abilities at explaining are on full display in these lectures.  The lectures were recorded, they are still available today and are widely used by educators, and by people who are not specialists but who just enjoy finding things out.

 Here are a few more of his quotes on teaching:

 “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

 “If you can’t explain something to a freshman, you don’t really understand it.”

 He advocated for scientific skepticism, a concept which is even now not well understood by so many Earthlings, who equate it with being reflexively dismissive.  

 Being a skeptic, however, does not imply that you dismiss claims without considering them – you are merely saying that the burden of proof is on the one making the claim, and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  You are still, always and forever, open to evidence and reason if you are a skeptic.

 Before moving on to further discussion of Feynman’s view of science, I would like to recommend the books he wrote for a general audience.  They are witty and contain remarkable insights; and he has a knack for story-telling.

 “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” – a memoir which consists of vignettes about his life and his way of thinking, published in 1985.

 The title came from an incident at a tea party he attended.  The hostess asked him whether he wanted milk or lemon in his tea, and he said “both”.  This answer provoked the famous remark from the lady.

 “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” – a further memoir, published shortly after his death from cancer in 1988.  This is the book that contains the story of his role in the investigation of the Challenger explosion.  He notably pointed out that “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled”.

 These first two books were co-written with his friend and fellow bongo drum enthusiast Ralph Leighton.

 “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”. – a further collection, compiled and edited by science journalist Jeffrey Robbins and published in 1999, which stemmed from a 1981 interview by the BBC in which he emphasized the sheer joy of discovery.  This book includes his comments about what he called “Cargo Cult Science”, further discussed below.

 “Six Easy Pieces”, for those who would like a simplified version of his “Lectures on Physics”, written by his friend and fellow Caltech physics professor Matthew Sands, who had worked with Feynman on the original lectures.

 “The Meaning of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist”. – based on a series of three lectures he presented in 1963 at the University of Washington: “The Uncertainty of Science”, “The Uncertainty of Values”, and “This Unscientific Age”.  This book was also compiled and edited by Jeffrey Robbins and published in 1999.

 In these lectures, Feynman champions individual responsibility, intellectual freedom, and humility in the face of complexity.  Simple, easy-to-understand wrong narratives about complex real-world situations are not okay.

 More about Feynman’s views on science and scientific method.

 A key theme in his views was a commitment to the hypothesis of an objective reality, a universe which operates according to laws that are independent of human opinion or culture, and the use of experimentation to conduct investigations.

 This view put him at odds with many earlier medievalist thinkers, who argued from authority, with Aristotle considered the ultimate authority, rather than from the results of experiments.  

 It also puts him at odds with claims from many otherwise intelligent Earthlings, that science is just a narrative, a more-or-less arbitrary social construct; and with claims that truth is relative to cultural or linguistic frameworks which we must respect (except for Nazi Germany, of course).

 He emphasized the role of science as a method more than as a body of knowledge.  To the extent that Feynman would agree at all with the idea that science is a narrative, he would say that scientific writings are a snapshot of the ongoing evolution of what we have learned so far about the subject matter while working to insure that we are not fooling ourselves.

 Science is not just one perspective among many.  It is a uniquely powerful way of approaching truth.

 A quote from Feynman:  “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”

 He criticized the obscurantist and jargon-laden language often employed by academic writers with shallow and agenda-motivated thinking which masks a lack of real understanding.

 His critique foreshadowed the famous Sokal Hoax, a prank carried out in 1996 by physicist Alan Sokal.  Sokal submitted an article to the “scholarly” journal Social Text titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

 His essay was crammed full of scientific jargon, strung out in a way that any physicist would immediately recognize as nonsense, but which was accepted by the journal for publication.  And the fact that his title used the term “hermeneutics” rather than “interpretation” is the icing on the cake, illustrating the use of obscurantism to create the illusion of esoteric knowledge.

 The essay included claims that were designed to confirm the ideological biases of the editors, such as the claims:

 - That quantum gravity supports postmodern relativism;

 - That the concept of “reality” is no more than a linguistic construct;

 - That physical laws are socially constructed;

 - That Mathematics is no more than a cultural narrative.

 After the article was published, Sokal revealed in an article published in another journal that the article published by Social Text was a deliberate parody, full of meaningless but flattering nonsense; and that the journal’s decision to publish it demonstrated intellectual laziness, and confirmation that the thinking he parodied was agenda-motivated, and thus not scientific.

 There have been further examples where similar hoaxes were perpetrated.  

 Look up, for example, the Grievance Studies Affair, where in 2017-2018 a trio of academics aimed to demonstrate a lack of rigor in certain academic fields that were strongly influenced by postmodernist “thought”.  

 The trio produced twenty intentionally absurd papers, crafting them so as to conform to prevailing postmodernist narratives, and peppered with the right jargon, that were submitted to journals in disciplines such as gender studies, cultural studies and critical race theory.

 The titles of the papers and the arguments presented were quite hilarious, but seven of the twenty were accepted by journals, and four of them were actually published before they were revealed as hoaxes.

 One paper was titled “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism”.  The article was a reworked chapter of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, My Struggle, with the Nazi terminology replaced by currently fashionable postmodernist feminist jargon.  

 The other titles are equally funny.  My favorite is “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon”.

