Richard Feynman Enthusiastically Explains How to Think Like a Physicist in His Series Fun to Imagine (1983)

“It’s inter­est­ing that some peo­ple find sci­ence so easy, and oth­ers find it kind of dull and dif­fi­cult,” says Richard Feyn­man at the begin­ning of his 1983 BBC series Fun to Imag­ine. “One of the things that makes it very dif­fi­cult is that it takes a lot of imag­i­na­tion. It’s very hard to imag­ine all the crazy things that things real­ly are like.” A true sci­en­tist accepts that noth­ing is as it seems, in that noth­ing, when you zoom in close enough or zoom out far enough, behaves in a way that accords with our every­day expe­ri­ence. Even the nec­es­sary scales — in which, for exam­ple, an atom is to an apple as an apple is to Earth itself — are dif­fi­cult to con­ceive.

Despite his much-cel­e­brat­ed bril­liance as a physi­cist, Feyn­man also admit­ted to find­ing the quan­ti­ties with which he had to work unfath­omable, at least when exam­ined out­side their par­tic­u­lar con­texts. At the atom­ic lev­el, he explains, “you’re just think­ing of small balls, but you don’t try to think of exact­ly how small they are too often, or you get kind of a bit nut­ty.”

In astron­o­my, “you have the same thing in reverse, because the dis­tance to these stars is so enor­mous.” We all have an idea of what the term “light year” means — assum­ing we don’t mis­un­der­stand it as a unit of time — but who among us can real­ly envi­sion a galaxy 100,000 light years away, let alone a mil­lion?

Feyn­man dis­cuss­es these mat­ters with char­ac­ter­is­tic under­stand­ing and humor across Fun to Imag­ine’s nine seg­ments, which cov­er phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na from fire and mag­nets to rub­ber bands and train wheels. Those who know their physics will appre­ci­ate the vivid­ness and con­ci­sion with which he explains this mate­r­i­al, appar­ent­ly right off the top of his head, and any­one can sense the delight he feels in mere­ly putting his mind to the behav­ior of mat­ter and ener­gy and their rela­tion­ship to the world as we know it. And how­ev­er much plea­sure he derived from under­stand­ing, he also got a kick out of how much mys­tery remains: “Nature’s imag­i­na­tion is so much greater than man’s,” he says toward the end. “She’s nev­er going to let us relax.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Life & Work of Richard Feyn­man Explored in a Three-Part Freako­nom­ics Radio Minis­eries