I met Richard Feynman once, not long before he died, at an MIT meeting on the physics of computation. Over breakfast I expressed the hope that amazing, unimaginable discoveries awaited us, and that quantum theory was not the final theory. This made Feynman furious. I imagine that this was because he could not bear the thought of missing out on all the fun!
Here are two experiences that I would also like to share.
One day I was getting dressed and picked up a strange black T-shirt with an amazing iridescent metallic pattern on it. ``What shirt is this?!'' I asked myself. I looked away for an instant, realized that it had to be a black T-shirt of a Magritte painting, and then looked again at the shirt I was holding. The strange metallic pattern had disappeared, and was now blue sky and clouds in the form of a bird against a black background, a well-known Magritte.
What, I wonder, is the world like if we could look at it without preconceptions? Might something amazing slip through between the cracks? A tiny sliver of uncensored reality perhaps?
The other experience I want to share occurred while walking over a line of ants crossing my path, preoccupied with my thoughts, but trying to avoid stepping on any of them. Suddenly I stopped and wondered how much could they possibly understand of me and my purposes. And how much can I possibly understand of God's thoughts and plans?
What if we are as insignificant to God as ants are to us: mere objects of pity if we are accidentally stepped on? What if the degree of intelligence needed to begin to understand the universe surpasses our own by as much as our intelligence surpasses that of an ant, what then? Well, we have to try to do it anyway.
But what if God is to Man as Man is to a microbe, a bacterium, or a cell in our fingernail or hair? Well then, we shall have to try to increase our degree of intelligence by many, many orders of magnitude, by many powers of ten! [By the way, how can intelligence be defined and measured mathematically? Does it have something to do with information-processing capability? Is there any connection with algorithmic information theory?]
As Hamlet tells his friend, ``There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'' Well then, we must try harder to dream!