By now, you will have been bombarded with Steven Pinker quotes and grown sick and tired of them. So is it good news or bad news that I’ve started reading Richard Feynman’s lecture notes?

I’ve no idea if I will have a continued interest in quoting various passages of his lecture notes (I see this, and my series on Pinker as been an intellectual-elitist variant on retweeting concepts and ideas that I’ve enjoyed), but I’d like to quote Feynman’s physics-chess analogy.

What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so; but we may be able to find all the rules. Actually, we do not have all the rules now. (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we still do not understand.) […]

How can we tell whether the rules which we “guess “are really ight if we cannot analyze the game very well? […]

A second good way to check rules is in terms of less specific rules derived from them. For example, the rule on the move of a bishop on a chessboard is that it moves only on the diagonal. One can deduce, no matter how many moves may be made, that a certain bishop will always be on a red square. So, without being able to follow the details, we can always check our idea about the bishop’s motion by finding out whether it is always on a red square. Of course it will be, for a long time, until all of a sudden we find that it is on a black square (what happened of course, is that in the meantime it was captured, another pawn crossed for queening, and it turned into a bishop on a black square). That is the way it is in physics. For a long time we will have a rule that works excellently in an over-all way, even when we cannot follow the details, and then some time we may discover a new rule.