Let's Watch Richard Feynman's "Character of Physical Law" Lectures Together

A problem in pop science is a simple lack of knowledge or even interest in the very basics of science as it is, the ground level facts of the universe. The old-school stuff. So, you see comments and posts on biotech (read: GMOs) that don’t seem to understand the basic genetic mechanisms of evolution, or on such pseudoscience favorites as the "quantum soul" that don’t know a thing about electrons. And there’s the favorite of science-y thought, the Singularity, in which our brains are set to migrate to machines in the (relative) very near future. Even that idea’s most vocal marketers don’t seem to know how brains work, or even where neuroscience is at this moment of gray matter unraveling. It’s actually not very far.

I get this because I think I started in a similar place with science writing, an obsession with the distant theoretical edge. That seems like an obvious place to start and finish, of course, because that’s where all of the excitement and news is supposed to be. If it’s unknown vs. known, the unknown is always going to win, right? Out there at the edge is the possibility of disruption and, thus, true excitement. But I’ve become very doubtful of that anymore. It started with a bit of unease, a differential equations lecture on resonant frequency, and then a gradual realization that there’s no scientific fact—not one—that is known well enough to demand boredom.

A thing about known and unknown is that unknown is easier. The unknown, the land of crazy upending theories and multi-billion dollar machines, demands less of us as pop science spectators. When something is at the fringe, I think we’re given something of a pass on understanding it, or understanding it well enough/properly. The farther away something is on the frontier, the less deeply we have to travel within it. The frontier is a safe place for not understanding. Richard Feynman said famously, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” If it’s a mystery to scientists, it takes a bit of load off of us.

This is all a long way of saying that pop science would be better if it spent more time on this side of the frontier. I think people that read science blogs do so not just for science news, but to learn about science in general. I also think it’s a lie to say that leading edge science is way more interesting than established science; it does, however, require a bit more effort being put toward its being made interesting. Not much though.

I was in Powell’s Books in Portland a couple of weeks ago. The store, which is kind of like everything available on Amazon (used and new) compiled in a couple of buildings, has a whole annex for science books across the street from the main building to I guess keep number nerds from intermingling with word nerds and having babies into both art and science. Anyhow, I was looking for a book to read, actually browsing. And it struck me that the ratio of pop science books about the Higgs boson to books on any other subject was about three-to-one. This is a very crude estimate probably influenced by which books the store had chosen to place cover-out, but I think the general observation that the ratio of books covering frontier physics to old-school physics is tilted dramatically in favor of the prior.

I suppose some of this has to do with the rise of pop science in general and if it were such a big thing 50 years ago the ratio might be a bit better. Dunno. This is all a long way of leading into this video below, one of a series of lectures that the physicist and great explainer Richard Feynman gave in 1964 at Cornell University as part of the school’s Messenger series. The prospect of Feynman explaining the most basic physical laws of the universe was enticing enough that the BBC put the series on TV and a fair number of fans have put them on the internet. The lectures are also available in book form as The Character of Physical Law, which is available at Powell’s.

Instead of ranting about the lack of good pop science writing about intro level science, I could have just pasted Feynman’s lead-in to his first lecture, on gravity. It’s pretty good. Feynman's lecture actually starts at about the six minute mark here.

I'll keep posting these every Friday or so, minus the possibly misplaced ranting.