you take any crazy idea uh well I don't know it's hard to make up a very crazy one they witches or something like that you tell about what people used to believe in witches and of course nobody believes in witches now and you say how could they believe in witches then you turn around you say let's see what witches do we believe in now what ceremonies do we do every morning we brush our teeth what is the evidence that the brushing the teeth does us any good in cavage so you start wondering are we all imagine in the the as the Earth turns on the orbit there's an edge between light and dark and along that edge all the people along that edge and we doing the same ritual for no good reason just like in the Middle Ages they had other rituals and you try to Picture This Perpetual line of toothbrushes going around the earth it's to take the world from another point of view now it may be May well be that brushing teeth is a very good thing because it gets rid of cavities and you're going to ask you can find out whether it does or it doesn't by trying to find out now you're going to ask your dentist he says of course and you say how evidence I have not found the evidence from dentists because they just learned it in school now I'm not trying to argue that it's good or bad to brush teeth what I'm trying to argue for is to think about thing from a new point of view [Music] you see I have had in my life a number of uh Pleasant experiences when the earliest one when I was a kid I invented a problem for myself the sum of the powers of the integers and in trying to get the formula for it I developed a certain set of numbers that I for formula for which I couldn't get and I discovered later that those were known as the boli numbers and discovered in 1739 so I was up to 1739 when I was about 14 you see and then a little later I discover something I find out I just may invented a thing called uh which we now call uh operated calculus and that was invented in 1890 something you see I was gradually I was inventing things that came later and later but the moment when I began to realize that I was now working on something new was what I read about Quantum electrodynamics at the time and I read a book and I learned about it for example I read the rxs book and he had these problems that nobody knew how to solve it were described there I couldn't understand the book very well because I really wasn't up to it but there in the last paragraph at the end of the book it said some new ideas are here needed and so there I was some new ideas were needed okay so I started to think of new ideas [Music] Richard feineman nobbel Prize winner and his son Carl stepped gingerly down the wet cobbles of Milbank high in the Yorkshire penines feeman professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology retreats to this remote Village near his wife's home for a special purpose it's here he finds the time and Solitude to sift the ideas that have made him the most feared and original mind in modern [Music] physics feineman is in the Forefront of one of the oldest and most intriguing games of hid and seek in science finding the ultimate constituents of the world in this search Fineman is a celebrated Maverick who was encouraged by his father a New York Clothing salesman to confront conventional wisdom one Sunday all the kids were all walking in little parties with their fathers in the woods then the next Monday we were playing in a field and the kid said to me say what's that bird what's the name of do you know the name of that bird I says I have the slightest idea he said well it's a brown throated thrush he says your father doesn't teach you anything but my father had already taught me about the names of birds he once we walked and he says that's a brown Thro of thrush he says know what the name of that bird it's a brown Thro of thrush in German it's called a f in Chinese it's called A in Japanese a and so on and it when you know all the names in every language of that bird you know nothing but absolutely nothing about the bird then we would go on and talk about the pecking in the feathers so I had learned already that names don't constitute knowledge if knowing the name of something that's caused me a certain trouble since because I refuse to learn the name of anything so when someone comes in and says uh you got any explanation for the Fitz cloning experiment I says what what what's that he says you know that the long lived keson disintegrates into two pies oh oh yes now I know but I never know the names of things what he forgot to tell me was that the knowing the names of things is useful if you want to talk to somebody else so you tell them what you're talking about but the basic principle of knowing about something rather than just knowing its name is something that you stuck to is it yes of course it's you have to learn these are kind of disciplines in the field of science that you have to learn that to know when you know and when you don't know and what it is you know and what it is you don't know and it's uh you got to be very careful not to confuse yourself how else did he try and progress mold your methods of thinking the way you looked at the world well we had a lot of uh little games like he would say at the dinner table you'd think of some little problem and he'd say suppose we were you were a martian we were martians and we came down to this earth that and we look at got it from the outside and that I can't explain exactly what he meant but there's a way of looking something a new as if you never saw it before for the first time and asking questions about it as if you were different for instance uh if you would ask later I did some little amusing research for a paper in college on sleep but it started with a question of his kind suppose you were a martian who never slept they didn't have sleep you didn't have to sleep and you came down to this earth and you saw these people had this funny flppy that every day