6 ms·

Feynman also said: "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." [1] Showing a limitation of the maxim or

Feynman also said: "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." [1] Showing a limitation of the maxim or Feynman's hubris? [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

moomin 9y ago
Listening to Feynman talk about magnetism fails to answer that question definitively one way or the other. But seriously, if you can't explain what a complex-valued "probability" is to a layman, apparently you don't understand quantum mechanics?
- freddref 9y ago
  It might have been hubris at the time he got the prize, but later he felt different about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY
  - kornish 9y ago
    Another video which touches more on the same point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkv0KCR3Yiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkv0KCR3Yiw (Highly recommend the whole Feynman series, which is excerpted from an interview video called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which is also spectacular)
- fnordfnordfnord 9y ago
  I assume this is the bit of video you're referring to?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
  - moomin 9y ago
    That's the one :)
azag0 9y ago
Some parts of physics might stretch the ELI5 to its limits. I like to explain science to my non-science friends, but I'm always hitting the issue that parts of the specialized knowledge become intuitive, and then it's difficult to go back. Say, my understanding of how electrons behave in matter is a category on its own (let's call it quantum), and it's difficult to translate to common terms.
- bdamm 9y ago
  The more I try to learn physics, the more I need to see the mathematics to understand the ideas. Without the math, I don't believe it is possible to break beyond the surface 'armchair' level of understanding.
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    I started by building an intuitive understanding of advanced physics before I really dug into the math. It is absolutely possible. That being said, I did have a very good understanding of advanced mathematical concepts to start with, so I could think intuitively about things like high-dimensional spaces and eigenfunctions.
squeaky-clean 9y ago
A lot of people seem to be conflating the idea of explaining something to a layman, and explaining something using simple terms.
- coldtea 9y ago
  That's because those things are inherently tied. It's not about taking your time and making the layman an expert to understand some hard topic. It's about being able to relate it to them in simple terms. Obviously, if you use the "hairy" physics etc terms, then the layman wont understand your explanation, because he is not familiar with them.
- sh87 9y ago
  Unfortunately, that is what is expected more commonly these days where the audience being presented to a.k.a layman aren't users or domain experts or people who know whats going on. They're management "experts" tasked with getting "resources" to "get things done". I've seen people from my domain making ridiculous, inaccurate analogies and oversimplify to hide the inherent challenges that a task usually involves. And they get away with that because they aren't the ones actually building the product. They just have to sell it. And the one's they are selling to aren't/won't be using the product either, they will tell someone else to use it.
- Jach 9y ago
  A math formula is one of the objectively simplest ways of expressing something. But it's not easily understood unless you know the math well, thus violating Gruber's rule. Feynman was honest about this, because magnetism can be explained very simply, but not in any familiar way to things most people already know about. At least as good as math (and capturing the objective complexity better I think) is a working program. "What I can't program, I don't understand." When people ask for a simple explanation, they usually expect it to be easy for them too, because we all want simple and easy at the same time, even though only one of those is objective. If your reply to "how do magnets work?" is to start by writing down Maxwell's equations, you're gonna get crap for it, but someone who uses the fake rubber band analogy will be well received. But who really understands magnetism better?
coldtea 9y ago
It's not just some hard physics that have trouble with the ELI5 / "should be able to explain it" concept. This is also true for literature, poetry, non-analytical philosophy etc. And there the challenges are not about the complexity of the subject, but about its subtlety, and how one needs historical context and/or certain life experiences (or even proclivities) to be able to grasp a particular piece of work.
- rocqua 9y ago
  It's not so much life experiences, but prior knowledge and familiarity. Taking mathematics as the operative example. A lot of deep theorems are trivial when you fully understand all relevant definitions. These proves cannot be stated 'in simple terms' because it took a stack of non-simple definitions to even formulate such a theorem. Explaining the entirety of the stack gets hard when the stack gets deep. For example, a lot of math gets really hard to explain when the concept of the real numbers being 'uncountably infinite' whilst the rationals are 'countably infinite' isn't obvious.
  - wnoise 9y ago
    > A lot of deep theorems are trivial when you fully understand all relevant definitions. A lot of deep theorems comes down to properly choosing the definitions so that the theorems are true.
cxromos 9y ago
Neither if he was speaking about Quantum Mechanic. Feynman probably paraphrasing Bohr: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
lymitshn 9y ago
In one of his books he told this story as follows, a cab driver watched him on TV and said to him "I cant believe you actually tried to explain what did you found." Then Feynman said "Well, what would you say?" Cab driver "If i could explain it in 2 min. then it would not be worthy." Afterwards Feynman used that line. I might be wrong though, but pretty sure he told a story like this.
Animats 9y ago
Not hubris. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. Here's his Nobel Prize lecture.[1] This gives some insight into how he thought. [1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/196...
stcredzero 9y ago
I run into this all of the time when explaining what I'm doing at work as a programmer. It's not that I couldn't explain why my merging workload increased due to the increased code collisions from my coworkers working in the same files, and how dividing my current assignment in two so I could check in code would reduce this. It's doing that in a normal conversation under time and attention constraints which is the problem.
- dtashima 9y ago
  In the workplace, there is also the problem of coworkers' (managers in particular) desire to listen to you explain it.
dtashima 9y ago
Well he made that statement in 1965, and then wrote QED, which is a layman's explanation of his Nobel Prize work, in 1985. So perhaps he set out to prove himself wrong. QED does explain quantum electrodynamics without any calculus or other math (for example, he uses imaginary clocks as a way to explain wave interference), but I think if the average person read it they wouldn't walk away with even a partial understanding of it.
cestith 9y ago
I don't see this as evidence the other statement is false. If it was something he understood well enough at the time he was earning the prize, it wouldn't have been groundbreaking work worthy of the prize. Gaining that understanding or paving the way for that understanding is what's prize-worthy.
dragonwriter 9y ago
If one assumes that things at the edge of human understanding and thus most worthy of such a prize are understood only incompletely by those who understand them best, it is both consistent with Feynman's maxim and not at all a sign of hubris.
eksemplar 9y ago
They are both right. Something's can't be dumbed down enough to explain to everyone, but you can always explain the concepts. An example could be comparing an interface to a chocolate cookie recipe, when explaining it to your grandmother. She'll still have no idea what an interface actually is, but she'll have a good grasp of the concept.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wddps 9y ago
Why is this true? Can someone explain it to me?

