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"Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said t
by inopinatus 7y ago
"Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, 'Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.' Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, 'I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.' But he came back a few days later to say, 'I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it.'"
-- David L. Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun, ISBN:978-0393039184.
- agumonkey 7y ago> That means we don't really understand it. I wonder if other physicists shared the sentiment.
- inopinatus 7y agoI hope so. I've always thought the quintessence of science is pushing back the boundaries of ignorance. To advance we must first understand the true outline of our incomprehension. In that light, I don't think Feynman's remark is a negative sentiment at all. To know what what you do not know, etc. (c.f. confucious 2:17, rumsfeld 2:02)
- agumonkey 7y agoI didn't mean it in a negative way either I always seek clarity, and quite often 'complex' science is just about that, you get to see differently, eurekas. And when there's no eureka, to me then something is wrong, and the science has been accepted at face value which is also wrong.