You must have seen many excerpts from the following video featuring Richard Feynman:
But maybe you have never watched the whole 66-minute-long video. Here it's waiting for you.
He covers lots of things – need for imagination in physics; heat is wiggling; surface tension is the attempts of molecules to get in...
In a similar way, he explains using the atomic language why gases cool down when they expand. And thousands of other fun things...
Various atoms like each other to various degrees. Wood and oxygen. They get caught and create lots of jiggling which is spread elsewhere and what you get a catastrophe. The catastrophe is called fire. ;-)
Where the did carbon get there from? It came from the air. The wood is from the air: it grew by absorbing carbon dioxide. Just a little bit from the ground. These anthromorphic stories about the life of the atoms sound funny.
He also traces the energy – it ultimate comes from the Sun. Where did the Sun find the jiggling (energy)? He has to stop somewhere...
How do rubber bands work? There are chains of molecules but other molecules are jiggling and hitting the chains, trying to shorten them. It only works when the rubber is warm – heat is necessary. Rubber bands' temperature goes up when you stretch them and vice versa. The jiggling is inside everything.
Around 14:40, the scene about "what the magnets feel" starts. You must have already seen this exchange. An irritated Feynman repeats the claim of the author of the question that it's an excellent question but makes it very clear that the question was utterly idiotic, too. When we ask "why", we must have some facts that we're allowed to use as more fundamental facts, parts of the answer. Magnetism is more fundamental than the macroscopic events we know from the everyday life.
At 22:07, we switch to a dentist and a water dam. Turning wheels in the dam make all the wheels in the city turn. It's all about iron and copper, a natural thing. Again, he points out that there are long-range forces that are more fundamental than the "direct touch" forces we know. Gravity is much weaker; but it may matter when the electric forces etc. get neutralized.
31:40, fraternity at MIT gives questions like: Why you get left-right but not upside-down reflected in the mirror? ;-) A fellow Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (humanities) was impressed by this question and didn't want to believe that I could solve such a problem. ;-) The actual mirror only reflects the front-rear direction. We just psychologically imagine that the image is rotated around the horizontal axis – this rotation is a symmetry unbroken by the gravitational field – which makes the image left-right reflected.
34:50, what keeps the train on the tracks? The planes of contact are tilted, regulating the direction back if the train is destabilized much like the differential – something that the trains don't need.
37:20, seeing things. A not too pretty woman sitting in the swimming pool allows one to watch the waves instead. Sensitive spots in the eye. Mess of waves in the space (electromagnetic fields with all the frequency modes) and complicated mechanisms in the eyes and radios. As a kid, I was also stunned when I realized the idea that all the information about all the radio and TV stations is flying around me in the room at the same moment.
At 43:20, he talks about scales. Big numbers. You scale yourself to imagine them. Why Earth is round. Nuclear fuel. Neutron star matter – balancing gravity and pressure. Pulsars – they're the same thing. Immense densities, confirmation of predictions. Black holes.
54:30, ordinary people like Feynman can master these things. There are no miracle people. With some investment of time, he becomes a scientist. A bit too idealistic. 55:20, his research is a nutty mixture of equations, ideas, and vague pictures of equations. In every man's head, the imagery is probably very different from others. Translation engines work hard. He thinks so because different people solve problems differently. Feynman couldn't do counting multitasking; someone else uses an optical system for counting.
1:00:55, I have already linked to this many times. We're used to understand very different phenomena than the fundamental ones. Quantum mechanics is wonderfully different than the macroscopic world. People who try to reduce QM to some mundane or classical mechanism will be defeated.
Incidentally, when I talk about quantum mechanics, let me modestly mention that the first tag in the history has earned a gold badge on the Physics Stack Exchange. Which tag was that? Yup, it was quantum mechanics. Congratulations to Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Pauli, and a few others, too! ;-)
But maybe you have never watched the whole 66-minute-long video. Here it's waiting for you.
