"You Know There Is Sense Behind This Damn Thing" Richard Feynman

Many years ago now, the famous scientist Albert Einstein said:

""One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

There are a couple of questions that this astute observation raises. One is, why did Einstein consider it such a mystery, what were the underlying reasons for him calling it an eternal mystery? Does this give us some insight into Einsteins own view of reality?

I'm no expert on Einstein but it seems that he was somewhat at odds with himself as to where he stood on certain issues. Some have tried to make him fit in the Judeo/ Christian box and make him out as a believer. Some have called him a Deist, and yet others wish to claim him as their very own atheist.

In the end we can only understand him according to his own writings. Whatever else we may accord him all the world recognizes him as a great scientist. And rightly so.

Those, like myself, who acknowledge that there is a benevolent God, appreciate his comment. To us the comprehensibility of the Universe is only explicable in terms of the existence of God. But, true though that is, in our view of reality, it still does not diminish his statement. We can still appreciate the mystery.

There are a number of eminent scientists who point to the same reality. One of them, I have recently discovered was Richard Feynman. But it's not the immediate sort of observation that you would make about the man. For all his learning there is nothing remotely religious about his view and he would probably be the first to inform you about it as this transcript of a video testifies:

If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we're going, what the meaning of the Universe is and so on, then I think that you could easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems. How a scientist can take a mystic answer, I don't know because the whole spirit is to underst... well never mind that, I don't understand that, but anyhow- if you think of it... well the way I think of it, what we're doing is we're exploring, we're trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics, no I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world, and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. But whatever way it comes out, it's nature, it's there, and she's going to come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do, except to find out more about it. If you say...but your problem is why do you find out more about it...
If you thought that you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question you may be wrong, it may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But I don't look at it...my interest in science is to simply find out about the world and the more I find out the better it is, I like to find out.

"we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do"

 Feynman has been characterized as the "greatest scientist since Einstein".

While he makes no claim to be a person of faith, or to believe in any sense of a higher power or authority, and indeed disparages the thought that any self -respecting scientist could believe that; he does- whether he was aware of it or not- make a suprising assumption about reality. And in the light of that assumption- if it were taken to its logical conclusion- lends much credibility to the theistic worldview. But, he decides, he just doesn't want to go there. 

So what is it that is so surprising? Well the fact that he says: "You know there is sense behind this damn thing!"  Of course, taken in its proper context he was talking about his sheer pleasure at learning how to decipher a Mayan book, written in hieroglyphic writing. It had already been deciphered but that wasn't important to him. It was the challenge he relished. So it is hardly suprising for him to make the statement that because he knew the book had been written by an intelligent being and that the heiroglyphs were not just a haphazard collocation of symbols, it really was a language- and as he put it: "You know there is sense behind this damn thing! " 

In other words the intelligibility of the thing was a foregone conclusion, the realization that it was intelligible meant that it was indeed decipherable.

Still not surprising? No, but then when you went on to consider that he moved straight on from this recollection to his favourite pastime- science- without hardly a pause. He moved straight on to describe the inquisition of nature by science and scientific methods, and he did so by the use of the "Chess" analogy. But chess of course, as everybody acknowledges is a game invented by a human intelligence. So by using the analogy of science as trying to understand (from scratch) the rules of the chess game he has tacitly made the assumption, that it, like the Mayan book was intelligible to us, for precisely the same reason. That it can be "deciphered" is because it has been intelligently put together. He puts the same emphasis on it that Einstein did. While recognizing the mystery of its intelligibility, he did not want, to explore that idea, rather he was content to explore the banquet that was more appealing, that of nature, rather than what might be behind nature. While he rightly decided that the only way to know the truth of nature was not to try and read into it his own ideas, not to make assumptions, it must speak for itself- he didn't hesitate to assume that nature was in fact intelligible to us. His incessant curiosity at this juncture was not piqued by that thought. It was left for others.

Richard Feynman on deciphering a Mayan book:

"You know there is sense behind this damn thing! The problem is to extract it with whatever tools and clues you've got. And that's lots of fun. One way that's kind of a fun analogy to try to get some ideal of what we're doing and try and understand nature, is to imagine that the God's are playing some great game like chess. Let's say a chess game. And you don't  know the rules of the game. But you're allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, and then a little corner perhaps. And from these observations you try to figure out what the rules are of the game. What the rules of the pieces moving. You might discover after a bit for example that when there is only one bishop around on the board that the bishop maintains its colour. Later on you might discover the law for the bishop is it moves on a dialgonal which would explain the law that you understood before that it maintains its colour. And that would be analogous to we discover one law and then later  find a deeper understanding of it. Then things can happen, everythings going good you got all the laws, it looks very good and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs, in some corner so you begin to investigate that, to look for it. It's "castling" something you didn't expect. We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions, we're not trying to check all the time our conclusions after we checekd them enough well ok. The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting. The part that doesn't go according to what you expected. Also we could have revolutions in physics after you did notice that the bishops maintain their colour and they go along the diagonals and so on, for such a long time, and everybody knows that that's true, then you suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesn't maintain its colour- it changes its colour. Only later do you discover a new possibility that the bishop is captured and that a pawn went all the way down to the queens end to produce a new bishop. That can happen but you didn't know it. And so it's very analogous to the way our laws are, they sometimes look positive, they keep on working, then all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that we're wrong, and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of colour happen. And so forth, and gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply. 

"You know there is sense behind this damn thing!"

Unlike the chess game though, in the case of the chess game the rules become more complicated as you go along, but in the physics, when you discover new things it looks more simple. 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 as we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience every once in a while we have these integrations in which everything is pulled together in a unifiication, which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

Einstein: 

"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call my self a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That , it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

"Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is , comprehensible to reason. I cannot imagine a scientist without that profound faith. This situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

quoted from here