The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Richard Feynman)

[rodsky]

---

I am proposing a project for the true fans of this section of iStorya.net. In YouTube there are 5 videos of a 1981 interview of Richard Feynman, called "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". I'm going to post the 5 videos in this thread, and I would like to seek your assistance in creating a transcript of the interview.



So here are the challenges:

1. A full English transcript of the entire interview

2. Translation to Tagalog / Cebuano of the English transcript

Here are the five videos:

Part 1
YouTube - The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out (Part 1-5)

Part 2
YouTube - The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out (Part 2-5)

Part 3
YouTube - The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out (Part 3-5)

Part 4
YouTube - The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out (Part 4-5)

Part 5
YouTube - The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out (Part 5-5)

The goal of this project is to create English, Tagalog, and Cebuano subtitles (i.e. *.SUB, *.SRT files) for an actual full length video of the interview, which I will share freely with those who want to share this interview with their friends, of one of the most remarkable people who ever lived in this earth.

I shall try to get the ball rolling by posting a transcript of the beginning of the first video in the next post.

-RODION

[rodsky]

Beginning transcription for Video 1:

I have a friend, who's an artist, and he sometimes taken a view which I, don't agree with very well. You hold up a flower and say "Look how beautiful it is" and I'll agree I think. And he says "You see I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh take this all apart and it becomes (a) dull thing." And I think that he's kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too. I believe, although I may not be quite as refined as, asthetically as he is, that I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, one centimeter, there's also beauty in the smaller dimensions. The inner structure, also the processes. The fact that...the colors of the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it, is interesting, it means that insects could see the color. It adds a question--is this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms, does it--why is it aesthetic, all kinds of interesting questions, which science and knowledge only adds, to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds, I don't understand how it subtracts.

(At this point we see Feynmen doing a charcoal sketch of a girl seated on a sofa)

I've always been rather very one sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated, almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn and I didn't have much patience with what's called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work at it. It's only afterwards when I got older and more relaxed that I spread out a little bit, I learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one-sided person and don't know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence, and I've used it in a particular dimension.


We had Encyclopaedia Britannica at home. And even when I was a small boy he (father) used to sit me on his lap, and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And then we would read say about Dinosaurs, and maybe it would be talking about the brontosauraus or something, and it would say something like, or the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it would say something like, this thing is twenty-five feet high, and the head is six feet across, and so he would stop always and say "Let's see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the window, but not quite because the head is oh, a little bit too wide, that it would break the window as it came by." Everything we read would be translated as best as we could, into some reality, so that I learned to do that, and everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying, by "translating" and so I used get read the encyclopaedia, when I was a boy, but with translation you see, so it was very exciting and and interesting to think there were these animals, of such magnitude. I wasn't frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don't think, but I thought it was very very interesting, and that they all died out, and at that time nobody knew why.

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill Mountains is a place where people went in the summer, and um, the fathers--it was a big group of people there--but the fathers would all go back to New York during the week and only come back over in the weekend. And on the weekends when my father came, he would take me for walks in the woods and would tell me various things about...interesting things that were going on in the woods--which I'll explain in a minute but--the other mothers seeing this, of course, though that was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks, so they tried to work on them but, they didn't get anywhere, at first, and they wanted my father to take all the kids, he didn't want to because he had a special relation to me and we (were doing a) personal thing together. So it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend.

And the next monday, when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in the field, and then one kid said to me, "See that bird? What kind of a bird is that?" And I said "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of bird it is." He says "It's a Brown-throated Thrush" or something, "Your father doesn't tell you anything!". But it was the oppposite, my father had taught me, looking at a bird he says, "Do you know what that bird is? It's a Brown-throated Thrush. But in Portuguese it's a "Honto La Pero", in Italian "A Chutera Pikita", he says "in Chinese it's a "Chong-ong-tok" in Japanese "Apatara kupudecha" etc. He says now if you know all the languages you wanna know the name of that bird is, and when you finish with all that, he says, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now he says "Now let's look at the bird and what it's doing."

He had taught me to notice things, and one day while I was playing with what we call an express wagon which was a little wagon, which has a railing around it, for children to play with, they can pull around. It had a ball in it--I remember this--it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon, and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, "say, Pop, I noticed something--when I pulled the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, it rushes to the back of the wagon...and when I'm pulling along and I suddenly stop the wagon, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon, I said "Why is that?" That he says, nobody knows, he says "The general principle is, that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing still, tend to stand still, unless you push on them hard." And he says "This tendency is called inertia, but nobody knows why it's true." Now that's a DEEP understanding, he doesn't give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something, and KNOWING something. Which I learned very early. He went on to say, "If you look close, you find that the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it's the back of the wagon that you're pulling towards/against the ball, but the ball stands still or as a matter of fact, from the friction, starts to move forward really, and doesn't move back." So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again, and pulle dthe wagon from under it, and looking sideways, and seeing indeed he was right, the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forwards, it moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk, it moved forward a little bit, it just that the wagon caught up with it. So, that's the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions. No pressure, just lovely, interesting discussions.

My cousin who was at that time, who was three years older (than me), was in high school and was having considerable difficulty with algebra, and had a tutor. And I was allowed to sit in the corner while the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra. And uh, so problems like 2x plus uh, I said to him, my cousin, what are you trying to do you know... 2x + 7 = 15 he said, and you're trying to find out what x is, and I said you mean 4. He says "Yeah but you did it with arithmetic, you have to do it by algebra." And that's why my cousin was never able to algebra because he couldn't understand how he was supposed to do it.

(this ends the transcript for Video 1)

-RODION

[rodsky]

UPDATE: user stealthghost kindly gave me a link to the complete transcript. I'll be posting the rest of the transcript here soon--I'll leave my transcript of the first video intact--sayang pod baya akong effort

-RODION

[JeKeRo]

pd mangutana pd ka makaEXPLAIN ana imong CLOSING REMARKS bazta mo post ka qya ^_^ plzzz
kanang Linya ni Richard Feynman bah nya kinsa diay na cya?

[mariaClara]

--- can't wait to go home and watch the clips --- so bad gyud diri oie, asta nat.geo gi-block.. grr.. ---

[diehard96]

pd mangutana pd ka makaEXPLAIN ana imong CLOSING REMARKS bazta mo post ka qya ^_^ plzzz
kanang Linya ni Richard Feynman bah nya kinsa diay na cya?

feynman was a distinguished physicist who at one time worked at the los alamos lab. his scientific prowess perhaps was rivaled only by his fun personality that challenged stereotypes of a serious scientist.

[pusang_iring]

the best analogy i've ever heard was when Feynman was talking about how we try to understand the rules of nature by comparing it to how we try to understand the rules of chess

[rodsky]

the best analogy i've ever heard was when Feynman was talking about how we try to understand the rules of nature by comparing it to how we try to understand the rules of chess

I think that's in part 3 of the videos up there Yeah I agree, I like the chess analogy as well.

-RODION

[rodsky]

Bumping this up in light of the recent "Einstein for Everyone" thread. Feynman is also one of those people who makes science easier to comprehend for the layman.

-RODION

[rodsky]

YouTube - Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman

-RODION