Watching Richard Feynman and viewing lectures I have never seen before I enjoy the way he talks about science. To me, as with everything else human beings do, there are two sides to everything. There is the thing itself – the physics of the universe, how we think things works and the whole idea of the tools and theories propounded and excluded or accepted. Then there is the fact that all these sciences are creations of human beings and have a psychology about them even if that psychology is not at once discernible.
What makes physics work is the same thing that makes human beings work in the world – the idea and results of continuous experiments. Many of these experiments we have divided into different classes of the sciences but we have also divided them up into different classes of politics and art. Human beings experiment, we try, we test, we try something else, we copy and we create something slightly new but we always build experiment upon experiment.
So whilst we know that these experiments are opening up the universe to us, creating our societies, enlivening our civilizations we should also know full well that each and every experiment tells us something more about ourselves. Not simply because as Carl Sagan so famously said, we are the stuff of stars, but because as Feynman says, we are the way the universe can understand itself.