Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS | Hacker News Reader

Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS

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190 pointsskotzko20 comments

If you are interested in physics and have not seen Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled The Character of Physical Law, you really owe it to yourself to watch them in their entirety [1]. The site's interface has some neat features, such as links into the transcript and notes related to the topic being discussed.

Dr. Feynman delivered these lectures as part of the "Messenger Lectures" [2] series at Cornell University in 1964:

Lecture 1: Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law

Lecture 2: The Relation of Mathematics and Physics

Lecture 3: The Great Conservation Principles

Lecture 4: Symmetry in Physical Law

Lecture 5: The Distinction of Past and Future

Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainty - The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature

Lecture 7: Seeking New Laws

[1] Requires SilverLight: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_Lectures

Fortunately they're also on youtube, if you - like me - either don't like silverlight or you can't install it on your computer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-JKAHaml7A

http://xkcd.com/182/ (Maybe someday science will get over its giant collective crush on Richard Feynman. But I doubt it!)

Stephen Wolfram on Richard Feynman : http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/feynman/

A famous letter Feynman sent to Wolfram : http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...

His answer on why he does not believe in Computer Science is pretty convincing. What I would love to have happened is a professor telling me that what I am going to be learning is not exactly science. Nobody did, so I spent a couple of years trying to scientify things.

I've heard others give the same argument, but I don't find it very compelling. There's no rule that says that science cannot be applied to purely human endeavors. We would not say that sociology is not a science, even though it is a study of a purely human concept. Science is simply a method of increasing your knowledge of a system. It doesn't matter if that system is the bare physical universe, the chemical interactions within a cell, or the flow of data and logic in a computer program.

One unambiguous application of the scientific method to computing is in debugging. Your program behaves unexpectedly – aha! a new phenomenon. The lateral thinking hardware in your brain engages as you tinker around, reproducing the bug and noticing the conditions in which it happens. You gather all of this together with your existing knowledge of the system, and come up with an explanation for the bug – a hypothesis! Then you try to falsify your hypothesis. You might try to falsify it by watching a value in the debugger, for example. Or you might modify your program and see if the bug persists or changes its behavior. You aren't usually recording all of this on paper, because in this case you don't care much about presenting your findings to others. Others will be satisfied if the bug is gone. And of course, you probably aren't thinking of the words "hypothesis" and "experiment". But that's what you did, and that's why you figured out the bug.

(On the other hand, some programmers try to debug their programs by poking and picking randomly at their code until they get it working. I would urge them to try adopting a scientific approach. It's not just a way to satisfy a teacher in a chemistry lab, as it turns out.)

Actually, people still say that sociology, and other social "sciences" are not science. You're assuming that the scientific method is science, but its more than that. Many modern fields of endeavor call themselves sciences mostly because of the success of science. They only superficially emulate science. This includes Computer Science, which is really mathematics and engineering.

Feynman himself speaks about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY

Feynman is talking there about things which call themselves science but do not actually correctly follow the scientific method. The distinction between "the scientific method" and "science" is meaningless, and the claim that CS does not qualify as a science because it only deals with something manmade is little more than elitism.

Computer Science as a field has evolved since then, and I doubt he would insist on the same view today. It is very common for Computer Scientists to work in close collaborations with e.g. biologists, physicists, etc. to study natural phenomena. Some branches of Computer Science, I'd agree, are more artificial (Compilers, Programming Languages, Networking, etc... ) and less directly about nature. These branches were mostly synonymous with Computer Science in those times, and I believe these are what Feynman was also thinking about.

In the situation you are describing, computers are used as tools in the sciences of biology and physics. Just because something is used to aid another science does not make itself a science.

That's false. For example, I've done some work on computational models of the visual cortex. Researchers in this area have in the past made testable predictions about the structure of the visual cortex regarding for example, distributions of synapses, types of neurons and their function, etc. All this done based on computational arguments about time/space complexity, etc. The brain is basically a computing device, it makes perfect sense that it should be analyzed as such.

That's funny because one of the first things my first CS professor said (paraphrased): computer science is very poorly named--it isn't a science and it isn't about computers.

I was not that lucky. But I later watched a couple of videos from SICP and it made sense. :)

Feynman's view on CS is similar by Hal Abelson's take on the term (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLUPjefuWA). Abelson's point about CS being more like magic has always stuck with me.

I really loved the portrayal of programmers as sorcerers and programs as spells in SICP. It's a very apt metaphor.

I still enjoy reading Danny Hillis's story of Feynman's days working at Thinking Machines, whenever I happen to run across it.

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

Don't forget The Feynman Series http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRmbwczTC6E

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

I'm so terribly bored by the same Feynman lectures reposted again and again to either YC, Facebook, or Reddit. Do a search and they come up again and again.

I wish there were more lectures by others spread around. Say John Bardeen, for example.

Yeah! Feynman should write some new stuff already!

no no no, just recognize that all that is awesome with physics doesn't begin and end with Feynman! Share the love!

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