[bcatanzaro]

I almost want to read it as satire. Especially juxtaposed against his death. Because the ideas of "What I cannot create, I do not understand." and "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved" seem profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.

[gowld]

If you are calling Richard Feynman "profoundly unwise" and "endlessly futile", you might need to do a bit more reflection on the grounding for your opinion.

[jszymborski]

Surely it can be true that a profoundly wise and consistently effective person holds a belief or utters a phrase that is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.

[ScotterC]

Absolutely true. And paradoxically, they may fully understand that the phrase is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile and yet know the benefit of holding the belief anyway.

[cutemonster]

Isn't there an implicit "... that you stumbled upon, and found interesting".

And to him (and others like him), that might have been possible.

While for other more ordinary people, it'd be profoundly unwise and endlessly futile, to hope to do that

[JKCalhoun]

Feynman has a comment in one of his two autobiographies where he describes an argument with an artist friend — about, I think, the beauty of a rose. His friend believed that "dissecting" the rose, breaking it down to its biological components chemical processes, took away from the beauty of the rose.

Feynman disagreed — couldn't understand how knowing more about the thing could possibly take away from it.

It was the one thing I read from him where I disagreed with him. It seems strange to me he didn't see naivety, wonder as things someone might cherish. Those are things that you are in danger of losing when you come to know too much.

I'm probably belaboring my point, but I remember when I was in my 20's pointing out to my girlfriend at the time some of the more well known constellations in the night sky. They were not well know to her. I'd try to point to a star, point to another — "There, that's Scorpio. You can see the one reddish star, Aldebaran in the center..."

No, she could not see it. Christ, like Orion, I can't look up at the night sky in winter and not see it. What does she see in the sky at night?

Oh, that's right, an amazing jumble of mysterious points of light — like I used to as a young boy.

Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer".

[jstanley]

This comment went the exact opposite of the direction I was expecting.

Do you also find that you enjoy magic tricks less when you know how they're done?

Personally I find the "not knowing" kind of painful. I can't imagine cherishing ignorance.

[calebio]

Agreed. I find that I still have "wonder" all of the time, and that is what drives me to try and "figure it out". The sense of wonder never goes away, but my naivete about a single experience does go away.

I don't know why I'd want to continue to be naive about something after experiencing it. There's plenty of new things to see and do that will generate that "wonder" feeling all over again.

[localhost]

You can listen to him talk about it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo