Free The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 by Elizabeth Finkel

tellingly, he crossed out the second ‘simple’ and replaced it with ‘elementary’. For it turns out there is nothing simple about Newton’s proof. Although it uses only rudimentary mathematical tools, it is a masterpiece of labyrinthine intricacy. So arcane is Newton’s proof that Feynman could not understand it. That is because in the age of calculus, physicists no longer learn much Euclidean geometry; like stonemasonry, it has become something of a dying art. Feynman was rather surprised that he couldn’t follow a piece of scientific reasoning now three centuries old, and he seems to have taken that as a personal challenge. Because he couldn’tunderstand Newton’s proof he decided he had to do a version of it himself. The task nearly defeated him and the result of his work, when it was finally published, occupies close to 100 typewritten pages. It appears in a marvellous book called Feynman’s Lost Lecture , by Caltech physicist David Goodstein and his wife Judith Goodstein, a former Caltech archivist.
    Most of Feynman’s students probably didn’t follow his proof either, but he knew he could expect their applause and he ended his lecture with a flourish, like the showman he was. When he had found that he couldn’t understand Newton’s proof Feynman could have abandoned his idea for the lecture, since no one knew he was planning to give it. But he could not let the challenge go, and it is evident from his notes that he derived a tremendous amount of pleasure from his ‘ride in a buggy’. For a man who would soon be granted the highest honour in science, it was a DIY triumph whose primary value was the pride and joy that derive from being able to say ‘I did it!’
    Feynman apparently devoted a fair bit of time to the ‘buggy’ exercise, yet when all is said and done he was a man on his way to a Nobel Prize, and at the end of his lecture he made a remark that very likely resonated with his Caltech audience: ‘One should not ride in a buggy all the time,’ he told the class. ‘One has the fun of it and then gets out.’ The question that stands at the heart of this essay is: What happens if one doesn’t have the option of getting out of the buggy? To extend Feynman’s metaphor, what happens if a buggy is the only form of transportation available to you? For Richard Feynman, a highly trained theoretician with an exceptional gift for mathematical abstraction, a joyride in ‘a buggy’ was a pleasurable diversion; while he manifestly enjoyed the experience, he did not have to rely on a handmade vehicle for his serious travel needs. He also had access to the Ferrari of quantum field theory. We may go even further: Feynman and his fellow theoretical insiders had access to an entire fleet of fancyautomobiles outfitted with all the brilliant black-box controls that 20th century physics has been able to deliver. These indeed are the men and woman who design the black boxes of contemporary science.
    As a Nobel Prize-winning theoretician Feynman had the keys to the scientific equivalent of the executive garage. But what if one doesn’t have the keys to that garage? What if one doesn’t have access to any of the ‘fancy automobiles’? Metaphorically speaking, with respect to theoretical physics, that is the position of the majority of people on Earth. From the perspective of a contemporary theoretical physics insider, what the rest of us understand about the workings of the universe is the equivalent of riding a bike. That is what so many popular physics books keep telling us: that the majority of what we believe about our world is wrong. While the rest of us saunter along in a kind of bucolic ignorance, academic theoretical physicists have been putting in place a network of freeways on which they cruise their ever-more-complicated Ferraris and Lamborghinis. It is a vast and deeply impressive network that