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| "There are a number of possibilities. The first is the limited imagination of physicists: when we see a new phenomenon we try to fit it into the framework we already have--until we have made enough experiments, we don't know that it doesn't work. So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, 'This is the way it works, and look how wonderfully similar the theories are,' it's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.
Another possibility is that it is the same damn thing over and over again--that Nature has only one way of doing things, and She repeats her story from time to time.
A third possibility is that things look similar because they are aspects of the same thing--some larger picture underneath, from which things can be broken into parts that look different, like fingers on the same hand. Many physicists are working very hard trying to put together a grand picture that unifies everything into one super-duper model. It's a delightful game..."
- Richard Feynman
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| ...attitudinal benefactions...
-Julian Hartt
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| "So now you know what I'm going to talk about. The next question is, will you understand what I'm going to tell you? Everybody who comes to a scientific lecture knows they are not going to understand it, but maybe the lecturer has a nice, colored tie to look at. Not in this case!
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school--and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you're not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, am I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won't be able to understand what I am going to say? It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does."
"I hope you can accept Nature as She is--absurd."
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| "By the way, what I have just outlined is what I call a 'physicist's history of physics,' which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development, which I do not really know!"
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