for a certain amount of time have to lie down and become unconscious and then the natural question would be how does it feel to get unconscious what happens do you ideas run along and suddenly they stop or do they just run more and more slowly but what happens to your ideas how does it feel to become unconscious so I tried to answer the question what happens when you become unconscious but do you find that these days you still when you're faced with a particularly difficult problem when you're absolutely stuck you tend to say let's look at it like a Maran would look at it sometimes there are lots of things that people did for example Maxwell Put the equations together the farad he formulated the equations mathematically with some model in his head then dur uh got his answer by just writing and guessing an equation and uh other people got their answer like in relativity got the idea by looking at principles of symmetry now all these methods and Heisenberg got his Quantum mechanic by thinking only talk about the things that you can measure now all these ideas we should only talk about things that we can measure try to Define things in terms of only things you measure or let's formulate the equation mathematically or let's guess the equation or all these things are tried all the time look for symmetries all that stuff is tried all that stuff when we're going against the problem we do all that that's very useful but we all know that that's what we learned in the physics classes how to do that but the new problem where we're stuck we're stuck because all those methods don't work if any of those methods would have worked we would have gone through there so when we get stuck in a certain place it's a place where history will not repeat herself and that's more makes it even more exciting because whatever we're going to look at at the other the method and the trick and the way it's going to look is going to be very different than anything that we've seen before because we've used all the methods from before so uh therefore a thing like the history of the idea is an accident of how things actually happen and if I want to turn the history around to try to get a a new way of looking at it it doesn't make any difference it I I don't care the only thing that the real test in physics is experiment and history is fundamentally irrelevant the most enduring Legacy from his father was not just learning to question the physical world but an enthusiasm for the inquiry which at 54 Fineman still shares today it has to do with curiosity it has to do with people wondering what makes something do something and then to discover that if you try to get answers that they're related to each other that things that make the wind make the waves and the motion of water is like the motion of air is like the motion of sand the fact that things have common features turns out more and more Universal what we're looking for is how everything works and how everything is what makes everything work and uh what happens first in the history is we discover the things that are on the face of it obvious and then gradually that we asks more questions and then we dig in a little deeper to things that we can just make we need to do a little more complicated experiment to find out about but it's a curiosity as to where we are what we are is it very much more exciting to discover we're on a ball half of it sticking upside down it's spinning around in space there a mysterious Force which Hold Us side it's going around a great big glob of gas that's burning by a fuel by a fire that's completely different than the fire any fire we can make well now we can make that fire nuclear fire now but uh that's much more exciting story to many people than the tales which other people used to make up who worried about the universe that we were living on the back of a turtle or something like that they were wonderful stories but the truth is so much more remarkable and so what's the pleasure in physics is that to me is that as it's revealed the truth is so remarkable so amazing and I can't I have this disease and many other people who have studied far enough to begin to understand a little of how things work are fascinated by it and this Fascination drives them on to such an extent that they've been able to convince governments and so on to keep supporting them in this investigation that the race is making into its own environment as a theoretical physicist Fineman doesn't have a laboratory and he finds family relaxation helps him to concentrate in recent years he been concerned with the long asked almost childlike question what are things really made of what makes up the world we see around us have we at last come to the foundation stone from which we can make anything a tree a human being or must we go on looking at smaller and smaller pieces and going deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit pinan is trying to knit together our scattered knowledge of the smallest pieces of matter to see whether they fit a pattern the problem although fundamentally important to all branches of science seems far removed from everyday reality the world is strange the whole universe is very strange but see when you look at the details and you find out that the rules are very simple of the game the mechanical Rules by which you can figure out exactly what's going to happen when the situation is simple it's again this chess game business if you were in just a corner where only a few pieces are involved you can work out exactly what should happen and you could always do that when there's only a few pieces and so you know you understand it and yet in the real game there's so it's so many pieces you can't figure out what's going to happen so there was a kind of hierarchy of different complexities it's hard to believe it's incredible in fact most people don't believe that uh the behavior of say me W yak yak and you nodding and all this stuff is the result of