Richard Feynman (1918 -1988)
5 March 2024 — Richard Feynman is one of the most eccentric geniuses of all time. His love for teaching, trying to explain things in an extremely uncomplicated way for general people to understand, bongo-playing, safe cracking, etc. were some of the unique traits that made him stand out from the rest of the scientific community.
His out-of-the-box personality and expressive nature gained him some reputation at all the universities where he taught. And being a 1965 Nobel laureate and his demonstration of the failure of O-rings in the 1986 Challenger Shuttle disaster investigation caught him the attention of people from all around the world.
I have all of his books and this week I started re-reading them. Here is one of my favorite passages:
“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.
God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore.
But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not yet understand.
Therefore I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out”.