Richard Feynman: Philosophies Behind Ideas

“For those who insist, however, that the only thing that’s important is that the theory agrees with experiment, I would like to make an imaginary discussion between a Mayan astronomer and his student. The Mayans were able to calculate with great precision the predictions, for example, for eclipses and the position of the moon in the sky, the position of Venus, and so on.

However, it was all done by arithmetic. You count certain numbers, you subtract some numbers, and so on. There was no discussion of what the Moon was. There wasn’t even a discussion of the idea that it went around. […]

Suppose that a young man went to the astronomer and said, I have an idea. Maybe those things are going around, and there are balls of rocks out there. We could calculate how they move in a completely different way than just calculate what time they appear in the sky and so on.”

— Excerpted from Richard Feynman’s “Seeking New Laws | The Character of Physical Law” Lecture (1964)

Plato: “The Cave”

“Imagine that there are people living in a cave deep underground. The cavern has a mouth that opens to the light above, and a passage exists from this all the way down to the people. They have lived here from infancy, with their legs and necks bound in chains. They cannot move. All they do is stare directly forward, as the chains stop them from turning their heads around. Imagine that far above and behind them blazes a great fire. Between this fire and the captives, a low partition is erected along a path, something like puppeteers use to conceal themselves during their shows. […]

Look and you will also see other people carrying objects back and forth along the partition, things of every kind: images of people and animals, carved in stone and wood and other materials. Some of these other people speak, while others remain silent. […]

Now, tell me if you suppose it’s possible that these captives ever saw anything of themselves or one another, other than the shadows flitting across the cavern wall before them? […]

And if a sound reverberated through their cavern from one of those others passing behind the partition, do you suppose that the captives would think anything but the passing shadow was what really made the sound?”

— Excerpted from Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave | Republic” (380 BCE)

Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms

“Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences posses firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called ‘paradigms.’ These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”

“In this essay, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. […]

[…] ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’ By choosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual practice — examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together — provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.”

— Excerpted from Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962)

Yaneer Bar-Yam: Complex Systems

“A dictionary definition of the word ‘complex’ is: ‘consisting of interconnected or interwoven parts.’ Why is the nature of a complex system inherently related to its parts? Simple systems are also formed out of parts. To explain the difference between simple and complex systems, the terms ‘interconnected or ‘interwoven’ are somehow essential. Qualitatively, to understand the behavior of a complex system we must understand not only the behavior of the parts but how they act together to form the behavior of the whole. […]

[H]uman civilization is a complex organism. It is clear that the behavior of parts of the system is strongly interdependent. It is also apparent that the behavior of the whole is strongly dependent on its parts. The strength of interdependence is to be measured by the amount of information (bits) needed to describe all of the distinct ways that one part affects the others. Our conclusion is based upon common and well-known phenomena. In this regard we are only echoing many discussions of the global economy, global communications and global interdependence. Yet it is a significant observation. It is also significant that the phenomena of interdependence have become manifest relatively recently. Thus we have an indication that a transition to a manifestly complex organism has occurred during this century. Prior to this time the behavior was not characteristic of a complex organism.”

— Excerpted from Yaneer Bar-Yam’s “Dynamics of Complex Systems” (1997)