lots and lots of atoms all obeying these very simple rules come out that that it evolves into such a creature that a billion years of life with its experiences has produced the thing with prongs that stick out like this and so on the real there's such a lot in the world there's so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomena that it's almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomena can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules but you've had to build the most complex scaffolding to find out the simple rules but it is not complicated it's just a lot of it and if you'd start at the beginning which nobody wants to do I mean you come in to me now as an in an interview and you're asking me about the latest discoveries that have made nobody ever asks about a simple ordinary phenomenon in the street oh like what about those colors or something like that we have a nice interview explain all about the colors butterfly wings whole big deal don't care about that want the big final result then it's going to be complicated because I am at the end of a 400 years is a very effective method of finding things out about the world in the search for the ground rules of the physical world John Dalton worked out a comprehensive explanation over 150 years ago he assumed that everything we see is made out of tiny atoms that they are immutable and indestructible and that atoms of different chemical elements like lead or copper have different weights too small to be observed the atoms combine with each other to form complicated molecules and vast collections of these molecules are recognizable to us as tables trees or whatever but in the final analysis atoms were to be the smallest constituents of matter ultimate and unchangeable at the turn of the century we evolved our present picture of the atom light electrons surrounding a heavy Central core or nucleus once the atom was shown to be destructible attention turned to the nucleus and during the 30s it was found that bombarding one nucleus with another led to a release of energy and the breaking up of the nuclear this process which takes place in nuclear accelerators is photographed in a liquid bubble chamber you take a liquid liquid hydrogen or some other liquid and expand it so it's ready to boil low temperature and your decreased de pressure it's ready to boil and it has to form bubbles somewhere and it's any little piece of dirt or any little disturbance it'll form a bubble in that condition if a particle comes flying through from some machine it leaves a track it tears up the atoms along where electrons are knocked off the atoms along its track and uh we can't see that but when the gas tries to expand when the liquid tries to boil the bubbles form around these charged particles which are left so it leaves a a string of bubbles are then formed then you can take a picture of the bubbles so simplest picture would be if you had a machine that made fast particles particle go through and you see a string of bubbles but if the particle on the way through hit the nucleus of another atom then you see a string of bubbles in a kind of a y if it made its recoil plus some other thing instead of why you may see more complicated tracks three or four coming out and then one of them going along and going into two then you know that some particle went along and disintegrated now these things are going nearly at the speed of light and so if you can see a short distance a few centimeters that's corresponds to a tenth of a billionth of a second that is if a track comes out goes along here and then Bates into two you know you made a particle which integrated into two in less than a 10 billionth of a second so you see it's not very difficult to to find out about these things with the right with clever techniques since the war with evidence from bubble chamber photographs like this physicists have explored the nucleus of the atom the results have been spectacular and confusing the harder the nuclei were bombarded against each other the more they disintegrated into even tinier particles until literally hundreds were known in the last 10 years some order has been made out of seeming chaos by arranging the particles into patterns each pattern has eight or 10 members related by nuclear properties like Spin and Mass to the physicist patterns like this imply the possibility of even smaller particles not yet identified but already named the key to the question of what makes up the physical world then lies in the understanding of the nature of these nuclear patterns we're getting close because we have a number of little theories by which we can understand these patterns one picture which descries what particles you're going to find rather well is that all these particles are made of out of something else which we happen to call quarks and now Quark is an object which comes in three varieties it's either a type B type or C type Quark okay and that the particles that we find are of two big classes and one class we can understand is being made out of three quarks and depending on the different proportions how many A's B's and C's and how they're moving around each other if we count how many states we would get from putting three objects together could be made in so many ways in 27 different ways each one being three we find groups of particles and groups of 27 analogously and so on a little more complicated but it's more subtle but it's like that and then when we allow for their motion around each other we find the higher energy states anal to the way that that we ought to get and even even semiquantitatively there seems to be a relation between the states the rates that which one turn into another so it looks like they're made out of just three quarks then there's this other class of particles which are called mesons the first class we called Barons the words aren't going to do any good but the other class of mesons we have to understand is being made