Richard Feynman was a very gifted man, a remarkable thinker, a physics pioneer. Like many very gifted people, he seemed to have little appreciation of quite how special his real gifting was.
Feynman seemed to like spinning his own myth regarding his personal life. He stored up anecdotes enough to fill a book or two. You can still buy them. Some of this material is not at all politically correct by modern standards, and rightly so. But he also encouraged equality in the workplace and had a tenacious concern for truthfulness and realism there, which I'm getting on to. Nearly everyone other than he saw his real gifting. We don't remember the man for his womanising or trickster antics. We remember him as someone with a profound, natural, apparently-effortless, insight into physics. Someone with the ability to explain difficult concepts to the rest of us; the less gifted.
Feynman illustrated a combination of brilliance with necessary condescension. By that I mean the ability to put himself in the shoes of his students, intellectually. He could condescend in a benign way to bless the rest of us. For me this was second-hand, through books taken from his lectures. (Condescension, if realistic and genuine, is not inherently bad, and knowing others' limitations when teaching is good and necessary). Feynman could adapt concepts he understood very clearly and make them as simple and amenable as possible. Would that we all had had lecturers like that.
Feynman was the hero of that far more widely known and appreciated physicist, Sheldon Cooper. (You probably know Sheldon was the central character of 'The Big Bang', a popular TV comedy series).
Feynman displayed humility and awe toward his teaching subject. And so on to the point of my post.
Found on his blackboard at Caltech at the time of his death in the top left corner was a simple statement.
'What I cannot create I do not understand'.
We don't know exactly what he meant, or what led him to write this. Perhaps a pervading awareness of his terminal physical illness brought this phrase to him. Doctors could not transform or recreate the malignant tissue of his rare form of cancer. Doctors can't create tissue directly, period. We can indeed grow certain tissues. We analyse nature, we play with and rearrange nature, but ultimately we do not truly create anything. To truly create is to bring about from nothing. Or from nothing within the creation, anyway.
To prove our understanding, we must demonstrate it in action. This is a hard wall for hard science. 'Do the experiment for us'. The engineer understands this. Conjecture is one thing, working practice resulting in hard product may be quite another. Sometimes we fail to acknowledge the line between these.
Feynman's statement certainly applies to deep past science. Can we create life from inanimate matter? Can we set it up to evolve and populate? In this case, we have the constituent matter readily available. We have the right atoms. But the answer is 'No'. We are nowhere near those goals. Our theories, in truth, remain theories until we can test them.
Can we invoke a universe from nothing? Can we provoke a universe (or the beginnings of one), seed it to unravel, from an initial set of conditions we engineer, as a physical reality? No. We cannot.
Is science useless then? Of course not. To see its limitations simply means you have stopped worshipping it.
Underneath the quote, in another box, Feynman wrote 'To solve every problem that has been solved'. Again we weren't party to his thought processes or context. But that second sentence is achievable, by definition, by mankind corporately. It's an unrealistic aim for one man, although mankind could in principle achieve it. That's to say, all problems, with their solutions, so far achieved, could be brought together in one place for general access. 'Wikipedia' is trying to get there and doing a pretty fair job.
Feynman's two statements are boundaries. They are the two banks of a precipice, a precipice between God's type of knowledge and power and our own.
There's a huge veil and a huge chasm between the sum of our knowledge, and the ability to truly create; to create as Christ, in His divinity, has created.