He covers lots of things – need for imagination in physics; heat is wiggling; surface tension is the attempts of molecules to get in...
In a similar way, he explains using the atomic language why gases cool down when they expand. And thousands of other fun things...
Various atoms like each other to various degrees. Wood and oxygen. They get caught and create lots of jiggling which is spread elsewhere and what you get a catastrophe. The catastrophe is called fire. ;-)
Where the did carbon get there from? It came from the air. The wood is from the air: it grew by absorbing carbon dioxide. Just a little bit from the ground. These anthromorphic stories about the life of the atoms sound funny.
He also traces the energy – it ultimate comes from the Sun. Where did the Sun find the jiggling (energy)? He has to stop somewhere...
How do rubber bands work? There are chains of molecules but other molecules are jiggling and hitting the chains, trying to shorten them. It only works when the rubber is warm – heat is necessary. Rubber bands' temperature goes up when you stretch them and vice versa. The jiggling is inside everything.
Around 14:40, the scene about "what the magnets feel" starts. You must have already seen this exchange. An irritated Feynman repeats the claim of the author of the question that it's an excellent question but makes it very clear that the question was utterly idiotic, too. When we ask "why", we must have some facts that we're allowed to use as more fundamental facts, parts of the answer. Magnetism is more fundamental than the macroscopic events we know from the everyday life.
At 22:07, we switch to a dentist and a water dam. Turning wheels in the dam make all the wheels in the city turn. It's all about iron and copper, a natural thing. Again, he points out that there are long-range forces that are more fundamental than the "direct touch" forces we know. Gravity is much weaker; but it may matter when the electric forces etc. get neutralized.
31:40, fraternity at MIT gives questions like: Why you get left-right but not upside-down reflected in the mirror? ;-) A fellow Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (humanities) was impressed by this question and didn't want to believe that I could solve such a problem. ;-) The actual mirror only reflects the front-rear direction. We just psychologically imagine that the image is rotated around the horizontal axis – this rotation is a symmetry unbroken by the gravitational field – which makes the image left-right reflected.
34:50, what keeps the train on the tracks? The planes of contact are tilted, regulating the direction back if the train is destabilized much like the differential – something that the trains don't need.
37:20, seeing things. A not too pretty woman sitting in the swimming pool allows one to watch the waves instead. Sensitive spots in the eye. Mess of waves in the space (electromagnetic fields with all the frequency modes) and complicated mechanisms in the eyes and radios. As a kid, I was also stunned when I realized the idea that all the information about all the radio and TV stations is flying around me in the room at the same moment.
At 43:20, he talks about scales. Big numbers. You scale yourself to imagine them. Why Earth is round. Nuclear fuel. Neutron star matter – balancing gravity and pressure. Pulsars – they're the same thing. Immense densities, confirmation of predictions. Black holes.
54:30, ordinary people like Feynman can master these things. There are no miracle people. With some investment of time, he becomes a scientist. A bit too idealistic. 55:20, his research is a nutty mixture of equations, ideas, and vague pictures of equations. In every man's head, the imagery is probably very different from others. Translation engines work hard. He thinks so because different people solve problems differently. Feynman couldn't do counting multitasking; someone else uses an optical system for counting.
1:00:55, I have already linked to this many times. We're used to understand very different phenomena than the fundamental ones. Quantum mechanics is wonderfully different than the macroscopic world. People who try to reduce QM to some mundane or classical mechanism will be defeated.
Incidentally, when I talk about quantum mechanics, let me modestly mention that the first tag in the history has earned a gold badge on the Physics Stack Exchange. Which tag was that? Yup, it was quantum mechanics. Congratulations to Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Pauli, and a few others, too! ;-)
Richard Feynman: Fun To Imagine
Reviewed by DAL
on
June 01, 2013
Rating:
Reviewed by DAL
on
June 01, 2013
Rating:
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