Fun to Imagine

Richard Feynman – Fun To Imagine

• Jiggling Atoms
  • heat is just jiggling of atoms
  • heat transfer is just transfer of this motion
  • The jiggling that is heat doesn’t dissipate in the same way as a bouncing ball dissipates its bouncing.
• Fire
  • describes trees as being made of mostly air and sun, and fire as the release of the sun’s heat and light
• Rubber Bands
  • kinked chains
• Magnets (and ‘why?’ questions)
  • Gives an example of how even simple why questions fail to terminate in understood phenomena
  • Explains that magnetic forces can’t be described very well in terms of other, better understandable phenomena.
• Bigger is electricity!
  • What makes the dentist’s drill work?
  • Traces the flow of electricity, from its generation at some nearby dam to the dentist’s office.
  • The static that lets a recently-used comb attract paper is electricity.
  • The effect of pushing on an upholstered chair is electrical repulsion on a small scale.
• Mirrors
  • What mirrors swap is not your left/right, but your front/back
• What keeps trains on tracks?
  • wheels are tapered to be bigger toward the center, so when turning a corner, the axle actually tips accordingly (unlike with a car)
• Seeing Things
  • How human eyes perceive the electrical field, and how other animals perceive different wavelengths of the electrical field via different instruments
• Big Numbers, pt. 1
  • atom:apple::apple:earth
  • telescope as a gigantic, high-coverage eye
  • unwieldy numbers
  • naming the stars in just our galaxy, 1/second, would take 3000 years
  • gravity’s strength keeps the earth mostly round (no mountain is more than about a mile higher than the rest of the planet’s mass
• Big Numbers, pt. 2
• Ways of Thinking, pt. 1
  • Feynman’s internal counting procedure conflicted with speaking, but John Tukey’s conflicted with speaking.
• Ways of Thinking, pt. 2