Sunday, April 20, 2008

They know it!

I am reading this amazing book by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". A couple of pages later, he's talking about The Beauty of a Flower---

[...]
but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imaging the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at a dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting-- it means that insects can see the color.

[...]
I was thrilled when I could read further between those lines. The last lines not only infer that the insects can see the color, but the fact that the plant knows that the insects can!

Yeah. Pleasure of finding things out indeed!

3 comments:

Deepak Salunke said...

Richard Feynman was indeed a gr8 scientist and an amasing human being... If interested u can have a look at his interview taken in 1988 and aired on BBC Horizon here - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7136440703094429927

Anand Sarolkar said...

Seems an interesting read...

Milind said...

Another reasoning is this- by Darwin's theory only those plants who had colorful flowers survived (or kept outnumbering other plants) by 'unknowingly attracting insects.