To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. ~ William Blake
Richard Feynman certainly views the world with different eyes than most. As a child, he learned from an early age not to accept rote thinking. His father failed to spoon feed him the answers to the questions the world posed. Instead, his father encouraged young Feynman to question and to reason, to discover the truest nature that nature herself was willing to reveal.
When walking through the woods in his youth, Feynman Senior encouraged his young son to take notice of all things around him. It was not enough to merely know the names of the flora and fauna around him for his father asserted that to know such was only to know of people and their naming of things. But, for example, to truly understand the brown-throated thrush, one must watch the bird and learn from it in this way.
Later Feynman rejected the way that mathematics is taught in schools. He himself gained tremendous joy in discerning the value of x through his own deduction, rather than having to follow a set formula that leads every student down the same path to the same predetermined answer.
Feynman asserts that there is great beauty in understanding the physical world, and that to really understand what exists around us, we must have an understanding of mathematics. We could, just as Feynman asserts, view a flower. It is beautiful of its own visual accord. But it may hold yet majestic splendor than what our eyes initially reveal. What of its life cycle or how its belonging to an ecosystem impacts the lives of other living creatures? What of its formation, the construction of its cells, the lay of its petals? Is not the Fibonacci Sequence in itself a thing of grand beauty?
Perhaps Feynman’s most significant contribution to science is his willingness to discover for discovery sake. Like viewing a flower, noticing all the ways in which it may be appreciated as beautiful, Feynman seeks to replicate the same in all scientific processes. He asks us not to predetermine results or outcomes or presuppose answers, but search for the sake of searching, letting Mother Nature open to us like a flower opening her petals for the sun. He asks us to accept the truth that is laid bare before us.
We may consider Feynman a serious scientist, having given us noble and notable contributions. But I do not think he would wish us to take this legacy from him. Rather, I think he would wish we retain a child’s desire to continually explore the known and the unknown, reveling in the pure pleasure of discovering what we think we know, what we think we understand for the first time, and the first time, and the first time….
To better appreciate Richard Feynman's definition of beauty, please enjoy this short film:
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