The Meaning of It All by Richard P. Feynman

very interesting. He knew all about food, and he was talkingabout nutrition, different things. I remember several of the important statements which he made, such as “even worms won’t eat white flour.” That kind of stuff. It was good. It was interesting. It was true—maybe it wasn’t true about the worms, but it was good stuff about proteins and so on. And then he went on and described the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act, and he explained how it protects you. He explained that on every product that claims to be a good health food that’s supposed to help you with minerals and this and that, there must be a label on the bottle which tells exactly what’s in it, what it does, and all claims must be explicit, so that if it’s wrong, so on and so on. He gives them everything. I said, “How is he going to make any money?” Out come the bottles. It comes out, finally, that he sells this special health food, of course, in a brownish bottle. And it just so happens that he has just come in, and he’s been in a hurry, and he hasn’t had time to put the labels on. And here are the labels that belong on the bottles, and here are the bottles, and he’s in a hurry to sell them, and he gives you the bottle, and you stick it on yourself. That man had courage. He first explained what to do, what to worry about, and then he went ahead and did it.
    I found another lecture which was somewhat analogous to that one. And that was the second Danz lecture given by myself. I started out by pointing out that things were completely unscientific, that things were uncertain, particularly in political matters, and that there were thetwo nations, Russia and the United States, at odds with each other. And then by some mystic hocus-pocus it came out that we were the good guys and they were the bad guys. Yet, at the beginning, there was no way to decide which was the better of the two. In fact, that was the main point of the lecture. So by some sort of magic I produced some kind of relative certainty out of uncertainty. I told you about the bottle with the labels, and then I came out on the other end with a label on my bottle. How did I do it? You have to think about it a little bit. One thing, of course, that we can be certain of, once we’re uncertain, and that is that we are uncertain. Somebody says “No, maybe I’m sure.” Actually, though, the gimmick in that particular lecture, the weak point in the whole thing, the thing that requires further development and study is this one: I made an impassioned plea for the idea that it’s good to have an open channel, that there’s value in uncertainty, that it’s more important to permit us to discover new things, rather than to choose a solution that we now make up—that to choose a solution, no matter how we choose it now is to choose a much worse thing than what we would get if we waited and worked things out. And that’s where I made the choice, and I am not sure of that choice. Okay. I have now destroyed authority.
    Associated with these problems of lack of information and so forth, but particularly lack of information, there are a number of phenomena that are more serious, I believe, than astrology.
    I, in preparation for this lecture, investigated something that was in my town, in the shopping center. There was a store with a flag in front. And it’s the Americanism Center, Altadena Americanism Center. And so I went into the Americanism Center to find out what it is, and it’s a volunteer organization. And on the front outside, there is a Constitution and the Bill of Rights and so on, and a letter which explains their purpose, which is to maintain rights and so on, all in accordance with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and so on. That’s the general idea. What they do in there is simply educative. They have books that people could buy on the various subjects that help to teach the ideas of citizenship