Nobelist Wolfgang Pauli (1945) is said to have remarked, “When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?” At any rate, he thought about it a great deal during his life.
Tag: Richard Feynman
At Mind Matters News: Has the human sense of smell declined in recent millennia?
To be sure that our sense of smell has declined, we would first need to see whether concerted efforts to improve it were successful. Richard Feynman tried it.
Some thoughts from Richard Feynman on science and religion
Feynman: These scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged simply as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems to be inadequate.
Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman on ancient sources who thought Earth is a sphere, orbiting the sun
So, unlike modern pundits, Newton and Feynman knew a lot about the actual carefully thought-out views of ancient astronomers. But what, after all, did they really know? None of those people had smartphones.
Massimo Pigliucci: Feynman was wrong about truth and beauty in science
He starts out well but notice how Darwinism, flung into the works like an old shoe, undermines the topic completely. If beauty is really “in the eye of the beholder” full stop, there is really no such thing as beauty. If the “capacity for aesthetic appreciation” evolved “possibly involving natural selection,” then it is unrelated to the object and best understood in terms of how many children artists have.
Feynman, says Massimo Pigliucci, is wrong about beauty and truth in science
Massimo Pigliucci: But as the German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out (also in Aeon), there is absolutely no reason to think that simplicity and beauty are reliable guides to physical reality. She is right for a number of reasons.
New Scientist on the glitch at the edge of the universe
The constant 1/137 may be variable after all. This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all. Physicist Richard Feynman, who knew a thing or two about it, called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no Read More…