6 ms·
Of course Feynman had something to say about this: "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know ab
by madrox 6y ago
Of course Feynman had something to say about this:
"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
I knew this intuitively at a very young age, which made me a poor public school student. Unfortunately, there are some subjects that are easy to learn on your own, and some that are only easy with a good teacher. Biology is one of the latter. However, that may be different these days.
- svara 6y agoHe's making an interesting point that's largely true, but not the whole truth. It's the typical physicist arrogance towards biology. ;) For example, evolution through natural selection would not have been understood if Darwin and Wallace hadn't put great effort into cataloguing and classifying species. You might say they obviously were thinking about mechanisms at the same time, but the cataloguing was the precondition to their later insights. They built on the foundations set by, amongst others, Linnaeus, who's main contribution to the field was a classification of living things.
- infinite8s 6y agoThe same was true of physics (for example, Tycho Brahe's extensive astronomical measurements paved the way for Copernicus's heliocentrism model and Newton's later theories of mechanics).
- whatshisface 6y agoBrahe's measurements weren't classifications, they were measurements. Physics-through-classification dates back to the failed attempts of ancient philosophers to explain the natural world. They had ideas like, "there are two kinds of things, things that fall down, and things that do not. The things that fall fall because they are things-that-fall." The present-day bad blood that physicists have towards taxonomies probably has something to do with the fact that their field was founded the day physics taxonomies were abandoned.