of a quark one quark and one antiquark an antiquark is a negative partic with all the numbers all the charge properties the exact opposite of a Quark we make a quark and an anti Quark put those together we understand the meeson states put three quarks together we understand all the others so we have made a really great progress in analyzing these patterns so much so that it looks very much as if to me at least that we're very close to understanding this part of physics this strongly interacting system but what's the main barrier still to well the quarks have well the main barrier is we don't understand it quantitative we don't know exactly the laws I mean I we do things like I'm just talking to you only a little bit more carefully counting how many states we should get and so on but we don't know exactly how they move and exactly what holds them together and so on so on also there are a number of paradoxes with this Quark picture this picture helps to give us a behavior at low energies of the what kinds of particles to expect but then you'd expect that a particle would be made out of only three parts but we've done some experiments at very high energy hitting a proton with an electron which can only be interpreted by supposing that the number of particles inside is really infinite if there are particles inside it can't be done with just three you can calculate it doesn't come out right so there's a difficulty furthermore the idea that they're just B3 particles is self-contradictory to the ideas of Relativity and so on which imply the exist of particles and anti particles and when there are three there should be possible for the forces to produce pairs of particle anti particle in various numbers so there should be not just three but many more so the infinity is not a paradox by itself the three is more of the Paradox why is it so simple why can we get away and understand so much with just three when there should be an infinite number probably in there both theoretically and experimentally another thing uh that's a little technical but very power paradoxical is that we had a rule back for atoms that no two electrons can occupy the same state it's called the Exclusion Principle and we thought we understood that that was necessary according to quantum mechanics and relativity you know has to be and with the quarks we find the exact opposite rule two particles tend to occupy the same state the exact opposite seems to be contradictory with principles there are ways of escaping this all the time only by complicating the picture but the simplest picture just three which explains everything is self-contradictory furthermore some people suppose that maybe these quarks could come apart that would mean the prediction of new states which consists of only one Quark say if there were such a state it would have to have a charge of one3 normal charges of our objects for example or 2/3 and uh we don't find experimentally any such particles now everybody's looking for them but it looks as if if they exist at all they have to be extremely heavy then the problem is very good if they're extremely heavy how compared to a proton say how is it when you put three of them together you get a light object that's not heavy like the proton there are technical ways of arranging it but they're always complicated every the situation is as it always is when we're near the answer it looks much simpler than it has any right to be and we have to understand that simplicity and why we think it must be more complicated our minds are complicated somehow just like the the orbits of the planets which were supposed to be circles which looked simple then they were experimentally they weren't circles so they made circles on circles on circles on circles got more and more complicated turns out it was really much simpler it was a force invers as the square of the distance which made ellipses and so but different way of formulating entirely which was beautiful so now we have our Wheels within Wheels we it looks simp in nature is no doubt simpler than all our thoughts about it now and the question is what way do we have to think about it so that we understand its Simplicity that's where we stand now on holiday in the penines Richard Fineman is paid a neighborly visit by yorkman Sir Fred Hy the astronomer cosmologist and science fiction writer at First Sight there seems little in common between the study of galaxies and nebuli billions of miles in diameter and millions of light years old and nuclear physics where particles exist for only a million millionth of a second but the formation of stars and galaxies is determined on a massive scale by the behavior of the very nuclear particles Fineman studies Hy and Fineman share an interest in the foundations of physics and exchanging ideas in the local pub is always as profitable as it is enjoyable you think you agreed that the quazar are in real trouble that the very big red shifts I think so I I've had this uneasy feeling now for about 5 years it looked crazy for a while but it's like up of evidence all the time this way each one makes a new problem every piece of evidence is the same problem in the same sense if there were any cause for a red shift as big as that other than recession we'd be all right that's right but in the present physical laws there doesn't seem to be any place for such a reged that's God that one fa at the same time the same kind of laws predict the kind of peculiar phenomenon of black black holes which we confusing yeah and it could be that either the gravity is wrong or one of the physical laws are wrong too some physical law that's involved because I'm not arguing at the moment the physical laws are wrong I mean you you would agree that one has to push it through along these lines yeah the best way to progress I always think maybe is to try to be as conservative that's what wheeler always said to try to be as conservative about the physical laws as possible and explain