brainrow

The physicist Richard Feynman occasionally led workshops at the Esalen Institute, which was attended by lots of people with “new age” ideas. The book No Ordinary Genius includes this brief exchange between a workshop member and Feynman:

You are an original thinker. I would like to ask you, how would you go about designing a miniature antigravity machine?

I can’t. I don’t know how to make any antigravity machine.

You would lick the world’s problems.

It doesn’t make any difference. I still don’t know how to do it. The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination, in a tight straitjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. I’m not going to assume that maybe the laws of physics have changed, so that I can design something or other. I operate as if everything that we know is true. If we’re wrong, of course, we can redesign something with the new laws later. But the game is to try to figure things out, with what we know is possible. It requires imagination to think of what’s possible, and then it requires and analysis back, checking to see whether it fits, whether it’s allowed, according to what is known, okay?

In the case of an antigravity machine, I immediately give up, because my understanding of the laws of gravity are such that it doesn’t make sense for antigravity. The only antigravity machines, things which oppose gravity, that is, and which are very effective, are like you’re using now — a pillow, or a floor under your behind. Those are antigravity machines and they will support you in a space, above the earth, a few feet in this case, for a relatively unlimited time. Next?

See, there’s the bottleneck to human creativity. If we can just eliminate reality as a restriction, all sorts of wonderful things become possible.

Lots of prominent people have already managed to slip past this limitation, and they have been very successful, even if only in their own minds.