[extropy-chat] Feynman's 1963 Lecture - The Uncertainty of Science

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Robin Hanson wrote:
> On 1/21/2005, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> 
>> Although, reading through the lecture, I find that Feynman said only 
>> that there was freedom in physics, and he contrasted physics to other 
>> sciences which he said were not so advanced.  From what I have heard 
>> this egalitarianism is not the state in physics today, but maybe in 
>> the 1950s it was so.  I was not there, and I am not a physicist.
> 
> And maybe in Camelot, it never did rain until after sundown, and by 
> eight a.m. the morning fog had flown.  I was not there.

Once upon a time, Einstein sent in his papers, and they were published. 
The physicists of that era must have done something right.  Feynman's claim 
could not possibly have been meant in an absolute sense, that there was 
*zero* attention to personality.  But I can imagine that Feynman was 
approximately right.  Physics is a pretty technical endeavor, the most 
technical of them all.  Maybe you really could pay attention just to the 
equations and results, and not who said them.  I don't think that it is 
this way now, from what I have heard.  But I also doubt that Einstein could 
have happened today.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence