Thanks for your reply.

“For every Feynman who can tell a fancy story about how he did not worry about it and came out on top (and gosh, how he loved his stories…. but don’t get me started), there are thousands of scientists who got absolutely nowhere by doing the same thing.”

Could it be argued that if only one Feynman emerges by using intuition per many thousands who get nowhere using that route, surely the way to make progress fastest is to encourage even more scientists to use an intuitive approach? Besides, surely everyone trusts their intuition to some extent when deciding which speculative area to work in?

Maybe people have to trust their own intuition when deciding whether to investigate string theory (which has not been proved finite beyond two loops), which is an example of an amazing intuitive idea that hasn’t been proved to be self-consistent?

When students decide to work on string theory, they are doing so maybe for a lot of reasons, such as because it is fashionable, and because it interconnects so many different areas of frontier physics, even though it hasn’t won Nobel Prizes yet for experimental confirmation.

So students just have to trust their physical intuition in deciding what to study when available theories haven’t been proved self-consistent and can’t be checked experimentally.

This brings to mind what Wigner said about the different emphasis in the physics culture he met in America from that in his home country, Hungary, (in his autobiography, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, as told to Andrew Szanton). Wigner said that in Hungary intuitive ideas are the most valued, but in America it is the long hard calculus of working out the consequences of ideas in detail is valued the most.

Feynman was Feynman, with a stratospheric level of marvelous intuition that most of us do not possess… as such, he is not necessarily the best example for us to follow in all things.

Best,

-cvj

Thanks for these further thoughts about being science advisor to for what is (at least partly) a sci fi film. It’s fascinating.

“What I like to see first and foremost in these things is not a strict adherence to all known scientific principles, but instead internal consistency.”

Please don’t be too hard on them if there are apparent internal inconsistencies. Such alleged internal inconsistencies don’t always matter, as Feynman discovered:

“… take the exclusion principle … it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway …. Teller said: “… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” …

“… Dirac asked “Is it unitary?” … Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards … in time …

” … Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle …” - Feynman, quoted at http://www.tony5m17h.net/goodnewsbadnews.html#badnews

I agree with you that: “Entertainment leading to curiosity, real questions, and then a bit of education …”