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A comment on "2001": The Monolith and the Message (Roger Ebert, April 21, 1968). Parent comment

Re:"2001": The Monolith and the Message (Roger Ebert, April ... by mhb on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @11:14AM (#2139562)
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Feynman

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Re:"2001": The Monolith and the Message (Roger Ebert, April ... by grandpa on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @12:12PM (#2139836)
Feynman is saying that explanations do not detract from enjoyment, not that they are necessary to it.
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Re:"2001": The Monolith and the Message (Roger Ebert, April ... by mhb on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @01:03PM (#2140093)
He's saying that explanations produce a net gain in enjoyment since they add another dimension to an experience without affecting the ability to enjoy it in an unexplained fashion.
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Re:"2001": The Monolith and the Message (Roger Ebert, April ... by bradleyland on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @03:17PM (#2140648)
Feynman was speaking to poets. He was allaying their fear that increased understanding would lead to less "wondering", and hence less creativity.

I find it hard to believe that Feynman would apply that argument to works like Kubrick's 2001. In all of Feynman's speaking, he never took the stance that something must be explained entirely in order to be interesting. Quite the opposite; Feynman was most interested in the things that hadn't yet been explained. The things that no one else could explain.

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Re:"2001": The Monolith and the Message (Roger Ebert, April ... by mhb on Tuesday January 25, 2011 @05:23PM (#2141194)
He was addressing the idea of the poets' that he could not appreciate the beauty of the stars because he understood why they worked. His delight in understanding how things worked increases his enjoyment of them.

The reason he was interested in things that hadn't been explained yet is because he wanted to find explanations - not because there is an inherent advantage to their remaining opaque.

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