Free The Meaning of It All by Richard P. Feynman Page A

Las Vegas and talk to the show girls and the gamblers and so on. I have banged around a lot in my life, so I know about ordinary people.) Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that’s true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not. Whether it’sprobably occurring or not, not whether it could occur.
    That brings me to the fourth kind of attitude toward ideas, and that is that the problem is not what is possible. That’s not the problem. The problem is what is probable, what is happening. It does no good to demonstrate again and again that you can’t disprove that this could be a flying saucer. We have to guess ahead of time whether we have to worry about the Martian invasion. We have to make a judgment about whether it is a flying saucer, whether it’s reasonable, whether it’s likely. And we do that on the basis of a lot more experience than whether it’s just possible, because the number of things that are possible is not fully appreciated by the average individual. And it is also not clear, then, to them how many things that are possible must not be happening. That it’s impossible that everything that is possible is happening. And there is too much variety, so most likely anything that you think of that is possible isn’t true. In fact that’s a general principle in physics theories: no matter what a guy thinks of, it’s almost always false. So there have been five or ten theories that have been right in the history of physics, and those are the ones we want. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s false. We’ll find out.
    To give an example of a case in which trying to find out what is possible is mistaken for what is probable, I could consider the beatification of Mother Seaton. Therewas a saintly woman who did very many good works for many people. There is no doubt about that—excuse me, there’s very little doubt about that. And it has already been announced that she has demonstrated heroicity of virtues. At that stage in the Catholic system for determining saints, the next question is to consider miracles. So the next problem we have is to decide whether she performed miracles.
    There was a girl who had acute leukemia, and the doctors don’t know how to cure her. In the duress and troubles of the family in the last minutes, many things are tried—different medicines, all kinds of things. Among other things is the possibility of pinning a ribbon which has touched a bone of Mother Seaton to the sheet of the girl and also arranging that several hundred people pray for her health. And the result is that she—no, not the result—then she gets better from leukemia.
    A special tribunal is arranged to investigate this. Very formal, very careful, very scientific. Everything has to be just so. Every question has to be asked very carefully. Everything that is asked is written down in a book very carefully. There are a thousand pages of writing, translated into Italian when it got to the Vatican. Wrapped in special strings, and so on. And the tribunal asks the doctors in the case what this was like. And they all agreed that there was no other case, that this was completely unusual, that at no time before had somebody with this kind of leukemia had the disease stopped forsuch a long period of time. Done. True, we don’t know what happened. Nobody knows what happened. It was possible it was a miracle. The question is not whether it was possible it was a miracle. It is only a question of whether it is probable it was a miracle. And the problem for the tribunal is to determine whether it is probable that it is a miracle. It’s a question to determine whether Mother Seaton had anything to do with it. Oh, that they did. In