Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”
I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.*

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is…” and I showed him the accelerations.

He says - “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
- “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.”

His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Richard P. Feynman

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Drugs is another example of how we actively seek to escape from reality rather than gaining objectivity in it. Drug consumption occurs in the whole spectrum of social classes, from the wealthy to the poor and destitute. It is a practise that can be traced since the beginning of time and in all types of societies, from civilised to non-civilised. It is in human nature to seek comfort and pleasure, and drugs is one way that humans found of doing it. The effect of drugs is to chemically alter the state of consciousness. And we deliberately pursuit this for several reasons: as recreation, as part of spiritual rituals, as relaxation or as an escape from the pain and suffering of reality. Objective reality doesn’t offer comfort (on the contrary, in many cases it can be painful) neither is spiritually fulfilling. To deliberately alter our state of mind through drugs is another example of how we actively pursuit comfort and we actively escape from objectivity.

Another example of how we actively search to escape from reality is entertainment. Entertainment is pursuit for many reasons: to escape from boredom or just as a distraction. But one of the reasons we look for entertainment is to momentarily escape from the burdens of daily life. We find entertainment in many forms: sports, music, literature, theatre, spectacles or movies. And how important is for us to escape from reality is reflected on the demand for entertainment. And the demand for entertainment is reflected on the high income of footballers, actors, pop stars, novelists, etc. We seem to have an insatiable demand for entertainment. Entertainment and escaping from reality is valued much higher than objectivity.

Holidays is another example of how we actively seek to escape from reality. Holidays is a time to relax and distract the mind. Nobody goes on holidays to the library or joins a course to learn something new. Holidays is also a time to enjoy and leave behind the compromises, responsibilities and burdens of our daily life. Going away on holidays for example is the best way of doing this and escaping from our daily life. So holidays is not only a time to rest and enjoy, but it is also time when temporarily escape from the reality we live in into a more pleasant one. Holidays is another example of how we actively pursue escaping to a more pleasant reality. Tourism is an industry of enormous size and importance. And its size is a measure of how highly we value escaping from our reality. If we consider how much resources and energy we invest on holidays and weekends, we soon realise the importance we give to escape from our reality and seek comfort from it.

In general, we invest much more time, energy and resources on entertainment, holidays, drugs or comforting metaphysics to escape or avoid reality than on gaining objectivity on it. Reality is often painful, and by nature we tend to seek comfort from pain. In order to do this we sometimes escape from reality or we adjust our world views into more comfortable ones. So not only we tend to be passive on gaining objectivity on Nature, but we are actually active on either escaping from reality or adjusting our subjective views into more comforting ones.

Philosophy of Nature

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The Pursuit of Comfort

Subjectivity is an inescapable aspect of our human condition. By nature, we are confined to a subjective view of reality. Higher objectivity is possible, but it depends on a learning process that demands an expansion and integration of knowledge.

We are going to sustain that our world view is not only inherently subjective, but human nature is such that we commonly avoid -and sometimes even reject- objectivity, while we actively pursuit subjective world views that suits our needs.

By nature, we are both lazy and tend to seek comfort. By laziness we don’t mean the unwillingness to work (which is a particular manifestation of its most general sense), but the tendency to minimise effort and maximise rewards. Laziness is not so much a weakness of character but a natural predisposition. It makes biological sense to be lazy. A behaviour that minimises effort and maximise rewards is a behaviour that maximises energy efficiency. The opposite would mean a behaviour that uses energy unproductively; and energy, during evolution, has always represented a scarce resource. It also makes biological sense to seek comfort. The pursuit of comfort comes from the pain and pleasure principle; which is a primitive, but an effective mechanism of self-preservation.

Because we are naturally lazy, we are normally passive about objectivity. Objectivity depends on a learning process that demands effort, time and energy, and it is in our nature to minimize effort. So we tend to search for objectivity only when we need it or when it represent a practical benefit.
Now, not only we are passive about pursuing objectivity because we are lazy, but because we tend to seek comfort, we are active on avoiding it. And there are many examples on how we commonly do this: religion, drug consumption, taking holidays, entertainment, etc.

Religion for example, is comforting in many ways: it make us feel less alone in the world, it offer meaning to life, it offer consolation in death, it offers a world that is essentially fair, it offers redemption from pain and suffering and bliss on their truths, and fundamentally, following a religion is comforting for being a way of forming part of society and satisfying the basic need of belonging.
Religious world views are not objective, but they are mane made world view that adjust to our needs and that make us feel better about ourselves, the world and our place in the world. About 86% of the world population follows a religion in one form or the other. This shows how it primes in man the need of feeling good over the need of objectivity.

Religion is not the only way we seek comforting worldviews. Modernity is characterised by a high acceptance of scientific truth, by a decline on religion and by growing materialistic, individualistic and hedonistic values; all of which results in a general spiritual emptiness. Science might explain the world, but doesn’t fulfil our spiritual needs. So people are looking for alternative ways to find comfort in life, like motivational techniques, positive psychology, self-help, orientalism, etc. Another emerging trend, that combines many of the latter elements, are new and alternative metaphysics. Some of these metaphysics, in order to gain acceptance, make false claims of being based on science. And another thing they offer is peace of mind through alternative ways of seeing the world. The idea that by knowing the truth we can avoid the pain from modern life is another example of how we construct worldviews to fit our needs. Reality is objective and neutral and is not comforting in itself.

. . . . . .

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I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves—a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”
I thought for a moment and said, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.”
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery”—even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there’s a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you’ve only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can’t go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?
This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that’s the correct motion. It’s the fundamental principle of Einstein’s gravity—that is, what’s called the “proper time” is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn’t recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn’t dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Richard P. Feynman

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