Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [224]
He 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. Only by understanding uncertainty could people learn how to evaluate the many kinds of false knowledge that bombard them: claims of mind reading and spoon bending, belief in flying saucers bearing alien visitors. Science can never disprove such claims, any more than it can disprove God. It can only devise experiments and explore alternative explanations until it gains a commonsense sureness. “I have argued flying saucers with lots of people,” Feynman once said. “I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that’s true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not.”
How could one evaluate miracle cures or astrological forecasts or telekinetic victories at the roulette wheel? By subjecting them to the scientific method. Look for people who recovered from leukemia without having prayed. Place sheets of glass between the psychic and the roulette table. “If it’s not a miracle,” he said, “the scientific method will destroy it.” It was essential to understand coincidence and probability. It was noteworthy that flying-saucer lore involved a considerably greater variety of saucer than of creature: “orange balls of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, thin, round flat things out of which objects come with funny shapes that are something like a human being.” It was fantastically improbable, he noted, that alien visitors should come in near-human form and just at the moment in history when people discovered the possibility of space travel.
He subjected other forms of science and near-science to the same scrutiny: tests by psychologists, statistical sampling of public opinion. He had developed pointed ways of illustrating the slippage that occurred when experimenters allowed themselves to be less than rigorously skeptical or failed to appreciate the power of coincidence. He described a common experience: an experimenter notices a peculiar result after many trials—rats in a maze, for example, turn alternately right, left, right, and left. The experimenter calculates the odds against something so extraordinary and decides it cannot have been an accident. Feynman would say: “I had the most remarkable experience… . While coming in here I saw license plate ANZ 912. Calculate for me, please, the odds that of all the license plates …” And he would tell a story from his days in the fraternity at MIT, with a surprise ending.
I was upstairs typewriting a theme on something about philosophy. And I was completely engrossed, not thinking of anything but the theme, when all of a sudden in a most mysterious fashion there swept through my mind the idea: my grandmother has died. Now of course I exaggerate slightly, as you should in all such stories. I just sort of half got the idea for a minute… . Immediately after that the telephone rang downstairs. I remember this distinctly for the reason you will now hear… . It was for somebody else. My grandmother was perfectly healthy and there’s nothing to it. Now what we have to do is to accumulate a large number of these to fight the few cases when it could happen.
Feynman, who had once astonished the Princeton admissions committee with his low scores in every subject but physics and mathematics, did believe in the primacy of science among all the spheres of knowledge. He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth. The very idea of different, equally valid versions of truth struck him as a modern form of cant, another misunderstanding of uncertainty.
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