Where it comes from
In November 1955 the National Academy of Sciences held its autumn meeting on the Caltech campus, and Feynman gave a public address called “The Value of Science”. Caltech’s magazine Engineering and Science printed it in December 1955 under the subtitle “Of all its many values, the greatest must be the freedom to doubt”. We opened Caltech’s scan of the printed pages for this check.
The talk lists three values of science. The first is that it lets us do things. The second is “the fun called intellectual enjoyment”. And inside that second one, at the bottom of page 13, comes the line:
“It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
The sentence runs over onto page 14, and the popular version matches it word for word.
The point he was making
Feynman wasn’t praising nature in the abstract. He was arguing with a feeling many people have, that science explains things away. His reply was that “the world view which is the result of scientific effort” is the bigger marvel: “We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past.”
Then he gave an example. How much more remarkable it is, he says, “for us all to be stuck—half of us upside down—by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.” Gravity on a spinning planet beats the elephant and the tortoise.
A little later in the same talk he complains that this wonder “remains unsung by singers”, and that people get “not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it.”
Our take
Real, and in its best setting. If you quote it, cite “The Value of Science” (1955) and, if you have room, add the elephant and the tortoise: the example is what makes the sentence land. The same talk also holds his famous lines about doubt, which we check in “a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty”.
