Richard Feynman: To Understand

‘What I cannot create, I do not understand,’

I think, though I can’t quite remember, I always loved physics. From online school to now I think I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the science. This is hypocritical for a reason but I won’t elaborate on that here. Anyway, I’ve always loved physics but I think I always decided that I was going to be, mainly, a marine biologist who knows mechanical engineering, or marine engineering, or mechatronics. Point was, I was a marine biologist who knew how to work with gears and bib bobs. I wanted to do this because I wanted to know how to build my submarine, as unrealistic as that sounds, yes, that’s what I believed I could’ve done given I knew a good degree of knowledge about engineering. I heard that 95% or such and such percentage of the ocean was unexplored. I found that quite ridiculous. How is it that we know more about some red dot in the sky than our own oceans? It baffled me and I agreed with many online who thought the same way, if there were any, pretty sure there were a few. When I grew up I wanted to explore that 95% of the ocean, get it all mapped out, record every Fish, Cnidaria, mollusk, mammal and every other who what there, all in my little submarine or personal diving suit, dreams I’m realizing I still have as I’m writing this all out now. I wanted to get a medal or something when I was finished, ‘The First Man to Chart The High and Low Seas,’ or something like that, get applause, get love, get a girlfriend, get a wife, live by the ocean, enjoy the ocean with her, that kind of thing. That was the ideal life I dreamt up in my head and I thought that was the life I was going to attempt to live in the future. Now I don’t know and it’s all Feynman’s fault.

Richard Phillips Feynman, ‘Dick,’ Feynman, his friends would call him, was a physicist, one of the best. He worked in Los Alamos during the second world war to build the world’s first atomic bomb. If you watched Oppenheimer, he was the guy playing bongos in the movie, he liked doing that in real-life too.Feynman was a character, a real strange one. In the 1950s, at some party, Feynman met with Jirayr Zorthian, an Armenian-American artist. I should think they struck up one exciting conversation because, by the end of it, each master in their own right would teach the other their craft, all because Feynman pointed out that they both admired Leonardo Da Vinci despite coming from completely different fields and that maybe they should become two Leonardo Da Vincis, that is to say, that they both should know how to do mathematics, physics as well as art. Feynman was decent by my standards looking at his early paintings, apparently not by Zorthian’s but, with time and practice he grew to be incredibly skilled at art as seen below, one of Feynman’s paintings.