moomin 9y ago

Listening to Feynman talk about magnetism fails to answer that question definitively one way or the other. But seriously, if you can't explain what a complex-valued "probability" is to a layman, apparently you don't understand quantum mechanics?

freddref 9y ago
It might have been hubris at the time he got the prize, but later he felt different about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY
- kornish 9y ago
  Another video which touches more on the same point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkv0KCR3Yiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkv0KCR3Yiw (Highly recommend the whole Feynman series, which is excerpted from an interview video called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which is also spectacular)
fnordfnordfnord 9y ago
I assume this is the bit of video you're referring to?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
- moomin 9y ago
  That's the one :)

azag0 9y ago

Some parts of physics might stretch the ELI5 to its limits. I like to explain science to my non-science friends, but I'm always hitting the issue that parts of the specialized knowledge become intuitive, and then it's difficult to go back. Say, my understanding of how electrons behave in matter is a category on its own (let's call it quantum), and it's difficult to translate to common terms.

bdamm 9y ago
The more I try to learn physics, the more I need to see the mathematics to understand the ideas. Without the math, I don't believe it is possible to break beyond the surface 'armchair' level of understanding.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  I started by building an intuitive understanding of advanced physics before I really dug into the math. It is absolutely possible. That being said, I did have a very good understanding of advanced mathematical concepts to start with, so I could think intuitively about things like high-dimensional spaces and eigenfunctions.

squeaky-clean 9y ago

A lot of people seem to be conflating the idea of explaining something to a layman, and explaining something using simple terms.

