piddling around with plates

. there is a picture in the article of feynman is pictured shaking hands with President Reagan - a genius with one of the least scientifically literate Presidents in history

I recently finished reading the second volume of anecdotes about Richard Feynman entitled
"What Do You Care What Other People Think ?"
I found both volumes to be highly entertaining, and recommend them to everyone. They should be required reading for government ministers for higher education.

On reading the second volume, I started to think again about Feynman as a practising scientist.

The major goal of his life's work was to find out about things and he achieve this simply by giving free expression to his innate curiosity.

This could lead him almost anywhere: spending hours observing ants, learning to pick locks, running up and down stairs while counting in his head, unscrambling a Mayan codex, finding the right laws for beta decay.

To discover how Feynman learnt to approach his it is worth going back to a story told in the first volume of anecdotes:
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman,
entitled "the dignified professor." After working on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, Feynman accept an offer from Cornell University to teach mathematical physics and to do research. He became concerned that, as a physicist, he was already "burned out," but was advised by the head of the laboratory not to worry about what he should or shouldn't be doing. When he had learnt to relax, Feynman rediscovered what it was that had made physics so enjoyable for him in the past -- the pleasure of playing with it.

Shortly afterwards, he observe a wobbling plate that had been thrown into the air and started to pay with the equations describing its motion. Feynman wrote: "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."

I also wondered how Richard would have managed with this approach to science if he had been British and if he had been embarking on his academic area in the early 1980's. His approach is symptomatic of everything the present British government appears to dislike about higher education. Feynman was a scholar ( the word is rather pompous but I believe it is appropriate ) who apparently did not feel the need to be constantly explaining how enormously useful his work was. He did not waste time worrying that the problem that engaged his attention were not the problems on which the fate of his country's economy depended.

According to the government ( in the form of Robert Jackson, the minister for Higher Education ), the primary function of universities should be to provide students with the useful skills need to produce the goods for the economy: the pursuit of new knowledge for its own sake (scholarship) is not good enough (as if the latter somehow precludes the former). The government intends to achieve reform in higher education by unleashing the hounds of marked forces. Those in higher education who argue that market forces are not conducive to scholarship are dismissed on the grounds that such arguments represent "a late 19th century fallacy." Jackson has also said "I have no doubt about it that it's the prevalence of that fallacy among the intelligentsia in Britain which has been one of the causes of the decline of Britain's economy in the last 50 years." (the quote is taken from an article by Peter Kellner published in The Independent on 6 March). There would appear to be no room for scientist "piddling around with the wobbling plate" in Jackson's model of the universities.

In 1880, Thomas Huxley delivered a speech in Birmingham in which he reflected on efforts to introduce physical science into ordinary education. These efforts were "pooh-poohed by the men of business who pride themselves on being the representatives of practicality." Huxley's words are as relevant today as they were a 100 years ago: business cannot be expected to support the kind of scholarship upon which figure long-term economic benefits depend. These benefits derive not from directing the study of science along particular paths, which is the inevitable result of allowing market forces to operate, but from independent, creative thinking ( "piddling around," as Feynman would have said) by scholars driven by their own interests and their curiosities. Such thinking is best done in the absence of pressures from excessive teaching commitment, the endless (often futile) writing of grant applications, and the seemingly constant demands to justify usefulness.

I have news for Robert Jackson. The low status, poor prospects and inadequate financial rewards accorded to scientist in Britain mean that market forces are already at work. Because of their operation we cannot find enough teachers of mathematics, physics, chemistry and computer science. Market forces are responsible for steering children away from science at a time when this country needs to be filling student places in all of its university science departments. Market forces are stiffing creativity thought their adverse effects on the morale and self-respect of university scientists. Self-respect and integrity are most important to the practitioners of science.

I leave the last words to Feynman:

"So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organisations, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom."