Richard Feynman on doubt, uncertainty and religion

[pokerfan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeCHiUe1et0

[eleny]

1. I love listening to him

Remember the documentary about his trying to visit Tuva? There was this great scene of him playing bongo drums and singing about orange juice. :D

[pokerfan]

2. I think I saw it on Nova

Part One of five: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5Pgmx2WCsY

[grantcart]

3. I think the funniest thing I heard him talk about was when he was working

on the Manhattan Project and while waiting to pass through the security gate he noticed that a bunch of local workers went down a few feet and went through a hole in the fence (evidently the section getting passes for plumbers and electricians was a few weeks behind) so he went through the gate and then came back out through the hole in the fence. He did this 4-5 times in rapid succession and the security people never raised any questions.

[parasim]

5. I just watched that the other night on Google video.

That guy was great. I loved the orange juice song.

[cloudbase]

4. Quite a guy.

The closest thing to a deity at a small institute of higher learning in Pasadena, CA.

[skepticscott]

6. He had one of my favorite quotes of all time

I read a story about he became involved in science textbook evaluation for the California public schools. During the process, he discovered that many of the people reviewing science textbooks had little or no training or experience in science. When he asked why this was, he was told that it was thought to be advantageous to have a wide range of viewpoints on the evaluation team. To which his (classic Feynman) response was that you can't get closer to the truth by averaging the opinions of people who don't know what they're talking about in the first place.

[pokerfan]

8. Judging Books By Their Covers

It's a chapter from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" which is worth adding to anyone's library. The chapter title came from the realization that some of the commission members were caught rating books that they hadn't read, literally rating the book by their covers:

We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.

I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."

Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"

"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."

The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late."

It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.

You can read the entire chapter here: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm">Judging Books By Their Covers

[FiveGoodMen]

9. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is first-rate reading for sure.

[trotsky]

7. If I could go through history and pick 10 human beings who best represented our species,

he'd be on that list for sure.

[applegrove]

10. I love that guy and his story of his first marriage. He was so deep for such a young guy.