This is the edited transcript of an interview with Feynman made for the BB C television program Horizon in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode of Nova. Feynman had most of his life behind him by this time (he died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the perspective not often attainable by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and very personal discussion on many topics close to Feynman’s heart: why knowing merely the name of something is the same as not knowing anything at all about it; how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.
If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we’re going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems. How a scientist can take a mystic answer I don’t know because the whole spirit is to understand—well, never mind that. Anyhow, I don’t understand that, but anyhow if you think of it, the way I think of what we’re doing is we’re exploring, we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world.
People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not, I’m just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers and we’re just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that’s the way it is, but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she’s going to come out the way she is, and therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re trying to do except to try to find out more about it.
If you say your problem is, why do you find out more about it, if you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you’re going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature, but I don’t look at it [like that]. My interest in science is to simply find out about the world, and the more I find out the better it is, like, to find out.
There are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we’re able to do so many more things than apparently animals can do, and other questions like that, but those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answer to them.
And so altogether I can’t believe these special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too local, too provincial. The earth, He came to the earth, one of the aspects of God came to the earth, mind you, and look at what’s out there. It isn’t in proportion. Anyway, it’s no use arguing, I can’t argue it, I’m just trying to tell you why the scientific views that I have do have some effect on my belief.
And also another thing has to do with the question of how you find out if something’s true, and if all the different religions have all different theories about the thing, then you begin to wonder. Once you start doubting, which is a very fundamental part of my soul, is to doubt and to ask, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong. Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong. Let us see. As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from and so on. With the scientific view, or my father’s view, that we should look to see what’s true and what may be or may not be true, once you start doubting, which I think to me is a very fundamental part of my soul, to doubt and to ask, and when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, but I don't have to such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean.
I might think about it a little bit and if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
