The Character of Physical Law, With New Foreword
It is fashionable for historians of science to dwell on the significance of scientific revolutions. Each revolution comes with a cluster of so-called geniuses, men and women whose skill and imagination force the scientific community to break out of old habits of thought and embrace new and unfamiliar concepts. Genius is a much studied phenomenon. Less attention is given to the importance of what might be called style. However, changes in work style can have as big an impact on scientific progress as conventional genius.
Richard Feynman had both genius and highly unconventional style. Born in 1918, he was too late to participate in the Golden Age of physics, which, in the first three decades of this century, transformed our world view with the twin revolutions of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. These sweeping developments laid the foundations of the edifice we now call the New Physics. Feynman started with those foundations and helped build the ground floor of the New Physics.
I must mention the important places where gravitation does have some real effect in the behaviour of the Universe, and one of the interesting ones is in the formation of new stars.
Perhaps it starts by some kind of shock waves, but the remainder of the phenomenon is that gravitation pulls the gas closer and closer together so that big mobs of gas and dust collect and form balls; and as they fall still farther, the heat generated by falling lights them up, and they become stars.
So this is how stars are born, when the gas collects together too much by gravitation. Sometimes when they explode the stars belch out dirt and gases, and the dirt and gases collect back again and make new stars — it sounds like perpetual motion.