Feynman used to have a unique of way of figuring out whether there were any goofs in models that fellow scientists used to tell him: (from
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" PDF, page 95, bottom)
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
"Wait a minute," I would say. "Is there a particular example of this general problem?"
"Why yes; of course."
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb" questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?"
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be right!"
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?"
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!"
Feel that
Swami Ramakrishnananda showed a similar mental process when he made this observation: (
God Lived with Them, page 303, top)
Science is the struggle of man in the outer world. Religion is the struggle of man in the inner world. Science makes man struggle for Truth in the outside universe, and religion makes him struggle for Truth in the inner universe. Both struggles are great, no doubt, but one ends in success and the other ends in failure. That is the difference. Religion begins where science ends. The whole scientific method is based on observation and experiment; but the moment man realizes that there is something beyond observation and experiment he will give them up and leave material science behind. Science will always have to deal with finite bodies, and God is infinite.