the phenomenon if you continuously fail you gradually realize you got to change something but when you start out by saying I got to change something there's so many ways of changing and you don't know how the it's most likely you don't have to change anything most of the time we succeed ultimately in explaining these damn things in terms of the known laws but it's the cases that fail are the interesting ones yeah yeah story is it the chat with the under the single lamp in the street yes that's uh where a passor by says what are you looking for he says I'm looking for my key and they search for it for few minutes and at the end of the minute these minutes the passer by said are you sure you lost it here and the man said not at all but unless I lost it here I'll never find it cuz the light's better here yeah yeah we work with the lights better yeah once I was thinking by analogy that there was a time in the 1900s when the thought that the properties of substances were not physics for example it would be numbers we would find a series of numbers the index of refra diretion that was physics but the number for the index that glass had an index of 1.54 3 and so on that salt had another index that those numbers the properties of substance would come from chemistry or something but that there it was that time all it was considered a different branch then when the quantum mechanical understanding of the atoms was evolved then we could calculate all these properties and we realized that all these numbers were really part of physics and so properties of substances became a branch of physics whereas previously it was a sort of chemical branch yeah then I wondered by analogy I was always worked by analogy what today do we not consider part of physics which may ultimately be part of physics I see and I realize immediately something we consider at the present moment most people consider that we study the laws of physics that is how things go given a certain condition how the things behave after that but how did they get into that condition is considered another problem in other words condition right B are given the conditions the circumstances and then it evolves from there according to physical laws we're studying the laws it's as though we were doing the chess game again and we're working on the rules but we're not worrying about how the pieces are supposed to be set up on the board in the first place that's not our business that's the business of History how the world evolved his astronomical history history of cosmology how the the universe exploded or the steady state or whatever it was it's not our business it's interesting that in many other Sciences there's a historical question like in geology the question how did the Earth evolve to the present condition in biology how do the various species evolve and to get to be the way they are but the one field which has not admitted any evolutionary question is physics here are the laws we say here are the laws today how did they get that way in time we don't even think of it that way we think of well that is that way from Forever it's always been like that the same laws and we try to explain the universe that way so it might turn out that they're not the same all the time and that there is a historical evolutionary question but how do you see it going it's it's hard to speculate is it a continuous change or is it something that depends on big you're the spec you and I think differently I think of the possibilities but I'm afraid to to put things in when I see op it's the dark I always figure the dark is it's too big for me to guess at a guess it's not much use in guessing things but but you're different that I would like to discuss with you sometime how do you do that because I'm really a little afraid to make specific guesses your backround I don't know way you you kind of grow up I don't know I'm afraid to make specific guesses because the moment I'm making that guess I can see seven other Alternatives and so since I see these other Alternatives I don't know which one to to p with I don't like to spend a lot of energy on my choice is is very simple I I I don't set any requirement that the answer be right it's just what I'm interested to follow that's the difference that's the difference that's the difference I'm trying to find I'm interested in I'm trying to find out not how nature could be but how nature is see how what's right don't find it you see I don't think you ever find it I see and your idea is to find out what nature could be different possibilities what what I think is interesting yeah even if it's wrong common ground is enthusiastically explored but is it only shared experience and knowledge that forms a bond between working scientists and separates them from us the interested Layman or even the artist I mean scientific fields are becoming so specialized and they're so varied are you really saying that you have more in common with say a paleontologist or someone in a branch of science very far removed from yours then you would with a playwright or a poet absolutely especially if he's a good paleontologist because he's a good paleont he's not just looking at old rocks he's looking at the history of the earth he's looking when he stands and he looks at his own fingers and he knows it's got five bumps and he thinks of how did it evolve with five bumps it's got the same as whales and so on and we keep talking about the importance of the fact that the thumb opposes then we can start discussing is it really so important the thumb or is it language that has been involved the system of symbolis then or the size of the brain this is a paleontologist I can talk about this stuff that's close to his field dolphins have bigger brains than we are they have a signaling system and they get interested in that and you start to discuss all that they know about dolphins and you complain that the way the United States Navy has been doing its experiments