coldtea 9y ago
That's because those things are inherently tied. It's not about taking your time and making the layman an expert to understand some hard topic. It's about being able to relate it to them in simple terms. Obviously, if you use the "hairy" physics etc terms, then the layman wont understand your explanation, because he is not familiar with them.
sh87 9y ago
Unfortunately, that is what is expected more commonly these days where the audience being presented to a.k.a layman aren't users or domain experts or people who know whats going on. They're management "experts" tasked with getting "resources" to "get things done". I've seen people from my domain making ridiculous, inaccurate analogies and oversimplify to hide the inherent challenges that a task usually involves. And they get away with that because they aren't the ones actually building the product. They just have to sell it. And the one's they are selling to aren't/won't be using the product either, they will tell someone else to use it.
Jach 9y ago
A math formula is one of the objectively simplest ways of expressing something. But it's not easily understood unless you know the math well, thus violating Gruber's rule. Feynman was honest about this, because magnetism can be explained very simply, but not in any familiar way to things most people already know about. At least as good as math (and capturing the objective complexity better I think) is a working program. "What I can't program, I don't understand." When people ask for a simple explanation, they usually expect it to be easy for them too, because we all want simple and easy at the same time, even though only one of those is objective. If your reply to "how do magnets work?" is to start by writing down Maxwell's equations, you're gonna get crap for it, but someone who uses the fake rubber band analogy will be well received. But who really understands magnetism better?

coldtea 9y ago

It's not just some hard physics that have trouble with the ELI5 / "should be able to explain it" concept. This is also true for literature, poetry, non-analytical philosophy etc. And there the challenges are not about the complexity of the subject, but about its subtlety, and how one needs historical context and/or certain life experiences (or even proclivities) to be able to grasp a particular piece of work.

rocqua 9y ago
It's not so much life experiences, but prior knowledge and familiarity. Taking mathematics as the operative example. A lot of deep theorems are trivial when you fully understand all relevant definitions. These proves cannot be stated 'in simple terms' because it took a stack of non-simple definitions to even formulate such a theorem. Explaining the entirety of the stack gets hard when the stack gets deep. For example, a lot of math gets really hard to explain when the concept of the real numbers being 'uncountably infinite' whilst the rationals are 'countably infinite' isn't obvious.
- wnoise 9y ago
  > A lot of deep theorems are trivial when you fully understand all relevant definitions. A lot of deep theorems comes down to properly choosing the definitions so that the theorems are true.

cxromos 9y ago

Neither if he was speaking about Quantum Mechanic. Feynman probably paraphrasing Bohr: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

lymitshn 9y ago

In one of his books he told this story as follows, a cab driver watched him on TV and said to him "I cant believe you actually tried to explain what did you found." Then Feynman said "Well, what would you say?" Cab driver "If i could explain it in 2 min. then it would not be worthy." Afterwards Feynman used that line. I might be wrong though, but pretty sure he told a story like this.

Animats 9y ago

Not hubris. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. Here's his Nobel Prize lecture.[1] This gives some insight into how he thought. [1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/196...

stcredzero 9y ago

I run into this all of the time when explaining what I'm doing at work as a programmer. It's not that I couldn't explain why my merging workload increased due to the increased code collisions from my coworkers working in the same files, and how dividing my current assignment in two so I could check in code would reduce this. It's doing that in a normal conversation under time and attention constraints which is the problem.

dtashima 9y ago
In the workplace, there is also the problem of coworkers' (managers in particular) desire to listen to you explain it.

dtashima 9y ago

Well he made that statement in 1965, and then wrote QED, which is a layman's explanation of his Nobel Prize work, in 1985. So perhaps he set out to prove himself wrong. QED does explain quantum electrodynamics without any calculus or other math (for example, he uses imaginary clocks as a way to explain wave interference), but I think if the average person read it they wouldn't walk away with even a partial understanding of it.

cestith 9y ago

I don't see this as evidence the other statement is false. If it was something he understood well enough at the time he was earning the prize, it wouldn't have been groundbreaking work worthy of the prize. Gaining that understanding or paving the way for that understanding is what's prize-worthy.

dragonwriter 9y ago

If one assumes that things at the edge of human understanding and thus most worthy of such a prize are understood only incompletely by those who understand them best, it is both consistent with Feynman's maxim and not at all a sign of hubris.

eksemplar 9y ago

They are both right. Something's can't be dumbed down enough to explain to everyone, but you can always explain the concepts. An example could be comparing an interface to a chocolate cookie recipe, when explaining it to your grandmother. She'll still have no idea what an interface actually is, but she'll have a good grasp of the concept.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wddps 9y ago

Why is this true? Can someone explain it to me?