Feynman: “The Rules of Chess”

[pokerfan]

Richard Feynman once noted that discovering the laws of physics is like trying to learn the laws of chess merely by observing chess games. You notice that bishops stay on the same color squares; you write this down as a law of chess. Later, you come up with a better law – bishops move diagonally. And, since diagonal squares are always colored the same, this explains why bishops always stay on the same color. This law is an improvement – it is simpler, and yet explains more.

http://youtu.be/o1dgrvlWML4

[progressoid]

1. Damn I miss him.

TUVA OR BUST!

[pokerfan]

2. I assume you've read Surely You're Joking?

For those who haven't, here's that chronicles his adventures when he volunteered to evaluate textbooks for the California State Curriculum Commission.

Finally I come to a book that says, "Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars." I turn the page, and it says, "Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees . . ." -- so far, so good. It continues: "Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of . . . (some big number)." There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It's vaguely right -- but already, trouble! That's the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don't quite understand what they're talking about, I cannot understand. I don't know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!

Anyway, I'm happy with this book, because it's the first example of applying arithmetic to science. I'm a bit unhappy when I read about the stars' temperatures, but I'm not very unhappy because it's more or less right -- it's just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It says, "John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?" -- and I would explode in horror.

My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That's only an example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There's no purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it was was a game to get you to add, and they didn't understand what they were talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

[progressoid]

3. Absolutely.

One of my favorites. Also read "What Do You Care What Other People Think"

And my brother loaned me his copy of "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman" But I haven't read it yet. Maybe when it snows, I'll find the time.

[pokerfan]

4. I'm a bit of a Feynman nut

I've read his lectures on physics and gravitation and his "lost lecture" on planetary motion where he uses a unique geometrical proof to show why planets must move in ellipses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman%27s_Lost_Lecture:_The_Motion_of_Planets_Around_the_Sun

Awesome stuff!

[amyrose2712]

7. There is always such a look of joy in his eyes. nt

[amyrose2712]

5. I just recently purchased that book, haven't read it yet. But it has

just moved up on the list. I absolutely love listening to him.

[amyrose2712]

6. Mine keeps stopping..:(

[pokerfan]

8. Flash problem?

Here's a transcript and no, I did not type all that out. :)

One way, that’s kind of a fun analogy in trying to get some idea of what we’re doing in trying to understand nature, is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, let’s say, and you don’t know the rules of the game, but you’re allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, in a little corner, perhaps, and from these observations you try to figure out what the rules of the game are, what the rules of the pieces moving are. You might discover after a bit, for example, that when there’s only one bishop around on the board that the bishop maintains its color. Later on you might discover the law for the bishop as it moves on the diagonal which would explain the law that you understood before-that it maintained its color and that would be analogous to discovering one law and then later finding a deeper understanding of it. Then things can happen, everything’s going good, you’ve got all the laws, it looks very good, and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner, so you begin to investigate that-it’s castling, something you didn’t expect. We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting, the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected. Also, we could have revolutions in physics: after you’ve noticed that the bishops maintain their color and they go along the diagonal and so on for such a long time and everybody knows that that’s true, then you suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesn’t maintain its color, it changes its color. Only later do you discover a new possibility, that a bishop is captured and that a pawn went all the way down to the queen’s end to produce a new bishop - that can happen but you didn’t know it, and so it’s very analogous to the way our laws are: They sometimes look positive, they keep on working and all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that they’re wrong and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of color happened and so forth, and gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply. Unlike the chess game, though, in the rules become more complicated as you go along, in physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears on the whole to be more complicated because we learn about a greater experience-that is, we learn about more particles and new things-and so the laws look complicated again. But if you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful-that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience-every once in a while we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

[amyrose2712]

9. Thanks, I found a different version and it played just fine...

I am actually watching the full "No Ordinary Genius" now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw