[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Richard Feynman – “The Nature’s imagination far surpasses our own.”
Rick Rosner: Yeah, scientists especially scientists who become quotable by being recognized as great scientists have lots of aphorisms. Sometimes you can appreciate them as themselves. Einstein talked about ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’, ‘If this Theory isn’t true then I feel sorry for God’ or something like that, you know talking about God and beauty and all that stuff. And you can appreciate the aphorism says “Oh that’s a very smart guy saying a pithy thing about science or the universe,” but you can go beyond that and see if the aphorism holds up.
And in the case of Feynman it’s interesting and this quote came up with the sum over histories that pretty much says that, let’s say a photon traveling from A to B through a possibly semi-obstructed field takes every allowable path. Some paths cancel each other out but the shortest paths tend to reinforce each other. Once the path has become a little longer then you have paths that are like a half step out of phase which cancel the transmission of energy from those paths, those half step out paths cancel paths that are on step. Anyways, the paths get longer and twistier and they tend to cancel each other out and the paths that don’t get canceled out or tend to be the ones closest to the path of least time to go from A to B. But anyway, it’s a sum over paths.
The photon takes every possible path which is consistent with quantum mechanics which says that if you can’t figure out which path of photon has taken via the use of detectors, then it takes every possible path. And to get back to the saying, the aphorism, he says that nature is much more creative than we are. But a way of looking at that is that nature tries every possible thing because nature has not unlimited resources but practically unlimited. Evolution tries every mutation that can be reached from an existent current genome. It’s not just mutations, the environment can change. Given the breadth of evolution, four billion years times like a sextillion creatures coming into existence every year say, evolution has a lot of resources to allow accidents to happen to which might shape future iterations of these creatures, with some of them being more successful which is the essence of evolution.
So when Feynman says nature’s more creative than we are, nature has a huge amount of resources to experiment with even though there’s no intention there. It’s all mostly random. That’s just the evolution of organisms on Earth but you have the rest of the universe and we haven’t seen evidence of organisms but we can see planets around a zillion other stars, we can see large-scale structures in the universe, we can see a lot of stuff out there and it’s a big ass universe. So there’s room for all sorts of stuff to happen and we know that a principle of existence is persistence, that things that don’t fall apart get to go on existing for a while and nature with its unlimited resources can stumble into ordered things and ordered systems that persist across time. So there you go, I mean he’s right, nature is cleverer but the cleverness consists of just letting a bunch of semi-random shit happen a gazillion times in a big ass universe and on a big diverse planet.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 