"Seeking New Laws"

This kind of game, of roughly guessing at family relations and so on, is illustrative of a kind of preliminary sparring which one does with nature, before really discovering some deep and fundamental law. Before you get the deeper discoveries, examples are very important in the previous history of science. For instance, Mendeleev's discovery of the... See more

The inexperienced and crackpots and people like that will make guesses that are simple, all right, but you can immediately see that they're wrong. That doesn't count. And others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated. And it sort of looks like it's all right. But I know that's not true, because the truth always turns ou... See more

And it's a very strong tendency of people to say against some idea, if someone comes up with an idea, and says let's suppose the world is this way. And you say to him, well, what would you get for the answer for such and such a problem? And he says, I haven't developed it far enough. And you say, well, we have already developed it much further. We ... See more

Now you see, of course, that with this method, we can disprove any definite theory. If you have a definite theory and a real guess, from which you can really compute consequences, which could be compared to experiment, then in principle, we can get rid of any theory. We can always prove any definite theory wrong. Notice, however, we never prove it ... See more

As soon as any real, definite idea is substituted, it becomes almost immediately apparent that it doesn't work.

So the only way that it seems to me that it can happen– that what can happen in the future first– either that everything becomes known, that all the laws become known. That would mean that after you had enough laws, you could compute consequences. And they would always agree with experiment, which would be the end of the line. Or it might happen th... See more

We must, and we should, and we always do extend as far as we can beyond what we already know, those things, those ideas that we've already obtained. We extend the ideas beyond their range. Dangerous, yes, uncertain, yes. But the only way to make progress.

Well, that's the way that it is scientific. It is scientific only to say what's more likely and less likely, and not to be proving all the time, possible and impossible.

Another thing that will happen is that if all is known– ultimately, if it turns out all is known, it gets very dull– the biggest philosophy and the careful attention to all these things that I've been talking about will have gradually disappeared. The philosophers, who are always on the outside, making stupid remarks, will be able to close in. Beca... See more