19.- Ways of thinking (Richard P. Feynman)

Me encantan estas entrevistas a Richard P. Feynman (muy simpático, no?), así que he decidido transcribir una de ellas, una que me gusta particularmente. Mucho trabajo y... ¡Bea, de no ser por tí esto estaría lleno de faltas de spelling! ¡Gracias!

Aconsejo mirarla aquí. La transcripción es sólo para la gente que como yo, preferiría que hubiese subtítulos.

¿Does an ordinary person by studying hard would get to be able to imagine these things like you do?

Of course. I was an ordinary person who has studied hard. There is no miracle people. It just happens that they got interested in this thing and they learn all the stuff. They are just people. There is no talent special miracle ability to understand cuantic mechanics or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields. It comes without practice and reading and learning and study, so if you say it take an ordinary person who is willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics and ___... then he is become a scientist.

What I’m actually doing my own things and I’m working in a high, you know, “deeper deserteric???” stuff that I worry about. I don’t think I can describe very well what it’s like. First of all, it’s like asking the centipede which leg comes after which it happens quickly and I’m not exactly sure if flashes and stuff is going ahead, but I know is a crazy mixture of partially equations, puzzle solving equations that having some short of picture of what’s happening that the equation sign is happening, but they are not that well separate as the worlds I’m using and it’s a kind of a naughty thing, it’s very hard to describe and I don’t know that it does any good to describe it. There’s something that struck me that’s very curious.

I suspect that what goes on in every man’s head may be very very different, the actual imagery or semi imagery which comes, and that when we are talking to each other at these high and complicated levels and we think we are speaking very well and we are communicating, but what we are really doing is having some kind of big translation scheme going on for translating what this fellow says into our images, which are very different. I found that out because __ very early, lowest level, I would go into the details but I got interested in… well, I was doing some experiments and I was trying to figure out something about our time sense.

And so what I was doing. I would count, trying to count up to a minute. Actually a __ so I count to 48 and that would be one minute so I calibrate myself and I would count a minute and 48___... but it’s close enough. And then it turns out that if you repeat that you can do it very accurately, when you get to 48, or 47, or 49, not far off, you’re very close to a minute. And I would try to find out what affected that time sense, and whether I can do anything at the same time that I was caunting. And I found that I could do many things. I could… There were some things that not. For example, I had great difficulty… I was at the high university I had to get my laundry ready. And I was putting the socks out and I had to make a list, how many socks and there were something like six or eight socks, and I couldn’t count them because the counting machine was being used and I coundn’t count them until I found that I could put them in a pattern and recognice the number.

And so I learnt away after practicing in which I could go down a line of newspapers and see them in groups of three, three, one, that’s a group of ten, three, three one… Not saying the numbers, just seeing the grouping. I cound therefore count the lines of types, I practiced, in the newspapers, the same time I was counting in internally in seconds, so I would come, I could do this fantastic trick of say: 48! That is one minute and there are 67 lines of type, you see? It was quite wonderful. And I discovered many things. I could read while I was… no I… excuse me. Yes. Yes, I could read perfectly all right while I was counting, and get an idea of it what was about, but I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t say anything. Because of course, I was sort of when I count I sort I talk to myself inside. I would say, one, two, three, sort of in the head.

Well I went down the breakfast, and there was John Tukey was a mathematician down in Princeton in the same time and we had many discursions. I was telling him about the experiments and of what I could do. “That’s absurd” he says, “I don’t see why you have any difficulty talking whatsoever, and I can’t possibly believe that you could read” So I couldn’t believe all this but we calibrated him. Was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds, or whatever I don’t remember the numbers now. And then he says “All right” he said, “what do you want me to say?” “Mary had a little lamb. I can speak about anything. Bla, bla, bla. Bla, bla, bla. 52! It’s a minute?” And he was right. And I couldn’t possibly do that. And he wanted me to read, cause he couldn’t believe it. And then we compared notes and it turned out that when he thought of counting what he did inside his head when he counted was he saw a tape with numbers that went clink, and clink, and clink. The tape would change with the numbers printed on it he could see.

Was since a sort of an optical system that he is using and not voice. He could speak as much as he wanted, but if he had to read then he couldn’t look at his clock, whereas for me was the other way. And that’s where I discovered, at least in this very simple operation of counting, the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they are doing the same thing. And so struck me, therefore, if that’s already true at the most elementary level than when we learn about the mathematics, and the Bessel function, and the exponentials, and the electric fields, and all these things, that the imageries and methods by which we storing it all and the way we think about it could be really if we would get into each other’s head entirely different. And in fact while somebody, sometime has a great deal of difficult on understanding a point that you see as obvious, and viceversa, it may be because it’s a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular frame working and so on.

Now I’m talking like a psychologist and you know I know nothing about this.