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Also from Richard Gleick’s biography of Feynman
"I asked my dad why, when I pull my red wagon forward, the ball rolls to the back. He replied "That nobody knows. The general principle is that things that are moving keep on moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push on them hard." And he says "This tendency is called inertia, but nobody knows why its true". Now that is a deep understanding"
Here Feynman takes us to the limits of understanding. Inertia is a property of the universe that we observe but cannot explain. It is the clarity of thought that we urgently need. Feynman went on at one point to say:
"We have no excuse that there are not enough experiments, it has nothing to do with experiments. Our situation is unlike a complex detailed scientific field where we can say "Perhaps, there aren't yet enough clues for even a human mind to figure out what is the pattern". We should not even have to look at the experiments…. It is like looking in the back of the book for the answer… The only reason that we cannot do this problem is that we haven't got enough imagination"
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