The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

It is a fact that when we make decisions in our life, we don’t necessarily know that we are making them correctly; we only think that we are doing the best we can–and that is what we should do.

Applications aren’t the only thing in the world. It’s interesting in understanding what the world is made of. It’s the same interest, the curiosity of man that makes him build telescopes. What is the use of discovering the age of the universe? Or what are these quasars that are exploding at long distances? I mean what’s the use of all that astronomy? There isn’t any. Nonetheless, it’s interesting. So it’s the same kind of exploration of our world that I’m following and it’s curiosity that I’m satisfying. If human curiosity represents a need, the attempt to satisfy curiosity, then this is practical in the sense that it is that. That’s the way I would look at it at the present time. I would not put out any promise that it would be practical in some economic sense.

I’d be delighted to study it and find out all about it, because I can guarantee you it would be very interesting. I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

But the question of the meaning of the whole world, of life, and of human beings, and so on, has been answered very many times by very many people. Unfortunately all the answers are different; and the people with one answer look with horror at the actions and behavior of the people with another answer. Horror, because they see the terrible things that are done; the way man is being pushed into a blind alley by this rigid view of the meaning of the world. In fact, it is really perhaps by the fantastic size of the horror that it becomes clear how great are the potentialities of human beings, and it is possibly this which makes us hope that if we could move things in the right direction, things would be much better.

You see, what happened to me, what happened to the rest of us is we started for a good reason but then we’re working very hard to do something, and to accomplish it, it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop to think, you know, you just stop. After you thought at the beginning, you just stop.

I might think about it a little bit and if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

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.

For the first time in my life I felt a smidgen of what Richard Feynman called “the kick in the discovery,” the sudden feeling (probably akin to an epiphany, albeit in this case a vicarious one) that I had grasped a wonderful new idea, that there was something new in the world; that I was present at a momentous scientific event, no less dramatic or exciting than Newton’s feeling when he realized that the mysterious force that caused that apocryphal apple to land on his head was the same force that caused the moon to orbit the earth; or Feynman’s when he achieved that first grudging step toward understanding the nature of the interaction between light and matter, which led eventually to his Nobel Prize.