You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that the essence of matter is defined by its interactions rather than its composition.
Richard P. Feynman highlights the idea that the fundamentals of existence are rooted in interactions rather than mere physical components. In this view, it is the relationships and exchanges between particles that characterize mass, rejecting a simplistic definition based purely on constituent parts. This perspective invites a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of matter and the universe.
In practice
In a physics class discussion about the nature of matter, this quote could be used to illustrate the concept of mass and interaction.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.
Science has helped us to understand and master ourselves, creating an elevated new form of human life, the wealth and beauty of which cannot be pictured today by the keenest imagination.
If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.
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