Richard P. Feynman an astounding theoretical physicist and professor
∆ Quantum mechanics & particle physics
∆ Quantum electrodynamics (QED) for which he shared a Nobel Prize
∆ Superfluidity of liquid helium
The diagram above is of a vector boson fusion producing a Higgs boson. Feynman developed this method of representing particle interactions which have been important to the understanding of work in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.
The following is a wonderful video of Feynman talking about light
commovente: by Richard Feynman (1918-1988). Known for his interesting and amusing lectures, Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was also an avid artist. Working under the pseudonym Ofey he released over 100 drawings, all of which you can view here
Yo-Yo Ma performs Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s ode to the wonder of life, animated by artist Kelli Anderson – the culmination of the nine-part animated Universe in Verseseries, celebrating science and the wonder of reality through poetic beauty.
Earlier this year, a study made headlines worldwide by bluntly demonstrating the human capacity to be misled by “pseudo-profound bullshit” from the likes of Deepak Chopra, infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.
This is all well and good, but how are we supposed to know that we are being misled when we read a quote about quantum theory from someone like Chopra, if we don’t know the first thing about quantum mechanics?
In a lecture given by Richard Feynman in 1966, the influential theoretical physicist told a story about the difference between knowing the name for something and truly understanding it:
“This boy said to me, ‘See that bird standing on the stump there? What’s the name of it?’ I said, ‘I haven’t got the slightest idea.’ He said, ‘It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you much about science.’
I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn’t tell me anything about the bird. He taught me ‘See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird — you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,’ and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.
The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody’s name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say, 'the Fitz-Cronin effect,’ and I ask, 'What is the effect?’ and I can’t remember the name.
There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog — a windable toy dog — and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says, 'What makes it move?’ Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, 'What makes it move?’ Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, 'What makes it move?’ and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about — physics, biology, chemistry — but that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book: The answer I was trying to learn is that 'energy makes it move.’
Now, energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I meant is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea — it is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that 'God makes it move,’ or, 'Spirit makes it move,’ or, 'Movability makes it move.’ (In fact, one could equally well say, 'Energy makes it stop.’)
Look at it this way: That’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference. It’s the same with this inertia proposition.
Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.
What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, 'I don’t think energy makes it move.’ Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, 'Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.’ You cannot. So you learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson, is that not possibly destructive?
I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others: 'gravity makes it fall;’ 'the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction.’ Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it’s not science.”
Feynman’s parable about the meaning of science is a valuable way of testing ourselves on whether we have really learned something, or whether we just think we have learned something, but it is equally useful for testing the claims of others. If someone cannot explain something in plain English, then we should question whether they really do themselves understand what they profess. If the person in question is communicating ostensibly to a non-specialist audience using specialist terms out of context, the first question on our lips should be: “Why?” In the words of Feyman, “It is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudoscience.”
For anyone that’s been following us for some time, I’m sure have come to know the team’s fascination with storytelling in games; and our goals to broaden the emotional spectrum within them. Normally when one thinks about games and all the emotions ever formed from playing them; It gets hard counting pass five, (empowerment, rage, love, laughter, fear). If we’re talking about a mainstream game, then we barely touch the ones I listed.
This post I wanna go a bit in-depth, Breaking down a bit of narrative formation and technique. Like molecular gastronomy, we must make practical use of emotions and manipulation
THE BRAIN
Before talking about game design, we have to talk about the human mind. This will included a lot of neurology and philosophy, but we’ll eventually come back to video games. Just a quick look at how the mind works to give you a basic understanding of how immersion in games is created.
It’s very easy to think that what makes up yourself is a fixed entity that is not possible to change. When one consider the extensions of his or herself, ( arms, legs etc) you have a very firm picture of what is ‘you’ and that it is something set in stone. The reality is quite the opposite; what you consider as yourself malleable; There a few examples of this that shows this bit a more in detail. They start of by setting up a rubber hand on a table, and then ask the subject to put his real hand next to it. A screen is then put up in-between to block the subjects view from the real hand, making him only see the rubber hand. The rubber hand and the real one is now continuously stroked in the same place and manner. After a while the subject will feel as if the rubber hand is his own. This impression can be tested by taking a hammer and quickly hitting the rubber hand with it. The subject will then pull back their real hand, as if it were the target. This unconscious reflex confirms that the subject really believes the hand to be his own. The rubber hand changes the brains body perception, to the extent that even the unconscious action of pulling away from danger is based upon this new sense of self. This is called a feedback loop, by creating the feeling stroke and seeing where the stroke is being made.
