We may need to explore the working definitions of this
quotation in a little more detail; in particular, what
exactly do we mean by "Nature" and "Fooled".

Initially, I thought that there might need to be a time
component to this. We can fool nature for a short time but
eventually nature will win - a bit like the house in a
large casino.

But it doesn't always hold...

In my garden, I fool nature every year with the help of
a cold frame. Plants are led to believe that it is warmer
and sunnier than it really is, and, when set out in early
spring, they are stronger and more developed than if they
were not cultivated in this way.

Perhaps we could imagine some sort of inverse relationship
between what we mean by Nature and what we mean by Fooled.
The laws of physics may be harder to fool than the laws of
germination.

-- Tchad (email), February 6, 2007

I think your analogy is flawed. The rules of germination simply state that a certain set of conditions in the immediate environment must be met for germination to occur. Namely certain levels of soil temperature, moisture and light levels. By putting your plants in the cold box, you aren't fooling nature. You are simply altering the immediate environment to meet the conditions of germination.

However, if you planted your seeds in the soil outside of the cold box, no matter how much you claimed that the weather was perfect for germination, the seeds won't germinated unless it actually is.

-- Matthew (email), February 6, 2007

Feynman is referring to the laws of Nature. Those very laws make gardening work-arounds work.

A short-form version of Feynman's statement is "You can't pitch Nature."

-- Edward Tufte, February 6, 2007

There is a strong parallel to Feynman's "Nature cannot be fooled"
in Galileo's remarkable letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615.
Here's my account from Visual Explanations, page 53:

-- Edward Tufte, February 6, 2007

Feynman's statement is the last sentence of his famous report on the shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. The statement can be parsed as follows:

"For a successful technology"
This is the domain statement, which describes the scope or relevance of the upcoming idea. The domain is techology or, more broadly, engineering and scientific work.

"reality must take precedence over public relations"
This is pointedly addressed to NASA, where the wishful thinking of pitching the safety of the shuttle led to public estimates of LOCV (loss of crew and vehicle) as 1 in 100,000 flights. (That is, the shuttle could perhaps be launched everyday for 300 years without an accident. In fact, today, the empirical LOCV rate is 1 in 57.) There is a strong hint in this clause that pitching out corrupted the risk analysis within.

"for Nature cannot be fooled."
A reference to Newton on the utter indifference of the universal laws of Nature to what humans beings wish or think about those laws. Nature operates in its own inevitable lawlike way, independent of human thoughts. The passive voice here does not directly say who is attempting the fooling; nonetheless, the "public relations" mention in the main clause specifically identifies one possible fooling agent.

-- Edward Tufte, February 6, 2007

Seven members of NASA's Return to Flight Group brought up Feynman's "Nature cannot be fooled" in their review of the work repairing the space shuttles after the 2003 Columbia accident (from Beautiful Evidence, p. 168):

-- Edward Tufte, February 7, 2007

Feynman's words are also included in the epigraphs to my essay/chapter on PowerPoint.

-- Edward Tufte, February 12, 2007

I received a pleasant comment after a recent presentation at the Deming International Research Conference in NY ...

Unsure how to post images on the forum, I've put them here: http://www.rationalsys.com/deming.html

The abstract intentionally invokes the image of Feynman, as I believe both he and Dr. Deming share two important characteristics: joy in learning and intrinsic motivation, and seeking to understand how nature works.

The comment: a professor came up after the presentation and said, "Do you know what your graphs reminded me of? Do you know the name 'Tufte'? "

The earlier graphs were displays of me personally seeking to understand a statistics problem; the latter graphs were examples of math projects I've done with 3rd-4th graders dealing with the world and school crossing data.

Mike Round

-- Michael Round (email), February 20, 2007

Another famous quote in line with "nature cannot be fooled"

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

-- George Chovanes (email), February 6, 2009

In the student lounge of my undergraduate aerospace department, the walls were covered with ratty old posters of cold-war era aircraft and rockets, the newest jumbo jets, and the latest Mars mission. But despite those striking and impressive images, my favorite poster showed an old airplane lodged in a solitary tree accompanied by a single caption: "Flying is not inherently dangerous, but to an even greater extent than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of carelessness, incapacity, or neglect." I contend the statement is truer still when applied to spaceflight.

I'd suggest that we start a grassroots movement to mandate that quote be put in the dreaded "take-away" box at the bottom of every NASA chart, but it includes punctuation (no!) and too many words to fit in the allocated space when the minimum 30+ point font size is used.

-- Adam Wuerl (email), February 9, 2009