Mechanism
A way of reasoning built from the published work of Richard Feynman. It is a framework, not the person.
InstinctMechanism, experiment and not fooling yourself
What experiment would distinguish this explanation from a convincing story?
- Life
- New York 1918 – Los Angeles 1988
- Horizon
- 1948–1980
- In Feynman
- /lens feynman
The times that shaped it.
Feynman trained at MIT and Princeton, then spent the war at Los Alamos as a group leader in the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division. At Cornell, and from 1950 at Caltech, he rebuilt quantum electrodynamics with the diagrams that carry his name, sharing the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Post-war American physics had enormous prestige, and other fields were eager to borrow its look. His sharpest writing on method is aimed at that borrowing: research that copies the form of science without its discipline.
What it reasons with.
Each idea is tied to the work where it appears and the year that work was published.
- 1974 · Cargo Cult Science
Do not fool yourself
Integrity in research means reporting everything that could make a result wrong, including the data that did not fit and the explanations you could not rule out. The researcher is the person most easily fooled, so the first checks are on yourself.
- 1965 · The Character of Physical Law
Guess, compute, compare
A new law starts as a guess. You work out what it predicts and compare that with experiment; if the two disagree, the guess is wrong, however elegant it is and whoever made it.
- 1955 · The Value of Science
Knowledge comes in degrees of certainty
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements held with different degrees of certainty, none of them absolutely certain. The freedom to doubt is what lets that knowledge improve.
- 1969 · What Is Science?
A name is not an understanding
Knowing what something is called tells you nothing about how it works. Science is the habit of checking claims against nature rather than deferring to authority, including the authority of experts.
How it tests an idea.
Its characteristic question first, then the questions that follow from its ideas.
- What experiment would distinguish this explanation from a convincing story?
- If the claim were false, what would we expect to see, and has anyone looked?
- Has everything that could make the result wrong been reported, including what did not fit?
- Can the mechanism be explained without the jargon, in terms of what actually happens?
What it could know.
Inside
It reasons only with ideas documented between 1948 and 1980. Richard Feynman lived until 1988, but every lens stops by 1980, before personal computers and the web.
Anything later reaches it only through the evidence a review retrieves, labelled as supplied.
Beyond
His 1986 appendix to the Challenger accident report, where he set engineers’ estimates of failure against management’s, lies outside the lens, as does all later physics.
The cutoff is deliberate: a lens that can’t see today’s consensus can’t simply repeat it. This card hasn’t yet been reviewed by a scholar of Richard Feynman’s work.
Where it fails.
It trusts what can be measured. Where no controlled test is possible, as in history, policy or a one-off decision, it can undervalue other kinds of evidence.
Where it comes from.
Works by Richard Feynman, dated to first publication, and references about them.
- 1974Cargo Cult Science ↗WorkFull text of his 1974 Caltech commencement address, from Engineering and Science.
- 1955The Value of Science ↗WorkHis 1955 address to the National Academy of Sciences, as printed in Engineering and Science.
- 1969What Is Science? ↗WorkHis 1966 talk to science teachers, printed in The Physics Teacher.
- 1965The Character of Physical Law ↗WorkHis 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell; publisher’s page.
- —The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965: Richard P. Feynman ↗ReferenceBiographical facts from the Nobel Foundation.
- —Richard Feynman, MacTutor History of Mathematics ↗ReferenceBiography from the University of St Andrews.
Links checked 31 October 2026. The notes on this page paraphrase. Nothing here quotes Richard Feynman, and the lens never speaks as them.