Nobel Physicist on Faith and Certainty

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Richard Feynman was born May 11, 1918 in Queens New York, where he and his family lived in a modest middle-class neighborhood. By the age of fifteen, Feynman had already learned and mastered differential and integral calculus. He was accepted into MIT in 1936 and there he excelled in physics and other scientific subjects. He went on to Princeton as a graduate. When the Manhattan project began he was asked, at the age of 24, to join the Los Alamos theoretical division. But before going he married his high school sweetheart, Arlene Greenbaum, who was sick with tuberculosis. When Feyman joined the project, the head of the theoretical division, Hans Bethe (pronounced bay-tah) became somewhat of a mentor to Feyman, and the two developed a long lasting friendship. Feyman and Bethe were a good team; Feyman was fast, but made mistakes, and Bethe was slower because he double checked everything. One of Feyman's talents was his speed in solving equations in his head, and finding ways to take large and complex equations and split them into smaller and more manageable pieces. This was very useful with many of the massive formulas used in the project, but even the split up equations were time consuming. Another one of Feyman's tasks was to find the amount of it would take for the bomb to explode. Feyman was not just a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos, he was also the life of the party at many of the social events, where he joked and made many friends.

When his wife died (of tuberculosis) and the project ended in 1945, Feyman experienced a depression, but he quickly got his mind working on other things. He went to work on his thesis with Hans Bethe, to solve the mysteries of Quantum Electro Dynamics. To help solve the incredibly complex equations, which took weeks for a computer to solve, Feyman invented "Feyman Diagrams" for theoretical physics, for which he won a Nobel prize in 1965. In 1950, Feyman began teaching at the California Institute of Technology and in 1952 he remarried. He took up painting soon after, which never made a lot of money for him, but he didn't care because it was just a hobby. He stayed out the public eye for many years until in 1985 when he was asked to help find out why the challenger spaceship had exploded. He surprised NASA and the nation when he explained the it was the faulty O- rings on the ship that caused the problem. In 1988 he died from a long bout with cancer.

Channel: Education
Uploaded: January 13, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Author: AtheistMinistry

Length: 00:00:53
Rating: 4.85
Views: 8517

Tags: Richard Feyman Atheism Atheist

Video Comments:
MuslimApostate (September 5, 2008 at 5:09 am)
ricahrd is a pawn of the social darwinists and big business groups that support them. He's no different then dawkins in that he's all talk.
AtheistMinistry (September 5, 2008 at 12:34 pm)
Do you actually have any evidence for that strange assertion or is it just ad hominem? And what, exactly, do you understand by "social darwinist"?
SDCmorg (August 26, 2008 at 11:52 am)
I think that is true for many religions and beliefs indeed. I think religions and science are after the same things (explaining nature), but when religions were thought up we didn't have the objective investigative method of science nor the understanding we've learned since, so we attributed all the natural phenomena to 'god' (probably 'nature' in disguise).

The thing with a few monotheistic religions, tho, is this requirement for unreasoned 'blind faith.' That changes the equation a lot.
TheT4xid3rmist (August 28, 2008 at 6:28 am)
The Bible never says to follow blindly. It says to test and see whether these things are true or not. People who follow their religion blindly are tools. They should be convinced of their religion, not because of what some priest or rabbi told them, but because of their own personal research. If most people actually researched their religion, they would find their beliefs are completely off base and with no backing to it from, what supposedly shapes their beliefs, the Bible.
AirAddict101 (August 21, 2008 at 1:39 pm)
"I think it much more interesting not knowing"
Talk about ignorance .....science is all about knowledge mate and knowing the truth, not ignoring things....
AtheistMinistry (August 21, 2008 at 9:43 pm)
Truth is a theistic concept banished from science.
MuslimApostate (September 5, 2008 at 5:13 am)
Truth is a fairy tell made up by scientists to ensure the general public that science can prove all of lifes answers which it can't and never will cause science like all things man made has limits.
AtheistMinistry (September 5, 2008 at 12:25 pm)
Actually, there is no notion of "Truth" in science. That is the point made in this video.
SDCmorg (August 21, 2008 at 11:44 pm)
Feynman just meant that by admitting that you don't have absolute knowledge of something, it allows you to keep exploring. If you claim to have absolute knowledge of 'the truth' (as religious people like to do), then there is no longer any incentive to probe further and to learn more. He is not espousing ignorance. He is espousing intellectual honesty of being able to say 'I don't know' rather than to claim to have a knowledge that you can't possibly have (or have no convincing evidence of).
crazykb (August 25, 2008 at 11:46 pm)
". He is espousing intellectual honesty of being able to say 'I don't know'" Good. Science is all about the pursuit of knowledge. And to say "I don't know" is a prerequisite of that journey. As Carl Sagan would have said: " there is no such thing as a stupid question". To say " I don't know" is to be humble. Humility (as socrates would have said) is the conerstone of wisdom. And our modern bullshit world could use more of it...