Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to
one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the
great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the
blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964. Think about what
he's saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can —
how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly
well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important
difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in,
busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's
happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we
don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be
only one conclusion: we're wrong. The world knows. Our minds
guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins.
It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are,
who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with
the experiment, it is wrong." This view is based on an almost
sacred belief that the w