The Character of Physical Law

The Character of Physical Law

Richard Feinman, 1964

I'm currently slowly re-reading Feinman's Character of Physical Law. It's a transcription of a series of popular lectures he delivered. At this point I've read enough popular science that there's not much that's new to me, but I'm still trying to grasp some of the details. I was very amused to find the following passage in there, tho:

The layman then searches for book after book in the hope that he will avoid the complexities which ultimately set in, even with the best expositor of this type. He finds as he reads a generally increasing confusion, one complicated statement after another, one difficult-to-understand thing after another, all apparently disconnected from one another. It becomes obscure, and he hopes that maybe in some other book there is some explanation. .. The author almost made it - maybe another fellow willmake it right.

.. Hey, that's Me !

Haha. He goes on to back-up the conclusion I've come to myself after lots and lots of pop-science reading: At a certain point, the salient points of quantum mechanics cannot be boiled down to something you can understand without actually getting fully involved in the material.

.. Altho I recently came to a fleeting understanding of Bell's Inequality, which was sort of the main point that I'd always had to take on authority instead of reason.