‘What does why mean?’ by Richard Feynman
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Highlights
- If you try to follow anything up you go deeper and deeper in various directions. If, for example, you go βWhy did she slip on the ice?β, well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that. No problem. But you ask βWhy is ice slippery?β That’s kind of curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It’s very interesting. You say how does it work? You could, you see, you could either say I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me β ice is slippery. That explains it. Or, you could go on and say why is it slippery? And then you’re involved with something because there aren’t many things as slippery as ice. It’s very hard to get greasy stuff, but that’s sort of wet and slimy. But a solid that’s so slippery, because it is in the case of ice, that when you stand on it they say, momentarily, the pressure melts the ice a little bit so you got a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you’re slipping.
- You’ll notice in this example that the more I ask why, it gets interesting afterwards, my idea. The deeper the thing is, the more interesting.