

Richard Feynman: What Is Science? - wallflower
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html

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Xlythe
The lines between a name and the meaning behind that name are blurred too
often. Often in school, when studying or help was needed, I'd hear students
proudly proclaiming that "that's the x principle" and then go on and write
down a condensed formula for it. They wouldn't know how the formula was
derived, but knew that there was a very specific formula for the "x principle"
and that that was it.

I have trouble, because I'm not arguing that names are unimportant. They are
necessary, they condense complicated subjects into simple words and give a
common ground for discussion. But I once had a probabilities teacher who wrote
down seven names for what were essentially 2 formulas (Just written in
different ways). There was a quick 5 minute lecture on how to get a specific
formula (usually, though sometimes none was given), but the the emphasis was
on what the formula was called and when exactly to use it. Maybe I missed the
point of the course, it was just a first year probabilities course, and the
goal was to ingrain those 7 terms into our brains for the more complicated
subjects. But there was so much more behind those equations and how they were
derived. By the end of the class, I felt cheated. It was a foreign language
class, not a math class.

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udfalkso
tl;dr

"What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this
planet an evolution of life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which
are intelligent. I don't mean just human beings, but animals which play and
which can learn something from experience--like cats. But at this stage each
animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop,
until some animal [primates?] could learn from experience more rapidly and
could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the
other, or he saw what the other one did. So there came a possibility that all
might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and
maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.

The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned
from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either
because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventors?

So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species [humans?] the rate at
which learning was increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely
new thing happened: things could be learned by one individual animal, passed
on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus
became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.

This has been called time-binding. I don't know who first called it this. At
any rate, we have here [in this hall] some samples of those animals, sitting
here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from
the other.

This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated
knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world--but
it had a disease in it: it was possible to pass on ideas which were not
profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily
profitable.

So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly,
were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great
accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.

Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what
is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab
initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the
experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is
what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking
by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race['s]
experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition."

. . .

"I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance
of experts."

