Hello and HAPPY DAY! How does slowing down
sound to you today? Would you like to reduce
the noise for just a bit? Are you ready to
make a choice and decide to listen?
My name is Igor, SF Walker. I am here to remind
people to slow down. To reduce the noise.
To walk their lives into a natural flow.
Welcome back to the Book of the Week series.
Every week as I read another amazing title,
I share it with the world. Today we look at:
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
The parents’ motives are selfish, for nothing
can magnify parents in the eyes of their neighbors
as much as the child’s success. “When
a child does something good and unusual, it
is the parents chest that swells up and who
looks around and says to his neighbors (without
actually speaking, of course) ‘See what
I have wrought? Isn’t he/she wonderful?
What have you got that can equal what I can
show?’ And the neighbors help the ego of
the parent along by acclaiming the wonders
of the child and by admiring the parent for
his/her success.”
A life in the business world, “the commercial
world,” is arid and exhausting; turn rather
to the professions, the world of learning
and culture. Ultimately, for the sacrifices
of his/her parents a child owes no debt, or
rather the debt is paid to his own children
in turn.
Wise Melville Feynman, Richards father, placed
a high value on curiosity and a low value
on outward appearances. He wanted Richard
to mistrust jargon and uniforms; as a salesman,
he said, he saw the uniforms empty. The pope
himself was just a man in a uniform.
You see, there is a difference between a conscious
thing and an unconscious thing. What is that
difference? Well, I don’t have more precise
words in which to say this, but I would not
be worried if a computer is unemployed. If
a human being is unemployed, I would worry
about the sorrows which that human being experiences
in virtue of conceptualized self-awareness.
So, are dogs conscious? Well, yes. It is going
to be a question of degree. But I wonder whether
they have conceptualized awareness.
To nurse the egos and the prodigies, to run
the most eccentric, temperamental, insecure,
volatile assortment of thinkers and calculators
ever squeezed together in one place is a task
that not everyone can accomplish and not everyone
is capable of doing. This is the question
of resourcefulness one is capable of directing,
rather than the resources one has readily
available and at hand.
It was essential to Richard’s view of things
that it must be universal. It must describe
everything that happens in nature. You could
not imagine the sum-over-histories picture
being true for a part of nature and untrue
for another part. You could not imagine it
being true for electrons and untrue for gravity.
It was a unifying principle that is the nature.
Science is a way to teach how something gets
to be known, what is not known, to what extent
things are known (for nothing is known absolutely),
how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what
the rules of evidence are, how to think about
things so that judgments can be made, how
to distinguish truth from fraud, and from
show.
Why is Richard called by some a magician?
A genius? Because he looked on the whole universe
and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret
which could be read by applying pure thought
to certain evidence, certain mystic clues
which God had laid about the world to allow
a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to
this esoteric brotherhood. He did read the
riddle of the heavens. And he believed that
by the same powers of his introspective imagination
he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the
riddle of past and future events divinely
foreordained, the riddle of the elements and
their constitution.
He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as
a blemish upon our ability to know but as
the essence of knowing. The alternative to
uncertainty is authority, against which science
had fought for centuries. “Great value of
a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,”
he jotted on a sheet of notepaper one day.
“Teach how doubt is not to be feared but
welcomed.”
Einstein said, “Science without religion
is lame; religion without science is blind.”
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically
marvelous universe, this tremendous range
of time and space and different kinds of animals,
and all the different planets, and all these
atoms with all their motions, and so on, all
this complicated thing can merely be a stage
so that God can watch human beings struggle
for good and evil, which is the view that
religion has. The stage is too big for the
drama.
Richard believed that it was not certainty
but freedom from certainty that empowered
people to make judgments about right and wrong:
knowing that they could never be more than
provisionally right, but able to act nonetheless.
God forbid that we should give out a dream
of our own imagination for a pattern of the
world. — Francis Bacon
Please help out, its easy, simply like this
video so more people can enjoy it. Share it
too and spread the word. Subscribe to my channel
and stay up to date. Link to this book is
in the description below. Buy it. Read. Never
stop learning.
Thank you
Love&Respect