Its amazingly strange and bemusing that see this in our everyday experiences;We’re in this changeable self. We tend to believe that we perceive reality as is. But really, what we perceive through our senses. A vast collection of quantum waves gathering and process, so forth and so on.
“How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.” -
Vilayanur s. Ramachandran
BACK TO VIDEO GAMES
So, you ask….. What the hell does this have to do with video games? The answer is simple, video games provide the same kind of feedback-loop. It does this in the same sort of mixture between the rubber hand trick. Now, it is other forms of media that do this in part too, and its mostly referred as presence. But what makes our young and beautiful media so great, is films and literature can’t create the same type of feedback loop. A movie or book can only send one signal. Its just sending you whatever it contains, and you’re unable to respond or influence its future output. Some say this is why games could never be art. ( but I’ll save that for some other time ). This is what makes games possibly the best medium EVER.
Great examples of this at work are horror games which are really simplistic to create in terms of mood. We’ve all heard countless talks about how games should strive to achieve emotions like other media. However, when it comes to feelings of fear or terror, video games take the cake.
A film or book wants or sometimes needs time to build a sense of place and connection, much of which can be hard to pull off effectively. But why should we be tied down but the limitations of such a small emotional field. Laughter, sadness, love, empowerment (without the guns), and all other emotions should be able to used to the strength of video games. Some say other emotions simply don’t come so easy and require a more complex design. I’m also not saying this is impossible; games like Ico, Another World, and Journey showed us this. Journey for me, was amazingly profound and spiritual. This was due to the feeling of being alone, and at some point meeting another lost or helpful player. I don’t want to drag this out much more.
Following the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in January 1986, President Reagan appointed a Presidential Commission to investigate the accident. The fourteen members of the Commission included former Secretary of State William Rogers as chairman, astronauts Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong, and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. After months of investigation, the Rogers Commission identified the cause of failure as an O- ring in the right Solid Rocket Booster that ruptured due to the cold temperatures of the launch.
Here, Alton Keel (left), the representative to the Commission from the Executive Office of the President, and chairman William Rogers (center) arrive at the Galaxie Theatre at KSC’s Visitor’s Information Center for a one day briefing and tour of the NASA facility
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and popular science author Richard Feynman was born on this day in 1918.
A pioneer in quantum mechanics, Feynman grew up in New York and was educated at MIT and Princeton. During World War II, he was invited to join the Manhattan Project and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on developing the atomic bomb. After receiving his PhD and the end of the war, Feynman went to work at Cornell, where he spent five years. He then moved to CalTech, where he taught and worked from 1950 until his death in 1988.
Feynman’s greatest scientific contributions lie in the areas of quantum mechanics and of quantum electrodynamics, for which he collaboratively won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for their work on the physics of elementary particles. He also made significant contributions to the discovery of quarks, predicted the advent of nanotechnology, and developed the Feynman diagrams, which are pictorial representations of the math behind the behavior of subatomic particles.
Sometimes referred to as the Great Explainer, Feyman believed in communicating complex ideas in a way that the general public could understand. He was a popular lecturer and wrote a number of books, including his memoir,Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, and The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which Discover named as one of the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006.
One of his final public milestones came as part of the commission assembled to investigate the 1986 Challenger explosion. Feynman was able to decisively demonstrate that it was a failure of the material comprising the shuttle’s O-ring due to cold weather that led to the accident.
Image Credit: Photo of Richard Feynman, taken in 1984 in the woods of the Robert Treat Paine Estate in Waltham, MA. Copyright Tamiko Thiel 1984 (OTRS communication from photographer) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart …yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? …on a dead planet with no life to entertain.
Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle onto dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness …matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.
- a poem by Richard Feynman from “The Value of Science”, 1955
In late 2015, a study made headlines worldwide by bluntly demonstrating the human capacity to be misled by “pseudo-profound bullshit” from the likes of Deepak Chopra, infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.
This is all well and good, but how are we supposed to know that we are being misled when we read a quote about quantum theory from someone like Chopra, if we don’t know the first thing about quantum mechanics?
“The world is strange. The whole universe is very strange. But see– when you look at the details and you find out that the rules are very simple– of the game.” -Richard Feynman
“You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.”
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”
Happy 104th birthday to the legendary theoretical physicist, science communicator, author and Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman who was born on this day, 11th May 1918 in Queens, New York City.
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