 In 1974, Feynman made a famous commencement speech at Caltech, where he introduced the term “Cargo Cult Science”, mentioned above, in which he criticized practices in academia which had the form of science but lacked true scientific rigor.

 What exactly was a cargo cult?

 Cargo cults emerged in a few locations on islands in the Pacific during and after World War II.  The native populations, who had had no experience of industrial civilization, observed soldiers building runways and control towers, and that soon after the runways were constructed, when the soldiers sat in the control towers wearing headphones, airplanes full of stuff - “cargo” - began landing on the runways and discharging the stuff.

 The natives evidently concluded that if they too were to build runways, sit in imitation control towers and wear imitation headphones, things that they had seen the soldiers doing, they too would soon be beneficiaries of cargo deliveries.

 Eighty-some years later, and without any actual cargo deliveries to confirm their faith, people still participate in these cargo cult rituals, most notably in the island nation of Vanuatu.

 In his speech, Feynman commented that in much of academia “[cargo cultists] have arranged things to make it look as if the airplanes will land … but they don’t.  So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential”.

 He was especially concerned about experiments designed and performed to confirm a belief rather than to test the belief scientifically, which means to look for ways to falsify; about a lack of rigorous controls and reproducibility; scientists being dishonest even with themselves; and scientists cherry-picking data.

 An example of such shoddy experimentation would be the work of psychologist J. B. Rhine of Duke University in the 1930’s and 40’s.  Rhine was committed to a belief in the existence of extra-sensory perception, and he ran some experiments using Zener cards, cards with simple symbols, in which he sought to demonstrate clairvoyance by showing that his subjects could guess the symbols on the cards beyond what they ought to be able to do by chance.

 He interpreted the results he obtained as evidence of clairvoyant abilities; but when these experiments were later repeated under stricter controls, and with honest selection of data, the results returned to chance levels.  

 Rhine had ignored or rationalized negative outcomes in his experiments, because he was trying to support his hypothesis, rather than trying to falsify it as scientific method requires.

 There have been countless examples since Rhine’s day, for example studies where the conclusion rests solely upon correlation without any explanation of causation, or upon propositions that are inherently unfalsifiable – ask your chatbot for more if you are curious.  

 Much cargo cult science has been done, is still being done, and it is becoming ever more evident that there is an alarming and growing problem with replication when it comes to way too many published results, particularly in the social sciences, which are currently dominated by people who are more interested in promoting Marxian dogma than in discovering supportable hypotheses.

 The problem is not confined to the social sciences of course.  Many of those working in the science-industrial complex are motivated by things other than a desire to find the truth.

 Feynman had some interesting things to say about free will and determinism too.

 Without ever reaching any firm conclusions about the reality of free will, he said that for practical purposes it makes sense to talk about free will – not because we know on some metaphysical level that it exists, but because as he put it, “It is not possible, due to the complexity of the environment and ourselves, to predict what a person will do, and so we have the illusion of free will”.  We cannot measure, predict or control all the variables, so there is no practical reason to reject the notion of free will, even if it is ultimately illusory, he says.

 And he also suspected that the idea of a deterministic universe might eventually be modified by the phenomenon of quantum indeterminacy.

 On that note I recommend, if you are curious about this topic, the work of the brilliant physicist David Deutsch of Oxford University, a pioneer in quantum computing, who advocates the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which he believes preserves determinism.  See his book “The Fabric of Reality”.  

 Deutsch, by the way, is also a strong critic of the notion that artificial intelligence is going to inevitably, and quickly, drag us into a singularity.

 Others, notably the late Daniel Dennett, have argued that there exist degrees of freedom even within a deterministic framework, another fascinating speculation.  See his book “Elbow Room”, a clever title because in addition to the usual meaning of the colloquial term, the elbow joint itself creates degrees of freedom of movement.

 There is something else that science is not which we ought to discuss as a contrast to Feynman’s legacy; and that is the notion that science is some sort of social establishment, and that the very definition of science is “what the scientific establishment does”.

 In today’s world, it has become fashionable in certain circles to say things like, “Science is just another story we tell ourselves, and no story is any better than any other story”.

 Aside from the common-sense observation that a story that results in airplanes that fly is better than a story that results in airplanes that do not even get off the ground, or that crash when they do, there is a deeper problem to address.  

 It is simply wrong to say that science is a story at all – science is a method of evaluating the believability of stories in general.

 Apart from how we might speculate about the motives of people who spread this type of thinking (and you shouldn’t be surprised that there is often a simple desire for attention, nor that there is a connection to the desire to access grant money from the government, by producing results that are pleasing to your rulers), it’s easy to demonstrate the way that they put the rabbit into the hat, a hat from which they then pull the rabbit and expect us to be surprised.

 To define science as “what scientists do” is to beg the question of who is a scientist.  Are you a scientist just because you are a member of a set of individuals that is labeled “scientists”, perhaps on account of credentials or job title; or are you a scientist if and only if what you actually do is to follow scientific method, regardless of credentials or job titles?

 Whatever the motives might be of those who profess a belief in such ideas, the effect of spreading these ideas is to impede the evolution of actual science, to the detriment of all Earthlings.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences.

 Treasure your memories.

 Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.