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Richard Feynman on What It Means | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios

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    (instrumental synthesizer music)
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    (tape rewinding)
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    (electronic instrumental music)
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    - [Voiceover] My father, you see,
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    interested me in patterns
    at the very beginning
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    and then later in things,
    like we would turn over stones
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    and watch the ants carry the little
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    white babies down deeper into the hole.
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    We would look at worms.
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    We’d go for walks and we’d
    look at things all the time,
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    the stars, the way birds fly.
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    He was always telling
    me interesting things.
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    I mean this story’s a rumor,
    as far as I’m concerned,
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    but the story is that before I was born,
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    he told my mother that,
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    “If it’s a boy, he’ll be a scientist.”
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    My father used to sit me on his lap
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    and the one book we did use all
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    the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica
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    and he used to sit me on
    his lap when I was a kid
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    and read out of the damned thing.
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    There would be pictures of
    dinosaurs and then he would read,
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    you know the long words,
    the dinosaur so and so
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    attains a length of so and so many feet.
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    He would always stop and he would say,
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    “You know what that means?
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    "It means, if the dinosaur’s
    standing on our front yard
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    "and your bedroom window, you
    know, is on the second floor
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    "you’d see out the window his
    head standing looking at you."
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    He would translate everything
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    and I learned to translate everything,
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    so it’s the same disease.
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    When I read something,
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    I always translate it in the best I can
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    into what does it really mean.
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    I can remember my father
    talking, talking, talking.
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    When you go into the museum, for example,
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    there are great rocks
    which have long cuts,
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    grooves in them, from glacier
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    and I remember, the
    first time going there,
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    he stopped there and explained to me
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    about the ice moving and grinding.
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    I can hear the voice, practically
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    and then he would tell me,
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    “How do you think we know
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    "there were glaciers in the past?”
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    He’d point out, “That's
    what we're looking at,
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    "that these rocks are found in New York
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    "and so there must have
    been ice in New York.”
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    He understood.
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    A thing that was very
    important about my father
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    was not the facts, but the process.
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    How we find out.
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    What is the consequence
    of finding such a rock?
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    But that’s the kind of guy he was.
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    I don’t think he ever
    successfully went to college.
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    However, he did teach
    himself a great deal.
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    He read a lot.
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    He liked the rational mind
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    and liked those things which
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    could be understood by thinking.
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    So it’s not hard to understand
    I got interested in science.
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    I got a laboratory in my room.
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    We also played a trick on my mother there.
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    We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels
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    and another substance, an iron salt,
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    probably alum, in the soap
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    and when they come together,
    they make blue ink.
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    So we were supposed to
    fool my mother, you see.
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    She would wash her hands and
    then when she dried them,
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    her hands would turn blue,
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    but we didn’t think the
    towel would turn blue.
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    Anyway, she was horrified,
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    the screams of, “My good linen towels!”
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    But she was always cooperative.
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    She never was afraid of the experiments.
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    The bridge partners, would tell her,
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    “How can you let the
    child have a laboratory?
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    "He'll blow up the house,"
    and all this kind of talk
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    and she just said, “It’s worth it.”
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    I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”
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    I took later solid
    geometry and trigonometry.
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    In solid geometry was the first time
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    I had any mathematical difficulties.
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    It was my only experience with how
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    it must feel to the ordinary human being
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    a then I discovered what was wrong.
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    The diagrams that were being drawn
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    on the blackboard were three-dimensional
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    and I was thinking of
    them as plane diagrams
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    and I couldn’t understand
    what the hell was going on.
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    It was a mistake in the orientation.
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    When he would draw pictures
    and I would see a parallelogram
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    and he called it a square,
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    because it was tilted out
    of the plane, you know
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    and I, “Oh God, this thing
    doesn’t make any sense.
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    "What is he talking about?”
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    It was a terrifying experience.
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    Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling.
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    But it was just a dumb mistake.
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    But I suspect that this
    kind of a dumb mistake
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    is quite common to people
    learning mathematics.
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    Part of the missing
    understanding is to mistake
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    what it is you’re supposed to know.
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    It isn’t the question of
    learning anything precisely,
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    but of learning that there’s
    something exciting over there
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    and I think that the same
    thing happened with my father.
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    My father never really
    knew anything in detail,
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    but would tell me what’s
    interesting about the world
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    and where, if you look, you’ll
    find still more interests,
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    so that later I would say,
    “Well, this is going to be good.
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    "I know this has got
    something to do with this,
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    "which is hot stuff.”
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    This kind of feeling of what was important
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    and that is the key.
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    The key was somehow to
    know what was important
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    and what was not important,
    what was exciting,
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    because I can’t learn everything.
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    (electronic instrumental music)
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    The thing that I loved was,
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    everything that I read was serious,
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    wasn’t written for a child.
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    I didn’t like children’s things.
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    Because, for one thing I was very,
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    very, and still am, very sensitive
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    and very worried about was that
    the thing to be dead honest,
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    that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy.
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    Details purposely left out
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    or slightly erroneous explanations,
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    in order to get away with it.
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    This was intolerable.
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    I kind of try to imagine what would
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    have happened to me if
    I’d lived in today’s era.
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    I’m rather horrified.
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    I think there are too many books,
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    that the mind gets boggled.
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    If I got interested, I would
    have so many things to look at,
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    I would go crazy.
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    It’s too easy.
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    (tape reversing)
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    Subtitles by the Amara.org community
Title:
Richard Feynman on What It Means | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Duration:
05:32

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