> "those who can, do research; those who can not, explain research." I've rewritten this comment maybe 10 times because I'm struggling to capture how completel

> "those who can, do research; those who can not, explain research." I've rewritten this comment maybe 10 times because I'm struggling to capture how completely myopic this idea is. But here's a quote from Feynman's 5th messenger lecture [1] that I really enjoy, he's talking about the graph of all possible human endeavors: [The graph] is a series of concepts that we use to understand things at an ever higher level. And going on, we come to things like evil and beauty and hope. Now, which end is nearer to the ultimate creator or the ultimate or, if I make a religious metaphor, which end is nearer to God? Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that the whole structural interconnections of the thing is the thing that we have to look at. And that all the sciences and all the efforts-- not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kind-- are to see the connections of the hierarchies is to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, the man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today, we cannot-- and there's no use making believe we can-- draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other. In fact, we've just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy. And so I don't think either end is nearest to God. And to stand at either end and to look out off the end of the pier only, hoping out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or the stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world with that aspect alone is a mistake. And it is not sensible, either, for the ones who specialize at one end and the ones who specialize at the other end to have such disregard for each other. They don't, actually. But the people say they do. Sorry. [LAUGHTER] But actually, the great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle. And in that way, we are gradually understanding this connection, this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies. Thank you. [1] http://www.cornell.edu/video/richard-feynman-messenger-lecture-5-distinction-past-future http://www.cornell.edu/video/richard-feynman-messenger-lectu...