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 mind, it's important to think carefully about how best to explain ourselves to the spirit of Feynman.

1.2 What's a Scientist to Do?

Let's start with a rather banal observation: science is about the world. Scientists are in the business of understanding the world around us—the actual world, not the set of all possible worlds, or Platonic heaven, or J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Of course, this isn’t just limited to the observable, or visible world: science is interested in the nature of parts of the world that have never been directly observed and (in at least some cases) never will be. Physicists, for instance, are equally concerned that their generalizations apply to the region of the world inside the sun as they are that those generalizations apply to their laboratory apparatuses. There’s a more important sense in which science is concerned with more than just the observed world, though: science is not just descriptive, but predictive too—good science ought to be able to make predictions, not just tell us the way the world is right now (or was in the past). A science that

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