is not right and we ought to find out more about doph and you go on and on you talk those are things of the day they're just as good but you can go on and on with would I talk to a playwriter or something I I find because I don't look go to plays or something I don't find it easy to talk to them I don't get much out of it I was going to say this is because you can talk to scientists in other fields presumbly because you read the scientific magazines presly and hear the scientific gossip rather than no because we don't have to have magazines or gossip we think originally we think of a new idea we talk to each other and we try to look at something from a new point of view and we Delight each other in a new point of view and when you're talking to somebody else who's trying to think of something new different and he thinks he's thought about the whales or the Dolphins and he had some little thing he's thought of that's a little different than the thing that you've thought of and so when you're talking back and forth he's excited by your point of view about dreams and you're excited by his little observation that he has made about dreams if he has happened to have thought about that so the point is and our backgrounds Give us a slightly different point of view I mean a scientific back like I specialize in physics to say he specialized in paleontology so his his information on dreams might be more deeper more evolutionary for example he might well he can't we don't have way of telling I suppose about the evolution of dreams but he might know for example about other animals he might have thought about whether other animals dream and what the signs are and all other things that I hadn't thought of I can't make it up now because I'm not the paleontologist but I believe that yes I find always that a good man uh I take it all back I take it all back a good man I've talked to Good Men in other fields there's certain kinds of man in every field that I can talk to as well as I can talk to a good scientist I met a historian a writer of history from France once and I had a marvelous conversation with him MOA his name was Andre MOA and then I met an artist Robert Irwin who's a very important artist in Los Angeles in modern art and I could talk to him at the same depth of excitement so I take it all back if you give me the right man in any field I can talk to him I know what the condition is that he did whatever he did as far as he can go that he studied every aspect of it as far as he has stretched himself to the end he's not a diletant in any way and so he talk deep as far as he can go and he therefore he's up against Mysteries all the way around the edge and or and we can talk about mystery and a that's what we have in common you are talking a bit about these fallow periods when things are get very painful after discussing working problems it is natural that Fineman and Hil should Savor that most thrilling pleasure of all the moment of Revelation try all sorts of things and you about trying it have you had a moment when in a complicated problem where quite suddenly the thing comes into your head and you're almost sure you've got to be right oh yes that's this is a God yeah and then you tried to figure out what the conditions were were of that moment that you can do it again for example I worked out the theory of helium once and suddenly saw everything I was struggling struggling for two years and suddenly saw everything only after I can remember everything about by the way psychologically funny you can remember the color of the paper you were writing on has that true the room and everything else and uh then you wonder what's the psychological condition well I know at that particular time I simply looked up and I said wait a minute it can't be quite that difficult the must be very easy I'll stand back and I'll just treat it very lightly I'll just tap it and it'll see Bo Bo and there it was so how many times since then I'm walking on the beach and I said now look it can't be so complicated tap happen nothing Happ Happ nothing happens yeah so the lights are great but uh the secret way how what the condition it's that missing bit in the brain isn't it that suddenly lights up and yeah and I have no idea I've thought about it because some uh some may suggest that I think about that because if I could only figure out the formula for how what condition to be in to get good ideas i' be much more efficient and more happy know so I've often paid attention to what the condition is and have never found any correlations by the way it's the the light that's absolute easy I just got absolutely wild how it drives how long it last it's not very short it's a very big moment and then yeah yeah days and then there are lesser Pleasures as you see as you work on more things and more people notice it and you're on the high Fe for about three days that's right yes it's like a it's like a supernova I suppose no that's 54 days that's better yeah but uh I was going to say that it's the the hope of that kind of goal that keeps you going that can keep you going through these dos you see and that I think uh what I learned when I was a child from my father was that if you did work a little bit at these things there would be your time which you get this yeah and I had to learn that first I'd never been able to to do it yeah and then afterwards you wonder why that devil was I so stupid that I didn't see this that's not only true of you it's true of history of the history of the science you can always look at a particular moment in history and wonder why they hadn't thought of it 20 years earlier or 10 years ear depending on the case it's because we're du somehow it's most mysterious that it just means that however good you may get comparatively compared to apes and things apes and so we're still very bad at it absolutely yeah we're doing the best we can kind of very good yeah this depressing and sobering thought well it's it's been fun